Bundles of Joyce: Meet The Robinsons (aka And You Thought Your Parents Were Weird)

Disney's 2007 offering Meet The Robinsons in some respects represents the studio at its most downtrodden. It is certainly telling that it resorts to a device rarely seen in the studio's canon, which is to end with a quote from Walt Disney himself: "Around here, however, we don't look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we're curious...and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths." Shorn from this quote is the additional information clarifying that Walt was specifically talking about the approach at WED Enterprises. Retained is that rather awkward "however", making it clear that this was part of some wider conversation that we are not here privy to. Instead, there is the implicit invitation to attach our own meaning to "however", and to what wider conversation the minds behind Meet The Robinsons might themselves have been responding to. It's no secret that the 2000s were not auspicious years for Disney. The Renaissance of the 1990s had given way into the Dork Age, with most of their animated features either outright flopping or earning only modest totals. Meanwhile, the box office was dominated by a new breed of animated feature; the age of 3D animation had arrived in full force, with it being largely a two horse race between Pixar and DreamWorks for dominion of the industry. Disney, who for decades had had the luxury of being effectively the only game in town when it came to big league Hollywood animation (Don Bluth's 1980s challenge notwithstanding), were suddenly finding themselves left in the dust. Having made the controversial decision to ditch hand-drawn animation altogether and to pivot to 3D, they'd done little restore their credibility when the first product of this bid for renewed relevance was the ghastly Chicken Little (2005) - a modest success that instantly cemented its reputation as one of the most loathed entries in the Disney canon. Meet The Robinsons knew that it faced an uphill battle when it came to both winning over the general public and convincing the Disney enthusiasts that the old magic hadn't gone away, and as such that closing nugget of Walt wisdom could be seen as an earnest plea for audiences to bear with the studio as it sought to regain its footing in a changing industry. Alternatively, it could have been interpreted as a massive middle finger to the devotees who favoured traditional animation and were disappointed at how quick Disney were to write off their legacy and jump on the 3D bandwagon. In light of everything that was happening at the time, I can see why that final title might have rubbed some people the wrong way, if it came across as taking Walt's words out of context to support their new computer-animated agenda. Not to mention that Disney could hardly take credit for "opening new up doors" when they were simply stumbling down a trail that Pixar, DreamWorks and Blue Sky had already blazed. They weren't exactly selling us on the notion that this was the best possible future.

Personally, I am not so cynical as to suppose that this was the intention. I don't believe that the quote in question was meant as a commentary (at least, not a conscious one) on the studio's abandonment of 2D animation. Nevertheless, its inclusion does betray a fundamental lack of confidence on the film-makers' part - an admission that, yes we know that we're asking our audiences to go along with a lot, but look, this is exactly in the spirit of the old Disney. It is meant to convey a sense of playful optimism, but there is a distinct whiff of scepticism about it, a feeling that the film couldn't be left to speak for itself and needed the pseudo-endorsement of Walt to lend it authenticity. I would rather that it wasn't there at all. Because Meet The Robinsons shouldn't have doubted itself. It's no masterpiece, but it holds up remarkably strongly for a film that emerged from such a shaky and uncertain time in the studio's history. I speak as someone who was so dismayed by the direction Disney was taking in the 2000s that I chose to sit out the theatrical run of Meet The Robinsons altogether. It certainly had a lot to bounce back from. Brother Bear (2003) and Home on The Range (2004) were the products of palpably low morale, while Chicken Little was a gruesomely misguided attempt to ape the lucrative DreamWorks model. I wasn't expecting Meet The Robinsons to break the streak; based on word of its troubled production, and on its madcap trailer, I'd envisioned it being something of a mess. And, in a manner of speaking, it was. But it was a mess in the best possible way, one fully in keeping with a philosophy expressed in the film: "From failing you learn; from success, not so much." Meet The Robinsons might not be top tier, but it feels more authentic than other Disney products of its era, being willing to experiment and to go to more offbeat places in order to find new direction. It is a greatly more idiosyncratic piece than the succeeding Bolt (2008), a film structurally more polished but also doggedly averse to anything resembling risk or originality. I will be clear that I remain, above all, a 2D animation devotee, and think that Disney's treatment of it was lamentable. Nevertheless, I now have little trouble in declaring Meet The Robinsons to be the studio's second best entry of the decade, topped only by The Emperor's New Groove (seeing how Lilo & Stitch has so lethally debased itself, as of 2025).

The quality I can most admire about Meet The Robinsons is the sizeable extent to which it actually feels like something of a personal project. There is a real beating heart to the picture in a way not seen at Disney since the debased Lilo & Stitch. Somebody cared about getting this particular story told. I'm not sure that it was necessarily William Joyce's story, as related in his 1990 publication A Day with Wilbur Robinson, that they were particularly passionate about bringing to an audience. But they cared about what they had in Meet The Robinsons.

For an idea of how challenging and drawn out this film's development was, plans for a big screen version of A Day with Wilbur Robinson had been gestating at Disney since before the book itself was even commercially available. Film producer Bill Borden, a personal friend of Joyce, was given access to a proof copy and suggested that Disney might be interested in optioning it for a feature adaptation. Joyce wrote a treatment and pitched it, with the intention that it be adapted as a live action film and that it stay true to the book's timescale of taking place within a single day. He then set about drafting several different scripts while a variety of big name directors were courted - Joyce's top picks were Steven Spielberg or George Miller, with Peter Jackson, Francis Ford Coppola and Diane Keaton also being considered, but all to no avail. According to Borden, there was a prevailing sentiment that a live action children's film involving singing frogs and flying saucers was too costly and impractical for the time. The project stalled and languished in Development Hell for several years, until Disney executive Leo Chu managed to revitalise it by re-envisioning it as an animated production. From there, Joyce and Borden's input lessened, with Dorothy McKim taking over as producer, Jon Bernstein being assigned to write a brand new script and Stephen Anderson, a story supervisor on Brother Bear, coming in to helm the project in his directorial debut. In their hands, the plot underwent some drastic changes, with the Robinsons becoming a retro futuristic family in the vein of The Jetsons, and the pivotal conflict switching to an orphan's quest to find his place in the world. The latter development especially resonated with Anderson, who was himself adopted as a child and felt an affinity with the young protagonist Lewis.

Even with the project finally off of the ground, its path to completion remained a rocky one. When Pixar's chief creative officer John Lasseter was appointed to power at Walt Disney Animation Studios in 2006 he was infamously dissatisfied with how the feature was shaping up and ordered a major overhaul. It's reported that, under Lasseter's guidance, 60% of the film was scrapped and reworked (although Joyce disputes this). I previously prodded Blue Sky's Epic for having five credited writers, a sign of a torturous number of rewrites, but Meet The Robinsons has seven. As a knock-on effect of the protracted production schedule, Lewis wound up being voiced by two separate young actors, with the initial choice, Daniel Hansen, having already hit puberty by the time Lasseter's revisions were required. A sound-alike was located in Jordan Fry, a name that sounds oddly familiar to me for some reason. Great Caesar's ghost, could it be? Actually, I'd known at the time that Lewis was to be voiced by the same young actor who'd played a note-perfect Mike Teavee in the then-recent Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, and I did consider seeing the film at least out of support for Fry, but in the end my Disney fatigue was just too insurmountable. I consider it a really neat bit of career progression, because in some respects Lewis's story plays like a warmer variation on that of Mike as portrayed by Fry. There is quite a bit of thematic overlap between the two characters. Both are highly precocious children whose talents go unappreciated by the adults around them, but the role of Mike Teavee obviously requires that to be played with an angrier edge, and the story doesn't favour him. With Lewis the prospect of being young, intelligent and out of step is framed more positively, and he finds the connection and understanding that Mike was ultimately denied (Mike, though, remains the juicier character). 

Time has not been especially kind to Meet The Robinsons, in spite of its merits. Heck, 2007 was not overly kind to it. Critical reception was lukewarm, and its box office intake was substantially weaker than that of Chicken Little (a film that, while it outgrossed most of their recent 2D output, didn't meet Disney's expectations as a Pixar killer). On the plus side, it didn't amass anywhere near the level of disdain that its predecessor did, but then my mind inevitably goes to that immortal line from The Picture of Dorian Gray: "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." As it stands, Meet The Robinsons is one of those Disney films with something of a non-reputation, along with most of the package features, Fantasia 2000 and my dear sweet Oliver & Company. People rarely acknowledge its existence at all - not least Disney themselves, who didn't even include the film as part of a retrospective in the closing credits of their 2023 feature Wish. It sort of fell through the cracks where zeitgeist was concerned. I'm sure I wasn't the only person experiencing Disney fatigue at the time. Maybe people were reluctant to embrace Disney's new direction, particularly after Chicken Little. Maybe the glut of CG animated product across the decade meant that the technique's novelty was waning and that audiences were getting choosier about which features they gave their money to. Or maybe the marketing was simply too cluttered (that girl from the science fair who is a blatant bootleg of Wednesday Addams isn't a major character or one of the Robinsons, so what was she doing on the poster?), too confusing or else just too unimaginative.

This particular piece of marketing was inspired though.

It's important to keep in mind that Meet The Robinsons represented something of a learning curve for Disney. They were adjusting to the process of computer animation and trying to find a new identity post-Renaissance, and were lagging behind some of their contemporaries in both regards. Tonally and aesthetically, Meet The Robinsons is a lot less sophisticated than Pixar's Ratatouille; when you compare the two, it's a little startling to contemplate that they even came out within the same year, Pixar's film is so many leaps and bounds ahead. I doubt it would be at all controversial if I called Meet The Robinsons the worst-looking of the three major Joyce adaptations. It is a rough, rough little picture. But it's also the Joyce adaptation for which I feel the greatest personal affection. It's a film about finding the value in imperfection, a point it makes so convincingly that its lack of polish becomes a part of its appeal. 

What is A Day with Wilbur Robinson about? 

A Day with Wilbur Robinson is narrated in the first-person, from the perspective of an unnamed child who goes to spend a day (and a night) at the house of his friend Wilbur Robinson. He is greeted at the door by Wilbur and the family's butler Lefty (an octopus), and taken out into the garden, where they encounter Wilbur's parents scanning the lawn with a matter detector, helped by their robot assistant Carl. Mr Robinson explains that they are searching for Grandfather's false teeth, which have gone missing...and, come to think of it, they're not too sure where Grandfather is either. The narrator and Wilbur join in the search, exploring the vast, slightly surreal halls of the Robinson abode and encountering eccentric relative after eccentric relative. Aunt Billie plays with life-sized trains, Cousin Pete keeps pet tigers, Uncle Judlow uses a brain augmentor to boost his thought processes, Cousin Laszlo floats around by means of an anti-gravity device, Uncle Art travels in a flying saucer, etc. Eventually Grandfather is located in his science lab, training his band of musically-inclined frogs with the help of his friends, Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, but the whereabouts of his teeth remain a mystery. Come evening the family sits down to each a spaghetti dinner, with Uncle Gaston, the cannon enthusiast, firing meatballs out of his miniature cannon. Soon after, Grandfather's false teeth are located in the mouth of one of the frogs. The family celebrate with a pillow fight, before Uncle Art regales them with stories of his adventures in outer space, and the frogs serenade them to sleep with violins. The following morning, the narrator bids the Robinsons farewell and goes his own way. Looking back over his shoulder, he sees Wilbur shooting himself out of Uncle Gaston's cannon, holding up a sign that reads: "See Ya Later, Pal."

The story is related in a comically deadpan fashion, with the Robinsons' eccentricities often understated within the text. For example, Billie is simply described as "playing with her train set" and Pete as "walking the cats", with the illustrations filling in the more unusual details of the trains being life-sized and the cats in question being tigers. Lefty, likewise, is not identified as an octopus, and when Art arrives in his flying saucer, we are told that he has come in from abroad. Uncles Spike and Dmitri, who first greet the narrator at the door, are actually hiding out in a couple of plant pots, a detail the narrator similarly takes in his stride.

 

How much of this is in Meet The Robinsons? 

Meet The Robinsons is a more faithful adaptation of its source book than is Epic of The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs...in the sense that it's actually about the same characters that were in the book. A bunch of them, at any rate. One member of the Robinson clan who is conspicuously absent from Disney's take is Mr Robinson - he's been replaced by another character, for the sake of accommodating a brand new plot twist. Also excised are Uncle Pete and his tigers (what? why wouldn't you want to include the tigers?) and Uncle Judlow and his brain augmentor. Wilbur's older sisters, Tallulah and Blanche, have been combined into a single character, named Tallulah, who is now Wilbur's cousin (the new plot twist becomes a whole lot simpler if Wilbur is an only child). Some new additions include Uncle Fritz and Aunt Petunia (the latter of whom is actually a puppet operated by the former), Uncle Joe, who never leaves his easy chair and gets no discernible dialogue, and Wilbur's grandmother Lucille. Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong do not appear.

It's probably fair to say that the film plays homage to the book more than it does outright adapt it, with certain details being implemented as quick nods to Joyce's creation before moving swiftly along. For example, the search for Grandfather Robinson's teeth still occupies a chunk of the middle act, and is resolved in the same manner, with the teeth showing up in one of the singing frogs (trained by Mrs Robinson in this version), but is here a minor distraction rather than a major plot motivator. A Day with Wilbur Robinson is not a rousing adventure story like The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs, but a slice of life yarn about a remarkable family who do not see themselves as so remarkable, and who enjoy spending time together. It has no villain and the main source of conflict (those misplaced teeth) is a totally benign one. In expanding it to feature length, the nature of Joyce's story has been changed fundamentally, transforming it into an altogether busier narrative about time travel and space age technology, with the Robinson family being recontextualised as a futuristic family from the year 2037 (a year that, eep, doesn't seem anywhere near as distant now as it did back in 2007). We thus get an implicit explanation for the family's singularities - they are simply from another time, and what's normal to them would naturally bamboozle someone from the dawn of the century.

Something Meet The Robinsons is not able to carry across is the big running gag of Joyce's book, where Wilbur will intermittently acknowledge that the narrator has happened to stop by on an unusually boring day at the Robinson household, sparking the reader's imagination as to what life for this family could possibly look like on an exciting day. Lewis's reactions are also a lot less deadpan; in the book, it was clear that the narrator was a regular guest at the Robinson abode, and as such was unfazed by what he found within, but his film counterpart is required to find it freaky and unfamiliar. Hence, he's terrified to be greeted by Lefty at the door, and he explicitly questions if Billie's trains are really toys. In an illuminating interview with Slash Film, Joyce admitted that he missed this aspect in Disney's film, noting that in his story it was a matter of, "this is how they live, this is what they do. They were much more like the family in "The Philadelphia Story," Katharine Hepburn's family. Just breezy and sophisticated and unflappable. And the Robinsons in the animated film are a little more goofy." The script still is, nevertheless, able to slip in the odd concession to the idea that the Robinsons don't perceive themselves as being terribly strange. The film's equivalent of the spaghetti dinner sequence (where Gaston still fires meatballs from his cannon, only here it plays out as a pastiche of the chopsocky cinema that Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill had recently brought into the mainstream), is followed by Lewis asking Art if dinners with the Robinsons are always like this. Art calmly responds, "No, yesterday we had meatloaf." 

 

So what is Meet The Robinsons about?

Meet The Robinsons tells the story of Lewis (Hansen/Fry), a twelve-year-old orphan who as a baby was abandoned by his mother on the steps of a children's home (a moody opening sequence that recalls the low-key sombreness of the similarly orphaned Penny in the prelude to The Rescuers). Precocious and with a flair for devising radical (albeit malfunctioning) inventions, Lewis has a hard time endearing himself to potential adoptive parents, and believes that his only hope of finding a family would be to locate and reconnect with his biological mother. He comes up with his most ambitious creation to date, a machine that scans a subject's brain and extracts information from their subconscious memories, with the intention of using it to remember what his mother looked like. While presenting the invention at his school's science fair, he is approached my a mysterious boy named Wilbur Robinson (Wesley Singerman), who claims to have waltzed in from the future to warn him of an impending ambush from a sinister figure identified as the "Bowler Hat Guy" (director Steve Anderson). When Lewis's memory scanner spectacularly malfunctions (owing to the covert interventions of the Bowler Hat Guy), Lewis loses all confidence in himself, but is enticed by Wilbur into taking a trip in a time machine to the year 2037, so he can prove that he is who he says he is and convince Lewis to return to the fair and fix his scanner. Lewis, though, is far less interested in Wilbur's agenda than he is in using the time machine to head to the past and intervene in his mother's abandonment of him; they get into an argument and break the time machine, leaving Lewis stranded in the future, where he has little choice but to acclimatise to life with Wilbur's oddball family while endeavouring to repair the machine. In the meantime, the Bowler Hat Guy has followed them into the future, intending to abduct Lewis and find out how the memory scanner works so that he might pass the invention off as his own.

It is revealing that the film's middle act, which is the part that's most like Joyce's book, ends up being its weakest. Anderson was clearly nowhere near as invested in bringing Joyce's characters to the screen as he was in telling the new story that had been crafted around Lewis, chiefly because it was Anderson's story, more or less. Growing up as an adopted child, Anderson had eagerly awaited the day he turned 18, so that he could access his birth records and discover who his biological family were. Then, when he'd reached his mid-20s, it crossed his mind that he'd never gotten round to it, and he reflected on what had changed his priorities. In part, it was because he was happy with the family he had, but also because he was now more focussed on where he was going than where he had come from, and the future we was building at Disney animation. I do not know if Anderson ever did look up the details of his birth parents or make contact with them, but it hadn't proved as integral to his sense of identity or belonging as he'd long assumed. Lewis's journey to that same realisation feels authentic and heartfelt, since there clearly was a passion and conviction behind it stemming from Anderson's experience. By contrast, the movie comes to a near-total standstill when we get to the part where we're obligated to spend time with the Robinsons. It becomes no longer a matter of hanging out with the Robinsons for the joy of hanging out's sake, but an awkward road stop in between a story that feels bigger and more urgent. It doesn't help that the majority of the household are narrative dead weight. As a collective, they might embody the lively, jostling family atmosphere that's missing in Lewis's life, but the only ones who really matter, in story terms, are Wilbur, Mrs Robinson, the grandparents and Carl the robot.

The film's most successful character is the one who was apparently the greatest source of contention when Lasseter entered the picture, which is the Bowler Hat Guy. Lasseter thought him too much of a wimp to convince as the antagonist, and suggested making him a more serious threat. Anderson was resistant to the idea, but a compromise was eventually reached whereby the hat itself (artificially intelligent and named Doris) was revealed to be the nefarious brains behind the operation, with Bowler Hat Guy becoming more of a comic foil. He remains a very non-traditional Disney villain, with a lot more of Team Rocket in him than Jafar or Lady Tremaine. The most comparable rogue in Disney's own gallery would be Edgar from The Aristocats, a character who always felt weirdly shoehorned into the part. I suppose I can't blame Lasseter for having misgivings about any villain who might seem redolent of Edgar. And yet, Bowler Hat Guys works rather wonderfully, compensating for what he lacks in genuine menace with exquisite comic timing (Jim Carrey was at one point attached to the role but pulled out to star in Joel Schmaucher's The Number 23, leaving Anderson himself to fill in with a quasi-Carrey impression that still delivers) and a meaningful thematic backbone. The decision made late in the game that really holds the final character together, more so than making him the minion of a robotic hat, was to make him the future adult version of Mike "Goob" Yagoobian, Lewis's sleep-deprived roommate (voiced in his child form by Matthew Josten), originally scripted as an entirely separate character. As a twist, it's frankly both a bit of a cheat (since Bowler Hat Guy bears not even the vaguest physical resemblance to Goob) and a little too transparent (it's clearly telegraphed in a scene where Bowler Hat Guy and Goob encounter one another, and the former seems inordinately invested in the latter). But it works. I totally buy into it. I can't even fathom how the story was ever supposed to get by without it.

Goob's motivation for turning to villainy is a deliberately silly one, but also poignant and a little startling. An avid young baseball player who was kept awake one night too many by Lewis's tireless inventing, his drowsiness caused him to miss a catch and cost his team an important game. For this he bore a grudge against Lewis that eventually consumed him, leaving him so bitter and angry that he drove away all prospective friends and adopters. It is a dark parallel to the story's other major revelation, that the adult Lewis (Tom Selleck) is none other than the Robinson patriarch (hence the excision of the book's Mr Robinson), now a world-renowned inventor living in a future that represents the best he can possibly be. His path to success was strewn with innumerable mistakes, but each mistake was an opportunity for learning, and each played a vital role into shaping him into the person he has become. The tension between the past and the future is embodied in the conflict between Goob and the Robinsons. Goob, who aspires to get revenge on Lewis by sabotaging his future and becoming a famous inventor in his place, has remained permanently frozen in that moment of childhood failure, emotionally stunted and fixated on lost opportunities, to the point that he has squandered his own future. Rather than learning or growing from his personal setback, he has allowed that setback to define him. He is, for all intents and purposes, a small child inhabiting a gangly adult body (to the extent that he still wears the young Goob's baseball uniform under his black garments), and he serves as a living rebuttal to Lewis's assumption that his salvation lies within the past. Lewis's desire to go back in time and prevent his mother from abandoning him is rooted in the perception that the trajectory he's been on since has been one of non-stop failure, and that his only remedy is to hit the reset button and reclaim the life he feels should have been his. Like Goob, he finds a false refuge in the past, and in the idea of correcting historic wrongs that inhibits his ability to embrace the challenges that could move him to more positive pastures. His former friend, now twisted and malformed beyond all recognition, becomes a grotesque, cautionary reflection of Lewis's skewed priorities, and of the other path he could potentially take if he does not take advantage of what is in front of him - one defined by bitterness and regret.

The nefarious hat Doris, meanwhile, becomes a clever metaphor for Lewis's self-doubt and how it threatens to destroy the many good things he still has every chance of creating if he perseveres. An embodiment of his personal failings, she is a creation of his that did not run according to plan; having taken on a life and a will of her own, she has returned to haunt him, seeking to disrupt his future by eliminating his self-confidence (unlike Goob she has greater ambitions in doing so than mere vengeance). Throughout the film, there is a running theme whereby hats are associated with the suppression of identity - during the portion where Lewis is accommodated by the Robinsons, Wilbur gets him to conceal his distinctive spiky hair by donning varying headgear, so the rest of the family doesn't cotton on to who he really is. Doris is likewise a consumer of selfhood, latching onto Goob because of his low self-worth and subsuming his identity, so that he becomes outwardly recognised as the Bowler Hat Guy. As an offensive weapon, she attacks her victims from the head down, scrambling their thought processes and causing them to lose their sense of purpose. Goob uses a smaller version of the hat (dubbed "Little Doris") to mind control animals into doing his bidding (first one of Mrs Robinson's frogs and then a T Rex), before an entire legion of hats in Doris's likeness are unleashed during the climax and enslave humanity, in a corrupted timeline where Lewis was never able to realise his dreams. Doris recreates this alternate dystopian future in her own image, with hat-shaped monuments dominating the darkened landscape as omnipresent symbols of his crushed potential. Lewis ultimately defeats Doris by asserting his ownership of her, vowing to her that he will never create her and thus willing her out of existence. He overcomes the adversity she presents with the realisation that his self-doubt is his own creation, and that he can take charge of it by not giving it the final say. The resolution is a straightforward triumph of positive thinking over negative thinking, with Goob coming to understand that his mistake was in believing that the latter would protect him. "Doris...I thought she was my friend", he murmurs sadly, echoing the misguided teachings he had earlier dispensed to his younger self, in advising him to let hate be his ally. 

The moral of Meet The Robinsons might be "keep moving forward", with the past being regarded potentially destructive to anyone too fixated on it, but it also presents something of a paradox (one that those inclined to interpret it as an allegory for the demise of traditional animation might want to keep in mind), in that it is a profoundly nostalgic film. Its approach to that all-important future can be described as very backwards-looking and yearnful. The Robinsons are a decidedly old-fashioned futuristic family, the 2037 they inhabit being informed by the kinds of mid-20th century futurist visions that gave us The Jetsons and, more pertinently, the Disney parks' Tomorrowland and Walt's blueprints for Epcot at Walt Disney World. (This is the sense in which Meet The Robinsons is most characteristically a Disney film - its vision of a utopian community is essentially Disneyland, and not light on corporate propaganda.) It may well have been factor in why the film didn't set the world alight upon release, as its relentlessly cheerful, euphoric depictions of the future* might have seemed a notch too quaint to resonate with where we were at in 2007. But then Meet The Robinsons is nothing if not a deeply personal story, and its futuristic visions best appreciated as a reflection of its protagonist's journey, and his progression from forlornness to genuinely relishing where his own potential could take him.

* (The Robinsons' future is optimistic...to a point. It seems that the Canucks have gotten rather a raw deal in 2037, with the country formerly known as Canada now being the US state of North Montana. I'm not sure that I want to know what happened there.) 

How much of the spirit of Joyce's book is retained in Meet The Robinsons?

If Meet The Robinsons is about the tension between past and future, what could have been versus what could be, then A Day with Wilbur Robinson is more concerned with the present moment. It is a book with a distinctly Carpe diem philosophy. The only point in which the future is anticipated is in the closing illustration, where Wilbur bids his friend farewell by holding up the sign: "See Ya Later, Pal." In the context of the book, this affirms that the narrator will return to the Robinson abode and that many more wonderful days with Wilbur Robinson lie ahead. It is also an implicit invitation to the reader to return to the book and to relive the adventure at a later date. The film plays homage to this illustration toward the end, when Wilbur returns Lewis to the year 2007 and bids him farewell by writing "See Ya Later Dad" in the clouds with the time machine. The nature of the relationship has obviously changed, and so has the meaning behind the message. Wilbur promises Lewis that they will meet again, but when they do it will not be as straightforward as simply popping round to a best friend's house for a fun-filled day. In order to reunite with Wilbur, Lewis will have to go through the whole process of growing up, courting the future Mrs Robinson, siring Wilbur and raising him as a child. The Robinsons might represent the end goal, but the real adventure, as Lewis is about to discover, is in the getting there.

On the film's Blu ray commentary, Anderson mentions that Rob Thomas wrote the theme song, "Little Wonders", without having seen the film, and that it was instead informed by the content of Joyce's book. He comments on how remarkable it was that the song opens with the lyrics, "Let it go", which just so perfectly happened to tie in with one of the film's major themes (obviously this commentary was recorded years before a certain other Disney picture completely commandeered the phrase "Let it go" in popular consciousness). Lewis's big moment of letting go, in the film, arrives when he is taken by Wilbur to the point in time where his mother abandoned him, so that he might have the chance to intervene, or at least to gain some understanding of the woman who has long been such a source of fascination to him. To Wilbur's surprise, Lewis approaches her but holds back and avoids interaction. Instead, he confirms his allegiance to his life he has been leading by knocking on the orphanage door and allowing it to play out on its current course (in the opening sequence we'd likely assumed that it was his mother who did the knocking, but it transpires to be the time-travelling Lewis). His closure comes in the realisation that he can leave the question of where he came from unanswered and still have a firm sense of his place in the world. As he tells Wilbur, he already has a family in the Robinsons. Of course, "let it go" is a phrase that can be taken both ways, and on the surface the film's forward-looking approach could be seen as somewhat contrary to the Carpe diem values of the book - in order to make the most of the present moment, the ability to let go of the future can be as valuable as letting go of the past. Yet this is the lesson Lewis that ultimately learns - how to cope with the unknown and to utilise what's on his immediate horizon. Crucially, although his trip to 2037 has given him reassurance of his potential, it does not give him reassurance of certainty. His future with the Robinsons is only a possible future, and nothing is guaranteed him. His adult self is clear that in order to become him, he will have to make the right choices in life. Indeed, the real thrill comes in not knowing exactly what lies ahead, and having a blank slate upon which to make all of the vital discoveries for yourself. This much is also suggested to Lewis by the adult Goob in his final appearance. Lewis requests that the Robinsons forgive Goob and allow him to join the family, but Goob chooses to go his own way before the offer can be extended to him. He leaves Lewis the unicorn filofax in which he was previously seen filling out his checklist of villainous deeds. The old checklist has been scribbled out, and beneath it he has supplied a new checkbox, beside a question mark.

The film ends with Lewis returning to the present day, where he does indeed seem to be making all of the right choices that will get him onto that more auspicious path. He heads back to the science fair, where his newly-restored brain scanner proves a smashing success, attracting the attentions of two prospective adopters who are revealed to be the middle-aged Robinson grandparents. Naturally, they hit it off with Lewis, and before long he's moving out of the orphanage and into his brand new home. He also remembers to attend the young Goob's baseball game and to wake him up at the critical moment, enabling him to make the catch and giving him the possibility of a brighter future. The final shot shows Lewis hard at work at his inventor's desk, enthusiastically sketching out new ideas (including a prototypical Carl), the crumpled bits of paper all around him indicators of the failures that are an inevitable part of the learning process.

Popular perception - if it acknowledges the film at all - has judged Meet The Robinsons as one such failure on Disney's own journey back into relevance, at a time when it was making numerous false or at least questionable new starts. Chicken Little had suggested a bleak, bleak future for Disney (seriously, I would consider Doris's dystopian future over whatever further horrors we might have gotten in a timeline where that abomination had grossed as much as Finding Nemo), while Bolt pointed to future that was safe, sanitised and frightfully derivative. The Princess and The Frog (2009) gave us a tantalising glimpse into the best future of all, one in which an undervalued art form was given a brand new lease of life, but sadly it was not to be. It was only with Tangled (2010), followed by Wreck It Ralph (2012) that Disney settled into the groove that would work for them for a while, a re-embracing of their traditional fairy tale formula (Frozen, Moana) alternated with attempts at trendier modern stories (Big Hero 6, Zootopia). Maybe Meet The Robinsons was always a little too singular and unconventional to have represented a viable future for Disney. It's a picture that feels perpetually out of time. But it certainly is a joy to experience in the moment. 

TACtics: Beach Road (Give Me Back My Boy)

 

I will hand it to "Beach Road". Airing in 1990, this was one of TAC's earliest television campaigns (following the same faux documentary style as "Girlfriend" before it), but I'm not sure if they've produced another since that's quite this distressingly painful to sit through. It wouldn't be overstating to call it 60 seconds of pure protracted anguish, leading to a point of total despair. If "Girlfriend" set out to Upset, Outrage and Appal, then "Beach Road" really took it to the next level, with the mission to Depress, Sicken and Overwhelm. Like "Girlfriend" it gives us a gritty, fly on the wall perspective of the aftermath of an accident, as paramedics endeavour to revive an unresponsive child knocked down by a vehicle on what I presume to be the titular road in Melbourne. There's an outpouring of emotion from all sides, the messiness of the situation neatly encapsulated by the rapid intercutting between the various parties - the victim's mother, the driver, a woman assumed to be the partner of the driver - while the authorities attempt to get a handle on how this happened (spoiler: the driver was doing 90 km/h in a 60 zone). The narrative set-up and trajectory is a little similar to the Drinking & Driving Wrecks Lives piece "Eyes", but with a rawer presentation that immerses us more aggressively in the midst of the turmoil. 

As with "Girlfriend", we're guided through this grim scenario by a medical professional who is clearly no stranger to the devastation reckless driving can cause. Identified on screen as Paul Thresher, Ambulance Officer MICA, he acts as our narrator and emotional grounding, speaking with an authority that injects reason into the disarray. He clearly explains how the calamity is the logical outcome of going too fast, hitting harder and causing more damage. It's an element that later TAC installments would ditch altogether, as seen in the subsequent anti-speed piece "Tracy"; before long, we'd be on our own, without so firm and dependable a voice to help us navigate the unrelenting trauma, as TAC sought out a more immersive experience still. "Girlfriend", "Beach Road" and "Tracy" all take place in the aftermath of an accident, and were designed to give us front-row seats of the unbearable emotional fall-out that accompanies such a dire turn of events. Though we approach each situation from the perspective of an onlooker who's stumbled onto the scene after the fact, the intimacy of the shots gives us the sensation of being right there in the firing line with those directly impacted - we feel at once the urgency of the first responders, the desperation of the perpetrators, the despair of the victims' loved ones (often the perpetrators and loved ones were one and the same, although not in the case of "Beach Road"). While the emotional fall-out remained an integral component of the TAC formula going forward, later ads would shift attentions to the spectacle of the crash itself, giving us some impression of what it was like to be inside the doomed vehicle and to witness the moment that things flipped from banal to baleful. Consistently, the strategy was to capture the shocking point at which reality bit and the full magnitude of what had occurred was left to sink in. For as unrefined as the formula is in "Beach Road", it's here that you can really feel those fangs beginning to sharpen, with it going to the kind of harrowing territory that "Girlfriend" merely hinted at. Whereas "Girlfriend" (and, arguably, "Tracy") leave us with some ambiguity as to the final condition of the injured party, "Beach Road" offers no sliver of hope, and no prospect of redemption. The child is declared dead, and we end with a full-on descent into the weeping and gnashing of teeth of the mother and driver alike. One is in hysterical denial, the other more silently broken.

What "Beach Road" emphasises, more bitterly than "Girlfriend" before it, is the irrecoverableness of the matter, the precise moment its inhabitants cross over into the point of no return. The driver's attempts to deflect responsibility by insisting that the traffic around him was doing 80 km/h are juxtaposed with the paramedics' efforts to revive the boy; both prove equally futile. The tragedy of such a young life being cut so mercilessly short is matched only by the realisation that, for the mother and driver, the gruelling road is only just beginning. Compared to the ridiculous boyfriend figure in "Girlfriend", the driver here is treated as a worthier subject of empathy, with a more hauntingly subdued treatment given to his final display of remorse (though his kitschy fashion sense is admittedly a curious touch). The intercutting of his silent breakdown with the devastated outbursts of the mother is an affecting contrast, showing them as sufferers in a mutual yet wildly disparate despair. Each is left in a position of intense loneliness. The mother has had her kin cruelly taken from her. I believe the woman who challenges the driver about doing 90 to be his partner, since she's as overdressed as him and can be glimpsed standing beside him in other shots, yet she is notably absent in that final shot, offering him nothing in the way of solidarity or comfort. Paul's damning condemnation that he has to live with the guilt for the rest of his life is alone his cross to bear, even if he's not the only one having to live with the repercussions.

As the ad nears its end, Paul delivers the tagline, "Don't fool yourself, speed kills", words not half as iconic as the "bloody idiot" tagline of "Girlfriend", but as blunt and effective as they need to be, implicating the viewer as complicit in the accident for their own reluctance to acknowledge the potentially serious consequences of the action. The last, most unsettling word, however, goes to the bereaved mother, screaming "Give me back my boy!" as we fade to black. Her demand is naturally beyond anybody's power to fulfil, but the rawness and the passion of her grief cannot be denied her, forming the bottom line on the entire matter. She screams this not to the driver or to the paramedics, but simply into the void, as she's drowned along with the driver in that final sorrowful engulfment. The time when anybody could have made a difference to how the scenario turned out has passed and will not return. All that's left now is the stifling embrace of eternity.

TACtics: Bush Telegraph (He Was Just Here...)

 

"Bush Telegraph" from 1996 might be one of the best and most hard-hitting films ever produced by the Transport Accident Commission, but anyone venturing into it should know that it commits an egregious and practically unheard-of sin in the sphere of road safety campaigning - it incorporates an implied dog death. Seriously, how many times can we say we've seen that happen? When it comes to public information films and public service announcements, the ones that entail animal misfortune tend to be those PIFs and PSAs pertaining specifically to animal issues. Warnings on the perils of drink driving and speeding seldom cast our four-legged friends as incidental victims, as it would likely be seen as a step too far. Under the right circumstances, you might be able to justify killing a child for emotive impact, but it's hard to imagine the death of a dog being perceived as anything other than totally gratuitous. When dogs do show up in road safety films, they tend to play one of two roles. Often they're the catalysts for disaster, the element of unpredictability that throws everything else off - a loose dog might run in front of a speeding vehicle, causing the driver to swerve and lose control, or a child might run into the road in pursuit of their dog. Or else they're representative of the bereaved. A dog sniffing forlornly at the body of its lifeless master can make an effective shorthand for our unhappy aftermath, and is usually a less heavy-handed visual than a crying child. The dog in "Bush Telegraph" is one of the rare canine participants who's forced to share in the fate of its human owners, who think unfortunately little about getting behind the wheel after one too many. Is it gratuitous? In a narrative sense, yes. The dog doesn't add anything in terms of plot progression and could very easily have been jettisoned. What the dog does allow for is a small touch of atmospheric uncanniness; if you listen closely, just moments before things take their inevitable turn for the catastrophic, you can hear it barking. It knew what was going to happen and was trying to warn them, but to no avail. A good boy let down by bloody idiot owners.

The dog isn't the only passenger to tragically perish along with the driver. He also takes his teenaged son with him, a development that's less gratuitous and more the logical outcome of his having inducted his son into a culture with an explicitly lax attitude toward drink driving. "Bush Telegraph" pivots on a similar theme to that of TAC's earlier "Tracy", and the UK PIF "Mates", in underscoring the damning contradictions of a professed friendship where one party so wilfully endangers the other with their reckless driving, but broadens it to be not merely a problem stemming from the choices of the individual, but the mindset of the wider community. Here, there are multiple failures of responsibility. The title of the short alludes to the way in which this particular group of associates communicates and looks out for one another, calling to advise when there are "booze buses" (sobriety checkpoints) in the vicinity, but actively encouraging each other to crack open that extra can of beer before hitting the road. The camaraderie that offers ostensible protection against meddling authorities is shown to be deeply treacherous, its solidarity extending in the wrong direction. "Bush" goes a step further than either "Tracy" or "Mates", so that the irresponsible friend doesn't even have to get behind the wheel with his chum to seal his fate - the fallacious assertion that he's been drink driving for years and nothing's ever happened to him, therefore it's no big deal, is more than enough. Meanwhile, the doomed driver's teenaged son is not yet old enough to participate in the drinking itself, but he is already complicit in the surrounding culture. He's the one who receives the call from Billy warning them of the booze bus on patrol and helps in passing the message on to his father. Later, as he and his father pass the checkpoint and observe that Billy, of all people, looks to have been pulled over, they share a hearty giggle at the irony. Although the son conveys some misgivings about his father's condition as they set out on their drive, he's absorbed the group's core value that the humiliation and inconvenience of getting caught out by a checkpoint is your biggest concerns when it comes to drink driving, and that so long as you can bypass those pesky booze buses then it's all hunky-dory. So when his father's impaired judgement causes them to advance into the path of a hulking great tanker and get jointly flattened (along with that poor dog who saw it coming), it's the terrible culmination of the multiple ways in which he's failed in his duties as a parent - firstly by putting his son in the immediate danger of being the passenger of a drink driver, and secondly by instilling in him the sense of communal negligence that's led him so lethally astray. The shared demise of father and son illustrates how the fate of one generation is bound to the choices of the generation before it, with both being steered in the same perilous direction.

The crash in "Bush Telegraph" is one of TAC's most impressive, right up there with that seen at the end of "Nightshift" - it's abrupt, it's brutal and it makes it painfully clear, without showing any actual gore, that the occupants of the crumpled vehicle would in all likelihood not have survived. The short is, in general, a textbook example of TAC's three-act formula at work - we have the nondescript build-up representing the calm before the storm, the eye-popping incident that causes everything to change, and finally the bleak aftermath in which those still standing struggle to come to terms with this cruel twist of fate. In this case, the lull immediately preceding the collision seems almost eerily tranquil, a vacant space filled by only the muted sounds of the dog barking and a couple of kids crossing with a bike in the foreground. It's an uncomfortable stillness, accentuating our anticipation of the impending calamity. We (like that unfortunate dog) know exactly what kind of situation we're headed for - that much has been thoroughly telegraphed by the preceding dialogue - but the questions of when, where and what form that destruction will take hang queasily in the balance. Even with our level of foresight, odds are that we (like the driver) didn't see that tanker coming until it was directly upon them.

The post-accident denouements are where TAC campaigns tend to be most prone to excesses, although "Bush Telegraph" is one of their more restrained specimens, and very much to its credit. There are even traces of the sardonicism that characterised some of the later Drinking & Driving Wrecks Lives installments, notably "Pudding" and "In The Summertime", in how the culture of heedless consumption depicted is ironically juxtaposed with its devastating consequences. The short ends with a return to the two friends who'd sent the driver on his way with that fateful one for the road, and a second telephone call, this one carrying news of a very different nature. The friend who answers initially responds with disbelief, before dissolving into a sober silence. Over his shoulder we see the alcoholic indulgence continue, with the other friend casually swigging at his own can, finally lowering it when it becomes apparent that something is desperately wrong. A woman (possibly the wife of one of the two, or else a client they're doing building work for) wanders into view with a fresh supply of beer, and delivers the ad punchline, buoyantly advising them to "Drink up!", in a bitterly inadvertent toast to the ruination their overconsumption has brought. Then she too catches wind of the fact that this isn't the time, and the entire scene sinks into sombreness, the carousing atmosphere abruptly voided. The call's recipient turns to face them, and the ad fades to black before he's able to deliver the harrowing message. We sense that the darkness might have set in on their social circle for quite some time. 

What's equally haunting about that closing sequence is the way the recipient initially ingests the news, insisting that, "He was a just here a few s...", as if trying to negotiate with some higher power as to why his friend couldn't possibly have departed so suddenly. Alas, there is no quibbling with it. As TAC are so adept at illustrating, the barrier between being and non-being really is that flimsy.

The Ultimate Penny Kid Appreciation Post (aka My Bloodlines Go A Long Way)

 

The summer of 2025 was made infinitely more palatable for the presence of a snot-nosed little gremlin who helped unleash a nightmare at 600 feet and firmly won my heart in the process. And all he did was throw a coin at an inopportune moment, race down a flight of stairs, knocking aside a grown man on the way, and finally get flattened by a falling piano. Such is the morbid lot of a character in a Final Destination premonition. That's my boy Alfred the Penny Kid. Lived in splendour, died in chaos. 

What stayed with me most about Final Destination Bloodlines were the characters. Sure, like everyone else who goes to see a Final Destination installment I was primarily there for the gruesomely creative kills, but the characters are what made the experience. Having a bunch of figures we can feel genuinely invested in before their inevitable reduction to human passata is what elevates macabre pleasure into super macabre pleasure. We had some grisly kicks and we made (then lost) a few friends on the way. Of the central cast, I know that everybody loves Richard Harmon's Erik (it seems like they pulled out every last stop to make him the fan favourite), and Owen Patrick Joyner's Bobby (a jock who's a soft-hearted turtle daddy is an appealing combination), but the player who particularly stood out to me was Rya Kihlstedt as Darlene (to the extent that I'm actually kind of regretting how I bad mouthed Home Alone 3 at the end of my review of Bushwhacked last year). Nonetheless, for as much fun as it was following Stefani's family and their fight to stay a part of this mortal coil while on the big D's hit list, for me their story never quite scaled the same glorious heights as the movie's prologue, in which we bore witness to the messy downfall of one of the most hubristic buildings known to Man. The Skyview's disintegration was quite the lurid spectacle, as grand and as ghastly an opening disaster as this franchise has ever executed, but once again it was the characters who really stuck with you. Yes, even the minor ones who were just there to be fodder for the crumbling rubble. They too were such a colourful and distinctive bunch - not least the older and bolder of the two children unfortunate enough to be caught up in the misadventure. This kid, portrayed by Noah Bromley, had extremely minimal screentime all told, but as far as I'm concerned he's the Bloodlines MVP. We do know the character's real name (Alfred Milano), for reasons I'll get into later on, but the film's closing credits have him filed under the affectionate moniker "Sky View Penny Kid". "Penny Kid" is how directors Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky also refer to him in the Blu-Ray commentary, so that's the name I'll be predominantly using here. (Also, if you haven't seen Final Destination Bloodlines, know that there will be spoilers.)

I love the Penny Kid (to death), and I dug every scant second he spent on screen. But I get the impression that I'm something of an anomaly in that regard, and it vexes me so. In the aftermath of Bloodlines' release, I was a little taken back by how much animosity I saw for this child on certain online venues. I mean, I understand it to a point. Not everyone's going to feel so warmly-disposed toward a character who played such a vital role in a chain reaction that doomed numerous people. It was an accident, but one born of churlish disregard. Compared to the other child (Jayden Oniah) who shows up in the Skyview and sits there innocently toying with a model train (innocently, but unwittingly foreshadowing how this whole story will eventually end), Penny Kid is really not in the business of endearing himself to onlookers with any winsome wholesomeness. Rather, he represents the darker side of childhood, the amorality mixed with the uninhibited idle energy and the resentment of adult authority. He doesn't set out to cause serious harm, but he's decidedly not an innocent. He immediately feels out of place amid all those unwary adults gathered at the venue, no matter how dressed up to the nines he is. Prologue protagonist Iris (Brec Bassinger), by far the most perceptive visitor at the Skyview, seems unnerved by him the instant she lays eyes on him - although it might not be the Penny Kid per se that unsettles her so much as the weapon of mass destruction he wields and insists on taking all the way to the top of the tower. In either case, there is a certain delectable irony in having the most insidious person on the scene the one we would ordinarily be inclined to perceive as the most harmless, as this franchise already understands. You might recall how, in Final Destination 2, Kimberly Corman was taunted by a child in an adjacent car who bashed two toy vehicles together with an eerie smile on his face that seemed to knowingly anticipate the impending pile-up. But Penny is the most joyously extreme example to date. (Here there is an additional significance to having our chilling omen of what's ahead be a child, which becomes more apparent by the end of the film.)

Penny Kid is not a character designed to procure sympathy. But he gets it from me anyway.

So what exactly is the kid's role in the prologue? He's present at the grand opening of the Skyview (a swanky observation tower/restaurant clearly modelled on the Seattle Space Needle) in 1968, and is first seen attempting to steal coins from the fountain at the bottom. A security guard catches him in the act and advises him that his sticky fingers will bring bad luck; Penny apologises, but keeps the change he's already pocketed. Shortly after, he boards the elevator and ascends to the top of the tower, alongside Iris and her partner Paul, played by Max Lloyd-Jones. (It should be noted that the elevator sequence is the only point in the prologue where Penny Kid is accompanied by his parents, a detail it's strangely easy to miss; at every other time we see him, he's been left unsupervised.) Iris, whose anxieties have been increasing the further she ventures into the building, is particularly ill at ease inside the elevator, which is visibly over capacity. Her reservations are not allayed by the commentary given by the elevator operator (Travis Turner), who cheerfully describes how construction of the Skyview was rushed to have it ready five months ahead of schedule (Iris: "Is that a good thing?"). Penny Kid picks up on Iris's fearfulness and teases her by jumping on the elevator floor. He's later seen on the observation deck where Paul proposes to Iris, pulling out the coins he collected earlier and releasing them down the side of the tower. As he prepares to throw the last of his coins, a penny, he's accosted by yet another security guard, who warns him that a penny thrown from a tower could turn into a lethal weapon. Penny Kid gives an ostensibly polite and compliant response, but calls the guard a "fat ass" under his breath and throws the coin anyway when his back is turned; Iris sees this and clearly has her misgivings, but turns a blind eye and follows her new fiance to the dancefloor for what they assume will be a night of celebration. Alas, the shoddily-constructed tower just wasn't made to withstand so many partygoers jumping up and down to Isley Brothers tunes, and eventually gives way. As for the dreaded penny, instead of falling to the ground and potentially getting embedded in someone's skull, it gets sucked into the building's ventilation system, eventually colliding with a pipe and causing a gas leak. One thing leads to another, a panicked guest gets set on fire from contact with a kitchen pan in the ensuing commotion, they get too close to the gas leak, then kaboom. Now the building's on fire, on top of everything else. As the guests make a mad dash for the stairway, Penny Kid climbs down from the observation deck and asserts his right to go first by means of the Birkenhead drill. Unfortunately, the stairs prove just as shoddy as everything else in the building, for as the stampede of feet starts to trample down them, they also give way, causing everyone upon them to fall to their deaths...all except the Penny Kid, who has the advantage of being both lighter than everyone else and at the front of the procession. He keeps going, and is eventually able to get out of the tower unharmed. Whereupon he's crushed by a piano falling from the flaming wreckage above and turned into, well, human passata. Atop that very piano was the penny he'd thrown earlier; its gruesome work accomplished, it slides back down into the fountain and resumes its place within the waters.

Of course, that's only the premonition, and it doesn't come to be outside of the head of visionary Iris, who proves a worthy adversary for Death. With her foresight and resourcefulness she's able to avert the disaster completely, first by getting hold of that infernal penny, then by covering the open flames in the kitchen area and finally by warning everyone that the building is disintegrating beneath their feet. They heed her words and are all able to go home safely that night. But if you've seen any of the prior installments, you already know how it goes. Death returns for Round 2, and works its way through its earmarked victims in the order in which they were originally intended to die. The twist in the case of Bloodlines is that we're not following the immediate survivors of the opening premonition, but the descendents of Iris and Paul. The former so excelled at saving lives that Death was faced with an unusually protracted list that took decades to work through, giving numerous survivors time to reproduce before their number came up. As per Death's procedures, any further descendents of unintended survivors are automatically added to the list, as they should never have existed in the first place. (This confused some viewers, who recalled that in Final Destination 2 it was put forth that the birthing of new life could have the opposite effect and invalidate a list entirely, but this was never actually confirmed.)

An anecdote I've seen repeated a lot from different commentators discussing Bloodlines is that the audience in their theatre cheered when Penny Kid met his demise beneath the piano. The thought of an entire auditorium of people cheering the pulverising of a child, even an unruly one, strikes me as a little harsh, but I get it. It was designed to be an uproarious moment (Stein and Lipovsky observe on the commentary that this is the moment that's gotten the "biggest reaction" in the screenings they've attended), in that it plays like something out of a live action cartoon. You can't quite believe your eyes the first time you see it - it's nasty, it's gleeful and of course it took serious balls (keep in mind that Tim Carpenter from Final Destination 2 was reportedly written as a much younger character, but aged up because nobody at the time wanted to involve kids in these splatter fests. I guess we as a society have moved on since then). It obviously works as a karmic death, since Penny is effectively done in by the very coin that he threw, which takes a prolonged time to work its way down, setting the piano into motion and finally crashing to the bottom just as he's leaving the building. I'm not going to shame you if you found his death funny, because on some level, I did too. I have, however, read a lot of reactions to Penny Kid that make me bristle. The most distasteful are along the lines of people claiming that they would punch Noah Bromley if they saw him walking down the street. I know it's just internet bravado speaking and most people probably wouldn't, but there's something very unsavoury about threatening to do physical harm to an actor because you don't like something their character did that becomes a thousand times worse when the actor in question is a child. Then there are those who'll suggest that he's the ancestor of some other detested character like Hunt or Carter. Not tsundere Carter from the original film. The bad, racist Carter from The Final Destination. How...dare you? (Also objectively false.) I've gotta say that I am perturbed by the number of people who are willing to lump him in with the likes of Carter, Isaac, Frankie, etc, as if being an obnoxious child is really on the same level as being a racist or a sex offender. Some folks will even go a step further and claim that he's the villain of the entire franchise, at which point I can practically feel the fissure spreading across my brain.

Hence why I feel obligated to make a post in which I outline why I love Penny Kid, what makes him such a fun and fascinating character, and why I think that much of the animosity he receives is just plain overblown. If I don't stick up for this littlest of guys, then I'm sensing nobody will.

The notion that Penny Kid is somehow the villain of the franchise seems to stem from two misconceptions - a) that Penny Kid is responsible for the entire Skyview disaster and b) that the other disasters in the preceding films are all connected to what went on at the Skyview. Neither is correct. Penny Kid didn't cause the entire disaster, as anyone who watched Bloodlines ought to know. The floor was already cracking before the chain reaction with the coin got underway. Because the tower itself was total shit, despite its beguilingly elegant appearance, and all the rushed construction and endless cut corners meant that it was unable to withstand anything too out of hand or unexpected. Penny Kid might have represented that element of wild unpredictability getting into the system, but he didn't corrupt said system so much as expose the terrible flaws that were already there. One way or another, that building was going down, and the hubris and irresponsibility of the officials behind it were ultimately more to blame than the disobedience of a child. He's also not responsible for the occurrences in the preceding films, with Lipovsky confirming that the Skyview disaster was not intended as an "origin story" for any of the other scenarios in the Final Destination series (it clears up much of the mystery surrounding a certain recurring character, but that's it). I'm also not sure why people are so convinced that Iris's '68 premonition and her subsequent cheating of Death would necessarily have been the first time that anything like this had ever happened in all of human history. Does it have anything to do with the trailer, which invited us to "Witness the birth of Death"? All marketing bluster. I recall that, prior to the film's release, there was speculation that all of the visionaries from the previous entries would be descendants or relatives of Iris, and that the ability to experience premonitions was genetic, but that turned out to be bogus. We still don't know where the premonitions come from.

Another point I'll make in Penny's defence is that there was, in my eyes, a grown adult in the disaster who behaved so much more odiously than him. The Maître d' (Bernard Cuffling) shoved Iris like a thug and doomed everyone inside the elevator. Whatever you might think of Penny, he has an intrinsic excuse in that he's only a child, but what's this guy's explanation? Yet he seems to have gotten off scot-free, at least in terms of online vitriol (in the film itself he gets messily bisected by the falling elevator). Don't call that justice.

It's important to establish that, while I've described him above as a chilling omen, Penny Kid is not The Omen. He isn't like Damien the Devil's spawn.^[1] There is nothing evil or supernaturally bad about him. Nor is he a scheming sociopath along the lines of Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone or The Good Son (you can take your pick). What he DOES remind me of, in the best possible way, are the bratty children from Charlie and The Chocolate Factory. You know how partial I am to those bad nuts. Like them, he's a caricature of childhood vices, exaggerated for effect but based on the honest observation that children aren't always doe-eyed cherubs who behave as adults desire. Often they are chaotic and lacking in boundaries. We've noted that Penny Kid seems eerily out of place at the adult party, but there's a way of looking at it that might even make him, if not quite sympathetic, then at least comprehensible. My guess is that he likely didn't want to be at the Skyview that evening. The celebration wasn't a family event, and it didn't exactly seem like a fun place for a child to hang out. The only other child present was a few years younger than him and tucked away at the back, so probably wouldn't be viable company. Penny was bored and frustrated, and decided to amuse himself by throwing coins from the tower. That that he's so isolated from others his age and forced awkwardly into an adult milieu marks him out as someone whose innocence has been corrupted too soon, something best exemplified in his use of adult language to combat the grown-ups he butts head with. Which also happens to be Penny's funniest trait - for me, his most uproarious moment came not in being crushed by a piano, but in his shocked reaction to Iris when last we see him, as she physically intervenes by prising the penny from his grasp, and he cries out, "WHAT the FUCK is WRONG with YOU?", with the quirkiest intonation. That line, and that delivery, is a great part of why the character holds such a special place in my heart. Stein and Lipovsky loved it too. I was delighted when they stopped their commentary just to listen to it, before confirming that the line in question was improvised by Bromley. That kid did a fabulous job in the role, and I'll look forward to seeing if he pops up anywhere else.

Penny is a wonderful throwback to the likes of Augustus, Veruca, Violet and Mike, right down to the fact that his childish rebelliousness ultimately brings to him to a sticky end. The bad nuts don't actually die in Charlie and The Chocolate Factory (except maybe in the stage musical), but they do receive gruesome comeuppances that, in most cases, entail some grotesque form of damage being dealt to their bodies, a concept Bloodlines takes to its extreme, in having Penny's body be wrecked beyond recognition. His story is a cautionary one that works on the same brutally visceral level as Roald Dahl's novel, in being all about consequences and the misfortune you'll potentially bring on yourself by venturing beyond your limits and not adhering to adult authority. Dahl's novel followed a fairytale logic, in which a wayward child might be transformed into a blueberry and dejuiced back to their original state (but for the detail of remaining blue). Bloodlines follows quite a different logic, that of the urban legend. The warning Penny is given by the second security guard, that he could kill someone by throwing a penny, is an old wives' tale. Throwing a penny from a tower is still an inconsiderate thing to do, because if it hit someone it would certainly hurt them, but the part about it plunging directly into their skull has no basis in fact. It's just something people tell us will happen, and might even have happened to an acquaintance of one of their own acquaintances, and which we too pass on, in spite of our healthy scepticism, because the narrative of such a small and childish act reaping such terrible consequences is too irresistible not to. Bloodlines takes the idea to demented new heights, so not only does Penny Kid beget his own demise by throwing the penny, it causes a whole lot of additional, gleefully improbable damage on its downward trajectory, sending an already nightmarish situation hurtling out of the frying pan and (literally) into the fire. His story is a lesson in the pitfalls of pushing back against authority; despite having assimilated too much of that adult culture for his own good, Penny really seems to dislike his elders. At best, he feigns politeness with the security guards, but insults one of them behind his back. He shoots a standoffish glance at Iris as she enters the elevator and teases her soon after. The saddest observation to be made about him is that he doesn't seem to have a particularly strong bond with his parents. Not only is he seen alone in most of his appearances, during the attempted evacuation he does not try to reunite with them. (It's also true that he ran off after the stairs gave way, grinning with elation at his own seeming good fortune, but was there anything he actually could have done to have assisted those on the other side of the gap?)

The spectre of the urban legend haunts Bloodlines in a broader sense still. Perhaps inevitably in a series that's all about mundane situations going horribly wrong, the various mishaps depicted feel suggestive of this brand of folklore, the kind that speaks to the anxieties of the modern world, offering unsettling reminders of our mortality and innumerable vulnerabilities, even when surrounded by technologies and creature comforts, and functioning as warnings against deviant behaviours and misplaced trust alike. The sequence where Iris and Paul are invited to join the overloaded elevator, on the operator's foolhardy insistence that there is still sufficient room, has eerie, seemingly deliberate echoes of another old legend, as recounted by Bennett Cerf in the 1944 publication Famous Ghost Stories, where a woman interprets a dream as a warning not to enter an elevator that subsequently breaks and falls. There are countless urban legends concerning food and beverage contamination - the glass shard in the lemonade ice is not a variation I'm sure I've heard, but it wouldn't surprise me if it's out there. Finally, there's the film's epilogue, in which yet another hoary myth is evoked involving the childish misuse of pennies - in this case, the possibility that a coin placed on a railway track could cause a train to derail - in an obvious echo of Penny Kid's earlier misadventure.

Although before we touch on that we should shed light on the fate of Penny Kid. We know that his being crushed by a falling piano didn't actually come to pass, thanks to Iris's interventions, but after the flashback sequence, by which the older Iris (Gabrielle Rose) recounts how she confiscated his penny, he isn't seen again. I'll admit that this was contrary to my expectations when I first watched Bloodlines; then, I could have sworn that they were setting the youngster up to be of greater significance later down the line. Given that he'd died so late in the premonition, for a while there I had fully anticipated seeing Penny re-emerge within the present as an adult. When it was established that Death was currently up to Iris, my heart sank because I knew that, as per the rules of this franchise, he'd already have to be dead. Since I had so much investment in the character, I was curious to know how he'd met his demise for real and what kind of life he had led in his borrowed time. Fortunately, the answer to that is included within the finer details of the film, as an Easter egg for those eagle-eyed enough to spot it. Among the documents that Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) inherits from Iris is a timeline made up of newspaper clippings detailing all of the fates of the Skyview survivors and their descendants. If you study it closely, you can make out the various headlines and stories, and it's pretty fucking obvious which one is supposed to be Penny Kid. He's this guy, Alfred Milano.

 

When the above image started circulating online, there was some preliminary debate about which post-it note alluded to him - whether he was Alfred Milano or Kirby Dylan, and if he had a daughter named Francesca or no descendants at all. Since then, it's been accepted that the way the post-its align with the wider timeline would appear to identify him as Alfred. In addition, Francesca's associated clipping indicates that she was killed in a gas leak, which ties in with how her father's actions were once fated to inadvertently trigger such a calamity. My boy Penny, though? It seems that he was run over by a piano-moving truck whilst trying to make off with someone's wallet. If there's a crumb of comfort to be extracted from this, it's in the likelihood that he would have died a mercifully quick death, as he did in Iris's vision. I'd imagine it would have been a lot like Terry's in the original Final Destination. And he died doing what he loved - gallivanting with ill-gotten change.

Was I disappointed that he never changed his ways and progressed from being a pouty brat to a petty criminal? Maybe...for about ten seconds. The truth is that it all makes perfect sense. He was never going to change because of the sheer futility of doing so. Iris might have thwarted Death's plans at the Skyview, but the people within remained bound by the fate already chosen for them, and however much borrowed time Iris (and their procreating urges) had secured them, there's a level on which they all remained permanently mired in that moment from 1968. The question of how much control we have over our own destinies is a particularly intrinsic one to Final Destination, where characters are traditionally called to match their supposed free will against forces much greater than themselves, and it's a point that Bloodlines emphasises through the recurring motif of circles. As Stein and Lipovsky facetiously put it on the commentary, "Circles kill". The Skyview is absolutely plagued by the little round devils. There is, yes, the penny, but the building itself also assumes a circular shape when viewed from above. The prophetic Johnny Cash tune heard playing on the radio as Paul and Iris approach the tower laments not simply of falling into fire but into a burning RING of fire. There's the ring Paul offers to Iris when he proposes to her, a classic symbol of eternity. And of course Iris's own name, alluding to the circles in her eyes, which foresee the impending destruction before it happens. Circles kill because they symbolise the inevitability of fate, for whatever move you make will eventually take you right back to where you started (something Stefani discovers in the film's epilogue, when she finds herself reliving various details from Iris's prologue experience). It is the bottom line on why I can't really hold any of what happened at the Skyview against Penny Kid - Death had decided that this particular group of mortals' time had come, and one way or another it was going to make it happen. The penny IS fate (ie: Death), and it knew exactly where it needed to be. There was no transcending the path already ordained, however prolonged. In Penny Kid's case, he never overcame his magpie tendency to pilfer shiny change, and continually found himself pushing up against authority, which shifted from meddling elders to law enforcement (the discernable details in his associated article would indicate he was a repeat offender). His desperation to avoid the police is what caused him make a fatal error and blunder into the path of that truck. And, once again, he died under a piano, even if it wasn't the piano per se that killed him. Lived in splendour, died in chaos.

Admittedly, not everything about it adds up. The timeline indicates that he perished some time in the early 1980s, but considering that he died so late in the premonition I would have expected him to have stuck it out at least a decade or so longer. (I'll concede that while he was the third-to-last character we saw die onscreen, ahead of Iris and JB, he wasn't necessary the third-to-last to die overall - there were a bunch of falling people who may have yet to hit the ground at the precise moment the piano squashed him.) A bigger problem is the visual inconsistency regarding his age. We don't know exactly how old Penny Kid was back in 1968, but he clearly can't have been much over 10, meaning that if he'd died in the early 80s, he'd have been in his mid-20s at the time. Yet that age doesn't align with the pictured individual, who looks a lot closer to his mid/late 30s - which is roughly the age bracket I'd have anticipated Penny Kid making it to before Death got round to him, based on the premonition. A great deal of care and attention evidently went into the construction of that timeline, and I look forward to combing through with greater scrutiny in the future and uncovering further macabre treasures, but there might have been the odd bit of oversight here and there. If he did die in his 20s, then the really tragic implication is that Francesca must have been a particularly young age when she lost her father, and soon after her own life. We have only speculation to go on where she's concerned, but it's noteworthy that she had her father's family name, implying that he was either married to her mother or in a stable relationship with her. The point is, he found someone who liked him, so there. Although it's too bad that her involvement with him ultimately landed her with two very traumatic losses.

 

By the time we get onto Stefani's story, Penny Kid and his bloodline may be long extinguished, but there's a sense in which he still lives on. He has a counterpart in the present. Enter the Penny Lady (Ethel Pitchford). She's first seen during the hospital sequence, where she briefly interacts with Erik, before reappearing and playing a more significant role just as the picture is tying up. After confiscating the penny from Penny Kid, Iris had kept it for all these years, taped up in her morbid scrapbook where it could cause no harm; it's transferred to Stefani's possession, but "escapes" outside the hospital, whereupon Penny Lady finds it and picks it up. The penny has unfinished business, and Penny Lady has arrived to help complete what Penny Kid helped to start. She and Penny Kid are, in many deceptive respects, polar opposites. Significantly, one is a child while the other is a senior, indicating the beginning and the end of the line. One is male and one is female. One's a rapscallion, the other seems utterly guileless. But they are nevertheless soulmates - two sides of the same coin, if you will. They share that same magpie attraction to shiny pennies, and they bookend the narrative in where that attraction ultimately leads them. Of note, if Penny Kid had lived, he would be in his 60s by now, and I'm guessing that's the age bracket she's in. (Here's a crazy idea, but could she even be Penny Kid's aforementioned widow? Probably not, but I'm toying with making it my headcanon until proven otherwise.) And, in both cases, the character's involvement evokes a classic piece of modern folklore pertaining to pennies. Unlike her younger counterpart, Penny Lady doesn't purposely discard the coin upon the railway tracks; rather, she absent-mindedly releases it while engaged in the most wholesome act of of purchasing cookies from a children's bake sale. It finds its way down to the tracks (the same tracks seen in the film's opening shot), as it was always wont to do, and derails a train, spelling disaster for Iris's remaining bloodline. In practice, Penny Lady's sweet-tempered obliviousness proves as lethal as Penny Kid's churlish deviancy; in the landscape of urban myth, both are equally inviting of misfortune. Their mutual mistake was in assuming that they had mastery of the penny, by holding it in their hands, when in actuality they were merely pawns in the hands of Fate.

There is a slight twist, however, in that, unlike her young counterpart, Penny Lady does not get caught up in the disaster she helps unleash. There's been some debate among fans as to whether anyone besides Stefani or Charlie (Teo Briones) was killed by the runaway train (while we see houses get demolished, we can't say for certain that anyone was in them at the time), but as the train derails, it goes in the opposite direction to where Penny Lady was lurking, so we've no reason to believe that she was affected. When Erik had encountered her earlier in the hospital, he was sizing her up (presumably none too seriously) as a potential murder victim whose remaining lifespan could be stolen, on the advice of Bludworth (Tony Todd - RIP), and asked her if she had much time left. "I think so..." she'd replied, visibly rattled by the question (as you would be). Though she plays into the hands of fate, Penny Lady noticeably does not tempt it for herself. Her presence might signify the end of this particular (blood)line, but as we've established, fate's preferred form is not a line, but a circle. There is no definitive end to its game; it will keep renewing itself over and over. Life will go on following the elimination of Iris's descendants, and so long as life goes on, the machinations of death and fate must persist. There is one further name to be crossed off the list in the form of Bludworth (although that will have to be resolved off-screen, for obvious reasons), but after him there will be plenty more macabre scenarios to be realised. The same chaotic cycle of lives being brought into the world only to be helplessly snuffed out will continue, and there's not a whole lot to be done about it, other than what Bludworth finally suggested, which is to make the most of whatever comes in between. It's a point the film accentuates by showing the penny still in motion as the closing credits play, rolling alongside items from Iris's collage, with it still to be determined (at least from our perspective) where it will land next on its deadly journey. (Penny Kid's clipping is featured in this closing montage, although not as one of the stories seen in close-up.)

In a manner of speaking, Penny Kid lives. I mean, sort of. He himself is obviously dead, but his spiritual successor lives on, and that's good enough for me.

[1]  Not that I don't have my share of sympathy for Damien too, but we'll save that discussion for another day.