Treehouse of Horror '98: The Terror of Tiny Toon (aka They're Laughing At Your Pain!)

The one thing that no one ever really expects when it comes to these Simpsons Halloween specials is complete originality. Traditionally, the Treehouse of Horror series has always been where the show gets to nip out of its comfort zone and indulge in the kinds of horror-fantasy pastiches that the regular Springfieldian reality is unlikely to accommodate, and going in there does seem to be this unspoken assumption that every segment will offer a Simpson-ised twist on something familiar. So much so that it tends to throw people whenever we get a Treehouse of Horror segment with no really obvious source. Take "Nightmare Cafeteria" of "Treehouse of Horror V", for example. Some will insist that it's a parody of Soylent Green (1973), even though it's nothing like Soylent Green (there might be a vague allusion in the premise of cannibalism being used as a solution to overpopulation, but that's as far as it goes). Not all THoH entries approach their influences in equal measure, of course. Some offer abridged and dedicated recreations of very specific stories, others spoof genre conventions more broadly (compare how "Attack of The 50-Foot Eyesores" handles the set-up of giant monsters to how "King Homer" does it), and there are those where you may be able to discern the odd nugget of inspiration here and there, but it isn't sustained or central enough for the segment as a whole to qualify as a parody of said source. Inevitably, some of these perceived connections will end up feeling more tenuous than others. On the question of whether "Hell Toupee", the opening segment of "Treehouse of Horror IX", is actually a reworking of the Amazing Stories episode of the same name, I'd argue that there might have been an element of idea-borrowing (although this is explicitly refuted by the production crew on the episode's DVD commentary, and not in the "wink wink, nudge nudge" way that they suggested that the "Time and Punishment" segment of "Treehouse of Horror V" had nothing to do with the Ray Bradbury story "A Sound of Thunder"), but the segment certainly isn't a full-on parody in the way that "Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace" very conspicuously is of Nightmare on Elm Street.

But what of the episode's second segment, "The Terror of Tiny Toon"? The title is clearly a play on that of the 1938 Western The Terror of Tiny Town, but was the narrative, which sees Bart and Lisa getting transported into an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon, and terrorised by their favourite cat and mouse duo, modelled on any one thing in particular? At the time of writing, the Wikipedia article for "Treehouse of Horror IX" states as a fact that it's a parody of the 1992 movie Stay Tuned (citing a Den of Geek article that merely describes it as "Stay Tuned-styled"), but that one I kinda wanna straight-up call bullshit on. Mainly because the basic premise of a character getting sucked into a television set and interacting with the assorted programs and personalities therein was already a worn one by the time Stay Tuned got a hold of it. I had seen it done in at least two cartoon shows, Garfield and Friends and Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, before I'd even reached my first half-decade, and there are other features where it shows up too, like Amazon Women on The Moon (1987) and Shocker (1989). It was a standard of the cable and satellite era, when people watched a shit-load of television and had more choice than anybody in search of diversion could possibly require. The major distinguishing detail in Stay Tuned (a pretty lame movie if you ask me - The Simpsons could certainly do a lot better for parody material -  although I think there is a faction of the Blockbuster generation that considers it a cult classic, so I probably should keep my mouth shut) was that the broadcasting system in question was operated by Satan (offering six hundred and sixty-six channels), which doesn't seem to be what's going on here. I'm not sensing a lot about the segment that would mark it out as specifically a parody of Stay Tuned, as opposed to yet another variation on a standard premise in an age of media saturation. (In the interests of fairness, Stay Tuned does get a mention on the DVD commentary, but in rather an odd context that suggests that it's been confused with the 2006 Adam Sandler vehicle Click.)

If "Tiny Toon" was conceived as an allusion to any one movie in particular, then I reckon it's more likely to have been one much closer to The Simpsons' home - namely, the "It's A Good Life" portion of Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), where Nancy Cartwright plays a schoolgirl named Ethel, whose monstrously omnipotent "brother" Anthony banishes her into a televised cartoon and watches with glee as she gets set upon by the sadistic creations therein (cue endless jokes about how Cartwright has been stuck in the cartoon world ever since). As an aside, I've always felt that the means through which Bart and Lisa get transported into their television bear a truly uncanny resemblance to how Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon get spirited away to the titular town in Gary Ross's Pleasantville (tussling over a remote control with reality-warping powers), only the timing doesn't line up - Pleasantville was released to US theatres on October 23rd 1998, exactly two days before this episode's debut. Sometimes these so-called allusions might be nothing more than total coincidences.

Truthfully, and in spite of the over-familiarity of the premise, "Tiny Toon" has a set-up that feels wholly organic to the Simpsons universe, to the extent that it doesn't need to be a parody in order to justify its existence. It seems straightforward enough that the writers wanted to do a segment where Bart and Lisa had the opportunity to interact with Itchy and Scratchy, something that couldn't happen within the series proper but was perfect for a Halloween show. It allows for further commentary on the subject that Itchy and Scratchy were primarily designed to critique, that being the question of media violence and how harmful it is to children. More than anything, "Tiny Toon" feels like an extension on an idea articulated in the Season 6 episode "Itchy & Scratchy Land", which was the closest the family had previously come to being on the receiving end of the cartoon duo's brutality (by way of malfunctioning animatronics in their likeness), and ended with the conclusion that violence was funny so long as it wasn't happening to you. Specifically, Bart notes that the horror the family endured at the titular amusement park would have been funny to someone who was watching them, an observation blatantly designed to call out the viewer's role in all of this. As a concept, Itchy and Scratchy have this inherently double-edged quality, prompting us to question what the real evil of the equation might be. Even if we are amused by the sadistic inventiveness of the shorts, odds are that we'll be instantly perturbed by the uproarious reactions of the characters in-universe, which turns into a grotesque mockery of our own. (It's one of the reasons why an Itchy and Scratchy spin-off would, in all likelihood, not work, as you would only get half the joke...and if anyone's going to bring up Happy Tree Friends as a counterargument, I feel that series was honestly more indebted to the running gag from South Park about Kenny's numerous demises than it was to Itchy and Scratchy; it's a cartoon version of Final Destination, more or less.) Clearly, Itchy's repeated dismembering of Scratchy is meeting a need within the Springfieldians, and the magnitude and abundance of that need might be more disturbing than anything that happens in the shorts themselves.

What's immediately appealing about "Tiny Toon" is that, following more than a decade of abuse for the Simpson children's jollies (the cartoon cat and mouse having been a part of their lives since the Tracy Ullman days), Scratchy finally gets to call out Bart and Lisa in person and put to them the all-important question: "Why are you laughing?" The icing on the cake is that Itchy would be just as horrified by the notion of anybody laughing at the pain that he's deliberately inflicting. Whatever force compels him to get horrifically homicidal with his feline co-star, it is a private arrangement that can only truly be understood within the bounds of their show's internal culture; he doesn't view his sociopathy as a spectacle that exists for the amusement of others, and the very suggestion enrages him. Bart and Lisa might have had the luxury of laughing at this cartoon carnage where there existed a clear dividing line between the two worlds, but now they've found themselves on the wrong side of the fourth wall, and have to answer for their desensitisation to televised violence. Worse still, their plight becomes entertainment for anyone outside of the television screen; Homer wanders in and, seeing that Bart and Lisa have been magicked into the cartoon realm, cheerily wonders how they'll get out of this one, echoing the sentiments of the viewer (although this is a Halloween episode, so we can't automatically take it as a given that they will get out of it).

The prospect of Scratchy getting his overdue revenge on Bart and Lisa is such an inspired one that it almost has you regretting that the show didn't think of it a little earlier in its run, back when it had a point to prove about the joys of media violence amid Congressional efforts to curb it. The THoH installments IV to VI are where the series peaked in being gratuitously bloody and disturbing, something it largely shifted away from toward the end of the decade (wherever the segments persisted in being tremendously unsettling tended to be on an emotional level more than than a gory one - see the endings to both "The Thing and I" and "The Genesis Tub"). "Tiny Toon" could have benefited from more of the demented energy seen in "Time and Punishment" and "Nightmare Cafeteria", for if there ever was a segment you'd have expected to be truly balls to the wall surreal, it's the one set inside a cursed cartoon (a place where, as Anthony tauntingly reminded Ethel in Twilight Zone: The Movie, anything can happen). The utilisation of cartoon cliches throughout "Tiny Toon" is fun and reasonably inventive (in one scene, Bart and Lisa's eyes pop out, and in another Bart is able to get them out of certain doom by creating his own eject button), but could have been more madcap still. By Season 10 the show's writing in general had also lost a noticeable chunk of its freshness, and scripts were becoming increasingly hampered by what could be described specifically as Simpsons cliches - "Tiny Toon" has a particularly glaring instance where Bart asks Lisa, "Don't you ever get tired of being wrong?", a gag transplanted wholesale from "Attack of The 50-Foot Eyesores" but with a more mundane payoff. The segment does, however, boast one really great, authentically disturbing moment, when Bart has an axe lobbed at his head and initially laughs it off, only for a trickle of blood to appear on his forehead and for him to register that the cartoon weaponry is capable of dealing him actual damage. And there is ultimately a bulletproof reason why it was for the best that they waited as long as they did to tell this particular story - too much earlier and it could not have included Poochie, who makes a glorious cameo appearance here. Rumors of the alien pup's demise were greatly exaggerated, it seems. He's still skating around Itchy and Scratchy's neighbourbood, still trying desperately to hold onto relevancy, and still getting little in the way of respect. (I'd have loved to have seen something of Disgruntled Goat too, but you can't have everything.) 

On the one level, "Tiny Toon" is a pure parental nightmare, in which Marge's long-standing concerns about exposing children to media violence are proven valid. The segment opens with her denying Bart and Lisa permission to watch a Halloween-themed Itchy & Scratchy short ("If I let you watch one of these gruesome Halloween cartoons, I'd be a pretty lousy mother!") and having the foresight to confiscate the batteries in the remote control before going out trick or treating with Maggie. She didn't figure on Bart rooting through Homer's toolbox and pulling out a plutonium rod (not unlike the one he unleashes into the streets of Springfield every week) to use as a substitute battery, however, so the kids still get their gruesome Halloween blood-fest, and a whole lot more than they bargained for. Superficially, "Tiny Toon" seems happy to echo the conclusions reached in earlier iterations of this premise, namely that an abundance of television is probably not a good thing. By making television the work of the literal Devil, Stay Tuned had a particularly unsubtle subtext on that front, although it wasn't radically different to the one we'd already garnered through the similar misadventures of Garfield and Mighty Mouse (or indeed the situation in Poltergeist) - if you stare into the chattering cyclops for long enough, it will steal your soul. In "Tiny Toon", the television becomes a box that literally devours children, and exposure to the violence within becomes something that will very actively and grievously harm them. As usual with Itchy and Scratchy, though, there exists that element of double-edgedness - from the cat and mouse's perspective, Bart and Lisa are the villains who mocked their experiences by regarding them as entertainment, an assessment that arguably aligns the Simpson children more closely with the barbarous Anthony than with the doomed Ethel. In Twilight Zone: The Movie, the cartoon world was a reflection of Anthony's uninhibited id - he felt an affinity for entities of the animated ilk because he too could make anything happen according to his childish and sadistic whims - and we sense that Itchy & Scratchy offers something similar (albeit much less extreme) for Bart and Lisa, in being an outlet where it is socially acceptable to let their inner sadists hang out, and where laughter at the cat's pain is hotly encouraged.

There have been occasions throughout the series where exposure to the gruesome antics of Itchy and Scratchy does indeed appear to be having a detrimental effect on the children - most obviously in "Itchy & Scratchy & Marge", where Maggie took to emulating whatever behaviour she saw on the box. At the end of "Itchy & Scratchy Land", Lisa is inspired to prove a point to Marge by throwing a shoe at Bart, behaviour that would be egregiously out of character for her in any other context. But in general, The Simpsons has seldom given much credence to the idea that media violence makes sociopaths of us, with the characters' uproarious reactions to the violence being as far as it goes. Their laughter is ugly and disturbing, sure, but is it actually harmful or unhealthy in of itself? Is the television a corruptive force, conditioning viewers to find images of suffering funny, or is it merely a reflection of what's already dark and horrible about their human psyches? Is the media landscape shaped by our own need for diversion, and for acceptable targets on which to vent our immense feelings of helplessness and frustration in our day to day lives? It might not speak well of the series' denizens that, rather than sympathising with the downtrodden Scratchy, they'd align with the bullying Itchy in making him their all-purpose punching bag (not that they feel any real loyalty toward Itchy, as we saw in "Homer Goes To College"), but The Simpsons has never shied away from exploring some of the meaner tendencies of the human condition.

The implication that Bart and Lisa are being confronted by manifestations of their own repellent ids (and are thus less comparable to Ethel than to Anthony getting a taste of his own medicine) is reinforced when Homer gets bored of their fight to remain in one piece and switches over to Live with Regis and Kathie Lee (ehh, that was a morning show, right? So what time of day is this all supposed to be happening at? I would have assumed early evening if Marge and Maggie were going trick or treating. But whatever, this is a magic TV remote, and I'm sure that it's capable of bending reality in all sorts of ways). The sequence with Philbin and Gifford is by far the strangest thing the segment has going, not least because Philbin and Gifford appear as their regular live action selves, enduring some crude interactions with the animated figures that are momentarily transplanted into their show. We'd seen live action footage integrated with animation in a prior Halloween segment, "Homer³", but I believe that Philbin and Gifford had the honor of being the first celebrities to guest star in The Simpsons in live action form, a novel choice that diminishes the distinction between the conflicting cartoon worlds. Suddenly, Bart and Lisa cease to signify a "real" world imperilled by a lawless fictional one, for in this sequence there is no real difference between them. Both animated duos become chaotic forces that feel mutually out of place as they invade the space of the morning show, scalding Philbin with cilantro-free soup and causing Gifford to indignantly abandon the set. Despite their limited screentime, Philbin and Gifford end up stealing the segment, as between them they snag the two best lines - Philbin's "My eyes! My beautiful eyes!" and Gifford's "I'm going home! Dom DeLuise can interview himself!" Superb delivery in both cases. 

 

The question at the heart of "Tiny Toon" concerns the dividing line between entertainment and reality, and at what point it crosses over from being harmless diversion into cruel exploitation. It's a question that proves something of a through line for the entire episode - "Hell Toupee" sees Snake receiving the electric chair as part of a dystopian (although sadly not implausible) reality show, while "Starship Poopers" climaxes with the family seeking the televised services of Jerry Springer to settle an interspecies custody dispute. We've leeway to revel in whatever is offered up for our viewing pleasure, so long as it remains distant and safely contained on the other side of the screen; when Bart and Lisa attempt to experience the same action directly from the frontline, they find they are no longer protected by that barrier and that things go down very differently. "Tiny Toon" hints that the healthiness of our media consumption hinges on our ability to differentiate between what is real and and what is merely fictitious, what has consequences and what's all just frivolous fun, with the cartoon domain becoming a hellish intersection where the two are blurred and where the evil in our ids is no longer in check. The segment adopts a more reassuring stance in its final moments, reversing the situation so that the cartoon world spills over into the Simpsons' but proves entirely harmless outside of its own ink and paint turf. Bart is returned to his reality in a partially-skeletal form, having been hosed with a school of piranha (a sequence that, while creative, comes with a curious lack of a nauseating aftertaste), but with no ill effects other than to freak out Marge, and it's easily remedied with Lisa's resourceful use of the rewind button. Itchy and Scratchy attempt to follow them through the screen, but find that when they cross over into the "real" world, they become semi-bound by its rules, rendering them no more menacing than an actual cat and mouse and resigning them to new existences as family pets. The balance is thus restored, and media violence can be safely accommodated within the realm of domesticity once again. Itchy, who has seemingly lost his ability to speak and can only squeak like a regular rodent, is captured by Homer and dropped into a gerbil tank. Meanwhile, Scratchy's thirst for vengeance is pacified when he falls in love with Snowball II, a cute moment that's somewhat soured by Marge's assertion that he has to be neutered, lest he go on to sire a litter of freakish real cat-cartoon cat hybrids (cue a classy iris out on Scratchy's crotch). The takeaway is that media violence, insofar as it is all just escapist fantasy, is way too ridiculous a beast to translate into much of a threat in the real world. It can't get too far in before its balls come off.

TACtics: Gravel Truck (I Can Feel My Lunch Bouncing About)

"Gravel Truck" is something of an oddity - it boasts one of the most gruesome-looking accidents in all the TAC canon, and yet the ad as a whole is not, by their standards, fantastically memorable. In fact, in my head it's always lived in the shadow of "Mates", a similar (although somewhat less graphic) ad from New South Wales' Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA). The execution of "Mates" is frankly a lot naffer, but that works in its favour. As a cautionary piece, it's got no shortage of character. "Gravel Truck" has the smash factor, but doesn't have the...let's call it the smarts factor. The lingering discomfort that a particularly striking safety ad leaves on your psyche when it's done. Can we dig in and figure out why? 

Before we get started, there is some discrepancy concerning the title and debut year of this entry. Multiple YouTube uploads and at least two different PSA wikis have it down as simply "Gravel", with both wikis stating that it's from 1993. The Monash University Accident Research Centre's 1999 study, however, lists the title as "Gravel Truck" and the year as 1996, and that's the source I'm going with. 1996 seems about right to me, since it strikes me as characteristic of TAC's output from specifically the mid-1990s, when they were at their absolute peak with their televisual trauma farming. Nothing was withheld in making those shocks as bold and salacious as possible. We had the combusting vehicle in "Fireball", the all-out crunching of the combi in "Nightshift", the kid going under the wheels onscreen in "Mum In A Hurry" (most other ads would have been tasteful enough to cut away and leave that to your imagination, but taking prisoners was hardly TAC's thing), and the almost Final Destination-esque twist of that giant tanker lunging out of nowhere in "Bush Telegraph". All of which, needless to say, made for hard-hitting imagery. Still, I wonder if in "Gravel Truck" we are starting to see the limitations of this technique. The problem with relying too much on shock value is that viewers will potentially grow numb to it after a while, enticing you to chase after bigger and ever-more outrageous spectacles, to the point that they risk becoming so over the top that they lose their ring of credibility (there is a certain infamous Northern Irish speeding PIF that I think absolutely falls into this trap - you surely know which one I'm talking about). I'm not saying that "Gravel Truck" is anywhere near that level of extremeness, but it is in rather an odd in-between space, like TAC were experimenting with shocking viewers with a more nauseating Red Asphalt-style approach that was centred on gaping at bodily injury, but then good taste (mostly) prevailed and they decided to be as moderate as possible about it. It goes simultaneously too far and not far enough, and as a result it cancels out what identity it might have had.

It is another scenario in which multiple factors have a hand in the accident, with the particularly deadly ingredient this time around being the speeding. There are shades of "Tracy", in the visible P symbol on the vehicle (indicating that the driver is new and inexperienced, despite his protests to the contrary), and "Fireball", with its emphasis on the hazardous nature of the country roads, even to people who think they can handle them. At least the young occupants of this specific doomed vehicle are a less rowdy bunch than the kids in "Darren" and have their seatbelts buckled, although it doesn't do much to spare them from the carnage in question. We learn that they're on their way to pick up Sophie, who will apparently be "dark as" if they keep her waiting. Jess, the front seat passenger, is the sensible party in this equation, repeatedly berating the driver Gary for going too fast, while back seat passenger Nick encourages him to hammer it. Gary suggests that it's the bumpiness of the terrain that's getting to Jess, and insists that they're in safe hands because he's driven this route numerous times. Having haphazardly overtaken one truck without incident, they encounter another truck coming in the opposite direction, prompting both vehicles to swerve to the side to pass each other on the narrow road. Unfortunately, since Gary is driving too quickly and impulsively, he doesn't see the obscured danger until it's too late - there is a school minibus travelling close behind the truck and, thrown slightly off course by the gravelly surface at the side of the road, he nearly blunders right into it. He manages to swerve, just clipping the minibus, but loses control of the car and sends it hurtling into the bush, where it makes a truly brutal side-on collision with a tree. The dust settles, and we catch sight of not only the lifeless bodies slumped inside the wreckage, but Gary's mutilated remains lying beside it (we recognise that distinctive chequered flannel he was wearing). The impact really seems to have ripped him up; the camera doesn't exactly hone in on it, but it lingers long enough for you to notice that he might be missing his head (I'm not totally clear, but he's certainly missing something). We've seen glimpses of bloodied corpses before in TAC ads, like the girlfriend in "Fireball", but this is on a whole new level of gory detail. Or at least it would be if it weren't so curiously soft-pedalled (if you're going to be that graphic, then you might as well go whole hog with it). The image of decapitated Gary falls a little flat as the ad's final zinger, but at least the impact of the car against the tree is astoundingly savage - to the extent that we're not doubting the seriousness of the accident and the gorier touches don't really add much. It comes off as a half-hearted attempt to tack on a gratuitous shock for viewers growing wise to the formula.

Something that is notably absent from "Gravel Truck" is any kind of emotional follow-up with the grieving parties, which isn't necessarily what denies it the smarts factor. I have gone on record as saying that this particular aspect of the TAC formula is the one that can be hit or miss for me, since my preference tends to be for more understated displays of emotion. Sure, there are times when a more overblown reaction is entirely appropriate - I think "Beach Road" and "Mum In A Hurry" are examples of ads that manage to justify it, in lending an inescapable realism to their appallingly tragic scenarios. On the other hand, some of the most unsettling TAC endings have been the ones that handle the reactions of surviving characters in a low-key fashion, such as the trucker's drooping shoulders at the end of "Nightshift" and the final words of "Bush Telegraph". They close their ads on a more muted note, but it stays with you. "Gravel Truck" looks to be going for a similarly understated approach in having the camera pan briefly to the minibus, where the audience of murmuring children within function as a Greek chorus on the unspeakable horror, only it's still such a melodramatic detail that I think comes off as a touch comedic (albeit not to the charmingly awkward extent as the comparable ending in "Mates", where a busload of schoolkids gawks at the wreck with a seemingly gleeful fascination like the proper little monsters they are).

The smarts factor requires more than lurid spectacle (whether it be physical, emotional or both). We need a reason to feel a connection with the characters, and like there are real lives being devastated here. I do wonder if the real reason why "Gravel Truck" makes less of a lasting impression is because it's overall less narrative-driven than some of TAC's other ads - the characters touch briefly on their plans for that evening and on the need to pick up Sophie (whoever she is), but we're not given a huge sense of the wider world and of their place within it. Compare it to, say, "Fireball", where the opening dialogue established the characters' connections to the local community (setting up for the epilogue's twist), but also the broader life plans that were about to be tragically terminated. All of this was in service of the message about these kids being at at home in the country, yet still succumbing to its perilous roads, but it gave you a strong enough taster of the kind of lives they had been leading. One of TAC's greatest strengths was in how they were able to blend the build-up to an accident with the details of the everyday, whereas in "Gravel Truck" much of the dialogue feels a little too openly expository and repetitive. There's a lot of repeated emphasis on Jess's objections to Gary's speeding, and on Gary's insistence that he knows the road. Perhaps ironically for a speeding ad, the build-up feels slow, and not in a deceptively calm way, but in a way that's taken up by a large amount of empty space. Like a lot of TAC ads, "Gravel Truck" exists in two different presentations, the full 90 second version and the shorter 60s second edit, and for the most part, I don't think the former benefits from being so long. Lost from the shorter cut are the comment about Sophie being "dark as" and a moment where Gary casually lists off the layout of the route ahead: "You go up over this rise, there's a sharp turn to the right, another dip then it's a quick left." He is, perhaps inadvertently, listing off the various points where mishaps could easily occur if adequate care is not taken, and shrugging them off as they're no big deal. It's a classic case of familiarity breeding contempt, establishing Gary's overconfidence and indicating that he isn't making any allowances for the possibility of something unexpected entering the mix. It is a useful narrative detail, but it causes the subsequent sequence where Gary hastily overtakes the first truck to feel redundant, since it doesn't tell us anything about Gary (or Jess) that we don't already know. I'm not really seeing why we needed to have both of them. I have considered the possibility that the latter might potentially have been intended as a fake out moment, where we expect the accident to happen and the characters get away unscathed (only to crash further up when they push their luck one time too many), but I'm not sure that it plays that way - it feels as though it's there purely to reinforce the point about Gary being a habitually reckless driver. 

Where "Gravel Truck" does excel is in one of its most subtle yet ominous touches - the cloud of dust rising off the road as they make that turn in the opening, establishing the rougher nature of the road and foreshadowing the part the treacherous terrain will play in the accident. I'd argue that this is the only serious means by which the shorter edit loses out; the dust cloud kicked up in the 90s second version lasts longer and is considerably more impressive. The dust is, without question, the star of the piece. Not only does it pepper the journey with a hint of impending instability, the way it rises and settles at the end makes for a poetic final visual, even more quietly affecting than the mangled corpses it's swirling above. Dust they are, and to dust they have returned.

TACtics: Bones (Bend Your Knee, Katie)

 

The good news is that, despite its ominously macabre title, "Bones" ends up being one of the happier TAC installments. That says little, and indeed it shouldn't, but still, the victim actually survives in this scenario. That has to count for something, right? 

Debuting in 1992, "Bones" adheres closely to the formula set out previously in "Darren", with us once again finding ourselves inside a car with a bunch of kids with a frightfully low sense of self-preservation. Our protagonist, backseat passenger Katie, unbuckles her seatbelt and leans forward to whisper something in the ear of the driver Chris, causing him to giggle. The front seat passenger, who goes unnamed, attempts to get in on the private joke, but is rebuffed. Chris, like Darren before him, makes a perfunctory effort to be the mature one in the equation, by telling Katie to sit back and put her seatbelt on again, but in the process takes his eyes off the road - which is hugely unfortunate, as it's right at that moment that a pedestrian steps out into their path. Chris's reflexes are thankfully still on point enough that he's able to swerve and avoid the pedestrian, but this causes him to rear-end a van parked at the side of the street. They would have been looking at a mercifully minor collision, but for the fact that Katie hadn't had time to re-buckle - and since there's nothing to restrain her, she goes head first through the windshield and smacks into the van on the other side. This being TAC at their most brutally immersive, we get to experience that short but horrifying trip right along with her, via a POV shot that has us sailing over the dashboard and winding up with a load of broken glass in our face. 

It seems fair to say that the pedestrian likely didn't possess a significant sense of self-preservation either, as from the looks of it he'd already stepped out in front of a hulking great lorry, although it's hard to tell exactly what was happening at his end, and that's by design. Our perception of what lies up ahead is as limited as it is for the occupants of Chris's car. What "Bones" gets across particularly deftly is the importance of expecting the unexpected, and being prepared for the fact that what's on the immediate horizon could change in the blink of an eye. The ad opens with a subconscious hint of what could potentially go wrong - the first thing we see, even before our main characters have pulled into view, is that formidable lorry trundling along beside them. Even if no threat is visible, its looming presence has us instantly alert to how vulnerable and out of their depth this snickering lot are (in contrast to "Darren', where the road appeared open and free, and the perfect playground for these puckish young day trippers, until it wasn't). Our instinct proves entirely astute, for the lorry does indeed play a critical role in their downfall, by obscuring what's incoming. It represents that overhanging element of uncertainty, the doings on the road that are intrinsically beyond their control and perception, making it especially lethal when the pedestrian - the element of unforeseeable chaos - leaps into the mix and throws everything into disarray. There were a few different factors at play here. The pedestrian doesn't appear to have made the most sensible choices, and that much was obviously out of Katie's hands. Distracted driving also played a part in the accident (if Chris had seen the pedestrian sooner, he might have been able to brake then and there, as the lorry did), and to a degree that was Katie's fault, since she was the one interfering with Chris's concentration, though the onus was ultimately on Chris to not take his eyes off the road. The fundamental point, however, is that if Katie had been wearing her seatbelt, she would have been safely protected in the event of the unexpected. By figuring she could let her guard down for just a brief moment, she left herself exposed to the fickleness of chance. 

On the upside, Katie has survived her little misadventure, although the price she now has to pay is a heavy one for such an easily preventable mistake. The epilogue of "Bones" closely recalls the "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" entry "Recovery", in which we witnessed a man undergoing physiotherapy after losing his ability to walk in an accident. The emphasis in "Bones" is likewise on the harrowing fragility of the human form (hence the title) and what a long and arduous road it can be to get back to normally when physical trauma has stripped you of your everyday functioning. The processes both of standing up and sitting back down in her wheelchair have her in a wad of acutely discernible discomfort, and there is an additional shock, when we get sight of Katie's face (obscured at the start of the epilogue, as she's being wheeled into the rehabilitation centre), and see how heavily scarred it is. The physiotherapist offers her words of support, assuring her that tomorrow will be better and that moving about will get easier every day, but her optimism is undercut by Katie's tearful response: "I'm just so sick of this." She echoes the protagonist of "Recovery", who similarly asserted that he couldn't keep going, no matter how much encouragement was thrown his way, although the implications of "Bones' are potentially even grimmer, suggesting that Katie has been in rehabilitation for long enough already, that she's heard it all before, and all that tomorrow really has to offer is the prospect of having to come back and repeat the agonising ritual all over again. The short ends hauntingly, with a sobbing Katie holding her arm across her wounded face in a diagonal position that evokes the protective embrace of a seatbelt.

"Bones" received a new lease of life in 2019, when it returned to the airwaves, this time in an edited version that was cut down from a minute to 30 seconds, and accompanied by a revised tagline: "This ad made people buckle up 30 years ago. Shame we have to play it again." The maths was a little off, but the point was sill effectively made.

TACtics: Haunted (You Were Aware Of That, Were You Chris?)

 

When the Transport Accident Commission got started with its television advertising in 1989, its approach was one of unrelenting realism. The pseudo-documentary format of earlier entries like "Girlfriend" and "Beach Road" swiftly evolved into the more salacious shocks of "Darren" and "Fireball", which sought to recreate the sensation of being inside a doomed vehicle moments before a crash, causing the viewer to feel less flies on the wall than active participants in scenarios destined to end in tragedy. The emphasis was squarely on the raw immediacy of those life-changing accidents, and on pinpointing the moment at which we'd slipped past the point of no return and were left to soak in the harrowing realisation that, for the persons involved, things were never going to be the same again. But even the most audacious of formulas can only retain their teeth for so long. Numerous variations and countless psychologically scarred Victorians later, and TAC felt that a fresh angle was in order to complement the emerging millennium. "Haunted" from 2005 shows a dramatic shift from the shock-driven tactics of those earlier campaigns, with an approach that leaned more toward the spirit of the UK's "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Live" series, where emphasis tended to rest less on the accident itself than on the longer term fall-out - in this case, the very longer term. "Haunted" is impressively ambitious in its narrative scope, telling a story that spans multiple decades and demonstrates the bitter extent to which a single failure in adhering to your responsibilities as a driver can leave you mangled as a person, if not always as conspicuously as you might imagine. It seeks to address the very question that was explicitly raised by Ken Stott's character at the end of "Fireman's Story", but was there treated as defying any kind of comprehensible answer - how does a drink driver get on with life whilst having to accommodate the knowledge that their foolish actions brought fatal consequences? Even if you are able to maintain the guise of normalcy going forward, is it not the kind of thing that would be perpetually tearing you up inside?

"Haunted" makes for a fascinating comparison with "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives", since it does the one thing that campaign seemed determined to avoid, and does it very effectively - it has you sympathising fundamentally with the perpetrator. This was a perspective largely downplayed in D&DWL, where PIFs centring on the consequences for the drink driver were either about the immediate horrors of being booked for an offence and becoming the most hated person in the vicinity ("Arrest") or filtered through snapshots of the broken innocence for which they were directly accountable ("Kathy" and "Eyes"). The drink driver was usually the incorporeal boogeyman, and rarely humanised ("Mates", one of the few specimens in which we actually got to meet them in the flesh, had them depicted as a snivelling wimp, not unlike the bloody idiot seen staggering about the hospital corridors in "Girlfriend"). They are, naturally, the antagonists of the equations, with the traditional route being to regard them as objects of scorn and contempt (something still manifest in the uncompromising campaign tagline), but the stance taken by "Haunted' is a valid one nevertheless - we do need to be able to put ourselves in their shoes, and appreciate how their lives could so easily become our own if we were to make the same mistakes. In "Haunted" we find ourselves immersed in the world of the perpetrator to the point of entrapment. The claustrophobic cruelties of being wedged inside a steel box hurtling along on a terminal collision course are supplanted with the equally horrifying experience of being stranded inside the head of a man whose outlook has been irrecoverably altered by an ill-advised decision he made at an earlier junction in life, when he hadn't grasped how easy it was to go over the alcohol limit. We get something resembling DETR's "What's It Like?" campaign, with its nightmarish impressions of the offender's inner turmoil, but explored from a more narrative-driven angle.

"Haunted" follows a man named Chris from his early 30s into the later stages of middle age, all throughout which he is persistently troubled by visions of a mysterious boy in an ominous black shirt. Chris gets older, while the boy stays the same age. A subtext of child neglect seems to intermittently suggest itself (Chris's initial reluctance to acknowledge the boy, the lack of a shoe on the boy's left foot), raising the possibility that the boy might be the childhood Chris, or an abandoned son from a prior relationship. It is evident that the boy's appearances represent intrusions on Chris's life within the present, reminders of a past that he would sooner leave behind, but remains beleaguered by. A flashback eventually reveals the identity of the boy - he was the victim of a road accident that Chris caused in his early 20s, when he got behind the wheel after drinking a couple of beers, something that he hadn't considered a huge deal until was faced with the worst possible outcome and blood on his hands. The boy's metaphorical ghost has attached himself to Chris ever since, ready to make himself known whenever Chris gets a little too comfortable in the here and now.

The effectiveness of the short rests a lot upon the lack of any really overt drama outside of the flashback sequence, and even that is handled with a healthy degree of moderation - the featured scenario is similar to that of "Beach Road", with the paramedics trying unsuccessfully to revive the boy while Chris is questioned, only minus the presence of any distraught relatives, a move that allows the emphasis to fall purely on Chris's horror. On the surface, the Chris of the present appears to be leading a very normal and positive life. Whatever the consequences of his drinking driving were for him from a strictly legal standpoint, they are seemingly behind him. He has a job and a couple of kids with whom he shares a patently loving bond. He hasn't completely gone to pieces in the aftermath, but holding it together underneath remains an unending struggle for him. In one sequence we see Chris riding the bus, looking as if he's about to crack a casual smile about something, only to see the kid gazing back at him from an adjacent street and for his momentary mirth to be shut right down. I did wonder if there was any significance to his using public transport in the present day instead of driving, although I suspect that the main purpose of this scene is to show Chris as an active member of a community while illustrating the extent of his isolation (there is an obvious metaphor in none of the other passengers being seated particularly close to him). Awareness of the boy's omnipresence is a burden that he alone has to carry. We see intermittent hints of how this burden might be placing a strain on his relationships, most notably in a shot that shows the boy lying on a bed between Chris and his wife, who are facing in opposite directions - although a wedding ring is still visible on Chris's finger in the final sequence, so I don't think the implication is that it is literally driving them apart. Rather, their physical separation becomes a shorthand for how intrinsically alone Chris is in his suffering, so that even when he's in the company of others, he cannot keep that kid at bay. Those close to him might well be aware of that spectre from his past, but that grief and culpability is not something in which they can personally share.

For Chris, life must go on, but a part of himself has certainly died at the scene of the accident, while the anonymous kid has acquired a kind of ghoulish immortality, as the unabating shadow to Chris's emotional state. Chris is locked into the horror of that terrible moment when the boy was declared dead; in a powerful stylistic touch, the present day is depicted in predominantly gloomy, storm cloud-ridden tones, in contrast to the overwhelming brightness of the flashback, which is firmly established as the incident that overshadows and defines all else. In a way, the boy does represent the younger Chris, in becoming a symbol for their mutually extinguished vitality. The kid is unable to progress any further, while the ageing Chris is unable to fully embrace the life right in front of him, so that even an occasion as ostensibly joyous as his daughter's wedding is undercut by his relentless pangs of conscience. In the full version (see below) we hear a reference to the speech that Chris is due to deliver as the father of the bride, and sense that he perhaps views himself as a fraud, in being called upon to toast the future that he feels he has already cancelled. The film has a cyclic narrative, closing as it began with Chris, now in his early 60s, standing alone out of doors with only his memories, the pain of which has clearly not dulled over time. The final shots within the present are set against a murky evening sky, indicating little prospect of alleviation from his demons - the horizon offers only further darkness.

I'd rate "Haunted" as one of TAC's most affecting pieces. The balance of realism with more abstract storytelling is infinitely more successful than in "Glasses", and it builds up a convincingly intimate portrait of Chris as a genial guy paying for a single (yet severe) mistake from which there is unfortunately no going back. Of note is that there are two different cuts of the film, the full version clocking in at a couple of minutes in length, and a truncated version that's only half as long. The version uploaded to TAC's official YouTube channel is the shorter of the two, which omits a sequence where Chris is seen in his kitchen preparing lunch for his children, as well as various other smaller touches such as the paramedics laying the deceased boy's shirt back over his chest.

Interestingly, toward the tail-end of the decade the UK had "Live With It", an anti-speeding PIF from THINK! with a near-identical premise, although the execution was markedly dissimilar. I wouldn't say that it in any way eclipsed the sombre potency of "Haunted", but for what it's worth it stands out as one of the better THINK! entries, proof that a compelling premise can come in multiple flavours (although in this case always in some variation of grim).