A Disney Christmas Gift (The Clock Watcher Cut)

 

If you're a younger Gen-Xer or an older Millennial, then you might have memories of a Disney compilation film that used to make the rounds during the festive season, under the title of A Disney Christmas Gift. First airing on CBS on December 4th 1982 as part of their regular Walt Disney slot, it contained a selection of shorts and clips from classic Disney films, linked by chintzy live action segments showcasing wind-up toys of Disney characters and the decorating touches at Disneyland. Only a limited number of the featured clips had any legitimate connection to the Christmas season, so artful snippets of voice-over narration (much of it in song) were applied to create the brittle illusion of a running festive theme - we're told, for example, that the winter sequence in Bambi happens on Bambi's first Christmas morning, even though there's nothing in the film itself to indicate this, nor any logical reason for these forest creatures to have any concept or knowledge of what Christmas is. The "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo" sequence from Cinderella was dubbed to have the Fairy Godmother shout out "Merry Christmas, Cinderella!" right before the fade-out (if you look closely you'll notice that her lips don't move), despite everything preceding it having absolutely sod-all to do with the festive season. The "You Can Fly" sequence from Peter Pan similarly doesn't happen at Christmas, but the characters explicitly reference the holiday in the lyrics, so I'll give it a pass. The most tangential thing on the menu is a clip from The Sword in The Stone (worked in as a vague allusion to the Nativity story - "another young king was born" - which is as overtly religious as the special gets) that doesn't exactly show off the best side of any of the principal characters, except maybe Archimedes the owl. Merlin throws a hissy fit and ditches Wart, for reasons that might not be obvious to anyone who hasn't seen the movie proper, and Wart proves to be a royally incompetent squire by forgetting to bring Kay's sword to the big sword-fighting tournament (we're not meant to side with Kay, but do you really blame him for being cheesed off with Wart about this?). The clip also ends abruptly, with a voice-over assuring us that "And so began the legend of King Arthur!" just as the development of Wart pulling the titular sword from the titular stone is barely getting started.

A Disney Christmas Gift was covered by the guy who does the annual Island of Misfit Christmas Specials feature (as “A Walt Disney Christmas”, which might be a legitimate alternate title). I enjoy his work and have a lot of respect for him, so I do mean it with the utmost most courtesy when I say that parts of his coverage are sort of misleading. The bit that I think is true is that Disney created the special because Mickey's Christmas Carol, which was at one point intended to air in its timeslot, was delayed due to an animators' strike, and A Disney Christmas Gift was an easy placeholder project to assemble cheaply and on the fly (note that Mickey's Christmas Carol wound up debuting not as a TV special, but as a theatrical short attached to the 1983 re-release of The Rescuers). But it simply isn't the case that Disney only aired this once and then canned it, nor is this special anywhere near as rare as he suggests...to the contrary, Disney proliferated the shit out of it on home video. In the 1980s it was available on every format you'd care to name, including CED, and it continued to see the light of day on the formats still standing (ie: VHS and LaserDisc) into the 1990s. I'd also point out that the special was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award For Outstanding Animated Program in 1984, so it was presumably well-received enough at the time (it lost to Garfield, who was king of that award until the Simpsons showed up).

The reason why A Disney Christmas Gift might be considered a misfit now is because this kind of cut and paste job inevitably looks redundant in an age where the original content is so readily accessible. I'd take a wild stab that that's why Disney never released it on DVD or Blu-Ray - by the time we'd reached the versatile disc era, A Disney Christmas Gift was long past boasting any especially rare or must-have material, unless you were nostalgic for the interstitials themselves. And its total absence on Disney+ absolutely doesn't knock me out. If you want to watch the scene with Bambi and Thumper ice skating then you can do it easily enough just by fiddling with a few buttons. It wasn't such an egregious practice in the 1980s, however - in fact, in the UK we had a regular feature called Disney Time which ran all the way from 1961 to 1998. For just shy of four decades, the BBC could whip up a bit of easy crowd-pleasing filler for their Bank Holiday programming by tossing together a few scenes from Disney movies and having a celebrity provide commentary in between (I am deeply sorry to have misplaced my recording of a 1989 edition with Frank Bruno introducing a featurette on the making of Oliver & Company...and I sure wish I'd had the foresight to tape the 1993 show with Mike Smith being stalked by some guy in a Jafar costume). For a while these cheesy-ass clip shows were the closest that an entire generation of us were going to get to seeing a lot of the features themselves. You have to remember that, at the time A Disney Christmas Gift debuted, only a scant number of Disney's animated titles were available on home video. It was a market they were initially approaching with extreme caution, since they were still set on re-releasing their animated features theatrically in a regular rotation, and feared that having them out there simultaneously on Betamax and VHS might undercut all of that (the Disney Vault system, whereby titles were only available for a strictly limited period before being locked away for the better part of a decade, was eventually adopted as a cunning means of perpetuating their catalog's mystique). In 1982, getting to watch Bambi flunk at skating from the comfort of your own living room would have been a rare enough treat in itself, and it remained the case for most of the decade.

Far more obscure than the original special, and what I really want to focus on here, is the truncated variant that aired during the latter end of the 1980s. When this variant first dropped is still a mystery to me; Wikipedia claims it debuted in 1987, while the Disney Wiki says 1986...one of them must be wrong, but I wouldn't like to say which. This was the version of A Disney Christmas Gift that I watched as a child (my family had it on an old VHS recording, I suspect from 1988, maybe 1989), and for a while, the only one that I ever knew existed. I'd be curious to know the story behind its being. It surely couldn't just be a case of them needing to trim down the original to fit a shorter timeslot, which could have been accomplished straightforwardly enough by shaving off a few excess clips. No, this was a complete top to bottom revamp. It feels like a case of somebody looking at the original and deciding that there was a far snappier version longing to get out of it. A few of the clips and shorts used in the original were retained, but some were dropped altogether and new ones added in. The most striking alteration, though, was in the interstitials. Gone were the live action segues, the renditions of "On Christmas Morning", the syrupy verses leading into each segment. Instead, footage from The Clock Watcher (1945), a Donald Duck short featured in the original special in its near-entirety, was here chopped up and redubbed to create a crude framing narrative, in which Donald was allegedly wrapping presents for the Disney characters seen in the clips. As Lisa Simpson would say, it seems new to the trusting eyes of impressionable youth.

Stumbling across the ORIGINAL version of A Disney Christmas Gift many years down the line was a disconcerting experience; the title certainly rang a bell, and I went into it fully expecting to get the version I'd known in my childhood. At the time, my memories of The Clock Watcher Cut (as I'm now fond of calling it) were vague and distant, and the 1982 original had that air of seeming familiar but also not quite right. It was like getting reacquainted with a program I had once viewed, but an off-kilter version from a parallel universe; so much of the content appeared to match, but the tone, pacing and presentation was all wrong. My most vivid memory was of Donald persistently arguing with an animate speaker pipe, so when we got to The Clock Watcher segment, I wondered if I had perhaps misremembered this as something that happened all throughout the special, as opposed to this one chunk. The tip-off that I hadn't came in how the segment ended. I'd remembered all too strongly how things between Donald and that speaker pipe ultimately went down. The 1982 special excises the short's final punchline entirely, making the ending appear to land at Donald's expense, whereas The Clock Watcher Cut incorporates the original closing gag with Donald getting his long-awaiting reckoning with the unseen individual at the other end of the pipe. I'd remembered that specific visual so clearly because it frankly baffled me as a child.

It might be helpful to establish what's really going on in The Clock Watcher, a short that's based around Donald working in the gift wrapping section of a department store, but didn't originally take place at Christmastime. Donald's boss (voiced by John Dehner in the original short) feeds him false cheer and passive aggressive chides through the speaker all day, while Donald does a deliberately half-assed job, eager for the clock to run out so that he can get out of there and go home. Quitting time eventually arrives, but Donald is ordered to work overtime and wrap an onslaught of last minute packages, whereupon he snaps and runs upstairs to pound the living snot out of his boss (and presumably hand in his letter of resignation right after), a development represented by a visual of the speaker disintegrating beneath the stress of all the bad vibrations. The Clock Watcher seen in A Disney Christmas Gift '82 was itself a heavily modified version of the 1945 release; for one, the original incorporated some uncomfortable racial humor, wherein Donald manipulates the "mouth" of the speaker to have it talk like a stereotypical African American, so that understandably had to go (note the abrupt transition between Donald's fiddling with the speaker and the subsequent moment where he's wrapping a chair). Also excised was the original's opening sequence, with Donald arriving at the Royal Bros department store, clocking in, leering at a mannequin in lingerie, and being subjected to the Royal Bros workforce song (I suspect this was done to make the scenario more concise by jumping directly to the gift wrapping, although they were probably quite glad to be rid of that mannequin too). And, of course, the final catharsis where Donald clobbers his boss is gone - I'm not sure why, but I would hazard a guess that they wanted to sand off the short's violent coda, mild though it was, to keep things good and genial for the holiday season.

The Clock Watcher Cut had no such qualms; it concludes in much the same manner as the original short, with Donald being ordered to work overtime and losing his temper, except that in this version the boss can be heard conceding and agreeing to leave the rest of the wrapping to Santa (seguing into the final short, The Night Before Christmas - see below). The visual of the speaker disintegrating is present and correct, and one that I really didn't know how to make sense of as a small child. I should emphasise that, back then, my callow brain couldn't quite grasp that the speaker was merely a device being used by an off-screen presence to communicate with Donald, and had instead accepted it as a character unto itself. And so when the speaker started falling apart at the end (I didn't then comprehend that Donald had anything to do with it, and assumed he'd just vacated the building in protest), it made me sad because I thought the speaker was randomly dying. Given his final assurances that Santa was on his way, my best interpretation was that Santa was currently trying to squeeze his way down the pipe, having mistaken him for a chimney, and the poor speaker couldn't withstand the pressure. Also noteworthy is that the voice coming through the speaker is nowhere near as obnoxious as in the original short - he certainly never misses the opportunity to rub it in that Donald's having to work on Christmas Eve (possibly for the benefit of anyone who'd tuned in during the last commercial break), but he doesn't pile on the smarm as heavily as his 1945 counterpart - making him less deserving of the brutal beating he takes at the end.

I don't know if this is a particularly contentious opinion, but I'd argue that The Clock Watcher Cut was the superior version of A Disney Christmas Gift. If somebody did indeed decide to revamp the special on the assumption that they could get a snappier show out of it...then congratulations, they succeeded. Both editions are fundamentally tacky collages, but Donald's ongoing contention with the speaker gives the arrangement a lot more bite than the twee interludes of the original, and who wouldn't empathise with Donald's frustration at being stuck in the workplace on Christmas Eve? A shame, then, that it's been regulated to the status of a mere footnote. The 1982 original might now be only a distant memory for a certain generation, but it had its turn at being touted as a holiday classic, whereas I'm not sure that its shorter equivalent received so much as one measly home video release. Alas, my family's copy from the late 80s appears to have fallen down the same black hole as Frank Bruno's plugging of Oliver & Company, but with a little digging, I was able to locate another recording, enabling me to revisit Disney's seasonal clip extravaganza more-or-less as I'd remembered it. For the benefit of anyone who's only familiar with A Disney Christmas Gift '82, here's an overview of what was featured in the Clock Watcher Cut (outside of the Clock Watcher interstitials themselves). Italicised are the clips and shorts that were NOT in the 1982 original.

• On Ice (1935): One of Donald's earliest shorts, and one he appears to be reliving as a traumatic flashback when the special begins. It ends with Goofy bonking him on the head, and we dissolve to find Donald throwing a fit in the present (which, in the original Clock Watcher short, was in response to hearing the morning rendition of the Royal Bros workforce song).
  
• Pluto's Christmas Tree (1952): Although Chip and Dale were initially introduced as nemeses for Pluto, their career with him was fairly brief, this being the last of only four shorts in which they got to go head to head with the yellow mutt. It's why I couldn't buy into those erroneous rumors from early last year that Pluto would be the villain of the 2022 Rescue Rangers movie (!), desiring revenge for all of the humiliation the chipmunks had caused him back in the day - his list of grievances would have been pretty minor compared to Donald's (and no, I couldn't fathom Donald being the villain either, although what they actually came up with was far more conceptually appalling). As it turns out, the real reason why Rescue Rangers '22 would never have cast Pluto as the villain is because that movie was dead set against acknowledging that there was Chip and Dale life before Rescue Rangers. Why, I've no idea, as Chip and Dale starred in some splendid shorts within their time, and Pluto's Christmas Tree is among the highlights. Classic ending where it looks as though a seasonal truce has been called between mouse, dog and chipmunk, only for Chip to get sick of Pluto's howling and to slap a "Do Not Open Til Xmas" sticker upon his snout. To this day the image of the silenced Pluto still puts me in the holiday spirit.
  
• Bambi (ice skating): Bambi is my favourite Disney movie, and I'm delighted to report that this year I finally accomplished my long-standing goal of seeing it on the big screen, when Disney re-released a few of their classics as part of their centennial celebration. Oh, but as a small child, before I'd had a chance to see it in its entirety, period, I used to positively HATE whenever any of these Disney clip affairs dropped a sequence with the wide-eyed fawn. For a while, all I knew about the flick was that one traumatic plot point everybody talked about, and I was always terrified that it was going to happen right then and there in the featured footage. Of course, it never did, nor do I believe that the people responsible for assembling these programs would have been callous enough to allow it. The creators of this special certainly had no intention of ruining everybody's Christmases and went with the safer option of Bambi and Thumper having fun in the snow (which is, incidentally, Bambi's last gasp of childhood innocence). Bambi sucks at ice skating, and I never tire of seeing it. As with the original Gift, we're told that it takes place on Bambi's first Christmas morning, and that Donald here had the snow delivered to Bambi by express delivery. My question there is how on earth would that have survived the transit?
  
• Peter Pan ("You Can Fly"): The character who was vilified (bizarrely, and somewhat skin-crawlingly) in the aforementioned Rescue Rangers '22 is featured here at a more innocent time in his career. This is the one area where I think A Disney Christmas Gift '82 actually outdoes the Clock Watcher Cut, since the latter doesn't show the full sequence, just the build-up with Peter telling Wendy, Michael and John to think happy thoughts and peppering them with Tinkerbell's sparkly dandruff. We fade-out right before the part where they fly above London and begin their journey to Neverland, ie: the big culminating pay-off of the sequence. The result doesn't feel quite as anticlimactic as the Sword in The Stone clip from the original, but it comes close. As this special would have it, the shadow Peter is attempting to affix to his shoes at the start is a spare one sent to him by Donald (and in such a tiny package too).
  
• The Three Caballeros (Las Posadas): Panchito tells Donald about the Mexican festival of Las Posadas, in which a procession recreates the journey of Mary and Joseph before celebrating by breaking out the piñata. If you've seen The Three Caballeros, you'll know that this is Disney's trippiest feature bar none (seriously, I don't know what Donald was on for most of it, but I want some), yet this particular clip isn't really representative of that - it is the most uncharacteristically restrained and solemn sequence in the original film. The subsequent moment, where Donald has a go at hitting a piñata, causing an array of mind-bending colour to rain down upon him, is our only inkling as to its real madcap nature. Its inclusion here no doubt enabled the special to claim a little extra educational merit, in providing a brief window into the different customs used to observe Christmas around the world.
  
• Toy Tinkers (1949): I'm surprised they kept Pluto's Christmas Tree and added in Toy Tinkers, because the two shorts have virtually the same premise - a character chops down a tree and contends with a Yulteide home intrusion from Chip and Dale. Still, having the two shorts pretty much side by side allows for a fun contrast between Donald and Pluto's respective warfare styles, and it's clear why the former was more frequently favoured as an antagonist for the pesky sciurines. Pluto is, well, an animal about it, whereas Donald gets to be a much more knowing bastard in his tactics, particularly when playing the chipmunks off against each other. I doubt that trick with the disparately sized walnuts would have occurred to Pluto.
  
• Cinderella ("Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo"): The clip is the same as in the original Gift, right down to the unconvincing redub with the Fairy Godmother calling out, "Merry Christmas, Cinderella!" Here, Donald is tasked with sending out a package that reportedly contains "a wish come true for Cinderella", so we're perhaps to assume that the Fairy Godmother was smooshed up inside it.
  
• The Night Before Christmas (1933): Confession - I think my family's recording might have cut out just as this short was beginning, since I have no memory of it ever featuring in any of my childhood viewings. Anyway, you know the drill. 

 

A Sideshow Bob Kinda Christmas: Bobby, It's Cold Outside (aka I''ll Just Lay Here And Chew)

"Gone Boy" came as such a pleasant surprise to me that I was obviously approaching Bob's subsequent showing, in "Bobby, It's Cold Outside" (ZAB0F01) of Season 31, with some caution. Its predecessor concluded with Bob realising, with the help of an unnamed psychiatrist, that his Bart-slaying obsessions were senseless and unhealthy, and moving on to a new ambition of opening a flower shop. An epilogue set many years in the future showed an older but wiser Bob living a secluded existence in a lighthouse, haunted by memories of his former life and aware that he had a valuable lesson to share with anyone who'd care to hear it (which the Squeaky Voiced Teen didn't). Character development that suggests a positive outcome for Bob comes only sparingly, and is absolutely not something that I take for granted. I was pretty certain that "Bobby, It's Cold Outside" was going to not only undo all of that, but not even bother to address it. I'd been there before, you know - "Day of The Jackanapes" had gotten around Bob's prior peacemaking with Bart in "Brother From Another Series" by ignoring it altogether. Was I right to be so suspicious of this one? Yes and no. Bob's interest in floristry presumably hasn't stuck as a serious ambition and, more dishearteningly, his thought processes are once again hijacked by his pathological revenge fantasies against everyone's favourite shamus in short pants (at the start of the episode, we find him making festive decorations in the shape of Bart being gored, strangled or devoured by sharks). Yet the events of "Gone Boy" are not completely forgotten, and "Bobby, It's Cold Outside" actually does serve as a weird kind of sequel to that episode. There's a direct callback to the ending of "Gone Boy", in that Bob is already living in his lighthouse and wearing what looks to be the same sweater he had on during the flash forward. It isn't exactly a direct continuation of the same storyline, but the reappearance of that lighthouse reinforces the idea that it holds some kind of symbolic significance for Bob - presumably, his compulsion to distance himself, both physically and emotionally, from the rest of society. With that in mind, I guess I can look on his ongoing Bart fixation as playing into that same metaphor, it being the thing that's pushed him so far down the path of desolation, stranding him in his deranged fantasy world and disbarring him from experiencing any kind of functional life's purpose or affinities. Although a twist is yielded on the latter front. Remember Teen's indication, at the end of "Gone Boy", that Bob wasn't the only societal outcast who'd sought out the seclusion of a lighthouse abode? That he still had fifteen others like himself to deliver to that day? Well, we potentially get to meet one of them here. Having exiled himself to the outermost regions of civilisation, Bob gets the unexpected opportunity to make a connection, with someone who's perhaps not exactly a kindred spirit (her darkest secret is that she puts extra butter in her muffins), but is capable of accepting and embracing him for who he is.

Of course, it still annoys me, on mere principle, that Bob is already back to wanting to disembowel Bart, but the good news is that "Bobby, It's Cold Outside" isn't another "Cape Feare" knock-off, and it finds something more for Bob to do than his usual homicidal scheming. In fact, he isn't even the villain of this episode. Oh, but you know what's really a breath of fresh air about this one? He doesn't take a rake to the face. I'm deadly serious. There's a joke in there involving a rake, but for once it doesn't entail Bob being injured by it. Bart knocks him out with a giant lollipop and Homer boots him about inside a box, but that's all the physical abuse he endures in this one. HALLELUJAH! This truly is a Christmas miracle! As to who the real villain is, let's just say that "Bobby" finally gave us a scenario that Simpsons viewers had been baying to see for decades. I'm not sure if this is how they'd envisioned it playing out, but it happened.

Airing on December 15th 2019, this was Bob's second Christmas episode (unlike "Gone Boy", this one actually takes place during the festive period) and, at the time of writing, his last canon appearance. And if Bob was going to take a hiatus for a few years then this was honestly a really nice place in which to leave him. "Bobby" gets automatic credit for closing on what feels like an unambiguously optimistic note for our friend. Holy shit, Bob actually gets laid at the end of this one. That in itself is a very good thing, and I will happily accept it as an explanation for how he's been able to stay out of trouble for so long. I have noticed a pattern wherein Bob seems to be a lot more chill in situations where his sexual needs are being met. It obviously wasn't the case in "Black Widower", but there Bob wasn't really attracted to Selma and visibly struggled with the whole love-making side of his ruse. By contrast, in "The Italian Bob", where Bob and Francesca had a very active and mutually gratifying sex life, Bob seemed genuinely happy for a while. Then we have "Wedding For Disaster", a rare episode that has Bob show up casually and present no threat to anybody, right after he and Krusty were reportedly sleeping together..."for warmth" in Krusty's words. Yeah, I'll bet. ^[1] I'm not saying that I believe sexual frustration to be the root cause of Bob's personality flaws - just that, every now and then, a truly satisfying fuck clearly does wonders in relieving his symptoms.

On the subject of Bob's love life, we can thank "Bobby, It's Could Outside" for finally clarifying the status of Bob's marriage to Francesca, who hasn't been seen or referenced since "Funeral For A Fiend" of Season 19. She doesn't get so much as a shout-out here, either - Cassandra Patterson, his new lady love, makes explicit note of the fact that Bob isn't wearing a wedding ring, so it seems safe to assume that he and Francesca have officially called it quits (maybe his time with Krusty in "Wedding For Disaster" had something to do with it, we can only speculate). In other words, Bob's family arc just fizzled, and Francesca and Gino may never be seen again, the thought of which does not leave me unsentimental. It's ironic, because when "The Italian Bob" first aired, I remember seriously not liking the idea of Bob having a wife and son. For years, I'll admit that I'd harbored the same misconception about his sexual orientation as Homer. In our defence, Bob is queer-coded AF, as many classic animated villains are, and their insistence on making him heterosexual still seems kind of suspect to me. (For the record, I have Bob headcanoned as bisexual, and he and Krusty as bitter ex-lovers from the start of the series. I'm 100% convinced that their boys' night in in "Wedding For Disaster" wasn't the first occasion on which they fucked.) And then eventually I came around to it, right about the time that The Simpsons decided they were done with that entire thread. More accurately, I came around to Gino. Francesca I could take or leave; as a character she was serviceable, but there was nothing in her chemistry with Bob that ever crackled and had me thinking, "Yes! Absolutely! This is the girl for Bob!" Gino didn't have masses of depth either - he is only a toddler, after all - but the idea of Bob being a parent was one that slowly grew on me. I figured that it could be a good next step in bringing out a whole different side to his character. Of course it never happened, and by this point in time I suspect the writers have forgotten that Gino even exists. It's something I contemplated very recently, after watching "Pin Gal". Obviously this was nowhere near my biggest concern regarding that episode, but it didn't escape my notice that the Bowlarama had a portrait of Bob in its gallery, apparently participating in some kind of kids' bowling league, and he was pictured with Gerald, the baby with the one eyebrow, and not his own son. The implication there, I guess, is that Bob was dating Gerald's mother, which might be somebody's fanfic fodder, but to me it's just a missed opportunity to work in a nod to the littlest Terwilliger, however marginal. Because I'd like to think that Bob has maintained some form of relationship with Gino, even if he and Francesca are now history. Bob's got his share of shortcomings - he's mean to his brother, and his first marriage ended because he attempted to blow up his bride on their honeymoon - but the one thing I'd never pegged him for was a deadbeat dad. C'mon Bob, you do have some standards.

Alas, I'm not sure if even Bob remembers that Gino exists. Cassandra asks him if he's ever thought about children, and Gino blatantly doesn't cross Bob's mind. We see Bob's train of thought, and it goes directly to Bart, and to the various little moribund representations of him currently dangling from his Christmas tree. You know Bob, there was a time, way back in Season 1, when you came across as being very compassionate toward children. Although maybe that side of him hasn't completely evaporated. This episode involves Bob getting a gig playing Santa Claus at a local Christmas-themed amusement park, and using that guise to be a force of benevolence around the town. Like I say, he's not the villain.

While it's a lot less explicit on this point than "Gone Boy", "Bobby" continues its predecessor's basic themes in exploring Bob's duelling desires and what he genuinely wants out of life, and in that regard it is quite a neat little character study for him. The title of the episode, while obviously modelled on a controversial festive standard that will come up later on, alludes to a lonely third party's efforts to get closer to him - the bookends with Cassandra underscore the tension between his urge to remain immured in his homicidal obsessions and his willingness to broaden his horizons by opening up to an intimate relationship. Cassandra occupies the lighthouse nearest to Bob's and is terribly unsubtle in her own yearnings to be better acquainted with her neighbour; Bob has evidently decided she poses no threat to him (when he goes to answer the door, he instinctively takes a machete, but puts it down when he sees that it's her), but remains guarded against her. He is, after all, in hiding after breaking out of prison, and is acting on the assumption that Cassandra doesn't know who he is. Spoiler - she knows exactly who he is, and when she asks Bob if he has any dark secrets of his own, this is her attempt to impart this to him, and not just an excuse for an exposition dump, although we get that too. The circumstances under which Bob managed to escape are revealed in a flashback that also incorporates elements of "Cape Feare" (yeah, predictable) and "The Bob Next Door" (the really gross stuff, so if you have a problem with body horror you should look away). Turns out he knocked out a priest, stole his clothes and bicycle and pedalled his way out without being challenged (I assumed at first that the priest was visiting the prison, but the guard at the gates tells him to stay out of trouble, so I guess the implication is that he was a fellow inmate being released? Hmm). Yeah, it's silly, but it's still less of a contrivance than Bob's (largely unexplained) escape in "Gone Boy", and it did have me giggling, so it will suffice.

"Bobby" also has shades of "Brother From Another Series", in that it explores Bob's capacity to do good whilst having to deal with the suspicions of a prying Bart. Bob is scouted out for the role of Santa on account of his mellifluous baritone, and his ego naturally overrides his inclination to keep himself hidden. Then when the Simpsons visit the park, and Bart unwittingly strolls directly into his clutches (why Bart is so anxious to see Santa is not revealed, but we've already observed that the show tends to vacillate on how much reverence he has for the Santa mythos), there is absolutely no fighting his urge to reveal to him his true identity. He makes an opportune attempt to off his nemesis by strangling him with Christmas lights, but this is really the script getting what it clearly sees as an obligatory plot point out of the way. Bob discovers, not for the first time, that his killer instinct is not forthcoming, which he here attributes to his commitment to staying in character: "I am a trained method actor. I inhabit my roles, like Daniel Day-Lewis in Phantom Thread, or Mike Myers in The Love Guru!" Phantom Thread is a movie I could totally envision Bob enjoying. I'm surprised he'd even want to acknowledge The Love Guru, though.

I said in my piece on "Gone Boy" that Bob's dynamic with Bart had by then come to resemble that of Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner, but in this episode it's really more akin to that of Sam Sheepdog and Ralph Wolf. The characters are so accustomed to encountering one another that there's a certain degree of familiarity underpinning their interactions throughout. Bart attempts to expose Santa's identity but discovers that everyone else is entirely indifferent to the arrangement - if anything, Homer seems only too happy to have that common ground with Bob, pointing out that he also played Santa at the Springfield mall on a previous Yuletide. While Bart himself remains wary of Bob, even he doesn't attack his part as lone objector with quite the same level of frantic paranoia as he exhibited in "Brother From Another Series". I mean, he actually accepts a ride with Bob on this occasion, something I absolutely couldn't see him doing back then, whether or not he had a shotgun to brandish. And after all they've been through with Bob, it seems wild that the Simpsons would be so relaxed about having him inside their living room. But I also think of Sam and Ralph in terms of the idea that Bob sees himself as inhabiting a role. The episode operates on the conceit that he's in an unusually clement mood because he's so determined to be the embodiment of Santa - an explanation that's technically superfluous given how "Gone Boy" concluded, but my take is that Bob is less inhibited by the role of Santa than he is relishing the freedoms he's gained from stepping out of his designated role as town homicidal maniac. In doing so, he gets to be an asset to the community and experience a taste of what his psychiatrist previously alluded to when he asked Bob if he'd considered how his life might have gone had he devoted it to good. There is some unspoken sadness in the implication that this can only be temporary - Bob and the Simpsons demonstrate that they are entirely capable of getting along and functioning as a team, but it's tempered by the nagging knowledge that as soon as this narrative trajectory has run its course, they'll go back to being enemies again, for no deeper reason than that the Powers That Be demand it.

Meanwhile, there's this other story thread unfolding where Springfield is being ravaged by "The Ghost of Christmas Presents", a mysterious thief pillaging their online purchases from their doorsteps before they can access them. One of the victims is Lenny, who devises a plan to catch the thief by setting out a decoy package with an exploding dye marker inside. Unfortunately, the package ends up exploding in his hands, injuring him - quite badly; Carl finds him lying in a pool of his own blood in the aftermath - but he gets a glimpse of the looter and is able to identify them by writing the letters "SB" with his fluids. When word of this reaches Bart, he naturally assumes that "SB" refers to Sideshow Bob, and that his nemesis is out for revenge on the town by stealing Christmas (a scheme that frankly seems a bit banal for Bob's tastes). If this narrative misdirect is sounding familiar, it's because it was cheekily recycled from "Wedding For Disaster", where Homer was kidnapped and Bart and Lisa, on finding a keychain with the initials "S.B.", presumed Bob to be responsible (as it turned out, wrongly...Krusty was able to vouch for Bob's whereabouts when the kidnapping occurred). It could be that "Bobby" is making a deliberate callback to that episode, since there's a gag with Homer turning in Selma Bouvier, aka the real perpetrator of "Wedding For Disaster" (along with Patty), prompting the police to release their prior suspects Scott Bakula, Steve Ballmer and Sandra Bullock. In "Wedding For Disaster" there was an obvious flaw in Bart and Lisa's deduction, in that "S.B." aren't actually Bob's initials; Sideshow Bob isn't his real name, and I get the impression that Bob himself doesn't much care for the sobriquet, even if he is resigned to it. Here, Bart is working second-hand off of Lenny's identification, so I guess we can go easier on him. Bart returns to the Christmas park after dark and infiltrates Santa's workshop, hoping to find evidence of Bob's latest diabolical plan, but all he finds is a folder listing some rather dry life's goals. (I have a question - are these meant to be Bob's actual life goals, or just a character-building exercise for his performance as Santa? Because one of the listed actions is "Find birth father", and well...you're telling us that the man we met in "Funeral For A Fiend" wasn't Bob's biological father? Come on.) Bob shows up and vows to prove his innocence by assisting the Simpsons in pinpointing the real thief. He conceals himself inside a package (Bob is quite the contortionist, thanks to his background in clowning), which is subsequently stolen, and trailed by the Simpsons to a warehouse, where they discover that the culprits are...Smithers and Burns! Homer is quick to point out the blatant contrivance: "Since when does Smithers go first?" (No kidding; despite being our secondary antagonist, Smithers gets exactly one line this entire episode.)

That aforementioned scenario that Simpsons fans had been wanting to see for decades? Bob and Mr Burns finally meet. Viewers had always figured that if the show's two most prominent bad boys were ever to cross paths, we'd be in for a truly explosive match-up. I suspect most of them were anticipating that Bob and Burns would either team up in a nefarious alliance or to go head-to-head in an exhilarating face-off. So, what happens? Burns sits on Bob's knee and opens up about the emotional trauma his parents inflicted on him at Christmastime. Look, you've got to see the funny side. Burns recalls how, as a child, he was so starved for affection from his parents that he went to a Gimbels Department Store Santa and requested a hug from his mommy and a smile from his daddy. The store Santa, not seeing any reason why the young Monty wouldn't be getting these, told him that they'd surely be coming. Instead, Burns was packed off to boarding school on Christmas day, and both of his parents were dead by the time he returned. (Discontinuity alert! Burns' mater was alive during the events of "Homer The Smithers", remember?) Burns admits that he and Smithers were stealing the town's presents because he wanted everybody to experience the same Yuletide dejection that he did. "[My parents] never gave me anything except a hundred million dollars! Santa lied!" Bob has a diplomatic solution - using his skills as a dramatic thespian, he's able to convince the emotionally pliable Burns that he's the real Santa and that his mom and pop really did love him, their detached child-rearing style being the essential factor that made him so strong. Bob asks Burns to consider what's become of all the other billionaires of his day (Burns: "Broke, dead, a lot of #MeToo...") and points out that Burns himself has endured, thanks to his parents' love. It goes without saying that this whole sequence is swathed in a thick, thick layer of insincerity; it has it all, right down to a close-up shot of Burns shedding silent tears at Bob's blatant distortion of the truth and then experiencing an inevitable 180 degree change of heart. Manipulative sod that Bob is, what is clearly genuine is the relish with which he seizes the opportunity to act out the perfect Santa to ease Burns' pain, and that's goodwill enough. The seasonal spirit is transmitted from one misanthropic loner to another, and Burns resolves to return all of the stolen packages to everyone's doors, prompting the townspeople to sing his praises.

"Bobby, It's Cold Outside" is by no means a perfect episode, and I do have my share of nitpicks to dish out. There's a sequence with the Simpsons singing "Baby Shark" that's already looking kind of dated (are tots still into "Baby Shark"? My nieces outgrew that particular development stage long ago), and I could have lived without that sight gag where Bob kills a pelican, albeit by accident. And while I'm accustomed to criticising episodes made under Al Jean's watch for the abruptness of their endings, this one has basically the opposite problem, in that it seems to struggle in figuring out where to tie itself up. In part, this is to do with how the ending is structured, as there are three different story threads that are resolved separately in consecutive vignettes, giving the sense of an especially protracted conclusion. The Simpsons get a mundane wrap-up that involves Homer and Marge wanting to make out on the living room couch on Christmas morn but getting interrupted by their inconsiderate kids, who insist on creating bedlam with their presents. Then there's one where Burns meets Steve Ballmer at the airport, which is incredibly drawn-out and feels tacked on primarily to beef up Ballmer's guest role. Sandwiched in between is the ending that most matters, where Bob, the unsung hero of the season, receives his overdue share of the festive zest.

Now that Christmas Day has arrived and his obligations as the amusement park Santa have been fulfilled, Bob has little choice but to return to his lighthouse and resume his position as a societal exile. Yet, even with this being his seeming lot in life, he discovers that he doesn't have to be alone out here; there is someone who's prepared to receive him, not in the assumed guise of Santa, but as regular old Bob. He's resigned to spending his evening watching It's A Wonderful Life on the chattering cyclops (footage from the actual movie, not an animated parody, which is apparently a modern Simpsons thing; there was a small moment in "Gone Boy" where Bart watched real footage of a John F. Kennedy speech), and has gotten to the part where George Bailey blows up with his family. His sympathies are firmly with George ("That girl is pretty bad at the piano"). Just then, Cassandra comes knocking, wanting to give Bob a Christmas gift (a rake), and to reveal point blank that she knows all his dark secrets and is itching to kiss him. It becomes apparent at this point that Cassandra is a hybristophile, meaning that she finds Bob's criminal history a turn-on. Bob is still reluctant to let her in, and the ensuing interplay takes the form of a modified rendition of "Baby, It's Cold Outside", a call and response song written by Frank Loesser in 1944 that has since become a fixture of holiday albums. Traditionally performed as a duet between a male and female vocalist, who play a host and a guest respectively (known as "Wolf" and "Mouse" in the sheet music), it charts the former's efforts to dissuade the latter from ducking out of a romantic interlude prematurely by citing the inclement weather conditions. You'll be aware that there's been a ton of discourse surrounding this song in recent years, since the lyrics can be interpreted as alluding to a date rape scenario, with the line "Say, what's in this drink?" being a point of particular contention (that the participants are called "Wolf" and "Mouse" doesn't exactly dispel that sense of a predator-prey dynamic). The counterargument goes that the song was written as a subversive takedown of the social conventions of the 1940s (ie: the exchange is all foreplay, designed to bypass the expectation that a woman wouldn't spend the night with a man to whom she wasn't married), and while I find that credible, I can understand why it might still be uncomfortable listening for some. Here, Bob and Cassandra sing a gender-flipped version that's very attuned to contemporary concerns about the central scenario - Bob is, initially, the one trying to push Cassandra away and back into the cold, insisting that, "I'm being a gent...", but he comes around when Cassandra says the magic words: "I'm giving consent..." She's even willing to put that consent in writing, producing a contract that both parties sign (I've freeze-framed and tried to read what's on the contract, but alas, my eyes can't pick out much that's legible). Bob finally accepts her companionship, and while their tender moment is briefly interrupted by Captain McCallister, who's crashed his boat outside and needs them to turn the lights on, I've no doubt they resumed right after and were still on their hormonal high come Groundhog Day.

That's all very lovely, but if there's a festive song I'm going to predominantly associate with Bob, it's "Christmas Is Going To The Dogs" by Eels - you know, the one Max parties to in the Jim Carrey version of How The Grinch Stole Christmas. Granted, it was written to reflect a distinctly canine perspective, but the lyrics do seem to suit his morbid, gloomy outlook.

 

I said at the start of my "Gone Boy" review that Bob's wheels on the story and characterisation front had both been spinning for some time, and in spite of all the good work done with him in that episode and here, I have to stand by that statement, if only because I know that it will inevitably all be reset. What the 2020s will bring for Bob remains to be seen, but his recent Treehouse of Horror appearance was pivoted heavily on "Cape Feare" nostalgia, and I don't take that as a good sign. I would love for Cassandra to stick around and become Bob's long-term girlfriend, because I think she is good for him, but I fully expect her to go the way of Francesca and Gino and never be mentioned again. Still, whatever happens, the late 2010s were a surprisingly peachy time in Bob's life and I'm glad to have had them. I find it heartening that, after all my grievances in the 2000s, the show was able to go on to produce some further Bob installments that I've rather enjoyed, and the thought that he might have found happiness, however temporarily, is one I'm going to keep savouring for as long as I may. Soon after this aired, the world itself was completely changed - a pandemic was right around the corner, and before we knew it we'd all be as isolated as Bob and Cassandra. So in some respects this episode feels like the last dance of a more carefree age. I wouldn't praise "Bobby, It's Cold Outside" in the same breath as I would "Brother From Another Series" or "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming", but I am warmly disposed to it, and it has already become an annual holiday tradition in my household. And so, as Drederick Tatum (of all characters) observed, God bless Us, Every One!

 

[1] You're possibly going to tell me that Bob and Krusty didn't actually do the deed, they were were just sleeping in the same bed. But I don't know, I feel the writers were definitely taunting us to suppose otherwise, and that's good enough for me. Did I ever mention that I was an ardent Bob/Krusty shipper back in the day?

A Sideshow Bob Kinda Christmas: Gone Boy (aka Bob Is Afraid)

Another Yuletide is upon us, and I can think of no better way of heralding the season than by circling back to a concern I touched on earlier this year in my coverage of "Pin Gal", but there didn't have scope to delve into - how IS Bob getting by in this cruel, crazy, beautiful world? I've brought you up to speed on the state of things for my other golden boy Jacques, and laid out in staggering detail how I feel about that, but what about Bob? He is, after all, the primary tie that still binds me to the series after all these years. My enthusiasm for modern Simpsons may not be up to much, but I remain so enraptured by Sideshow Bob as a character that whenever he's a new episode on the horizon, they have my undivided attention. It's not because I think there's a particularly riveting arc going on with his narrative or characterisation (to the contrary, both have been spinning their wheels for quite some time), but because he holds such immense significance to me personally. I feel like I've invested so much of myself in Bob, this peculiar-looking cartoon clown who's been around since my childhood, and for whom I've always felt this strange but unabating affinity. The fact that he's still here, and that I've been able to intermittently check in on him as I've grown up and aged over the years honestly seems pretty wild to me. Bob and I, we're on this journey to nowhere together, and I've no intention of deserting him now.

Bob made his most recent appearance only weeks ago, but in a Treehouse of Horror segment, meaning that it automatically had no bearing on his character's development or his current standing within the series' continuity (for whatever that continuity may be worth nowadays). In terms of canon appearances, Bob hasn't been seen since before the pandemic, and it just so happens that his last two episodes were both festive affairs. That in itself is a funny thing - The Simpsons went for about three decades without a seasonal Sideshow Bob installment, and then two came along, not quite at once, but in relatively close proximity. The first of these was "Gone Boy" (XABF02) of Season 29, which debuted on 10th December 2017 (just a few days ahead of Disney's announcement that they were officially buying Fox) and, of the two, boasts the more dubious Yuletide credentials. Personally, I wouldn't have classed "Gone Boy" as a Christmas episode - it's set during winter amid lots of snow-covered scenery, but other than an incidental remark from Abe about picking out a Christmas tree, there's nothing to specifically indicate that the season of good tidings is anywhere close at hand. And yet, they stuck an ostentatiously Christmas-themed variation on the opening sequence on the front, so here we are.

Thus far, I haven't spoken much about modern Bob episodes, or anything past the 1990s. Like many old-school viewers, I'm of the opinion that Season 8's "Brother From Another Series" was the last stop before a seriously rough ride - there was a significant gulf, both narratively and tonally, between his spat with Cecil and his next appearance, in Season 12's "Day of The Jackanapes", that set a negative precedent for how he'd be utilised going forward, and from which Bob as a character never truly recovered. Nevertheless, I think it's important to acknowledge that the Bob episodes that came after are not to be viewed as a monolith - within that time, there have been different eras applying their own approaches to the character, and the odd thing being done that's even quite interesting and experimental, at least in theory. Handily, these eras can be sectioned off more or less according to their decade, with the 2000s representing a particularly inauspicious time for our hero. It no doubt says something that my favourite Bob appearance from that era was in Season 20's "Wedding For Disaster", where Bob shows up for a single scene, the joke being that he is just randomly there and has nothing to do with the pivotal conflict. Of the "true" Bob episodes, "The Italian Bob" was the only halfway decent entry of the lot, with the aforementioned "Day of The Jackanapes" and "Funeral For A Fiend" each representing the absolute nadir of his career. I am willing to credit his 00s run with this much, however - with the exception of "Day of The Jackanapes", something that was maintained for most of the decade was the sense of an ongoing arc, with each new Bob appearance having some kind of meaningful impact on where he'd be situated for his next one. "The Great Louse Detective" did the unthinkable and allowed Bob to escape at the end; "The Italian Bob" went directly from there and revealed that Bob had fled to Italy, with the intention of starting a new life in a secluded village where nobody knew who he was. Then "Funeral For A Fiend" saw him return to Springfield with his newly-acquired Italian clan to cause fresh hell for the Simpsons, with the outcome that he was eventually recaptured and sent back to square one. The approach since then has been to treat that whole period as something of a lost weekend for Bob - none of its developments, including the fairly significant one of giving him a wife and child, have stuck. Continuity between Bob episodes has generally loosened, with writers sticking him wherever he's needed for the sake of convenience. So, "Wedding For Disaster" had him inexplicably out of jail and hanging out with Krusty, right before he was back behind bars for "The Bob Next Door". The 2010s also saw Bob sink to a new low in his homicidal obsessions, in that he started to do some really fucked up shit with his own body. Not so much in "The Man Who Grew Too Much", where it's more cartoonishly silly than it is gross or disturbing, but what he gets up to in "The Bob Next Door" would frankly make John Kramer vomit. I don't recommend that episode to viewers with a weak stomach. Unfortunately for them, it yielded one of the few developments that's actually impacted on subsequent Bob episodes - every now and then, we have this running gag where his facial skin will randomly peel off. Um, yay?

It might be a testament to how badly my expectations were whittled down across the preceding decade, but I was comparatively satisfied with Bob's run throughout the 2010s. Obviously we weren't scaling the same glorious heights of "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming" and "Brother From Another Series", but I've learned to take what I can get from these things. "The Bob Next Door" was the only one I honestly didn't dig on any level - once you get past the body horror angle (which is impressively gnarly for a non-Halloween episode), it's a very standard Bob-wants-to-kill-Bart story in the most worn and misshapen of "Cape Feare" molds (see below). The others, though, have at least something going for them. "The Man Who Grew Too Much", for as ridiculous as its narrative trajectory gets, has a genuinely lovely idea at its core - Bob and Lisa, two lonely intellectuals, finally realising that they have a lot of common ground. "Wanted: Dead Then Alive" from "Treehouse of Horror XXVI" is a pretty good Halloween segment that yielded one of my all-time favourite Bob quotes ("What is this Game of Thrones they're referencing?"). And then there's "Gone Boy", which finds Bob in a more introspective mood than usual. It doesn't do a whole lot more than state what's been bleedingly obvious about his character for some time, but the fact that it states it at all sets the tone for a somewhat different type of Bob encounter. This one is sympathetic toward Bob, and that much is definitely appreciated.

The title of the episode is an obvious nod to Gillian Flynn's 2012 novel Gone Girl (which became the basis of a David Fincher film in 2014), and like that story it deals with characters reacting to the disappearance and presumed death of a character who is actually very much alive, although that's as far as the plot similarities go. Homer manages to lose Bart out in the wilderness; unbeknownst to him, Bart has fallen down a manhole and become trapped inside a secret underground military bunker (which also happens to house a Titan II missile). The entirety of Springfield comes together in a frantic search for the missing boy but quickly writes him off for dead, much to the distress of his family...and to Sideshow Bob, who can't wrap his twisted head around the suggestion that something might have gotten to Bart before he did, and with his arch nemesis no longer out there he may just need to find a new hobby. That's the first thing we must address about modern Bob - his obsession with slaughtering Bart has basically eaten his brain, dominating his thought processes in a way that's often regressive to the rest of his characterisation. There comes a point where it ceases to be sinister and just becomes sad. So very, very sad. I said in my review of "Pin Gal" that Jacques' existence is looking kind of pitiful now, but he is still safely above Bob by numerous tiers in the debasement iceberg. Jacques at least has a passion and an occupation that gives him drive outside of stalking a Simpson.

My problem with most Bob episodes past the 1990s can be summed up in a nutshell - they are, broadly, way too indebted to "Cape Feare". "Cape Feare" is the episode they predominantly want to be, or at least to evoke. In some respects, that's understandable. For better or for worse, "Cape Feare" is the most beloved of Bob's appearances, and its cultural impact is undeniable. Its cheeky reappropriating of Bernard Herrmann's score for the 1962 thriller Cape Fear (also featured in the 1991 remake) managed to rewire popular perception of the theme, so that a significant chunk of people now recognise it foremost as Bob's leitmotif. But it's also the episode that bolstered perception that scheming to kill Bart is what Bob as a character is fundamentally all about - that he's a total monomaniac with no higher life's aspirations than to violently disembowel a 10-year-old child. For someone as talented and resourceful as Bob, that's a pretty dire fall from grace, yet it is the assumption that's clearly underpinning almost all of his later appearances. If you're not convinced that that wasn't all Bob cared about back in the day, then let's play a game. Of the six original Bob episodes, how many of them actually involved Bob attempting to murder Bart? By my count, only two: "Cape Feare" and "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming". Let's narrow this down even further - how many were there in which murdering Bart was actually the be all-end all of Bob's scheme? That distinction belongs to "Cape Feare" alone. In "Last Gleaming", Bart was never Bob's primary target; rather, they happened to cross paths, and Bob took advantage of that and dragged him into his kamikaze mission. "Brother From Another Series" opens with Bob remarking that whenever he could find a spare moment, he's tried to murder Bart, which is obvious hyperbole, but within the context of the enmity running alongside wider ambitions. This is, I feel, why many of Bob's schemes post-Y2K have rung so hollow - they've lost sight of the fact that there was more to his character than him being a pathologically vindictive freak of nature with impeccably charming manners. Certainly, he's always had that vindictive streak, and would never pass up an opportunity to thoroughly spite anyone who so much as put a chink in his pride. The difference being that in his earlier years, Bob's Machiavellian endeavours tended to be also geared towards obtaining something that had value and meaning beyond his personal grudges. What he mainly desired, more than revenge, was leverage. He sought to control and influence other people, whether it came from his position as a local children's TV personality, as mayor of Springfield, or by threatening to blow up the town with a nuclear device, so that he could refashion the world to be a little more as he believed it should be. Driving him was a certain principled, if supercilious vision, in that he was deeply concerned with society as a whole and its low cultural standards (that his concerns were often valid made it all the more juicy). Bob was effectively waging his own one-man culture war, and while he no doubt saw Krusty's most devoted fan as the epitome of what he was up against, he recognised that the problem neither began with Bart nor ended with him.

An irony I often contemplate when mulling over the Cape Fear films, and their extensive influence on Bob's character trajectory, is that the 1991 version ends with this line, spoken by Juliette Lewis's character: "...if you hang onto the past, you die a little every day. And for myself, I know I'd rather live." That's a very good takeaway, and one that Bob himself has spectacularly failed to grasp over the years. My lifelong journey with my favourite character has, in the bleakest possible terms, amounted to watching him die the most harrowing and protracted of emotional deaths. Everything Bob once had going for him has been gradually snuffed out as he clings to the one toxic desire he inexplicably believes will solve everything. If only he could make like Elsa and let it go. It's not completely his fault, of course. It's not like Bob didn't already take an entirely sincere stab at going straight, all the way back in "Brother From Another Series", only to be denied transcendence of the role the status quo had decreed him. In "The Italian Bob" he attempted to get away from Springfield altogether, and for a while found happiness in a separate domain, only for those rotten Simpsons, purveyors of the status quo, to flush him out and drag him back into his old habits. There might actually be a sliver of justification in Bob's blank-eyed insistence, in this episode, that "Evil isn't a choice." The irony in question has less to do with Bob's in-universe perspective than it does the show's fixation with its own past, and how it has continually used him in a way that seems centred on chasing bygone glories. Its veneration of "Cape Feare", and its need to keep trading on memories of that episode, have effectively kept Bob's characterisation in stasis, trapping him in a past ideal of himself which was frankly always a distortion of what he stood for, heavily informed by a Hollywood picture that was itself drawing from one of the industry's past successes. Robert Mitchum, filtered through Robert De Niro, filtered through Robert Terwilliger. Instead of trying to remake Cape Fear over and over, why not let the poor guy do something truly original? Something that doesn't involve him attempting to kill Bart or getting a rake in the face? If there's some concern that it wouldn't be a Bob episode without a random rake blocking our hero's path, I would counter that "Sideshow Bob Roberts", "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming" and "Brother From Another Series" all managed perfectly fine without it.

"Gone Boy" certainly contains no shortage of callbacks to "Cape Feare". Bob's infamous "The Bart, The" tattoo makes a reappearance, he has his inevitable rake troubles (as well as banana skin troubles, for a whisker of variation), Bob gives another passionate one-man rendition of Gilbert and Sullivan (to Milhouse, on this occasion), and the script even works in a gratuitous Hitchcock reference (Bob dreams in the title sequence for Dial M For Murder, and in Saul Bass graphics). What it's very deliberately not evoking, however, is the one key aspect that I suspect caused "Cape Feare" to resonate with viewers as strongly it did, in spite of its flagrantly shallow plotting - there, Bob was legitimately threatening. "Cape Feare" managed to make him the butt of an absolute onslaught of physical comedy, and yet still present him as someone whom Bart should be intensely afraid of. Here, Bob is simply a nut who doesn't know what he's doing, much less why he's doing it. When Bob and Bart finally meet, in the third act, Bart doesn't take him at all seriously, as he shouldn't. That genie isn't going back into that bottle. This is a problem that John Frink's script clearly understands all too well, hence why it has Bob come across as more ridiculous than threatening. That Bob has become a parody of himself is precisely the point; "Gone Boy" openly probes why he remains so compelled to keep targetting Bart after all this time, with the conclusion that Bob himself doesn't even comprehend it any more. By this stage, their enmity is comparable to that of Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner. In the Coyote's case, it blatantly isn't about his basic need to eat and stay alive - devising such elaborate schemes and assembling all those complex contraptions, he must burn considerably more calories than he's going to obtain from ingesting a single roadrunner. And if he's got money to buy devices from Acme, then presumably he's got money to order take-out. He continues with his pursuit, not because there is anything worthwhile to be obtained from it, but because he's too entrenched in it to back out now. His allotted role of chasing that Roadrunner has come to define who he is. Bob, similarly, has become so entrenched in his pursuit of Bart that he can't see it for the patently absurd waste of time and calories that is. What, exactly, is hoping to achieve, outside of the fact that wanting to kill Bart is apparently his thing, and he needs that relationship with Bart to validate his being?

This in itself is not radically new territory for a Bob episode to be exploring. The notion that he's developed too much of a personal attachment to the kid, however warped, to go through with the anticipated killing was integral to the resolution to "The Great Louse Detective". And the implication that life after Bart would lose all luster for Bob was the premise of "Wanted: Dead Then Alive" - of course, being a Halloween installment, Bob was there given the leeway to violently off Bart and then figure out how to reanimate him so that he could do it over and over. This was played entirely for grisly kicks, as you'd expect it to be. "Gone Boy" considers the matter from a markedly different perspective, which is to say what a fucking tragedy this all is for Bob. It occurred to me that the episode's title alludes not merely to Bart's disappearance, but to Bob's lost contact with anything resembling reason, reality or self-respect.

What makes "Gone Boy" more interesting than your average "Cape Feare" knock-off is that it introduces a character with whom Bob is able to explicitly discuss these very concerns. The episode begins with Bob out in the open, as part of a team of prison inmates assigned to cleaning up trash off a roadside (so, naturally, Cool Hand Luke allusions abound). The inmates are instructed to join in the search for Bart, and while this sounds as though it's going to provide Bob with the ideal opportunity to escape and get dangerously close to Bart, that expectation is swiftly subverted. This particular thread doesn't go anywhere, outside of the inmates subsequently learning that the search is to be called off because Bart has been officially declared dead. Bob is so distraught that he starts to self-harm by repeatedly thwacking himself with a rake, behaviour that gets him referred to the prison psychiatrist. The psychiatrist's name is, surprisingly, never given - Bob addresses him simply as "doctor" - which is kind of a shame; he's a prominent enough figure here that I think he deserved at least to have his moniker spoken. His dialogue with Bob is amusing, thanks in part to his improbably calm demeanor, and it's nice to see Bob interacting with someone who is ostensibly more sympathetic toward him than most. Make no mistake, the guy is still recognisably a dick. He drops a weighted disc onto Bob's abdomen, and the final gag involving his character, while not exactly at Bob's expense, still leaves rather a bad taste in my mouth (call me a prig, but I just can't laugh at the implied execution of multiple mentally ill inmates). The points he makes to Bob are nevertheless valid - that his murderous obsessions have impeded his ability to derive anything meaningful out of life, and he'd do well to look on Bart's death as a release - and they clearly resonate with Bob, even if he initially rejects them. Beckoning Bob in the other direction is Bart, or at least a hallucinated version of him, who takes control of Bob like a puppet, a pointed visual metaphor illustrating how Bob has basically surrendered all of his agency to Bart. For as much as Bob strives to have Bart living in persistent terror, he has in practice allowed this 10-year-old kid to dominate him and dictate his every move.

What the psychiatrist says is sensible. What he does, less so, which is to hand his obviously unstable patient a pair of scissors and tell him to cut out Bart's image from a photograph, thus assuring himself of his ability to remove Bart from his life. A frantic Bob refuses to accept that Bart is dead, whereupon he sticks a scissor blade into the psychiatrist's leg and makes a bolt for it. And just like that, Bob is loose and free to stalk Milhouse all the way to Evergreen Terrace. Apparently, all he needed to do to escape was skewer the thigh of a man who didn't look as though he would have been able to physically stop him from running out anyway. Which is all very questionable, when you consider that he was in a psychiatric facility inside a freaking prison. Shouldn't there have been a whole squad of security on the other side of the door ready to pin him to the floor and tranquilise him? I get that plot contrivances are sometimes a necessary evil to keep a story flowing, but this is quite a big leap, Frink.

Milhouse, meanwhile, has discovered that Bart is alive and gone to the Simpsons' house with the intention of revealing his whereabouts to the family, but decides to keep his mouth shut so that he can take advantage of Lisa's fraught emotional state and her desperation for a shoulder to cry on. Which is really very rotten of Milhouse - Bob's intrusion, and his cornering of Milhouse, frankly feels like instant karma knocking the young Van Houten right in the head. On being forced to lead Bob to Bart's location, Milhouse points out the obvious - if Bob goes down the manhole and into the bunker, he'll also become trapped there. Bob, who already immured himself in his own metaphorical bunker with Bart ages ago, is naturally undaunted. The ensuing confrontation has soon escalated to the point where Bart and Milhouse are strapped to the Titan II missile, with Bob working all of the necessary controls to activate the device. With only five minutes to launch, Bart asks Bob the million dollar question - why is he doing this? The way he puts this to Bob is startling; he doesn't sound like he's attempting to manipulate him, as he did in "Cape Feare". Rather, this is Bart making a sincere attempt to understand his nemesis after all these years, and why he feels so compelled to gruesomely destroy him. By now, even Bart has lost sight of what this was once all about. Bob can't produce even a vaguely rational answer (Bob: "It's an ICBM...I Commit Bart's Murder!", Bart: "That's your justification for killing two kids?!"), which gives him pause. He telephones his psychiatrist (currently hospitalised from Bob's earlier assault with the scissors) for guidance. The psychiatrist, comically unfazed by the revelation that Bob has a couple of defenceless children at his mercy, assures him that he already knows what he wants to do. Moments later, we see the missile fire off into the air...but Bart and Milhouse are safely down in the bunker below. Bob has cut them loose, and might have metaphorically freed himself in the process.

The Bob episodes "Gone Boy" inevitably evokes, if less consciously than "Cape Feare", are "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming" (once again, Bob's ambitions have gone nuclear) and "Brother From Another Series", in that it involves Bob making a sincere effort to go straight and managing to make peace with Bart along the way. Here their conciliation feels more cute than convincing - I mean, they actually hug at the end, a move that both parties would undoubtedly have regarded as a step too far in "Brother From Another Series". I suppose it's best read on a symbolic level, with the firing of that missile representing the total dispelling of a greater burden for Bob, leaving him and Bart free to be as chummy as they please, give or take a little lingering mistrust on both sides (Bart asks Milhouse to confirm if Bob isn't about to stick a knife in his back; Bob asks Milhouse to confirm that Bart hasn't stuck a "Kick Me" sign on his back). Of course, that missile is still going to end up somewhere - we see it crash into the Springfield Sculpture Gardens, where the pretentious aesthetes in attendance mistake it for a conceptual piece and mock the efforts of this NORAD ("More like Snore-ad!"). What happens next is a little odd; the missile apparently explodes and reduces them all to ashes, only it's presented in those same Saul Bass graphics that plagued Bob's dream earlier, leaving me unclear as to the reality of this sequence. I'm happy to write it off as another hypothetical scenario, as I'd sooner cling to my interpretation of Bob as fundamentally incapable of hurting anyone, except obviously himself. I suggest we just sweep it under the rug, as the Bass-ified Willie does.

Six months later (so the titles say, but there's still snow outside - shouldn't it be summer by now?), we find Bob back with the prison psychiatrist, exhibiting a much more optimistic outlook on life. Bob admits that, for the first time in forever, he feels real happiness, and that he now has a whole new ambition of opening up a flower shop. Hey, if they seriously want to explore Bob's aspirations of becoming a florist in future episodes, then I'm all for it. Could it be that Bob is about to get a happy ending for a change? Kind of; it's a more genteel conclusion than Bob is used to, but there is an obvious limitation on his ability to change his situation. He remains weighed down by the consequences of the life choices he's made, as signified by his now having eight (I counted) weighted discs spread out across his chest and abdomen - he acknowledges that he'll first have to go through three consecutive life sentences before he can realise his new dream. Still, the episode treats us to an additional surprise in the form of an epilogue, flashing forward by many years to reveal an older Bob (I would guess somewhere in his 60s), now released and living in a lighthouse. It's not revealed if he ever got that flower shop he wanted, but it seems that he's chosen to isolate himself from the rest of civilisation, either out of shame or because it's the only way he can keep himself out of trouble. He gets an intermittent moment of human contact with the Squeaky Voiced Teen (or a descendent of the Squeaky Voiced Teen), who shows up at his door to deliver a copy of The New Yorker. Bob divulges to the Teen that his routine now consists of maintaining the lighthouse and wandering the beach, where he writes "DIE BART DIE" in the sand each day before the tide inevitably wipes it clean. What's that all about? Is he contemplating the futility of the twisted ambition he spent countless years pursuing, and how little of a mark he was able to leave on the world, or is this some kind of cleansing ritual that never quite gets the desired result? Either way, it's harrowing just how deeply the phrase has stayed ingrained in his thought processes, even if he's found a non-destructive means of channelling the associated impulses. Having transcended the thing that ostensibly gave his life meaning, Bob is left only to ponder the realisation that there never was any meaning; he remains haunted, less by Bart himself than by the extent of his obsession with Bart and how it consumed him. I will admit, when I saw they were flashing forward with Bob, I was trepidatious about what kind of prospective destiny they were going to pigeonhole him into, but this doesn't strike me as an altogether unfitting way for Bob to eventually end up, leading an existence that's basically peaceful, but suffused with regret. I appreciate that they went with a scenario that's thoughtful and quietly sad, as opposed to anything too knowingly silly, and one I can actually get something out of on an emotional level. Even the abruptness of the final punchline, so typical of anything with Al Jean's stamp on it, doesn't detract from the poignancy of the sequence. What Bob previously wanted more than anything was leverage, and now he absolutely has a message that others should hear - that life is too short and too precious to be spent on useless things like revenge - but Teen dismisses him as a nut and leaves him in isolation once more, telling him that if he installed a mailbox then he wouldn't have to knock. 

Perhaps the most troubling revelation is that Teen has fifteen other lighthouses to visit today, all of them populated by people whom he considers weirdos. Presumably, those fifteen people all have stories of their own about what drove them to such a secluded existence and the psychological baggage they now carry with them. Bob is hardly an outlier in this world; the route he's travelled may have been wildly off track but it's well-trodden nonetheless.

Finally, I want to draw attention to a scene where Bart, inside the bunker, goes through a collection of records and pulls out an album by a group of cartoon rodents known as Calvin and The Hipmunks. I hit the pause button so that I could examine the tracklist on the back of that thing, and they've a song called "Having A Ball At The Berlin Wall". Oh, you joke, Simpsons, but it happened.