Life and Stuff (aka Not Asleep, Not Awake, Always Tired)

About midway through Kumar Satkunarasa's Life and Stuff, the protagonist meets someone who shares their philosophy about life being harder for people who aim to exist than for those who just want to survive. It's a philosophy that Life and Stuff automatically calls into question, through the images that it juxtaposes with this statement. The people who are supposedly trying to exist are all shown in silhouette, bustling about their nondescript business in an indistinct mass. Its visual representation of a person who just wants to survive, meanwhile, is a picture of an impoverished child, who seems real, and their plight immediate, but is also invisible to these indifferent silhouettes. The aspiration to exist is exposed as an absurdity, being the luxury of those who do not have to worry about day-to-day survival. But it's also in this statement that one of the key tensions of the short is vocalised - the need to feel that our being in the world is having some kind of meaningful impact versus the feeling of drifting passively through. It seems significant that it occurs about midway through the runtime, and is spoken by the only character whose words the protagonist seems (momentarily) inclined to take heed of, and who doesn't immediately fade into the backdrop of their life. It is, in truth, a mere extension of an idea that had already occurred to the protagonist earlier on, when they'd arrived home from school to find their parents arguing over the TV remote, and wondered if anybody really grows up, or just grows old? This is the uneasy concept at the heart of Satkunarasa's four minute piece, which travels through the entirety of an individual's lifetime in a gut-churning pace - it isn't simply that life is short, but that it potentially has no cumulative effect. That, far from progressing our way from bright potential to silver wisdom, we might be stumbling down lonely corridor after lonely corridor, ending up nowhere. The protagonist feels perpetually callow no matter where they are in life, waiting for some epiphany or final meaning that never comes to them. Even as they lie on their deathbed, their life fails to flash before their eyes and put it into any kind of coherent perspective. 

Life and Stuff was completed for Satkunarasa's degree while studying at Bournemouth University, and combines computer animation and various repurposed clips and images to create a collage effect, a representation of a life pulled together from various odds and ends, amounting to a string of memories as ambivalent as the short's title. We are spurred ever onward through these humdrum chronicles by the relentlessly forward motion of the camera, never stopping to linger for long at any of the transient sights as we're whisked along an assortment of drab domestic spaces, sunlit beaches and, in the short's most grotesque sequence, down a toilet u-bend to mingle with life's literal shit. Satkunarasa presents it all with the same doggedly sardonic tone as his 60 second piece One Day, regarding the mundane details of a single day in the life of an office worker, the highlight of which was an idle train of philosophical thought they swiftly berated themselves for daring to momentarily entertain. The title was cheekily deceptive, appearing to suggest that something eventful might occur, but in actuality indicating that this self-contained day was much the same as any other. Life and Stuff is a macroscopic expansion on that same theme, guiding us through a complete lifetime in a way that is implied to representative of the broader human experience. The crucial difference is the shift in perspective. One Day was narrated in the first person, suggesting that Satkunarasa might be speaking directly from his own experience. Life and Stuff is told using second person narration, switching the short's tone to that of an instructional manual and the protagonist to a hypothetical; even details that would appear distinguishing, such as their larger than average head at birth, are presented as expected bumps in the road, thrown in to make their being that much more challenging. We follow them from their days as a disaffected school kid navigating the confusion of adolescence, through their menial career as a warehouse worker and into their twilight years of contemplating that they now have more to look back upon than forward to, an aching realisation related somewhat incongruously in Satkunarasa's distinctly youthful-sounding voice. We'd do well to keep in mind that Life and Stuff is a student film, and it conveys the fear of what lies ahead from a certain vantage point, from which old age is a distant threat on the horizon that still looms frighteningly large in its inevitability. These are the anxieties of a student gearing up to enter the real world, someone who is really only at the beginning of their journey but can already feel the passage of time taking its toll as their youth already seems behind them. Even its earliest stages, there are haunting reminders of how this story must invariably end. The protagonist's conception is heralded by a leaf falling from a near-bare tree. The skeleton in the school classroom is a grisly symbol of the bodily destruction that awaits us all, although its vacant eye sockets and hollow grin are equally suggestive of the emotional disconnect that keeps staring the protagonist in the face.

I saw Life and Stuff while it was making the festival rounds in late 2012, and the thing that stayed with me about it was its depiction of an overwhelming loneliness, that sense of being adrift in a world where everything seems to be functioning around you, not with you. A moment that particularly stood out was the one where Satkunarasa seemed to be evoking the visual language of Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi (1982), when the protagonist gets their first job cleaning an office skyscraper and is troubled by a timelapse sequence of a busy city that seems to be thriving just fine in their absence. It put me in mind of that specific sequence from Reggio's film that occurs about an hour in, when we glimpse a solitary worker through the windows of an office, their life running parallel to the constant flow of traffic outside. In general, the people in the "Grid" portion of Koyaanisqatsi move in sped-up swarms, making it difficult to pick out and focus on any particular person. The metropolis is depicted as a chaotic Babel in which the voice of individual is all but unintelligible, with this one shot giving us a fleeting impression of an isolated figure subsisting in a world that seems totally unaware of their existence. In Satkunarasa's short, a running feature is the persistent feeling of distance that accompanies the protagonist throughout life. A younger sibling is mentioned precisely once, and purely to be the set-up of a joke involve a Kinder Egg, the parents are forgotten as soon as the protagonist sets foot into the working world, and the schoolmates and colleagues exist only to emphasise the protagonist's alienation. The female companion acquired during the short's middle section is the only secondary character who gets close enough for any semblance of a genuine connection to be formed, and for the protagonist to learn a few of the traits that mark her out as an individual, such as her fondness for Sesame Street and for rouge lipstick. This is presented at first as an almost miraculous intersection between two souls on equally adrift trajectories (the coffeehouse sequence where their bond is solidified shows the rest of the world buzzing by in a very Koyaanisqatsi-esque fashion), although the prospect of it bringing mutual healing is too romantic to weather Satkunarasa's unrelenting sardonicism. The longer they stay together, the more their common understanding deteriorates (something implied to coincide with their waning sexual intimacy), and the distinguishing traits of our Sesame Street-watching significant other are distorted into signifiers of insurmountable differences.

 

Truth be told, and in spite of that persistent feeling of alienation, I don't think the protagonist of Life and Stuff leads such a bad life. The breakdown of that long-term relationship is the most upsetting thing that happens to them, and even then it ends on more of an anti-climactic note than an openly traumatic one. Indeed, they get to finish up in a position that many would envy, with all their years of manual labour paying off and enabling them to retire to a coastal community by the equator to live an idyllic existence of fishing and looking up at the stars (of course, if we read between the lines, then it's possible to conclude that they were left so heartbroken, in spite of Satkunarasa's detached narration, that they were compelled to put physical distance between themselves and their ex). Yet even in their laid back new routine they remain fundamentally adrift, indulging in the childishly creative but explicitly solitary pastime of creating constellations that exist only to them. They find themselves in a culture where they literally speak a different language to their neighbours, at point that makes them a curiosity to the local children. All the same, they do seem to form an understanding with the children that overcomes this communication barrier - as the protagonist enters old age, the children have grown up into adults and assist them in their daily routine of pushing their boat out to sea, having potentially become a found family to them. Still, the short ends poignantly, with the protagonist worrying that their contribution has amounted to nothing, their ultimate thought as they shuffle off this mortal coil being the terrifying hypothetical that nobody left upon it will even notice their absence. Of note is that the animatic uploaded to Satkunarasa's YouTube channel contains an epilogue, not present in the final film, in which we learn a little more about how life goes on after the protagonist's death - that the local community pay to have their body flown back to their town of birth for burial (a gesture that could be taken as either an act of kindness or definitive rejection), leaving nature to deny them their mark by eroding their name from their tombstone. The finished short feels more impactful for ending where it does, with the onset of oblivion, and the haunting dual implications of the closing statement, "Your heart stops". It suggests both that time has abruptly run out and that the protagonist already anticipates the answer. They've tasted enough of life's indifference to know.

The Homer They Fall (aka Fustigation Aside)

Season 8 of The Simpsons was the series' Death Period, a time when the atmosphere in Springfield seemed unhealthily fixated with the notion that all things must pass. The show's anxieties regarding its own presumed-imminent demise wouldn't become totally transparent until the latter stages, with the aggressively meta trilogy of The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show", "Homer's Enemy" and "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase", but even long before then you got the whiff of a certain tension in the air. One of the season's earliest offerings, "The Homer They Fall" (4F03), which debuted on November 10th 1996, opens with a vicious nugget of satire regarding the decline of once formidable television institutions and the pitfalls of hanging onto the glories of yesteryear. A public reunion between the surviving cast of 1960s juggernaut Bonanza promises nostalgic diversion but instead becomes a depressing memento mori, as two ageing Native American actors perform to a modest turnout amid the grubby consumerism of the Springfield Mall. "On the series we were always trying to kill the Cartwrights," one of the performers quips. "But it looks like Father Time took care of that for us, right?" A nonplussed Marge notes that the dingy display represents a downgrade from last year's rendition, where three Native Americans at least managed to show up. Already we can picture how much more diminished the set-piece has yet to become on subsequent years, with the lone man standing feebly gesturing to an audience of even lesser size and enthusiasm. Elsewhere, the episode's title might have conveyed its own degree of ominousness. It is a nod to the title of the 1956 Humphrey Bogart boxing picture The Harder They Fall, itself taken from the saying, "The bigger they come, the harder they fall" - this is often attributed to welterweight champion Jersey Joe Walcott, and describes how those of greater stature are doomed to suffer the most mortifying of downfalls.

To some fans, Season 8 represented the first step on on the series' own inevitable descent from greatness, even if it was a far smaller step than what was to come in the Scully era. Or perhaps that's the price it paid for taking as many risks as it did. Season 8 is something of a contradiction - a wildly cynical chapter in the show's history that, by its end, had outright admitted that it had nowhere to go whilst encompassing some of the boldest and most experimental Simpsons stories since the series' beginnings, back when the mere idea was hot and radical. Naturally, not every risk taken was to everybody's tastes (the aforementioned meta trilogy, in particular "Homer's Enemy", seemed purposely designed to sit uneasily with a chunk of the viewership), and might have amounted to the feeling of there being a disturbance in the Simpsons equilibrium, the tipping point before things fatally gave way. Season 8 may not be the cosiest of seasons, but it is the one that I find the most infinitely fascinating, an era combining razor-sharp writing with an intrepid determination to push as many envelopes as it could. "The Homer They Fall" is a relatively unassuming example of what No. 8 had to offer, and while nowhere close to being its most contentious entry, strikes me as another terribly undervalued one. Notably, Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood went down surprisingly hard on it in I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide, offering this assessment: "A pastiche on Mike Tyson's return to the boxing circuit after his time in jail, and his conversion to Christianity. Sadly, this makes for the dullest, one-joke episode of the entire series." Which was about as negative as they had been about any episode up until this point. I'd be curious to know what they consider the story's one joke to be exactly (they're also wrong - Tyson was raised a Christian and converted to Islam). I will say that the episode potentially did itself no favours in coming so soon after Season 7's "Homerpalooza", another episode centred on Homer's freakish ability to withstand the kind of extreme bodily trauma that would kill or severely cripple the average person. Both stories climax with Homer discovering that there are limits to his superhuman abilities, and defiantly putting himself in a situation that will not end well while his family observe powerlessly from the sidelines. If you were worried that the series would be running short of ideas after 150+ episodes, "The Homer They Fall" might not have been the installment to put your fears to rest.

"The Homer They Fall" is also another in the long line of "Homer Gets A Job" episodes that originated with "Dancin' Homer" of Season 2 and, as Marge deftly puts it, lands somewhere in the middle in terms of plausibility. On the DVD commentary, the production crew share that they had fully anticipated the Frank Grimeses in the audience scoffing at the notion of Homer becoming a boxer and finding himself in the same ring as his universe's equivalent to Mike Tyson, and so went to great lengths to justify it within context. It was not, though, considered outlandish enough to occupy the gallery of unlikely Homer adventures that had the actual Frank Grimes so incensed in "Homer's Enemy" - because let's face it, you're not going to get much sillier than Homer being sent into outer space. A question that often hangs over the "Homer Gets A Job" stories is how Homer is able to pursue his latest occupation and retain his regular job at the plant (excepting "Dancin' Homer", which explicitly addresses this), but here I don't find it much of a stretch to suppose that boxing is just an avocation he's doing outside of working hours. The set-up has Homer discovering that he possesses a unique condition in which his brain is cushioned by an extra-thick layer of fluid, meaning that his skull can endure an insane amount of punishment. On witnessing this, Moe suggests that he try his hand at boxing, revealing his own history as a budding young boxer who ultimately didn't have what it takes to enter the big leagues, and offering to be his manager. He quickly establishes that Homer has no aptitude for delivering punches, but that needn't matter - Moe trains him to follow a fool-proof strategy that involves allowing his opponents to expend all their energy and then making them keel over. It's a strategy enables Homer to rise to the top of the local leagues, fighting hungry young hobos in Moe's bar, but things take a more precarious turn when Moe is approached by his former manager Lucius Sweet (guest voice Paul Winfield), who's willing to offer a substantial sum to have Homer go up against heavyweight champion Drederick Tatum. Moe knows this is a fight Homer couldn't hope to win, but is tempted by that opportunity to get close to the prestige that was denied him in his own boxing career.

Despite the familiarity of the premise, I would argue that "The Homer They Fall" is as bold and experimental as many of the more prominent Season 8 installments, but it's bold and experimental in low-key, deceptive ways that perhaps don't register right away. For one, it is only nominally a story about Homer. He's front and centre throughout, but it doesn't take a great deal of interest in what being a boxer actually means to him. "Homerpalooza" makes for a handy comparison, since it handles what is essentially the same set-up entirely differently. There, becoming a roadshow freak who routinely took a steel ball to the gut offered something of real personal value to Homer. It was a chance to reconnect with his youth and to be a part of the hip and happening culture of the 90s. To be idolised by his children, who had earlier rejected the notion of par-taying with him if he were the last dad on Earth. To be someone of influence, and not just another ageing fogey left in the dust by the fickle nature of fashion. In "The Homer They Fall", becoming a semi-professional boxer is essentially a means for Homer to lead a marginally swankier lifestyle, getting to eat his salad dressing of choice, upgrading from Premium mode to Mega Tycoon mode at the car wash and, possibly, enjoy those blue cupcakes they sell sometimes. It's a hobby with some neat perks, but not something Homer seems to be staking his sense of self-worth upon. The episode keeps him in a very passive mode, blankly going along with whatever Moe imposes on him, and showing virtually no initiative of his own. There is a point, early on, where Jonathon Collier's script betrays its lack of interest in Homer, and in the Simpsons as a whole, and this is where it possibly comes off as a little cold to some - in the first act we've the basis of a very convincing personal struggle for Homer, when Bart acquires a space-age utility belt from Comic Book Guy, only for it to be stolen by Jimbo, Dolph and Kearney. Homer attempts to get the belt returned by taking the matter to the parents of the bullies, but unfortunately they're also bullies who would just as happily whale on him. Homer withstands their attacks but fails to get the belt back, and subsequently laments to Moe that all he seems to be good for is taking beatings. We see the sliver of an emotional stake in his recognition that he was unable to rectify things for his son, but this is swiftly forgotten - and, even more egregiously, so is the entire narrative thread involving Bart's belt. Apparently Jimbo, Dolph and Kearney are allowed to keep it. First act conflicts that are essentially nothing more than extended build-ups to the main event weren't necessarily anything new (remember Homer's trampoline in "Bart's Inner Child"?), but what makes it feel a little unsporting here is that we're given just enough insight into how taken Bart is with the belt to care that he gets it back. Often life doesn't have happy outcomes and the bullies do win, but the fact that it isn't even mentioned again threatens to get the episode off on a slightly bum note. As it turns out, the bullying material does have thematic significance later on, but nothing that pays off any emotional investment in Bart's plight specifically. 

The Simpsons themselves are effectively ciphers in "The Homer They Fall", with the arguable exception of Marge, who gets to be the voice of reason and decency as we descend into the cut-throat insanity of the third act. But even so, her anguish at the prospect of watching her husband be pummelled into a bloody pulp is only secondary to the real emotional thrust of the story, which is on Moe and his desire to be more than a sleazy bartender serving crummy liqueur to Springfield's most downtrodden clientele. Moe is given a more overtly sympathetic treatment here than he was the last time this conflict was the focus, in "Flaming Moe's" of Season 3, even though his treatment of his best bud is on a whole other level; his theft of Homer's cough syrup cocktail might have been scummy as hell, but at least he wasn't endangering Homer's life in the process. Yet Collier's script offers even greater insight into Moe's deflated soul, his determination to cling to whatever meagre scrap of eminence might come his way, and his final realisation that some things in life take priority over personal glory. And that's the hidden genius of "The Homer They Fall" - it purports to be a story about Homer's rise and fall within the boxing arena, but it's really a story about Moe's fall from a much broader kind of grace and his triumphant rise again (to an absurd degree that basically ends up in quotation marks, but we'll get to that in due course). 

Honestly, it's one of the things that I most admire about Season 8. Far from merely being a season of flashy gimmicks and biting anger at its own viewership, there was a genuine effort to flesh out a selection of the supporting cast and give compelling new context to their place within the show's dynamics. The premise of Moe as a man of broken dreams, who'd once had the opportunity to really make something of himself but had tragically blown it, was previously trialled in "Radioactive Man" of Season 7, albeit for a single scene that had no bearing on the overall story. There, it was revealed he was part of the Our Gang ensemble (somewhat questionably, given that that would have made Moe, what, 70 in 1995?), but had obliterated his acting career after inadvertently killing one of his co-stars (the original Alfalfa, aka Carl Switzer, who in reality died at age 31 under circumstances no less dark). Ultimately, it played less like a sincere expansion on the character's backstory than a protracted, nostalgia-wrecking joke about the industry's exploitation of child actors ("Luckily Alfalfa was an orphan owned by the studio"), but there was a real pathos to the idea nevertheless. The reasons for Moe's failure as a boxer are more mundane, but also more relatable - in the end, he simply wasn't good enough, getting knocked out 40 times in a row (that plus politics). Who hasn't known the sting of desperately wanting something, only to have life feed you a bitter reality sandwich? Moe put his all into boxing, going through a range of monikers (Kid Gorgeous to Kid Presentable to Kid Gruesome and finally to Kid Moe), and having nothing to show for it but a collection of faded memories. These memories remain a great source of fondness and pride for Moe, and he keeps the various artefacts from his boxing career on display to remind him of a more prosperous time, but they are all crucially squirrelled away inside a toilet (could there be a clearer metaphor?). Then Sweet strolls back into his life and offers him a Faustian bargain - the chance to bring those dreams out into the open, where the entire world will be watching, and to demonstrate that he isn't a failure by producing a fighter who can put up a decent stand against a champ. Moe states the obvious - "Homer's no boxer, he's just a freak" - but Sweet already knows that Tatum's victory is a foregone conclusion. He just needs Homer to "sustain verticality" for three rounds, in order to create a crowd-pleasing display for Tatum's comeback fight. If Moe can achieve that, then Sweet can secure him a future in the boxing scene. The sequence ends with a fabulous piece of direction from Mark Kirkland, as Sweet puts on a crown and walks away, leaving the toilet door to slam and conceal Moe once again inside his den of squalid ruination. He does a lousy thing in accepting the terms and sending Homer to the ring with Tatum like a lamb to the slaughter, but our sympathies are with Moe nevertheless. We understand his yearning to escape that despair, and to follow Sweet to the glory of which he'd once dared to dream.

Truthfully, "The Homer They Fall" has a heart of gold, not unlike Moe himself in the end, although it hides this behind its somewhat rough exterior. As with "Flaming Moe's", the friendship between Homer and Moe is shown to be parasitic in nature, with Moe cunningly manipulating Homer into giving him the lion's share of his earnings, even if the money isn't what he's truly seeking from the arrangement. He also insists that Homer put complete trust in him as his manager, only to exploit that trust by setting him up to fight Tatum (whom Homer initially assumes to be just another hobo). But it proves overall to be far less cynical about the relationship than "Flaming Moe's", demonstrating that there are grounds for a fundamentally supportive affinity between these two non-achievers. Moe's entire arc is cleverly bookended with him needing to make sound moral choices, both of which involve stepping up to defend Homer from the barbarism of adult thugs - first, the parents of Jimbo, Dolph and Kearney, and finally a thuggishness of a whole other magnitude.

A more subtle, possibly coincidental way in which "The Homer They Fall" harks back to "Flaming Moe's" is in the reintroduction of Drederick Tatum, who in the Season 3 episode was seen giving a television interview in which he had this to say about Springfield: "That town was a dump. If you ever see me back there, you know I really [bleep]ed up bad!" And [bleep]ed up he clearly did, for he's back in Springfield in this very episode, looking to restart his boxing career after a slight blip in his personal life. Tatum was established as a character all the way back in Season 2, in "Homer vs. Lisa and The 8th Commandment", but had never received a starring role up until now, having been largely restricted to throwaway cameos, and having appeared to go a bit quiet around the middle of the decade (I guess now we know the reason). As noted, Tatum is a thinly-veiled parody of real world boxing champion Mike Tyson, right down to speaking with Tyson's trademark frontal lisp. Like Tyson, he'd also been through a spot of legal bother, having served a term in Springfield Prison on a charge of assault against his mother. Tyson was actually in prison on a rape charge, but that's somewhere The Simpsons were obviously never going to go - Tatum pushing his mother down the stairs is ostensibly meant to be a more comical-sounding equivalent, although when you think about it, it's perhaps not significantly nicer, given the presumed age and size difference between the two parties. Still, the episode manages to sell us on the humor of the circumstance, mainly in Tatum's half-assessed expression of remorse: "If I could turn back the clock on my mother's stair-pushing, I would certainly reconsider it." Despite the stain on his record, Tatum certainly hasn't fallen from grace in the eyes of the public, who are all too happy to buy into his anticipated pulverising of Homer as a narrative of righteous revenge. Sweet, meanwhile, is based on Tyson's then-manager Don King, and in his case the script even draws a big bold line under the allusion, in Homer's oddly gratuitous remark that Sweet is exactly as rich and as famous as King, and looks just like him too. The casting of Winfield as Sweet was a cunning allusion in itself, since Winfield had played King only a year prior in the HBO biopic Tyson (although for yours truly he is first and foremost the wisecracking Mirror from The Charmings, one of those "forgotten" 80s sitcoms that I remember all-too vividly). Winfield is wonderful in the role, perfectly nailing Sweet's flamboyance and quirkily ostentatious vocabulary, and keeping him charismatic enough for us to feel the lure of the transparently slimy bargain he's selling.

For as passive as Homer is in all of this, he gets one really good and revealing scene, when his family learn of the impending match-up and challenge him on its wisdom over the breakfast table. Lisa cautions him that the odds against him winning are a thousand to one, according to the casinos in Vegas, to which Homer responds with his most quotable line of the episode: "Alright, I think we've all heard just about enough from Mr. Newspaper today." Implicit in his delivery, and in the churlish manner with which he crumples the offending item and disposes of it out the window, is a definite sense that Homer isn't as clueless as he might seem about his situation. He knows deep down that he hasn't a snowball's chance in Hell of coming through this intact, but is desperately trying to convince himself otherwise. This is reinforced in a later sequence, where Moe instructs Homer to visualise how he can possibly triumph and the best Homer can come up with would be for Tatum to be felled by a congenital heart defect moments before the fight begins. Why is Homer so obstinately insistent about putting his life on the line? Is he really that won over by the pipe dream of owning a plug-in room deodoriser? Has his success against all of those brawlers from the boxcars given him an inflated sense of confidence? Or is he like Moe, and susceptible to the prospect of participating in the glitz and glamour a heavyweight match, even as a pawn sent out to be brutally fustigated? We don't get a ton of insight into Homer's perspective, but we get just enough hint that there is something of a little more substance going on.

The final act where Homer goes up against Tatum is a surprisingly gut-wrenching affair. It's peppered with lots of smaller gags, the funniest being when Homer enters the ring to "Why Can't We Be Friends?" by War, but it's startling how much the tension is allowed to dominate. The sequence before the fight where Marge confronts a visibly anxious Moe is played almost exclusively for drama - as we touched on when covering "Flaming Moe's", Marge and Moe are typically positioned as opposing forces in Homer's life (even with Moe's pitiful crushing on Marge), with both in constant, if indirect competition for his devotions, but this is as life and death as their rivalry has gotten to date. The closest thing to a joke in the exchange is the way Moe brusquely attempts to blow off Marge's concerns with his insistence that, "I'm not the villain here, okay? If Homer gets killed in the ring tonight, it'll be because of your negative attitude!" Marge manages to force a promise from Moe that he will throw a towel into the ring the instant that Homer is in any kind of danger, and leaves - the way the camera then lingers on Moe's conflicted expression, to the sound of Marge's receding footsteps, is almost eerie in its disquietude, a small moment in which we find ourselves trapped in Moe's lonely dilemma, culminating in him emphatically discarding the towel altogether (thus regulating his moral compass to the trash). The episode's second guest voice, Michael Buffer, shows up to play himself doing his familiar announcing duties (and as a child of 90s Britain, I cannot overstress how flat-out impossible it is for me to hear him holler "Let's get ready to rumble!" and not immediately have PJ and Duncan ringing in my ears^[1]), before Tatum proceeds to beat the living shit out of Homer. There are clear limits on how far the episode is willing to go with this brutal display - we don't see any blood or real injury detail - but every last thud from Tatum's hulking fists against Homer's malleable skull lands with an ice-cold shock to our own systems. As well it should. Moe had earlier raised an interesting point, when he'd disputed who ought to be seen as the villain of this flagrantly messed-up scenario. Is it Tatum, who's doing the actual pummelling of a man he blatantly outclasses in strength and stamina? Is it Sweet, who procured the whole dubious arrangement? Is it indeed Moe himself, for putting his personal ambition above the interests of his best friend?  Or maybe it's the entirety of Springfield, for so vehemently cheering the atrocious spectacle on? 

What's clever about the climax is that although it's Homer receiving the pummelling, the character whose endurance is really being tested here is Moe. How long can he stand by and do nothing before it dawns on him that it again falls on him to save his pal from being massacred by mindless bullies? In this case, the bullies are filling up the entire stadium, shaking their fists and urging Tatum to make the finishing blow. We suspect that their motivation isn't altogether different from that cited by the parents of Bart's tormentors, in that they need the bread and circuses as distractions from the crummy lives they've had to live. They collectively get in on the carnage, baying to see Homer offed for their own gratification, and Moe finally summons the gumption to stand up to them all, thanks his moral centre getting its second wind - that, and a device pilfered from an audience member known as the "Fan Man". Introduced by Buffer as a "ruiner of events worldwide", the Fan Man was a real individual (actual name James Miller) who'd gained notoriety when he'd interrupted a heavyweight title fight in 1993 by riding a powered paraglider into the ring, and went on to pull off a series of similar stunts in both the US and the UK. (Reading about him, I was put heavily in mind of Larry Walters, the man who attached a bunch of helium balloons to his lawn chair and went for a flight over part of Los Angeles, in that their lives sound like funny anecdotes to share at dinner parties, until you click on the relevant Wikipedia pages and discover how tragically they ended.) Moe lifting Homer to safety with the powered paraglider is a nod to that disrupted heavyweight fight, but it's also a cheeky bit of symbolism in its own right, signifying Moe's ascent from the depths of depravity. It's an allusion so transparent that the script once again can't resist having Homer underline it, asking in his semi-conscious state if Moe is an angel. "Yes Homer, I'm an angel," Moe dryly responds. "All us angels wear Farrah slacks." Tatum is awed at how much Homer's manager evidently cares about him, and shows some vulnerability of his own when he asks Sweet if he would have done the same for him. Sweet insists with his usual leer that he would, then packs Tatum coldly off to the van, giving us the sense that he too has been exploited for the sake of public spectacle. Sweet pays Moe a check for $100,000 but condemns him as an incurable loser and will have nothing more to do with him. Moe seems to have no hard feelings about this outcome; when Marge thanks him for giving up his prestigious new path for Homer, Moe replies, "What do dreams matter, Marge? I was able to stick up for a pal." Moe enters the story thinking he needs one kind of redemption, but exits having attained quite another.

The ending is, admittedly, a little suspiciously naked on the sentiment, especially given that we're dealing with a scuzzbag like Moe here, and The Simpsons being The Simpsons insists on tempering it with a dose of sly humor, sending us off what has to be one of the most bewildering outros in all the series. Having gained his angel wings, Moe is unable to stay grounded and leaves Springfield behind, insisting that he needs some time to think. His seraphic exit is tempered by the sudden reappearance of the Fan Man, who yells at him to return the stolen paraglider (there is something nicely cyclical in how this story begins and ends with pilfered contraptions), undercutting the melancholy with a reminder of the sheer absurdity of what we're looking at. It only cranks that weirdness up to 11 for the closing credits, taking Moe's redemption motif to more dizzying heights still by showing him using the paraglider to help people in various crises around the globe - we witness him saving a mother and baby from a flooded village, lifting an explorer from a quagmire, extinguishing a forest fire and distributing boxes of aid to the needy. And all to the sounds of "People", a song originally performed by Barbara Streisand for the 1964 musical Funny Girl, here delivered with haunting precision by regular Simpsons vocalist Sally Stevens. It is specifically a song about the value of managing to get beyond "grown-up pride" and to bare vulnerability, something that we know Moe would ordinarily be averse to. Honestly, this whole sequence gets to me in ways that it probably shouldn't. The joke is that it pushes the notion of Moe the saintly humanitarian to such a degree that it doesn't seem quite sincere, ultimately putting his redemption in quotation marks. And yet I could shed honest-to-God tears at it. Stevens' performance is just that achingly beautiful, and I profoundly regret that it wasn't included on Songs In The Key of Springfield, or either of the sequel albums. If you'd told me at the time that The Simpsons would be ending with Season 8 and this was to be Moe's personal adieu, I would in all odds have believed you, and declared it one of the most poetic character send-offs of all-time. In that parallel timeline I'm sure the thought of paragliding Moe still being out there, encircling the globe and helping every desperate soul he happens across, would be weighing on my mind even now.

Sky 1 edit alert!: This might actually be the single most baffling edit that Sky 1 ever implemented. For some reason they always used to remove the couch gag and jump directly to the credits on the TV set. Sky 1 were occasionally known to cut couch gags from Halloween episodes, if they depicted anything too grisly for their standards (the family being hung in "Treehouse of Horror VI" for example), but this particular couch gag was assuredly as inoffensive as they come, depicting the family in cowboy gear, and the couch bucking like a horse and carrying them off into the sunset. What's even more peculiar is that they later had no problem with showing that exact same couch gag before "Homer vs. The Eighteenth Amendment", so I've no idea what was going on here. Sometimes Sky 1 were just screwy. Also gone (less bafflingly, if austerely) was Moe's "Future down the crapper" remark.

[1] Fun fact: there is a trademark on Buffer's signature "Let's get ready to rumble!" announcement, hence why Ant and Dec had to title their single with the looser "Rhumble" variation. 

BT '92: Get Through To Someone (Up To My Eyeballs)

September 2024 yielded the kind of unexpected pleasure that I suspect could only truly be understood by myself - the unexpected pleasure of discovering a whole new BT "Get Through To Someone" ad I hadn't previously known existed. For a while, six installments was all I'd been able to root out of the campaign, and I'd resigned myself to the likelihood that they might indeed be all that there was to see of it. It seemed like a decent enough number for a (relatively) short-lived promotion, enabling it to touch life at a number of bases - different forms of relationship angst, parents whose children were flying the nest, having to navigate some embarrassing domestic inconvenience. Issues that could be readily remedied by lifting the receiver and dialling, and all to the genial tones of a sunny harmonica. A scenario I'd not seen represented was that of the adult friends whose lives seem to be pulling them in different directions and who yearned to maintain their connection - but unbeknownst to me, GTTS had that covered too. The tale of scouts-cum-chefs Frank and Lewis had eluded me since 1992, but I finally got to see it, thanks to an upload on Neil Miles' channel.^[1] 

Frank, hard at work in a hectic restaurant kitchen, is asked about his mate Lewis, who's gone to work in a venue called Giovanni's (it's never explicitly stated, but we might assume that he is a former employee of the featured kitchen). Frank admits that he hasn't spoken to Lewis recently, having been "up to [his] eyeballs" in work, but quickly finds himself on a wistful trip down memory lane to the time when he and Lewis were rambunctious Cub scouts, savouring the outdoors and playfully tormenting a peer by the name of Chubby Johnston. "Eyeballs" is in many ways an inversion on the typical GTTS formula, in which fantasy sequences were used to emphasise the chasm between knowing and not knowing. Picking up the telephone and making contact with another being was the logical course of action, whatever the circumstances, bringing reason and clarity to a universe inclined to pursue its own irrational conjecture.  The fantasies were often delirious and unsettling, signifying the pitfalls of uncertainty and miscommunication. Even in "The Bellows of Indifference", which forewent the usual tortured visions and had the protagonist talk himself up with a dubious internal monologue, the all-important phone call indicated a final coming down to Earth (or return to Kansas, given that he had a Cairn terrier). This is not so with "Eyeballs", where the fantasies (objective flashbacks, even) represent a gentle escapism, a yearning for a youthful idyll that feels as though it might be well behind our heroes. The closing call works not to dispel these visions, but to validate and preserve them.

A recurring fascination of the GTTS campaign are the busy mise en scenes - the particular character that pervaded the protagonists' immediate environments and addled imaginations while echoing something of their emotional crossroads. Here, there is an obvious contrast between the present and the past, with the bustling kitchen signifying the adult responsibilities Frank has convinced himself must take priority over his connection with Lewis. The flashbacks, meanwhile, take place out in the open against a backdrop of natural serenity, with hooting owls, chirping crickets and a gentle evening haze becoming shorthands for boyish optimism and honesty. The young Frank and Lewis are seen howling, alluding to the fact that they're scouts of the Wolf Cub variety. It is also, significantly, a primal form of communication, both expressing their allegiance to their pack and serving as a private in-joke between two friends. The demands of adulthood are consuming and easy to get lost in, while childhood is wild and liberating. The flashbacks convey a connection with a bygone time that still feels so alive and immediate within the present but is in danger of being consigned to mere nostalgia. Frank and Lewis have not yet drifted apart to a fatal or alarming degree - Frank specifies that it has been weeks since he last spoke to his old friend, not months or years - but they are at a crucial point in their lives where things are moving on, and they risk losing touch with one another, and with the childhood memories they built together, should they get too subsumed in their diverging adult duties. Lewis has been altered by his new path, but only superficially - when he receives the call at Giovanni's, he does so in a fake Italian accent, but switches to his authentic self when he recognises Frank's voice coming down the line. As it turns out, he and Frank have changed little since their Cub days. They are still as in sync as ever, with Frank using the exact same terminology as Frank did earlier about being up to his eyeballs. And of course they're still creatures of the youthful wilderness, howling in unison, even while wearing their professional chef attire and in the formal enclosed environs of their respective kitchens. The adult and child worlds are not such a contradiction, the former having capacity to accommodate the latter with a little effort and the right technology. The light above the phone at Giovanni's glows warmly, championing telephone communication as an illuminating force, one that has the power to extend across both physical and temporal barriers and keep lifelong friends together.

The twist in the narrative reveals that, rather than pulling them apart, Lewis's latest career move has only reaffirmed their tie to their childhood utopia, taking them right back to where they left off. We learn that an adult Chubby Johnston also works at Giovanni's, as a maître d'. Now impeccably dressed, he seems far removed from the days when they used to humiliate him by swathing him in bandages, but he is still not in on the joke, shuffling past humorlessly in the background while they indulge in their euphoric bonding ritual. It is interesting that they chose the bustling kitchen as the final connecting visual and not the scouting idyll, but as we've established the two are effectively one and the same. This is the culture in which they've upheld their mutual belonging; thanks to British Telecom, they remain connected as part of a wider community of dynamic chefs, not simply two disjoined souls adrift in separate eateries.

 

After the thrill of discovering "Eyeballs", and with it that the GTTS campaign was bigger than I had realised, I dared not hope for an eighth installment. Life had already generous enough in throwing me this one unexpected bonus; anything further would have felt like too much to ask. And lo and behold, that is exactly what I got - not longer after "Eyeballs" surfaced from oblivion, an eighth installment from early 1993 also showed up. In fact, as of now the tally sits at eight and a half - I'm not sure that we can fully count the Sunday Special ad with no real narrative, just a bunch of people jabbering in a four-way conversation, and a weird connecting image that (so far as I could see) wasn't discernible in the mise en scene.

 [1] It also transpired to have been on Adam Beckwith's channel all along, though I must have missed that. 

Living In The Bottle: The Beast In The Cage (One Foot In The Grave)

Something I've come to appreciate about One Foot In The Grave is how beautifully ominous the episode titles tend to be. In keeping with the series' quintessentially morbid tone, and with the unrelenting pessimism and freakish misfortune of its pivotal character, titles are typically nothing less than borderline apocalyptic threats, waggishly hinting at what form of disaster will inevitably strike the Meldrews on this particular outing. The suggestion of genuine horror is usually tempered by an evident sense of playfulness (though not always - "We Have Put Her Living in The Tomb" does exactly what it says on the tin, and is truly a nightmare to behold), with winking nods to popular culture (eg: "In Luton Airport No One Can Hear You Scream") or titles transplanted wholesale from more infamously macabre works (Edgar Allan Poe was a notable recurring influence, as seen from "The Pit and The Pendulum", "Descent Into The Maelstrom" and "Tales of Terror"), their significance cunningly repurposed to suit the circumstances of Victor's predicament. "The Beast In The Cage", a possible allusion to the short story The Beast in the Cave by HP Lovecraft, conjures images of something snarling, savage and inhuman becoming increasingly riled at its captive existence - and sure enough, Victor spends the entirety of the installment confined to his car, his plans for a bank holiday excursion having been brought to a standstill by a torturously slow-moving traffic jam. The implicit joke seems self-explanatory (Victor is, naturally, the beast and the Honda, which should have been his means of mobility, has become his prison), and yet so much more might have been made of it still. Absent from the final edit was an entire section of dialogue in which the meaning behind the title was expounded on more openly, with the suggestion that its analogical intentions were broader and a notch more complicated than simply relating another cosmic gag at Victor's expense.

In its early stages, the arrangement could be said to come more at the expense of the audience than Victor, even as we join him to discover that he's spent the preceding four and a half hours staring at the back end of a horse. When "The Beast In The Cage" first aired, on 23rd February 1992 as part of the sitcom's tertiary series, it was only the second of Victor's bottle adventures, following the formula laid out by "Timeless Time" of Series 2. By the time we got to "The Trial" of Series 4, viewers had been prepped to expect that these bottle episodes might become a customary occurrence, but for those venturing into "The Beast In The Cage" for the first time, the set-up probably seemed quite innocuous. There was nothing to suggest that this traffic jam business would be occupying the entire episode - that this wouldn't be the first scene of a larger story, and that before long we'd being fading out and moving along with the Meldrews to some fresher development. The "penny drop moment", when it occurs to the viewer that they've been inside the car for a little too long for comfort, and that the traffic jam might well be all that there is to this particular journey, ends up becoming its own bit of glorious meta humor. On the DVD commentary, show creator and writer David Renwick shares an anecdote about how Jonathan Powell, then controller of BBC1, had been watching the episode with his wife, who'd remarked to him about four minutes in, "I've got a feeling they're never going to get out of that car..." The notion that the Meldrews and the viewers are mutual prisoners, doomed to the resignation that they won't be going anywhere, is reinforced in Susan Belbin's direction. "The Beast In The Cage" is the most intensely claustrophobic of the One Foot In The Grave bottle episodes; compared to "Timeless Time" and "The Trial", were Victor at least had the comfort of being cooped up inside his own home, here he and Margaret have little freedom of movement, and the viewer is made to experience that along with them. Our view of the predicament is restricted mostly to what they can see of it. Other than the two aerial shots that open and close the episode, all of the action is shown from inside the vehicle. Even during a brief moment where Victor and Margaret get out of the car to exchange seats, the camera doesn't leave the vehicle's interior.

"The Beast In The Cage" also implements a twist, about twelve minutes in, that alters the rules of the dynamic - just as we've gotten used to the rhythm of the piece, and think we know exactly what this is going to be (ie: another two hander between Victor and Margaret), family friend Mrs Warboys (Doreen Mantle) suddenly climbs into the back seat, and it's revealed that she too is along for the (non) ride, having left the car in search of the nearest toilet. Her surprise appearance comes directly after Victor's declaration that his situation has already gone beyond all human endurance, indicating that it signifies a deepening of his torture. Sure enough, one of the first things she does on her return is to reveal how she bungled Victor's straightforward request for a packet of smoky bacon flavour crisps, confidently broadcasting that the pub she'd stumbled upon had three huge boxes full of the desired pick-me-up, but that she failed to bring any back with her. She subsequently offers him a cool refreshing ginger beer, only to admit that she didn't acquire any of that either. Part of what makes Mrs Warboys such an indelible character is that I think we all know someone in our own lives who is infuriatingly like her.

The presence of Warboys represents a deviation from the conventions of the One Foot In The Grave bottle episode, which tended to focus on the isolation of the Meldrews. Victor and Margaret were the only characters to appear in "Timeless Time" and Victor was completely alone in "The Trial". In both cases, all interactions with the outside world came via telephone - in "Timeless Time", a neighbour called to argue with Victor about his picture-straightening technique, while in "The Trial" there were various clashes with people who had irritated Victor, and an unwelcome call from Warboys herself. "Rearranging The Dust" took place in a solicitor's waiting room where Victor and Margaret were intermittently joined by other clients, but interactions were fairly minimal, and while a third person did eventually appear during the blackout in "Threatening Weather", they were predominantly on their own there too. The upshot of these Victor-Margaret two-handers is that something new and illuminating about their relationship or personal history was ultimately revealed, once they were alone and vulnerable enough to let the mask drop. "Timeless Time", for example, contains the only reference to their deceased son Stuart. This doesn't happen in "The Beast In The Cage". The episode closes with Victor making a poignant observation about how their squandered day trip is a distressingly good metaphor for his life's trajectory, but this doesn't tell us anything we don't already know. This shouldn't surprise us - having someone like Warboys listening in from the backseat doesn't facilitate the level of emotional nakedness that had the Meldrews opening up about Stuart, the origins of their relationship or what became of Margaret's father. But even before the third wheel enters the picture, we know that the Meldrews are far from alone; in keeping with this being the most claustrophobic of the bottle episodes, they're forced to share this entrapment with not only Warboys, but legions of other souls subject to the same stagnation, and to the same sense of scuppered ambition. This is the episode's bigger twist still - while Victor has been dealt a typically bum hand, in being stuck behind the rear of a horse for the duration, in the scheme of things he hasn't missed out more than anyone else. The loss of Stuart was a deeply personal one, and the Meldrews' sleepless isolation in "Timeless Time" symbolised how they were essentially alone in their constant, if rarely vocalised, mourning for their son. It was a pain that could only truly be known and understood by them. "The Beast In The Cage", on the other hand, proposes that there is something far more universal about their traffic-bound predicament; that everyone is travelling down the same congested highway, doomed to come to an eventual standstill and to contend with the disappointment of never being able to get to wherever they'd once thought they were headed.

The question of where the Meldrews thought they were headed isn't brought up within the episode's dialogue, to the point where it could be dismissed as deliberately irrelevant - as Margaret points out, it wouldn't be worth completing the journey now anyway - but this is where things get especially curious. Thanks to axillary One Foot In The Grave media, we know that they'd intended to go to a zoo...or at least, that was how Victor remembered it. Included in the script but excised from the final edit was a sequence of dialogue where he and Margaret come to the mutual realisation that their day has been so dominated by the congestion that they've lost all sight of their planned destination, only to arrive at completely different conclusions. Victor reckons they were going to Whipsnade Zoo while Margaret insists that they had agreed on Windsor Castle. For as adamant as Margaret is on the matter, I note with some amusement that the official synopsis given in the BBC's listings favours Victor's perception: "An outing to Whipsnade Zoo turns into a nightmare." I'm taking that as official confirmation that Victor was right...or at least I would if said disagreement had made it into the televised episode. As it stands, that synopsis is the closest it gets to retaining any formal connection to Whipsnade Zoo. Three years on, however, and we did get to experience that lost material first-hand, by way of Victor's foray into the wireless. The One Foot In The Grave radio series broadcast on BBC Radio 2 in early 1995 consisted of audio remakes of four classic episodes: "Alive and Buried", "Timeless Time", "In Luton Airport No One Can Hear You Scream" and "The Beast In The Cage" (interestingly, no episodes featuring Patrick and Pippa, which might have been a coincidence, or maybe Angus Deayton and Janine Duvitski were unavailable for recording). In this version of "The Beast In The Cage", the Whipsnade Zoo-Windsor Castle debate was retained, as was a further reflection on the matter from Warboys, and it's apparent that the decision to have their party headed for a venue filled with captive animals was not arbitrary. 

Listening to the radio installments is a strange experience, like stumbling into a parallel universe where the basic outcome was always the same for Victor but where things played out a little differently. The essence and direction of each narrative was kept intact, but the scripts were dotted with various minor alterations. Moments that depended prominently on visual humor or storytelling were obviously removed or rewritten, dialogue was frequently tweaked, and entirely new gags and sequences were added in, including material that might have been planned for the original television versions but hadn't made the cut (and in some cases were eventually accommodated in a different TV installment altogether - Victor's polystyrene rant in the radio version of "Luton Airport" was used five years later in the Series 6 episode "The Dawn of Man"). I should confess that for myself it's always worked the other way around - in the mid 1990s I had all four radio episodes on cassette and would listen to them constantly, long before I owned any media of their television counterparts, so in my head I'm hard-wired to accept them as the "authentic" versions, and whenever I watch the television originals I'm always conscious of the various ways in which they don't line up. It was an infinitely sounder and more flavoursome approach than the alternative, which was to extract the audio directly from the television originals and simply cut out whatever didn't work in radio form - as we saw when three other episodes, "The Man In The Long Black Coat", "The Broken Reflection" and "The Trial", were later released in audio form and did exactly that (I'm not sure if these received radio broadcasts, but they were made commercially available on cassette). In their case there were often abrupt fade-outs and set-ups with no payoff. "The Broken Reflection" was a particularly awkward choice, since an entire subplot about Victor minding Patrick and Pippa's houseplants had to be excised, presumably because it was too reliant on visual narration, causing the audio edit to feel both conspicuously short and to end on a bizarrely glum and humorless note. Anyone who listened and didn't immediately follow this up with the hilarity of "The Trial" was certainly going to have their day ruined.

In the radio remake's take on events, Warboys, who had inexplicably believed they were going to Cheddar Gorge, is troubled by Victor's mention of the zoo, as she's ethically opposed to keeping wild animals in captivity. Her line, "Animals in cages like that, it's not natural", feels key, since it's obviously supposed to echo what's going on around them, with all those human animals leading awkward and uncomfortable existences in their tiny steel cages. On the DVD commentary, Renwick explains that the zoo discussion was cut from the televised version because of time constraints, and while he acknowledges how it would have tied in with the ideas conveyed in the title, he ultimately didn't think that you needed to have them spelled out in order to grasp their significance. I only partially agree. While the humor of the title is discernible enough, omitting all reference to the zoo means missing out on a rich vein of symbolism - the implicit suggestion that, irrespective of whether or not the Meldrews had intended to get to Whipsnade Zoo, they have ended up at a zoo of sorts, that being the human zoo. It isn't simply in the insinuation that the humans are being confined, but that they are being exhibited as well - that their lives are not only meaningless, but amusingly so for anyone who happens to be surveying them from the outside. There is a moment, not translatable for the radio version, where Victor remarks on the traffic jam as being a "complete waste of human life" while observing the driver behind them in his rear view mirror. There is nothing about this driver in particular that ought to invite comment, but there's nevertheless something voyeuristic about the juxtaposition, as though Victor is musing on the absurdity of human life in general. It's also as close as the episode comes to breaking the fourth wall; although we spend the episode feeling the Honda's claustrophobic confines along with the Meldrews, our primary perspective, from where the windscreen should be, more reflects the position of someone looking in from the exterior than that of a fellow occupant. It is as though Victor, Margaret and Warboys have become our own personal exhibit, entertaining us with their daft antics from inside their wildly unnatural habitat. The ways in which humans respond to their constrained, inelegant existences cannot help but become the stuff of spectacle. We sense that if we were to uproot from the Meldrews and to wander around the surrounding exhibits, we would find plenty more to gawk at. At one point Victor sticks his head out the window and reports seeing a man sunbathing on the roof of a Pickfords removal truck (somewhat questionably, given the visible lack of sunshine).

This doesn't just apply to those poor sods with the misfortune of being stuck inside the traffic jam either. Anybody with a salacious or unlikely yarn to be spun around them is destined to become the object of idle diversion for the perpetually bored, as demonstrated in a sequence where Margaret and Warboys indulge in a round of lurid gossip about various characters in their community. For what sums up both the absurdity and the banality of modern living more succinctly than the remark, "Of course, she wears nothing in bed except Sainsbury's cocoa butter"? This is followed by what sounds like the basis of a particularly grisly urban legend, when Warboys suggests that said individual risks sautéing herself to death whenever she uses her electric blanket, and then a similarly dubious tale about a man who had a cast removed to find that his arm had mysteriously disappeared. Victor ponders aloud why people would be compelled to circulate stories of such squeamish mortification (before Warboys lets it slip that a few comparably lurid stories have been shared about him), but how else are they going to fill the vapidness and stagnation of their own captive lives? 

The Whipsnade Zoo analogy doesn't end there, however. Once Warboys has made her stance on zoos explicit in the radio version, she suddenly goes off on a strange train of thought about the larger predatory animals (specifically tigers and vultures), and whether it might actually be good sense to keep those creatures confined, to prevent them from roaming around and mauling everybody to death. It's a suggestion that clearly touches a nerve in Victor (alas, we have no way of discerning what Margaret makes of it). In a way, I can understand why this aspect of the discussion was cut, since it is a bit rambling and nonsensical, even by Warboys' standards, and the dialogue they prioritised for the television version is honestly a whole lot funnier and sharper. But from a thematic standpoint it suggests a complicating of the analogy, with Warboys proposing that the alternative to this vapidness might be even more unbearable. If we stop to consider these implications, we might arrive at the conclusion that the titular "beast" is not Victor specifically, but humankind in general, and the "cage" is the thin veneer of civility that keeps us from tearing one another's heads off (and possibly exacerbates our urge to do so). Early in the episode, Victor had professed an understanding for why some people are driven to violate that societal taboo and become psychopaths. But those ferine tendencies run deep, and will find ways of manifesting beyond physical brutality. Later developments would appear to confirm that we are all just snarling zoo animals, imprisoned side by side, maddened by our mutual entrapment and angrily swiping at one another through the bars of our exhibits. We get multiple instances of Victor coming to blows with other frustrated individuals who, in lieu of outright savagery, are forced to resort to more creative means of expressing their latent beastliness. The first of these involves the driver of the vehicle to the Meldrews' left, and it's perhaps not a total coincidence that he bears an animal name - one Mr Salmon (Trevor Byfield). True, a salmon might not be the first creature that comes to mind when we picture a raging beast, but there is something decidedly fishy about him (a joke made within the episode itself).

The Salmon encounter is a good demonstration of why Victor's reputation for being a relentlessly bitter individual unreasonably kicking off about everything under the sun is frankly unearned, for Salmon is being astoundingly rude to the Meldrews, loudly blazoning through their personal space with his sketchy advances on Lisa (Louise Duprey) and Carol (Tish Allen), the two twenty-something girls in the vehicle to the Meldrews' right. As Renwick so aptly puts it on the commentary, it amounts to a complete dismissal of Victor's existence. I think most people in his position would have a hard time containing themselves. Margaret implores him to choose the civilised alternative, by winding up the car window and disengaging; retreating into the symbolic cage is their best defence against getting sucked into the ferocity of the world outside. Victor refuses, countering that this would mean further stifling themselves for someone else's benefit: "We're not suffocating to death inside here...just so he can get off with two sex-hungry trollops!" (to which Carol produces the terribly vicious but supremely witty response, "I notice it worked for you..."). It also has to be said that this entire sequence is a whole lot funnier in the television version than the radio, where we miss out on some wonderful visual gags - not least, the outrageous decal seen on Salmon's car window when he finally winds it up in his own churlish act of retreat. Also sacrificed was a great moment where Salmon receives a call on his characteristically chunky 90s mobile (back then, a sign that he was flash), which transpires to be for Victor, and to be coming from somebody further down in the queue looking to take their annoyance for the slow movement out on him.

Another confrontation happens more indirectly. Throughout the episode, we had heard various grumblings from Victor about the mechanics at his local garage and how ineffectual they were in fixing his seemingly cursed Honda. Toward the end, Victor decides to put a cassette on, only to discover that the mechanics, tired of his complaining, have used it to record him an insulting message - and what's more they've done it in song form, to the tune of "Cwm Rhondda" (I like to think this is a deliberate callback to the ending of "Timeless Time", where Victor had threatened to get even with the intrusive sparrow by sneaking up to its nest with a Welsh male voice choir). On the commentary, Renwick states that one of his favourite running gags throughout the series was the idea that people who had scores to settle with Victor would go to ridiculous lengths to do so, orchestrating elaborate revenge schemes that would require far more planning and effort than they should logically be worth. He cites another example from the episode "Warm Champagne", where a professional artist neighbour had painted an unflattering faux pub sign in Victor's likeness, pointing out that it would have cost him a night's sleep or two just to get it done. But maybe these boxed-in beasts really do have nothing better with which to occupy their minds.

As with "Timeless Time", a preoccupation with time and its finiteness pervades "The Beast In The Cage". An inconvenience Victor contends with at the start of the episode concerns a clock that is two minutes fast and which cannot be turned backwards, meaning that he has to run it through the entire cycle just to have it show the correct time. We circle back to the symbolism in Victor's final reflection, as he mournfully muses that, "You can't turn the clock back." There's the resignation that it is now too late in the day for the Meldrews to do anything with their bank holiday, and that as soon as the traffic clears they'll have to turn around and head for home. (In the radio version, Warboys offers the flimsy silver lining that "at least it's been a day out...a change from just sitting at home all day", a gag pre-empted in the television version with the acknowledgement that the Meldrews wouldn't have accomplished anything more productive by staying put, other than Victor cutting his toenails.) It is, incidently never stated on which bank holiday "The Beast In The Cage" is intended to take place, but we can narrow it down a little. On the commentary, Richard Wilson confirms that the episode was filmed in the winter, which accounts for the gloomy conditions outside, but that it was meant to be set during the summer. (The incongruous weather needn't have been an issue, given the temperamental nature of the British climate, only the script makes it clear that this is supposed to be a blisteringly hot day on top of everything else - we have Victor complaining about the Honda being like a bread oven and his feet like a pair of boiled lobsters, that man sunbathing atop the removal lorry and Victor's insistence that Warboys put ice in his pineapple cordial, which to his horror contains a dead wasp.) It could very feasibly be the Spring bank holiday that falls on the last Monday of May, but from our thematic standpoint it makes far more sense for it to be the bank holiday that occurs on the last Monday of August, and is traditionally viewed as the final opportunity for a day of summer's recreation before the autumn kicks in. This opportunity being denied the Meldrews aligns with that underlying sense of time having run out, and with Victor's concession that his life ultimately didn't end up going anywhere, despite the sense of vigour and purpose he recalls feeling in his younger years. Margaret offers the consolation that it is the same for everyone - that we are all the same boat/traffic jam/metaphorical zoo, and all we can do is to try to make the best of it, as Warboys suggests.

"The Beast In The Cage" has a neatly cyclical narrative, opening with Victor rejecting Margaret's offer of a sucky sweet, insisting that he is more likely to be sucking on the car's exhaust pipe before long, and closing with him belatedly accepting her offer. This is preceded by one final threat of bestial behaviour, as Victor (presumably none too seriously) announces that he's become so hungry he might have to resort to eating Mrs Warboys. Instead, he chooses the civilised alternative and asks Margaret to pass him the sweets, a signal that he's resigned himself to fate. The camera pulls out into another aerial shot as the credits roll, showing the Meldrews still imprisoned in the congestion, and we leave them on an even more indeterminate note than than we did at the end of "Timeless Time". In that episode there was a certain predictability to the monotony, for we knew that the morning would come soon enough, and they'd be opening up yet another can of worms (even if that represented an unknowable nightmare in itself). Here, we don't know much longer they might be forced to endure their inertia, and there's no indication that they'll be moving on any time soon. For now, the final shot emphasises both the extent of their entrapment, and how far afield their predicament extends. There are a million stories in life's great traffic jam. This has been one of them. 

The Most Wonderful Time of The Year (aka Look What Disney Did To Bob)

Watching the Simpsons shorts created for Disney+, it is somewhat mind-boggling to contemplate that there ever was a time when the series doing a self-proclaimed cheap cartoon crossover was treated as a matter of extreme contention, at least among the higher-ups. "A Star Is Burns" of Season 6 was conceived and created with the intention of convincing you to check out The Critic, a series by former Simpsons showrunners Al Jean and Mike Reiss, which had been picked up by Fox for its second season (following a troubled start on ABC) and would be premiering right after. Simpsons creator Matt Groening was so infamously opposed to the move that he insisted on having his name scrubbed from the credits, arguing that The Simpsons and The Critic didn't have anything to do with on another. He was basically right. Writer Ken Keeler had a valiant go at making the set-up as fun and credible as could possibly be expected, but there isn't much dancing around the fact that the episode rests on a massive contrivance - the idea that snobby New York film critic Jay Sherman and the uncultivated small-towners of Springfield would want to hang out together. There's a weird false harmony to their interactions, as if both parties know that ingratiation is their best recourse, even with Bart getting in the occasional aside about how intrinsically crummy the arrangement is. With hindsight, though, the possibility of Jay and the Simpsons sharing a common universe was barely a stretch at all, not when compared with the company the family would be toadying up to in three decades' time. Who would have guessed that in the 2020s we'd be seeing official content that had the Simpsons rubbing shoulders with fairy tale princesses, space tyrants and talking ducks who wear naval jackets (but not pants)? Welcome to the world of Disneyfied Simpsons, a world as baffling as it is brain-rotting.

The obvious rejoinder is that the Disney+ shorts (unlike "A Star Is Burns") are clearly not part of the Simpsons canon and that the crossovers therein represent no radical new world-building for the show's internal universe, but rather pieces of fun, bite-sized content to be readily consumed on the side. More accurately, they're thinly-veiled advertisements for the Disney+ library that hide behind a repurposed, declawed version of the Simpsons' irreverence. They're over before they've even started, they might give you the occasional dumb laugh (so help me, while watching May The 12th Be With You, I actually did chuckle when Mary Poppins - or was it Shary Bobbins? - said, "No fat-shaming on Disney Playground Planet, brat!") and have you go away wanting to binge the latest Marvel series, but they add nothing of value to the Simpsons brand. In my eyes, Plusaversary (2021) would be a strong contender for the nadir of the entire franchise. The part of it that had me absolutely throwing my hands up was at the end when Bart walked in dressed up as Mickey Mouse and Sideshow Mel leaned over and said something along the lines of "I can't believe you're getting away with this!" Excuse me Mel, but what the fuck is there to even be getting away with? Plusaversary is about as subversive as an episode of House of Mouse. Bart did a far more scathing Mickey Mouse impersonation in The Simpsons Movie, and even that was relatively mild compared to how savagely Disney were sent up in the episode "Itchy & Scratchy Land" (if they were able to sneak a gag like "Nazi Supermen Are Our Superiors" into one of these shorts then yeah, that might have impressed me). Before that head-scratching finale, we had Lisa singing a ditty about the virtues of Disney+, in a manner that seemed eerily reminiscent of her role in "The Simpsons Spin-off Showcase" segment "Chief Wiggum, P.I.", only without the winking irony. There were attempts to disguise the tackiness of the occasion with sprinklings of pseudo self-deprecation, including an ever so quaint gag about parents using their televisions as inexpensive babysitters. When Roald Dahl was making that observation in 1964 I'm sure it seemed biting and scandalous, but the conversation about children and screens has moved on significantly, what with the coming of tablets and social media, and I doubt that anyone in 2021 was terribly shocked by the admission that TV is a convenient fallback for keeping the kids pacified.

Defenders of the Disney+ shorts will point out that The Simpsons were never sticklers for artistic integrity, and that they were hawking candy bars before they even had a series proper, but at least those Butterfinger commercials had the decency to restrict themselves to actual advertising blocks and had zero pretensions about what they were. The Disney shorts are cynical slices of self-promotion dressed up as fun little nuggets of bonus content; superficially, they might be capable of acknowledging their own vapidness, but they are not designed to make us question our relationship with the media we consume, as might once have been expected of a creation as iconoclastic as The Simpsons. They have the air of a surrender more than a challenge. I think Frank Oz's comments about Disney's handling of The Muppets applies here: "They're cute...I love cute things like little bunny rabbits, but I don't like pejorative cute."

So yeah, the Disney+ shorts are not my bag and I've tended to avoid talking about them because these days I prefer to direct my efforts toward things that I like or that I at least think are interesting. Besides which, they're so aggressively lightweight that I'm not sure there is a whole lot to be said about them ("Chilli and Bingo were in the same narrative space as Marge and Maggie - isn't that nutty?"). And then last year they did the one thing guaranteed to grab my interest - they dragged Sideshow Bob into this dubious arena - and I thus feel obligated to comment. The Most Wonderful Time of The Year dropped on October 11th 2024, and revolves around Bob joining forces with the Disney villains to belt out an ode to the spooky season by way of a corrupted Christmas standard ("It's The Most Wonderful Time of The Year", originally recorded by Andy Williams in 1963). That they're singing about Halloween but the short has the trappings of a festive special is the big underlying joke. The definition of a Disney villain has been expanded to include the likes of Vader, Thanos and Agatha, but there is a curious dearth of Pixar villains in The Most Wonderful Time of The Year. Curious, because come on, one of them was actually voiced by Kelsey Grammer. Surely if you're going to have Bob interacting with bad guys from other Disney-owned properties, Stinky Pete is the first who should have come to mind? The mint condition prospector's failure to show must be this short's single biggest missed opportunity.

As it is, The Most Wonderful Time of The Year is basically harmless - which, honestly, is about as good as I could have hoped it to be. It's not as feeble and inexplicably self-congratulatory as Plusaversary, but it is every bit as vacuous. I'll start by focussing on what I liked about it, which is that Bob is still a treat to listen to. There's been so much discourse in recent years about the ageing voice cast and what it might mean for the future of series, but Grammer seriously doesn't sound too bad for a man entering his 70s (admittedly, I'm not sure if he's doing Bob's maniacal laugh any more - he apparently found that challenging enough in his 30s). There's a moment in the prelude where Bart (the only Simpson to have any dialogue in this short) indignantly requests that Bob kill him and not torture him with singing, and my immediate reaction was "How dare you? Bob is a wonderful singer!" And yeah, I stand by that. The performance was essentially fun. I also quite liked Bob's description of the Halloween season: "A time when we take a break from the hustle and bustle of daily life to think about what's really important: murder, mayhem, madness and, hey, a few laughs."

Worth noting is that The Most Wonderful Time of The Year is only our second villain-themed Disney+ short. The first was Welcome To The Club from 2022, which was about Lisa meeting the Disney villains, and which actually had the germ of a good idea. Lisa has been invited to become an official Disney Princess, only to discover that she has a greater affinity with the villains. And why not? Disney princesses are, generally speaking, upholders of traditional patriarchal systems and values, whereas villains are the rebels who challenge the status quo. I could see Lisa having some issue with Cruella De Vil, Gaston and the others who were animal killers or exploiters, but the ones who were queer-coded misfits would definitely have a case. It wasn't especially well-realised (Lisa's big hesitation about joining the villains is that they always die at the end, which historically has happened more rarely than people tend to assume), but the potential was definitely there for a short that integrated the characters in a meaningful way, and wasn't just a crossover for the sake of a crossover. Bob's reason for hanging out with the Disney rogues gallery is a lot more surface-level -  the gist of it is that he's a villain, they're villains, so let's all have a big song and dance where we celebrate being evil for the sake of evil. Needless to say, this is as surface-level as Bob's characterisation gets, in line with the flattening he underwent post-1990s. He is just here for the murder, mayhem and madness, and not because he too was once a queer-coded misfit who challenged the power structures of his own environs. The greatest contrivance of the set-up occurs at the opening, when he invites us to, "Pull up a chair, relax and let me extend you on behalf of Disney+ the most wonderful wishes of the season". You know, I don't for a second believe that Bob watches Disney+. He's a PBS guy and you know it. (Actually, as per "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming", he's not much of a chattering cyclops guy at all, but I'm sure he'd see Disney+ as particularly representative of dumbing down cultural standards.)

Unlike Welcome To The Club, there's not any real comprehensive narrative here. It's a straight-up music video, more or less. Bob is holding the Simpson family captive in their own living room in the opening sequence, but this doesn't go anywhere once the song itself gets underway (also, the house is on fire, a detail to which everybody inside seems strangely indifferent, and we later see Snowball II running from the blaze, but that's it). Bob doesn't have any overarching nefarious scheme going on, we don't see the Simpsons escaping from his clutches, and although Bart later shows up with Loki to oppose Bob, hitting him with a rake (ugh, fuck those things) is as far as it goes. Bart is also dressed up as Alex from A Clockwork Orange, a callback to the costume he'd donned in the wraparound narrative of "Treehouse of Horror III". It's an interesting choice, given that Disney doesn't own that film (no, that's Warner Bros' property to bastardise in their own stupid crossovers, as we saw with Space Jam: A New Legacy), but I think it's supposed to code him as being in something of a miscreant mode himself. And wouldn't you know it, by then end of the song he and Bob are on the very same page, singing side by side like they're the best of buds, conceding to the possibly that they are not so diametrically opposed after all, but rather different shades of the same deviant spirit. For Halloween is absolutely the time be unleashing your inner deviant, if not quite as literally as this song suggests. And yes, we could absolutely question the appropriateness of Bart dressing up as that character, which I think was supposed to be an implicit joke in "Treehouse of Horror III". Here, I don't know if Disney fully thought the implications through, seeing as how one of the stills during the closing credits shows Alex-Bart tormenting a gagged and bound Bob. Where exactly is our train of thought supposed to be going?

Futuristic rapists aside, The Most Wonderful Time of The Year is an overwhelmingly safe short, and that's absolutely to its detriment. It doesn't do anything really radical or unexpected with the concept of the Simpsons and Disney worlds colliding for a Halloween bash. There was precisely moment that genuinely caught me off guard, and that was when Amos Slade, the villain from The Fox and The Hound, was singing about the joys of shooting deer while directing his gun at Bambi and his mother, only for the Great Prince of the Forest to sneak up from behind and wallop him.

I'll admit that this sequence hit me, in part because my brain had a slightly hard time processing its very existence. We have Bambi, star of my favourite Disney movie, Bob, my favourite fictional character period, and Slade...well, I'm not really a massive stan of Slade per se (there are some who champion him as one Disney's most complicated villains; he certainly is one of the pettiest) but The Fox and The Hound was one of the quintessential movies of my childhood, and it blows my mind seeing them all onscreen together like this. When I was watching all three properties as a kid in the mid-90s, I would never in a million years have imagined that I'd be seeing them intersect in this way. It's precisely this kind of insidious buzz that these shorts are looking to coast on, and it has little to offer beyond cheap novelty. But it's also the one portion of the short that kinda sorta disturbed me on any level. Not because the action itself is especially edgy; it's not like Slade succeeds in even spooking the deer, after all (without Copper, I've a feeling he'd be a pretty incompetent hunter). No, what I find unsettling about it is the way Bob pops up wearing a bib with Bambi's face on and cries out, "Yummy!" Oh Bob. The death of Bambi's mother represents the ruptured innocence of multiple generations of children; why are you cheering this on? Although let's face it, while Bob is absolutely not a Disney+ subscriber, and I'm also not convinced that he's as big a Halloween enthusiast as this short implies...he probably does eat venison. And it tears me up inside. 

Slade is, incidentally, the most "obscure" Disney villain to appear in the short, in that he isn't one you tend to see featured on merchandise (ie: not one of the sexy villains). For the Disney buffs, I don't think The Fox and The Hound could be considered an obscure title at all, but I suspect that your casual Disney+ viewer has no clue who he is and assumes that he's meant to be the actual hunter who killed Bambi's mother. The most obscure characters to appear overall would probably be Hansel and Gretel from the 1932 Silly Symphony short Babes In The Woods, who are brought out alongside Snow White, Aurora and Rapunzel for a joke about how a number of Disney's stars would be obliterated from existence (to the approval of Thanos) if the Brothers Grimm were somehow capable of getting their stories copyrighted. Meanwhile, a character who seems to be disappearing more silently is Dr Facillier from The Princess and The Frog. He's AWOL from Bob's celebration, despite being one of Disney's most popular 21st century villains, and the short unwittingly draws attention to his absence by incorporating a scene where the Sultan from Aladdin is transformed into a frog by Jafar, a bit that feels like it would be better suited for Facillier (sure, Jafar's got personal baggage with the Sultan, but turning humans into frogs is specifically Facillier's thing). 2024 really wasn't Facillier's year, since he was also conspicuously absent from the "Tiana's Bayou Adventure" attraction that opened in Disney's US parks upon the bones of Splash Mountain. There's been speculation that Disney is becoming increasingly hesitant to use him, for concerns that his voodoo associations could be deemed problematic, and I guess his absence here will be adding further fuel to that theory.

For the most part, the choices of characters are the predictable ones, and that's really too bad. If we must be downing these nutritionally-empty remember berry smoothies, then I say go whole hog with it. Slade was a good start, but there are far bigger swings to be taken still. For instance, why wasn't my man Frollo invited for the occasion? He's a gnarly old soul. Goob and Doris are also fun if you give them a chance. Disney has allowed the Who Framed Roger Rabbit property to stagnate for decades (despite it being the gold standard for cartoon crossovers, in that it was made with palpable love and skill), but Judge Doom and Toon Patrol are terrific villains who are absolutely crying out for more recognition. Be creative. Have Magnifico from Wish show up and all of the other villains be embarrassed to be seen with him, including Edgar from The Aristocats. Heck, why not get Harry and Marv involved, since Disney has Home Alone too? Those guys would absolutely sympathise with Bob, in knowing the sting of being repeatedly bested by a wily prepubescent. Or are there additional legal complications in using Pesci and Stern's likeness?

It also has to be said that the Simpsons visual style really doesn't become a lot of the Disney characters that are featured. In particular, I don't get why Scar, who has one of the most badass designs in all of Disney villaindom, always looks so unbelievably hideous in these shorts. I did wonder if it might be a nod to the show's tendency to draw cats in the most grotesque possible fashion (Groening has stated on multiple DVD commentaries that he thinks Snowball II might be the ugliest feline in animation history, of which he's very proud), only Shere Khan looks halfway decent by comparison, so that's probably not our answer. Elsewhere, the Tangled characters clearly didn't get the memo that The Simpsons is an iris-free zone, and egad does Mother Gothel look like she's on substances.

And what of The Simpsons' own antagonistic arsenal? Do they get much of a look-in with so many Disney foes running rampant? Besides Bob, Nelson is the only one to contribute anything to the song, but a lot of them do make appearances, notably during a crowd shot that packs in a fair number of knaves from across the series. The selection of characters is certainly interesting. Most of the expected faces are there - Mr Burns, Fat Tony, Snake, Herman, Russ Cargill, Hank Scorpio and the like. It's also heartening to see Ms Botz and Lyle Lanley, two one-off villains who presumably won't be back because their voice actors are sadly no longer with us, but that doesn't mean they can't be remembered and celebrated. Other choices are more questionable. Groundskeeper Willie? Er, in that one Halloween segment, sure. I'll concede that he also tried to bludgeon Bart in "Girly Edition". But outside of that, could you really call him a villain? Helen Lovejoy? I've always thought she had a ton of untapped potential as a rival to Marge, but I'm not sure if she ever went far enough with that energy to be lumped in with the rest of these ne'er do wells. Agnes Skinner? Look, much like Helen she's not a very nice person, but if that were the criteria, most of Springfield would be up here. Meanwhile, I was surprised by the absence of Kodos and Kang, given that this is a Halloween-themed short and all, but the space squids do feature later on, having some kind of strangling tussle with Ursula (or are they merely exchanging long protein strings?). The total lack of Cecil Terwilliger feels like the short's second biggest missed opportunity, but then I could imagine a man of his refinement, even one with faded dreams of being a TV clown's sidekick, turning up his nose at the idea of participating in anything so corny. ("Something like this was inevitable, Bob. It's the final step in your descent from legitimate maniac to dancing bear!")

The short ends in a predictable manner, with Bob getting hit by another rake and calling it a "tired gag". True, and pointing it out doesn't make it less so. Although the final still in the closing credits shows Bob riding off into the night on a rake a la a broomstick, implying that the hardest of feelings have truly been put aside in the spirit of the Halloween season. And that's just beautiful. God bless Us, Every One!