Desserts (Best Served Cold?)

The opening gag of Jeff Stark's 1999 comic horror Desserts is so deliciously subtle that it doesn't even register the first time we see it. The credits promise us "a stark film", a term that obviously denotes its writer-director, but slyly underscores the nature of the experience to follow, when Stark's name turns out to be no misnomer. What is immediately striking about Desserts is its bluntness. At a concise four minutes in length (a good chunk of which is occupied by credits), it presents a scenario that's part unbridled nightmare, part macabre joke, and above all a story of sweet, sweet revenge. Its execution is so unabashedly punchy, in fact, that it's not hard to imagine it being repackaged as a public information film, albeit one of the sicker-minded ones. A man (played by Scottish actor Ewan McGregor and identified in the credits as "Stroller") goes for a ramble on the beach and happens upon an unattended chocolate eclair, possibly left behind by some absent-minded picnicker. Looking around and seeing no one else in sight, he decides that the alluring pastry is up for grabs and stuffs it into his mouth. This, needless to say, turns out to be a huge mistake, and the outcome is swift but brutal. Concealed within that humble eclair is an enlarged fish hook, which pierces straight through Stroller's gob and gets him yanked (by some unseen force operating other end of the line) into the depths of the ocean to his presumed doom. A ghoulish twist that convincingly evokes the heavy-handed visual language of a PIF looking to shock viewers away from any number of situations in which they may be tempted to put something into their bodies that could bring them trouble down the road. The presence of the young McGregor might immediately put us in mind of Trainspotting and heroin addiction (the actor's participation was secured by producer Jill Robertson, who had worked as part of the crew on Trainspotting), but Stroller's demise works just as aptly as a metaphor for the pitfalls of developing too much of an appetite for sugary junk food. Or even a straight-up warning about not eating random food items you find lying around in the middle of nowhere, if you don't know where they've been or who might have tampered with them.

At the same time, there is an obvious an animal rights subtext to the short, one that naturally appeals to my vegan sensibilities while warmly recalling the ending of the "Gone Fishin'" episode of Tales from The Cryptkeeper, the younger-skewing animated spin-off of the HBO series Tales From The Crypt. Adapted from a Vault of Horror comic published in 1951, it concerns a grossly irresponsible fisherman who ultimately falls foul of a race of intelligent piscines that like to hunt for humans, in their case by using money as hooked bait. It was a story that had a very profound effect on me, in that even today, if I see any banknotes lying about on the ground, of any value, I'll walk straight past them. I'd like to say it's because I'm honest and want whoever dropped them to have the chance to get them back, but nope, it's because a cartoon show I watched when I was 10 hard-wired my brain to automatically suspect discarded banknotes of being traps (it made graspingness seem unappealing, and that's no bad thing, surely?). The point is that the twist in Desserts is in no way original (it also shows up in the "A Little Fishy" segment of the 1986 anthology film Escapes, and I'm sure there are other instances still), but that doesn't matter. It is a particularly slick, particularly efficient variation on an old theme about nature turning the tables on humanity by pinpointing our own weaknesses, raising questions about what constitutes a worthy survivor.

In the case of the Tales From The Cryptkeeper installment, the character's fate was clearly karmic - he was a bully who regarded fishing, much like everything else in his life, as an opportunity to revel in power over other living things - although ironically the talking fish that finally snagged him hadn't consciously plotted revenge, with its dialogue indicating that their culture did not tend to look on humans as individuals. Basically they echoed the same perspective the character had applied to them, with the distinguishing virtue that they abhorred wastefulness, leading to this awkward but fabulously morbid bit of wordplay: "A good manner-fish never catches more than he can can!" With Desserts, it's the film's title that carries the most weight in that regard, referring to the pivotal pastry while containing a playful pun that encapsulates the notion of getting what's coming to you. Stroller is, on the surface, an innocent. We see no evidence that he has ever personally wronged a fish, or indeed anybody. Even his name speaks to his guilelessness, suggesting someone who is going about their business in an entirely casual manner, as opposed to actively looking for trouble. And yet the title insinuates that the outcome should be seen as karmic. He is the only human who apparently exists in this time and space (although we do see a shape in the sand that resembles another footprint close to where he finds the eclair, suggesting that the process is potentially cyclic), and as such he becomes an everyman who pays the price for humanity's sins against the ocean. The sins, in this scenario, are not born of wilful malice, but of unwary consumption and the belief that whatever resources he happens across are his for the taking. The rapaciousness that compels him to bite off more than he can chew becomes a shorthand for humankind's reckless plundering of the Earth, something that's shown to be just as mindless as a fish's compulsions to chomp at any bit of bait that's dangled its way, and as likely to drag us toward our own destruction. 

It is hard to shake the sense that Stroller has been the victim of a grand conspiracy, as opposed to a random victim unfortunate enough to have stumbled upon the baited eclair. The opening credits show the underwater, distinctly inhuman perspective (its cold eeriness anticipating the alien gaze of Jonathan Glazer's 2013 feature Under The Skin) of our unseen aquatic angler as it identifies its prey approaching along the sands. Notably, it surveys Stroller's form up close (and with the waves visibly behind him), suggesting an omnipresent intimacy that feels at odds with the implied distance between the hunter and the hunted within the body of the short. To me, this indicates it is not vengeful fish per se that have targeted Stroller so much as the collective forces of nature all around him. Desserts imagines a world in which nature successfully eliminates humanity and then begins wiping away all traces of its existence; not content with merely swallowing Stroller whole, the ocean must subsequently wash over his footprints and begin the process of rubbing them out. There is something almost comical about this, as though the tides are consciously removing the evidence from a crime scene. One of the film's most vital ingredients is its puckish sense of humor, which is further accentuated when we fade to black and are greeted by a incongruously buoyant instrumental rendition of the music hall favourite "I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside".

But even if Stroller represents the failings of an inattentive human race, his fate still feels like a paradox. Throughout the short, a great deal of emphasis is placed on his insignificance in relation to his surroundings, with its opening wide shot making us particularly aware of the vastness and seeming infinity of the barren shoreline, against which he initially appears as nothing more than a tiny blot on the horizon. It underscores how nature will always be a fundamentally bigger force than man, but has the effect of making him seem like rather an unimposing entity, and thus a curious target for such a magnificent scheme. It recalls the 1972 Spanish television film La Cabina, with its protagonist who is at once too much of a nondescript everyman to appear in any way important, and yet has clearly been the victim of a plot purposely designed to consign him to oblivion. Stroller is established as a little fish in a big ocean, and we suspect that it is precisely this insignificance that makes him so vulnerable. It's here that we may be able to mine one further pun from the title, playing on our uneasy feeling that the wider world might have deliberately deserted him. Desserts grapples with the issue of mortality, touching on the extent to which humankind is as assailable as the creatures it is accustomed to exploiting, the fine line between life and death, and the helplessness of the individual fated to be removed from the picture sooner or later, only for the picture itself to shrug and carry on as if nothing much occurred. Stroller inhabits a landscape of endless and oppressive emptiness, with the opening illustrating how he is, unbeknownst to himself, already inside the belly of the beast before he's even been dragged into its depths. The barrenness of his space conveys the indifference of his own (non-existent) people, who have effectively abandoned him to his demise - we sense that the lack of anyone in sight who could potentially have deterred him from destruction or assisted him when he became caught on the line was likewise not a matter of mere misfortune, but of nobody caring to intervene. The world reacts to his obliteration with much the same coldness, as the tides wash over his footprints, negating what meagre imprint he might have left behind, and the absence of onlookers means that his vanishing does not even go acknowledged. There is no regard afforded to the little guy, and that might as well be the conspiracy in itself. 

Mr Hat's Second Biggest Mystery (South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut)

 

The single biggest mystery surrounding South Park's Mr Hat is obviously how he managed to reach the gas pedal in the episode "Chef Aid" in order to operate a truck and break Mr Garrison and Chef out of jail. That's something that is just flat-out unknowable. It's also not the kind of mystery that I suspect many of us are liable to lose a whole lot of sleep over. The inexplicability of it all is, in part, what makes it so hilarious. More crucially still, this was Mr Hat's finest hour, and the outcome was monumentally awesome. He'd used his preternatural puppet powers for heroic purposes, atoning to Garrison for being a two-timing whore and enabling Chef to attend the benefit concert his friends from the rock business were holding in his honor. The particulars of how he managed to pull this off seem irrelevant when he brought such cheers and lifted spirits all round.

The same cannot be said for Mr Hat's second biggest mystery, which is the one that caused yours truly quite a bit of heartbreak and confusion during the summer of 1999. I speak of the theatrical feature film, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, and of the small role he played in its conclusion. Let's take a moment to reflect on how the movie, for all of its merits, has rather a vexing resolution insofar as Mr Hat is concerned, one that appears to leave him and Garrison dangling and gives out contradictory signals regarding which suitor's hand he ends up on. This one gets kind of personal, so buckle up. 

South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut climaxes with combat breaking out between American and Canadian forces, and Kyle and Cartman getting caught in the crossfire. While fleeing the ensuing carnage they encounter a mortally wounded Garrison, who pleads with the boys to take Mr Hat with them. They initially attempt to honor his request, but Cartman quickly tires of hanging onto the puppet and discards it. Soon after, Satan arrives on Earth to bring about the apocalypse, accompanied by his manipulative and emotionally abusive lover, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, and trailed by the soul of a damned but determined Kenny McCormick. Satan continues to be subjugated by Saddam, but with the moral support of Kenny he finally summons the resolve to stand up to him. Out of gratitude to Kenny, Satan agrees to grant him one wish (apparently he can do that benignly, not just through Faustian bargains), and Kenny asks for things to go back to the way they were before the war (aware that this would not exempt him from his own dark fate). Satan laments that he seems destined to live forever in solitude, when he notices the discarded Mr Hat and asks if he'd be willing to accompany him back to Hell. Satan throws his voice to supply the puppet's response - "Sure, I bet we could be best friends, Mr Satan" - and in doing so he eerily acquires the accent and effeminate tones of Garrison. This can be interpreted in two different ways. Either Mr Hat is literally speaking through Satan, as he can be perceived as doing with Garrison, and is actively flirting with him (which I guess tracks with his record for being a two-timing whore), OR Satan has officially hit rock bottom in his desperation and risks sinking into Garrison's derangement. (I gave my thoughts on the question of Mr Hat's reality in my coverage of "Weight Gain 4000", and am once again inclined to apply the philosophy that both things can be true.) An uplifted Satan makes his departure, still holding onto Mr Hat, and the bloodshed on Earth is duly undone. Garrison recovers from his injuries and anxiously looks around for his puppet companion, unaware of what transpired. Meanwhile, the entire town joins hands and celebrates its miraculous deliverance with a reprise of the opening number, "Mountain Town".

There is one further twist to this scenario that we'll get to shortly, but let me first be upfront that for my young teenaged self, who had been sitting there lapping up every solitary second of this film until that moment, this aspect of the ending proved to be the humongous fly pissing nosily in the ointment. To say that it sat uneasily with me would be an understatement, since it's all well and good for Satan to want to alleviate his loneliness with an endearingly uncanny puppet, but where exactly would that leave Garrison? I felt so strongly that Satan's happiness should not come at the expense of Garrison's, and that's a sentiment I'll continue to stand by. Because Garrison has feelings too, you know. He might be a royal dickhole in most regards, but the puppet was the one thing he genuinely loved and cared about. At this point in the series he was still very dependent on his relationship with Mr Hat, and we'd already seen in "Summer Sucks" how depressed he became in being separated from him for a prolonged length of time. With the help of Mr Twig, he was able to bluff his way through most of that absence, but he was clearly not a happy bunny deep down. Whenever the children asked him when Mr Hat was coming back (as seen in "Clubhouses" and "Chef Aid") it cut right through his facade like a knife through butter. So the implication that he was about to be subjected to round two of that process seemed really unnecessarily cruel. Not to mention that we, like Garrison's class, had just spent a good chunk of Season 2 waiting for Mr Hat to return (because Mr Twig was blatantly never going to replace him), so were they seriously about to send him packing again, not even nine months after he and Garrison were reconciled in "Chef Aid"? Was this going to be a regular thing with that puppet?

Or was this all in fact a gigantic false alarm, and I was allowing myself to get stupid hung up over absolutely nothing (and not for the first time)? Because there is this one additional detail at the end of the film that I want to call attention to and cannot emphasise enough - Mr Hat is back with Mr Garrison in the final sequence. It isn't explained how, but he is. They appear together in two different shots, the first being the crowd zoom-out during the reprise of "Mountain Town". And then at the very end, Garrison and Mr Hat are among the characters bidding farewell to Kenny as he rises out of Hell and, in recognition of his most noble deed, is welcomed by the angels into Heaven. Garrison is waving, while Mr Hat's gaze is directed upward, indicating that he is very attuned to what is going on. Neither reappearance went unnoticed in the cinema, and they definitely made me feel a whole lot better. In my head, I could rationalise it perfectly. After all, Kenny had wished for everything to be returned to the way it was before the war. He was, in effect, wishing for the restoration of the status quo, so that things could resume as normal and there would be no lasting consequences to have to grapple with in the series (his demise was the only outstanding matter that would explicitly not be remedied by the wish, but we all knew that was automatically being reset). Which ultimately required Mr Hat to go straight back to Garrison, whether Satan was on board with that or not. That might seem like a sorry turn of events for Satan, who would have had his sole consolation stripped away from him offscreen, but the dude can't just be stealing other people's puppet boyfriends. Not to mention, it wouldn't really have been a happy ending for him anyway, if the implication was that he'd have become as mentally damaged as Garrison (so which of them would actually have been taking the other to Hell?). Best just to let this one go, old Nick. You do have your upcoming relationship with Chris the nutritionist to look forward to. (Oh, and maybe give some attention to Damien, ya sodding deadbeat?)

And it should be noted that this was indeed consistent with the continuity of the series, where Mr Hat was still with Garrison, and there was never any reference to Satan coming between them - although I had to wait a few months to confirm it, as the UK was currently between Seasons 2 and 3, and I didn't really get into using this internet thing until the year 2000 (and even then, mostly to look up fake Pokémon cheats...I never did get that Pikablu after wandering round the Safari Zone for hours).

Technically everything worked out. But I still walked away from the experience with a sour taste in my mouth. Having Mr Hat show up at the end was absolutely better than nothing, but I didn't like the fact that they hadn't addressed it within the narrative, making his final status a little fuzzy. How could I be certain that his reappearance was even intentional and not an animation error? That it happened in two shots and not just one, and that the second reappearance had seemed so prominent gave me some hope that that wasn't the case, but I couldn't say for sure. To this day, I still don't know what the intention was, and it's one of those things where if I dwell on it for more than ten seconds, it will bug the living snot out of me. It's for this reason that I've always had a somewhat ambivalent relationship with South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. There's a lot that I can love about it - the soundtrack, the new characters of Gregory and Mole, the interplay between Saddam and Satan, the reveal of Kenny's face and his final redemption (not that Kenny was ever in any serious need of redemption from the viewer's perspective, but he demonstrated what a good kid he is at heart). But the moment where Garrison regains consciousness and asks "Where's Mr Hat?" hurts me too damned much, and since it occurs right at the end, that's the feeling I'm inevitably left with. I just said that I liked the soundtrack, but simply hearing that reprise of "Mountain Town" sends instantaneous chills down my spine.

It's also why I'll reflexively grit my teeth whenever I hear anyone suggest that Bigger, Longer and Uncut would have been a really high and logical point on which to have concluded the franchise (a discussion that seemed more pertinent nearer the time, when there were doubts about the series' longevity). I cannot tell you how relieved I am that this wasn't where it ended. If we'd lived in an alternate reality where South Park had been required to bow out early, then I honestly believe that the Season 3 finale, "World Wide Recorder Concert", would have been a much more triumphant curtain call. I've some major biases on that point, since "World Wide Recorder Concert" is my favourite South Park episode, and it's probably not a coincidence that Garrison there gets the last word and it all ends happily for him (well, happily in the sense that what he doesn't know isn't hurting him). The allusion to the ending of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country might not be on quite so epic a scale as Kenny's final ascension in the movie, but in its own quiet way I find it every bit as moving.

One way or another, Mr Hat obviously did ditch Satan and find his way back to Garrison. That much is evident from how the series carried on, even if the movie itself didn't care to explicitly account for it. I'm also aware of how very silly it is to let a matter this inconsequential eat any kind of hole in me. So why does it continue to bother me?

 

Everything worked out...with a happy end?

Part of the problem is that it's not altogether clear where precisely in the series' chronology the events of the movie are intended to fall. I'm not sure if Parker and Stone have given any official confirmation on where they see BLaU as occurring, but from what we the viewers have to go on, we just know that it has to be some time between Season 2's "The Mexican Staring Frog of Southern Sri Lanka" (which first set up the Satan-Saddam relationship) and the Season 4 two-parter "Do The Handicapped Go To Hell?" and "Probably" (which picked it up where the movie left off). Bigger, Longer and Uncut hit US theatres on 30th June 1999, as Season 3 was roughly a third of the way through its run, and "Sexual Harassment Panda" was the first episode to air after its debut (on July 7th 1999), but I don't think that automatically makes it BLaU's immediate successor in terms of internal continuity. In my mind, BLaU takes place well before the entirety of Season 3. Sure, there are a handful of moments in Season 3 that were blatantly designed to coincide with BLaU's theatrical presence - "Cat Orgy" contained a shout-out to the film's most prominent box office competitor, the staggeringly brainless Will Smith vehicle Wild Wild West, while "Two Guys Naked In A Hot Tub" had a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo from Mole, a character otherwise exclusive to BLaU. But with regards to the contents of the movie itself, it seems more closely connected to what was going on in the second season, which is when I'm going to hazard a guess that it was scripted. Callbacks to the series are predominantly to Season 2, and to earlier Season 2 installments at that. The revelation from "Ike's Wee Wee" that Kyle's infant brother was Canadian-born proves significant, while Mr Mackey's naive and surface-level understanding of addiction from the same episode comes up again in his showstopper, "It's Easy, Mmmkay". A lot of the supporting kids in the movie are also quite vague and undefined, in a way that I'd associate with the first couple of seasons - Craig and Butters are still background characters, and I don't think Tweek (introduced in the penultimate episode of Season 2) shows up at all. But that's all very tenuous, right? Of course Kyle wasn't going to forget that his brother is Canadian (even if Sheila did), Mackey's well-intentioned condescension has always been one of his defining character traits, and when you've an extensive cast and only 80 minutes to spare, it is inevitable that not everybody is going to have a chance to stand out (heck, not even Pip, who at that point was one of the more established supporting child characters, got to be anything more than an extra in the movie). The essential detail that most firmly aligns BLaU with Season 2 would be the Saddam factor. He was kind of a looming figure in its opening stages, before just going quiet for a bit.

Saddam's appearance at the end of "The Mexican Staring Frog of Southern Sri Lanka" was itself a continuity nod to the Terrance and Phillip special "Not Without My Anus", which had infamously aired in place of "Cartman's Mom Is Still A Dirty Slut", the much-anticipated follow-up to Season 1's closing cliffhanger, as an April Fools prank earlier that spring. (Note that when Sky 1 aired Season 2 in the UK, they did not attempt to replicate the trick and stuck "Not Without My Anus" on the tail-end as a weird little out of context extra, making it random as fuck when Saddam showed up in "Mexican Staring Frog", and with a Canadian accent to boot.) The term "continuity" might need to be applied quite loosely in this scenario, since "Not Without My Anus" was framed as a made-for-TV drama within the context of the South Park universe (albeit one purportedly based on a true story). The means by which Saddam met his demise in "Not Without My Anus" (suffocated by the farts of a stadium of flatulent Canadians) also differed from how he was later reported to have died within the movie (gored by a pack of wild boars), a discrepancy that I'm almost positive was due to them needing a concise explanation for the benefit of movie-goers who hadn't kept up with the series and would otherwise have been confused about why Saddam was in Hell (particularly with his real-life counterpart being alive at the time), and the events of "Not Without My Anus" being too baffling and convoluted to recap at the start of BLaU. The series offers a curious intersection between these disparate continuities - in the episode "Probably", when Satan recounts to God the circumstances under which he met Saddam, he reaffirms the death by wild boars backstory, but also specifies that it happened in April, a nod to the original air date of "Not Without My Anus". It's also notable that in the movie itself, the featured events are explicitly stated to take place six weeks after Saddam's swine-inflicted death, which suggests that they would have fallen some time soon after "Mexican Staring Frog", if Saddam was established to already be dead within the internal timeline.

Now let's consider how Garrison and Mr Hat might specifically fit into this. In the series, Mr Hat was with Garrison from the very beginning up until the Season 6 episode "The Death Camp of Tolerance" when Garrison decided to officially retire him (sob). The only exception in between would be that aforementioned arc in the middle of Season 2 where he went AWOL for a few episodes and was temporarily replaced by Mr Twig. So...if you're determined to tie Mr Hat's supposed disappearance at the end of the movie with the continuity of the series, that's the only window you have. But is that even doable? Could this actually be the origin of that whole bizarre love triangle arc in Season 2, rather than merely a harrowing echo of it? Perhaps. There is a fan theory proposing that "Summer Sucks" should be seen as the direct successor to the events of BLaU, as awkward as it would seem to have to retroactively factor in the movie before an episode that debuted a whole year ahead of it. After all, that installment opens with Mr Hat having already absconded, and Garrison struggling to comprehend what's become of him. It would also be consistent with what the movie indicates about Saddam and where he goes within the series' timeline, with bonus points for the fact that if his death occurred in April, six weeks along would certainly be taking us into the run-up into summer. The obvious bugbear of this theory, from my perspective, is that it requires you to overlook Mr Hat's reappearance with Garrison at the end of BLaU, which I am loath to do, but I think it's an intriguing notion nevertheless that merits consideration.

The trouble is that the background information regarding Saddam might ultimately hold more water with this reading than what happens with Garrison and Hat in "Summer Sucks". There are certain narrative details it seems somewhat of a stretch to have to line up with the movie (notably, that in "Summer Sucks" Mr Hat specifically goes missing on the last day of school), but it's more of a tonal mismatch that I'm feeling. The circumstances behind Mr Hat's mysterious disappearance in "Summer Sucks" are implied to be quieter and more mundane (relatively speaking) than the high-stakes drama of the movie's climax. Garrison spends the episode grappling with a low-key but intensely personal crisis that, so far as he's concerned, completely overshadows the town's apocalypse of the week, an out-of-control black snake firework destroying everything in its path. His immediate assumption is that one of the children has stolen the puppet as a prank, though he later reflects, during his psychiatry session with Dr Katz, that Mr Hat might have walked out because of a disagreement they'd had earlier that morning. What they disagreed about is anybody's guess (and Garrison presumably attached less significance to it than did Mr Hat, if it was really that much of an afterthought to him), and I'd argue that the story works as well as it does because it keeps the details to such a vague and understated level (making it the perfect companion to the wilder, more overblown A-story about the snake). We learn few of the particulars, like what inspired Mr Hat to go or how he was able to leg it in the absence of legs, a choice that accentuates the absurdity of the situation, but also the pathos. Garrison's loneliness becomes twofold. Not only has he been unceremoniously ditched by his emotional support puppet, the rest of the town takes little to no interest in his plight and can't even begin to understand what he's going through. Even the viewer isn't totally sure on where to stand, with Katz's assessment suggesting that his testimony should be seen as unreliable, although toward the end we get a teasing glimpse into Mr Hat's side of the story, which corroborates at least some of what Garrison was saying. The puppet is revealed to have travelled to Green Bay, Wisconsin, apparently to live out his sexual fantasies involving Brett Favre (and odds are that he succeeded, given that Favre seemed to return his interest). So if this does take place right after BLaU, then presumably he's already dumped Satan and is weighing up his options before going back to Garrison.

I do find it basically plausible that Parker and Stone might well have conceived the movie's conclusion first and then been inspired by that to do the whole arc in Season 2 where Garrison and Mr Hat spend several episodes separated. On a conceptual level it certainly feels as though there could be some intersection, particularly since they didn't land that far apart, all things considered. At any rate, it's an idea they did better justice to in the series, where they had a lot more time to explore its implications. And since Season 2 saw the light of day first, it makes the ending of BLaU feel kind of redundant as well as mean. Whatever Garrison did prior to "Summer Sucks" to drive Mr Hat away, he had suffered enough for it, and my feeling is that he'd earned the right to keep the puppet at his side uninterrupted for a few more seasons. So yes, I definitely understand the appeal of the theory. It takes what amounted to a joke and a loose end in the movie and allows it to have meaningful follow-up with a clear resolution in the series, in a way that doesn't feel as if it's rolling back on any prior development. I'm not sure that I buy the two premises as totally compatible, however. At most, I can see one idea giving rise to the other, but I'm not really sensing that they are one and the same. I don't subscribe to the theory, but I will make this one further observation about it. When Mr Hat finally returns to Garrison in "Chef Aid", Garrison is initially reluctant to take him back and throws him out the door, telling him to go to Hell. That's standard retaliation from Garrison (he said the same thing to Mackey in "Summer Sucks"), but it gives it a little extra resonance when you're watching it through the lens of Mr Hat having potentially already been there.

As I say, I'd rather not ignore the fact that Mr Hat IS with Garrison during the final sequence of BLaU. That is what my heart and my gut tell me to look toward, even if my brain is inevitably going to get in the way by asking questions. We've already discussed how the nature of Kenny's wish might potentially account for Mr Hat's return within the narrative, but since it's not acknowledged we can't be certain what was actually supposed to be going on, and that keeps me in such a queasy state of limbo when processing this ending. For that much I will forever curse South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, even as the "Uncle Fucka" sequence retains its devilish power to have me collapsing into fits of giggles. It is what it is nonetheless, and do we have any means of making sense of why the sequence plays out as it does? I suspect that I've given the matter more thought than anybody else on Earth, and as I see it there are three different possibilities we have to choose from.

The first is that Mr Hat's reappearance is indicative of something being cut from the final sequence (in spite of the film's innuendo-laden title). It's entirely possible that the epilogue was running on a little too long and needed to be trimmed down, and the solutions to Stan and Kyle's respective arcs would naturally take priority. In which case they might have taken out a follow-up moment with Mr Hat and Garrison and hoped that audiences would just roll with it. Irritating shortcuts will sometimes be taken (Pixar's Soul, for example, was meant to incorporate a sequence explaining Mr Mittens' survival that was ultimately excised, although they showed Mittens alive and well anyway, to the relief but also confusion of cat-loving audiences all over). Back in 1999, this is what I'd desperately hoped would turn out to be the case, but I don't think it ever went anywhere.

The second is that Mr Hat being with Garrison in those two closing shots was an animation error that was somehow made twice over. This is by and far my least favourite possibility, since it makes that final glimmer of comfort a total fluke and suggests that the intentions of the film were a whole lot meaner, although it isn't completely unsalvageable, by virtue of the fact that it still happened. I'm of the opinion that there can be happy accidents. Just look to the ending of "World Wide Recorder Concert". When Garrison boards the bus in the final scene and gives his directions to Ms Crabtree, you might notice that Kenny is alive and seated in the background, despite having already been killed during the disastrous brown noise incident. It wasn't entirely out of the question for Kenny to die and be immediately resurrected (it happened earlier that season as part of a meta joke in "Succubus"), but my intuition here is that Kenny's return was indeed a mistake. It happens from time to time. But you know what, I'm glad that he's there. I think that closing Undiscovered Country allusion is simply wonderful, and it strikes me as only right and proper that even Kenny was allowed to be a part of it. We can apply that same logic to BLaU. If nothing else, those shots give the appearance of Garrison not being left alone at the end or excluded from the celebration, and that too seems only right and proper. If it was an honest error, then all I can say is, bless the inattentive animators who were responsible. Whatever they were paying you was not enough.

The third possibility is the one that I tend to lean toward nowadays, which is that Parker and Stone were straight-up trolling us. They worked that interaction between Satan and Mr Hat into the resolution because it amused them, but at this stage weren't actually looking to mess with the status quo and just stuck Mr Hat back with Garrison anyway, in stark defiance of any and all prospects of there being genuine consequence. The question of where precisely the movie is supposed to fall within with the series' timeline becomes irrelevant, because everything is reset at the end, the situation with Garrison and Mr Hat included. If anybody cared enough to get their knickers in a twist about the lack of explanation, then that would be hilarious, wouldn't it? I, unfortunately, was the easiest victim in the world. But hey, at least the outcome actually went in my favour, in terms of what I'd wanted to see happen. And the following year they gave us "World Wide Recorder Concert", which I wholeheartedly adore and see as compensating for any callous disregard Garrison might have received at the end of the movie, so it's all good.

Besides which, I've made the point twice already that a number of Mr Hat's most memorable moments were rooted in a degree of inexplicability. As is befitting a character who is a puppet of ambiguous autonomy. The question of how he managed to ditch Satan and get back to Garrison's hand at the end of BLaU will just have to be added to that same list. We all know that it wouldn't have worked out between Mr Hat and Satan anyway, in the same way that it ultimately didn't work out between him and Brett Favre. Mr Hat is a flirtatious son of a bitch, but Satan is so touchy-feely, and I could see that pissing Mr Hat off before long. Maybe his last-minute u-turn was entirely unrelated to Kenny's wish, and he just realised then and there that Satan really wasn't as hot as all that and he was getting out of the arrangement through his own volition. You underestimate those preternatural puppet powers at your own peril (unless of course you're Kathie Lee).

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #57: Canada's House Hippo Problem

In 1999 Canadians received notice of a peculiar home invader who was taking over their kitchens whenever they'd switched off their lights and retired for the evening. Meet the North American House Hippo, a small hippopotamid (roughly the size of a rat) that is indigenous to Canada and to regions of the eastern United States, where it's carved out quite the ecological niche, feeding off discarded crumbs by night and nesting in shoe cupboards by day. Wherever there are opened bags of potato chips and unattended slices of toast with peanut butter, these resourceful hippos thrive, yet they are highly elusive creatures, and little was known about their habits until a short documentary was cobbled together and extensively televised at the end of the millennium. The minute-long piece showed us the nightly routine of one such hippo, as it emerged to forage for its preferred foods, and to annoy Jake the cat by flashing its (tiny, but still intimidating) tusks his way before going for a dip in his water bowl, all while voice actor Len Carlson (known for his work on The Raccoons and Care Bears) provided genial commentary. With that, a magical new world was revealed, sparking the imaginations of young Canucks all over as to what weird and wonderful delights could be lurking within the nooks and crannies of their humble households. 

It all sounds just a tad fanciful, right? Anybody with their thinking cap on would have hopefully deduced that no such creature really existed, and that was precisely the point of the short. The fictitious hippo was created by visual effects team Spin Productions on behalf of Concerned Children's Advertisers, a Toronto-based organisation who specialised in producing public service announcements for young audiences on a variety of topics, including substance abuse, physical fitness, self-esteem and personal safety. "House Hippo" was conceived as a way of introducing children to the issue of media literacy, and why they couldn't automatically trust everything they see on television, no matter how accustomed they might be to regarding it as a form of authority. A hippo was chosen as the unlikely house pest because as a concept it seemed so irresistibly hilarious, but also so oddly convincing in its miniaturised form. A moose and a giraffe were considered, but in their case the artifice was just too apparent. This was a unique kind of movie magic that only the hippo could provide. Meanwhile, the format of the PSA was designed to recall a familiar staple of Canadian culture, the Hinterland Who's Who vignettes of the 1960s and 70s, a series of charming micro-documentaries commissioned by the Canadian Wildlife Service to provide introductory portraits of the country's fauna. Here's an example, focussing on one of my favourite animals:

The music of "House Hippo" differs substantially to the John Cacavas-composed flute leitmotif that accompanied Hinterland Who's Who, hinting at its more whimsical intentions, although Carlson's voiceover was intended to evoke John Livington's, giving the PSA an air of pseudo-authority that's ultimately counteracted by its epilogue. A second narrator speaks up, openly acknowledging the pretence and prompting the viewer to consider how they processed the bogus information they'd just received: "That looked really...real?! But you knew it couldn't be true, didn't you? That's why it's good to think about what you're watching on TV and ask questions, kind of like you just did." The hippo reappears on a television screen, now full-sized and restored to its natural habitat in sub-Saharan Africa, and we can see that it never actually left. The final image hints at the trickery behind the fake documentary - the hippos we were shown were indeed real, but they were extracted from stock footage, with painstaking technical wizardry employed to create the illusion that they were wandering through a nondescript kitchen and interacting with the objects therein. The intentions of the film were clearly expressed, and yet anecdotal reports abound that a lot of kids tuned out during that all-important denouement, either because they weren't fully receptive to the concept of media literacy in the first place, or because they were too enchanted by the notion of there being tiny hippos in their closets and wanted to preserve that fantasy. Concerned Children's Advertisers had already sold them on the premise, and they weren't going to negate that by suggesting that they be boring and sensible about it at the end. As such, "House Hippo" is often cited as an example of an advertising campaign that humorously backfired, spreading misinformation when it was intended to do the exact opposite. Harmless misinformation, I suppose (well, maybe not to those kids who were inspired to leave plates peanut buttered toast on their kitchen floors and ended up attracting flies and roaches), and the PSA certainly won a lot of hearts amid all the confusion it created. It is remembered today with tremendous affection, immortalising the misplaced hippo as a Canadian icon, a monument to an alternate reality that seemed so much more enticing than the one we were stuck with. You could argue that it did in fact make its point with more potency than its creators had originally anticipated, by boring its way into the hearts and souls of its viewers in order to demonstrate what a frightfully appealing beast misinformation can be. In the end it became more of a slow-burn message - one that, rather than giving its young audience a life-changing education in 60 seconds, required them to grow up and gain a little extra wisdom and perspective on the case of the house hippo and its impact on their perception.

"House Hippo" strikes me as being a more benign cousin to those Hula Hoops Shoks ads about the electric eels purportedly loose in Britain's water supply that had enough kids convinced that their bathrooms had become a no-go area in the Y2K. There was something eerily authoritative about that campaign to the youngsters who hadn't yet developed the ability to discern absurdist irony, and certainly nothing joyous about the thought of being zapped by a confused and disorientated knifefish the instant you turned on your taps. Whereas "House Hippo" warmly evokes the hidden magic and wonder that might be stirring in the most ostensibly banal of environments, "Shoks" gives off a distinctly grimy despair that has the world you inhabit seeming a whole lot more malevolent (as noted in my coverage of the campaign, it ultimately speaks more to the nightmarish prospect of dying alone in a 1970s high-rise apartment than being fried by an eel). But you know kids, maybe it's a good thing that those shrunken hippos weren't actually in your kitchens; in a way, they had the potential to be just as big a menace as those electric eels. If you stop to think about it, would you really want one of those things nesting around your footwear? It all ties in with the bigger picture of how we tend to perceive hippos, which constitutes a serious bit of misrepresentation in itself. In media, hippos are typically depicted as loveable softies (think George from Rainbow and Peter Potamus), and small wonder, when they look like big squishy bath toys. In actuality, they're noted for being violent and territorial creatures, of the sort you don't mess with if you're interested in keeping all your body parts in place. These hippos might be small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, but it's evident that their aggressive nature is still intact, with Jake the cat making what is plainly the right call in backing down from a confrontation. Now imagine if one of these little chonks had made a nest inside your shoe, and you put your foot in without checking it first. I think there's a very good prospect of you losing some of your toes in that scenario. If they were inside your house, then your parents would have been laying traps for them like nobody's business, and that wouldn't have been very fun.

The house hippo didn't just stick to his allotted range of Canada and the eastern United States. We were also alerted to his (non) existence in the UK, when local company Media Smart got their hands on the ad in the mid-00s. In addition to using their own logo at the end, their version also ran about 20 seconds shorter, removing the references to the hippo being a native of North America (in accordance with his expanded territory) and shaving off a few of the specifics, such as his weaknesses for peanut butter and pieces of string. I have memories of an even shorter version still, which dispensed with the faux documentary aspect altogether and just had the hippo roaring at Jake, with the commentary that if you see something on TV that looks real but you know it can't be, then you can consider yourself media smart.

I hadn't thought about the house hippo for years, but was recently reminded of it while watching Sophy Romvari's remarkable feature Blue Heron, which prominently incorporates the original PSA (partly to evoke the time period in which the film takes place, but also to foreshadow its own uses of non-literal storytelling). It got me pondering the unique appeal of the hippo, and that beguiling middle ground he occupies between cozy familiarity and all-out insanity. It's no surprise that he made the cultural splash that he did, for it is an immensely charming PSA, and so lovingly made. We can suspend our disbelief and buy into the internal narrative that there are tiny hippos in our households, such a joy is it to see this most preposterous of creatures blend in so convincingly with this most mundane of environs. The fusion of humdrum nocturnal setting and improbable imagery evokes a lovely intersection of a dreamed state and waking reality. At the same time, we shouldn't overlook that the house hippo is a metaphor for something deeply insidious, and a problem that has merely intensified with the rise of digital media, deepfakes and AI. We live in a world where the house hippos have taken over. They seemed like a cute thing to have around at the dawn of the millennium, but now you can't put your foot in any direction without having your toes messily savaged. One way or another, Canada and everywhere else has a troubling house hippo problem, and the string-stealing kitchen invader has accordingly received a brand new lease of life in the fake news era. Concerned Children's Advertisers are sadly no longer with us, having become Companies Committed To Kids in 2014 before closing down in 2017. But the legacy of the house hippo lives on, with the premise being resurrected in more recent PSAs by the Ottawa-based MediaSmarts (not to be confused with the aforementioned UK-based Media Smart), encouraging children to "Break The Fake" by developing their critical thinking skills and taking the time to research what's real and what isn't. It's us against the hippos, so be careful to give your metaphorical shoe a good shake before you put your foot in it.

On the subject of hippo misconceptions, I once saw a movie where it was claimed that they fart out of their mouths, but I don't think that's actually true, is it? Mind you, the same movie gave Michael Douglas kind of a silly haircut, and that can do a lot to undermine your credibility.