Humdrum (aka Fear of A Midday Shadow)

If you owned a copy of the 2000 home media release Aardman Classics, you might recall just how flat-out unsettling the compilation got the deeper you delved into its centre. For those who only knew the Bristol-based animation studio for the Morph skits and the creations of Nick Park, I'd imagine this would have been one heck of a bucket of ice water. Things got off to a deceptively genial start, with the original Creature Comforts short and the first of the spin-off ads for electric heaters featuring Frank the tortoise. Then Pib and Pog appeared, in all of their mean-minded, psuedo-educational glory, and things were thrown just a little off of balance. The Creature Comforts gang resurfaced, and for a fleeting moment we felt like we were safe again...right before were slap-dab in the middle of an incredibly fucked-up computer animated bit about a minotaur murdering a duck with the help of a severed hand. Sandwiching Minotaur and Little Nerkin in between the two ads about the dishwasher-loving pandas had the effect of making the pandas seem utterly false; going back to their smiling faces immediately after witnessing the horrors inflicted on that duck was like to having to resume your place at a dinner party after being privy to some enormously disturbing gossip about your host. There was some agreeable content ahead - War Story, Wat's Pig, a music video where a claymation cat with the vocals of Nina Simone performs "My Baby Just Cares For Me" - but "Heat Electric - Penguins 3 and Pablo" would be the last stop before a very disconcerting stretch throughout the middle, where we were basically leaping from one bite-sized nightmare to the next. Stage Fright, Pop, Ident, Loves Me, Loves Me Not - it was a non-stop parade of sleep-robbing freakiness. Obviously nothing else among them was as dark and sobering as the apocalyptic drama Babylon, but twisted psyches with full creative freedom clearly were endemic to the studio. The end of the compilation took us back into calmer territory, with the grimy realism of the Conversation Pieces and Animated Conversations, but even then they had to stick on one final scare to send us home with, in the form of Boris Kossmehl's Not Without My Handbag. In 2006 Aardman released another compilation, Aardman's Darkside, touted as a glimpse into the studio's nastier, more adult-orientated underbelly, but I personally saw very little difference between the films therein and at least half the line-up of Aardman Classics. Family-friendly was definitely not their default setting in the days before Chicken Run.

Lurking amid that sinister middle stretch was the 1998 film Humdrum - a short that, based on the opening credits, I had seriously expected to be a lot darker than it was. Everything about the title sequence - the deeply ominous musical notes, the black backdrop, the abrasive, jagged lettering -  suggests something truly terrifying is in store. Which may well be part of the joke; we enter into Humdrum prepped for a more dramatic affair than actually transpires. Instead, the key characters, two shadowy entities voiced by Scottish comedians Jack Docherty and Moray Hunter, are navigating a nightmare of a whole other nature, one that has less in common with the overt horrors of Stage Fright and Not Without My Handbag than the plight expressed by the verbose zoo animals in Creature Comforts. Stuck indoors and fed up of staring at the same four walls all day, the shadows spend the entirety of the six and a half minute runtime in search of alleviation from the stifling monotony. Their names are never disclosed, but I've taken the liberty of applying my own for the purposes of this review - Pawn, the thoroughly morose one (Docherty), and Rook, the intermittently exuberant one (Hunter), based on the chess pieces their heads resemble. This design choice strikes me as entirely deliberate, since the game of chess comes up explicitly in the dialogue, with Pawn recounting what happened on a previous and (we presume) equally boring occasion, when Rook made him eat all of the white pieces after losing a bet. He indicates that most of the pieces have yet to work their way through his digestive system (though he thought he saw a couple of pawns yesterday), a gleefully scatological gag that takes on added resonance if we view it as a mirror to the characters' own predicament, engulfed by a smothering monotony and desperately looking for an exit that never appears. The idea that the characters themselves are chess pieces also calls attention to their positioning for most of the film, perched at opposite ends of a table, suggesting that they are, whether knowingly or not, opponents and not allies in their ongoing entrapment. In the absence of any other distractions, they have nothing to gaze into except the dark abyss of one another, their every move a bid to keep not only the monotony from gnawing away them, but their companion's eccentricities too. Pawn is, unsurprisingly, the underdog in this equation, with Rook appearing to outmanoeuvre him at virtually every turn, and we sympathise with Pawn all the better for it.

Humdrum was directed by Peter Peake, the particular twisted psyche behind the aforementioned Pib and Pog, with a script doctoring credit for Rex the Runt creator Richard Starzak (then known as Richard Goleszowski). The film takes a unique visual approach - like your archetypal Aardman production, it uses stop motion figures, with the twist that the camera in this case is interested not in the figures themselves but in the shadows they cast. Seemingly detached from any corporeal bodies, Pawn and Rook exist only as murky, one-dimensional entities who nevertheless manage to be entirely fluid and expressive with the limited features they have. They seem at once alive and stranded in a ghostly state of only half-existence, distorted imitations of a full-bodied world that seems eerily unrealised. Meanwhile, the blistered backdrops onto which the shadows are projected take on a low-key life of their own, reflections of the protagonists' barren mental states that intermittently shift to signify the nascent traces of evanescent preoccupations. When the game of chess is mentioned, the wall assumes the checkered pattern of a chess board. When a cow is cited, the blotchy markings of a bovine's hide can be seen. The uncanniness of the visuals is buffered by the distinctly human warmth of the characters' banter, the dialogue between Pawn and Rook being both hilarious and natural. If you were watching it on the Aardman Classics compilation, then that warmth, coupled with the relative simplicity of the piece, came as a great relief following after the busyness and mean-spiritedness of the preceding Stage Fright. Starzak's playful touch seems particularly evident in the film's bluntly self-aware script, incorporating multiple barbs at its own nicheness. The possibility of turning to the television for escapism is dismissed early on, when we're told all that's on is "some weird animation thing". The major development that dominates the latter stages of the film - Rook's proposal that they entertain themselves by creating shadow puppets with their own hands - is met with weary disdain from Pawn: "I can't think of anything more boring that staring at some stupid shadows, for god's sake! Is this what happens when you don't have any friends?!" Elsewhere, Humdrum looks to be making some broader comment on our relationship with popular entertainment and the extent to which it alleviates or reinforces our monotony. The radio proves as futile a means of diversion as the television, bearing out Pawn's gloomy assessment that music "is all the same rubbish these days", with every station the characters tune into broadcasting some variation on "La Cucaracha".

The real purpose of the shadow world is to allow for a series of clever twists regarding the nature of perception. In the first half of the short, a momentary distraction arises in the form of a dog (or, more accurately, the shadow of a dog) barking at the protagonists' doorstep, which Pawn indignantly attempts to send packing. We think we understand what's going on, until Rook shows up and identifies the dog as a double-glazing salesman, who has apparently pestered the shadows on previous occasions. Our natural assumption would be that Rook is simply in cloud cuckoo land, until the door is closed and the dog, suddenly speaking in plain English, confirms his perception. It becomes even funnier when you rewatch the sequence with the knowledge that Pawn is always addressing the caller as a double-glazing salesman and not a dog; it makes me wonder, likewise, if the dog is actually barking from the protagonists' perspective, or if it's all just a comical means of conveying a particularly incessant sales pitch?

The interlude with the dog seems initially to be nothing more than a random sprinkling of absurdity, but later transpires to have laid the ground for the punchline of the short, once the game of shadow puppets has unfolded and become increasingly heated. As noted, the viewer's sympathies are invariably with Pawn, since he is the character with whom our perspectives are more firmly aligned. Odds are that we too would not recognise Rook's ridiculous attempt at contorting his digits into the shape of a cow, before he supplies the giveaway mooing (Pawn quite accurately observes that it looks more like he has his hands caught in a sandwich toaster). By contrast, Pawn's wizardry in creating an astonishingly fluid rabbit shadow is always painfully conspicuous to us, even when Rook insists that it looks more like an otter with two sausages tied to its head. It all climaxes with a deliciously cathartic moment where Pawn finally loses it with the hopelessly obtuse Rook: "I'm stuck indoors playing Guess The Misshapen Beast with someone who clearly wouldn't recognise a rabbit if it came to his house for tea, said "What's up, Doc?" and started burrowing into his head! There are blind people with no fingers who are better at shadow puppets than you! No wonder I'm a tad miffed!" All thoroughly just criticisms...except it's all tipped on its head in the closing moments, when a second caller appears at the door, a mooing shadow that perfectly matches Rook's prior attempt at creating a cow. Something even more shockingly unexpected then occurs - for the first time, we see a smile form across Pawn's face. "Not today, thank you," he says politely, before closing the door, seemingly unfazed by the irony of the situation. While it's certainly gratifying to see things end on a more buoyant note for the beleaguered Pawn, it's here that we also part ways with the character, seeing how our perspective no longer lines up with his. Suddenly, he seems at totally peace with the absurdity of his surroundings, and what's obviously normal to him has us scratching our heads with regard to what we're actually looking at. Is this hideously misshapen beast an accurate representation after all of how bovines look in this world? Is it another door to door salesperson flogging their unwanted wares? A grand cosmic joke at the expense of Pawn? A meta joke at the expense of the animators? All of those things at once? Has Pawn potentially been the daffy one all along, while Rook has a firmer grasp on the realities of the shadow world? After all, we never get any objective insight into how a rabbit even looks in this universe, outside of Pawn's projection - for all we know, his efforts really do look more like an otter with sausages protruding from its head. Or is Pawn simply calmly rejecting the film's final efforts to make a fool of him? All that matters is that Pawn is now in on something that we aren't, and it seems significant that he closes the door while facing the viewer, effectively ejecting them from the premises and leaving them out in the cold. The music heard during the end credits, yet another variation on "La Cucaracha", offers a striking contrast to the music featured during the title sequence and seems almost mocking of the viewer's confusion.

Humdrum was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short, but lost to Aleksandr Petrov's take on The Old Man and The Sea - a film to which there was seriously no shame in losing. I'm just happy that it got some recognition, since like a lot of the studio's projects that weren't helmed by Nick Park, it remains something of a hidden oddity. It's disconcerting as hell, yet basically genial enough that it helped the psychological scarring from elsewhere on the Aardman Classics release to go down more easily, which speaks volumes to Aardman's character at the time.

Homer vs Patty and Selma (aka Neither A Borrower Nor A Lender Be)

There is something faintly paradoxical about the way in which "Homer vs. Patty and Selma" (2F14) handles the overdue grudge match promised upfront by its title. On the one hand, this is the first Simpsons episode in which the mutual dislike between Homer and his twin sister-in-laws is permitted to take centre stage. Their antipathy has been a fixture of the show since its very first episode, where having to accommodate Patty and Selma was one of the many grievances weathered by Homer during a particularly grim holiday in "Simpsons Roasting on An Open Fire", but had seldom escalated into anything more dramatic than regular rounds of passive aggressive murmurs. The characters make little secret of what anathema their respective existences are to one another, but it's always been something that, for the most part, everyone just has to tiptoe around. So long as they've ample opportunity to take snide potshots at the enemy party (often from behind their back), then Homer and Patty and Selma are about able to coexist, united on the understanding that they're required to put up with one another for the sake of Marge. It's far from ideal, but it's a kind of equilibrium. "Homer vs. Patty and Selma" attempts to explore in-depth what putting up for Patty and Selma for Marge's sake really looks like for Homer, by thrusting him into a situation where that equilibrium is flipped hopelessly out of whack, with Patty and Selma gaining the critical advantage. Showrunner David Mirkin suggests on the DVD commentary that when this first aired, on February 26th 1995, it represented the show's most exhaustive dive to date into this uneasy dynamic, and I'd agree insofar as it does more with it from a narrative standpoint than any episode before it was wont to do. But I'm not sure if that necessarily makes it the most developed look at the relationship between Homer and his sister-in-laws, as it has to be said that this is something of a regressive entry on Patty and Selma's end. It makes the move of casting them as straight up villains, for which there is honestly very little precedent. Patty and Selma have never been the most affable of souls, but they have typically always been treated with more nuance than is evident here. Whereas a lesser series might have settled for painting them as the loathsome boogeywomen Homer assumes them to be, with no greater drive than to make his life miserable, The Simpsons has always been careful to give them distinct shades of humanity, with doubts and vulnerabilities all of their own. "Homer vs. Patty and Selma" is a rare episode in which their characterisation is determined exclusively by Homer's perspective, and therein lies the paradox - their disdain for Homer gets a ton of focus, but they themselves are at their most one-dimensional, to the point that you would have to go as far back as "Simpsons Roasting on An Open Fire" to find an episode where the matter was ever quite this one-sided.

That's not to say that Homer is without fault, since he gets into his situation through an act of flagrant misjudgement, the kind that could only validate Patty and Selma's perspective that he is an unworthy husband for Marge. The episode opens with him having invested all of the family's savings in pumpkins, observing that demand for the gourd has been souring all throughout October but failing to grasp the obvious reason for this (ie: Halloween is right around the corner). The season passes, leaving him with only a worthless investment, a looming mortgage payment and too much shame to be capable of explaining the situation to Marge. Having exhausted every other possible avenue of support, he turns to his last ditch option of Patty and Selma, who've recently received a big promotion at the DMV and are in a sound position financially. They agree to lend Homer the money, keeping the wolf from the Simpsons' door but leaving it wide open to a disagreeable intrusion of another nature. Not surprisingly, Patty and Selma had an ulterior motive for their generosity, having spied an opportunity to gain leverage over Homer - as Selma so elegantly puts it, "We know something you don't want Marge to know.  Now we own you, like Siegfried owns Roy." The twins insist on calling at the Simpsons' house more frequently, forcing Homer to perform a variety of degrading tasks at their beck and call in exchange for their continued silence around Marge. But of course that cat's only staying in that bag for so long.

As Mirkin observes, this an unusually straightforward and grounded story for its era, the kind of conflict we might expect to have come up not just in the show's earlier seasons but in any number of its live action counterparts. It has, though, unmistakably the flavour of a Season 6 installment. It's a wholly relatable situation - at some point in our lives, we've all had to ask a favour of someone with whom we did not ordinarily get along, and perhaps they weren't exactly gracious about it - but it paints itself in distinctly big and broad strokes. Take the comically exaggerated sequence where Patty and Selma are first inducted into the conflict, as Homer arrives home to find smoke gushing out from under his front door and is initially elated, thinking the house is on fire and that insurance money will cover his pumpkin losses. He rushes in, to find the source of the smoke to be none other than his sister-in-laws with their usual cigarette-biting antics. They're established, none too subtly, as toxic invaders, filling the household with their noxious fumes like a couple of rapacious fire-breathing dragons. But the sequence feels just as telling for the troubling window it offers into Homer's muddled, overly-impulsive psyche; he spends the entire first act struggling to save his family's home from repossession, yet he was momentarily happy at the thought of it going up in flames if it meant an imminent cash payout. It foreshadows how the story will eventually develop, as Patty and Selma do indeed turn out to be Homer's salvation, at least in the short-term. In the long-term they prove to be just as destructive as his hypothetical fire, making his home life unliveable and dragging his already battered self-esteem to blistering new lows.

The resulting episode is one of assorted contradictions. It's a small story that, in narrative terms, is content to stay small. Neither Patty and Selma nor writer Brent Forrester seem interested in taking their unholy arrangement to overly dramatic heights, the tasks Homer is required to do being unpleasant but basically nondescript. The nastiest it gets is when they force him to grovel at their freshly-massaged feet and to talk in the voice of a stereotypical Hanna Barbera dog. Yet the larger-than-lifeness that dominated your average Simpsons outing by the mid-1990s stays firmly in the driver seat. It isn't entirely disconnected from the realism of the earlier seasons; for one, it's nice to have another story in which the family struggles with money in a meaningful way, something that used to happen a lot in the early years but now rarely seemed to be an issue any more (we were just a season away from that infamous moment where Homer hands Bart $750 like it was pocket change). But the undeniable despair of the predicament is buffered by copious amounts of silliness, and this is before we get into the comparatively lighter subplot. There's the ridiculous means through which Homer loses the family's money in the first place (which, admittedly, seems quite sedate compared to his recent get-rich-quick shenanigans involving a sugar pile and a trampoline), the cartoonish physicality of the sequences where he ejects Patty and Selma (and Marge, in one instance) from the house, and the way he protests Marge's evaluation of the matter by smashing a plate against his head. There are a few downright baffling gags, including a total non-sequitur involving a possibly paranormal television and a nod to The X-Files. And then the third act development where Homer resolves to bring in more money by moonlighting as a chauffeur takes a distinctly improbable detour, which Homer puts neatly into quotation marks: "I can't believe my very first passenger is comedy legend Mel Brooks!" With hindsight, Brooks' cameo seems kind of ominous, it being an early example of a celebrity appearance that's been conspicuously crowbarred in for the sake of a celebrity appearance (Brooks' wife Anne Bancroft had recently voiced a character in the episode "Fear of Flying", and the producers wanted to stick Brooks into an adjacent story while they were at it). Brooks is given no substantial link to this particular narrative; he's there because he just happened to be passing through. They could have dropped any celebrity into the backseat of Homer's limo and it would have made every bit as much sense. And yet I can't really begrudge the Brooks sequence because it contains what might be my second favourite joke of the episode, one so subtle that it took a few watches for it to completely register - Homer telling Brooks that he loved his movie Young Frankenstein because it scared the hell out of him. (I can relate to that; I'll never forget my confusion on being shown the movie Airplane! at age 7 and, being too callow to comprehend the idea of a spoof movie, trying to follow it as a serious adventure story. It certainly made me leery about airline catering.) Besides, the script is able to scrape some decent humor out of Brooks' sidelined status, when Homer is found by Wiggum to be driving without the correct licence, and ordered to apply to Patty and Selma at the DMV. Homer starts screaming uncontrollably, and Brooks, not comprehending the situation on which he's vaguely impinging, concludes simply that Homer is dangerous and opts to bum a ride with Wiggum instead.

This is also the episode where Homer envisions Bart as a giant rat. Bart, sadly, perceives that as an insult, but I know I would much rather be compared to a rat than to a royal.

 "Homer vs. Patty and Selma" is less interested in how Homer relates to Patty and Selma (something touched on in more nuanced, if not pivotal ways in episodes such as "Principal Charming" and "Selma's Choice") than the depths of his devotion to Marge, and this is where the emotional crux of the story lies. Which is not to say that it's even half as interested in Marge herself, who doesn't have much to do other than stand on the sidelines and look sad. Her reaction on coming up to speed with Homer's financial ills is curiously downplayed, given how much he'd feared her finding out. Other than voicing her confusion as to why he didn't tell her, she doesn't express much of an opinion on her husband blowing the family's savings on Jack-o-Lanterns, leaving it unclear what she's really feeling in the aftermath. Disappointment? Concern? Resignation? Homer's self-loathing, and his assumptions about what his investment fiasco says about him ends up overshadowing anything that Marges actually says or does, which is doubtlessly the point, but it keeps her in a position of total passivity throughout. Conversely, this is one of the few episodes in which Marge gets to openly highlight something that should be obvious but nearly always gets ignored whenever her husband and sisters are spitting venom at one another - just how shitty it must be for her to be caught in the middle of it all. In one scene she tells Homer, "It's very hard on me to have you fighting all the time." With that in mind, there is a layer of hidden poignancy in Marge's de-emphasised view of events, since for a chunk of it she's under the impression that Homer and her sisters are finally getting along, when things are actually worse then ever while her back is turned. Which takes us into my absolute favourite joke of the episode, following Patty and Selma's "perfect" dinner with the Simpsons where nothing at all went wrong. Even more revealing than the strained, plastic grin on Homer's face is Marge's joyous aspiration to celebrate the ostensible truce by serving the most international coffee in the house - Montreal Morn! That one line says pretty much everything about Marge, about her outlook on life, her expectations and her lived reality. It's capped off by another fantastic gag when she returns a few moments later, announcing shamefacedly that her Montreal Morn supplies have been depleted and all she has to offer in its place is some cheap and nasty Nescafe (yuck, I would be ashamed too). Marge's life is an onslaught of perpetual disappointments, her hopes of impressing by serving flashy coffee about as realistic as all prospects of her husband and her sisters ever putting aside their bad blood.

Since Homer's story is a (relatively) grounded one with (somewhat) genuine stakes, a B-story is woven in to pad it out with extra levity. This involves Bart being forced to take ballet lessons and discovering a latent talent for the dance. When tasked with performing before the school, however, he balks, fearing that the bullies will target him for enjoying a traditionally feminine pursuit. As B-stories go, it's a fairly arbitrary one, offering not even the vaguest of intersections with the A-story (the aforementioned "Rat Boy" moment is the only point where Bart and Homer even interact). The most they have is a loose thematic parallel about the Simpsons boys harbouring secrets for shame of what others might think of them. But as a premise it certainly has boundless appeal. There's something about Bart being a natural ballet dancer that just makes perfect sense to me, to the point that it feels as though this might have been expanded into an actual A-story with further refinement. As it happens, the writers are content to treat it as a bit of fluff on the side. Maybe they didn't think there was anything more to be done with the idea than the standard expose and takedown of gender norms - which, judging how this arc ends, they were clearly not interested in doing sincerely. Giving it considerable momentum is the wonderful performance from guest star Susan Sarandon as Bart's ballet instructor, doing a very similar voice to the one she would subsequently use as a talking spider in James and The Giant Peach (1996). Whenever she's on screen, the story positively sparkles. Once she fades from the picture and we enter into Bart's recital, it struggles with where to take itself, ultimately settling on rather an iffy conclusion. I'm not really talking about how Jimbo, Nelson and co turn on him when he summons the courage to reveal his passion for ballet to the school - we all saw that one coming (to the point where you could question if it's even that much of a subversion) - but what happens at the very end, when Bart fails to jeté himself across a ditch to escape the bullies, and winds up potentially breaking a few bones down at the bottom. Lisa suddenly appears, embracing the injured Bart and telling him how proud she is that he showed his sensitive side. This is supposed to be our heartfelt moment to take the sting off, by having someone commend Bart for following his dreams in spite of what it cost him. In practice, it plays like an unconvincing attempt to suggest that Bart's relationship with Lisa was what the subplot was really about, which totally doesn't work because Lisa had barely even featured in it up until now. Honestly, it felt as though she had more of a meaningful presence in Homer's story, where he filled her in on his intentions to find a second job. It's also not helped by its inconclusive ending, with Lisa apparently wandering off while Bart groans, "Why'd you just leave me when I clearly need medical attention?" Yeah, why Lisa? I mean that does seem very out of character for you. Again, I think a more substantially developed version of this story might have fixed things so that Lisa's moment feels less like a tacked on afterthought; the version we have is fun, but effectively fizzles. Besides Sarandon, I think my favourite thing about it is the rare witticism we receive from Richard and Lewis. ("If they don't get here soon, it'll be T.S. for them!")

The A-story likewise bows out on rather an abrupt final note, as though it absolutely cannot wait to reset the status quo and move on, and I think it's the hurried nature of the respective wrap-ups for each narrative, coupled with their total disconnect from one another, that makes it all-too easy to dismiss the episode as one of the season's fillers. Erik Adams of The AV Club calls the two stories "undercooked" and "partially formed", characteristics he attributes to pressures Fox had placed upon the writers at the time. (Now that you mention it, while Season 6 both starts and ends strongly, there is a noticeable lag around the middle.) We may come away feeling underwhelmed, as though nothing that happened therein was of any real consequence. Which seems unfair, because the developments that occur toward the end of Homer's arc are genuinely potent. It takes the earnest route, at least in the short-term, with an unusual display of maturity on Homer's part. He manages to salvage his pride, not by meeting Patty and Selma at their level and continuing the cycle of antipathy, but by rising above it and acting on the opportunity to be kind to them. As with "Black Widower", the twins' cigarette addiction ends up being the factor that nearly spells disaster, in a way that taps deftly into the niceties of life in the nineties. Having failed Homer on his driving test, Patty and Selma are so exhilarated that they momentarily let their guard down about smoking on the job and are caught by their boss with the offending cancer sticks. She's so outraged that they'd be smoking in a government building that she threatens to rescind their promotions. Homer is all ready to savour the schadenfreude, until he notices how anxious Marge seems about the situation and puts aside his desire for petty vengeance. Instead, he helps Patty and Selma by pretending the cigarettes were his, redirecting their boss's wrath his way ("You, sir, are worse than Hitler!") and sparing their jobs. He admits afterwards that his Good Samaritanism was motivated not by sympathy for Patty and Selma, but by empathy for Marge and the recognition that if her sisters were to suffer, so would she. If Patty and Selma bring out the worst in him, then she's a counterbalancing reminder of why he should not stop striving to be the best he can be. By taking the higher ground, he leaves Patty and Selma totally disarmed; they are humbled by his actions, and Marge is able to make her own case for why, in spite of all his failings, she'd still be with him. Perhaps there is a better side to Homer that, up until now, Patty and Selma have simply never witnessed.

These observations feel more heartfelt and rightfully earned than those used to round off Bart's arc. But the script insists on undercutting them in a typical Simpsons fashion. The conclusion comes abruptly by design, in a way that seems to mercilessly dash all possibility of any durable understanding between the warring parties. Patty and Selma behave graciously, apologising to Homer for their recent mistreatment of him and suggesting that they might be able to do him a favour in return. The implicit offer they're actually making is to pass him on his driving test, but he has set his sights set on a much bigger prize. He demands that Patty and Selma forgive his debt altogether, which they are clearly reluctant to do. Homer, though, isn't settling for anything less - he's located a convenient out to this story's entire predicament, and with only seconds left on the clock you can bet he's taking it. A cancelled debt means that he no longer needs the chauffeur gig and can walk away scot-free. And so he does, declaring the debt void and bolting off with Marge in tow before Patty and Selma have leeway to negotiate. They're left standing there, powerless and obviously put out. The debt may have been nullified, but we sense that so too has a wad of their newfound goodwill toward their brother-in-law. It paves the way for the cycle of resentment to only continue, so I guess nobody really won.

Oh, and I noted in my recent coverage "Team Homer" that, originating with that episode, there seemed to be a conscious push on the writers' part to have Moe promoted to the status of Homer's best friend. You might not have guessed that that was so imminent from how Moe is depicted here, with his very darkest of inclinations on display. He agrees to lend Homer the money, not as a friend, but as a loan shark, and on the condition that he gets to break Homer's legs in advance since he has no collateral. Homer backs out when he can't convince Moe to deal him a bloody head injury instead. Sure, with friends like that, who even needs enemies?

The Case For Sidney's Family Tree (aka Knighty Knight Bugs Is A Stupid Cartoon)

There have been many, many contentious Oscar rivalries across the decades, but few quite so endearingly offbeat as that between Looney Tunes mega star Bugs Bunny and Terrytoons newcomer Silly Sidney the elephant, who in 1959 went against each other for the Academy Award For Best Animated Short Film (or Best Short Subjects, Cartoons, as it was then known). Actually, when Bugs' entry, Knighty Knight Bugs, triumphed and Sidney's Family Tree was sent away empty-handed, I doubt it was considered a terribly earth-shattering outcome from anyone within the industry. After years of languishing in the shadows of Disney and MGM, Warner Bros were increasingly becoming the studio to beat for Short Subjects; Knighty Knight Bugs represented their fifth overall win, four of which had occurred within the past decade (Knighty Knight Bugs would prove to be the last of their victories, as the 1960s were a spectacularly unkind time to the Looney Tunes, and to theatrical animation in general). Terrytoons, meanwhile, seldom had their shot at Oscar glory, with Sidney's Family Tree being only their fourth nomination in the history of the award, and the taste of victory was consistently denied them. In the years that followed, it seems unlikely that many people lost sleep over the match-up, or even gave it a second thought. And then, 31 years after the fact, it suddenly gained retroactive notoriety, when it became the basis of the Tiny Toon Adventures episode, "Who Bopped Bugs Bunny?" It was 1990, and Sidney was back from the abyss of obscurity...in a manner of speaking. The elephant in question went by the name of "Sappy Stanley" and his character design was given a grotesque modification, courtesy of John Kricfalusi, so that his mouth was located inside his trunk. It was patently obvious that this was meant to be Sidney, however. He was still bitter about losing to Bugs after all these years, and apparently vindictive enough to kidnap the rabbit and steal his Oscar (or Shloscar, as it was called in-universe), setting Daffy Duck up to take the fall along the way - a startling turn of events for an elephant who, in his original series of shorts, was never depicted as having a mean bone in his body. ^[1] That's what the sting of losing to Knighty Knight Bugs had done to him!  This portrayal of Sidney (sorry, "Stanley") was voiced by Jonathan Winters, and for an entire generation of children (yours truly among them) he would have been their introduction to the character. And what a first impression! Casting him as a villain with such a vicious axe to grind might seem like a terribly mean-spirited move (this was, after all, a written-by-the-victors scenario, with Warner Bros mocking a character they'd already defeated once), but they made a singularly cool antagonist out of the neurotic elephant. Far from defiling Sidney's legacy, they gifted it with a fun and affectionate new twist.

When confronted by Babs and Buster, Stanley's justification for his crimes was that he deserved the award by right for good taste, since "Knighty Knight Bugs is a stupid cartoon". That's a sentiment to which I am honestly very sympathetic. While I wouldn't necessarily go so far as to call Knighty Knight Bugs "stupid", I do find it astonishing to think that the ONLY Oscar of Bugs' entire rich career was for this cartoon. They couldn't have picked a more pedestrian, more middle of the road example of his work if they'd tried. There is nothing outstanding about it other than that it happens to be Bugs Bunny's sole Oscar win. That it won the award while the phenomenal What's Opera, Doc? (1957) wasn't even nominated a year prior feels like a sick cosmic joke in itself. But then nominations for Bugs shorts were surprisingly sparse in general - only two shorts, A Wild Hare (1940) and Hiawatha's Rabbit Hunt (1941) had previously attained the honor. The success of Knighty Knight Bugs is a blatant example of the Academy handing out a win not on the merits of the nomination itself, but in compensation for their having overlooked a body of much stronger works to an artist's name. On that basis, I think Sidney/Stanley has every right to feel aggrieved.

Could Sidney's Family Tree actually have beaten Knighty Knight Bugs in a battle based solely on the respective merits of each cartoon? Here's where Sidney's Family Tree would still be at a hot disadvantage - there is little getting around the fact that the animation in Knighty Knight Bugs is of a considerably higher quality than that of Sidney's Family Tree. Terrytoons was, after all, renowned for doing things on the cheap. Studio founder Paul Terry infamously cared more about the quantity of his output than the quality and never had any pretensions to making serious art. Sidney himself came about as part of a new wave of Terrytoons characters created after Terry retired in the mid-1950s, leaving his studio in the hands of Gene Deitch (remembered chiefly for his infamous run of Tom & Jerry shorts in the early 1960s). Deitch's strategy had been to move away from the studio's existing store of characters (Mighty Mouse, Heckle & Jeckle, Little Roquefort & Percy) in favour of implementing new blood, and with only a fraction of the budgets of his already notoriously frugal predecessor. A former apprentice of United Productions of America, Deitch applied that studio's approach of limited animation against basic, undetailed backgrounds (techniques that would prove instrumental with animation's impending shift to being a medium of television) ^[2]. And lo, the look of Terrytoons got even cheaper. A second's glance at Sidney's Family Tree would clue you in that this was a considerably less prestigious production than Knighty Knight Bugs.

Likewise, it is important to acknowledge that the competition for Best Animated Short of 1958 was hardly a two-horse race, three contenders being the category's bare minimum. Sidney had not just the heavy-hitters at Warner Bros to worry about, but Disney too. The also-ran who's largely been squeezed out of this discussion is Paul Bunyan, the House of Mouse's take on the overgrown lumberjack of American folklore. But then again Disney, the undisputed kings of this award in the 1930s, had fallen quite vastly out of favour by the 1950s. Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Bloom (1953) was their only win for Best Animated Short that whole decade. At a hefty 17 minutes, Paul Bunyan was certainly the most epic short in contention that year, although that might even have worked against it. It goes on a long time and offers rather a wishy washy pay-off. I can see why Academy voters might have felt underwhelmed by it. Whatever their shortcomings, Knighty Knight Bugs and Sidney's Family Tree do have the virtue of being short.

Somehow, it's my impression that 1958 wasn't the strongest of years for short animation, and Academy voters weren't exactly left with an embarrassment of riches at the end of it. They had their choice of the mediocre Bugs Bunny cartoon, the interminable shaggy dog story from Disney, or the unassuming, frugally-animated short about the unknown elephant. "Oh jeez. Well, everyone loves Bug Bunny, and this is his first nomination in 17 years. Let's just give it to him now while we have the chance, and take a load off our consciences." It's not fair, but it's where we are.

Am I really poised to argue that Sidney's Family Tree was the worthiest of the three nominees after all? I'm sure that part of the joke, in Tiny Toon Adventures, was in Sidney/Stanley ever seeing himself as a serious contender to begin with. And yet where Sidney's Family Tree is at an advantage, at least in my eyes, is that, unlike Knighty Knight Bugs, it actually feels like it's about something. That something being neediness. The characters have a loneliness and a vulnerability that makes them endearing, even if it exists largely within the subtext. It may not be the most technically accomplished of the three entrants, but is the one to which I am the most warmly-disposed.

Sidney's Family Tree was only the second of Sidney's adventures (he'd made his debut earlier that same year with Sick, Sick Sidney).  Directed by Art Bartsch, it follows Sidney (voice of Lionel Wilson, better known to modern viewers as Eustace from the early seasons of Courage The Cowardly Dog) in his efforts to find himself an adoptive family. The whereabouts of his biological parents are accounted for in a verse recited by Sidney during the opening credits; they joined a circus and left him alone in the jungle. Initially, his plight is met with little sympathy by the other animals, who remind Sidney that he's 44 years old. Which is one of Sidney's main running gags - his crippling anxieties about having to live in the adult world whilst being a perpetual kid at heart. And really, who couldn't relate to that? The guy's cast off and alone in the world, being in his 40s doesn't preclude him from still not having a clue what he's doing, and all he yearns for is a whisker of emotional security and validation. He tries taking his case to a passing hippo and giraffe, but gets brushed aside in both cases. They've already got offspring of their own, and don't have time to be indulging a neurotic elephant on the side. (The giraffe, incidentally, is named Cleo, and she would become a recurring character in Sidney's subsequent cartoons. For now, Sidney addresses her only as "Mrs So-and-So", which probably isn't going to score him many points in the courtesy leagues. She seems to know exactly who he is, however.) 

Sidney's luck changes when he runs into an animal also looking to fill an emotional void, a female chimpanzee who's desperate for a baby of her own, but doesn't have one. She eagerly agrees to be Sidney's adoptive mother, but her mate isn't so thrilled when she breaks the news that this two-ton elephant manchild is moving in with them. It's through what's implicit in the chimpanzees' interactions that the short adds a dash of hidden substance to its subtext. The male chimpanzee is every bit as keen to start a family as she is, and when she indicates that they've made good on that aspiration, his immediate assumption is clearly that she's pregnant. This is even reinforced with a cheeky subliminal visual gag, wherein he joyously squirts an obviously phallic banana out of its skin on thinking that he's finally managed to sire offspring of his own. It's not a point that the script particularly lingers on, but it's easy enough to read in between the lines and interpret the chimps as a couple who want to procreate, but haven't had much luck with the conception process. The female chimp sees Sidney as the answer to their problems, but the male isn't so willing to accept him as a baby substitute. The interplay between Sidney and his grudging adoptive Pop is where most of the narrative focus lies, as he first attempts to cope with the arrangement and then aspires to get rid of Sidney, but it also takes the time to establish a bond between Sidney and his mother, incorporating a tender moment where she knits him a trunk cozy and bids him a good night. The connection between the two seems heartfelt enough that you genuinely feel a sense of her pain at the end, when her mate announces that Sidney is out of their lives for good.

Sidney's Family Tree is an extraordinarily gentle cartoon. Possessing neither the loftiness of Paul Bunyan nor the anarchic aggression of Knighty Knight Bugs, it coasts along considerably on basic geniality. The very darkest thing that happens is when Sidney's adoptive father attempts to ditch him by trapping him inside a cave, which he obviously doesn't get far with. Even the frugal production values, and the all-round lack of technical sophistication, come together in ways that play to the film's merits. The plain, predominantly yellow backgrounds dusted with crude floral outlines are barebones as can be, yet they radiate a warmth and vibrancy. Phil Scheib's flute and percussion score is repetitive, but adds to the soothing ambience of the piece.

Sidney remains too naive and trusting to ever cotton onto the fact that his adoptive father doesn't want him around, interpreting his hostility as tokens of affection. His priorities seem to change, however, when a female elephant happens to wander past and catch his eye, and Sidney is compelled to follow after her, seemingly forgetting about his simian kin. The male chimp is giddy with delight, attempting to sell the outcome to his heartbroken mate as a case of nature running its course, an empty nest an inevitability she signed up to when she chose to take on a baby. His relief proves to be short-lived; as it turns out, Sidney still has no intention of taking his place within the adult world, reaffirming his commitment to his protracted childhood by inducting his new mate Hortense into the fold. The elephants show up at the chimps' tree and announce that they'll be moving in with them until they find their feet (as if that's ever going to happen). Sidney believes that they make the nicest family in the jungle, and while the closing visual gag, in which the branch collapses under their combined weight, would ostensibly undermine that, what's important is that they all go down together - a chaotic and unconventional unit, but ultimately as valid as any other, connected firmly by the basic need to be needed on both sides. I'm sure the male chimp will come round eventually (or maybe not - later Sidney shorts appear to indicate that Cleo the giraffe wound up becoming his parental figure after all, along with a lion who was ironically named Stanley).

Sidney's failure to beat Bugs to the Oscar did not deter him from enjoying a prosperous enough run of shorts. His cartoons continued up until 1964, by which point he had made the transition from theatrical animation to television (such were the changing times), finishing up his career as a supporting segment on The Hector Heathcote Show. Since then, he hasn't exactly remained at the forefront of public consciousness (few, if any, Terrytoons characters honestly have in the 2020s). An elephant never forgets (nor forgives, as his thinly-veiled resurfacing on Tiny Toon Adventures would bear out), but the world forgot Sidney long ago. His 1990 grudge match against Bugs, Babs and Buster, far from being a mean-spirited dig, was a real shot in the arm of relevancy for a character who'd been otherwise consigned to stagnation. My only regret is that they restricted Sidney/Stanley to that one episode and he did not become a recurring nemesis for the Tiny Toons gang. It was not, however, his last hurrah - Sidney was a featured character on Curbside, an attempted Terrytoons revival project made by Nickelodeon in 1999, in which he was voiced by Dee Bradley Baker, although this never got further than the pilot. As to whether we'll ever see Sidney again, who knows? Paramount Pictures currently owns the rights to the Terrytoons characters, but don't appear to be doing a great deal with them.

At the very least, Sidney has an Oscar nomination to his name, and that's something that can never be taken away from him. It's also one more Oscar nomination than Daffy Duck ever received (sad, but true).

Now if Tiny Toons Looniversity would just do something as awesome as to bring back Sappy Stanley, it might even be worth my while to watch it. So far as I can tell it hasn't happened, so the revival gets a hard pass from me.

[1] Although a latent dark side was arguably hinted in the short "Meat, Drink and Be Merry". This is the one where Sidney attempts to become a carnivore, and the way it plays out is so weird and unsettling, like he's aspiring to be the neighbourhood serial killer.

[2] Mind you, while Terrytoons never won this award, there was precedent for UPA doing so twice, with the Mr Magoo shorts When Magoo Flew (1954) and Magoo's Puddle Jumper (1956).

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #50: John Smith's Penguins (featuring Jack Dee)

For the 50th entry in this retrospective, I'm doing something very special and going in search of one of most heavily-guarded of all of my personal advertising-inflicted traumas. Lurking somewhere within the darkest depths of my psyche is a penguin-shaped cicatrix that on occasion still throbs and causes me to lose sleep to this day. It's high time we put a spotlight on one of the freakiest, unholiest, most thoroughly cursed unions in advertising history - the union between John Smith's Bitter, a waddle of beady-eyed, singing, tap-dancing penguins, and morose comedian Jack Dee, never for a second dropping the mask and giving the impression that he wanted to be there. Such was the man's charm. I should confess upfront that I am mostly unfamiliar with Dee's work outside of this campaign, but it's my understanding that the moroseness and the unenthusiasm were part of his brand. And singing, dancing penguins are ostensibly the antithesis of all that, and of John Smith's. Ostensibly.

The partnership between Dee and John Smith's originated in the early stages of the 1990s, but it took a few installments for penguins to be added to the formula. A ladybird theme was dabbled with at one point (in theory, they should have been the ideal counter to Dee, since they're such bright, colourful and cheering bugs), but it didn't stick. From the start, the basic premise of the ads, pinned to the slogan of "No Nonsense," was about putting themselves in quotation marks, professing an awareness of how hackneyed it was to have fake animals and (one assumes) equally fake celebrities endorsing your products. This was a campaign about the naffness of other campaigns, which in practice amounted to it getting to have its cake and nosily scarf it down too. Dee's sour face provided a humorous departure from the plastic grins of your typical celebrity shill, while the ladybirds he was initially and all-too-reluctantly paired with lampooned the kind of hollow visual gimmickry endemic to television advertising. In one installment, Dee was surrounded by people in ladybird costumes chirping some inane jingle. In another, Dee himself was physically transformed into one of the spotted bugs. All very much against his will in the ads' internal narrative, for Dee was a down-to-earth man who preferred to tell the people about the virtues of John Smith's straight, with no bells and whistles. Then in 1995, somebody decided that the ladybirds were too subtle and what Dee really needed to go up against was a plague of musically-inclined penguins. And with that, a full-blown televisual nightmare was born. That first diabolical penguin spot happened to catch me unawares as a child, and I could practically feel my personality warping in eight different directions just watching it. The world didn't seem like quite the same place after. Nothing seemed quite the same.

What did the penguins have that the ladybirds didn't? I think a lot of it goes back to what I said in my piece on the Bud Ice Penguin. Spheniscids give off that unique cocktail of cuddliness, clownishness and, owing to their vaguely human-shaped appearance, utter uncanniness. Viewed from just the right angle, they can seem strangely off-kilter, a quality that the "No Nonsense" leans into with a particular dry fiendishness. I maintain that my visceral reaction to the John Smith's penguin, as a child, was not the result of a callow mind overreacting to offbeat stimuli - there's something about these birds that I find innately sinister to this day. Compared to them, Feathers McGraw seems like the sweetest-faced of jokers. All by design, I'm sure. The "No Nonsense" had to walk a careful tightrope between revelling in the very lunacy it appeared to decry and establishing some distance from it. On one level, the penguins were intended to be comical; the viewer was supposed to laugh at the hilarious contrast between the singing spheniscids and the po-faced Dee. But they were also intended as a parody of the general inaneness and vapidity of advertising, a point communicated by giving them a certain grotesqueness. The over the top spectacle of the penguin chorus is meant to feel reminiscent of a fever dream; the viewer is bombarded with absurd sounds and imagery at a faster rate than they can reasonably process it. The flashiness of television advertising, the campaign warns us, is something that should engender suspicion. The penguins, however superficially amusing, embody the falseness and the hollowness of product marketing, the sourpuss tones of Dee and the taste of John Smith's representing the welcome interjections of reality undercutting it at every turning. The two forces appear to be at odds, but are actually cozy bedfellows; something that is gone for even more full-throttle with the penguins than it was with the ladybirds is the sense that we are being given leeway to enjoy the silliness while pretending to sneer at it. Above all else, the "No Nonsense" ads are concessions to the guilty pleasures of advertising, and to the base level on which our brains respond to the absurd spectacle of dancing penguins, even when knowing we should be above such things.

The initial penguin spot ended with Dee banishing the offending creatures from the bar. But of course, he couldn't keep them at bay for long. The birds proved such a hit that they returned in subsequent ads to continue their uncanny song and dance routine, with the caveat that Dee invariably got to send them packing with his abuse. (Dee typically limited his abuse to verbal put-downs, but at least one ad, which contained a nod to puppeteer Rod Hull, involved implied physical abuse. The penguins scream in that one.) Somehow, the campaign took an even stranger turn in 1996, in an ad that parodied the bombast of Hollywood blockbusters as much as the vapidity of advertising. The twist here was that the penguins were finally given the upper hand (or flipper) and had free reign for the entirety of the ad. Dee was completely oblivious to their presence, with the narrative that the penguins had been added in the aftermath using green screen technology, and without Dee's consent; he thinks that he has finally succeeded and convinced the advertising executives to ditch the gimmicks, when in actuality they have settled a devious workaround. And the results were utterly terrifying, with the penguins having adopted an apparent vindictiveness after so many turns at being berated by Dee. They have dropped their song and dance routine in favour of aggressive mockery, and scatology. Not only could the penguins now breathe fire, they could apparently also propel themselves into the air by farting fire. Perhaps in retaliation for that earlier Rod Hull gag, one over-sized penguin even stuffs Dee up its rear and then belches him out through its beak. At the end of the ad, Dee's image was even manipulated so that he appeared to be wearing a penguin suit, a playful admission that Dee and the marketing sidekicks he supposedly loathed were really birds of a feather.

The Dee campaign came to an end before the decade was out, with one of the last installments yielding what felt like the perfect punchline to the series. Dee finally got his wish - we found him alone in a room with only a pint of John Smith's and "no gimmicks, no penguins". A slight pause. And then: "Might as well go down the pub." Indeed. In the end, our fascination with kitschy advertising amounts to much the same thing as our fascination with what lurks at the bottom of a pub glass. If it's not about escapism, then what is it for?

Cadbury's Creme Egg: Float On (aka Creme, Get On Top)

Note: It was initially my intention to try working this in as another edition of "Horrifying Advertising Animals", but all the while I had the voice of David St. Hubbins from Spinal Tap bellowing in my head: "They're not animals, they're signs of the Zodiac!" Fine, it can stand on its own.

Somehow or other Cadbury's Creme Eggs managed to crank out an awful lot of UK marketing mileage from a question that I seriously doubt very many level-headed people cared to complicate: "How do you eat yours?" (or alternatively, "How do YOU do it?"). The implications of this campaign hook were both grotesque and banal. Banal, because how many variations can there even be when it comes to ingesting a piece of egg-shaped chocolate confectionery? The average consumer is either going to eat the whole thing together in bite-sized chunks like a civilised person (relatively speaking, given the product) or extract the fondant innards with their tongue or forefinger and then eat the chocolate shell; is there really a great deal else to be done with the thing? And grotesque because...do I really want to know some of the possible answers to the question I just posed? I think that forefinger option is frankly already pushing it. And is focussing on the various disgusting methodologies other people might apply to the act of eating likely to boost our own appetites? There reached a point, round about the new millennium, where the campaign started to lean quite heavily into those gross-out implications, with ads showing people dunking chips into the fondant and other mank images that I swear were only a step away from belonging in a John Waters movie (granted, IIRC the woman doing the chip-dunking was pregnant, which explains her oddball cravings, but I still can't say that I enjoyed the visual). Which, by coincidence or not, is around the time I went off creme eggs as a product. Possibly chips for a while, too.

The least repulsive campaign ever spun around the concept arose circa early 1990s, and hinged upon a cute idea - that the way you ate your creme egg, like your star sign, spoke volumes about your personality. What it was actually trading on, which meant absolutely nothing to me at the time, was 1970s nostalgia. The campaign was structured around a clever reworking of "Float On", a 1977 hit for soul group The Floaters, notable mainly for its spoken word interludes, in which each Floater gave his name, his star sign and his mating preferences in a style designed to recall the formalities of video dating. The TV ads mimicked this format in having a representative of each star sign step out before a microphone and deliver some slick statement on how they did it with their creme eggs, while the song's titular hook was modified into a jingle directly extolling the product. Having no prior reference for "Float On", my kid brain accepted it as an original tune, and to this day, whenever I hear the actual Floaters tracks my neurons are invariably wanting to work a "Cadbury's Creme Egg!" in there.

The campaign's real magic ingredient, though, was its visual wit. The characters in question were all claymation figures, courtesy of the ever-reliable Aardman and animated (I believe) by one of the studio's founding fathers, Peter Lord himself. The twist being that when they spoke about their respective pun-laden affections for creme eggs, they each morphed into the creature or item that symbolises their sign. As with Aardman production, even their advertising work, the amount of care, heart and craftsmanship that goes into the process is simply impossible to ignore. The ads had such a warmth and a vigor to them, and it's on that basis that they had me so enraptured as a small child...even when pretty much every other aspect of the premise was floating on right over my head (aside from the obvious - the pro-creme egg message). Astrology was not something I understood at the time; it was enough for me to think that the characters were turning into animals and other beings that somehow symbolised the quirky nature of their chocolate rapacity. Something else I was obviously not going to get was the very blatant sexual innuendo that permeated the campaign from top to bottom. Because yeah, that's the other thing that makes it an interesting series to revisit as an adult - it's hard to seriously entertain the notion that the characters are talking about creme eggs. Here, you get the impression that the eggs are really just the metaphor.

There exists a 90 second super-cut of the campaign combining all twelve star signs into one, but at the time I only ever saw these aired in three separate 30-second segments, with four characters apiece. Note that the ordering within the shorter versions differs from that of the full edit (and in neither case does the ordering align with that of the actual Zodiac). Here's a rundown of who appeared where, and what salacious quips they each came out with:

Ad #1: Leo/Gemini/Sagittarius/Taurus

• "Hi, I'm LEO! I eat the lion's share! Roar!" He has a rapacious appetite and he dominates.
  
• "GEMINI! And I like to slurp it!" "Bite it!" "Slurp it!" "Bite it!" I remain divided on whether these are actual twins we're seeing here or if the implication is that Gemini has something of a split personality when it comes to her mode of creme egg consumption. If the former, then they're licking/biting from the same egg, which is as gross-out as this campaign gets.
  
• "SAGITTARIUS! I could eat two or three on the trot!" Cos he's got hooves, see? Are centaurs known for their promiscuity or am I getting them mixed up with satyrs?
  
• "TAURUS! And I go at it like a bull in a sweet shop!" This is an odd one, for multiple reasons. Obviously it's a play on the expression "bull in a china shop", referring to a person who behaves gauchely in a situation that demands subtly or delicacy, with the words tweaked to make it more pertinent to the product being touted. Bovines aren't exactly renowned for being sugar addicts, but I suspect it was also intended to play as an amalgamation with another expression, "like a kid in a candy store", meaning to be overwhelmed by the array of wonderful options before you (now, that's a pun that might have worked a treat for Capricorn). That in turn makes me conscious of the fact that Taurus, like most of the swingers on parade here, has an American accent, so is he likely to say "sweet shop" instead of "candy store"? I guess what he means to convey is that he's going to throw his weight around with sheer excitement. Taurus wears a leather jacket, which is appropriate to his bull motif, although it's maybe a little morbid for him to be wearing the skin of the animal he ultimately morphs into.
  

Ad #2: Pisces/Aries/Libra/Cancer

• "PISCES! And I dive right in!" I'm a Pisces, and I find my sign's representation a bit on the mixed side. Visually it's great; I like how Pisces' sparkly sequin dress transforms into fish scales, and I absolutely dig how, as a fish, she's got both eyes on the side of her face like a flatfish (even if her overall design seems to be based more on a swordfish). But the innuendo's not the most tantalising, and I'm a little hung up on the fact that Pisces is represented specifically by TWO fish swimming in opposite directions - was there no way of working that concept in here? Or did they feel that the split personality motif would get too repetitive alongside Gemini? Incidentally, Pisces is the only female character to undergo any kind of beastly transformation (since Scorpio is a no-go in that regard - see below).
  
• "ARIES! I give it a good battering!" This ad so makes me want to be an Aries, given that sheep boy gets by far the sauciest innuendo. Fun fact: a snippet of his dialogue was also sampled in the Gorillaz track "Aries". His attire is, naturally, wool-themed - he wears a woolly sweater AND a jacket lined with wool. How is he not boiling under those stage lights?
  
• "LIBRA! I like to weigh up the alternatives! Weigh-hey!" I've seen a lot of speculation that Libra was voiced by Danny John-Jules, who is best known for playing Cat in Red Dwarf. I've yet to find any official source on the matter, but yeah, it certainly sounds like him. Libra seems like a tough sign to incorporate into this particular premise, since it's represented by an inanimate object, not a creature, but they managed to have him embody those scales in a way that feels slick and not excessively goofy. He holds an egg in each hand in a weighing motion, and his eyes turn into the dials. Gotta love the bonus pun he signs off with too.
  
• "CANCER! And I'm a shell man myself!" Nice crab nod, but unless I'm missing something, not much in the way of innuendo. And why is he wearing a hoodie and not a shell suit? If you ask me, Cancer got the most short-changed by this campaign. His sideways scuttling exit in the 90-second version looks cool, at least.
  

 

Ad #3: Aquarius/Scorpio/Virgo/Capricorn

• "AQUARIUS! And sometimes I get carried away!" Yeah, I'll say. Aquarius gets the kinkiest visual of the lot, in that she pours the contents of the egg all over her face and proceeds to lick it off. It's worth noting at this point that the creme eggs seen in this campaign are ALL disproportionately large, but Aquarius's really takes the cake. Hers is an ostrich egg edition.
  
• "SCORPIO! One nip from me and it's history!" Scorpio is, strangely, the only animal sign who doesn't morph into the critter in question. Instead, her pigtail rears up behind her in the manner of a scorpion's tail and slashes the creme egg open. She looks properly badass, but if you were hoping to see an actual scorpion then it's an anti-climax nevertheless.
  
• "VIRGO! Ah-hem. This is my first one..." For a while, Ad #3 was the only installment I was having difficulty locating on YouTube, and a large part of what was stoking my curiosity in the meantime (besides completism) was wondering how on earth they were going to represent Virgo. It's an awkward concept to have to work with in this context, more so than Libra. What they came up with was definitely clever - this girl's never had a creme egg before, and she's understandably nervous about putting something this dubious-looking into her mouth. Virgo is, unsurprisingly, the least sexualised of the bunch, with plain clothing that's supposed to convey a mix of chasteness (the collar blouse) and girlish innocence (the bow in her hair). For some reason she's also the only character to not speak with an American accent. I guess the idea was make her sound a less sultry than the others; she's out of place within the soul music ambience.
  
• "CAPRICORN! Mind if I butt in?" So Capricorn's style is that he's a thief. He steals Virgo's egg, in the only instance of two signs interacting, thus forcing her to retain her creme egg virginity. Capricorn wears a turtleneck sweater (presumably made out of mohair), has a goatee and also two weird bumps protruding from his head that I guess are supposed to be his hair? Dude comes off as somewhat of a creep (stick a pitchfork in his hand and in his human form he could pass for your archetypal cartoon devil), but he does make one heck of a charming aqua goat. In fact, if I'm applying to this fictional dating agency, then Capricorn's the one I'm coming away with, just on the basis of his winsome goat grin.