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.

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #56: Good Hedgehog, Evil Hedgehog (Sonic Adventure 2)

I'd have thought it would be common wisdom that all hedgehogs are good hedgehogs. Regions of the world where they'd be considered invasives notwithstanding, it is hard to imagine a creature more endearingly innocuous. Erinaceids are insanely adorable, and unless you happen to be an egg or a mollusc, essentially harmless. And yet there was apparently this guy named Shadow who let the side down back in 2001. My experience in playing the Sonic The Hedgehog games was limited to just the first three releases, so the narrative happenings of Sonic Adventure 2 remain a mystery to me. I couldn't tell you anything about Shadow himself and how he fits in with the broader Sonic lore. The game's promotional campaigning indicates that he was an exceptionally evil hedgehog and out to conquer the world right as Sonic was attempting to save it, but for all I know their rivalry could've turned out to be a giant misunderstanding, as it did with Knuckles in Sonic 3. In any event, this 30-second ad was happy to take that premise at face value and get a twisted little kick from imagining what it would look like if it were translated into real hedgehog biology. Take two hedgehogs, distil their respective natures to the very essences of good and evil, and what wonders might science behold?

Part of a series of ads from the early 00s that used footage of real hedgehogs to create a humorous contrast between Sonic's super-erinaceid abilities and his meeker real-world counterparts, this was less mean-spirited than those baffling Sonic 2 ads the UK got in 1992, at least on the hedgehogs' side of things. A cow meets a gruesome end, in a sequence that pays homage to the velociraptor feeding scene from Jurassic Park, but the carnage is handled with a heaping spoonful of absurdity that has it going down a whole lot easier. We all know that a hedgehog couldn't really do that to a cow, no matter much malevolent energy its deceptively small form might conceal (I'll also hazard a guess that the devouring of helpless cattle was not an accurate representation of how Shadow expresses his purported evil in the gameplay itself). There is likewise an intrinsic hilarity in seeing the ickle, distinctly non-threatening looking creature scurry around while the words "Evil Hedgehog" are displayed beneath it in big bold lettering. So what distinctive traits separate the good hogs from the truly rotten apples, according to the ad's internal narrative? A good hedgehog is a friendly little soul, docile enough to let you handle it and to feed genteelly from your palm, while an evil hedgehog must be safely contained behind a steel door, and its shockingly vicious appetite can only be appeased by feeding it live prey several times its size. This being a campaign that was fundamentally geared toward children, efforts were clearly made to restrict the resulting splatter to a tasteful minium, but you see enough to know that that cow did not exactly go out humanely. At the very end, the second hedgehog reaffirms its uncouth nature by belching, confirming itself as such an unrelenting revel that it hasn't even mastered civilised table manners.

The most flavoursome twist on offer was the decision to present this grisly scenario in the musty, washed-out aesthetic of an old-school educational reel, taking the absurdity to a degree that extends a little beyond the basic contrast between a good hog who eats politely and a bad hog who guzzles whole cows. The thing that most captivates me about this ad (besides the hedgehogs themselves) is the slight resemblance it bears to the cult BBC series Look Around You, a spoof of 1970s era science-focussed programming. It has the same cursed vintage tones and the same eye for understated detail that feeds into a bigger picture of omnipresent chaos. We might notice, for example, that the scientist tending to the evil hedgehog is missing an arm (if you look closely, you can make out the telltale bulge protruding from his chest where his arm has evidently been hidden away, but I think we can all suspend our disbelief for the sake of a morbid joke), indicating that live cattle aren't the only things the little pin cushion has a taste for. An even more macabre touch is the drain in the floor of the evil hedgehog's enclosure, hinting at the extreme amount of bovine blood these men anticipate being spilled. As with Look Around You, it plays like an artefact from a vividly uncanny bygone world, in which the rules of the universe appear significantly more unstable and the voice of authority becomes all the more suspect. Is this a window into an alternate reality where it's a fact of nature that hedgehogs can be divided into the conflicting camps of good and evil, and you have to know which one you're dealing with in order to live a long and healthy life? Or is the implication that these scientists actually created these little freaks of nature right there inside their labs (a line of thinking that is certainly invited by the Jurassic Park allusion) - an exceptionally good hedgehog designed to be the perfect pet, and an exceptionally evil hedgehog that's most likely in the running to join some kind of biological weapons program? Something tells me this won't end well for humanity.

The question of how the two opposing erinaceids would react if confronted with each other is not addressed here, but was answered by another installment within the same campaign, featuring two similar-looking hedgehogs, as well as an off-screen director engaged in the evil practice of inciting them to go head to head in the hedgehog equivalent of cock fighting. Once again, it was explicitly identified as a conflict between good and evil, yet despite being polar opposites on the moral spectrum, it would appear that they did not actually harbour any animosity toward each other - as soon they were set loose, they exercised their mutual pacifism by turning their pudgy round butts toward the screen.  Sometimes it's only proper that adorability wins out.

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #55: Bosch Roadkill (Say No To Squirrelicide)

 2015's "Stop The Roadkill" short feels like an odd mishmash of concepts. What starts out as a self-confessed PSA about the millions of critters killed on America's roads by the week culminates in a marketing pitch for Bosch's "on fleek" brand of windscreen wipers. The presence of the Humane Society logo at the end assures us that this passionate plea on behalf of imperilled wildlife was utterly sincere; even so, having it all boil down to an endorsement for wipers causes it to play somewhat like the protracted set-up to a gag. An elaborate display followed by a quick punchline, posing a simple solution to a problem that we suspect is quite a bit more complicated. The impact of roads on wildlife populations is nothing to be sneezed at (remember how much it kept coming up as a losing scenario when we looked at the Survival books three years ago?), and I'm sure there are a whole number of factors to be taken into consideration in the battle to reduce it (speed, constructing roads in ways that avoid breaking up habitats in the first place, etc). But as a starting point, fair enough - in order to prevent collisions (with wildlife, other motorists or anything else) you do need to be able to clearly see what's in front of you. A car with insufficient components won't be doing any favours to anyone. And as the ad's hook makes clear, a driver is only as benevolent and as worthy as the vehicle they hop around in. The scrawny cast don't care to distinguish, repeatedly warning the viewer against being a killer car, as opposed to simply steering one.

There's a likeable novelty to the production. The smashed and rotting corpses of five different animals, representative of those millions who wind up as roadkill every week, are reanimated under the light of the full moon. Having failed to make it safely to the other side, they find themselves stranded in an undead limbo, bound to the asphalt and cursed to bemoan their miserable fates to a retro dance track that is vaguely reminiscent of Michael Jackson's "Thriller", although not a full-on pastiche (Vincent Price-esque narration sequence notwithstanding). A promotional blurb included on the Andrew Barrett Creative website informs us that the tune in question is 100% original (and also composed by "a famous musical producer" who goes identified), although for me it still has a curious, even comforting air of backward familiarity - it's the kind of song I can hear and swear I've already heard sampled in multiple vaporwave tracks, without quite recalling the specifics. 

The biggest thrill of the video is in the puppetry and the character designs, and in the various smaller touches that give each of the zombie critters their own distinct flavours as they twist their pulverised, disintegrating hides to the cautionary beat. Their grotesqueness is counterbalanced by a warmth and personality that keeps the tone intrinsically fun, even as a flattened squirrel with unearthly glowing eyes is spewing the stomach-churning details about the damage dealt to his internal organs when he found himself caught beneath the wheels of a truck. His being a squirrel means we get an inevitable "nuts" innuendo - almost as inevitable as the rapping skunk who gives a demonstration of his anal artillery by discharging a cloud of noxious greenish gas (reinforcing the misconception that skunks are effectively passing gas in defence, as opposed to repelling their predators with foul-smelling liquid, but I suppose the biology might vary with an undead skunk, or "dead mother trucker", in the words of his leporine back-up). But even the most predictable elements are delivered with a stark brutality that fits the ad's playfully warped vibe. There's also a sly parody of PSA sloganeering, with the squirrel chanting "Just Say No to squirrelicide!" Enhancing the flavour considerably are the unique injuries that point to each creature's individual tale of woe. The deer has bagged a couple of souvenirs from the car that hammered him, in the form of the tree-shaped air freshener and rear view mirror dangling from his antlers (making me wonder if the driver fared any better in the collision, since he'd presumably had to have gone through the windshield in order to get them), and uses a Deer X-ing sign as a painfully ironic crutch. The skunk has skid marks running in a perfectly vertical line down his back, and sports a licence plate on his front as bling. One of the rabbit's ears looks to be hanging by a thread, while his leg detaches and does its own independent jig. The fox has a flashing headlight embedded in her chest, bone protruding from her tail, and can rotate her broken neck 360 degrees a la Regan from The Exorcist (she also detaches it in a later scene). For zombies, they seem like a mostly benign bunch, in generally wanting little more than for motorists to be conscious of their plight. The skunk is alone in expressing any vindictive intent, in awaiting the opportunity to get back at the SUV-driving, carpooling soccer mom responsible for his unwanted second stripe by directing the full fury of his unhallowed anal glands her way.

The ad climaxes with a car appearing on the road, but stopping well short of the undead menagerie. The unseen driver uses Bosch brand wipers and thus has zero trouble in seeing them ahead...although with that in mind I'm surprised that they aren't freaked out by the sight of these uncanny critters jiving in plain sight and don't immediately make a u-turn back to civilisation. But perhaps that too is a testament to how in control they feel as a result of having those wipers installed. Having made their point, most of the animals slink back into the roadside shrubbery, but the squirrel persists in dragging the moment out past its natural conclusion, leaping up onto the hood of the car and getting ejected by the wipers. They are thus depicted as invaluable tools in helping commuters to navigate the unexpected, including pesky zombie sciurines with chips on their shoulders (and within their nuts). We close with the tagline "Invented for life", which in this context has a crafty double meaning. 

The legacy of the short is somewhat of a phantom one, at least from my own late-to-the-party perspective. At the time it became "an internet sensation and Bosch's most effective online film ever" (according to A Barrett) it must have passed me by, meaning that I didn't attempt to access its official website, which reportedly had biographies for each of the battered quintet, until it had slipped away to Defunctville. I'm not having much luck in pulling up this information when I try whacking it into the Wayback Machine either, so if the characters had names I guess they'll have to remain a mystery to me, along with any details to their backstories that are finer than what the ad itself makes evident (the fox and rabbit, for example, don't get to tell their stories in the lyrics, so it might have been interesting to learn how they came a cropper).  More curious still are the gallery of GIFs and production images on the A Barrett page, which, in addition to showcasing some neat concept art, indicate that the ad even had its own miniature line of tie-in merchandising. There are tantalising photos depicting a keychain of the deer and a vinyl pressing of the song - although I'm not 100% convinced that the latter ever existed and wasn't just a mock-up created as a tongue-in-cheek promotional image (for one, I can't seem to locate a Discogs entry for the item; if it was real, then I'd hazard a guess that it was only available in a strictly limited capacity, as a promo item given out to press or to crew members, or something along those lines). Perhaps it's only appropriate that these decomposing creatures should linger on in a fragmentary form, no longer the full picture of what they once were, destined to haunt my unsatiated curiosity for evermore with their incompleteness. But so long as the ad itself is able to keep on circulating, the spirit of this demented nocturnal rave can keep rising up, furthering its huggably nightmarish cycle for innumerable full moons to come.

Lisa The Beauty Queen (aka T Is For Her Tooth-Filled Mouth)

Something I very rarely talk about in these Simpsons episode coverages are the couch gags, but I couldn't let the one preceding "Lisa The Beauty Queen" (9F02) pass without comment. It's a sequence that I'm sure tells a fascinating story - we enter the living room to find Maggie already seated on the couch, as Homer, Marge and Bart rush past her, overshooting their mark so drastically that they almost run off the film strip altogether and into the white abyss beyond, only to pivot in the nick of time and make it back to the couch, at which point Lisa finally shows up and takes her place beside them. Even as a child, the gag always stood out to me as weirdly incomplete. The intention is clear and charming enough. It's a tribute to the kinds of fourth wall-breaking antics that were endemic to the golden age of animation, in which characters would appear to wittily interact with their theatrical surroundings (for one such example, see the ending to the 1948 Bugs Bunny short Rabbit Punch). But it always seemed profoundly odd that only Homer, Marge and Bart were permitted to participate in the homage, when ordinarily the family are in these couch gags as a team. Wouldn't it have made more sense for all five of them to have run off the strip in unison? What is the purpose of having Maggie already seated, and Lisa appearing only when the joke's already over? Unless there's an additional reference that I'm missing, I would hazard a guess that something went awry with the animation in this sequence, and that removing Lisa and Maggie from the main action was done either as a cost-cutting measure, as a result of the full sequence not being completed in time, or perhaps because the effect simply looked too cluttered with all five characters running off the strip at once. The pairing of couch gags and episodes is usually arbitrary, but doesn't it have that extra tang of curiosity that Lisa should be good as omitted from the sequence before an episode she headlines?

"Lisa The Beauty Queen" was in an interesting position when it debuted on October 15th 1992, arriving at a time when The Simpsons was undergoing something of a tonal retooling. There is, in my opinion, a discernible gulf between "A Streetcar Named Marge", the last holdover from Season 3, and "Homer The Heretic", the first of the Season 4 batch proper, signalling the end of one era in the series' history and the dawn of another. "Streetcar" was as bold and ambitious an episode as The Simpsons had ever attempted at that stage, but its foremost strengths lay in the quieter, melancholic qualities that had grounded the family's earlier adventures, and in that regard it plays like a finale to the show's original phase (the point at which, in a parallel universe, it might plausibly have bowed out for good). "Heretic", meanwhile, loudly announced the direction the series would be taking in Al Jean and Mike Reiss's second year as showrunners - brash, outlandish, and driven more by gags than emotional honesty or plotting (notice how dragged out the resolution is, once Ned has saved Homer from the blaze?). Following it up with a relatively unassuming entry like "Lisa The Beauty Queen" was a smart neutralising move, demonstrating that this new era was still capable of crafting sensitive dramas that were in tune with the characters' vulnerabilities, even if they didn't hit quite the same melancholic notes as before. "Lisa The Beauty Queen" isn't exactly the most down-to-earth of Simpsons yarns - some of that trademark Jean-Reiss outlandishness seeps its way in, including a plot development that, at the time, might have been the darkest in the show's history - but it approaches a relatable topic in a meaningful way, exploring Lisa's quest to recover her self-esteem when it is brutally eviscerated by the sketchy dealings of a carnival cartoonist. Homer's solution is to enter Lisa in a local children's beauty pageant, believing that a girl as beautiful as her couldn't possibly lose. Lisa has her reservations but is persuaded to go along with Homer's plan and, with the support of her family, rises brilliantly to the occasion. Unfortunately, the pageant is being funded by a cigarette company, Laramie Cigarettes, who unbeknownst to her have a more sinister ulterior motive than simply circumventing advertising restrictions, in hoping to bag themselves an eminent young spokesperson for a campaign explicitly aimed at getting children into smoking.

On the DVD commentary, the crew joke about how the episode lacks a consistent through line, observing how it lurches from offering a humorous look at the world of child beauty pageants into an outspoken attack on the cigarette industry - which, as they concede, was hardly the bravest of possible targets (Jean notes that networks allowed you to go after cigarettes because they couldn't advertise on television, but a similar diatribe would never have been permitted toward the alcohol industry). It's clear that the beauty pageant story didn't yield enough material to run past the second act and they needed to manufacture a way to keep it going for a few more minutes, hence the participation of Jack Laramie. But as a journey for Lisa I've always felt that it made perfect sense - she's so desperate to gain the town's approval that she's willing to go along with all of these dumb and performative rituals, until she's thrown into a scenario so egregiously wrong that she can't ignore it. What the cigarette angle does mean is that Jeff Martin's script gets to go somewhat easy on the subject of child beauty pageants, regarding them as more of a smokescreen to an evil than an evil in themselves. There have certainly been far more cut-throat depictions in other media - compared to, say, the pageant featured in the movie Little Miss Sunshine (2006), the Little Miss Springfield contest seems like a positively wholesome occasion, a celebration of the town's radiant young girls and their individual talents. If not for that insidious cigarette sponsorship, you might wonder what the harm is. But then this was 1992, and while child pageants had long attracted attracted their share controversy, they weren't quite so hot buttoned an issue at the time. A few years on, and public perception would take a massive swing toward the negative following the murder of JonBenét Ramsey, a six-year-old girl in Colorado who had been very active in the pageant scene, but for now the general aura was a little more innocent. The greatest charge The Simpsons sees fit to level against such competitions is that they are highly vacuous and patently ridiculous affairs, being baby versions of the Miss America competition the family were watching a couple of episodes back in "A Streetcar Named Marge". Ideally, they're not exactly the first place you'd want to go if you're seeking reassurance about your physical appearance, something else that gets jokingly acknowledged on the commentary, but perhaps Lisa's ability to weather that particular challenge is a testament to something else entirely.

Lisa's crisis originates over something ostensibly small, but the hurt it causes is completely palpable. She pays to have a caricature drawn of herself at the Springfield Elementary carnival, and is aghast at the result, which she interprets as an accurate representation of how the rest of the world sees her. By the nature of the beast, anybody who signs up to be caricatured can expect to come out looking a little bit silly, but this specific cartoonist has taken a troublingly crude approach that makes zero attempt to flatter her, depicting her as goofy, wall-eyed and causing a miniature boy to flee in terror. Every time I watch this episode, I'm always astounded at the sheer callousness of this guy, since he is well within earshot when Lisa draws the expressed conclusion that she's ugly, and he does nothing to reassure her. Implying that it actually was his intention to make her feel that way? Or that he'd sooner she arrived at that conclusion than the more obvious one, which is that he's just a lousy artist? Either way, not a good look for him. It does make you wish that the giant pack of cigarettes that shows up in the third act had landed on him as well as Menthol Moose. What's more, there are a bunch of onlookers, kids and adults alike, who laugh uproariously at the drawing, and while it's not clear if they're laughing at Lisa or just the inaneness of the caricature, the fact that they're partaking in the humiliation of an eight-year-old child, who won't have the resilience to shrug this off, is seemingly of no odds to them. In reality, Lisa is no more freakish-looking than the next Springfieldian, but the damage is done. A subsequent scene shows her checking out her reflection on the underside of a spoon; it shows an obviously distorted image, but by this point there is no distinguishing between that distortion and how she perceives herself in her own mind. 

Elsewhere at the carnival, we find Skinner being accosted by a team of Disneyland lawyers for his infringement of their trademarked slogan, "The happiest place on Earth" - and yes, it is difficult to watch this sequence nowadays without musing on the irony that Disney has since gotten its hands on The Simpsons, along with a formidable proportion of popular culture, in spite of some of the anti-Disney sentiments they once cheekily expounded. My favourite joke, which might not have been intentional, is the sneaky, misshapen way they've drawn the Mickey Mouse ears on the blue-haired lawyer's briefcase, so that the series as it stood in 1992 wouldn't court any actual accusations of copyright infringement, and to my mind it kind of looks like a nuclear reactor symbol (coincidence, or underhanded satire on the animators' part?). Homer, meanwhile, is having a prosperous time of it, winning first prize in the school raffle, a ride on a Duff-themed blimp (a rare occasion on which he's able to one-up Ned Flanders, who has to settle for the raffle's second prize in the form of a shoe buffer). His elation is undercut when he realises how miserable Lisa is about her caricature, and is unable to convince her that she shouldn't see herself in that way - she dismisses his encouragement as the kind of meaningless babble that all parents are obligated to say to their children, even as he proves his point by asking his own emotionally abusive father to comment on his appearance ("Dad, am I cute as a bug's ear?" "No, you're homely as a mule's butt!"). He tries consulting Moe for advice, but Moe insists (somewhat suspiciously) that he has no experience in feeling unattractive. Then, a promotion for the upcoming Little Miss Springfield pageant feels like a godsend, for what better way to lift Lisa out of her despair than for her to compete and be crowned the winner, thus demonstrating how beautiful she really is? The possibility that it might not work out that way never so much as crosses his mind. He believes so strongly in the idea and is so determined to put his daughter first that he's willing to fund the extortionate $250 entry fee by selling his ticket for the Duff blimp to Barney, who has recently been making a killing as a human guinea pig.

Although the Homer-Lisa dynamic isn't exactly front and centre for a large chunk of the "Beauty Queen" narrative, it is where the emotional thrust of the episode lies, cementing it as part of an already rich tradition of stories dedicated to demonstrating how these two characters, who on the surface seldom appear to be on the same wavelength, could be bound by such a fundamental tenderness. Previous entries had tended to focus on Homer's repeated failure to meet his daughter's needs, either because he was too apathetic in general ("Lisa's Substitute"), unable to prioritise them ("Lisa's Pony") or exploiting them for his own selfish ends ("Lisa The Greek"). "Beauty Queen" offers an interesting variation on the formula, with Homer once again putting Lisa's feelings on the line through a questionable decision, but his heart is always shown to be in the right place. His actions, while boneheaded, are driven by a steadfast belief in his daughter's worthiness of taking that crown - when Marge puts it to him that the judges are going to hold Lisa to a very different standard to a parent, he responds in the most grotesque yet wholesomely loving of terms: "If I could gouge out somebody else's eyes and shove them into my sockets I would, but to me she's beautiful." What's more, he is actually vindicated by the episode's end; by then, even Homer can't fathom what he was thinking when he filled out the application, supposing that he must have been drunk, but Lisa assures him that he has, in his unorthodox way, enabled her to see herself more positively. She stops short of explaining why she feels better about herself and doesn't resent the final arrangement, which is a big part of what makes the ending so impactful. It isn't exactly hard to figure out, but the episode's final message feels all the more valid for the fact that it is essentially shown and not told. 

More than just a Homer and Lisa story, "Beauty Queen" is really a tale of how all of the family is able to come together to help one of their own in a time of crisis. I'm not sure how readily I swallow the specific moment where Marge persuades a reluctant Lisa to participate in the pageant by explaining how Homer funded her application - it feels reminiscent of the scene from "Lisa's Pony" where Marge comes clean with Lisa about the financial realities of owning a horse and the sacrifices made by Homer for Princess's upkeep, except in this instance Lisa didn't ask to be entered into the pageant, nor did Homer consult her before making the application, so it seems unfair that she should feel pressured into shouldering any of the responsibility. Not to mention that this is a major 180 from Marge's earlier stance that entering an insecure Lisa into a contest of this nature was a dicey proposition at best. You've got to keep the story moving somehow, but I think it might have felt more authentic if Lisa had discovered how Homer got the money and made the decision to take part on her own terms (alternatively, have Homer's sacrifice be framed as a testament to how much he believes in her, rather than something she potentially owes him for). Otherwise, the episode is a shining example of Simpsons solidarity at its mightiest, with all of the family getting to play their part in Lisa's becoming a force to be reckoned with. Marge takes her to a salon to show her to how to make the most of her appearance, Maggie role plays as her opponent in practice sessions, while Bart teaches her several cosmetic hacks that he's inexplicably well-versed in ("taping a swimsuit to your butt, petroleum jelly on your teeth for that frictionless smile, and the ancient art of padding"). He also points out that it is a much awkwarder business for siblings to pay compliments to one another than it is parents to their children, but assures Lisa that she isn't ugly. Amid all this preparation work are various smaller character moments, including the continuation of a running gag where Homer will make some teasing allusion to what we presume to be Bart's sexual innocence, only for us to get a direct window into Homer's thought processes and it to be revealed that he wasn't thinking about sex at all (prior examples showed up in "The War of The Simpsons" and "The Otto Show"). On the flip side, there's an early instance of another running gag that allows us to glimpse into Marge's thoughts and her private lusting over male celebrities (in this case professional golfer Jack Nicklaus), and I'm not sure, but Bart's surprising mastery of the high-heeled strut might be the first occasion on which we've seen him cross-dress. It certainly wouldn't be the last.

With the support of her family, Lisa's confidence slowly regenerates, giving her the moxie to put her all into the pageant, although at this stage she continues to fall victim to the fallacy that her self-worth should be staked on whether or not she can actually win. Her chances of doing so seem in doubt when she learns that she'll be competing against one Amber Dempsey, a seasoned beauty pageant contestant with such mass appeal that she was crowned Pork Princess in the same week as she became Little Miss Kosher. The figure of Amber is about as cut-throat as "Beauty Queen" is prepared to get in its lampooning of child beauty pageants. All things considered, she is a fairly mild caricature of the kind of kid who gets dragged around the pageant circuit (one of the major controversies surrounding child beauty pageants has to do with the sexualisation of contestants, and Bart's padding remark notwithstanding, this is something the episode steers well clear of, with Amber's presentation being cutesy rather than sexualised), but she's also the kind of pandering little terror who can get to the top through the most egregiously hollow of tactics, jeopardising all of Lisa's hard work with a single bat of her illegally-implanted eyelashes (well, not illegal in Paraguay). I do wonder if the episode might have gotten a little more mileage out of the pageant side of the story if it had delved a little more into the psychology of her character - as it is, Amber is really more of a plot device, getting only minimal dialogue (courtesy of Lona Williams, who worked as a writing assistant on the series) and barely any interaction with Lisa. Then again, it may be the point that she never comes off as very much more than a vacuous, perfectly plastic baby doll whose only real function is to flutter her eyelids up and down in an endearing fashion, making it especially galling that she should have the edge over a performance as impassioned as Lisa's. (I also like the small glimpses we get of Amber's mother from the sidelines, looking every bit as glitzy as her daughter, which I guess tells its own story.) The only other contestant who gets any degree of focus during the pageant is Apu's niece Pahusacheta, a relatively obscure character who would later get another speaking cameo in "Grade School Confidential" of Season 8, and whose valiant efforts to perform the entirety of "McArthur Park" on the tabla win her little support among the audience, but do enable Krusty, on top form as the pageant's presenter, to make one of his most hilarious observations (for years, "That just kept going, huh?" became something of a stock response in my household to anything interminable). Also of note is that the panel of judges consists of the woman at the ice cream parlour from whom part had wheedled a free sundae in an earlier scene and, even more randomly, Jake the barber, another relatively obscure character who had nevertheless been a part of this world since the Ullman days (and isn't it weird how he showed up to the panel in full barber attire?).

Lisa's gusto, sincerity and determination shine through, allowing her to make a strong impression with the judges and be named a finalist along with Amber. Alas, such laudable qualities are no match for those freakishly extended eyelashes, and Amber gets to bask in the glory while Lisa has to make do with the reserve position, to be called upon only in the instance that Amber is unable to fulfil her duties. (Krusty points out that there is precedent for this, alluding in his typically sleazy way to the case of Vanessa Williams, who was crowned Miss America in 1983 but forced to relinquish her title to runner-up Suzette Charles the following year over a scandal regarding nude photographs.) After this, Lisa becomes despondent once again. That she came second out of all the contestants is of little consolation - she failed to get the validation she'd convinced herself was most important, thus reinforcing her old insecurities that she simply isn't good enough. But a dark twist of fate comes to her aid, when Amber makes her first public appearance as Little Miss Springfield and is struck by lightning and hospitalised (it's a proper day for disasters, since Barney had just prior crashed the Duff blimp and caused it to go full Hindenburg, yet this gets comically little attention). With that, The Simpsons flashes some almost uncharacteristically morbid fangs - it would be a slippery slope from here into Frank Grimes' miserable demise - mitigated by script making it crystal clear that Amber survives and is on the road to recovery (according to Dr Hibbert, she has already been named Little Miss Intensive Care), even though she doesn't reappear for the rest of the episode. One way of looking at it is that it represents an act of divine intervention, with a bolt from above striking down the unworthy recipient and procuring Lisa her rightful position. Another is that it is Amber's sceptre, one of the key symbols of her glory, that attracts misfortune her way, which might have clued Lisa in that the title is something of a poisoned chalice.

Having been sworn in as Amber's replacement (in the style of Lyndon B. Johnson after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, with Marge dressed up as Jackie O, an inspired allusion to their shared maiden name), Lisa discovers that there is indeed a dark side to the vapid smile and wave rituals in which she's expected to partake. She finds herself powerless in the face of the endless chaos and despair unfolding around her, be it in the form of the mournful deportees she's expected to see off at the Springfield docks or the rioting troops during Bob Hope's appearance at Fort Springfield, angry that Tony Randell cancelled and that they got stuck with Little Miss Springfield. The full magnitude of what she's signed up to doesn't completely kick in until Jack Laramie unveils his nefarious plans for Lisa to become the new face of Laramie Cigarettes, citing a need to replace their depleted clientele ("A lot of people who smoke our product have been...well, dying") with young smokers and thoughts that it might be time to put their current mascot, Menthol Moose, out to pasture. Menthol Moose is of course a parody of Joe Camel, the infamous mascot of Camel brand cigarettes, who at the time was the subject of a deluge of controversy, when studies suggested that he'd emulated the same level of cultural recognition among children as Mickey Mouse, and that his popularity had coincided with an increase in young smokers (and it's just dawned on me that Menthol Moose has the same initials as Mickey Mouse, making that particular allusion all the more razor-edged). Menthol Moose is every bit as much a tool for evil, as is confirmed during a parade where Lisa is required to ride atop a float shaped like a packet of cigarettes, while the man in the Menthol costume rides at the front, dispensing free cigarettes indiscriminately to adults and children alike. Even Maggie gets hold of one, and is prepared to trade in one orally fixated habit for another. Lisa is at first inclined to fall in line with her duties, until she looks down and sees her legions of adoring young fans (and at least one pregnant woman) staring up at her with those addictive cancer sticks protruding from their mouths, and finds that she can no longer hold her tongue. She realises that with a position of influence comes tremendous responsibility; at the pageant she had expressed a desire to become Little Miss Springfield so that she could help to make the town a better place, and in order to do so she needs to be more than just a pretty and inoffensive face. She finds her voice and takes a stand, kicking the giant packet of cigarettes down onto Menthol Moose below - an unusually violent move on Lisa's part, but then this is essentially The Simpsons giving the middle finger to Joe Camel and all that he stood for. The moose (or camel) totally had it coming.

Lisa's refusal to be a corporate shill, or to remain silent about any form of injustice that she brushes up against, quickly makes her a liability for the powers than be, rather than a testament to the community and its ability to demand something better. Before long the town's officials are baying for an excuse to oust her from her post, and ultimately resort to disqualifying her on a pedantic technicality - on her application form, in an area marked "Do Not Write Under This Space", Homer had written "Okay". Homer expects Lisa to be angry with him that his blunder cost her her title, but she takes it in good spirits, reminding Homer of why he entered her into the pageant in the first place. He wanted her to feel better about herself, and she assures him that does. We see here a subtle evolution in Lisa's priorities from the beginning of the episode - the crown, the esteem and the official recognition of her beauty aren't important to her, as she's no longer looking to the approval of others to validate her self-worth. In the end, that kind of needy dependence would only have opened her up to being easily exploited. Having the rest of the family behind her gave her the resolve to put herself before the judges, but she's since gone a step further and realised that true confidence can only come from within. She's seen what she's capable of and how she had the courage to speak her mind when it would have been easier just to keep on waving, and therefore has no reason to doubt herself. And she's thankful to Homer for enabling her to go on that journey. It's a thoughtful statement on the superficiality of society's notions of beauty and on the importance of being able to value one's own virtues, delivered with a gentle conviction that doesn't need to sell itself upfront. It's also a deeply heartwarming moment that's tempered by just the right level of subversion and self-awareness, with Homer asking Lisa if she'll remember this the next time he wrecks her life. "It's a deal" she gamely replies. As we'd already seen from the likes of "Substitute", "Pony" and "Greek", things move in a cycle with Homer and Lisa. Sooner or later Homer, who can barely remember how the events of this particular story got in motion, will let his daughter down all over again, but that underlying connection that allows them to see past their differences will assuredly prove as much of a constant. "Beauty Queen" begins with Homer seeing the best in Lisa, even when she feels she has cause to believe otherwise. The ending demonstrates how that goodwill goes both ways.

Maxwell House (We Don't Like Change, Do We Deirdre?)

The Maxwell House "Deirdre" ad from 1994 is one of those campaigns that didn't really catch on with zeitgeist in any significant way, but that I've found definitely made a quieter impression on the people who saw it - particularly if, like myself, they were young and ultra-susceptible to a gloriously uncanny sign-off. For many years, my quest to locate the Imperial Leather spot about the dishonest minimalists that had so unsettled me in 1996 was impeded by the problem that no one besides myself seemed to so much as remember the premise (much less the brand it was promoting). If I mentioned this freaky black and white ad from the mid-1990s about a couple who lived in a surreal abode and were concealing bars of luxury soap from one another beneath the plant pots beside their bathtub, I was met with blank stares all around. But if I brought up the mid-90s ad about another couple who lived in an eerily drab living room and were complaining about their next door neighbours and how they'd stopped liking them ever since they'd switched coffee brands, then it was a different story entirely: "Oh bloody hell! Yes, I remember, that advert scared the crap out me. That freeze frame at the end was diabolical!" I wouldn't go so far as to claim that the eponymous "Deirdre" ever gave me nightmares as a child, but I do have distinct memories of waking up in the early hours, Skinamarink-style, and being haunted by the mental image of her monstrously contorted face in the darkness. I was certainly old enough to know that there was no way that that woman was going to emerge from the television and devour me, but in practice that mattered little. She had already gotten to me where I felt most powerless. She was, without doubt, one of the most terrifying presences to stalk the advertising airwaves in the 1990s, and I say it's high time we gave her her flowers.

There is actually quite a bit of thematic overlap between the "Dierdre" ad and the aforementioned Imperial Leather "minimalist" ad, in that we glimpse their respective products from primarily the perspective of people who would, on the surface, be inclined to shun such things. We could even combine them with the Toyota Roadster "ascetic" ad from 2000 to form a lose sort of trilogy of advertising scenarios regarding people leading deliberately spartan existences, in which said product acquired a haunting and/or intrusive presence as a sinfully destructive item to be resisted at all costs. They were all profoundly odd and disconcerting pieces that hinged on a tension between abstinence and clandestine desire in a way that clearly rattled me at various stages of my childhood development. In the ascetic's case, he lived alone out in the wilderness and had only himself to answer to for his lurid Roadster-inspired fantasies (and, in the extended cut, the suit and tie he had stashed away), but the other two involved deception amongst couples who'd made a conscious decision to forgo certain creature comforts, whether as a bold lifestyle statement or out of a sense of social superiority. For the Imperial Leather minimalists, the deception was mutual (and potentially something that both parties were fully aware of), but in "Deirdre" it was a joke that only one partner was tauntingly in on. Of the three, "Deirdre" is the most overtly comedic, but it's also by and far the most hair-raising, both on account of the fiendish sting in its tail and the repeated atmospheric dissonance to which it subjects viewers on the route to its psyche-scarring payoff.

The genius of "Deirdre" is that it effectively gives you two ads in one. One is breezy and conventional, the other is arch and sardonic. They represent the opposing characters of two different households, which are intercut with an incongruity so jarring as to evoke the sensation of flicking back and forth between two channels. The couples in question frankly don't feel as though they could inhabit the same universe, let alone live side by side on the same street. The Maxwell-drinking couple (never named, but we'll deem them our "protagonist couple", on account of them being the ones we're supposed to want to emulate) are presented in a succession of exuberant cuts that call to the mind the types of ad campaigns that would have populated breaks a few years back, when the 80s were transitioning into the 90s and there was an extensive reliance on upbeat jingles and sun-kissed images (for an example from Maxwell House's own arsenal, check out "Get The Max" from 1988). The time we spend with the protagonist couple is agreeable, if utterly banal. Taken on their own, it's a straightforward demonstration of how an activity as mundane as downing a morning cup of Joe might become an invaluable ritual in reaffirming familial connections and greeting the possibilities that each new day has to offer, with only the excessive jauntiness of the accompanying music track suggesting any kind of parodic intention. The cliched nature of the images is given a more thorough recontextualisation through the input of our antagonist couple, who comment on the action from their own lustreless confines. The bespectacled husband (also unnamed) is the only one who speaks, while the wife (she's Deirdre) stands expressionless in the backdrop. In their pre-Maxwell days, the protagonist couple were apparently just like them ("our sort of people"). The tale of how they changed their coffee and in the process ceased to be the kind of neighbours the antagonist couple could jibe with is revealed to us as though the husband were divulging some form of community-rocking scandal, with the final assurance that, "We try to avoid them nowadays".

Already there is an atmospheric unease, generated by the rapid intercutting of the motion and blaring party music characterising the coffee-induced euphoria next door and the silent inertia conveying the coldly puritanical flavour of the antagonist couple's lifestyle. It will likely not escape us that the protagonist couple are always seen surrounded by greenery, embracing the open world, while the antagonist couple never venture from their living room, making them prisoners of their own close-mindedness. But it also rests on a tension between what plays like a feverishly heightened fantasy and a cartoonishly tedious reality. Neither side feels particularly real. For all of their vapidity, the scenes with the protagonist couple have a surreal, dream-like quality, suggesting an exaggerated proposal for how a consumer product could transform your life, and with the framing commentary from the antagonist couple implying a self-awareness on the ad's part of its own falseness. The antagonists' world has, on the one hand, a stronger grounding in reality, with its lack of music and frenetic energy, but that's negated by the humorously caricatured nature of their conservatism. Although the two worlds appear to be at total odds, they represent the perfect balancing act - the make-believe paradise of the protagonist couple is both a knowing joke and a sympathetic refuge from the overbearing austerity next door. The antagonists' angle might give us an outlet for sneering at the more banal advertising conventions in which the protagonists are revel, but they themselves are ultimately too grotesque to elicit much affinity.

Which takes us to our infamous ending. A third-person voice-over imparts the slogan, "The full of beans coffee for full beans people", suggesting that this is the fundamental distinction being drawn between the two sides. Some people are "full of beans", possessing all of the enthusiasm for life that Maxwell House typifies, and those who aren't a part of that privileged group will simply not comprehend. The closing twist, however, implies that it is a potential that just about anybody can unlock. The antagonist husband acknowledges his wife for the first time: "We don't like change, do we, Deirdre?" Deirdre has spent the entire ad in silence, which ostensibly signals accordance with her husband's sneery sentiments. In the final seconds, she maintains her silence, but gets in the last word regardless. Her face alters dramatically as she holds up a jar of the forbidden product and demonstrates where her own allegiances really lie. She is willing to embrace the Maxwell House revolution, if literally behind her husband's back, and change is coming, whether he's ready for it or not. While her husband embodies the smug front of people set in her ways, Deirdre expresses the latent potential yearning to break free.

As a twist, it seems cute and logical, but the execution is disproportionately disturbing. Deirdre doesn't merely hold up the jar of freeze-dried beans with an air of surreptitious triumph. Her face contorts horrifically, in a manner that is presumably intended to indicate an intense and uninhibited elation bursting belatedly to the surface. In practice, she looks like she's possessed, a testament to the insidious power of the Maxwell House brand and its ability to warp everything it touches beyond recognition. It was an expression that sent shivers down the spines of innumerable young viewers, its horrors amplified by its insistence on lingering for good measure as a torturously drawn out freeze frame. I swear that the folks responsible for cutting together advertising blocks knew exactly what they were doing and had a penchant for inserting it right at the end so that the cursed image would be prolonged even further. It seemed to persist for an eternity regardless, a perfect vision of unfiltered monstrosity forever etched onto my brain, ready to strike whenever I was feeling in any way vulnerable. I don't think the closing sense of dread was entirely accidental either. The way Deirdre holds up the jar at the end, it frankly looks as though she could use it to bonk her oblivious husband on the head. Maxwell House takes the form of a deadly invading presence, already much closer than the husband assumes, being right behind him and inside his seeming place of safety. The barriers have been eradicated and we're left with an uncanny intersection between the exaggerated caricatures of one world and the excessive animation of the other. A distressing transformation indeed. 

The original Deidre ad is the only one I remember seeing at the time, but there was indeed an entire series spun around the premise, in which the husband got to exercise his equal disdain for Noel Edmonds (who'd also infiltrated their house unbeknownst to him and was unambiguously looking to strike his head with the jar of Maxwell House) and for Penguins (the brand of chocolate-coated tea biscuit and not the bird, although odds are that he didn't care for them much either). I'm not 100% sure, but I could swear the actress who played Deirdre kept changing with new installment - a subtle commentary on the inevitably of change and the husband's ongoing obliviousness? And then there was at least one ad that swapped out the cast entirely, centring on a different set of couples divided by Maxwell House, and with a holiday-making theme. The protagonist couple were there identified as "Ron" and "Fran", with Deirdre having been supplanted by "Laura". The antagonist husband still went unnamed, but here had acquired a wetter sense of humor to go with his new rain-soaked environs. I'm not sure, but I think this might have been the only installment in which the husband actually cottoned on to his wife's being a closet Maxwell drinker. "This isn't our usual coffee, Laura? LAURA!!!" 

 

 

Two versions of the original ad existed, one 46 seconds in length, the other a shorter 30 second edit, which saved time by trimming down the sequences with the protagonist couple, incorporating only one iteration of the "full of beans" slogan and, most curiously, using alternate takes of the antagonist couple, in which their dialogue was more concise ("Could changing their coffee be responsible for this distressing transformation?" becomes "Could changing their coffee have changed them?", and "We try to avoid them nowadays," becomes a more definite "We avoid them nowadays"). The husband's closing expression also differs slightly between the versions, with him gazing more intently at the camera in the longer cut and in the shorter cut wearing more a look of self-satisfied complacency. No massive differences to report between Deirdre's final poses, but for what it's worth I'd rate her as being marginally more terrifying in the shorter edition.

Safeway: Little Harry Learns His ABCs

In 1995 Safeway were ahead of the supermarket pack in launching a loyalty card scheme (beaten to the punch only by Tesco), under the banner of ABC. ABC stood for "Added Bonus Card", but it also suggested simplicity and everything happening in a perfect little sequence. Having one of these in your pocket entitled you to a range of goodies, from in-store discounts to family days out, and naturally we had a Little Harry ad to go along with it. This one differed from the last two Harry ads we looked at, in that it didn't tell the story of a single shopping trip, but was instead comprised of three smaller vignettes designed to give you an idea of the various different applications of the ABC card.

This ad always stood out to me as one of the most memorable of the Little Harry series, on account of the surprisingly vicious shade thrown at Tots TV, a contemporary preschool show on CITV about a trio of puppets named Tilly, Tom and Tiny. A VHS tape containing a collection of their adventures is posited here as a blatantly naff selection next to a sponge cake in the shape of Mr Blobby, one of the reigning champions of 1990s UK zeitgeist. Harry's audacity in looking his mother's gift horse in the mouth had him seeming like quite the subversive soul at the time. A running theme throughout these three vignettes involves Harry one-upping the adults around him with his more discerning sensibilities, further playing on the tension between his deceptively ickle exterior and his acerbic inner monologuing. Being a toddler didn't mean that he was thrilled about being stuck with something as wretchedly unhip as Tots TV when there was discounted Mr Blobby merchandising up for grabs. Obviously the viewer was expected to sympathise with his preference, for if the British public (at least the portion of it that bought CD singles) had chosen Mr Blobby over teen heartthrobs Take That in a recent popularity contest, then what chance did those unassuming puppets have?

I might be talking out of turn here, but I get the impression that Tots TV isn't massively well-remembered nowadays, in spite of its tremendously infectuous theme song. In fact, that entire era of preschool television (the gulf between the demise of Rainbow and the dawn of the Teletubbies and the Tweenies) seems sadly neglected in terms of nostalgia. Nevertheless, could we argue that time has ultimately been kinder to Tilly, Tom and Tiny (even with their secret cottage having been torn down in 2021)? The Mr Blobby phenomenon that ate the UK's brains in the 90s is something that people tend to look back on with quite a bit of leery bemusement, wondering how kids were expected to be anything other than utterly terrified of the character, let alone want to consume anything in his likeness. Personally, I don't feel overly qualified to comment, since I was seldom more than innocent bystander in that whole affair. Somehow or other I never watched Noel's House Party, the program where he originated, and I didn't learn of his proper context - that he was initially conceived as a parody of a children's character, hence his somewhat off-kilter aura, and the feature of a recurring sketch where he was unleashed on unsuspecting celebrities - until long after the fact. I was familiar with Blobby to the extent that he was inescapable back then, but I had very little first-hand experience with the hulking pink demon. Still, I think it's a safe bet that the Tots were always the more sophisticated of the two choices. What says more about the battle for culture lost than a wholesome videotape about three puppets and their lovely donkey being passed over for something as crude and unnourishing as a cake shaped like the creepy humanoid with the Pepto Bismol colour scheme?

The second vignette revolves around an agreeable bit of role reversal, with Harry and his father leafing through the ABC catalogue in the manner of a bedtime story, but with Harry doing all the reading while his father can barely keep his eyes open. Harry wants them to redeem their points on a family cinema ticket, but objects to his parents' practice of tongue-kissing in the back row, which he claims is prohibited by ABC's regulations. The humor lies somewhere between Harry's efforts to usurp the position of parental authority, by insisting that the adults keep their pesky hormones in check, and his guarded awareness of said hormones in the first place.

In the final skit, Harry is addressed as an adult (albeit facetiously) by the Safeway cashier who applies a £8.00 discount to his family's shopping and honors him by letting him hold the prestigious ABC card. Even then, he finds ample room for improvement in the adult establishment, handing the card back and suggesting that they produce one containing the whole alphabet (of course, juxtaposed with the cheeky grin Hanford is exhibiting, Harry comes off as being a mite facetious himself). Ever the avatar for the viewer's inner child, he reminds us that it's good and healthy to have copious amounts of childhood fancy mixed in with our adult discernment. 

And yes, if the "C" in ABC stood for "card", then calling it an ABC card was a classic example of RAS syndrome.

Safeway: Little Harry Goes To Wolverhampton

Little Harry's Safeway adventures continued in an ad (circa 1995) which saw the drolly articulate tyke and his mother enjoying a grand day out in one of the chain's newly-opened superstores, the location of which varied according to which part of the UK you were watching it from. The narration in the embedded YouTube upload gives the shout-out to a Wolverhampton store set to open its doors that August, although the all-purpose footage was adapted to reference a variety of stores in different regions. TV Ark has an upload of a variant promoting a couple of stores in Dumbarton and Glenrothes. Wow, Harry and his mother certainly got around.

The Harry campaign was designed to cement Safeway's reputation as a particularly appealing option for parents accustomed to shopping with small children, by emphasising the various perks they had implemented to make the experience more straightforward (including the "VIP" parent and child parking right beside the entrance). But by aligning the viewer's perspective with that of a toddler coming to grips with the vast world and all of its possibilities, at a time when even something as mundane as pushing a trolley around a stack of groceries seemed novel and exhilarating, it had the additional effect of making setting foot in one of their stores seem like a great and wholesome adventure. Safeway were pushing themselves as the supermarket chain that met all of your needs under one roof, to the point that you, like Harry, were dwarfed by its scope (albeit not to the same inhibiting extent where the wide aisles impeded his ability to interact with the items on the shelves). Harry's remark on assessing the magnitude of the venue - "I hope you cancelled the milk" - has a cunning double meaning, alluding hyperbolically to the possibility that they could be navigating its wares for days, while implicitly suggesting that having milk delivered to your door was a redundant service when you might as well pick it up at Safeway.

Harry's charm as an advertising character lay in his being both a child and an adult at once, the delightfully incongruous combination of Hanford's pint-sized form with Clunes' ultra-dry delivery. Innocence by way of sardonicism, he became the avatar for the inner child of every Safeway consumer whose gut reaction, on seeing balloons handed out, was to anticipate that some kind of party should follow. As it turns out, Safeway had two different parties (of sorts) to offer inside of its stores. One was the more subdued party targetted at adult patrons, a celebration of service and expansive convenience comprised of petrol stations, coffee shops, dry cleaning and all the things that you're expected to embrace as a grown-up. The second was located in the soft play area that serves as the ad's punchline, with the revelation that these Safeway superstores came with a crèche where you could dump the kids, the ultimate dream of any parent who didn't want to have to deal with a fussing toddler and a trolley full of dried penne and tinned peaches at the same time. Harry speaks so deftly to the adults who are still kids at heart that it's actually a little heart-rending, seeing him gazing longingly at the tots on the other side of the glass, unable to access this particular Safeway perk on account of his mum yanking him in another direction. He asks her not to take it the wrong way, but he'd rather stay in the crèche next time, with his repeated unanswered imploring leaving doubts as to whether it's going to happen. He articulates the desires of the wistful adult viewership more than their hyperactive children. Because admit it, no matter what your age, there is a very visceral part of you that likewise envies those kids, as you find yourself yearning for a simpler time when you could bounce relentlessly off of soft surfaces while someone else took care of your material needs. Alas, dry cleaning is where you're at now. You've got to be satisfied with the excitement in that.

You Never Were One Of Us, Benny! (Skittles)

 

In 1997, Skittles came up with rather a peculiar metaphor through which to tout their virtues, blessing our screens with 30-second advert proposing that the sensation of consuming the chewy fruit-flavoured candies was akin to being gunned down by a mob of anthropomorphic fruit imagined as 1930s-era gangsters. This was Dick Tracy meets the Munch Bunch, if you will. The centres of the confectionery in question were reportedly softer, but their promotional imagery was the stuff of fever dreams. 

 

Snacking on Skittles, as our narrating figure Benny the Banana puts it, is a matter of tempting fate: "You eat Skittles, you expect a hit, right?" It's quickly established that, here, a "hit" equates to summoning CGI humanoids with fruit-shaped heads, who'll barge in bearing oversized weapons and fire barrages of lethal juices your way. It's a scenario that perhaps seems even the more twisted for the fact that the victims of this fruit-inflicted violence are all children (this being an era when kids were still openly the target of a lot of confectionery-based marketing), who are each shown to "die" in ways suggesting that they were at the height of ecstasy as they breathed their last. On the one level, the concept seems almost uncannily morbid, with each child going limp and lifeless while bathed in a colourful puddles evocative of the kind of bodily splatter you would expect to see in an actual massacre. But it's counterbalanced by all the elements of this pseudo-bloodshed being coded to appear more cartoony than threatening (the exaggerated panic of the children, the Looney Tunes-esque movements of the fruity assassins, etc). Crucially, it has a similar kind of winking theatricality as the cream pie metaphor from Bugsy Malone, where a character who takes a pie to the face is regarded as "dead" within the internal narrative, until the final scene, where the play pretence of the gimmick is lovingly exposed. You can tell that it's all for larks. The tone of the ad, while freaky as hell, is certainly a lot less malevolent than that of the Kelloggs Fruit Winders campaign from the early 2000s, which saw humanoid fruits torturing not-so-humanoid fruits in ways that the teenage me found honest-to-god unsettling. It's possible to be playfully twisted without being sadistic.

 

The set-up of the ad has these ill-fated (or not) kids hanging around a warehouse filled with boxes of fruit, which given the theming are presumably intended to be prohibited items (or forbidden fruit - ha!), reinforcing the underlying narrative that to ingest Skittles is to do something exhilaratingly off-limits. I'll admit this much - I get how the metaphor works with regards to the fruit people blasting down those children, but I'm not 100% sure what's meant to be going on as far as Benny the Banana is concerned. I think it's safe to assume that he owns this warehouse, since he has his own personal office in there, but is he meant to be a wily dealer who's supplying these sugar-starved children with their clandestine candies? Are they supposed to be his minions, assisting him in a nefarious fruit trade that, among people whose heads are literally made out of fruit, has uncomfortably cannibalistic implications? Or is he giving them a sincere warning to think carefully about their usage of Skittles, lest they can't handle the inevitable hit? It's complicated by the fact that Benny also serves as our narrator, and I'm detecting a certain degree of glee in his account of how each of these children are successively juiced. I would have guessed that he was in cahoots with the fruity assassins, in supplying them with victims to gun down, until the ending when they decide that he's a traitor and turn their weapons on him. Is that because he owns a warehouse stocked with boxes of arguably cannibalistic goods? Who can say? As a development, it makes perfects sense in terms of how it relates to the product. We're introduced to each armed fruit person and their alliterative/punny monikers - we have Lenny and Larry (Lemon and Lime), Ozzy (Orange), Suzie (Strawberry) and the Undercurrents (Blackcurrant) - and we might notice that this alludes to the mixture of flavours you'll find in a traditional packet of Skittles. Or, specifically, it alludes to the traditional mixture of flavours in packet sold in Europe - the US isn't so big on blackcurrants (I believe that blackcurrant cultivation has a long history of being illegal over there), so the purple Skittles you'll find stateside are grape flavour. We have no bananas in either set, however. It's not that banana flavour Skittles have never been a thing - in 1989, Banana Berry flavours were included in special "Tropical" branded Skittles, and they've occasionally popped up in other variations here and there (rarely as a singular flavour, though; they've typically tended to be part of some combo) - but in terms of the standard European composition, Benny is clearly the odd fruit out, hence why the others denounce him. Why they do so within the internal narrative is still somewhat of a puzzler to me. 

 

Unless...the implication is that he's been ingesting Skittles himself? If that were the case, I would expect there to be some telltale signs, like an empty Skittles wrapper on his desk, but it would explain why they take Benny's unspecified infraction so personally, and why they're so compelled to give him the same gun-firing treatment (presumably not to kill him, but to send him into that same state of juice-induced stupefaction as those children?). Ah well, definite cannibalistic implications there. As the closing slogan proclaims, Skittles contain "real fruit for a real hit". The presence of real fruit is equated with authenticity, and also with a full-on bolt from the blue - a pun that I'm sure would have worked its way into this ad, only blueberries aren't part of this mob either.

Safeway: Little Harry Goes Shopping

Shopping at Safeway is an undertaking I never got round to in this lifetime. Growing up, they were this inoffensive brand that was always there somewhere in the backdrop, but I don't think I ever so much as set foot in one of their stores (same deal with Somerfield). My parents were long-term Sainsbury's devotees, and by the time I was old enough to manage my own food acquisition they were already disappearing, in the process of being swallowed up by Morrisons (an unfortunate fate, since Morrisons is the UK supermarket chain I'm dead-set on avoiding). The Safeway experience is one that I'll forever have to partake in vicariously, through the televised adventures of Little Harry and chums, the array of highly articulate tots who promoted the chain through the mid to latter half of the 1990s. What better way to establish your chain as a warm and family-friendly place to hang than to show small children having the time of their lives while on their weekly shop with their parents? Meanwhile, the accompanying tagline, "Lightening The Load", asked that we equate not just convenience and efficiency, but also wholesome good fun with the brand.

The child star who originally fronted this campaign was known as Little Harry. He was played by a boy named Jack Hanford, who was reportedly chosen from more than 1500 prospective young actors, although his innermost thoughts were delivered in the droll tones of Martin Clunes, best known for playing Gary in the contemporary sitcom Men Behaving Badly. The campaign owed an obvious debt to the then-recent Look Who's Talking films, which used a similar gimmick in pairing grown-up voiceovers with footage of ankle-biters. Harry would experience the various perks of shopping at Safeway with the fascination and naivety of a young child, but expressed through the sardonic musings of an adult, an approach that allowed for an easygoing mix of endearment and absurdism. The idea was to emphasise that Safeway was a particularly ideal choice for shoppers with little kids in tow, but even if you didn't fall into that demographic, you could perhaps still see a bit of yourself in Harry's wry observations. No matter what your age, your weekly excursion around your supermarket of choice was such a major part of your routine that there was something infinitely relatable and charming about following a single family and how their lives revolved around the contents of their grocery bags. Somerfield had a similar premise going (under the banner of "Shopping In The Real World"), but in their case the ads centred on an adult woman played by Suzanne Forster, and her slightly drippy husband with the tendency to misinterpret shopping lists ("I meant mincemeat for mince pies!"). 

In 1996 Harry was joined by a new co-star in the form of Molly, who was played by Rosie Purkiss-McEndoo and voiced by actress Lesley Sharpe, and was initially introduced as a romantic interest for Harry. Molly's encounter with Harry was treated by Safeway as a major event (it even came with its own line of tie-in merchandising), although it attracted its share of controversy at the time, from those who felt uneasy about the amorous overtones given to the tykes' interactions. Still, the outcome was ultimately not a pre-school recreation of the Gold Blend couple, with Safeway likely having broader motivations for adding new blood to the cast than to sell a few themed tea towels. The disadvantage in using children as the long-term faces of brands is that they'll grow up significantly within the space of a few years, so unless you're willing to build that into your campaign narrative, you might have to accept that they'll only have a limited shelf-life. I would hazard a guess that this is why Harry was all but phased out in later stages of the campaign, with ads shifting their focus toward Molly and her Paul Whitehouse-voiced brother, as well as a few additional "guest" faces, including a Northern Irish kid voiced by Frank Carson, an American girl voiced by Ruby Wax and a Scouser voiced by Cilla Black, although Harry did eventually return for a 1999 installment set at a millennium party. It served as a neat send-off for the campaign as a whole, as going into the Y2K Safeway made the decision to move away from television marketing altogether, and didn't have much longer to go as a brand. But of course the memories live on in our VHS recordings.

The first of the ads, from late 1994, saw Harry making his introductory visit to Safeway. He'd dared hope that his mother (Michèle Winstanley) was taking him to Toys R Us (the shopping locale where every child wanted to be be in the 1990s) and was initially disappointed to discover that they were headed for a supermarket, but was swiftly won over by the ease of the Parent & Child parking, and by the opportunities to comment on his fellow patrons from the vantage point of a trolley seat (including two sisters in a trolley with handy double seating). He was less sure about the bag-packing and carry-out service, since he could only interpret the helpful clerk as a stranger tampering with their goods before following them out of the building - the underlying narrative being that Harry was not accustomed to seeing such convenience from wherever he and his mother had shopped previously, so it was all new and alarming to him. (The ads often included shots of the Safeway employees smiling at the children, thus emphasising the genial service you could expect to receive within, although in this guy's case he cracks a curiously half-hearted smile, causing him to come off as being just as wary of Harry; not sure what the intended narrative is there.) Safeway's infinite friendliness to the young family crowd came to our hero's aid, when he and his mother were able to "hide" from the perceived stalker in a baby changing room (presumably helping his mother to deal with an entirely different kind of predicament), with the subsequent dissolve into the Safeway logo imparting the implicit message that parents would do well to view Safeway as a refuge from less accommodating venues. The ad went out of its way to cram in as many perks as possible - the option of gifting your loved ones with a Safeway voucher was not explicitly cited by the narrator, but was cunningly slipped into the mise-en-scene, when Harry and his mother walk past a poster promoting this very service.

Clunes' voiceovers naturally did a lot of the heavy-lifting humor-wise (slickly matched with Hanford's expressions), but for me the real high point of this ad is a moment where Harry has no words, and is instead having a grand time pretending to wield a sword - amid all the witticisms, it is heartening to see glimpses of the kid just being a kid.