The third canine-centred episode of The Simpsons' classic era stands out as the anomaly for a number of reasons. "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" (2F18), which aired April 9th 1995 toward the tail end of the sixth season, is the only entry of the four that isn't focused on the relationship between Bart and Santa's Little Helper. You get the impression that the Simpsons kids are much more protective of the dog (and his progeny) than their parents, which tracks with what we saw in those previous episodes, but there's no sense here that Bart relates particularly strongly to Santa's Little Helper because he sees in him so much of his own incorrigible self. Truth be told, "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" isn't really a Santa's Little Helper episode at all, with the dog's most significant participation confined largely to the first act. He serves as a catalyst to the main conflict and then takes a backseat, making this not much of a step-up from his turn in the previous season's "Sweet Seymour Skinner's Baadasssss Song". And yet his presence is felt all throughout this story. The plot involves him courting a female racing dog and siring an improbably large litter of twenty-five puppies, all of which have his face, and his appetite for destruction. We might not spend a lot of time with the leading pooch himself, but we have twenty-five bags of his troubled genes crawling around in his stead - which turns out to be way more Santa's Little Helper than anyone (not least the Simpsons themselves) can handle.
An advantage that "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" should have over the other "classic" Santa's Little Helper episodes is that, out of the four, it is the least prone to sentimentality. A shortcoming shared by "Bart's Dog Gets an F", "Dog of Death" and "The Canine Mutiny" is that their resolutions all hinge upon "boy and his dog" cliches played mawkishly straight, but this is something that "Two Dozen" sidesteps altogether. It isn't interested in tugging on the heartstrings, but in revelling in the inevitable chaos that comes with attempting to live under the same roof as twenty-five puppies, sire dog, dam dog and an ostracised cat. For the first two acts, this is as free-wheeling a farce as The Simpsons had ever tried its hand at by Season 6. Eventually, it settles into becoming one of those "Bart and Lisa Investigate" stories that have been a staple of the series since "Krusty Gets Busted" of Season 1, but even with some belated menace thrown into the plot (in the form of Mr Burns, and his nefarious plans for the puppies), it never takes itself overly seriously. There are action sequences that anticipate the high-adrenalin climax of "Brother From Another Series" (with Bart and Lisa being held at gunpoint and escaping by sliding down a chute), but here it's mostly in quotation marks.
Unfortunately, none of those anomalies work in the episode's favour, and I'm inclined to rate "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" as both the worst of Season 6 and the weakest of the show's runty litter of Santa's Little Helper outings. It is, if nothing else, more watchable than the mean-spirited "Dog of Death", but it is a far junkier experience. I feel a slight trepidation in saying that, as I get the impression that this is the best-regarded Santa's Little Helper episode among Simpsons fans, and I'm sure that is 100% down to the musical number that Burns performs toward the end about his sociopathic love of animal hides. No dispute that it's an extremely energetic and unforgettable set-piece, and I suspect that having it land so very late on in the game convinces viewers that the episode as a whole was a lot stronger then it was, since that is the last major spectacle it leaves us with. This is a case of The Simpsons cheekily exercising the writer's escape clause outlined by Robert McKee (Brian Cox) in the 2002 film Adaptation. :"The last act makes a [story]...You can have flaws, problems, but wow them in the end and you've got a hit." My question is, if the "See My Vest" sequence didn't show up to give us a much-need serotonin-boost at the eleventh hour, is there anything at all about this episode that would stick out to you as memorable or inspired? Aside from maybe the Rory Calhoun reference that works precisely because it's so unintelligible?
The thing is, "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" is a cute episode, but it's also kind of dumb. What's startling is that it's dumb in a way that I don't think there had been any real precedent for until now, at least in terms of A-stories. It makes a bit more sense when we take into account who wrote it. This was a Mike Scully script, and while Scully was still entirely capable of writing episodes with strong narrative backbones and sincere character observations (see "Lisa's Rival" from earlier that season), his worst indulgences were already starting to creep through, notably in his approach to writing Homer (again, see "Lisa's Rival" from earlier that season, or for a particularly foreboding example, "Lisa on Ice"), and "Two Dozen" feels like the first occasion on which he really let those eccentricities run rampant. I don't much care for the direction the show went when Scully eventually took over as showrunner, and I can somewhat see the blueprints for that direction in this episode. The story is half-baked and excessively cartoony, the humor is crude and physical, the Simpsons themselves are written fairly unsympathetically (although that's par for the course with these dog episodes) and the mindfulness for tying up loose ends is lacking (see next paragraph). The small mercy is that Homer is nowhere near as horribly written as he was in "Lisa on Ice" (in part because this plot doesn't give him as many opportunities to be an all-out dick), although Snowball II gets the worst of what we have - in "GET THAT CAT OUT OF THE WAY!" you can pick out the aggressively entitled tone he'd be assuming a lot under Scully.
For once, however, I am not inclined to name the eternally maligned Snowball II as the critter done dirtiest by this particular doggone script. That honor goes to Santa's girlfriend, She's The Fastest. "Two Dozen" kicks of with Santa's Little Helper in an unusually hyperactive mode and the family failing to realise that his behaviour problems stem from sexual frustration, until he breaks free and chases down and mounts a female dog on the tracks. Rather than doing the sensible thing and getting their dog fucking neutered, the Simpsons decide to take the female dog into their abode (her owner, the Rich Texan, seems only too happy to relinquish her, laughing uproariously when Marge asks if he'll miss her loyalty and companionship). It's a move that makes the Simpsons look stupid as hell, if they don't foresee where this scenario is headed, although maybe that's part of the joke. Needless to say, She's The Fastest didn't become a long-term fixture of the Simpson household - after the events of this episode, she's never seen again, and "Two Dozen" never attempts to give her character closure or account for her subsequent absence. I can't say I'd gotten terribly attached to this dog or had been anticipating many great adventures with She's The Fastest to come, but I do find it cheap and lazy that the script would go to such lengths to incorporate this additional pet into the Simpson fold, only to forget about her the instant she's served her narrative purpose. Could they not have worked in at least a throwaway line indicating that she'd fallen out with Santa's Little Helper and gone off with some other family? I'd like to give Scully the benefit of the doubt and assume there was something along those lines in an earlier draft that was cut for time, but the fact of the matter is that She's The Fastest is only a plot device, brought in solely to proliferate Santa's seed, and the episode has no qualms with treating her as such. In fairness, she's not the only animal to be acquired by the family and then completely memory holed - after Season 4's "Duffless", we'd heard nary a peep from that hamster who was adopted by Lisa and abused in the name of science/vengeance. The difference being, I suppose, that Lisa was chiefly interested in that hamster as a test subject, and there was no indication that she'd intended to keep it once her experiment was concluded (as terribly out of character as it seems for Lisa to treat an animal as a resource and then discard it). In "Two Dozen" we have Bart and Lisa begging for ownership of this dog and her original owner walking out on her, so it doesn't sit half as well with me for her to fade from the picture without thought or comment. There was an alternative - rather than saddling the Simpsons with a second dog and getting all that extra story baggage, they might have had the dam's owner dump the unwanted puppies with them (as happened with Eddie's litter in the Frasier episode "The Unkindest Cut of All"). As a side-note, the character design for Santa's girlfriend also bugs the living snot out of me - they gave her human eyelashes, for Pete's sake![1]
Returning to the dog track allows the series to get reacquainted with its beginnings in "Simpsons Roasting on An Open Fire", and while the explicit references to the events of that episode are a little jarring, given how drastically far removed "Two Dozen" feels from it tonally, I do like the subtler callbacks that don't advertise themselves so openly. She's The Fastest's racing number is 8, just like Santa's Little Helper before her, and Homer is once again swayed into placing a bet based on the perceived significance of the dog's name - which on this occasion actually works out for him, or at least it would have done if Santa's Little Helper hadn't disrupted the race. She's The Fastest's career is tanked, and for better or for worse, she takes up residence with the Simpsons. We get to see how the family's attitude toward responsible pet ownership has further degraded since the days of "Bart's Dog Gets an F", where it was recognised as a major transgression for Santa's Little Helper to be left to roam the neighbourhood unattended. In this episode, Marge, of all characters, willingly opens the door for the dogs so that they can wander all over town as they please, in a fanciful sequence that ends with the dogs seated at their own personal table outside Luigi's restaurant and coming to blows over what must be the toughest spaghetti strand in the world.
This might be a good point to acknowledge that "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" is, specifically, The Simpsons' tribute to the Disney animated canon (long before they themselves fell under the ownership of the Mouse), and there's an extent to which we need to view it through that lens. The title alone is a dead giveaway that the plot aspires to pilfer a few details from the 1961 classic One Hundred and One Dalmatians (it also evokes Fox's 1950 film Cheaper By The Dozen, then yet to be remade with Steve Martin and Bonnie Hunt), but the Disney references are scattered and varied enough to suggest a broader running theme. The romantic interlude with Santa's Little Helper and She's The Fastest is plucked straight out of Lady and The Tramp (1955), while the climactic "See My Vest" number is a flagrant rip-off of the "Be Our Guest" song from Beauty & The Beast (1991). (It's probably not an intentional reference, but that especially corny gag where Snowball II bats away the catnip also puts me strongly in mind of that random Parisian in The Aristo-Cats (1970) who decides to lay off the Merlot.) The entire story is a love letter to Disney, and as such it might be given leeway for being a little more cutesy and anthropomorphic than your average Simpsons outing. On the episode commentary, Groening talks with pride about how they always strove to have the animals in the series behave like real animals, with the rare anthropomorphisms being reserved for situations where they'd ring a deliberately disturbing note (the example he cites is in "Bart Gets An Elephant" of Season 5, where Santa's Little Helper and Snowball II attempt to walk upright and say "We love you" in a manner that suggests the effort is causing them excruciating pain). Ironic, then, that "Two Dozen" itself proves to be something of a deviant in that regard, with quite a few jokes that have the animals behaving in distinctly un-animal ways that, while self-consciously silly, feel as though they're intended to be charming rather than weird, eg: Santa's and She's snickering at the Shar Pei in the park (the Shar Pei's reaction is great, though) and Snowball II rubbing her eyes in disbelief. Still, such touches are handled with a sharp enough Simpsons edge. The sequence that's the most conspicuously Disney-ish is Santa's and She's aforementioned date around the town, and while this section is a little too long and frothy for my tastes, it's kept afloat by a playfully subversive undercurrent. There's a moment where the dogs have their picture taken after poking their heads through a photo stand-in, which is a self-evidently ridiculous scenario (who's taking the picture? Who is the photo even for?), except it's revealed that the image on the other side is a recreation of one of Cassius Marcellus Coolidge's paintings of dogs playing poker. To the untrained eye, this might read as a harmless, perfectly kitschy cultural reference, but a more seasoned Simpsons viewer might interpret its appearance as ominous, having been trained by "Treehouse of Horror IV" to see those pictures as inherently cursed. The spaghetti kiss moment from Lady & The Tramp likewise goes humorously wrong, with the apparent lovebirds turning into snarling beasts the instant their resource guarding urges are activated. And when we finally get to "See My Vest", a great part of that joke is that what Burns is singing about is so horrifically far-removed from the intentions expressed by Lumiere and chums to that same cheerful tune (although it might have appealed to Gaston, who used antlers in all of his decorating).
There was, of course, always more to Disney than cute creatures batting their unnaturally elongated eyelashes. There was an element of danger, typically involving the separation of the young and innocent from protective paternal figures and/or a deliciously flamboyant villain, and while "Two Dozen" eventually yields both of those things by bringing Burns into the mix, we first have to sit through a very laggy and staccato middle section that's little more than a string of skits about puppy-inflicted mayhem. The birth of the twenty-five pups brings what I personally consider to be the most unforgivable aspect of this episode, this being that it contains what has to be by and far the worst, most cringe-inducing line of dialogue ever spoken by a Simpsons character, at least in the 90s. I refer to Bart's "Hey look, a really small dog just fell out of Santa's girlfriend!" Forget that "Springfield swings like a pendulum do!" line my brother used to rag on hard in "All Singing, All Dancing", this is just heinous. Among other sins, it makes it sound as if Bart doesn't understand where babies come from, which of course he does. He had that video he showed his class about how kittens are born (the ugly truth) in "Lisa's Substitute", and he'd surely have put it together that puppy births are going to be much the same process. Then again, the whelping of She's The Fastest is a surprisingly clean business, devoid of afterbirth, umbilical cords and meconium, and the puppies are born with their eyes already open. Disney's depiction of the process in One Hundred and One Dalmatians honestly felt a touch more realistic.
I'm not going to go after "Two Dozen" for its far-fetched set up because at this point in the series it just seems futile. The premise of the Simpsons seriously thinking that they can live with twenty-seven dogs (plus a cat, a fish tank and - possibly - a hamster somewhere in the backdrop) is perhaps no more fanciful than the premise of them attempting to co-exist with a full-grown African Elephant chained up in their yard. It does mean, however, that when the threat of removing the puppies is finally introduced, it seems like common sense prevailing and not something you can really feel too mad at the adult Simpsons for imposing. Lisa's response - "Is that what we do in this family? When someone becomes an inconvenience we just get rid of them?" - would be a patently spurious rebuttal even without the cutaway gag showing Abe in miserable solitude at the Retirement Home. Sorry Lisa, but you clearly don't have room for all these dogs, and it's evident enough by now that your family are shitty pet owners anyway. This is, I think, what makes "Two Dozen" a weaker installment than either "Bart's Dog Gets an F" and "Dog of Death" - for all of those episode's deficiencies, they dealt with the trials of pet-keeping in a grounded fashion in which there were genuine stakes. When Bart (twice) found himself in the position of having to speak up for the beloved dog his callous parents were prepared to sacrifice to make their own lives a little easier, his distress and indignation felt real and searing. Here, we have a ludicrous scenario that plainly isn't sustainable, and which the family look obtuse for ever allowing to get this far. You just can't feel the same sympathy for the children's position this time round because, yeah, the line does have to be drawn somewhere. Their unreasonable pleading nevertheless manages to buy the puppies a short reprieve, with their parents agreeing to keep them so long as they don't cause any more trouble (um, right, because that's really going to happen). At this point we suddenly leave the milieu of a whimsical Disney film and find ourselves plonked right in the middle of the hellish sitcom banalities The Simpsons is so fond of sending up. Marge and Homer are hosting a dinner party for Reverend Lovejoy, Homer's old army drill sergeant (the remnant of some prior unseen adventure where Homer joined the army and was mistakenly discharged a month early) and the regional director of the IRS. Exactly the kind of trio whom you wouldn't want present to witness the stomach-churning spectacle of your roasted turkey ripping open to reveal two flea-ridden gremlins inside. The puppies are evicted!
Rehoming the puppies presents its own challenge, thanks to the pups' harrowing tendency to vocally object whenever any prospective new owner tries to separate them. "We've got to be realistic..." Marge insists (a little late to say that now), before Burns shows up and offers to give all twenty-five of them a loving home. We know right off the bat that Burns' intentions for those dogs can be none too savoury. The family themselves are savvy enough to recognise this, and to deny Burns ownership of the puppies, but not so savvy that they don't also turn their backs on the puppies for long enough for Burns to stuff them into a sack and take them anyway. "Two Dozen" took its sweet time, but now we finally have something resembling a decent conflict. Actually, when Burns shows up the tone of the episode changes drastically, going from Happy, Dopey and a bit Sleepy to something much more energetically demented. It stands to reason - it is so often the Disney villains who are the MVPs of their stories, with their extravagance and their dark eccentricities, so it should not surprise us that this rule would apply to Disney pastiches too. The third act kicks off with a sly moment of self-awareness, by pretending to go through the motions of having the Simpsons treat the puppies' disappearance as a genuine mystery, before cutting abruptly to the chase, with Bart and Lisa infiltrating Burns' mansion to investigate. They observe Burns taking curiously doting care of the puppies, prompting the Simpsons kids to ponder if they've perhaps misjudged the decrepit billionaire. But no. Burns lays out his sinister agenda with nauseating starkness, adhering to the traditional Disney model of belting out your heart's deepest desire with a lavish song and dance number, in this case an upbeat showstopper detailing the gruesome array of animal skins that went into the attire in his personal wardrobe. His latest fashion hankering is for a tuxedo made from greyhound fur - a narrative development that's honestly no stranger or more fucked-up than the Disney film it's spoofing, where ninety-nine Dalmatian pups were similarly threatened with the prospect of becoming a garish fur coat, although Burns' evil motives are expressed with a shameless theatricality that would put even Cruella herself in the shade. "See My Vest" stands out among Simpsons musical sequences because it is such a delirious exercise in bad taste - a head-spinning voyage through one man's hedonistic vision of every living creature under the sun as the raw materials to be cut up and modified into whatever hideous garment takes his fancy. Every taboo regarding animal mistreatment is violated; Burns has both slippers made from an endangered rhino and a beret made out of a decapitated poodle (less an outrageous fashion statement than a serial killer deviancy). The show was at least able to forgo its usual hard-on for hamster abuse on this occasion, though I suppose those loafers, former gophers aren't so far-removed from a hamster.
To be honest, this is all a bit much even for Burns, which goes back to what I said about his actions in this episode being in quotation marks. He's playing the cartoonishly flamboyant villain in a Disney parody; his shameless theatricality might be jaw-dropping, but it also ensures that it stays just unreal enough for comfort. He also gets to show the inkling of a sensitive side, having earmarked twenty-four of the puppies for death, but intending to spare the one that's endeared itself to him with its ability to stand up on its hind legs (just like Rory Calhoun - you know, the man who's always standing and walking), and whom he's christened Little Monty (even at his most doting, there is something faintly perturbing in his desire to transform this loveable pup into a reflection of his own ego). Bart and Lisa are able to exploit Burns' affection for Little Monty to their advantage, but not without first making a daring escape with the other puppies down a laundry chute. I'll concede that there are some underrated gags in the attempted rescue sequence - I like Bart's "Hush, puppies", and in particular that strange, ominous shot of the door handle slowly turning, as Burns and Smithers take an inexplicably long time getting back into the room that holds the puppies (Smithers, incidentally, doesn't get to be much more here than a quietly disapproving bystander to Burns' scheme). All that I can say is that it is mighty fortunate that the puppies were all able to vacate the laundry basket before Bart and Lisa landed, or else they would have risked squashing a few of them in the effort.
The group does not get far before being cornered by Burns and Smithers, at which point Bart gets a hold of Little Monty and mixes him up with the others, hoping that if Burns can't pick out his favourite dog then he'll have to treat them all with the same mercy. Unfortunately, Burns has no trouble distinguishing Little Monty, because he's the only puppy of the twenty-five who'll stand on his hind legs at his command. Thinking quickly, Bart is able to coax the remaining twenty-four to stand upright by dangling a line of socks above them (the culmination of a running gag in which the dogs were shown to have a perpetual hunger for socks), so that Burns can no longer tell which one is Little Monty. The whole scenario is a little hokey, but it plays neatly on the reason for Burns' contradictory outlook on the dogs, in that he sees Little Monty as different to the others and worthy of attachment because he's able to assert himself as an individual. It nearly backfires, for in practice all that Bart has done is nullify Little Monty's individuality, so that none of the dogs now stand out to Burns, and he initially resolves to kill them all. But even a heart as frosty as Burns' cannot help but melt on being confronted with a barrage of plaintive puppy-dogs eyes, and he decides that the creatures are simply too cute to kill. It's an undeniably sentimental turn from a character who, just a few minutes ago, seemed totally unabashed about wearing a decapitated poodle noggin, but Scully's script is clever enough to temper it by having Burns' evil not immediately subside, but suddenly swing in a startling new direction. The only crime more shocking than killing puppies would be killing children (unless it's Sideshow Bob attempting to kill Bart, in which case it's only business as usual in the woods), and Burns declares himself prepared to do just that, turning his gun on Bart and Lisa, with no apparent motive other than than that he can. But of course, he can't, for even those pesky meddling Simpsons kids are too disarming when you have them at their most vulnerable. Has he learned his lesson that fur is murder? Kind of. Burns insists that he'll never wear another item of clothing made from an animal...provided that animal can do an amusing trick.
As it turns out, Burns has a more ambitious trick in mind than simply standing on two legs. The epilogue reveals that he went on to successfully train the rowdy rabble into champion race dogs (Santa's Little Helper, as we'll recall, was a lousy racer, so the puppies obviously took after their mother in that regard), adding a further ten million dollars to his already bountiful funds. Meanwhile, Homer isn't exactly taking the realisation that he let these world champion dogs slip through his fingers. To its credit, the episode bows out in a uniquely ballsy fashion, with one of the strangest, most hair-raising endings of all of Season 6 (worthy of Season 5, in fact), which sees a horrified Marge wandering down to the basement to find Homer's silhouette swinging in an ominous manner designed to suggest that he's hung himself. What's going on is naturally a whole lot sillier - Homer is gripping onto a ceiling beam whilst batting an old lightbulb, which is apparently the most constructive outlet he has for his chagrin at losing the dogs. The episode then fades out right as the burning bulb smacks directly into his forehead, with obvious results. Homer suffering some form of physical mishap and screaming in agony is yet another Scully indulgence that would overstay its welcome once he took over, but here the execution is sharp and well-judged. If it's any consolation to Homer, I doubt that the puppies would have become world champions if they'd stayed with the Simpsons. It's not as though they had the resources or the know-how to train those dogs, who'd have instead spent their days lounging around, devouring socks and watching Baywatch. Besides, from an animal welfare perspective the greyhound racing industry isn't a whole lot less contentious than the fur industry, so you could argue that the puppies didn't actually win either.
Sky 1 edit alert!: Back in the day Sky 1 would always trim the dog track sequence to remove the frames where you see Santa's Little Helper mounting She's The Fastest, although we still got Bart and Lisa's confused commentary right after, making it plain enough what those naughty dogs were up to.
Also, gone was this entire exchange:
Bart: Oh, me and Santa's Little Helper used to be a team. But he never wants to play any more since his bitch moved in.
Marge: Bart, don't ever say that word again!
Bart: Well that's what she is! I looked it up!
Marge: I'm going to write to the dictionary people and have that checked. It feels like a mistake to me.
I am in two minds about this. Bart is referring to a literal dog as a "bitch", not a woman, but the way that statement is framed, it is still clearly intended to have misogynistic connotations, so I get why Sky might have felt uneasy about it. What puzzles me is that they always retained that moment in "Marge In Chains" where Apu calls Marge a bitch - I don't remember seeing that episode and ever not hearing it - and the context there is so much meaner-spirited. Regardless, it's not a huge loss, this being a limper variation on a joke that was much better done in "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?". Bart doesn't get nearly the same relish out of calling She's The Fastest a bitch as he did Herb a bastard.
Finally, I noted in my review of "Dog of Death" that there was unequivocally some anti-cat sentiment among The Simpsons' writing staff. To set the record straight, this observation does not apply to showrunner David Mirkin, who is evidently a cat person and devotes a chunk of the "Two Dozen" commentary to speaking with affection for all of the cats he's owned. Scully, by comparison, seems to have had mostly bad luck with the animals - growing up, his childhood pets were a cat he was severely allergic to (but which was beloved by his mother), and a canine vagabond that ditched him after only two days.
[1] I get that it's a reference to the antiquated practice of creating female counterparts by taking the male's character design and giving it long eyelashes and maybe a ribbon (see Minnie Mouse, Daisy Duck, etc). I don't have to like it, however.
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