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. Some of these perceived connections inevitably 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, "Terror of Tiny Toon"? The title is clearly a play on that of the 1938 Western 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 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 hoary 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 much about the segment that marks 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 would want 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 actually 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 designed to call out the viewer's role in all of this. As a concept, Itchy and Scratchy have this inherently double-edged quality that prompts 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 odds, 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 honestly believe that show was 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 (keeping in mind that Itchy and Scratchy themselves have been around since the Tracy Ullman days), Scratchy finally gets to call out Bart and Lisa in person and ask 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 else laughing at the pain that he's 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. Chances are that the viewer's mind is in a similar place (although it 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 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 immeasurable 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 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, and get to crudely interact with the animated characters that have been 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 the "real" world being imperilled by a lawless fictitious one, as in this sequence there's really not much difference between them. Both animated duos become chaotic forces that feel out of place as they mutually 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 show, 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 are accustomed to having the 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 things go down very differently. The answer, as "Tiny Toon" has it, is all a matter of awareness of that relationship between who we are and what we watch - that our media consumption, however vulgar, can stay fine and healthy for as long as we're able to differentiate between what is real and what is fictitious, what has consequences and what's all just frivolous fun, with the danger lying wherever the two become blurred and the horrors of our ids are no longer kept in check. The segment takes a 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 his partially-skeletal form, having been hosed with a school of piranha (a sequence that, while creative, doesn't land anywhere near as gruesomely as it should), 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 more. 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 escapist fantasy, is ultimately too ridiculous to translate into much of a threat in the real world. It can't get too far in before its balls come off.
No comments:
Post a Comment