Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives: Mirror

"Mirror", from 1996, is popularly regarded as the last film in the "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" canon, although it's worth noting that the slogan itself makes no appearance, suggesting that Safety On The Move were already in the process of figuring out a new campaign strategy. For now, they were still adhering to the template forged through the D&DWL series, with the final fade to black and stark white titles above the Safety On the Move logo. From a strictly formatting standpoint, "Mirror" represented a fitting enough conclusion to the campaign's run, in pursuing a "back to basics" approach, with a return to the barebones monologuing that characterised the initial wave of films from 1987. Unfortunately,"Mirror" lacks the emotional clout of "Jenny" and "Fireman's Story", seeing the series peter out with the standard whimper rather than a truly fender-bending bang. I will say that it made a significantly more effective print ad (see above) than it did a television short; I can still recall seeing that young woman's heavily scarred face glaring at me from the back of a bus, and just how rotten and uncomfortable it made me feel.

I tend to think of "Mirror" as the weakest of the D&DWL series, and not because it offers up a lower-key form of wreckage than any of its predecessors. Not every anti-drink driving PIF has to result in a pile-up with mangled bodies and shattered glass left and right, and there's certainly nothing wrong with attempting to examine how an ostensibly less dramatic accident could still prove life-changing for those who've suffered it. In the case of "Mirror", we learn how a collision caused by off-screen drink driver Nick left his girlfriend (our protagonist, who like all of those early monologuers goes unnamed) with severe facial scars, putting a dent in her self-esteem and casting a dark cloud over their relationship, which has endured, albeit for reasons other than true love conquering all. Nick, the protagonist suspects, is only with her because he feels guilty about having caused her injuries. For her part, she isn't totally unconvinced that she's with him because her facial scars have otherwise put a crimp in her social popularity.

I wouldn't call "Mirror" a total failure - if nothing else, I like how the titular object ties into the monologue in a thematic sense. The literal mirror, where our protagonist is applying make-up in a futile attempt to cover up her scars, ironically ends up becoming something of a confessional in which the unloveliness of their situation is laid bare. There's also the metaphorical sense in which Nick and the protagonist have become unwelcome reflections of one another's broken hearts and broken dreams, despite their alleged attempts to present as a functional couple. But that does lead me into my first qualm with this PIF - is it seriously suggesting, as the protagonist herself does, that the two characters are to be seen as mutually complicit in the whole sorry affair? That when the protagonist says, "It's as much my fault, I guess...", her words are to be taken at face value, with her scars representing a kind of deserved stigma for her questionable life choices? I can't help but think back to another D&DWL film, "Mates", which appeared to outright reject the insinuation that the passengers of an over-the-limit driver should bear equal responsibility if they get horribly mangled (the protagonist, fading in and out of consciousness in an intensive care ward, has this put to him by his "mate", the drink driver looking to alleviate his own guilt, but the ending makes it very clear that the film is not going for ambiguity on the matter), so it's curious that Safety On The Move should be legitimising this particular victim-blaming angle now. It's not that the passenger has no part to play when it comes to mindfulness of the driver's condition, I'm just not wild about the implication that these scars should be considered a source of shame for the protagonist, and that anybody judging her on the basis of her injuries is valid in doing so.

 

That being said, a question that repeatedly nags at me all throughout "Mirror" - and this does have the potential to alter our perception of the pivotal relationship - concerns whether or not it's possible that the protagonist is actually being gaslit by Nick into saying these things. Unlike the protagonist of "Mates" (who has no recourse to retort with anything other than heavy breathing, a response that's as damning as any explicit rebuking), might she have bought into the drink driver's attempts at self-excusing, or at the very least is prepared to play along with it in order to maintain their relationship? One of the most confounding aspects of "Mirror" is how it intermittently appears to evoke an analogy between the endangerment of your partner through drink driving and harming them through domestic violence, without seeming overly alert to the presence of this subtext. The film's opening - which has the protagonist applying make-up atop visible wounds, whilst maintaining that, "Nick - he's my boyfriend - he still feels bad about it", looks all-set to play on our immediate expectations that this will be a PIF addressing domestic violence, just as her downplaying of Nick's responsibility seems uncomfortably reminiscent of the kinds of minimisation sometimes used by victims of domestic abuse to cover for partners they feel unable to leave. Such an analogy has potential, but the impact goes unrealised, with the ad's fairly flat execution making it difficult to entertain the idea that we're being asked to interpret the monologue at anything other than the most surface of levels.

 

This ambivalent approach ultimately causes "Mirror" to come off as rather tone-deaf, particularly when we reach the end and the protagonist confides her grandest fear - that with her disfiguring injuries, it's now a choice between Nick's piteous but unloving company or total isolation. As with everything else, it's not clear if we're expected to view this as indicative of the protagonist's knocked confidence, or to be nodding along in agreement with the base assumptions that her prospects of happiness are dashed because her looks are gone and no one could possibly love her with her disfigurement. I mentioned in my coverage of "Pier" that some of the D&DWL films rely on shock value from depictions of disability that arguably reinforce their own set of prejudices, and it's much the same story with the facial scarring here. At only 30 seconds, the ad is somewhat limited in terms of how deeply it can delve into a character, but as a portrait of a victim recovering from physical and emotional trauma, it feels reductive. Pity, as opposed to empathy, is indeed what it appears to be looking to engender, and it in that regard it's not a whole lot more wholesome than her relationship with Nick.

Bart The General (aka Are You Boys Through Playing War?)

"Bart The General" (episode 7G05), which premiered on February 4th 1990 as part of The Simpsons' first season, marked a significant milestone in the then-fledgling series' lifespan - the first script penned by John Swartzwelder, who would go on to make more contributions to the Simpsons canon than any other member of the show's writing team. Renowned for his particularly subversive sense of humor, the proudly riotous "Bart The General" was in many respects the perfect launching pad for his Simpsons-writing career. The episode follows Bart's battle to reclaim his confidence and self-esteem when he becomes the favourite target of local bully Nelson Muntz (making his debut appearance), who takes to routinely pulverising our hero's face and stuffing him into a garbage can. Homer urges Bart to fight back using underhanded tactics, specifically by throwing mud in Nelson's eyes and pounding him square in the crotch, but this doesn't work out, as Nelson is still too great a match for Bart physically. Lisa suggests he take his consultation up a generation and visit Abe, so-called "toughest Simpson alive". Help then arrives from an unexpected source, when Abe takes Bart to meet a friend of his, a shady one-armed antique dealer named Herman, who instructs Bart to stand up to Nelson by way of a full-blown military attack, and to set about training the neighbourhood children to handle the stresses of battle, and water balloons. Bart is perturbed by the fact that Herman is blatantly mentally ill, but Abe assures him that under the circumstances that is to be seen as a tactical advantage: "General George S. Patton was a little nuts. And this guy is completely out of his mind. We can't fail!"

I get the impression that "Bart The General" is one of the more fondly-remembered installments in the show's terribly undervalued first season. This would be in spite of the fact that, of the germinal thirteen, it may well be the lightest on plot. The central problem remains an intrinsically relatable one...to a point. We all know what a thoroughly rotten experience it is to get on the wrong side of a bully, but at the same time, Nelson's approach to schoolyard tyranny is all about fisticuffs and physical intimidation, which I suspect might actually seem quite quaint to children of the digital age who've been reared with the bugbear of cyberbullying. Nelson is depicted here as a straight-up villain, and while it's interesting seeing him played as a legitimate threat (compared to subsequent appearances, where he's still fundamentally a bully but on somewhat chummier terms with Bart), if not for the sheer gusto of Nancy Cartwright's performance I fear he'd be rather a one-dimensional antagonist. His two cronies, known formally as "the Weasels", frankly do more of the heavy-lifting on the quirkiness front (their noting that Nelson has four other beatings scheduled besides Bart and their final invoking of the Nuremberg Defense - which, in their case, pays off). Enter Abe and Herman, and the whole thing suddenly takes off in an a deliriously anarchic direction, but the build-up to that point is fairly slow, and something that really stuck out to me on my most recent viewing is how dependent this episode is on padding. The first act has not one, but two dream sequences emphasising just how terrified Bart is of Nelson, and the Patton-inspired training montage, while easily the episode's highlight, runs on for a whisker too long. And yet that concluding act really is a top notch example of The Simpsons coming into its own and finding its voice this early on in the series' lifespan, the training sequences and the climactic showdown with Nelson being particularly neat exemplars of the zesty undercurrent of youthful rebellion that characterised those nascent days when Bart, and not Homer, was seen as the show's representative. Unhurried though the build-up may be, it goes to places I'll wager no other cartoon of the time would have dared to tread.

Despite its vibrant displays of audacity, I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide authors Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood accuse the episode of being "a bit unsure of itself, particularly towards the end". Really, I think it's more that "Bart The General" comes off as being a particularly rough example of primal Simpsons due to the high number of formatting kinks that are inevitably going to seem jarring to anyone who joined the show in subsequent seasons. You can tell that the series formula was not yet set in stone and that the crew were still fiddling around with various ideas - right from the opening titles, when, in lieu of the familiar introductory sequence with chalkboard variant and couch gag, we pan directly to the Simpsons' house. This in itself isn't massively unusual, for a Season 1 episode - "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire" lacks a full opening credits sequence, as does "Life on The Fast Lane". "Bart The General", though, goes the extra mile in also yielding the most singularly strange ending of all the season - a disclaimer where Bart breaks the fourth wall to assure his viewership that, contrary to what they have just seen, war is not the answer to all of life's problems, but does not make his point with total coherence (he insists that war is "neither glamorous or fun" but also recommends that you check out the "cool gory pictures" in the books about war at your local library). It's an odd, odd note to close on as, watching it, it's not altogether clear if this entire sequence was intended as a parody of the tag-on PSAs that were endemic to cartoons in the 1980s, in which the protagonists spoke directly to their viewers in an effort to make the moral intentions of the preceding twenty minutes crystal clear ("And knowing is half the battle!"), or if it represents a sincere statement on the part of the production team with a few jokes sprinkled in - although the DVD commentary would appear to imply the latter. There, the team have a good laugh about how this disclaimer enabled them both to have their (cup)cake and eat it, but they also acknowledge that, eleven years on, they probably wouldn't make this episode at all, for fear of being misunderstood. (Irrespective, a gag I'm fairly certain they wouldn't include today is the one recreating the "V-J Day in Times Square" photograph - even with Lisa getting the last word and forcefully rebuking the offender, having this kid visibly hold Lisa in a headlock while he kisses her, however accurate to the original image, is maybe too gross and disturbing a detail to get past.) It's also noted that they had, at one point, considered making these post-episode discussions with a library-bound Bart a regular feature, but obviously that didn't happen - possibly because, like the Happy Little Elves, their relevance dried up almost immediately, with "And knowing is half the battle!" type epilogues becoming less common among cartoons of the 1990s (although Animaniacs still had a lot of fun lampooning them with their Wheel of Morality), but then we also know that creator Matt Groening wasn't wild about instances of characters openly acknowledging their own fictionality.

Immediately after, the episode bows out with another, more subtle experiment, this time regarding the end credits - in place of the usual black void, we see a still of the Simpsons' house lit up at night. Of all the alternate presentation ideas kicked around in "Bart The General", this is the one that I most regret not becoming a fixture of the series going forward. There's something about the warm ambience of that nocturnal backdrop that I really dig; the diurnal cycles being used as a cozy signifier for narrative closure, instead of dragging us head-first into oblivion. But alas, you can't have it all.

Eight years before The Simpsons provided a more elaborate spoof by way of Season 9's "Das Bus", "Bart The General" strikes me as being a loose sort of variation on the themes of William Golding's Lord of The Flies; it too deals with the savagery children inflict on one another when prompted to take matters into their own hands - with the insinuation, implicit in the final line of Golding's novel, that what these children have done to one another here is nothing more than an extension of what adults have been doing to one another for all of human history. Bart is reluctant to take his case to Principal Skinner, the proper authority on all matters within school walls, on the grounds that it would "violate The Code of The Schoolyard" - and, to be fair, we've already seen first-hand evidence that Skinner probably isn't going to be of much help to him anyway, since he straight-up heard Nelson threatening Bart and dismissed it (note: I don't think that Skinner is being malicious, he's just too much of a square to grasp the significance of Nelson's words). We later hear a more thorough description of what The Code of The Schoolyard actually entails from Homer, who seems to feel even more strongly about it than does Bart - one of the episode's big revelatory gags being that the gap between the mentality of your average schoolchild and your average adult looking to blend their way into conformist society is practically non-existent. According to Homer, the rules that teach a boy to be a man involve not tattling, a total intolerance toward any and all differences and never saying anything unless you're absolutely positive that popular opinion is on your side (I don't know about you, but to me this all sounds highly reminiscent of the kind of 1980s-era cartoon moralising that Mark Evanier warned us about). The rules that supposedly maintain order and build character instead seem structured to engender hostility, distrust and division. Meanwhile, Marge's more pacifistic approach, which theorises that kids might not feel so inclined to wail on one another if they talked things out and established common ground, goes untested. Is she vindicated by the end of the episode? Possibly - after Herman has negotiated a peace treaty that both Bart and Nelson are willing to sign, Marge enters the room to ask them if they are "through playing war". Is this joke at Marge's expense, for interpreting the procedure (which involves tying Nelson up and basically kidnapping him) as more innocuous than it really is? Or do her words ultimately put their posturing antics into perspective, as an elaborate series of games and rituals designed to settle what is essentially nothing more than an elevated playground squabble? With the hostilities dropped, the characters mark peacetime by acknowledging the one thing they all assuredly have in common, which is to say a mutual weakness for Marge's cupcakes. It rounds the narrative off on a neatly cyclic note, given that this whole ordeal started with a dispute over the food item in question. Moral implications: perhaps we would all be better inclined toward one another if we each received an equal bite of the cupcake.

One of the internal conflicts that seems to best encapsulate the spirit of "Bart The General" (in what it suggests about the messiness and hypocrisies of the adult world) is the one that's only vaguely alluded to, and exists exclusively at the back of the story, this being the first real hint we're given of the ongoing animosity between Homer and Abe. For viewers who had followed the series over from its roots on The Tracey Ullman Show, Abe was already something of a veteran face, being one of the few supporting characters to have featured alongside the family in the original crudely drawn filler. Had Season 1 followed its intended narrative path, this would have been his first appearance in the series proper - and, like a handful of characters casually dropped into the action of "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire", he was robbed of a far more elaborate introductory sequence, which as a bonus enabled Abe to act as a derisory mouthpiece for the moral guardians who decried the enthusiastic welcome afforded the series by zeitgeist as indicative of some kind of broader social failing. We catch Abe typing a letter to an advertising agency, complaining about how the elderly are represented in the media and lamenting the passing of the "good old days when television was bland and inoffensive". It's a hilarious sequence, if somewhat contrary to Abe's role in the story, which is to usher Bart down the path of utter anarchy. Like everyone else, Abe's personality was not set in stone at this point, and "Bart The General" finds him in intermediate mode, with shades of both who he once was and the embittered, nonsensical coot he would shortly become. Carried over from the Ullman shorts was his tendency to ramble on ad nauseam about his bygone years, which remained a staple of his appearances going forward, but the Ullman shorts also depicted him as rather a wily character who was not above his share of pranks and mischief - as we see here, when he seizes the opportunity to launch his own personal war against Homer, pelting him with water balloons when he steps outside to complain about the children running amuck beside his front lawn. It's played as a simple role reversal gag, with Homer, who does not appear to recognise his father, berating "the tall grey-haired kid" for his misbehaviour, but embedded in this seemingly insignificant moment is a telling snapshot of the kinds of cruelties, intolerance and resentment that fuel the more "civilised" conflicts buried beneath the surface of everyday adult interaction. The Ullman short "Shut Up, Simpsons" had hinted that Homer's own shaky parenting techniques were passed down to him from Abe; "Bart The General" puts the boot on the other foot, incorporating the first explicit acknowledgement that Abe was offloaded by the family into a retirement home, with Lisa's line, "Remember the fight he put up when we put him in the home?", being discomforting for the manner in which, just for a moment, it seems to cast the Simpsons themselves in a subjugating light. As noted, Nelson is an archetypal school bully, and the episode's exploration of bullying as a subject, in consisting only of physical beatings, is fairly reductive, yet it does, ever so subtly, tip its hat to the understanding that bullying is something broader and more omnipresent, taking on many different forms, as illustrated through the sorry plight of the grizzled Simpsons patriarch. Abe advises Bart to stand up for himself, lest he have bullies picking on him his entire life, immediately before becoming a cautionary example, when Jasper (debuting as a foe, and not a friend, to Abe) steals his newspaper for dibs on the crossword puzzle. Deeper than his scuffle with Jasper, I wonder to what degree we're meant to be mindful of Abe's status as a victim of bullying as extending to his forced resignation to second floor, third dank room on the left, at the hands of a family (and a society at large) who've exercised their intolerance with abandonment? To that end, Abe's assault of Homer with the water balloons gives him a moment of triumph against the man he recognises as his own oppressor. (Homer, it's true, also has legitimate reason to see himself as the victim of this particular equation, but for now let's let Abe enjoy the moment.)

I also think of "Bart The General" as an important transitional episode for Lisa, despite her getting little to do past the first act. Coming right before "Moaning Lisa", the first proper attempt to get to grips with her middle child psyche, this was effectively the last hurrah for the bratty Lisa from the show's Ullman beginnings ("Some Enchanted Evening"'s displaced air date notwithstanding). Compared to those Ullman shorts, where she was seldom more than Bart's female echo, Lisa was by now becoming more of her own character - it's established here that, unlike Bart, she has a positive outlook on school, and likes pleasing the very authority figures that Bart strives to undermine - but her mutually rambunctious sibling rivalry with Bart had yet to fully peter out, hence their back-and-forth at the start of the episode, in which Lisa pettily refuses to share her cupcakes with her brother until she's milked her share of flattery from him. I find it hard to imagine the bluesy girl of "Moaning Lisa" - who explicitly refuses to get into disagreements over baked goods on the grounds that "a simple cupcake will bring me no pleasure" - being as flagrantly immature as she is here. Even so, "Bart The General" does a nice job of cementing the fact that Bart and Lisa, though they may not always see eye-to-eye, fundamentally do care about one another. Bart gets into his jam in the first place by defending Lisa when one of the Weasels steals and destroys the cupcakes she'd made for Miss Hoover (or Mrs Hoover, as she's referred to here). Lisa, for her part, hails Bart as a hero for standing up to Nelson and the Weasels...which doesn't prevent Bart from later airing a few passive-aggressive grievances at Lisa, by way a fantasy sequence in which he imagines her standing over his embalmed corpse at a hypothetical funeral, filled with remorse for the fact that, "If I had just given [a cupcake] to you in the first place, this whole horrible tragedy could have been avoided" (not exactly the case, as I'm sure the Weasel would have targetted her box of cupcakes anyway, but survivor's guilt and all that).

Of the duplet of dream sequences added in to fill out the first act, the second, set at Bart's funeral, is easily the juicier of the two, in part because it's so fantastically morbid. The crosses substituting for the dead Bart's eyes are a wonderfully absurd but grisly visual touch, but the sequence is even more compelling for what it potentially reveals about Bart's psyche, and his perception of his personal standing with each of the attendees (I note that these are restricted to characters who'd already appeared in this episode, which is why Skinner and Otto are the only school staff we see - I guess that this early into the series the writers were still very conscious about making sure that viewers were able to keep track of who each of the supporting cast were). Despite his overwhelming terror at what lies in store this afternoon, he still finds room to vent a few petty ill feelings, including his aforementioned potshot at Lisa, and in getting Skinner to admit that, "I guess you were right...all that homework was a waste of your time." More telling still is that Nelson does not actually appear to be the real overarching threat that's plaguing Bart throughout most of the fantasy - rather, he looks to be more troubled by the question of how many of his family and peers would actually care if he died, which seems a surprisingly weighty and existential concern for a ten-year-old. Apparently Bart feels insecure enough to suspect that his classmates would be happy simply to have the day off of school, and that Homer would be equally buoyant at the excuse to skip a day's work. In spite of Bart's doubts about how little he matters in the scheme of things, "Bart The General" contains some nice character-building moments with both parents responding to his vulnerabilities and doing their utmost to be supportive - although Swartzwelder is always careful to balance out the sentiment with a little wry subversion. The scene where Bart, having endured an emotional bruising along with his physical beating, retreats to the bathroom, to be found in the midst of a private crying session by Homer, is genuinely affecting, but the tenderness is immediately mitigated with a particularly gruesome example of Homer's parenting, when he attempts to dry Bart's tears by blasting his face with a blow dryer (and he would do the same to Lisa in a later episode). Meanwhile, those displays of vulnerability go a long way in making the t-shirt-ready pop icon Bart seem as fleshed out and human as the rest of us. I've no doubt that part of the thinking behind "Bart The General" as a story was to show that, while Bart may be a gleeful little hell-raiser, he is at heart a good kid who'll stick his neck out to protect those who need it. His earlier starring episode, "Bart The Genius", had introduced Martin Prince as a possible long-term rival, him being something of an anti-Bart (studious, respectful of authority and impeccably groomed and presented); Nelson, by contrast, is less the anti-Bart than he is the dark extension of the kind of unruly childhood bracket into which Bart himself is frequently pigeonholed (a parallel reinforced in having them share the same voice actor). Nelson also struggles in school and is drawn to bending the rules as a result, but unlike Bart he channels his frustrations with the system into lashing out at those weaker than himself. For all of the hand-wringing that went on at the dawn of the 1990s about Bart providing a poor role model for children, this episode demonstrates that, next to Nelson, he's really not such a bad apple.

Finally, in addition to Nelson and Jasper, "Bart The General" introduces us to Herman, who wouldn't get a generous amount of starring roles in the series ahead, but whom I've long championed as one of Springfield's most underrated denizens. His friendship with Abe (which, alas, would not extend beyond the following season's "Old Money") provided a welcome opportunity for the latter to socialise with somebody outside of the Retirement Castle milieu, and as a character he's always been so steeped in mystery and intrigue. He's also one of the series' few disabled characters, and to that end he could arguably be seen something of a negative stereotype, in that his missing limb is clearly intended as a visual indicator that there's something off about his personality. "Bart The General" might be the single instance of his eccentricities being used for heroic purposes, with subsequent appearances tending to cast him as a criminal of increasingly dangerous stripes - for now, though, there is perhaps something gratifying in having someone so unconventional facilitate Bart's deliverance, given Homer's prior remarks about how those with differences are to be treated primarily as objects of scorn. Here, Herman explicitly comments on his lost arm, telling Bart that: "Next time your teacher tells you to keep your arm inside the bus window, you do it!" As a point of curiosity, on the DVD commentary, it's revealed that the writers had initially intended for this to be the start of a running gag whereby Herman would be routinely asked about his arm and give a different story every time (they cite another scenario - possibly included in an earlier draft of "Life on The Fast Lane" - in which Herman insinuates that he lost his arm by inserting it into the ball return system at a bowling alley). I'll admit that I was actually a little disappointed to hear that, as I'd always liked how this line functioned (whether by design or not) as a call-back to the third episode of the series, "Homer's Odyssey", where Edna Krabappel cites a tragic bit of lore about a boy who stuck his arm out of a bus window and had it ripped off by a truck travelling in the opposite direction. From what we have to go on, you are perfectly free to conclude that the child from Edna's story grew up to be Herman. Coming off of Bart's assumptions that Herman's missing arm is indicative of an old war injury, the joke is, presumably, supposed to be that Herman lost his arm through extremely dumb and arbitrary means - although, if the implication is that Herman was only a child at the time, it would still have been one heck of a traumatic thing for him to have experienced at such a young age. Incidentally, I'm also aware that a flashback in a Season 24 episode, "To Cur, With Love" depicted Herman getting his arm ripped off as an adult whilst hitch-hiking, but I don't see that as anything more than a throwaway gag. The schoolbus maiming is still canon to me!

Wimpy '89: Ghost In A Can? (Ghostbusters II)

This is potentially an embarrassing thing to admit to, but I spent the first two decades or so of my existence with the original Ghostbusters film from 1984 flying firmly below my radar. It came out before I was born, so naturally I'd missed out on the initial momentum, but then in the interim the opportunity to get acquainted just never came up. I never caught it on TV, I never attended any parties at the houses of friends who had the VHS tape, nor was anyone in my household ever tempted to pick out the title during our once-frequent trips to our local rental store. Which is absolutely not to say that I didn't know who the Ghostbusters were. Course I did - this was the era when you were guaranteed to hear Ray Parker Jr extolling their talents at every school disco you attended, and like any child of the late 1980s I'd watched my fair share of the Real Ghostbusters cartoon spin-off. I was also familiar with their live action counterparts, by way of Ghostbusters II, which I saw multiple times growing up. I could swear that, in the mid-to-late 1990s, that film received a terrestrial UK broadcast with absolutely every Christmas or New Year's Eve that rolled around. Although clearly I never paid close enough attention to grasp the significance of those numerals, because I was never particularly mindful of the fact that I was watching Part Deux of a story already set in motion. I'm not sure how old I was when I put it together that the movie about the long-haired man in the painting with the unwholesome interest in babies was actually the sequel and not the movie that most had in mind when they spoke about Ghostbusters.* But I do know that I was very nearly 20 by the time I actually managed to sit down and watch the 1984 film. I've never watched it since, either. I guess in this lifetime my preferences were always destined to swing more toward Gremlins. And Casper.

Probably my fondest Ghostbusters-related memory would be the ads for the promotional tie-in that happened at Wimpy restaurants during the UK release of Ghostbusters II in late 1989. Former heavyweights of the UK fast food scene (the chain was American in origin, but never took off in its homeland), Wimpy had spent the preceding decade watching those Johnny-come-latelies at McDonald's swell in size and increasingly hustle in on their territory, and it was only going to get worse from there - by the 2000s, they'd all but retreated from the high street altogether (the logical assumption would have been that they'd gone bust, until I happened to find one tucked away in the corner of a bowling alley). In 1989, though, they were still considered relevant enough to be doing business with a major blockbuster, and they had quite the unnerving narrative to go along with their Ghostbusters-themed Happy Meal equivalent. This contained a burger and fries (no gimmicks), a slime milkshake (whatever went into that) and the main attraction, the so-called "Ghost In A Can" - which, so the accompanying television campaign led me to believe, you opened up at your own peril. It was all a bit too much for me, I'm afraid. If there was one thing guaranteed to prevent me from setting foot inside a Wimpy restaurant, it was the thought of everyone around me cracking open cans concealing nasty surprises.

Even at four years old, I wasn't quite naive enough to believe that Wimpy were actually giving away malevolent spirits in sealed cans, bestowing on members of the public the power to unleash evil entities into the world with a simple tab pull. But I apparently was naive enough to suppose that they might be giving away cans containing state of the art holographic technology that made it appear as though a ghost was swooping out, all as a freebie curiosity piece in a kids' lunch that set you back just £1.99. For how they touted it, I would certainly have expected some kind of fake ghost effect. But since the television campaign was the closest I ever got to the action, it just had to remain a mystery. It wasn't until I was at university, and the subject of Ghostbusters came up in a casual conversation I was having with a friend, that I suddenly remembered the Wimpy promotion, and how curious I had been regarding how the "Ghost In A Can" thing actually worked. I mentioned it to my friend. "Oh that," they replied. "I don't think there was anything in those cans except a bog standard Coca-Cola." Not even a special, limited edition flavour of Coca-Cola. Man, what a let down. Where exactly did the ghost come into it, then? Were we expected to supply our own, using just our imaginations? How lame!

Looking back, the clues were there all along as to can's actual contents. Re-watching the ad now, I can't help but notice that Coca-Cola logo in the top-right corner of the final still, which should have been a dead giveaway. I also feel a trifle silly for being as spooked by the ending as I was, given that the ghost that emerges clearly hasn't flown up out of the kid's can, but has rather been edited in choppily using footage from the movie. Something that also didn't occur to me at the time but now strikes me as a little odd is that the kid in the ad is eating his lunch in a library - which, yes, ties in with all the Ghostbusters window dressing, but you'd think that Wimpy would have also wanted to promote something of the atmosphere inside a Wimpy restaurant, in order to tie in that busting magic with the experience of dining at one of their locations. Or would that have made the inserted spectral footage look even less seamless?

My subsequent research has indicated that there might have been more to the campaign than just a flashy exterior. Not much more, mind. The meal also came with a "Ghost Licence", which contained instructions on how to get the most out of your imprisoned spirit. As per the licence, if you opened the can, your ghost would conveniently vanish into thin air and be lost forever. But if you held your depleted can up to strong light for a few minutes, then took it to a darkened room and peered inside, you would apparently see some kind of glow-in-the-dark effect at the bottom (or leftover ecto residue, as the campaign narrative would have us believe), to indicate that your ghost had, at one time, been there. A far cry from the impressive unleashing act suggested (however shoddily) by the TV ad, and maybe you lacked the patience to hold your can up to the light that long, or the inclination to put your eye that close to the sharp edges of the opened seal. But it might have provided passing amusement to the kids of '89. My research also indicates that the gimmick itself was actually nothing novel in 1989, and that these Ghosts In Cans had been used as promotional items since as far back as the original film's release in 1984. According to the Ghostbusters Wiki, there were equivalents in various international locations (none are listed for the US itself), including Sweden, Canada and a noted fake from Argentina, although only the cans released alongside Ghostbusters II were sold as fast food tie-ins (it also seems that Wimpy didn't have exclusive ownership of the promotion, in the UK - they were available at Burger King too). And if you followed the instructions explicitly laid out on the side of the can, telling you NOT to open the thing, and instead kept it very safe, and very close, then congratulations - you now have something you could try selling for an extortionate price on eBay. (I'm not sure that the contents should still be considered drinkable, mind.)

I still have no idea what made a "slime milkshake" so distinguished. I'm happy for that much to remain a mystery.

* The same also true for Bill and Ted, now that I think about it. I grew up with Bogus Journey, and with the spin-off cartoon. Excellent Adventure, though? It just clean passed my childhood by.

Logorama (aka I Don't Want To Set The World On Fire)

If you want succinct encapsulation of Ronald McDonald's 21st century trajectory from colourful bastion of childhood pleasures to sinister anathema in these health-conscious, coulrophobic times, look no further than his appearance in the 2009 animated short Logorama, which got an intense amount of mileage out of envisioning the smiling clown (voiced here by Bob Stephenson) as the kind of sociopathic, gung-ho criminal who would hold up diners and take children hostage. Basically they made him their equivalent of the Joker, a move that seems motivated by a roguish desire to subvert the character's kid-friendly branding whilst teasing out the more sinister qualities suggested by his outlandish appearance, and feels fully in sync with the pall that had been cast on McDonald's in the post-Super Size Me age - culminating in a relatively unsubtle sight gag, toward the end of the film, where Ronald is ultimately felled by a sign promoting Weight Watchers.

Logorama was directed by François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy and Ludovic Houplain and brought to life by French animation studio H5. The 16-minute film imagines an alternate Los Angeles in which all of the inhabitants are familiar advertising characters. Not only are the people themselves all logos, the environment in which they live is comprised primarily of logos - the buildings, the vehicles, the street-lighting, the plant life, the birds flying overhead...it's impossible to look anywhere in this world without having your eyeballs assaulted by a multitude of brands and symbols. The corporate logo is an intrinsic, inescapable part of this universe's very underpinnings - with the implicit commentary that the world we inhabit is effectively no different. You could say that Logorama amounts to 16 minutes worth of non-stop product placement, but product placement so densely layered and relentless that it serves to shine a spotlight on our relationship with branding. Many of the featured logos have become such a familiar part of our everyday landscape that we can go about our business barely noticing them at all. Certainly, Logorama wants us to notice, and to be acutely aware of just how many of the danged things we have surrounding us at any given time. Which is, on one level, a whole lot of fun - a sizeable chunk of the film's appeal lies in observing the plethora of ways in which the individual logos have been wittily and logically incorporated into this universe, with so many in-jokes and background gags in every frame that it's impossible to ingest them all in one sitting. The sprawling visual canvas of the logo-fied Los Angeles is a real feast for the hawk-eyed viewer looking to play an elaborate game of Where's Wally/Waldo? with favourite mascots and signage. But there is something intensely overstimulated, overstuffed and overbearing about the sheer onslaught of images and information simultaneously vying for our attention. What's more, by reducing the physical components of this universe to the codes and shorthands endemic to the world of marketing, Logorama suggests that an inevitable outcome of a world centred around corporations and consumerism is a disconnect from reality. This preoccupation is present from the opening shot, which shows a close-up of the logo for Malibu brand rum, with the silhouettes of two palm trees against a setting sun, before panning away to reveal this static image to be a billboard advertisement, and the actual palm trees rustling in the adjacent landscape to be rendered in identically flat, two-dimensional outlines - bringing to mind Godfrey Reggio's remarks, when discussing the meaning of his 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi, about " the transiting from old nature, or the natural environment as our host of life for human habitation, into a technological milieu, into mass technology as the environment of life". 

These concerns are articulated in an early dialogue, when two Michelin Men (the cops of this universe) debate the ethics of exhibiting wild animals in captivity. One of them, Mitch (voice of Sherman Augustus), states that he finds zoos depressing: "That cheetah can run like a motherfucker, but in the zoo? He ain't got enough room to hit second gear. I mean it ain't like they're in their natural habitat." His partner Mike (Stephenson) insists that the animals you see in zoos have all been "rescued" and would be dead if they'd stayed in their natural habitats, which Mitch argues only makes the situation all the more fucked up. All this talk of natural habitats calls attention to the extreme artifice of their own environs - and by extension, our own - begging the underlying question as to the extent to which our existence at the heart of all this consumerism has benefited or stifled us, and indeed the world at large. The question is echoed when we go inside the Los Angeles Zoo, which is populated by animal logos, including the NBC peacock, the WWF panda and the MGM lion, and where the exhibits substituting for the animals' natural terrain are, unsurprisingly, also logos - Linux penguins are seen sliding off of an exhibit comprised of the logo for Miko brand ice cream, Playboy rabbits are living down burrows in the Paramount mountain and, in one of the film's subtlest but most bitter background gags, the greenery in the animals' enclosures is supplied by a company dedicated to global palm oil investment.

Logorama won the award for Best Animated Short at the 82nd Academy Awards in 2010, which I recall causing some shock waves at the time, since going in most had expected Wallace and Gromit's latest, A Matter of Loaf and Death, to take home the glory. As a lifelong Wallace and Gromit fan, I was initially disappointed by this outcome, but when I finally had a chance to watch Logorama, I put my biases aside and found that I couldn't really fault the Academy for their decision. After all, Wallace and Gromit's triumph in the Animated Feature category for Curse of The Were-Rabbit was still a relatively recent memory. For Aardman devotees, A Matter of Loaf and Death represented something pretty special in itself - the duo's first television outing in twelve years - but from the Academy's perspective, Wallace and Gromit were Oscar mainstays who'd proven their mettle enough times already, and it doesn't surprise me that the freshness and boldness of a one-off like Logorama should manage to upstage them on this occasion. I could honestly say that I had never seen anything else quite like Logorama. The closest thing would probably be the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror segment "Attack of The 50-Foot Eyesores", in bringing together multiple advertising mascots (or parodies thereof) to make a satirical  point about the oppressive nature of branding and consumerism, but even then that doesn't get close to scratching the surface. It probably also didn't hurt that Logorama could be perceived as having topicality on its side - while the short's creators have denied that they intended for its apocalyptic climax to be read as an allegory for the Global Financial Crisis (states producer Nicolas Schmerkin in an interview with Animation Magazine, "we started this film so long ago that we had no idea that a financial crisis was going to cripple the world!"), it nevertheless felt like an appropriate film for the moment.

Logorama has more on its mind than simply sly social commentary; it's also a lovingly-observed demolition of action movie cliches, many of which would not seem at all out of place in the McBain skits on The Simpsons - not least the supposed heroes' tendency to take out numerous innocent bystanders while attempting to close in on their villain. Soon after watching Logorama for the first time, I remember showing it to a friend, and he was truly appalled at the sequence where the Red and Yellow M&Ms meet a grisly demise, run over by Mike and Mitch during their high-speed pursuit of Ronald ("Where's a cop when you need one?" asks Yellow, having narrowly avoided being ploughed down by Ronald, right before irony decides to get brutal on his sugar-coated hide). Alas, the M&Ms aren't the only victims of police incompetence - at the beginning of the chase, they manage to twice knock over Fido Dido (and if Fido survived that second hit, I suspect he might require a wheelchair for the rest of his life), and during Ronald's hold-up of the diner Mitch winds up accidentally shooting one of his hostages, Mr Peanut, resulting in the equivalent of the anthropomorphic peanut's head blowing up and his brains splattering. In Logorama, nothing is sacred - Haribo Boy (Matt Winston) sustains a bloody head injury, and Colonel Sanders (who is, for all intents and purposes, an old man with a cane) gets crushed by a collapsing Slim Jims sign. The whole thing is a euphoric cavalcade of cruelty and carnage, an inherently chaotic world frantically attempting to hold itself together and maintain the illusion of order, until finally, with a little extra help from Mother Nature, a breaking point is reached, and it all comes crashing down in an epic frenzy. It's here that, having invested so much wit and imagination into constructing this world out of signs and logos, the films' creators get to experience flip-side of all that, in taking as much gleeful relish as possible in having it all come apart at the seams. Sensing the impending destruction, the zoo animals panic, break out of their enclosures and rampage through L.A. in a desperate bid to flee the disaster zone. The earth splits, buildings topple, oil erupts and the city is flooded, leaving the debris of this once jam-packed metropolis drifting dolefully atop.

There are points where the limitations of the universe in Logorama seem indicative of our own societal deficiencies. You might notice, for example, that the film's heroine, Esso Girl (Aja Evans), is one of only a scant number of female advertising mascots represented throughout - as Alaux and de Crécy note in the aforementioned Animation Magazine interview, "the world of the logotype is quite patriarchal". It's probably no coincidence that Esso Girl is easily the most sympathetic character in the film, and the bond she forges with the prepubescent Big Boy (Joel Michaely) as the two of them are being held at gunpoint by Ronald is the closest thing the story has to an emotional centre. Compared to the Michelin Men, whose thuggish macho antics are, in practice, no more reparatory than any of Ronald's actions (and in Mitch's cases, ultimately result in his own demise), Esso Girl's gentler, more empathic approach to heroism is upheld as redemptive - not only is Esso Girl one of the few characters left standing by the end of the film, she manages to save Big Boy as well. But these are qualities on which the world of Logorama places little value, with Esso Girl being subject to repeated indignities at the hands of her male compatriots, facing jeers and sexual harassment from Julius Pringles (David Fincher), aka Mr P, and his Hot & Spicy counterpart (Andrew Kevin Walker). Even Big Boy, who comes to look up to her as his protector during the increasingly escalating crisis, is visibly regarding her through the lens of his awakening sexual curiosity all the while - a dynamic carried over to the end of their characters' arc, when, having survived the string of disasters that have presumably wiped out most of the population of Los Angeles, Big Boy and Esso Girl are seen lying side by side on their own private island, as the latter takes a bite out of an Apple Inc. apple. Paradise lost or paradise regained? The symbolism is double-edged; Esso Girl's successful navigation out of the collapsing city and her deliverance of Big Boy could be seen as her triumphing over the patriarchy that has subjugated and abused her (and seemed all-too eager to destroy itself), although Big Boy's adjacent salacity could appear to parallel the destruction with the onset of sexual desire, the disruption of the established order so that the seed of desire that begot it in the first instance can begin the cycle anew.

Despite the downfall of this ad-centric culture, the final sequence reasserts the inescapability of the corporate logo, pulling back to reveal that outer space is no more ad-free than is life on Earth (itself reduced to nothing more than the Universal logo). The epilogue consists of a series of jokes in which various logos are shown to have taken the place of planets and galaxies (some, such as Mars and Milky Way, are a natural fit), and to all revolve around a giant Pepsi logo. The last word goes to Ronald McDonald, who reappears after the end-credits, having inexplicably survived the destruction, to remind us that wherever we think we've got the universe regimented into orderly categories, chaos inevitably endures: "I'm lovin' it!" he bellows, into the vacuum of space.