Treehouse of Horror '90: Hungry Are The Damned (aka Have Your Cake And Eat It)

"Hungry Are The Damned" is a frustrating Simpsons Halloween segment. To a point, it's frustrating by design. Conceived as a loose kind of homage to the vintage Twilight Zone episode, "To Serve Man", it sees the family being abducted by a race of squid-like extra-terrestrials known as the Rigellians (fronted by two particularly prominent individuals, Kodos and Kang), who purport only to wish to indulge them with gourmet cooking and electronic entertainment. It spends much of its duration dropping anvil-sized hints that something significantly more unsavoury is going on, only to then hit us with a narrative twist that declares us to have been at fault all along for our disgracefully leery human minds. The more generous interpretation is that it ends up being a sort of anti-twist, the classic shaggy dog story in which the joke's on us for allowing ourselves to be strung along for essentially nothing. The less generous reading is supplied by segment writer Wallace Wolodarsky himself on the DVD commentary, where he openly describes the solution as "the biggest cheat".

It's not hard to see where Wolodarsky is coming from. There's a distinction to be made between artful misdirection (getting the viewers to look one way at a red herring, whilst laying the ground for a more surprising plot development right under their noses) and outright cheating (bombarding the viewer with evidence that one thing is happening, only to largely discard said evidence in favour of a "Gotcha!" at the end), and I'd argue that "Hungry" leans more heavily into the latter. To be fair, this isn't the only example of a Simpsons episode cheating with regard to a narrative twist. Take "Bart of Darkness", in which we were taunted to believe that Ned Flanders might actually be a "mur-diddly-urdler" - what's never accounted for, in the closing revelation that he was attempting to conceal an overwatered ficus plant, is why he had to excavate so much earth to do so. That was quite blatantly a tomb for a human corpse he was digging, not a houseplant. Still, the mystery in "Darkness" was working on two separate levels, anticipating (and explicitly calling out) the viewer's expectations that there would be an entirely innocent and thoroughly mundane explanation for Ned's suspicious behaviours, whilst dragging the scenario so ridiculously far that you almost felt dared to suppose otherwise. It also helps that the explanation, when it comes, is so beautifully in character for Ned that it scarcely seems to matter if not all of the smaller pieces fit. Kodos and Kang, on the other hand...well, it's a tricky issue. They've been hostile aliens ever since, and it has to be said that they are a lot more fun that way. The notion of them having benevolent intentions, even for the purposes of a single, self-contained segment, is a difficult one to swallow with hindsight. But given that this was their first appearance, and the writers were unlikely to have been thinking about a second when they penned it back in 1990, it does demand to be judged on its own merits.

Alas, even on its own merits, "Hungry" has always been my least favourite of the original "Treehouse of Horror" edition, and that bothers me so. It bothers me because there is so much to enjoy about it up until that invalidating denouement, not least that it is the most authentically unsettling of the three establishing segments. The atmosphere is so charged with sickly, oversaturated hues, the imagery so ripe with ghoulish foreshadowing - there's the barbecue and the bug zapper at the segment's opening (reminders of the perils that await those lower down the food chain), and that particularly disturbing shot in which the heads of an unwitting Homer and Marge are framed to look as though they've been chopped off and served on the very platters they're about to dine from. The design of the Rigellians themselves is also an unmitigated triumph, a combination of the most grotesquely inhuman of qualities - giant cycloptic beings with squid tentacles, shark teeth and over-active saliva glands, the most benign physical quality they probably have going for them are their pointy Spock-esque ears. Their non-stop drooling around the Simpsons transpires to be yet another red herring - this is something the Rigellians simply do, as confirmed by their subsequent appearances, and we've had plenty of time since to get used to it - and yet within the specific context of "Hungry" it's a fabulously eerie touch, implying that it does that, no matter how ostensibly civilised these aliens' demeanours, their Pavlovian reflexes keep telling a very different story. For much of its running time, "Hungry" pulls off a masterful balancing act; in some respects, the life and culture aboard that Rigellian spaceship is entirely, mundanely familiar, often to the point of absurdity (according to Kang, it's an astonishing coincidence that the English and Rigellian languages just happen to be the exact same), but all the while there's a pervading sense of these galaxy-hopping molluscs embodying something more distant, unknowable and dangerous. "Hungry" persistently indicates that we're headed for an outcome beyond our wildest nightmares. So when it's all revealed to be nothing more than a means to a confoundingly ambivalent punchline - well, it can't help but feel a little deflating. Maybe it's akin to how a few sick-minded viewers felt when Cocoon: The Return (1988) showed up in theatres and shut down their theories that the Antareans had similar intentions for that band of retirement home absconders they carried off in 1985.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for narratives in which things that appear strange and grotesque turn out to be benign, and where the precarious nature of human judgement is called into question. I just don't think that particular moral goes with this particular story, and the rather tepid ending sequence, which fails to produce any witty rejoinders to Lisa's platitude about the Simpsons being the real monsters aboard that ship, would appear to confirm that the writers weren't feeling it too strongly. It seems to me that there is a missing piece of the puzzle tucked away on that aforementioned DVD commentary, in which we learn that an alternate version of the story was at one time pitched where the dust-blowing duel between Lisa and Kang revealed an additional component. There, the book's full title read How To Cook For Forty Humans And Then Eat Them. The crew don't elaborate on where the segment might otherwise have gone, other than to acknowledge that it would obviously have had very different implications. Yet it's a production tidbit that speaks volumes to the arbitrariness of the conclusion, and how easily it could have been tipped in the other direction. The script feels conflicted; clearly, it's having a lot of fun in making those aliens appear sinister and ghoulish, and it's for this reason, I suspect, that they were characterised as such on subsequent Halloweens - it just seems a whole lot more natural and more in keeping with the spirit of the season (and the show at large). For now, "Hungry" feels obligated to pull back and pour a bucket of ice water on the audience's expectations, even if it's not the route you sense the writers necessarily wanted to go. I put that down, in part, to an early cautiousness when it came to ending these Halloween segments - in spite of their openly fictitious nature within universe, there seemed to be a rule that nothing truly untoward could happen to the Simpsons, and that things always needed to be reset more-or-less to status quo by the fade-out. Still, the ending to "Hungry" offers one genuine delight, in the form of a delectable performance from the late James Earl Jones as a third, non-recurring Rigellian, Serak The Preparer (Jones' vocals, both here and in "The Raven", helped to elevate The Simpsons' first Halloween outing into something truly, hypnotically out of the show's regular world). Serak's distraught plea, "I slaved in the kitchen for days for you people...you aren't the only beings who have emotions, you know!", is by far the most convincing ingredient of that sour denouement.

Serak might put on a good display for his species, and yet a question I've repeatedly asked myself, on revisiting "Hungry", is whether I actually trust Kodos and Kang, in spite of their final assertions. All of those prior insinuations that they were looking forward to sinking their pointy, drool-covered teeth into the Simpsons' hides are laid on just a little too thickly to be easily discarded, and surveying the segment with foresight of that twist, becomes less an exercise in pinpointing the misunderstandings so much as noticing how many of the details don't add up. Let's look at the case against the Rigellians:

1. First, the big one, and a problem the twist ending completely dances around - the Rigellians flat-out kidnapped the Simpsons. Even if their intentions were benevolent, the family didn't ask to be taken aboard their ship and whisked off to a purported paradise in the far reaches of space. Apparently, it never dawned on those aliens to consult their helpless captives on whether they wanted to be permanently separated from everything they knew and loved back on Earth. I mean, they do have a dog and cat who are dependent on the Simpsons to be there to feed them - is everyone happy with Santa's Little Helper and Snowball II being left to rot?
   
2. The "Your wife is quite a dish" remark seems hella inappropriate whichever way you slice it.
3. Why are the Rigellians so joyfully obsessed with seeing the Simpsons gain weight? If it's meant to be an indicator of how much the family are savouring the Rigellians' cooking, then that's possibly undermined by Kang's assertions in the following paragraph.
   
4. When grilled by Lisa over why the Rigellians were constantly trying to make them eat, Kang indignantly responds: "Make you eat? We merely provided a sumptuous banquet, and frankly you people made pigs of yourselves!" Suggesting that this was this all a Spirited Away-type deal, and that the Simpsons would have demonstrated better character if they'd resisted the temptations laid out before them? Why do I get the impression that any kind of polite refusal would have been unacceptable to the Rigellians? Kang's rebuttal seems to be imply that the Earthlings are accountable for their own gluttony and the Rigellians were secretly repulsed by their willingness to gorge themselves. The problem there is that we'd just observed Kang freaking out the instant the humans stopped eating, so his condemnation doesn't hold water.
5. Why would the Rigellians want to treat the Simpsons like gods anyway? And why the Simpsons in particular? Were they just a random unit of humans they happened to come across whilst scanning the Earthly suburbs for potential abductees, or was there a reason they singled them out? Did they intend to harvest more humans in this manner, or was it just the Simpsons they took a shine to?
   

The counterargument? I suppose there is no obvious reason why the Rigellians would have returned the Simpsons to Earth if eating them really was on the agenda. At that point, they already had the family safely within their clutches - it's not like they had any means of running and escaping whilst aboard that ship. Unless the Rigellians were too proud to openly admit to what they were doing, and their parting sermon amounted to something of a track-covering hissy fit? That seems as valid an interpretation as anything else.

Admittedly, the chief reason why "Hungry" has always sat uneasily with me has less to do with any holes in its story construction than with how humanity's fall from alien graces is framed as being the fault of one member of the Simpsons clan in particular. Here, Lisa's crime was essentially in activating the Independent Thought Alarm, by daring to question what those aliens were up to instead of mindlessly consuming like the rest of her family. To that end, she serves as the audience surrogate, in perceiving the dangers that should be totally obvious to anyone capable of connecting a few mental dots, but apparently goes above the heads of the other characters. Hence why the ending comes down so harshly on her - the viewer is intended to feel the sting of the "Gotcha!" and the Rigellians' accusations along with her, after having arrived at the exact same conclusions she did. In practice, I come away with an overwhelming sympathy for Lisa. I feel we're not so much mutually at fault as judges of character as we are mutually set up to fail. The reservations she had are perfectly healthy ones - she's small, vulnerable and stranded aboard this alien craft with a bunch of unknown beings and nobody else who seems to share in her anxieties. Again, the Rigellians forcibly abducted the Simpsons aboard their craft, so are they really in a position to complain if any of them had misgivings about the arrangement? Furthermore, one can't help but detect a somewhat anti-intellectual tone to the final assessment, with Marge suggesting to Lisa that she went wrong in being too smart for her own good. Independent thinking is explicitly upheld as the sin that gets the Simpsons expelled from a supposed paradise where the only acceptable mode of behaviour is to shut up and obey. I've toyed with the interpretation that since "Hungry" is contextualised as a story being told by Bart to Lisa, it might have been custom-constructed to strike at his sister's nerves, but I suspect it's futile to read too much into any supposed relationship between the story and storyteller. In my review of "Bad Dream House" I suggested that there is a clunky vanity to the implication that the Simpsons would be telling stories about themselves, although on reflection that probably is a hyperliteral reading of the episode's narrative choices. What's actually going on, I suspect, is that the Simpsons are telling stories about generic characters, and these are being dramatised as stories about the Simpsons for the benefit of the viewer. The ending of "Hungry" is as bizarrely ambivalent as it is, I suspect, because the segment doesn't have a whole lot conviction behind it, beyond delivering its searingly abrupt "Gotcha!". In the preceding "Bad Dream House", which also ended with the alleged monster rejecting the Simpsons because it considered them the real abhorrence, it was clear where the script ultimately stood on the matter. The Simpsons were social outcasts, so much so that even a possessed abode would sooner destroy itself than coexist with them (an outcome that wittily reverberates in "Hungry", when Lisa assures the Rigellians that the family are used to being perceived as lower forms of life all the time on their home planet), but they were outcasts of a feather. "Hungry", by contrast, closes with a moment of discord between our pack of undesirables, with Bart and Homer each churlishly berating Lisa for getting them banished back to the sublunary suburbs, and the last word, or rather the last murmur going to Marge, who purposely withholds making her feelings clear. Does she feel disappointment at the family's ganging up on Lisa, and in their not taking the expulsion as graciously as her, or is that murmur intended to express her private agreement?

Or perhaps it's even in that final disunity among the Simpsons ranks that we sight a few unpleasant parallels with the Rigellians themselves, and confirmation that, in the end, those aliens were all-too knowable. As another (less notorious but just as unsettling) Twilight Zone episode was keen to emphasise, People Are Alike All Over. After all, these beings didn't exactly take the misunderstanding with good, gentle graces, something Marge herself explicitly highlights with her observation that "For a superior race, they really rub it in." If the Rigellians really were that much nobler than the humans, then perhaps they could have found the elegance to laugh it off, understand why they might have given off the wrong impression, and extend forgiveness? Instead, they transpire to be petty AF, casting the humans out with an overbearing spurning. But then the seeds of that were already cleverly sown, during a sequence in which their electronic interactive technology was revealed to be lagging a couple of decades or so behind the Earthlings', and the aliens' response was to childishly assert that they were still running rings around them when it came to intergalactic travel. Maybe that is the best possible takeaway from this entire sorry breakdown of Earthling-Rigellian relations - both sides were as churlish and as unrefined as the other. Were there actually monsters aboard that ship? No, just unflattering reflections whichever way you looked.

Treehouse of Horror '92: Clown Without Pity (aka Potassium Benzoate For The Soul)

Here's something I've always found charming and intensely curious about The Simpsons' third Halloween installment, "Treehouse of Horror III" (episode 9F04, which first aired on October 29th 1992) - the way it structures itself to play like a particularly twisted episode of ABC's 1970s romantic comedy series Love, American Style. The first two segments, "Clown Without Pity" and "King Homer", close in the same gloriously kitschy manner, with a heart-shaped iris out and upbeat jingle, both reminiscent of how Love, American Style liked to sign off each story. The allusion isn't quite as arbitrary as it might first seem; Love, American Style was also an anthology series and, like each entry into the Treehouse of Horror, individual episodes were comprised of multiple self-contained segments, usually three longer pieces with shorter skirts in between. Listening to the episode's DVD commentary, I was a little taken back to discover that this element wasn't implemented until very late into production. For me, those iris outs are the very heart of the episode, the thing that gives it its unique sauce as a Halloween entertainment. It's always preferable whenever these Treehouse of Horror episodes appear to have some kind of underlying theme going, so that the segments work as a package and couldn't be easily swapped out with segments from other Halloween shows, and in the case of "Treehouse of Horror III" that theme is incongruous romance. What could be more delightfully subversive than for a Halloween show to reveal that its so-called tales of horror were actually build-ups to bizarre romantic unions? ^[1] For those stories to take us to truly strange and threatening places, only to consistently whiplash us into punchlines consisting of retro jingles and kitschy heart-shaped fade-outs?

Of course, this being an afterthought might also account for why the episode doesn't follow the allusion all the way through. The final story, "Dial Z For Zombies", completely disregards it, by ending with a bog-standard black-out. I don't know if it was intentional, but that always seemed so unsettling to me, having this weird, dead space where I'd already been primed to expect a heart-shaped iris. That alone is enough to make "Dial Z" my least favourite of the three, which is doubtlessly petty and probably a mite unfair of me. The Love, American Style allusion came about when the original ending to "Clown Without Pity" was sent back for revision, having been deemed unsatisfying, and perhaps it was only happenstance that the second segment ended with yet another love story. The third segment didn't fit the pattern, and the writers may have been unable or unwilling to readjust it - although if it was me, I think I'd have stuck a heart-shaped iris out on there anyway, just to complete the set (I mean, it's kind of a love story, the stupefaction the family feels for their television). Thankfully, the story doesn't quite end there. In the back-end of the Season 4 we had the episode "The Front", and its second act closes with Abe having some cross-dressing western fantasy that fades out to a certain familiar jingle and heart-shaped iris. There, the allusion feels a heck of a lot more random, but I've long rationalised it as the elusive third iris shot leftover from "Treehouse of Horror III", managing to squeeze itself in before the season was through. So everything worked out.

My favourite of the three segments is "Clown Without Pity", and that's in no small way down to the ending. It has one of the strangest, most unexpected endings in all the Treehouse of Horrors, and I frankly don't even want to think about how the segment was ever supposed to work without it. The evil Krusty doll that's spent the segment terrorizing Homer is finally seen retiring to Lisa's doll house and sharing a tender moment with the Malibu Stacy within. The mere idea of ending a story about a killer doll with it finding a gentle romance in a knock-off Barbie is so ingeniously weird, but if you think about what's going on in this sequence, it's also kind of sad. Hilarity, pathos, sweetness, WTF-ness - I get the full gamut of emotions in watching this unearthly doll snuggle up to that chunk of molded plastic, and I probably should explain.

"Clown Without Pity" is based primarily on the "Living Doll" episode of The Twilight Zone. The premise of a knife-wielding doll with murderous intent obviously had a more contemporary cultural reference point in the Child's Play franchise, but "Clown" follows the "Living Doll" plot of having the demonic toy take up a personal vendetta with the household patriarch while being nothing less than the perfect companion to its child owner. In "Living Doll" it was never clearly explained why Talky Tina took such a malevolent turn, but there was a subtext (implicit in Serling's closing narration) that the doll's powers were to be seen as manifestations of little Christie's aversion toward her emotionally abusive stepfather. The most disturbing element of the story comes at the very end when, having vanquished the stepfather, the doll redirects those malevolent energies to Christie's mother, insinuating that she might be next if she fails to act in her daughter's interests - the doll's final declaration, "My name is Talky Tina, and you'd better be nice to me!", conflates the girl and doll as a single entity. In "Clown" we actually get a clear-cut explanation for the doll's homicidal tendencies, and it is every bit as ludicrous and arbitrary as you would hope - eventually, it's discovered that the doll has a "Good/Evil" switch concealed behind its clothing, and behaves according to whichever setting it's on. Of course, what's never explicitly accounted for is why the evil-inclined Krusty directs its malevolence at Homer, and Homer alone, but perhaps we can dredge up an explanation if we look closely enough into the story.

First, though, another interesting tidbit from the DVD commentary is that "Treehouse of Horror III" might never have been, for showrunners Al Jean and Mike Reiss had some doubts about whether a third Halloween episode was warranted. That's easy to scoff at now, but I do understand where they might have been coming from at the time. Whereas two Halloween shows in a row could be chalked up to happenstance, with three you've basically cemented it as an annual tradition, and I don't blame Jean and Reiss for questioning if they really wanted to commit the series to that expectation of having to do a new one every October, regardless of whether the ideas were forthcoming or not. "III" was given the green light anyway (Jean and Reiss themselves penned "Clown Without Pity"), and these Simpson-ised tales of terror proved that they had life and value in them yet. True, certain aspects of the early Halloween shows were already nearing their end ("III" has the penultimate wraparound narrative, and the last to have basis within the show's regular reality), but in other regards the writers were only beginning to realise the full creative possibilities of dropping the established cast into macabre situations without continuity or consequence. "King Homer" and "Dial Z" contain our first notable instances of characters being killed in Treehouse of Horror segments. The examples here are fairly mild - Lenny and Smithers are both devoured by King Homer (as are Shirley Temple and Clancy Bouvier), but he downs them in clean, tidy bites (seriously, how much more horrifying would it have been had King Homer chewed with his mouth open?), and while the zombified Ned presumably gets his head blown off, the results are purposely withheld from us - but I'll admit to finding these moments a little shocking back in the day.

Watching our beloved characters get violently dispatched in ever-more gruesome fashions is a novel experience, sure, but a greater attraction of the Halloween series still lies in those characters getting to realise the darker possibilities within themselves, things that wouldn't be permitted in the series proper, but which nevertheless feel like logical expansions on the Springfieldians we know. What's impressive and frankly startling about the "Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace" segment of "Treehouse of Horror VI" is how convincingly Willie slips into the persona of Freddy Krueger. It's almost as though we're delving into a hitherto untapped layer of the groundskeeper's psyche, like he could have been a legitimately terrifying villain in another reality and just happened to get boxed into a more benign niche in the one we got. ^[2] Krusty, by contrast, makes a somewhat more reluctant Chucky - he can't handle being dumped into a bag with Homer's dirty socks, and he allows himself to get sidetracked with attempting to seduce Malibu Stacy - but "Clown Without Pity" is one the few venues where his eccentricities are played for uncanniness as much as humor. He is a clown, and whether we love them or loathe them for it, clowns do tend to have this intrinsic grotesqueness about them (as do dolls). For much of this segment, he makes for a bone-chilling visual, with a gaping mouth and eerily vacant expression. The aspiring killer at the centre of "Clown Without Pity" isn't the real Krusty, of course, but the doll has enough of Krusty's personality in it, including his lecherousness and general ineptness, to feel like an ugly extension of its inspiration's soul. This is the crass commercialism of Krusty's brand, manifesting as a miniature demon in his likeness, a corruptive presence infiltrating the home of the unsuspecting consumer and laying waste to the order within. This concern was near and dear to the heart of the first Child's Play (1988), in which the possessed doll hailed from a mass-marketed toy line, the Good Guys (a send up of the Cabbage Patch Kids and My Buddy). It also seems pertinent that the scene with Homer buying the doll at the House of Evil is drawn from the opening sequence of Gremlins (1984), another tale where consumerism is linked to corruption. The second golden rule, to not get the Mogwai wet, is first violated by accident, but when Mr Peltzer sees the results (it causes them to multiply), he seems to disregard that he was specifically told not to do this and starts devising plans to create more Mogwai and market them to every child in America, all while understanding little about this animal's nature or its lifecycle.

Unlike his Gremlins counterpart, the keeper of the House of Evil is willing to sell Homer the coveted item as a gift for his son, but warns him that it comes with a terrible curse (and a free frozen yoghurt, and all that jazz). He does not actually elaborate on the nature of the curse, and indeed, the suggestion that the doll's behaviour is caused by any supernatural curse seems invalidated by the final reveal that the doll has a Good/Evil switch on its back. Are we do assume that the old shopkeeper doesn't have a clue what he's talking about? Is it just a misdirect? Or is there something else he might be getting at through his talk of a curse?

The presence of the Good/Evil switch likewise seems to rule out any potential reading that the doll's mischief is linked to Bart's outlook, a la Talky Tina (although what do you want to bet that he was the one who set the doll to Evil in the first place?). Despite being introduced, by Lisa, as a story about a boy and his doll, "Clown Without Pity" actually has very little to do with Bart past the opening stages involving his party. There is, nevertheless, a sense that the doll might be reacting to something in Homer's slipshod parenting. We get a reminder of his paternal negligence at the beginning, when he admits that he forgot about Bart's upcoming birthday and rushes out to buy him a gift at the last minute. Thus, the Krusty doll represents a hasty attempt to paper over those cracks in his parenting, and it seems to work, with Bart proclaiming it to be the best birthday he's ever had. The appeal of the doll, besides its resemblance to Krusty, a television personality Bart idolises, is in its superficial reassurances of love. But this is a facade, and the doll is willing to demonstrate its insidious nature to Homer after witnessing a snapshot of his own, through his response to an environmental newscast in which Springfield's air is deemed to be toxic to children and the elderly. Homer's only reaction is to cheer, presumably relieved that he isn't among the affected, and not giving any thought to the possible impact on his own children and father. At that, the doll is suddenly and inexplicably at his side, ready to declare its distaste for him. Its declarations of love are mechanical, produced on demand at the pull of a string, but its declarations of murderous hate are apparently very real, produced by the doll's own volition. Keep in mind that Krusty's character was purposely designed to look like Homer in clown make-up, making this little monster a reflection of his parental negligence as much as the falseness of Krusty's brand. There is a complicity to the consumerism - the parent is aware of the shallowness of the arrangement but buys into anyway it in order to placate the child, all while turning their back on far greater issues, like air that apparently isn't even breathable to the younger generation. Consumerism is a game we're conditioned to play from a very young age, as a means of numbing ourselves to grim realities; the immediate gratification of a product is presented as preferable to the implementing of sustainable solutions to the social, economic and environmental threats that plague us day by day. The long-term cost being that those threats aren't going to simply go away because we've chosen to ignore them. At one point Homer attempts to bury his problem, by dropping it down a dark pit, but it immediately finds its way back up to him. Perhaps this is what that old shopkeeper was really alluding to when he mentioned that the doll came with a terrible curse? In general, consumerism does.

The real Krusty makes no appearance in this segment, but by now it was well-established what made his brand such an odious sham - away from the studio lights, he's generally depicted as a vulgar, spendthrifty sleazeball with no time or patience for his devoted young fans. The point where the doll's personality is most recognisable as Krusty's own is in the scene where it first attempts to seduce Lisa's Malibu Stacy, which is itself its own bit of absurdity. Does the Krusty doll believe the Malibu Stacy to be alive like itself, or is it engaging in some kinky fantasy with the non-living doll? Either way, its lusty impulses are an obvious perversion of the innocent play pretence we'd sooner associate with childhood ^[3]; we see the real Krusty poking through and puncturing the facade of his kid-friendly brand. Yet the killer doll's relationship with the inert Malibu Stacy is what ultimately forms the basis of our tender conclusion, following a fake-out happy ending where it looks as though Homer and the doll (now reset to Good mode) might be able to happily coexist. This is really paving way for a characteristically cynical Simpsons twist, in which Homer takes advantage of the doll's newly-awakened inclination to do good by making it into his personal slave, forcing it to bring him snacks, give him sponge baths and walk Santa's Little Helper. This was where the original script ended, but there was some sentiment among the production crew that the joke was falling a little flat, and the decision was made to expand on it by crafting an additional scene with the Malibu Stacy.  (For an idea of how late the revisions came, you can see where they've also pasted new dialogue onto finished animation in the penultimate scene - when the doll calls Homer a "stupid idiot" its lips don't move). The image of a weary Krusty returning to the doll house and hanging his coat upon the rack furthers the original joke about where being a nice guy gets you - the doll's situation is now analogous to that of your average put-upon shmuck working 9 to 5 for a tyrannical boss. There is a certain sitcom-esque banality to this arrangement, which calls to mind the ending of the Simpsons' previous Halloween, where Homer was shown attempting to live with the fact that he now had his own tyrannical boss's head grafted onto his shoulder. In both stories, the joke stems from the absurdity of these freakish, otherworldly occurrences infringing on the family's lives, only to end up conforming to a kind of normality - in the case of "Clown Without Pity", the absurdity that the likes of Chucky or Talky Tina, having made peace with their human adversaries, would go on to emulate the normality of a working shmuck. But I think this joke works on more levels still. Consider that only one of the two dolls in that closing frame is even alive. When Krusty tells Malibu Stacy that getting to come home and be with her is the one thing that makes its situation tolerable - well, that poor doll is flat-out delusional. The relationship is all in its head.

There is a moment, right before the iris out, in which the seeming wholesomeness is suddenly interrupted by the Krusty doll accidentally knocking off Stacy's head, before awkwardly reattaching it, potentially indicating that the inclination to dismember is still ingrained somewhere deep within its nature, even when set to do Good. This is intermixed with another, quieter subversion, in the reminder that the Stacy doll is but a fake, and that the Krusty doll is reacting to the cruel exploitation it faces daily at the hands of Homer by retreating into fantasy. It is engaging in its own play pretence as means of coping with those harsh realities, evocative of both the imaginative possibilities that a toy opens up for a child, and the specific purpose that consumerism has already served for the segment's human characters, in covering over the more unpalatable aspects their lives. In both scenarios, we're essentially navigating our way through a chaotic world by clinging to our dumb playthings; the little demonic Krusty doll emerges as no different, and it gets our final sympathies for that. The prosaic domesticity in which it immerses itself, coupled with the nostalgic sitcom jingle, are immediately familiar, recalling one of our favourite adult playthings, the kinds escapist fantasies packaged and sold to us on a nightly basis via television airwaves. It all points toward the segment's greatest irony, one that completely turns the workings of the story on its head - that this doll, the very emblem of corruptive consumerism, should end up discovering that humans (insofar as Homer represents them) are such an innately horrible bunch that it needs to construct its own insipid fantasies just to get away from them.

As Moe would say, it's funny, and it makes you think.

[1] Someone on the Simpsons Archive episode capsule suggested that it might as well have been a Valentine's Day episode, which seriously cracks me up.

[2] The one character who doesn't convince as a Treehouse of Horror villain is, surprisingly, Snake. We can do "Hell Toupee" some other Halloween, but for now I'll just say that I've always felt that segment did him kind of dirty. Maybe he's too obvious a target.

[3] It doesn't escape my notice that it's Lisa who's supposedly telling this story, and her playthings that are subject to this perversion. Make of that what you will. Also, where is Lisa going to sleep? The doll house is still on her bed at the end.

TACtics: Glasses (See Clearly Now?)

"Glasses" (circa 1993) is one of TAC's most baffling advertisements, and the first I would likely point to when making my case that their preferred strategy for piling on the emotional outbursts can sometimes work to the detriment of the final impact.

Not that there isn't a really ingenious idea in "Glasses", an ad built around a cunning bit of conceptual irony hinted in its deceptively unassuming title. Shot from the perspective of a driver attempting to navigate an urban highway, the view is repeatedly obstructed by a series of beer glasses positioned in front of their windscreen. The more glasses are added, the more blurred the road ahead becomes, until we're on our fourth glass and have our inevitable crash into the back-end of a lorry. The "glasses" at the centre of the ad are presented as a reversal on the kind of "glasses" that make eyesight more focussed, as a metaphor for how alcohol impairs your ability to make sound judgements.

It's a playful set-up, and one might argue not especially TAC-like in its approach. TAC are notorious for the unflinching realism of their campaigns; the more abstract devices used in "Glasses" immediately makes it one of the curious outliers of their portfolio. It makes more sense when you realise that the concept originated from outside sources, this being a remake of a drink driving ad first used by the Singapore Traffic Police in 1992 - one that attracted enough overseas admiration that it was also recycled for a Canadian campaign from Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). It's not surprising - the Singapore original is inventive, memorable and sharply to the point. It's also a fine example of how you can concoct a punchy drink driving campaign without any onscreen death or violence. Sure, it's implied that you, the driver, got into a horrendous, possibly fatal accident (the original version sees you swerving directly into the path of a bus), but the lack of corporeal figures means that there aren't any external characters to make those consequences solid and manifest; the horrors are directed inward, with that final ugly screech and queasy fade to red saying it all. For their part, MADD were content in contributing a straightforward repackaging of the Singapore original, but TAC? Let's face it, that isn't their thing. Does it sound in the least bit in character for them to put out an ad where no one is seen to be brutally killed or maimed, leaving everyone around them permanently traumatised? Oh no, they went the extra mile and attempted to implement a brand new, fully TACian twist to the scenario, so that we actually get to see the narrative continue beyond the first-person simulation, introducing real-world consequences into a set-up that had looked as though it might be entirely self-contained.

In other words, they tried to TACtify the unTACtable, and the results are awfully telling.

The original "Glasses" ad from Singapore.

The TAC version of "Glasses" has not one, but two narrative extensions. In the first, we see a bystander approach the scene of the accident and reel in horror at what they find. This section isn't so overdone, being not altogether different to the trucker's shoulders shrinking at the end of "Nightshift". It's in the second extension, when we're witness to a couple of police officers showing up at the door of the driver's family, that the ad frankly degenerates into a deluge of cliches, to the point that you might as well have come prepared with a Bingo card. We see the bereaved spouse having the obligatory emotional break down. All that's left is for a child to wander onto the scene and act all innocent. Oops, right on cue. Go to bed Jessica.^[1]

In theory, there is something pretty clever about showing how life continues beyond the driver's perspective, with insight into the consequences for those left behind. And yet, the individual pieces don't gel - the realism of the epilogue is so at odds with the abstractness of the opening sequence that the two effectively invalidate each other. It isn't a case of the closing realism signifying some stark return to earth after the giddiness of the opening, but two discordant styles uneasily occupying the same air time. Its Singaporean predecessor works as successfully as it does because it's committed to its concept and so elegantly immersive in its execution. The TAC remake plays like two, perhaps even three different ads stitched together - to the point that I have to theorise that that is, in essence, what we're looking at. It wouldn't surprise me if the original plan was to do a straightforward recreation of the Singapore ad, before someone argued that the lack of emotional aftermath was too great a departure for TAC's brand, so they created an extra scene from another proposed script they had laying around. It also wouldn't surprised me if that reaction from the second motorist was an early attempt that got sent back with notes when it was deemed to not go far enough. All in all, it reads as there being too many cooks in the TAC and Grey Melbourne kitchen, with the end-product revised and reassembled so many times over that it came out lacking any coherent vision (ironic?). If that epilogue had been allowed to function as its own stand alone piece, then I daresay it would have worked a whole lot better (although the girl's unconvincing "Mummy, what's wrong?" would still have been a sticking point - you might expect a small child who had witnessed her mother breaking down in that manner to be significantly more unsettled). Here, it feels like a display of self-indulgence on TAC's part.

The TAC remake of "Glasses".

It's also noteworthy that, for whatever reason, the TAC version doesn't implement the same sonic tricks as the Singapore original. The Singaporean version has the audio getting gradually more distorted, merging with that of a bar atmosphere, as a further indicator of the alcohol's dominating influence. In TAC's ad, the audio stays consistent throughout.

I think it says something of just how awkwardly cobbled together TAC's "Glasses" is when you look at how it fared in the 1999 study conducted by the Monash University Accident Research Centre. There, the most notable response from test subjects to "Glasses" came in the disparity in its perceived pleasantness between recall-based and viewing-based data. Subjects asked to recall this one from memory rated it as one of TAC's most pleasant ads, but that rating dropped like a rock amongst subjects who had only just viewed it. As the study notes: 

"The recalled and viewed responses were similar in all cases except for the Glasses
advertisement, where it was recalled to be relatively pleasant but viewing the advertisement resulted in a substantial reduction in the mean factor score. This is most likely the result of failing to recall the ending of the advertisement, where there is an emotive response from a bystander. Seeing this during the viewing of the advertisement may have resulted in a reduction in the perceived pleasantness of the advertisement."

In other words, the central conceit of the glasses being stacked one by one before the windscreen is what tended to stick with viewers about this one. The emotive epilogue was so disconnected that it was easy to overlook that it was part of the same advertisement. I'd say the moral here is to not mess with the classics.

[1] I know, that one's RTA, not TAC. Different part of Australia.

TACtics: Tracy (Speed Kills)

TAC's premier ad, "Girlfriend", might have launched with the explicit intention to "upset, outrage and appal", but you could argue that they pulled a significant punch in not introducing the possibility of death to the featured scenario. Lucy was at risk of losing her leg thanks to her boyfriend's bloody idiocy, but the only reference to fatalities as a prospective outcome came from charge nurse Karen Warnecke's comment about how, if the driver survived, they were the ones who had to live with the damage they'd caused. TAC were clearly in a more emboldened mood when they put out "Beach Road" and "Tracy", two anti-speed ads from the dawn of the 1990s, which saw them shifting in a palpably harsher direction. The TAC formula was still undergoing refinement - meaning that, as with "Girlfriend", we're not witness to the crash in either - but both are bleaker pieces than their predecessor. Not only were their victims shown in all the more critical condition, they also upped the emphasis on the howls of despair that would become TAC's trademark as much the blood and the crumpled bits of metal.

Of the two, "Beach Road" adheres more closely to the formula of "Girlfriend", by including an in-person narrator to act as Warencke's equivalent, a paramedic who talks to the camera and explicitly introduces TAC's anti-speeding tagline, "Don't fool yourself, speed kills." Again, it's the enlightened authority figure who's seen it all and is required to take it in their stride as part of their job, but is evidently appalled at how people keep making the same dumb mistakes over and over. "Tracy", whilst retaining the pseudo-documentary feel of its brethren, dispenses with the narrator altogether, instead putting all of its focus on the perspective of the irresponsible driver. Like the boyfriend in "Girlfriend", they've emerged from the crash they caused relatively unscathed, and spend much of the ad pushing to be brought up to speed on the condition of their passenger, who has taken a much more brutal pummelling, although (very much in contrast to "Girlfriend") the viewer is kept in the dark along with them until the end. The first responders have a more muted presence here - the faces of the paramedics questioning the protagonist are not clearly shown, and their voices, while discernible, are notably more subdued than that of the protagonist, whose hysteria is allowed to be the ad's dominating force. Neither "Beach Road" or "Tracy" shows the victim making it as far as the hospital - in "Beach Road", the unfortunate kid is pronounced dead at the roadside, while the titular Tracy is last seen being loaded into an ambulance, with the driver panicking about the possibility of her not surviving the journey. Technically, Tracy's fate is left hanging, which should, in theory, make it a less upsetting piece than "Beach Road", but it's hard to look at the final arrangement and envision any kind of positive outcome. Of interest is the plot description given in the Monash University Accident Research Centre's 1999 study:

"Shows a crash scene identifying that an inexperienced female driver, with her best friend as passenger, has been speeding, gone to change a tape and consequently crashed into a tree. She calls out “Tracy, Tracy” and that she really wants to go and see her. Tracy is trapped in the car, is freed, but dies. The driver is overwhelmed that she has killed her best friend."

 

The writer of this description appears, ostensibly, to have jumped the gun in declaring Tracy dead, because the paramedics within the ad don't; it is the distraught driver who makes that final harrowing assessment. Is the above summary a testament to just how much more persuasively her voice comes across above the low-key murmurs of the first responders, or to how the open-endedness of the scenario doesn't actually equate to hope? The ending leaves us stranded in an uncomfortable dubiety; much of the ad's bitter, lingering aftertaste comes in giving the final word to the driver, in lieu of that jaded, fourth wall-breaking professional who's seen it all before and could interject a degree of certainty into the proceedings. The narrating paramedic in "Beach Road" was ultimately powerless to prevent the bleak outcome of that ad, but his authoritative presence nevertheless gave the viewers some form of emotional grounding. He represented the voice of reason amid the mindless chaos, as was Karen Warnecke in "Girlfriend". Here, the paramedics are still enforcers of decency and common sense, providing equal parts admonishment (insinuating to the driver that she was going too fast) and protection (they want to keep the driver from seeing Tracy to spare her the horror), but their downplayed role makes them less of an obvious counterbalance to the protagonist's outbursts. Notably, they offer no real certainty on the outcome; the protagonist asks one of the paramedics if Tracy will die, and receives only a non-committal, "I don't know." We are left to fixate on the emotional state of the driver, and while she is the character with whom our perspective is most firmly aligned, there are points where her messiness throws us off, becoming its own show of perturbing fluctuation - when questioned if she was aware of the speed limit in this zone, her face momentarily contorts into a nervous snicker. The onlookers in the backdrop are also a nice touch; while presumably concerned about the situation, in practice they come off more as gawkers to the horrific spectacle, their relentless gaze but another stiffening of the driver's entrapment.

The scenario in "Tracy" is a slight variation on that later seen in the Drinking & Driving Wrecks Lives PIF "Mates", with a driver pleading for forgiveness from an injured friend who is in no position to answer. Here, the severed relationship is between two teenage girls, and the driver has a more overt sense of vulnerability; all-round less snivelling than her "Mates" counterpart, we do not doubt the sincerity of her remorseful wails, but her words are certainly no more effective. In "Mates", the labored breathing of the injured party came to function as a condemnatory response in itself, whereas here the final damning rejection comes in the abrupt slamming of the ambulance doors. It is a cold conclusion to a friendship rendered meaningless by one party's willingness to endanger the other through their own reckless decision-making. Again, it goes back to what I was saying in my coverage of "Nightshift" about less being more and the little things being what should ideally get to you in a safety ad. We don't need to be outright told that the driver, as the survivor, will have to live with the consequences - that much is discernable from the desolate denouement.

For as well put-together as "Tracy" is, when you get down to the nitty-gritty, I have questions about how effectively it works as an anti-speeding ad. Although the closing title makes it clear this is the intended takeaway, anyone attentive to the details will pick up that what caused this accident was a real hodgepodge of improper judgement. It could just as easily have worked as a warning against distracted driving - the driver mentions that she was in a hurry and attempting to change a cassette when the crash occurred. Furthermore, there is a P-plate visible on the front of the wrecked vehicle, meaning that she is a provisional driver, and thus inexperienced. It could be that "Tracy" was always designed to speak foremost to those fledgling drivers so intoxicated with the thrill of being able to drive that they've forgotten their vulnerability. I wonder how many older viewers saw this and thought, "Well, those kids were obviously stupid. I'm an experienced driver and I would never change a tape while speeding, ergo this doesn't apply to me," and stuck with their bad habit.