The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #51: The Robinsons Gang Is Not A Real Gang

If grotesque puppet creations are your personal nightmare propellent, then the UK television of the early 1990s might have been rough going for you. Call it the Spitting Image effect, but between The Winjin Pom, Dizzy Heights and The House of Gristle, there wasn't much escaping the horrors in latex. Ad breaks were of no refuge - for a good stretch of 1991 (and later 1993) you were likely to run into the Robinsons Gang, a bunch of creepy critters who were perpetually on the move, and always sipping from their cartons of branded fruit juice. The accompanying slogan assured us that "You Get More *slurping sound effect* With Robinsons Flavours", and I presume the intention was for this assortment of colourful puppets to act as embodiments of all the fun and variety of the Robinsons range. What it more aptly reflects is the overstimulated frenzy of a sugar high, and potentially something a lot harder. Among the campaign's numerous head-scratching details was a bus ad, in the premier installment, telling us to "EAT GRASS", and with no other leads on what that particular command had to do with anything, I'm going to go out on a limb and interpret it as a pro-drugs statement. It fits in just as neatly as anything else about the Robinsons Gang.

The set-up was simple enough - the Robinsons Gang was comprised of species with particularly lyrical and/or pun-friendly names, and a narrator would introduce us to each of them and whichever flavour had their favour by way of a wordy, fast-paced, repetitive ditty. So, we had the Boa Constrictor on The Bus, who slurped apple and blackcurrant, apple and blackcurrant, the Manic Gannet on The Bike, who wanted apple and strawberry, apple and raspberry, and so forth. Whichever mode of transport the gang was riding, the ads were able to incorporate ominous signage denoting the locations, "Somewhere, Nowhere, Anywhere, Everywhere" - implying that nobody in this universe had any idea where they were headed, and were possibly indifferent to such particulars. The trip itself was what they lived for. The lyrics were often designed to be as aggressively disorientating as the images - we hear, for example, that the Three-Toed Chameleon drinks apple and raspberry, apple and raspberry, but had actually wanted orange, pineapple and lemon, only the powers that be, according to the Chameleon herself, couldn't make it fit the song (except they just did; see how this thing is screwing with you?). These swirling affairs always climaxed with a lone dissenter, who conspicuously lacked a Robinsons of their own, saying or doing something to bring the revelries to a halt. In the first ad, we had the Hammerhead Shark, who leaned down from the top deck of the bus and threatened to eat the driver, a Pig, apropos of nothing. Neither juice nor grass would apparently satiate him; he was lusting for the driver's blood. This abrupt-as-heck murder threat confirmed what I'd intuitively always known on being plunged into the Robinsons' world - that brewing below the surface of this hyperstimulated rabble was some frightful menace and sooner or later it was all going to end in tears. The seriousness of the Shark's malicious declaration is left open to question. The Pig's initial reaction is to run squealing, yet his goofy antics thereafter would suggest he's figured that the Shark is only kidding. The violent manner in which the shark keeps pounding on that highly malleable streetlight, however, was doing little to reassure me.

Either way, the Pig evidently made it out in one piece, for he was seen again in the follow-up ad, a further surrealist nightmare in which the gang had exchanged their bus for a tandem bike that accommodated multiple riders, with the swine once again in the front seat, and left the city to discover a sprawling, equally mind-bending rural landscape. The Hammerhead Shark did not return (his pugnacious antics on the previous ride possibly got him expelled from the gang), but there were several other familiar faces, including the Boa and the Chameleon, along with some new recruits. In an especially bizarre touch, both ads featured a flesh-and-blood lady, suggesting a merging of realities in which the outright freakish is coexisting with the perfectly mundane. In the original, she was riding the top of that bus with all those monstrous puppets swarming around her comparatively delicate frame; as a kid, I'll admit I was somewhat concerned for that woman's safety, although I now think it would be cool if the intention was for us to interpret her as yet another member of the Robinsons Gang. Alas, the second ad clearly pigeonholes her as a nonplussed bystander - there, she's not taking part in the bike ride and is positioned passively in the foreground, perhaps awaiting the bus from the first installment. In place of the Shark, the gang was menaced by an Iguanodon, whose intentions were certainly more benign - he simply wanted to join in with the bike ride. Like the Shark, however, he took the chaos a step too far and pushed things fatally out of whack, leaping onto the rear of the bike and exerting enough force to send the rest of the gang flying. For myself, that Iguanodon's intrusion was no less unsettling than the Hammerhead's.

To my knowledge, those were the only two ads in the Robinsons Gang campaign. A few of the gang members never received formal identification by way of shout-outs in their respective ditties - among these unnamed recruits were a duck-billed platypus, some kind of burrowing critter in a hard hat, and I don't know what that purple thing behind them on the bike is intended to be (Portuguese man o' war?). It was not, however, the last we'd be seeing of the gang, as both ads were later recycled in 1993, with completely new audio. The frantic ditties were dropped in favour of a more conventional theme song, the lyrics of which were nowhere near as wordy, although the thing was still catchy as hell, and easier to hum along to. The final punchline of each ad was also altered, to have things circle back more explicitly to the exalted product. Now, the Shark and Iguanodon's respective actions were motivated by a craving for Robinsons, as their targets were accused of either concealing or stealing the coveted juice (the Shark asks the Pig what he's done with his Robinsons, the Iguanodon tells the others to come back with his Robinsons). I'll admit that these revised versions went down a whole lot better with my younger self, since they amounted to less of a sensory overload, although with hindsight there are certain details that I suspect might have become even more heinously baffling. If you hadn't caught the campaign during its earlier round, then without the benefit of the bison/basin wordplay, would you have understood why the gang had an anthropomorphic bathroom sink (with eyes and, potentially, guts) of all things random and unholy?

Inside No. 9 '22: Wise Owl (aka Bird of Prey)

Content warning: child abuse 

Earlier this month we bid farewell to the BBC series Inside No. 9, a show that could be aptly described as the modern-day successor to Tales of The Unexpected, but with plenty of personality and devilish ingenuity all of its own. Like ToTU, it was comprised of half-hour stand-alone comic dramas exploring the meaner side of human nature, typically with some kind of ghoulish twist at the end. Creators Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, who'd previously collaborated on the gleefully grotesque cult comedies The League of Gentlemen and Psychoville, tended to star in each story, although always as different characters; occasionally they took a backseat, and at least one episode, "3 by 3", did not feature them at all. The one major constancy was that every episode took place in a venue that in some way pertained to the number 9. Usually this denoted the house or apartment number, but Shearsmith and Pemberton also liked to think outside of the box in terms of how to work in that titular number (for example, in one episode, "Diddle Diddle Dumpling", it referred to the size of a shoe that formed a pivotal plot detail). The genre of the series was also perpetually shifting - some episodes were flat-out horrors, others were surprisingly tender tales of human vulnerability. One of the thrills of the series was entering into each weekly 9 and never knowing exactly what you would find. Besides the 9, there were really only two guarantees - a) every episode contained a "hidden hare" (literally an ornamental leporine slipped somewhere into the mise en scene) and b) the toilet and its related bodily functions always featured to some capacity, usually as a revolting observation on the side. Actually, I can't claim to have gone through the entire series with a fine enough comb to say for certain that the latter applied to absolutely every episode, but I feel confident in saying that episodes devoid of shit, piss or fart jokes were a whole lot rarer than episodes where nobody dies, and those constituted a slim minority. Shearsmith and Pemberton may be creative geniuses, but their trains of thought never seemed to venture far from out of the toilet bowl. And that's grand - the toilet has long served as a beautiful shorthand for everything ugly and forbidden about the human psyche, the matters we'd sooner flush into oblivion and not give a second's thought. We might recall the specific ground that Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho broke in 1960, with its unusually prominent focus on a flushing toilet.

Psycho, most appropriately, was given the tip of the hat quite a few times throughout Inside No. 9. One episode, "Private View", opens with a "Psycho moment", where a popular guest star is introduced and abruptly killed off. In "Merrily, Merrily", a character who mentions having studied psychology is met with the plebeian response, "Yes, I've seen that. Where she gets stabbed in the shower..." And of course, it's hard to not have the Bates in mind through much of "Death Be Not Proud", watching David's morbid relationship play out with his own gruesome mother (itself transplanted from Psychoville); they are gleeful caricatures of the very archetypes the Bates helped cement in popular consciousness. The most substantial of all these Psycho homages, though, occurs in the series 7 episode, "Wise Owl", which was directed by Louise Hooper and first broadcast on 1st June 2022. Its protagonist, Ronnie Oliver (Shearsmith), is an obvious counterpart to Norman Bates, albeit one who lurks in a suburban home in Rochdale (numbered 9, of course), rather than an isolated pocket of the Californian highway. He is yet another socially maladjusted figure who practices taxidermy, has a thing about birds and mentally has never escaped the shadow of the parental figure who dominated him throughout childhood. The particulars of the plot, however, are less evocative of Hitchcock's film than of the Richard Franklin-directed sequel, Psycho II (1983); Ronnie, like the middle-aged Norman, has returned to face his childhood demons following a lengthy period of hospitalisation. There are also echoes of Stephen King's Pet Sematary, with Pemberton playing Derek Blenkin, a client who tasks Ronnie with resurrecting the deceased pet of his five-year-old daughter, an albino rabbit named Ferrari. Like King's protagonist, Blenkin is hoping to delay a conversation about death with his daughter, confident he can pass the stuffed rabbit off as living by telling her it's always tired. His concern for his daughter's feelings is comically undercut by his desire to secure to the cheapest possible option, suggesting to Ronnie that he might leave off the rabbit's legs if it will spare expenses.

Now that the series has formally concluded and I've seen every installment, I have few qualms in declaring "Wise Owl" my personal pick of the bunch. It is, in my eyes, an unmitigated triumph. Given my fondness for all things Psycho, the Bates allusions alone might have been enough to get it into my good graces. But what really elevates this one to such immaculate heights is that it doubles as Shearsmith and Pemberton's affectionate tribute to yet another subject near and dear to my heart - the public information film. Shearsmith and Pemberton were clearly hotly attuned to the impact that such films had on the legions of tender young minds raised on their sombre teachings, tensions that lingered well into adulthood. They wove a beautiful, smartly-observed little horror yarn from that idea, one powered by a rich plethora of creeping disturbances but also an undercurrent of genuine pathos. "Wise Owl" is centred around a fictitious series of public information films that existed in a parallel version of the 1970s, an era that boasts particular infamy for the array of shocking and psychologically scarring educational films that found their way onto UK television screens, a lot of which played like miniature horrors and were specifically intended to be seen by younger viewers. The decade has, in recent times, acquired quite another infamy, as an era in which certain celebrated public figures were able to commit sexual offences with impunity. In a few cases, those infamies have intersected, with some of the most memorable PIFs of their day featuring since-disgraced figures who were then deemed credible as the voice of reason. There was a time when "Teach Them To Swim" was considered such a gentle and wholesome PIF, up against the barbaric likes of "Lonely Water", but now it's every bit as cursed, if not more so. Such apprehensions haunt "Wise Owl" to the core.

"Wise Owl" opens with an animated segment, a faux PIF presented with all the grain and crackle of a 1970s artifact. A brother and a sister (the voices of Dylan Hall and Isabelle Lee Pratt, respectively) are out playing with a kite. The boy, the older of the two, states that he's been asked by his mother to keep guard of the situation, something he immediately blows by demanding a go with the kite, causing it to fly away and get caught against a pylon. The boy thinks it's a perfectly a sensible idea to climb the pylon and retrieve the kite, but is stopped by Wise Owl (voice of Ron Cook), a friendly talking strigine, who advises him of the dangers and why he should not mess with electricity. The sequence beautifully nails down the qualities that made these vintage PIFs so indelible to the children who had to accommodate them amid their regular teatime viewing - in particular, that haunting sense of childhood innocence on the cusp of some awful, irreversible disturbance. The danger the children are in is made all the more stark with the knowledge that it is the little girl's sixth birthday, and the kite that lures them to that dreaded pylon an item of particular excitement for being her present. As a pastiche of a 1970s public information film, it plays itself almost entirely straight, to the point where I could have bought it as a genuine specimen of the era. The only part that doesn't quite ring true is when Wise Owl retrieves the kite himself by blowing in its direction, providing a facile solution to the problem of the girl's lost present, so that the character goes from being authoritative to super-heroic. For now, a pivotal dynamic is established. Wise Owl is the voice of reason; vigilant, trustworthy and benevolent, a parental surrogate who can be counted on in the absence of adult supervision. The boy is foolish and courts disaster. The girl is innocent and helpless.

The look and the tone of the "Wise Owl" animations was blatantly inspired by the "Charley Says" series, in which a young boy named Tony was prevented from making stupid decisions by a cat named Charley (who, unlike the Owl, couldn't speak English, only a discordant garble of purrs and yowls, which Tony inexplicably understood). Two of the Charley shorts are recalled directly at later junctions in the episode - the one where Charley stopped Tony from playing with a box of matches, and the one where he stopped him from going off with a sinister figure who'd approached him in the playground with the (undoubtedly false) promise of taking him to see some cute puppies. There was, however, never a Charley short devoted to the dangers of scaling pylons - the inspiration for the opening sequence (and the use of an owl in general) looks to have been drawn from the 1978 film Play Safe, where a cartoon robin was lectured by an owl on the dangers of electricity, citing grim examples of children who met horrible fates by playing too close to live wires and substations (including one particularly infamous interlude with Jimmy and his Frisbee).

As Ronnie goes about his business inside the house (which includes a harrowing moment, the story's analogue to the Psycho shower scene, where he contemplates suicide by climbing into a filled bathtub with a mains-powered radio), his routine is interspersed with further animations starring Wise Owl and the children. But unlike the opening sequence, both contain obvious disturbances to the formula, suggesting a breakdown of the security Wise Owl supposedly upholds. In the second PIF, the boy and his sister are enjoying a day at the beach. The sister goes off with their mother to paddle in the waves, while the boy, left alone to dig sandcastles, is approached by a strange man who offers to show him a starfish. He nearly accepts the invitation, but is once again saved by the interventions of Wise Owl, who advises him that the man's intentions might not be as friendly as his appearance (which is really not at all friendly, since he's literally a looming shadow in a trench coat and fedora; he actually looks a lot like the stranger in that illustrated edition of "Eddy Scott Goes Out To Play" I covered a couple of years ago). As a pastiche, it doesn't play itself quite as straight as its predecessor, with the added bit of blackly adult humor in the stranger's upfront observation that the boy looks "nice and shiny". It's also a little more on the nose with its nightmarish imagery - unlike its "Charley" equivalent, in which the playground prowler gave up the instant he was called out, we here get the extra sordid detail of the stranger's dark, gangly hand reaching out to seize the boy, prompting a violent response from Wise Owl, who swoops in and bites the hand. With the boy spared, Wise Owl turns and delivers the relevant lesson to the camera: "Don't be a Twit You! Always stay safe with your mummy and daddy! Wise Owl knows best!" The sequence doesn't end there, however. It rounds off with an unsettling epilogue, where Wise Owl flies away, leaving the boy alone once more, shaken and crying out for his mother.

An even more disturbing subversion occurs in the third film, which takes place, once again, on the girl's sixth birthday. Impatient for their mother to arrive home and to light the candles on her cake, the children retrieve the matches themselves from the mantelpiece. But on this occasion, no Wise Owl appears. No cat named Charley either. No voice of authority at all, in fact. The children are simply left to their own devices. The boy, ever the instigator of disaster, strikes one of the matches and holds it close to his face, smiling at the camera while the little flame dances ominously atop the head. We then cut back to Ronnie, who is studying his reflection in the bathroom mirror, stroking back the greasy curtain of hair around his ear to reveal the cluster of burn marks obscured underneath. It now becomes apparent that Ronnie and the animated boy are one and the same. The sequences we've seen are conflations; Ronnie has remained so subjugated by the Wise Owl and his teachings into adulthood that he's obliged to filter his own childhood memories through the form and imagery of the character's PIFs. Although Ronnie is now in his 50s, he is still identifiably a child, and lives his life according to the rules laid out by the Wise Owl. Safety consciousness is baked into his psyche, to an obsessive degree; he responds to a buzzing fridge by unplugging most of the house's electrical appliances, removing all the light bulbs and retiring in the darkness. He also makes a point of never talking to strangers. When Blenkin shows up at his door, he accepts the rabbit but avoids engaging with him on any conversational level. The girl who appears alongside him in the animated sequences is identified as his sister, Joanne, and before long we've discovered the terrible reason why it seems to be perpetually her sixth birthday in his memories. It's a date that will forever haunt Ronnie, the day when the kind of catastrophic, worst-case-scenario nightmares outlined in public information films spilled over into his reality. It seems that Ronnie really did attempt to light the candles on Joanne's cake without adult supervision, and it all went horribly wrong. Ronnie was burned and Joanne did not survive. Ronnie has lived with the guilt ever since.

A common theme throughout the animated segments is the absence of the children's mother, and Ronnie's apparent inclination to make bad decisions when left to manage his own welfare and/or his sister's. In the present, Ronnie receives a video call from his mother (Georgie Glenn), who still worries about the possibility of Ronnie doing something stupid on his own. She reminisces about a childhood pet of Ronnie and Joanne's, a cat named Mimsy that was eventually evicted on account of Ronnie's allergies. She then asks Ronnie if he'll be coming to see her on Monday for an important family anniversary. Ronnie responds by referencing that other parental figure whose whereabouts have, up until now, remained unaccounted for. "Will Dad be there?", he asks. Her answer suggests that he is elusive and doesn't involve himself in family matters. "You know what he's like." Ronnie may be without parental oversight, but watchful authority is omnipresent through the eyes of the various stuffed cats, lambs and badgers that adorn the shelves above and are ever peering down on him (in that regard, they fulfil a similar purpose to Norman Bates' stuffed birds). Explicit note is made of the fact that there are no owls in the macabre menagerie, although Ronnie gets a nightmarish visitation from something even more grotesque (and darkly comic), in the form of a monstrous man-owl hybrid that steps into the living room during the night, head rotating and genitalia on full display.

The following morning, Ronnie begins work on stuffing Ferrari the rabbit, and we get a fourth "Wise Owl" PIF, only by now the pastiche has given way into full-blown parody. In this sequence, Ronnie and Joanne are mourning the death of their pet cat, when Wise Owl appears and instructs them on how to preserve their beloved friend forever, guiding them through the taxidermy process in lurid detail. I mentioned that some level of bathroom humor was a requisite for every episode of Inside No. 9, although "Wise Owl" is actually one of the mildest examples on that front. All we really have (besides the toilet's inevitable showing in the backdrop of the bathtub scene) is Ronnie's mother's recollection that Mimsy "had a way of looking at you...like you were muck on its shoe". We do, however, get plenty of uncomfortable gross-out bodily humor in watching this cartoon cat be skinned, its eyes gouged out, its body incinerated and its tanned hide stretched across an artificial skeleton (in Ronnie's words, "Like putting a sausage into its skin"). The cat is, troublingly, identified as Mimsy, although I don't take to mean that the cat was actually killed and stuffed in real life. Rather, an allusion is being drawn between the childhood pet and childhood innocence; once dead, it cannot be restored to what it was. We know that, despite Ronnie's declaration at the end of the PIF that Mimsy is "good as new", that a stuffed animal is in no way the same as a living pet. Blenkin's plan to pass the stuffed Ferrari off as a live but perpetually tired rabbit is obviously doomed to failure, a facile attempt to mask over a painful reality. How doomed, however, comes as a bit of a shock. As the PIF ends, we see the end-results of Ronnie's real-life taxidermy session, revealing a pronounced difference between himself and his Hitchcockian counterpart. Norman Bates was, among other things, a skilled taxidermist. Ronnie is anything but. The body of poor Ferrari the rabbit gets absolutely desecrated in his hands. In death, the creature is afforded no dignity.

Unfortunate, because it's right at this point that Blenkin reappears at the door, wanting to get Ferrari back in the same condition in which he left him. He seems much more agitated than on their previous encounter, having learned from speaking to a neighbour that resident taxidermist Mr Oliver is a man in his 70s, and he might have entrusted his daughter's pet rabbit to an imposter. Naturally, he's horrified on seeing what's become of Ferrari. While he's absolutely right in asserting that any child presented with Ronnie's "Franken-Rabbit" would have nightmares, it's hard to imagine how his tactic of giving his daughter a preserved rabbit hide would have worked out any better in the long run. Ronnie, then, is only an amateur taxidermist, and he is not the regular occupant of this particular no. 9. That is one of the story's twists. It is not made explicitly clear why he accepted Blenkin's job and attempted to stuff the rabbit himself, although it seems that he does, at heart, only ever want to do the right thing and please people. His disinclination against interacting with strangers was potentially overridden by the knowledge that the innocence of a small girl, not much younger than Joanne, was hanging in the balance. But he isn't able to protect her from the bleakness of the world, any more than he was Joanne.

Later that evening, the regular seventysomething Mr Oliver returns home, having been away on business for the weekend. He is of course Ronnie's father, Wilf, and he's played by Ron Cook, who is also the voice of Wise Owl. That is yet another of the story's twists. Just as Ronnie and the animated boy are one and the same, so too are his father and Wise Owl the exact same entity. Wilf really was the voice of Wise Owl in the series of public information films that existed in-universe, and Ronnie has never been able to separate them in this mind. Wilf was not expecting to see Ronnie. "You'll have to give me money for that window", he states, indicating that Ronnie has forced his way into the property. He speaks with a distinct lack of affection for his son, dropping the first casual reference to Ronnie's having been institutionalised for much of his adulthood ("Did they have a telly in...where you were, or were you not allowed?") and unrepentantly acknowledging that he maintained no contact with him within that time. He never visited Ronnie; when asked if he received any of Ronnie's letters, he takes the opportunity to berate him: "I couldn't read half of them. Your handwriting's shocking!"

Even before Wilf shows up in the flesh, his animated counterpart has undergone a significant degeneration, transmuting from the benevolent voice of reason to an increasingly sinister being with each new appearance. Take that moment in the second PIF where he bites the stranger's outstretched hand. Within context, it's ostensibly framed as a heroic action, but it calls attention to the owl's potentially vicious nature, underscoring that central irony that Ronnie is receiving advice about avoiding predators from an animal that is itself a predator. True, you could lay the exact same charge against Charley the cat (in his own "Strangers" PIF, he reduces a fish to a skeleton in the blink of an eye), but a cat's domesticated, and not a critter it seems particularly unusual to depict hanging around with small children. An owl's a creature of the wilderness, which is suggestive of a whole myriad of unknown and hidden dangers. His instruction on not talking to strangers seems like sound advice to give to a child, but has a darker echo in a later sequence, when Ronnie recalls being asked by his distraught mother why he lit those matches, and is again visited by Wise Owl, who simply tells him, "You mustn't say anything." The message Ronnie is being fed is that silence is his only recourse. Even Wise Owl's catchphrase, "Don't be a Twit You!", while sounding amusingly plausible as the kind of trademark saying a character from a public information film would have, takes on harsher tones, in mirroring Wilf's evident tendency toward bullying and rebuking Ronnie. Cook's dual performance is terrific - as the owl, he's hauntingly convincing as an authoritative voice from yesteryear. As Wilf he's spookily mean, but not to a point that precludes the character's discernible wretchedness. When they merge together, the results are both unhappy and uncanny.

Since the "Wise Owl" series ended, Wilf (whose name is, incidentally, only a letter away from that of another predatory wild animal) has gotten intermittent gigs playing to the nostalgia crowd (most recently an event at a toy museum, which had him in the stellar company of "Ray Brooks, Nigel from Pipkins [and] one of the Bungles - not the scary one") but taxidermy is now his bread and butter. He tells Ronnie, "You'd be surprised how many people want to preserve something of the past, keep a memory alive. Freeze-frame of a happy moment." The taxidermy motif serves a string of purposes throughout the narrative. It is, most obviously, an allusion to Psycho, that classic tale of an abusive parent and their damaged offspring, but on that score it is also something of a misdirect. On our first viewing, knowing the series' predilection for gruesome and disturbing endings, we might suspect that this is building towards the shocking revelation that one of our two taxidermists, be it the professional or the amateur, has applied that same process to a human subject (as Norman infamously did with his mother), most likely the body of the long-deceased Joanne. But that revelation does not come. Instead, the taxidermy is used fundamentally as a metaphor for what Wilf has done to Ronnie, in keeping him perfectly preserved, forever a child under the Wise Owl's rule, only a shell of what he might once have been. With hindsight, the macabre instructional film on stuffing Mimsy the cat becomes a grisly allegory for the violations Ronnie has endured at his father's hands; in the aftermath, it would be a flagrant pretence for either Mimsy or Ronnie to be described as "good as new", with Ronnie's botched job on Ferrari the rabbit signifying a more honest representation of the ugly realities. And intensely ugly they are too. Ronnie reminds Wilf that Monday will be the 44th anniversary of Joanne's death; if she'd lived, she would have been turning 50. He's come to Wilf because he has questions regarding what really happened on that fateful day. There follows a replay of the earlier "Matches" PIF, only this time the live action Ronnie is intermixed with the animated Joanne, suggesting a puncturing through of the illusion. Ronnie recalls that she'd received a doll, a tea set and a kite (there's another predatory bird). "Wise Owl" is revealed to have been present after all, only now he is depicted as the abusive and negligent figure that Wilf was in real life. Joanne wants to light the candles herself. Ronnie tells her that she shouldn't, but is shouted down by Wise Owl, who mocks Ronnie for needing to ask permission for everything and tells him to grow some balls. Joanne is left without supervision while Ronnie is ominously ordered to follow the predatory bird upstairs into the bedroom, with the reminder that "Wise Owl knows best". Ronnie was conditioned to always follow his father's instructions, much as he was conditioned to always follow the teachings of the Wise Owl. Wilf abused both of those authorities at once, creating a climate in which the innocence of both of his children was prematurely snuffed out.

With that in mind, we can see how the scenario in the earlier "Strangers" PIF was really being turned completely on its head. The danger lay with the supposedly safe authority figure all along. The message never to talk to strangers becomes an admonishment against ever reaching out to the outside world for help, against Ronnie being able to vocalise what he was going through. This is a chilling inversion of the alleged purpose of a public information film, in which the authority's words are clearly designed to protect its own interests and not the subject's.

The story climaxes with a reversal of this dynamic, as Ronnie holds his father at knife point and forces him to accompany him upstairs. As he goes, he has one more flashback to Joanne, now a flesh and blood child (the girl who plays her is not credited), cheerfully lighting the candles on her cake, the last time he ever saw her alive. He takes Wilf to his childhood bedroom, and confronts him on why he allowed him to take the blame for the fire. Wilf responds that he had his career to think about, morbidly observing that for a renowned PIF voice-over's daughter to die in a fire of his causing was "not very on brand". Ronnie insinuates that Wilf betrayed his trust in him, and the Wise Owl, to which Wilf responds, "That was only a game. You enjoyed it." He then attempts to subdue Ronnie by evoking the lexicon of the Wise Owl: "Don't be a Twit You. Give your old man a hug." Ronnie looks as though he might comply, but instead raises the knife and slashes through an adjacent pillow, causing feathers to violently spill. Wilf hits back with the threatening reminder that such behaviour could potentially get Ronnie reinstitutionalised, assuring him that if he stops now then he won't say anything. Ronnie responds, "But I will", and goes his own way, clear in his mind over what he needs to do next. He's going to go to his mother and tell her everything. Wilf makes a further effort to dissuade him, by slipping back into the persona of Wise Owl ("Wise Owl won't let you...and we must always do what the Wise Owl says, mustn't we?"); in a deliberately on the nose detail that straddles the border between the unsettling and the just plain absurd, he does so with several feathers still hanging off of his body. The spell is broken, however. Ronnie no longer answers to the Wise Owl, having seen him for the wretched fool that he is.

It's tempting to conclude that "Wise Owl" was conceived as a measured response to criticisms of how the series had previously depicted trauma victims and characters with mental illness, which is to say, as ready to kill their abusers and liable to hurt others; for examples, see "Tom and Gerri" (which is a really good, really tense little character piece, although the ending might not please everyone) and "Thinking Out Loud" (for myself, the low point of the series, for a myriad of reasons). In that regard, Shearsmith and Pemberton aren't necessarily offering up anything more egregious than any number of horror-based media, which has an ingrained tendency towards treating the psychologically troubled as outcasts and objects of fear and suspicion (for all of its merits, Psycho is absolutely included; the film's title alone is a dead giveaway) ^[1] - although, correct, by the 2020s we really should be doing a whole lot more to challenge those preconceptions, and "Wise Owl" feels like a refreshing step in the right direction. To an extent, it is another exercise in rug-pulling from a series smart enough to use its own perceived formula to its advantage. In establishing Ronnie as an obviously mentally ill protagonist and coding him according to such a familiar archetype, it engenders a deliberate set of expectations, only to subvert them - in addition to the aforementioned misdirect with the taxidermy, there's also a fake-out moment where it looks as though Ronnie intends to stab his father, when in the actuality he's going for the pillow. But more than merely surprising, it reaches a genuinely affecting and cathartic resolution, one that eschews brutality and shocks in favour of conveying a sincere sense of Ronnie finding a way forward from his traumas. The cycle of horror and despair does not ultimately claim him. As he walks away at the end, we have every reason to believe that a more hopeful future lies ahead.

"Wise Owl" concludes with one final animated sequence, in which Ronnie the boy leaves the house and, freed from his father's toxic influence, takes his first real steps toward adulthood; in doing so, he visibly transforms from a boy into a man. The traumas that have dogged him for most of his life have not entirely receded; Wise Owl continues to follow him, and to berate him with the usual cry of, "Twit You! Twit You!" But he's merely an irritating speck at the back of Ronnie's head, not the dominating figure of the past, and Ronnie is fully capable of dismissing him. "Get stuffed!" Ronnie retorts, and keeps on walking.

 [1] For an example of how persistently accepted such ideas still are in the modern horror landscape, you might look to film critic Mark Kermode's rather tone-deaf response to a listener's charge that the 2022 film Smile perpetuated those very stigmas. I'm only bringing this up because I was somewhat taken back at how he brought Psycho into the conversation, to make the case that Smile shouldn't be singled out, without acknowledging that Psycho was made a whopping 62 years before Smile. You might very reasonably have expected attitudes to have moved on since then.

Never Say Pink Furry Die (aka Save It Till The Morning After)

Some Aardman productions are so obscure that they didn't even see the light of day in celebrations of the studio's obscurities.

The 2000 home media release Aardman Classics gave a comprehensive overview of the Bristol-based animation house's output pre-Chicken Run, but by no means a complete one. The DVD edition came with a booklet, Insideaard, offering a handy breakdown of the studio's filmography, and if you studied it extensively, you were going to pick up on a few glaring gaps here and there. The lack of Morph or Wallace and Gromit was self-explanatory, since this was intended as a showcase for the studio's assorted one-offs and oddities, with the Creature Comforts pieces as its obvious selling point. Other notable omissions included the preliminary Rex The Runt shorts (assuming you weren't counting Ident), the preliminary Angry Kid shorts, and any of the studio's advertising work outside of Creature Comforts. Also predominantly overlooked was the studio's music video credits, the only featured example being the quirky visual accompaniment created for Nina Simone's "My Baby Just Cares For Me" in 1987. From a representational standpoint, the absence of Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" (easily the most esteemed of Aardman's music video collaborations) seems hard to justify, but maybe there was an issue with licencing. The most mysterious of the snubbed items was a 1989 piece entitled Liftin' The Blues, credited to David Sproxton; to this day, the film continues to elude me, but I have gathered that it was an aviation documentary, which sounds intriguingly out of Aardman's wheelhouse. I fear that its hefty 52 minutes running time might have immediately precluded it from making this compilation, however. A more head-scratching omission would be the 1992 short, Never Say Pink Furry Die, which running at just shy of 11 minutes you'd think they might have squeezed into the mix. I wonder what the story was there? Was the implied sex scene considered a notch too ribald for the family audiences? It's not as though Aardman Classics was an overwhelmingly kid-friendly release anyway, what with the psychological horrors of Stage Fright and the apocalyptic visions of Babylon.

Never Say Pink Furry Die came about during the era when Aardman was regularly allowing its younger talent to create their own projects for Channel 4 - it's how Nick Park, Barry Purves and Richard Starzak were able to get their names into the limelight. This film's creator, Louise Spraggon, doesn't seem to have stuck with Aardman in the aftermath, which is a shame - partly because it is nice to see an Aardman project fronted by a female talent, but also because, while bedevilled with all the roughness of a first effort, it has promise, and I would have been interested to have seen how Spraggon's craft might have developed from here. The claymation visuals look considerably less refined than much of its contemporaries, but I quite like the homespun qualities, particularly the crudely-sketched, predominantly plain environments, which seem warmly nostalgic for the stop motion Paddington series from 1976.

The first thing to be said about the set-up of Never Say Pink Furry Die is how reminiscent the central dynamic is of Wallace and Gromit. Once again we have a master/pet relationship in which the pet is visibly the brains of the operation, although in this scenario both characters are equally non-verbal. The plot follows a young woman who wakes up with the mother of all hangovers, on a Friday the 13th that, most inconveniently, happens to be the day she's scheduled to get married. She's supported through her morning preparations by her far more organised feline companion, who clearly has a greater determination to get her to that alter on time...I don't know about you, but I don't think that exactly bodes well for her future union with her unseen groom. The matter gets thornier still - nestled within the woman's cleavage is a most peculiar item, the titular pink furry die, stoking hazy memories about possible misspent passions that unfolded the night before. We get flashbacks depicting her on what I presume to be her hen night, only there doesn't seem to be anybody out celebrating with her; either her friends have all ditched her at the bar, or she's henning it up by her lonesome. There is, in fact, only one other character in the full short besides the central duo, and they don't show up until the climax. Such is the paradox of Never Say Pink Furry Die; at times it seems so very busy and stuffed with details (the array of food packages, shrivelling Venus fly traps and half-eaten fry-ups on the kitchen unit, the records and magazines strewn across the bedroom floor), whilst being pervaded by so much dead and strangely empty space. Which takes us into its obvious shortcoming - the pacing of the short is listless to a baffling degree. There doesn't seem to be much urgency in how the narrative progresses, which isn't exactly ideal given that our antagonist is a ticking clock. What plot there is could have been told in less than half the run time, but there are long stretches focussed on giving a slice of life glimpse into the daily living routine of this woman and her cat, with the ostensibly pressing matter of the wedding rising to the surface only intermittently, whenever the cat glances at his wristwatch and a ceremonial leitmotif obligingly sounds. Otherwise, it's almost comical just how lightly the wedding seems to weigh on the narrative, never developing into anything other than a vague motivation for the characters to (just about) keep moving. We don't get much indication that this woman's heart is really in it - to the extent that she might just as well be going to a friend's birthday party, not the supposed happiest day of her life. Or is her terminal indifference all part of the joke?

For as long as it takes for the narrative to get to the point, the ending comes oddly abruptly, and this is where the tone of the pieces shifts into something flagrantly more sinister. We never get to the wedding, and by the credits it's honestly hard to say if the characters are even headed there at all. Given the groom's total lack of corporeality, the betrayal that's ultimately felt comes not so much at the closing revelation that it was the vicar with whom our protagonist knocked boots the night before (presumably the same vicar who's going to oversee her wedding ceremony, though it's not made explicitly clear) than at the fade-out, for abandoning us at this point in the story, and in the company of such a skin-crawling individual. When the vicar enters the picture, to assist the main duo with their broken-down vehicle, he is an immediately unsettling figure, with his eyes obscured behind his glasses, although deceptively, his initial function is to dispense quirky sight gags, with his car boot-ready alter, cross that doubles as a spanner, and unintentional substitution of petrol with holy water. Once the woman and cat have joined him in his van, and the furry die has been slotted back into its proper place, along with the last remaining fragments of clarity as to what went on that fateful night, it comes together less like a wacky comedy reveal than a moment of genuine squeamish horror. The general emptiness that's pervaded the film up until now - the seeming lack of anyone in this world besides the protagonist, her cat and this mysterious third party - suddenly feels treacherous, as though the predatory vicar has been closing in on this woman the entire time and she has unwittingly been all alone in his presence. The final arrangement, which finds the duo stranded in the vicar's ever-accelerating van, suggests a situation hurtling ever more critically out of control. The closing image codes them as having entered into a twisted symbolic marriage, bound by their mutually scandalous secret, with the license plate of the towed vehicle trailing behind in the style of "Just married" signage, while Peter Brandt's hazy background score feels evocative of a nightmare unravelling. I don't know if I'd go so far as to conclude that the vicar has literally kidnapped this young bride and her cat, but it does seem evident that their tribulation is just beginning - that, despite the increased speed, they aren't getting anywhere fast, except ever deeper into the whirlwind of chaos.

Homer's Odyssey (aka Simpson, At Last We Meet)

My favourite gag in "Homer's Odyssey" (7G03) is the one that wouldn't even have qualified as a joke on its initial airing. This episode, only the third in the series' run, involves Homer losing his job at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant and finding a new calling in spearheading a safety campaign against his erstwhile employers. It climaxes with Homer being invited to the office of the plant's bigwig, one C. Montgomery Burns, who's come up with an underhanded means of silencing Homer. "Ah, Homer Simpson," a glad-handing Burns declares, on coming face-to-face with his adversary. "At last we meet!" Truly the beginning of a beautiful friendship. What's so incredibly gratifying about this moment is the realisation that it would have meant nothing to those viewers who'd first tuned in to catch it on January 21st 1990. And yet for anybody who's gone back and watched it since, the line can't help but stick out like a sore thumb, seeing as it was the only occasion on which Burns could make that particular declaration and it be absolutely true. Ignore, for just a moment, any subsequent flashback episodes, like "I Married Marge" of Season 3 and "And Maggie Makes Three" of Season 6, which posited that Homer and Burns had met at earlier junctions in their lives. It wasn't necessarily the first time that Homer and Burns had crossed paths within the series' internal chronology, but it was the first time, so far as the viewer was concerned, that they were meeting. It's an ostensibly nondescript line, the significance of which could only be acquired retroactively, once the series had found the time to implement one of its strangest, most enduring running gags - Burns' baffling assumption, whenever he encounters Homer, that this is the first occasion on which he's dealt with this particular menace. They wasted practically zero time in getting it into motion; when Burns and Homer next met, in the following episode, "There's No Disgrace Like Home", Burns had already forgotten who he was. His selective memory blanking would only get all the more absurd as time went on, with he and Homer meeting every other week and the slate always being inexplicably wiped clean by the next. It's a gag that works on two levels - Burns' refusal to commit anything regarding Homer to his long-term memory is, on the one hand, a cruel denial of Homer's personhood, and of the notion that someone so lowly could have such a significant impact on someone as high in stature as Burns. But it's also a tongue-in-cheek denial from series of its own continuity; an acknowledgement that the characters cannot be allowed too much growth or self-knowledge, lest it threatens the very dynamics on which its perpetuation depends. Truth is, this denial is actually highly beneficial to Homer - if Burns had any awareness of what a persistent thorn in his side this one individual has been, he would have dealt him a harsh retribution a long time ago.

It doesn't stop there, however. There is yet another layer of juiciness to this particular snippet of dialogue, albeit one that's more accidental and much easier to miss without specific background knowledge on the series. For Homer would never meet this particular incarnation of Burns again, certainly not in such a head-to-head capacity. The Burns we see (or, more accurately, the Burns we hear) in "Homer's Odyssey", is a Burns from an alternate timeline, standing on the brink of a potentially very different trajectory for the series. I allude, of course, to the trivia that Burns wasn't always voiced by Harry Shearer; when production of the series was first underway, the showrunners had another man signed on for the role, by the name of Christopher Collins. Collins was already a highly experienced voice actor, having played such iconic 1980s cartoon villains as Cobra Commander in G.I. Joe and Starscream in Transformers. I'd imagine he would have been considered quite a catch for a fledgling series like The Simpsons. Unfortunately, it didn't work out, and Collins was dropped after recording lines for only a handful of episodes, reportedly because he rubbed people the wrong way. With Collins gone, Shearer replaced him as Burns, while a new voice actor, Hank Azaria, was hired and took charge of another role that had previously been allocated to Collins, Moe the bartender. "Homer's Odyssey" is one of only two Simpsons episodes in which Collins receives acting credits, and one of the few venues to preserve his performance as Burns. Or so it's widely accepted.

(Note that Christopher Collins was also known as Chris Latta, which is the name Transformers fans predominantly know him by. I believe that Latta was his birth name and Collins his stepfamily name, and he used both identities professionally. For the purposes of this review, I'll be calling him Collins, because that is the credit he used during his time on The Simpsons.)

I'll admit this is an issue I'm not 100% clear on. Over the years, I've seen a lot of conflicting opinion over whose voice it really is coming out of Mr Burns in "Homer's Odyssey". Some swear blind it's Harry Shearer, that Collins did originally record vocals for the character, but these were all dubbed over before the episode went ever to air, and if Burns' voice sounds in any way too scratchy or weird, we should chalk it up to the fact that Shearer, like everyone else, was still growing into his characters. I've seen at least one person claim that when "Homer's Odyssey" (and other early Burns appearances) first aired, they had Collins' vocals, but were subsequently re-dubbed with Shearer's for the sake of consistency and these are the only versions that exist now. Collins' name is, of course, retained in the credits, although in typical Simpsons fashion, it isn't stated what role(s) he's being credited for. The episode's DVD commentary is of little help on the matter, since Collins isn't mentioned at all (if there was that much friction between himself and the producers, then that's understandable; a DVD commentary isn't the place to be airing your dirty laundry about people you've clashed with). The commonly-accepted line, however, is that that is indeed Collins' Burns we're hearing in "Homer's Odyssey". IMDb credits him with the role; it also claims that he voiced Burns in "Simpsons Roasting on An Open Fire" and "The Tell Tale Head", although he isn't credited for either episode (Burns appeared in two other Season 1 episodes, "There's No Disgrace Like Home" and "Homer's Night Out", but I guess those performances were both Shearer's). If Shearer and Collins' respective takes on Burns really were that indistinguishable, then I'll admit that disappoints me; when I first heard that Burns was originally meant to be voiced by the man who did Cobra Commander, I'd imagined him sounding a lot closer to that character. There is, meanwhile, at least one other Collins performance that survives in the final mix, in "Some Enchanted Evening", as the presenter of America's Most Armed and Dangerous.

It should be noted that no such confusion exists over Moe. In his case it's accepted that all of his appearances (including "Homer's Odyssey") were re-dubbed by Hank Azaria before making it to air, and we can only speculate how Collins' take on the character would have sounded (I personally like to envision his Moe as sounding something like the Dalmatian he voiced in the movie Rover Dangerfield). Azaria weighed in on being hired as a replacement for Collins in a video interview given to GQ in 2018, although he didn't mention Collins by name:

"I didn't know til many years later, kids, that there was an original Moe the bartender voice that I replaced. I didn't know that! And I was like...that guy, you didn't like what he did? And Matt Groening was like, oh no, he was great. I'm like, so why did you recast him? (Groening said) like, he was just a dick. His voice was great, but he was just kind of jerky to everybody. Think about how awful like, that that guy could have been on The Simpsons his whole life. Lesson to you kids - always be nice!"

There's something about Azaria's statement, well-intentioned though is is, that just seems profoundly off. I agree with the general sentiment on always being nice, but it's the part about how Collins "could have been on The Simpsons his whole life" that bothers me. I'm going to hazard a guess that Azaria wasn't aware of this when he gave the interview, but Collins' "whole life" really wasn't that long. He died on June 12th 1994 from encephalitis. He didn't live to see The Simpsons' amazing longevity, nor to contemplate how he'd missed out on what could've potentially been a lifelong gig. He was only 44 years old. THAT is the kind of detail that gets me thinking, "How awful".

 

Christopher Collins, the orig on Evening at The Improv

All evidence points to Collins being ousted due to some degree of friction, but I'm inclined to take Azaria's testimony with a pinch of salt. Partly because he is only repeating what someone else had said to him (those probably weren't Groening's exact words, either), but partly because I've seen other claims (admittedly all stemming from internet hearsay) that it was specifically Sam Simon with whom Collins clashed, not absolutely everyone involved. Collins' fellow Transformers alumni have certainly indicated that he could be a something of a loose cannon (in the fondest possible way, mind you), but I've heard some pretty wild anecdotes about Simon too, so who knows what really went on between them? It's not like Collins is around to give his side of the story, or Simon for that matter.

The possibility that, had chemistry been more amenable, Collins would have stayed as Burns and Moe raises more "What if"s for the series than you might first imagine. We wouldn't simply have had the exact same show with a few different voices here and there. For one, Azaria might never have been hired had Collins' departure not left a vacant spot in the cast - in which case, various iconic characters that grew out of Azaria's unique talents, such as Dr Nick and Professor Frink, might never have existed. Instead, we could have seen some completely different supporting characters that were tailored to Collins' own strengths as a voice actor. Likewise, characters voiced by Dan Castellaneta or Harry Shearer might otherwise have gone to Collins, and received completely different vocal interpretations. The uneasiest question, though, has to do with how the series would have handled Collins' premature death. Given its nature, it's hard to see how his being retained as a Simpsons cast member would have made any difference. After a few years of voicing the characters, as opposed to a few scant episodes, Collins would presumably have found the time to develop each of his roles and make them his own, so swapping him out for another actor would have been a much more daunting process. Would Burns and Moe have been retired, along with any other characters he happened to voice, out of respect for the deceased Collins, as would happen with Doris Grau (for a time, anyway) and Phil Hartman? Or would Burns and Moe have been deemed too integral to the series to just be dropped? Obviously Grau and Hartman were sad losses, but their characters were basically peripheral enough that they could be phased out without creating too much disruption to the pivotal dynamics. The loss of a core cast member would have been more challenging to weather, to the point where you have to wonder if it might have cast doubts on how much life was reasonably left in the series. It's hard to speculate, because over the years The Simpsons has been so inconsistent in its handling of deceased cast members. With Grau and Hartman, I'm pretty sure that few people in the mid to late 90s envisioned the series going on for that much longer anyway, so quietly retiring their characters seemed the most sensible and tactful option. The loss of Marcia Wallace in 2013 led to her character being formally laid to rest within the show's continuity (in a manner clearly intended to be conflated with Wallace's real-life passing). By contrast, Russi Taylor's characters were promptly recast following her passing in 2019. Grau's character, Lunchlady Doris, was eventually un-retired, with Tress MacNeille as her new voice, but was renamed Lunchlady Dora, in concession to the sad reality that the "Doris" part of her had long departed. It's a terribly morbid topic, I know, but one I've seen come up with increased frequency in recent years, with the awareness that a lot of the cast aren't getting any younger and the series having seeming ambitions of remaining an unstoppable force for decades to come. For now it will likely remain a matter of crossing that unfortunate bridge when they come it. Sobering to think that, had Collins stayed, they might have crossed it thirty years ago.

Irrespective of who voiced him, it's clear that "Homer's Odyssey" was intended to be our introduction to Burns as a character, and that's a purpose it effectively still serves. He'd previously made a brief appearance in "Simpsons Roasting on An Open Fire", the first episode aired (if not produced), and it was his heartless denial of a seasonal bonus to the plant's blue collar workers that kicked that particular story's conflict into motion. This, though, feels like the first time we'd gotten properly acquainted with the magnitude of his malevolence, and the chilly shadow he casts over not only his workforce, but Springfield as a whole. Burns has only limited screen time in "Homer's Odyssey"; he doesn't appear until the third act, nor does the build-up ever mention him by name. When the children of Springfield Elementary take a field trip to the plant at the beginning of the episode, Burns doesn't greet them in person, but sends his PA Smithers (who's looking distinctly off-colour in his first onscreen appearance) to deal with them on his behalf. When Homer is fired, it's not by Burns himself or even by Smithers, but by some random nobody slightly higher up the ladder (well, not quite so random in that he's established to be the father of Bart's classmates Sherri and Terri, but I don't think we ever saw him again). And yet when Burns does finally appear, it feels as if he's always had a very active role in these events, an omnipresent threat lurking persistently out of sight, surveilling the masses below for any indication of weakness or insubordination. His introductory sequence shows him doing exactly that, panning upwards to reveal him glowering over the tiny figures in Homer's rally and looking eerily inhuman, even for early Season 1 when backgrounds and crowd scenes were all swarming with the most outrageously freakishly-designed of extras. Often, Burns' hunched posture and hooked nose give him an avian appearance, like a buzzard preparing to swoop down on prospective prey, but here I'd go a step further and say that the exaggerated emphasis on his cranium has him looking positively alien (foreshadowing the ending to "The Springfield Files" seven years before the fact). I'm put in mind of those Martians from The War of The Worlds who spent a long time watching humanity and drawing plans against them.

"Homer's Odyssey" was definitely the most ambitious Simpsons episode to air at this point, having its sights less on surveying the Simpsons themselves than on the world around them and the family's place within. It feels like the first real attempt to explore Springfield as a character in its own right, a sure sign that the show was already feeling confident enough to start branching out from the more limited storytelling possibilities of the Ullman shorts, in establishing a fully functioning community beyond the Simpsons' doorstep. It's for this reason that the first act plays, deceptively, like a protracted bit of plot misdirection. You'd be forgiven for initially assuming that this was going to be a Bart-centric episode - the school field trip takes up the first seven minutes, and only as the first act ends does it become apparent that this is actually going to be Homer's conflict. But those early moments with Bart and co are hardly filler, since they do a lot to establish exactly what it is that Homer will be fighting for much of the episode. The bus journey alone between the school and the plant, which encompasses the town's toxic waste dump, tyre yard and prison, reveals everything that's sordid and depressing about the Springfieldian soul (in the one the script's biggest WTF moments, we hear that the school's previous field trip was to that last venue). The kids wave gleefully to each of these establishments, seemingly desensitised to the grim implication that they represent the various possible futures awaiting them after leaving school - although the nightmare scenario of never escaping the school system in the first place (the driving conflict of the forthcoming "Bart Gets an F") is also evoked when Otto's odd idea of a shortcut takes them back past the school. Along the way, we get to know a few more of Bart's classmates, and further banes of his academic existence. In the spotlight this time are the devious twins Sherri and Terri, supplements to Bart's ever-increasing stockpile of antagonists (a role that, other than a scene in the aforementioned "Bart Gets an F", where they deliberately feed Bart the wrong test answers, they never went particularly far with) and Wendall, a quiet and unassuming kid for whom Bart expressly has no ill will, but whose perpetual queasiness makes him a nightmare to be seated next to on turbulent bus rides. Hard relate there.

The real behemoth of the episode, though, is the plant itself. It represents the grimmest of all possible futures, and everything toxic and inescapable about Springfield in the present. "Homer's Odyssey" establishes the plant as a dominating force not only in the Simpsons' own lives, as Homer's place of employment, but for the town as a whole. It looms over Springfield, an ugly, ominous, polluting beast run on incompetent labor and unethical business practices. While a Level 7 disaster waits in the wings, the plant is already poisoning the town, slowly and insidiously, as signified by the appearance of Blinky the three-eyed-fish, who'd play a more central role later down the line in the Season 2 episode "Two Cars In Every Garage And Three Eyes On Every Fish". There is, all the same, an extent to which that terrible plant is nothing more than a warped reflection of what's already corrupt and polluted in the town's collective psyche. Springfield in general is run on incompetence, and there's not a lot that its various authorities can do right - we get a taster of this during the town meeting, when Chief Wiggum, in his debut appearance, gives an update on the situation with the mysterious graffiti artist "El Barto" and has drastically failed to comprehend the nature of what he's up against ("El Barto" is yet another early detail that I don't think went anywhere in the series proper, although it was the basis of a few comic book stories). Homer makes an even bleaker discovery, that the town at large has a problem with simply not caring about its fellow residents' welfare. The characters who best encapsulate this pervasive negligence are the Winfields, the elderly couple who lived alongside the Simpsons and were keen on passing judgement on them, until they were formally written out of the show in the Season 4 episode "New Kid on The Block". In their first appearance, we find them seated out on their porch late at night as Homer staggers by, having tethered himself to a boulder with the intention of throwing himself from the Springfield bridge. The possibility that Homer might be looking to kill himself explicitly occurs to them, but they can't decide if he isn't just taking the boulder for a walk. Either way, they don't seem particularly concerned. Much as his neighbours are gleefully aloof, his ostensible allies are casually cruel; a cash-strapped Homer was earlier refused a drink on credit by Moe, who informs him that he has zero confidence in his prospects of finding another job and ever paying him back. "Don't worry, we're still friends", Moe adds, as if that means anything at all.

Homer's desperation for a Duff beer, with its promise of temporary refuge from his unemployment woes (expressed through the Siren song of the chattering cyclops ^[1]), is what prompts him to take drastic measures and raid Bart's piggy bank in the hope of scraping together enough change. When this fails, Homer concludes that his family would be better off without him; hence, he straps a rock to his body and heads dejectedly for that fateful bridge. It's this particular plot point - Homer's suicide ideation - that I suspect tends to throw some viewers off about "Homer's Odyssey", which in my experience seldom seems to be anybody's favourite of Season 1, an already undervalued batch of episodes in general. Having Homer desire to kill himself is a manifestly extreme direction in which to take his unemployment arc - as a narrative choice it was certainly bold, although tonally it gets a little ambiguous, with it not always being obvious where the levity is intended to lie and where the genuine pathos. Take the suicide note Homer scrawls out to his family (on a sticky note with the header "Dumb Things I Gotta Do Today"), which includes the statement, "I can only leave you with the words my father gave me: stand tall, have courage and never give up". Are we meant to find it sad or hilarious that Homer himself clearly doesn't see anything worth heeding in those words? (Mostly, I just find it hard to envision Abe saying anything so encouraging to Homer.) Homer's chosen method of death is also cartoonishly impractical, a measure conspicuously designed to keep the attempt from feeling too real. It's a tough tightrope the episode has to walk. We're not supposed to take Homer's ideation overly seriously, but not so lightly that we're immune to the Winfields' callousness.

The one aspect of the episode that definitely feels dated now concerns the minor plot point of Marge stepping up to support the family while Homer looks for work, by returning to her old waitressing job. It doesn't go any further than a single sight gag (the revelation that Marge is a roller carhop), but there seems to be a regressive assumption that Marge becoming the family breadwinner is a further indication of Homer's failings as a patriarch (Homer basically cites as much as a reason for accepting Burns' job offer at the end). The expectation that Marge would give up her job immediately after marrying makes more sense later on, with the revelation that she was heavily pregnant with Bart at the time, but here it feels like an old-fashioned supposition even for 1990. Despite taking such an active role in family proceedings, her narrative function is essentially passive - three episodes in and Marge's characterisation remained quite wishy-washy, her ill-suppressed agitation at Otto's rudeness being the only foreshadowing of her latent fire. The dynamics of the Simpson clan are not, in general, at the narrative forefront, but Homer's relationship with his family provides the emotional grounding throughout, in that all he wants is to do right by them and live up to the responsibilities he sees as unquestionably his. At this stage, the relationship between Bart and Homer was still the most prominent and developed of all the family connections, and there is a through line of Homer feeling particular shame wherever he's screwed up in the eyes of Bart. What makes Homer's firing at the end of act one particularly hard to bear is that it happens in front of Bart. In act two, it's not Homer's failure to find employment per se that brings on his suicidal despair so much as the realisation that his alcohol cravings have caused him to actively wrong his son. And when his family follow him to the bridge to intervene with his attempt, and Homer instead saves them from being hit by a van on the hazard-filled street (all while still being tethered to his boulder), it's the fresh understanding that he needs to secure them a safer environment that convinces Homer his life is worth living. He campaigns to have a stop sign installed on the road, and on discovering how unopposing people are of the motion, vows to keep fighting for additional safety signage the town over. Eventually, he gets emboldened enough to take on the big dogs in the form of that monstrous nuclear power plant, having realised that his gestures for a safer Springfield are all futile whilst they're living in its tyrannical shadow. Homer knows, better than anyone, how dangerous that place is, because he's been on the inside. As he puts it: "Our lives are in the hands of men no smarter than you or I, many of them incompetent boobs. I know this because I've worked alongside them, gone bowling with them and watched them pass me over for promotions time and time again. And I say this stinks!"

The title of the episode, in addition to getting a particularly obvious cultural reference out of the way (if you've a character named Homer, then it's basically law that you'll have to acknowledge The Odyssey at some point, much as you'll have to get in a pun on the Mona Lisa if you've a character named Lisa), alludes to Homer's journey to reclaim his self-respect after being pushed to his very lowest ebb. He goes from being deemed unemployable, derided by his neighbours and refused a favour by a self-proclaimed friend to being cheered by the entire town (other than on the measure of implementing a 15mph speed limit on Main Street; there are a number of audible boos when it's cited by an extra who could be a proto Ned Flanders). Having taken heed of the town's fatal lack of regard, Homer aspires to seize control of it and remold it in his more conscientious image. This ultimately means going head-to-head with Burns, who may as well be the human (though just barely) manifestation of the callousness that's characterised the town up until now - in that respect, he and the plant are practically the same entity. When Homer is summoned to Burns' office for that decisive collision of wills, Burns lays down the ultimate Faustian bargain - he will hire Homer as the plant's new safety inspector, on the condition that Homer immediately steps outside and assures his legions of supporters that the plant poses no threat to them. Burns recognises that being cut loose from the plant workforce is what gave Homer leeway for his rebellion, and that a sure-fire method of neutralising the man is to bring him back under his thumb. And Homer recognises that his becoming safety inspector is the very sort of critical absurdity he's just been explicitly lobbying against - with his prior track record, he's the last person qualified for that position. Faced between the principles on which he's built his newfound self-respect, and the temptations of job security, Homer chooses the latter, although he does a little arm-twisting of his own, wheedling Burns into allowing him to conclude his campaign on his own terms. Instead of assuring the town that the plant is safe, Homer urges them to protect themselves independently. He states that he's going to have to live without their respect and awe, an admission that he might have forfeited his right to such things, but the rally happily receives the news that he's been appointed safety inspector as nothing less than the fitting conclusion to the narrative in which they've been eagerly invested - even as Homer slips in the obviously self-serving detail about the job coming with a boosted salary.

That's another thing that potentially throws people off about this episode - the ambiguous ending. Is it a happy ending or isn't it? Outwardly, it has all the trappings of a triumphant deliverance, with Bart proudly acknowledging Homer as his father, and the episode coming full circle from the mortal embarrassments of that first act. It's an equally nice touch that the Winfields, who previously wouldn't lift a finger to help Homer, are now among the people cheering for him. Still, there's little dancing around the fact that is is Burns who comes out on top. His one concession is in failing to secure Homer's leverage for selling the public a positive image of the plant, but he is able to make the opposition go away, which seems victory enough. The townspeople are certainly no safer than they were before, and are potentially worse off with Homer overseeing the plant's safety procedures, yet they clearly think they've won. There's a level on which writers Jay Kogan and Wallace Wolodarsky appear to be skewering the mindlessness of the town's mob mentality (a topic that would come up a whole lot more frequently with Springfield), and our own desire for a happy ending, however facile. On another level, we are being invited to identify with Homer's struggle, and the sincerity of his desire to better both himself and the world around him. He heads to his new position with a thread of that sincerity still intact, however dubious it seems that he'll be capable of putting it into practice. Homer himself implores, "You have to learn that there's a little Homer Simpson in all of us," ie: basically fallible, but navigated by the best of intentions. The ending of "Homer's Odyssey" accepts that as a cause for celebration in itself.

We wrap up now, with Saturday Morning Rewind's tribute to Christopher Collins.

 [1] Has anyone tried to make the events of this episode correspond with the actual Odyssey? You know, just for fun?