Spookyfish (aka Aunt Flo's Last Visit)

"Spookyfish", only our second Halloween spent in the perennially cursed regions of South Park, has the distinction of being the episode to introduce the world to the terrors of "Spooky Vision", a gimmick in which the corners of your screen are continuously occupied by cut-out images of Barbra Streisand, as the words "Spooky" and "Vision" are spelled out down the sides in conspicuous lettering. I don't recall if Trey Parker and Matt Stone made this point saliently enough on any prior occasions, but they don't much warm to Streisand, and I guess they were still clearing that bile out of their system. Being a fan of Babs myself, my response ought to be, "Ha, joke's on them, I like looking at pictures of Barbra Streisand!" - except that there is something about this presentation that has me feeling weirdly uncomfortable. It is a joke at the viewer's expense as much as Streisand herself, being a glaringly lame novelty that's intrusive, distracting and designed to try your patience. But as the episode goes on, I find that it gets to you in more unsettling ways. The static images become authentically eerie (particularly the one featured in the middle act, where Babs' eyes appear completely blackened), a testament to how you can make anything unnerving by having it be this prominently and perpetually out of place. It becomes marginally less intrusive in the remastered episode, where the wider aspect ratio has the Spooky Vision elements more spaced out, which is honestly why I prefer watching it on the ye olde DVD. There, it's more boxed in, claustrophobic and all-round harder to ignore. In other words, the perfectly discombobulating Halloween experience. Bless you, Babs!

From my perspective, "Spookyfish" boasts a far more dubious distinction still, in that this is the first episode in which my favourite character never appears. Ah well, we mustn't be greedy about such things - on review, I'm really very pleasantly surprised at just how far Mr Garrison got into the series without sitting out a single episode (keeping in mind that he was technically in "Not Without My Anus" by way of the opening recap, which you might consider cheating, but I'm still counting it). You can correct me if I'm wrong on this, but the only other supporting character who I think appeared in all thirteen episodes of Season 1 (besides Mr Hat) was Chef, and he lost his streak very early in Season 2 with "Chickenlover", so Garrison did well to keep his going for as long as he did. But once he had lost it, he lost it quite markedly. Garrison was largely absent from the tail-end of Season 2, with "Gnomes" being the only episode from here until the finale in which he would feature. I feel a slight disloyalty in admitting it, but on my recent rewatch of Season 2 I found those three Garrison-less episodes to all be pretty strong in spite of it - yes, even the Charles Manson Christmas episode, which is the one that made me go "Huh?" back in 1999, turned out to be a whole lot better than I'd remembered. "Spookyfish" stands out as a particularly great entry; the biggest criticism to be made is that the narrative feels overstuffed with ideas (it's little wonder why Garrison isn't included - there wasn't room for him if he wasn't going to directly service the story), but they are uniformly fun ideas, and the results are lively and hair-raising in the way that the most memorable Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror" installments always were. It leans into the nightmare angle more heavily than the previous year's "Pinkeye" and brings out some genuine willies. A big part of that is down to the audio - whoever was responsible for the sound production on this episode really earned their money. The music, specifically the recurring leitmotif comprised of an ominous, banshee-like wailing, sells you on the notion that you've wandered into some Twilight Zone iteration of South Park, one that makes the regular town feel safe and friendly by comparison.

"Spookyfish" opens with a cheeky bit of misdirection, through a drawn-out sequence that has us anticipating that the plot will revolve around an Xenomorph-type alien turning up in South Park and creating havoc over Halloween. We follow the alien as it approaches Earth (in a shot that parodies the opening of Independence Day), hones in on Colorado and touches down near the bus stop. It emerges from its interplanetary craft, hissing malevolently, whereupon it steps into the road and is immediately crushed by the wheels of the school bus (it turns out that the alien was not much bigger than a house cat, recalling the twist ending of a certain Tony Ross book), abruptly shutting down that prospective narrative thread. Instead, we catch up with Stan, Kyle and Kenny, who are planning to acquire a pumpkin so that they can enter a local carving contest. Cartman shows up with a ridiculous fake beard and, even more alarmingly, an impeccably polite demeanour; he explains, without a hint of irony, that he wasn't in school today because his mother was unwell and he wanted to stay home and do chores for her, but he's eager to know if they were assigned any homework for the evening. This perturbs the boys, who can tell straight off the bat that something within their universe is drastically out of whack. Stan returns home, but he isn't finding any refuge there either. His mother Sharon's Aunt Flo has come to visit, as she does every month, and she's brought him a present in the form of a pet goldfish (the fish is never formally named, but we'll call him Spooky). Stan is unnerved by this new addition, which has a tendency to stare at him with a chilling intentness, like it knows something he doesn't, but his family don't believe him when he insists that the fish is working to some sinister agenda. At most, he gets Sharon to notice when the bodies of random townspeople start appearing at the foot of his bed, only for her to assume that her beloved boy has taken to murdering and to hastily conceal the evidence on his behalf. Meanwhile, confusion abounds over Cartman's alternating disposition - the familiar mean-spirited Cartman (who's become doubly insufferable since adding the word "hella' to his vocabulary) has clearly not gone away, but every now and then he'll apparently don the beard and transform into a kindly soul with a propensity for breaking out into Barney The Dinosaur-esque sing-songs about how much he cherishes his friends. The boys eventually put it together that there are two Cartmans in town, one of whom (the one with the beard) is an interloper from a parallel dimension. From that, they're able to determine the spine-chilling connection between Cartman's doppelganger and Stan's homicidal goldfish, but not before it brings tragic consequences for Kenny and Aunt Flo.

As a kid, I'll admit that I only half-got the joke with Aunt Flo. I realised that her presence in the Marsh residence was being used to make a bunch of allusions to Sharon's menstrual cycle - the humor in her being repeatedly referred to as Sharon's "monthly visitor" did not go over my head - but since I was totally unfamiliar with the euphemistic origins of the name "Aunt Flo", I didn't quite appreciate that she WAS the menstrual cycle, personified. Nor did I grasp the real underlying significance of Sharon's muted despair at the prospect of Aunt Flo no longer coming to visit her. Back then, I was more inclined to take the scenario at face value, as a strange tale of an intrusive relative who'd attached themselves to one member of the family, but whose visits were always an intensely awkward experience for everyone else. Whereas nowadays, to these adult eyes and ears, the metaphor really has all the subtly of a rabid hedgehog traversing a balloon factory. Aunt Flo has red hair and wears a pink and brown cardigan, she comes to visit Sharon once a month and sticks around for five days or so, during which she creates endless discomfort for the boys of the household, who aren't thrilled about having to put up with her, or her influence on Sharon's emotional state (Shelley comes off as a mite more accommodating). And then when she's removed from the picture permanently, that's our indication that Sharon has hit the menopause.

Now, for as much as Stan and Randy dread Aunt Flo's visits, she honestly doesn't come across as that unpleasant a character in person. In fact, most of the ways in which she's an imposition we only hear about second-hand from Randy - she'd reportedly object to Stan being permitted to sleep with the light on, on the grounds of it being a waste of electricity, and Randy gets banished to the couch while she's around. But whenever we see her in the flesh (and blood), Flo generally seems very nice and well-intentioned. For one thing, she buys the kids such cool and generous gifts. A goldfish would make for a thrilling present, if it didn't also happen to be a serial killer from a parallel dimension. When Flo learns how strongly Stan dislikes the fish, she takes it pretty hard but she doesn't take it out on Stan. As for her turning Sharon into a total bitch, if you ask me Sharon was a lot more openly callous toward Stan in "Clubhouses", when Aunt Flo wasn't in town (if nothing else, "Spookyfish" does make it clear how very important Stan is to Sharon, something she herself had expressly undermined in "Clubhouses").

And yet I have to admit that I don't completely trust Aunt Flo. It isn't explicitly borne out by any of the story's developments, but I've somehow always gotten the impression that she knows more about the situation than she lets on. There is a small, ostensibly incidental moment that seems to frame her in a knowingly sinister light, when a blood-stained Sharon steps back into the kitchen, having buried the first of the fish's victims in the yard and Aunt Flo (appearing in silhouette) catches her off guard. Sharon expresses surprise that Flo would be up at this time, but what Flo is doing up is never explained. Instead, she regards Sharon fondly and remarks, "Look at you, with your little shovel. Just like when you were 12!" In the original script, their interaction goes on a little longer, with Flo attempting to remove a loose eyelash from Sharon's eye and repeatedly poking her due to her trembly hand movements (later revealed to be caused by Parkinson's Disease), but in the episode itself it ends more abruptly, putting the emphasis squarely on Flo's contextless observation. It is a strange scene, touching on some common knowledge between Sharon and Flo that is not brought up again, or explained to the viewer. It colours their interaction with an unsettling ambiguity. Do we interpret Flo's observation as cheerfully oblivious, or is she indicating to Sharon that she understands what's going on? Does she genuinely not notice the blood on Sharon's clothing and on the tip of her shovel, or is she merely unfazed by it? Would we even expect Aunt Flo to be fazed by the sight of blood, given that it's what she herself deals in? And what meaning are we intended to read into her words? Is the implication that Sharon participated in a similar kind of backyard burial when she was a preteen? Are we to suppose that she potentially murdered someone at the aforementioned age, and this is why she's so quick to jump to conclusions about Stan being the killer, since she's assuming that the apple hasn't fallen far from the tree? Or might that be a hyperliteral interpretation of what Flo is insinuating? I think the really critical clue is in the specification that Sharon was 12 at the time that she previously played around with a shovel...12 being the average age when menstruation begins. 

You know what? I think we can figure this one out. Flo is reminding the blood-stained Sharon of how things went down on her first visit, and of the origins of their monthly relationship. It creates an implicit connection between the fish's activities in the present and Sharon's preadolescent fear and revulsion at her changing body. Am I proposing that the 12-year-old Sharon grabbed a shovel and buried the evidence of her menstruating in the back yard? Again, that might be a hyperliteral way of interpreting things. I think it's more that Sharon was faced with the problem of concealing what her body was doing and of keeping the flow of blood contained. Covering up her son's perceived new penchant for making blood spill is but a variation on what she's adapted to doing every month of her life for the past three decades or so. 

I'll confess that there was one aspect of "Spookyfish" that had, up until now, never quite satisfied me - the revelation that Stan's goldfish came from the same "evil, opposite" universe as the bearded Cartman. The two don't exactly feel as though they're cut from the same malevolent cloth, with the specific brand of evil manifested by Spooky the fish being on a whole other level to that of the mirror universe's human denizens, and even that of the other pets that appear in the final act. Basically, we get three distinct types of menace that are all tied up with the same convenient narrative bow, which seemed like kind of a slapdash solution (not that I suspected Parker and Stone of harbouring any pretences to the contrary). In the case of the mirror humans, the term "evil" is, for the most part, humorously misapplied. It's not that the mirror world is inherently evil, just wrong in terms of how it compares to the workings of the regular South Park universe. The character dynamics have been rearranged, and in some cases swapped out altogether. Evil Stan and Evil Kyle are disagreeable thugs, Evil Cartman wouldn't hurt a cockroach, we never meet Evil Kenny (my guess is that he's also dead in the parallel universe by the time Evil Stan and Evil Kyle cross over), but from the sounds of it he's got deep pockets, and Chef's evil counterpart is a skinny white insurance salesman (it leaves you wondering what the rest of the evil universe must be like - I'll venture that Evil Garrison really is the shameless womaniser that our Garrison so desperately wants people to believe he is, and Evil Mackey is a drug dealer). With the animals, you could argue that they ARE opposites, in the sense that pets are supposed to be domesticated and non-threatening, only their natures don't seem so much inverted as corrupted, in a way that recalls the situation in Pet Sematary - it seems enough to assume that the pets have turned homicidal because the ground on which they dwell has gone sour. Spooky, though? Pardon the pun, but he's a whole other kettle of fish. The other evil pets are savage little monsters with demonic red eyes and an insatiable taste for human misery, but appear no more intelligent than their regular, non-evil counterparts. Whereas Spooky is clearly sapient and conniving (he's also educated enough to write messages on the side of his bowl), and seems to get no shortage of kicks out of actively taunting Stan. There does appear to be a certain kind of calculated method to the fish's madness, even if it's not altogether clear what that might be. As a villain, I always thought he warranted a slightly more in-depth backstory than simply being from the same generic plane of evil as every other threatening thing in this adventure.

I do of course get what the parallel universe is really about. Primarily, it's to pay homage to the "Mirror, Mirror" episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, in which we got acquainted with the Enterprise's evil counterparts from a darker dimension. Hence why the interlopers here all have those ridiculous-looking goatees - it's a nod to the mode of facial hair favoured by the mirror Spock. To fortify the Star Trek allusion, an image of William Shatner even works its way into the story, albeit as a live action photograph (remember, he's Canadian, so the South Park style would in theory have called for him to have the flapping head and beady eyes). As the story develops and we end up at the Indian Burial Ground Pet Store where Flo purchased the fish, the hellish portal from Poltergeist (1982) also becomes a part of the explanation; as with Tobe Hooper's film, its presence is a retribution, brought about by the desecration of Native American land and culture in a way that goes far beyond what the store's moniker implies (the pet shop boy in charge admits that he exhumed the corpses, pissed on them and then buried them again upside down. Why did he do this? "I don't know, I was drunk?"). What my mind inevitably wanders back to, however, is the classic Twilight Zone episode, "Mirror Image", in which Vera Miles is at risk of being replaced by her evil double from another dimension. The evil Vera Miles, much like the Evil Cartman, either can't return to her own world or has no intention of returning, and to survive her only recourse is to supplant the Vera of this one. Despite his genial nature, the Evil Cartman poses an innate threat to the regular Cartman, in that the two of them cannot coexist in the same reality. This is reinforced in a subtle running gag, whereby whenever the two Cartmans are seen together there is a visible split down the middle of the screen (although curiously not while Kitty is in frame), evoking the sensation that we are in fact watching the same "actor" in a dual role that's been spliced into a single shot in the crummiest of fashions. This is especially prominent in a shot where Kenny is standing behind the two Cartmans and is effectively cut in half by the splice line (actually, it's too bad that the fish doesn't similarly bisect him, or that would have been the perfect precursor to the Final Destination method of foreshadowing). For all intents and purposes, there can be only one Cartman. Evil Cartman seems to have no difficulty assuming the life of the regular Cartman; he admits to being confused by the arrangement, but is still quite happy to treat the regular Liane as if she were his own mother and the regular Stan, Kyle and Kenny as if they were the same people he's being hanging out with all his life. The danger of displacement facing the regular Cartman is explicitly realised in the third act, when the Evil Stan and Evil Kyle emerge from the portal with the intention of reclaiming the Cartman of their universe. Regular Stan and Kyle, having decided that they prefer Evil Cartman to their own (not so much because he's kind and helpful, but because he lacks Cartman's annoying habit of saying "hella" all the time), are prepared to betray regular Cartman so that they can hold onto his counterpart. Does that make the regular Stan and Kyle the truly evil ones? Or do we not blame them one iota?

The animals from the parallel universe differ from the humans in that they don't have mirror counterparts. Actually, that's not strictly true - the evil menagerie DO have counterparts, in that their designs have been largely recycled from animals seen elsewhere across the series. I'm pretty sure there's an evil Sparky, an evil Rex (the whippet-type dog belonging to Clyde), an evil version of the scruffy gay mutt from Al's sanctuary, an evil gaggle of gay gooses, and an evil ferret that's really Mephesto's four-assed mongoose with its extraneous asses removed. But with the animals, the feeling of tension between two opposing worlds becomes more figurative. As noted, the Indian Burial Ground Pet Store evokes Pet Sematary, where the reconfiguration of a docile family pet into a monstrous beast (through an association with soured Native American land) was linked to the displacement of childhood security. Located behind a door at the back of the store is the portal from Poltergeist, an opening that allows children to be abducted from their carefree suburban existences and whisked away to a more ghoulish plane of being. 

At long last, I think I've happened on a connection between the bearded denizens of the mirror universe, Spooky the murdering fish and Aunt Flo that satisfies me. Nowadays, I'm inclined to read the whole of "Spookyfish" as an analogy for the horrors of puberty.

To explain this, it's necessary to think about what it is that Aunt Flo actually gives to Stan through Spooky the fish and why she gives it. Within the script, Flo's Parkinson's Disease plays as a largely incidental detail, amounting to nothing more than a spectacularly bad taste joke when the regular Cartman hops onto her trembling lap and observes that "You don't even have to put a quarter in her!" But the fact that Flo is not in the best of health might be taken as an indication that Sharon is already in the perimenopausal stage. Flo is aware that her visits to Sharon are nearing their end, and in that light her presents to the children can be seen as parting gifts - gifts that, in actually, serve as warnings that the cycle is merely gearing up to begin anew and that they will be next to undertake their slow and painful initiation into the messiness of adulthood (or at least to Stan; Shelley seems to be off the hook, but only for now). Stan is of course incapable of menstruating - he'll learn that the hard way in the following season's "Are You There God? It's Me, Jesus" -  but what he gets with the fish is a horrifying window into the menstrual process. Keep in mind that, for Spooky's initial victims, we don't actually see how he pulls off the murders. Later scenes confirm that the fish is capable of leaping out of his bowl and mauling anybody who stands nearby, but it remains unclear how he managed to get out of the Marshes' house, kill two random outsiders and bring their bodies back into Stan's bedroom. For all intents and purposes, the fish just makes the messy corpses materialise, leaving Stan to experience the terror of awakening and being confronted with the sudden appearance of blood. That is the real curse of the Spookyfish. A figurative period.

I am suggesting that the fish and Aunt Flo are effectively one and the same, which might seem at odds with the implication that Spooky later kills Flo, preventing her from sharing the location of the Indian Burial Ground Pet Store. But again, we don't actually see how Flo's demise plays out. The kids simply return to find her unresponsive, lying in a pool of the crimson fluid she was in the business of bringing forth into the world. This is the point at which one door closes while another creakily opens. One way or another, Flo's time has come, while the fish stays behind to continue her messy work with the incoming generation of prepubescents.

What's interesting is that this fear of puberty is most vocally articulated not by those on the cusp of experiencing it, but by an adult character, Sharon, who has already been there, done that and learned to accommodate Aunt Flo's monthly appearances for all these years. She sees the disturbance in Stan's bedroom and immediately thinks she understands what's going on and how to deal with the problem (namely, to conceal and contain). Her complicity in her son's apparent killing spree enables her to relive the horror of her own pubescence, but what really terrifies her is the prospect of losing her good and handsome boy, as he threatens to morph into something monstrous and beyond her control. She attempts to keep him grounded in the realm of childhood, by singing him a modified version of the traditional lullaby "Hush Little Baby" (in which she promises to bury any non-compliant mockingbirds in the back yard). Her protective urges reach their peak when Officer Barbrady calls around to ask if he can make a routine inspection of the Marshes' yard. He's investigating some missing persons (all of whom are victims of the fish, except for Shatner), and has a hunch that they might show up hiding out in somebody's bushes. He steps into the yard and sees evidence of the hastily buried corpses (we get a rare cameo from Sparky the gay dog - his only appearance of this entire season, in fact - claiming one victim's limb for a chew toy), prompting Sharon to knock him unconscious and imprison him in her basement. She needn't have bothered - we noted in our coverage of "Weight Gain 4000" that Barbrady has this astounding ability to miss what's directly in front of him, and that isn't any different here. Even when Sharon has him chained up and naked from the waist down (for reasons that are never explained), the reality doesn't seem to fully register for Barbrady. He at least cottons on to the likelihood that Sharon is hiding something, stating that he'll have to ask her a few questions, but is otherwise fairly impervious to his situation, singing "Jimmy Crack Corn" and casually greeting a flabbergasted Randy, when he goes down into the basement, as though he were passing him on the street.

The law may be beyond useless, but the threat of losing your child to the march of puberty is very much real. It is depicted here as something that will either destroy the child or steal their soul, with the former scenario being borne out when Kenny (naturally) falls victim to the fish, prompting Sharon to bury him in the yard (all while fighting off the hungry rat pack, who would have happily disposed of the body for her). Carol McCormick appears at the house to ask Stan if he has any idea what happened to her son, in a scene that always gives me the goosebumps. It's a rare thing for Kenny's death to be treated as a serious matter, even in-universe - usually, Stan and Kyle will react to it in the moment (although curiously not in this instance) and then move right along, as though they didn't just witness something that should by all counts have scarred them for life. We the audience are well aware that Kenny will be back next week as if nothing happened, and for the most part the show isn't looking to kid us otherwise. So it is genuinely startling on the sporadic occasions where it does have something resembling genuine consequences within the space of the individual story. Here, Carol is shown to be distraught at Kenny's disappearance and is drinking to numb the pain (and I feel so bad for her that I'm willing to overlook that she hit Kenny in an extremely rough-looking manner in an earlier scene). Meanwhile, Cartman is at risk of being abducted and permanently banished into the mirror world, on a case of mistaken (and then not-so-mistaken) identity. The portal behind the pet store, from which Spooky the fish originates, becomes the dividing line between childhood security and adolescent chaos - on the other side, the boys discover, is a world populated by distorted versions of themselves who all have facial hair (the beards might be a Mr Spock reference, but they are also signifiers that the transmutation into adulthood is well underway). Once Cartman has traversed that line, his childhood will become forever inaccessible to him, and the petulant brat his world has known will in effect have been erased and replaced with a humbler, maturer version of himself. Which is an outcome that few would find at all disagreeable, although the Evil Stan and Evil Kyle also show up to put a more unsightly face on this coming of age process and its potential to warp a person beyond recognition, in being contentious little hooligans. The Evil Stan and Evil Kyle certainly see themselves as more advanced than their regular counterparts, whom they each individually talk down to by calling "kid".

But there is clearly something more that's bothering Sharon about the prospect of her son hitting his metaphorical puberty, the question of what he is becoming and the possibility of distance (whether emotional or physical) being imposed between them. Watching her son come of age is a reminder that she too isn't getting any younger, and that there are further incoming changes she'll have to contend with regarding her own body. Aunt Flo might have been an alarming intrusion in the beginning, but her appearances have since become what's normal and familiar for Sharon, and the loss of Flo leaves her feeling broken and deflated. Once the line between the two worlds has been crossed there is no going back - the ceasing of monthly visits will not signal a return to the carefree days of prepubescence, but a disconnect from youth and fertility. It's here that the script is able to figure in a dash of quiet pathos, in a scene where Sharon attempts to open up to Randy about her grief at Flo's departure, only for him to struggle to relate to the issue on any level, dismissively suggesting that she should not see it as an ending, but as a new beginning (of course, he is also understandably distracted by her preceding admission to having falsely imprisoned Barbrady and buried a load of bodies in the back yard).

It may be too late for Sharon, but the boys still have the option of remaining children, with the episode climaxing in a thrilling showdown between growth and immaturity. The Evil Cartman proves an asset to the gang when he's able to diplomatically resolve the problem with Spooky the fish by talking the pet store owner into accepting a return. Stan and co will resist getting drawn into puberty's little tortures for now, thank you very much. Unfortunately, the mirror universe has other ideas - soon after, the Evil Stan and Evil Kyle arrive on the scene and attempt to coerce the owner into revealing information on the Evil Cartman's whereabouts by trashing the store with baseball bats, freeing the homicidal animals from their cages in the process. Their search takes them to the regular Cartman, whom they initially try to zap back to their reality, by way of a space age device called a "gingification gun", only his unpleasant temper quickly clues them in that he's not the Cartman they want, and he agrees to lead them to his doppelganger. Elsewhere, Stan, Kyle and Evil Cartman, having discovered what a brilliant team they make, decide to enter the pumpkin carving contest using the butternut squash Kenny had supplied earlier (since he couldn't afford an actual pumpkin) and manage to make the best of it and produce the winning entry. Mayor McDaniels is about to award them their prize of a Halloween chocolate (salty?) ball when they spot the Evil Stan, Evil Kyle and regular Cartman advancing in their direction. Worse still, the evil pets also arrive at the town square and begin massacring the townspeople (seriously, where are Jimbo and Ned when you need them?), although this much works in the boys' favour, as amid the confusion regular Stan is able to get hold of the gingification gun and use it to send the Evil Stan and Evil Kyle back to their universe. He then points the gun at the regular Cartman and gives him the bad news - he and Kyle prefer the Evil Cartman who doesn't say "hella" all the time and give zero fucks about cutting him loose. Thinking on his feet, Cartman gets into a tussle with the Evil Cartman and rips off his beard, meaning that Stan and Kyle can no longer tell which of them is which. One Cartman - the one on the right - pleads that the only course of action is to use the gun on both of them, to be sure of eliminating the Cartman they can't stand. Stan promptly fires on the Cartman on the left, sending him screaming into the mirror world, and assures the Cartman who remains that the choice was obvious as there was no way that their Cartman would have proposed anything so self-sacrificial. Then comes the taunting response: "Hahaha! You guys are hella stupid! I knew you would fall for that!" On this occasion Cartman has outwitted them (whatever else you can say about Eric, he is nowhere near as dumb as he looks), and the spirit of unabating immaturity has prevailed. Of course, Stan does still have that teleportation gun at the end, so in theory there would be nothing to stop him from zapping Cartman into the other reality out of spite, but from the looks of it he isn't actually that petty.

Meanwhile, the narrative thread with the evil animals goes unresolved. In the final sequence we see that Barbrady has been freed by Randy, who apologises for Sharon's behaviour and explains that she's been having a hard time with her Aunt Flo having permanently left her. Barbrady is happy to let the matter slide, since he recalls that his wife went through something similar when her monthly visitor stopped coming (the younger me saw this as a humorous misunderstanding on Barbrady's part, thinking that he meant periods while Randy was talking about an actual person, although given that Aunt Flo is the personification of menstruation, who's to say that she wasn't calling on Mrs Barbrady in a similar form?). Barbrady walks over to the townspeople being savaged by the pets and attempts to restore order, still naked from the waist down, and we leave with the massacre still in progress. We're given no reassurance that equilibrium will be returning to South Park any time soon, although the closing chaos does at least bring a moment of personal clarity for Sharon, who witnesses Spooky jumping out of his bowl and lunging at a man's jugulars, and considers that she was perhaps a little too quick in leaping to conclusions about Stan.

I wonder whatever happened to Spooky the fish? As horrifying as he was, I have to admit that the little murdering shit grew on me. He was a fun and memorable Halloween villain, and I like to think that he went back to his own universe, along with the other evil pets, to patiently await the next occasion when Aunt Flo will require his services. Because make no mistake, Flo isn't really gone. Her relationship with Sharon might have concluded, but her work at the Marsh household is far from over, and I've a feeling that she'll be back at their door before very long. Keep in mind that Shelley is 12 years old. Flo might not have targeted her on this occasion, but maybe that's because she knows that she'll have plenty of time to play around with her later. Good curses never die, they merely get passed along.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Duffless (aka Kiss My Red Asphalt)

 

It's fair to say that Season 4 was a relatively bright and breezy time in The Simpsons' life. Compared to Season 3, which had an entire trilogy based around scenarios where certain Springfieldians were either at risk or at perceived risk of being done away with by their compatriots, whatever anxieties had been plaguing showrunners Al Jeans and Mike Reiss seemed to be mostly out of their system by their tenure's second half. Season 4 is where they allowed their cartoonier tendencies to rule the roost, and (for better or for worse), the show's world got a whole lot more dynamic and larger than life. Serious and grounded stories were a little less high on the agenda, but that's not to say that the odd dose of genuine discomfort couldn't still work its way into the mix. So which episodes stand out as the darker entries of Season 4 (besides the Halloween show, which is always a given)? Obviously there's "Kamp Krusty" - any installment in which the children of Springfield find themselves far from home and at a summer camp that's actually a sweatshop dedicated to the manufacturing of cheap wallets for sale in Hong Kong was bound to be a harrowing experience. That was a Season 3 holdover, however, so it only half-counts. The implications of "Marge vs The Monorail" are frankly horrendous (how many people in North Haverbrook died?), but played at such an overblown level that they don't necessarily register. The situation in "Marge In Chains" has some distressing overtones, but the script isn't focussed enough to fully realise them. Where Season 4 gets most convincingly uncomfortable, I'd say, is with a pair of episodes where the consequences of Homer's lifestyle choices are at the forefront, namely "Homer's Triple Bypass" and "Duffless". "Bypass", in which Homer comes down with heart disease and requires a major operation, has him once again reckoning with the possibility that his time on Earth might be coming to an imminent halt (as he did in "One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish" of Season 2), while serving as a commentary on the American healthcare system, with his quest for surgery that won't break bank. "Duffless' (9F13) is less overtly dramatic - here, Homer is never in a situation where his life is immediately endangered (well, except where an eight-legged freak is involved) - but is in some respects the more emotionally haunting of the two. It works as a quieter, more nuanced character study, in a fairly similar vein to "Selma's Choice" (by astonishing coincidence, both episodes feature trips to dubious Duff-themed attractions), where the lead character is put under pressure and must come to a decision about what it is that will ultimately bring them fulfilment in life.

Debuting on February 18th 1993, this one sees Homer being arrested and convicted of a drink driving offence, resulting in the loss of his licence and prompting Marge to challenge him to give up beer cold turkey for a month. The resulting conflict is a fairly barebones one - once Homer has agreed to Marge's request, there's not a lot for him to do other than to stick it out as his entire world closes in on him and the allurement of the bottle mounts - but there is an honesty in its observations that keeps it at all times compelling. We see Homer being pushed to a really low point, with a good deal of emphasis on the intense loneliness that accompanies his addiction (even while attending an Alch-Anon meeting, he finds no solidarity) and the claustrophobia (a nightmarish sequence where the Duff brand is omnipresent). It's not the easiest going of episodes, but it finds the light at the end of the tunnel, offering up one of the most sweetly redemptive closing sequences of all the series. So sweetly redemptive, in fact, that there's the temptation to accuse it of being disingenuous, since we know that the status quo won't actually be yielding no matter how feel-good the sentiments, but that's a discussion we'll get to in due course.

One of the smartest things about David M. Stern's script is in how it implicitly challenges the underlying assumptions reinforced by what was then one of the series' longest-standings dynamics - namely, how hard it was to feel overly stressed about Homer's drinking habits when Barney Gumble is right there and so perpetually intoxicated that he's barely able to keep himself upright. If you want disingenuous, then maybe take a look at what that's all about. Since as far back as Season 1 (most notably, in "Homer's Night Out"), Barney has been on hand to make Homer look better by providing a sobering example of how Homer's life might have been if he'd really ballsed things up. Compared to Barney, Homer leads a relatively normal existence, with a steady job and a loving family, and for as frequently as he's seen occupying his bar stool at Moe's, he isn't shown to habitually drink to the same excess as Barney. But there is a certain fallacy in all of this, given that that Barney is merely a caricature of an alcoholic, played to such a grotesque extreme that he ceases to be an accurate representation of what addiction necessarily looks like. The implication (particularly prominent in "Homer's Night Out") is that drinking has been allowed to dominate his life because he doesn't have the responsibilities that Homer does to give him the incentive to do better, but then we know that it would be awfully naive to suppose that people with responsibilities like jobs and parenthood can't also be addicts, or that they wouldn't do a better job of disguising it than Barney. Alcohol dependency often exists within the cracks of normalcy, not outside of it. In that regard the opening act of "Duffless" does something fairly deceptive. Homer sneaks out of work early to accompany Barney on a tour of the Duff brewery, where they enjoy a selection of free samples (Barney with far more reckless abandon than Homer). As they're leaving the tour, Homer ostensibly does the responsible thing by confiscating Barney's keys and preventing him from driving them home, only to get pulled over by the cops when he then gets behind the wheel. Homer appears perfectly lucid, but when he's made to take a breathalyser test it's revealed that he is in fact over the limit, resulting in his arrest. Some viewers consider this turn of events to be most unfair, given that Homer had made the effort to be sensible with Barney and was blatantly nowhere near as intoxicated as his companion, but I would argue that that is precisely the point. Homer might have been right to have interfered with Barney, but he ultimately wasn't in a fit state to drive either. (Only a little bit over? You bloody idiot.) It is a common misconception that you need to be drunk to qualify as a drink driver, and while I'm not expecting or desiring for The Simpsons to function as a PSA on that point, it's also a valid observation in terms of what it says about Homer's characterisation. He might be doing okay compared to Barney, but does that actually mean that he's doing okay? I agree that there is an egregious injustice in Barney spitefully giving Homer away and then being encouraged to drive home by Wiggum, but that's Springfield's police department for you. Besides, by the nature of the episode's ending, it wouldn't be accurate to say that Barney gets off scot-free. For what he has to go through, Homer is given fleeting insight into how self-improvement is at least possible, whereas Barney stays deep in the pit of stagnation. 

With Homer having returned home from his legal ordeal, stripped of his licence and faced with the gruelling prospect of attending traffic school and two months' worth of Alch-Anon meetings, Marge quizzes him on his drinking practices using a checklist from a pamphlet, and it becomes sadly evident just how heavily Homer uses alcohol as a crutch for getting through the day. There's a delectable humor in Homer's responses ("Do you ever drink alone?" "Does the Lord count as a person?" "No." "Then yes."), but a genuine undercurrent of pathos too - not least in a moment where Marge asks him if he drinks to escape reality, and we see him take a swig of beer before checking himself out in the bathroom mirror and indulging in the fantasy that he has an ultra-buff body. It's hilarious, but it also illustrates what kind of existential despair is plaguing Homer underneath. For him, drinking offers relief from the weariness of existence, and from the eternal dissatisfaction of being who he is. Agreeing to give it up for a month means having to live with himself, and with the rest of Springfield, in a way that he's really not keen on doing.

With the major theme being how Homer navigates the grim vapidity of his day to day life without falling back on alcohol to ease the monotony, it shouldn't surprise us that "Duffless" emerges as one of the more grounded episodes in a season with a tendency to go off the rails. Conversely, it also offers up a formidable contender for its single biggest "WHAT THE FUCK?!" moment, when Homer attempts to exit the plant through a disused corridor and comes face to face with a spider the size of a Clydesdale horse. People don't talk enough about how reality-breaking that spider is - it is one heck of a fanciful thing to be implementing outside of a Halloween show, even with the unspoken assumption that the spider got really big through exposure to nuclear radiation (a fish with three eyes is one thing, but a spider that's like something out of a 1950s B-movie might be pushing it somewhat). The spider can supposedly be subdued with the recitation of Biblical verses, but if you're like Homer and don't know any of those, chucking a rock at its head will work just as effectively. That spider's not so tough. (It's also purple, which makes it marginally less horrifying than it would be if it were a more conventional spider colour.)

As much as it is, I'll admit that I'm cool with the spider. I rather enjoy the random nonsense of it all. Intellectually, its presence should be treated as a far bigger deal, but it's also the kind of detail you can only get away with if you push past it as quickly and as cheekily as the narrative does. The spider is, in the scheme of things, quite harmless. For me, the thing that prevents "Duffless" from attaining true greatness is the B-story, which sees Bart destroying Lisa's project for an upcoming science fair and Lisa seeking vengeance through a back-up experiment involving a hamster, a supply of cupcakes and an electrical current. It's nothing really terrible, but it's far from my favourite Simpsons subplot, and I promise you it's not because of the scene where the hamster receives a mild electrical shock. I know I've a tendency to grumble whenever the show does jokes about abused hamsters, but on this occasion that's honestly the least of my problems. I'm of the opinion that the two older Simpsons siblings work best when they're a team, and any episode that pits them against each other is automatically on shaky ground. It's not that it can't be pulled off, but I don't think that Stern ever lands the right balance. Here, their rivalry is nowhere near as mean-spirited and one-sided as in "My Sister, My Sitter" of Season 8, but it still leaves rather a sour note, which is ironic for a subplot that was presumably implemented to give balancing levity to an A-story that touches on heavy topics. Bart destroys a futuristic tomato that Lisa had been growing using steroids - not out of malice toward Lisa, but because Skinner presented him with an opportunity for mayhem that he couldn't pass up - leaving her naturally distraught (she'd also had aspirations of the tomato being used to combat world hunger, so...nice going there, Bart). With the science fair looming, she devises an alternative project that involves running a series of tests to determine if her brother is a slower learner than a hamster, with the intention of humiliating him in front of the school.

Quick question to Mr Stern - are we supposed to sympathise with Bart in this situation, or Lisa? Because neither party is coming off particularly well. There is, in theory, nothing wrong with attempting to explore Lisa's pettier, more childish side - in fact, it's what fuels some of the subplot's best laughs ("That'll learn 'im to bust my tomater!" is an absolute banger of a one-liner, and I love how Lisa's degraded grammar all but affirms her personal debasement). There's amusement to be had from her ruthless antics, but it's hard to get past the fact that she is being extremely vindictive. At the same time, I've no real sympathy for Bart. It's not as though he even attempts to atone or take responsibility for wrecking her tomato, nor are we given any evidence of Homer, Marge or even Skinner reading him the riot act for it. So I don't like the fact that he wins at the end (with victory handed to him by Skinner, no less, although it does allow him to give a shout-out to the very scientist who inspired his name). There is something about this whole outcome that feels terribly unsatisfying. Honestly, I'd have much preferred it if Bart and Lisa had both lost and the ribbon had gone to that overzealous father who'd commandeered his son's volcano project and worked too long and hard on it to let the poor confused kid share any of the glory. Also, this might be a tad nitpicky, but another reason I don't much care for the subplot lies in how it fudges the timeline of the A-story. Lisa explicitly states that the science fair is happening in three days, meaning that the actual length of time spanned by the bulk of the onscreen action is very short, and Homer's prolonged period of abstinence is left to be largely rushed through within the last few minutes. This might have felt a tad less hurried if there'd been a little more ambiguity as to how much time had already elapsed when we get to the science fair, and an aching Homer is seen drooling over Ralph's alcohol-fuelled car.

Where the subplot best succeeds is in its darker, more unsettling moments, like Lisa imagining a hamster with Bart's head getting stuck in a maze and crying out "Help me! Help me!" in the manner of the human-fly hybrid from the 1958 version of The Fly (consistently one of the most disturbing pop culture items you can possibly reference - just look at The Emperor's New Groove). Then there's the allusion to A Clockwork Orange (1971), where a highly-conditioned Bart attempts to grab hold of a pair of cupcakes (just like Alex reaching for the topless woman's breasts) before collapsing in a quivering heap. I'm likewise always unnerved by the high-pitched whining Bart makes during his first encounter with the electrified cupcake (which the subtitles on Disney+ helpfully indicate that is a Three Stooges reference - ah well, I've already admitted I'm not massively well-versed in their lore). Incidentally, on the DVD commentary Reiss talks about how difficult it was implementing the moment where the hamster gets shocked (this, coupled with Lisa's white saviour fantasy, admittedly feels like an out of character thing for her to do now, even if the hamster isn't seriously harmed). They were aware that the audience's sympathy would lie with the hamster and looked to make it as quick and easy as possible...which begs the question as to why they were so callously indifferent to that poor expired hammy we saw in "Dog of Death"? Given the frequency with which hamsters seem to end up dead or imperilled on The Simpsons, I had gotten the impression that the show's crew regard them as acceptable punching bags, although Reiss insists that this isn't the case. (Jean does, however, go on to immediately confirm my suspicions about them being a bunch of cat haters, when shares his theory that onscreen kitty carnage is all well and passable in television, but once you've killed a dog, you've automatically lost your audience. I don't know if I buy that as a universal principle. Wouldn't it depend on whether your audience was comprised predominantly of dog lovers or cat lovers?)

 

As brutal as those kids are, the most disturbing portion of the episode, bar none, would be the video Homer is forced to watch in traffic school detailing the potentially grave consequences of drink driving, which is presented by an incongruously buoyant Troy McClure, star of such esteemed driver's ed titles as Alice's Adventures Through The Windshield Glass and The Decapitation of Larry Leadfoot. I've never gotten official confirmation on this, but I strongly suspect that this film was modelled on the Red Asphalt series, an infamous collection of films produced by the California Highway Patrol between 1960 and 2006 that urged responsible driving using tactics straight out of the Mondo playbook (shocking images of crumpled vehicles and mangled bodies abound). Specifically, I believe that Troy's film was based on the 1989 entry, Red Asphalt III, which opens with a similar mise-en-scene and has the presenter saying "What a _____ waste!" multiple times. If you're tempted to look up Red Asphalt III, know that it isn't for the faint of heart (among other stomach-churning vignettes, we're shown footage of a driver whose head has taken a massive battering, and I think you see parts of his brain spilling out into the wreckage). Appalling stuff, and yet I'll admit to having a certain sympathy for Homer's reaction as he sits there giggling at the lurid onslaught. He's portrayed as an anomaly among an audience of fellow offenders who are all at serious risk of losing their lunches, but he nails a fundamental aspect of the experience of having to soak in a production of this nature (either because you were forced to do so in traffic school or because you're a masochistic sicko like myself and your morbid curiosity got the best of you). So often, it is insanely difficult not to laugh, particularly with a specimen like Red Asphalt III that insists on being as overbearing as possible with its grisliness. I would argue that it's not even schadenfreude. Sometimes the brain just goes, "You know what would be the most inappropriate reaction right now? Laughter!", and before you know it you've lost control. Truth is, laughter can be a natural response to stimuli so terrible and overwhelming that it defies being processed in any other way. Homer's exact assertion is, "It's funny because I don't know 'em!", suggesting that it's is a privilege of the distance between ourselves and the subject, and that's valid enough - often, the stimuli is so extreme that it doesn't fully register as someone else's lived horror. The issue doesn't just lie with Homer either; the irreverently upbeat music and cheesy puns that accompany the presentation are concessions that, no matter how high-minded the professed intentions, there is something dreadfully exploitative about exhibiting real-life death and suffering in this manner. All I know is that allowing myself the occasional ignoble snicker is what made it possible for me to get through Red Asphalt III. It is a confounding film. Unlike Troy, the presenter in the initial sequence does a decent and respectful job of reminding us of what's really at stake in these situations: "Remember that each [body bag] carried away contains a destroyed human life. Not a dummy or a cleverly made-up actor, but a real body. A lifeless person. Next time it may be a friend, a brother, your child, or you." But then we go into the studio with our main presenter, and he isn't quite so delicate in his approach. He gestures, with a more theatrical anger, to a pile of videotapes that he tells us were created by highway patrol officers depicting real accidents - "This one is simply labelled: 17-year-old DUI, six dead!" It's all a little much to take in. There are times when awkward tittering is the only coping mechanism we're left with.

It's also the only mirth that Homer derives from what's otherwise a soul-crushing experience. As he gets deeper into his dry month, he finds himself a pariah in every social situation, at once the sole sane individual who can see the rampant futility of the world with his metaphorical beer googles off and a man going slowly to pieces as he's pushed to the very limits of his endurance. Being a rare sole sober spectator at a baseball game opens his eyes to what a tedious, chaotic mess the entire affair is, while having to sit through the supperware demonstration that Patty and Selma are hosting in the Simpsons' home (I'm guessing that he's usually down at Moe's when this sort of thing is going on?) has his thoughts turning quietly murderous. Empathy and community are bitterly denied him, even by those who claim to be peddlers in it. He gets exiled from the local Alch-Anon group when he confesses that his cravings for anything remotely close to a beer had him crawling beneath the bleachers of a football stadium ingesting dirt, and the judgemental pricks therein won't even pretend to understand that desolation (not even Hans Moleman, who here reveals himself to be a 31-year-old who ruined his life through excessive drinking). The greatest menace, though, comes from the Duff advertising that's slapped in every direction he looks, and serves as a constant reminder that it's never less than him against the world. Earlier in the season, "Lisa The Beauty Queen" had tackled the topic of cigarette promotions and their odious efforts to create a generation of young smokers, and it was explicitly noted in that episode's commentary that such an outspoken attack was only possible because cigarette companies couldn't advertise on television and the networks didn't have to worry about stepping on their toes. With alcohol it's a much thornier issue, although "Duffless" still gets surprisingly audacious in critiquing how a product so potentially harmful can be pushed on consumers who can't handle it. The promos Homer has to contend with in the present might not be as bare-faced as the 1950s television ad glimpsed at the Duff brewery, where viewers were urged by a cartoon medic to fill up their undernourished Q-zones with "pure beer goodness", but their sheer omnipresence proves just as diabolical. It illustrates how difficult it is for someone fighting addiction when the pressure to drink is so deeply ingrained within every aspect of the cultural scenery. It gets to the point where even a passing train bearing the Duff logo on every carriage appears to taunt him by repeatedly commanding him to "Chug".

Even with the odds so heavily stacked against him, Homer makes it through the month with his promise to Marge intact, at which point he's eager to head straight to Moe's and get his Q-zone overflowing once more. Marge is disappointed that this would be his first inclination, since the entire purpose of this exercise was to prove to him that he had the willpower to survive without alcohol, not give him an excuse to go on the mother of all binges. Still, when Homer arrives at his sorely-missed watering hole, he finds that he can't go back to the way things were. He looks around himself, takes note of the palpable dolour that hangs over the bar's patrons, and becomes conscious of how much his own perspective has shifted within those 30 days of non-boozing. He tells Moe to put his beer back in the fridge and leaves, having decided that he'd sooner spend the evening sober, and in the company of Marge. It's here that the episode runs into its greatest challenge - we all like happy endings, and after the anguish Homer has endured in this particular go-around, it feels as though he's earned one, but how does it balance itself against our awareness that this newfound harmony is probably not going to last? Homer's weakness for Duff is too prominent a character trait to be going anywhere, and will prove his expressed Achilles' heel just two episodes along, in "So It's Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show", so does the ending become any less sincere with that in mind? There is a flip side to this problem, which is that alcohol addiction isn't an issue likely to be resolved by just one month's worth of abstinence. Realistically it would be something that Homer should expect to struggle with for a while. So perhaps the ending risked looking disingenuous either way. Instead, it exits on a glorious middle ground, with Homer gaining a moment of clarity on what it is that really makes his life worth living, and the sincerity of that realisation certainly not being in doubt (he was willing to give up the beer in the first place for her). Meanwhile, Moe speaks on behalf of the slighted status quo, asserting that Homer will be back in his usual spot before long, and working in an odd bit of pseudo-fourth wall breaking when he gestures toward the viewer and indicates that they, too, will return. It's then revealed that he is in fact pointing his finger at Barney, who's very much wedded to his personal Hell (to the extent that if Moe's bar didn't close, he wouldn't set foot outside its walls), but for a brief second, the viewer is implicated in this culture of sorry dependency. We know that nothing's going to change substantially for Homer, and we wouldn't miss it for the world. It's as if our need to return to our television sets night after night and while away the hours chuckling at the kinds of sad saps who populate sitcoms is indicative of some existential hole within our own lives. We're all creatures of our own dubious habits, after all.

In the meantime, Homer and Marge are allowed ride off into the sunset singing "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head", in a homage to Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid (1969). There's a cute visual gag in that Homer still doesn't have his licence back and is having to ride about on Lisa's little pink bicycle to get anywhere. With Marge perched on the handle bars it should be additionally awkward, but they're managing. It also doubles as a touching metaphor, with the bike, once a symbol of Homer's failure and humiliation, becoming his final means of mobility, a chance to glide free from the burdens of his past, now that his recent upheaval has directed him to an alternate path. It's a path that seems to only ever open on a temporary basis in the world of The Simpsons, but it's a reassurance to know that it's there. 

 

BBC2 edit alert!:  The death of Diana, Princess of Wales on 31st August 1997 had an inescapable impact on the zeitgeist in the UK. I remember tuning into Sky 1 to watch The Simpsons that very day and having to sit through numerous links showing footage of Diana and her family set to mournful music, creating such a deluge of misery that they had me feeling dirty for merely desiring a bit of fun and levity with a cartoon family in between. You'd have thought that "Duffless", which contains an explicit shout-out to Diana Spencer, would have been an obvious target for Sky 1's censoring scissors when it next appeared. Yet I remember being surprised when they aired "Duffless" in what was still the close aftermath and the entire Princess Di sequence was left completely intact. It's not that there's anything overtly problematic or offensive about the sequence in itself (the joke is just Barney being a drunken wally, in mistaking something as ridiculous as a pile of rags for the Princess of Wales, and Homer being comically hurt in the process), but given the atmosphere at the time I wouldn't necessarily have faulted Sky if they'd opted to play it safe and not have Diana joked about in any capacity (particularly given the episode's broader subject matter, and its subsequent talk of fatal road accidents). But no, they either overlooked it or decided it was okay. And then when BBC2 got round to airing the episode (some time later, once things had settled down a notch), they did implement all the anticipated edits, so that Barney simply drives forward without explanation, causing Homer to miss the mattress on the roof of the car and hit the ground, and the sequence immediately ends. While I've no doubt that the Beeb made these cuts in the interests of not ruffling anybody's feathers, it's quite possible that they thought it would be confusing to have Diana referenced as though she were still among the living - as I recall, they also cut the moment in "Treehouse of Horror IV" where Richard Nixon, having been summoned to the Jury of the Damned, protests that he's not dead yet, on the grounds that Nixon was dead by the time the BBC aired it and the joke would have made no sense. To which I say, they should have given a bit of credit to the viewer's ability to decipher the original context - not least because the actual punchline of that exchange was Devil Flanders' "Listen, I did a favour for you!", which will never not be hilarious. Also, the man never drank a Duff in his life.

This was not, however, the most bewildering edit to be made to The Simpsons on account of Princess Diana. Believe me, I've a much juicier anecdote to share when I get round to covering "Rosebud". Spoiler: that one was Sky 1's doing.

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #59: Britain's Bipping Hyena Problem

 

It's no secret that hyenas get a bad rap. Much has been made about what appalling PR Disney's The Lion King was for their kind. Beside the magnificent lions they made for gruesome little characters - scrawny, sleazy, slavering and perpetually cackling - but it goes deeper than them not being what you'd describe as conventional lookers. There is something the film finds innately cursed about the hyena, casting them as the very antithesis of the values signified by the Circle of Life (this is in spite of the repeated emphasis throughout on the connectedness of all beings, which should very logically include the hyenas), so much so that their mere presence in the Pridelands must not be tolerated, lest it lead to the order breaking down (there's even a dubious attempt at coding them as Nazis, by having them goose step through Scar's big musical sequence). Simba learns early on that one of his key responsibilities as monarch will be to keep the hyenas in their miserable little ghetto and outside of his kingdom; Scar's downfall, meanwhile, comes in allowing them to enter in and have free rein. I don't for a second believe that Disney did this because they thought that real hyenas were bad and wanted to convey that message - rather, they just needed an animal that fit certain archetypes and symbols in terms of the story they wanted to tell. But we all know that Disney has a lot to answer for in terms of colouring the public's perception of particular animal types (they made Dalmatians a beloved breed, while Siamese cats have conversely never quite shaken the stink that Lady and The Tramp left on them). Their hyena negativity wasn't exactly an isolated instance in popular culture either. In Yann Martel's 2001 novel Life of Pi, there is a section where the narrator says something along the lines of, "I am not one to harbour prejudices against entire species of animal, BUT..." and proceeds to rant on for about two pages or so about what an exceptionally grotesque creature the hyena is, to the extent that even an animal enthusiast couldn't extend them much love (it's been a long time since I read Martel's book, but at that point I remember rolling my eyes so far back that I may have glimpsed the insides of my skull). Once again, the hyena is contrasted unfavourably with a type of big cat. The tiger, Richard Parker, is every bit as much a dangerous predator, but his deadliness is offset by how beautiful he is to look at, whereas the hyena (or else Frenchman) represents survival at its most monstrously brutal - there is no nobleness or majesty in his case, just killing and the crunching of bones (he is effectively a metaphor for death without hope of spiritual deliverance).

I have precious little time for Martel's flowery posturing, but I can say this much in Disney's defence - contrary to popular assumption about its impact on the hyena's reputation, The Lion King made me vehemently pro-hyena. To me, Shenzi, Banzai and Ed were by far the most sympathetic characters in the picture. They were born into a world where the status quo did not favour them, and where survival was patently a lot harder for them than it was for the lions. Even as a child, I picked up on the contradictions in Mufasa's teachings about the Circles of Life, between what it meant in theory and what it meant in practice, and that struck me as terribly unfair (with hindsight, it was probably even more unfair to the antelope, who were expected to venerate the very creatures that were violently murdering them, but the movie downplayed that by not giving them personalities). As for the entire plot point of the hyenas running riot throughout the Pridelands and destroying it all (implied but not actually shown), I wondered if perhaps they wouldn't have gotten so carried away if the lions had been willing to share with them from the beginning. I felt that there had to be some kind of middle ground, a means for both species to find a balance and to coexist, but alas, the movie was uninterested in exploring such a notion. A year after The Lion King came the movie Babe, which had a message that appealed to me a lot more. There, I detected the faintest echo of Mufasa in the character of Rex, who was insistent on each creature remaining in its proper place, accepting what it was and being thankful for it. Which is all very well when the status quo does favour you. Coincidentally, Babe contains a throwaway line in which it's suggested that allowing a pig to challenge the sheepdogs at their game will lead to other radicalities like "a laughing hyena doing showjumping", and in my head I constructed that as a winking bit of affinity - Babe, a representative of one maligned species, was breaking down barriers so that other outcasts and misfits could have their own turn in the sun.

For myself, the hyena was cemented as the ultimate underdog (although not actually a dog), and I did have Disney to thank for that. It displaced the predominant image I'd previously had of the hyena, which is that they had this tendency to hang around car parks and do damage to vehicles while their owners were out watching Basic Instinct at the Odeon. For that particular bizarre notion I can thank the Central Office of Information, who'd put out a series of public information films in the early 1990s that showed hyenas breaking into cars, and for a while that was my primary exposure to the animal. The PIFs were part of a crime prevention campaign designed to alert motorists to the importance of properly securing their vehicles, with the hyenas themselves being stand-ins for thieves on the prowl for raidable targets, but as a small child I was way too literal-minded to take it that way. Honest to god, I thought this was a campaign about actual hyenas and the damage they would do to your car if you didn't hyena-proof it. At some point or other, I must have figured out that a hyena was not a creature you should expect to encounter roaming around Britain, in multi-storey car parks or otherwise, but for all I knew these were general warnings being issued to people who were going on holiday to places where they had hyenas. For their part, COI certainly seemed to be treating the symbol a bit too literally - for a while they were so intent on making the hyena the face of British car crime that you'd get these signs showing crossed out hyenas displayed in car parks and in car dealerships. After The Lion King came along and made me reconsider the species, seeing those signs made me feel so sad, since I was beginning to get the impression that the hyena had perhaps been falsely accused. I'd been inspired to do my own research on the animal, and I had yet to come across any reference to their alleged car cracking practices. What if this idea that they were car vandals was all just a gigantic misconception, along with the similarly erroneous ideas that they are dogs and hermaphrodites? 

This wasn't the first occasion on which COI had made a PIF representing criminal types as animals. We looked previously at "Magpies: Home" from 1984, in which a group of the titular corvids were shown raiding a bedroom, making an stomach-churning mess of the place and flying out with all of the lacy undergarments they could carry. That PIF had also traded on negative associations with the featured birds (the idea that they steal shiny things, the many superstitions surrounding them, etc), but it didn't feel anywhere near as defamatory. "Magpies" was happy to let the metaphor speak for itself, and didn't feel the need to explain to us how much actual magpies suck in order to drag the thieves down with them. It helped that it was a homage to Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, so there was a degree of knowing fantasy in its scenario. The photography of the magpies was also splendid - there was a level on which it worked as a covert celebration of the birds - whereas in "Hyenas" the beasts are restricted mainly to the shadows, with close-up shots depicting them with creepy glowing eyes. Moreover, in "Hyenas" we get a monologue openly stressing the characteristics that (in COI's eyes) make car criminals comparable to hyenas. And honestly, it's pretty messed up. Hyenas are bad because they show no compassion toward their prey? Well neither do lions or tigers. But of course they're majestic big cats, so when they show no compassion it's sexy. Use of the word "victims" in place of "prey" is likewise a highly emotive choice, which suits the particular narrative the PIF is seeking to tell about car crime, but makes the hyena's actions appear more malevolent than they should.

A word that doesn't come up in COI's campaign, but is key to understanding the hyena's negative reputation, and why they would have been singled out as a metaphor for criminality when there were so many other big scary predators to choose from, is "cowardly". COI were inspired to cast hyenas as the villains because of market research indicating that hyenas were unpopular with the public, who associated them with cowardice, and they were looking to paint car criminals in the same light. I must say that I find that to be a strange notion. Cowardice, as a concept, is heavily rooted in ideas of human morality; applying it to the animal kingdom, where creatures are merely doing whatever it is they need to survive, seems futile. What is it, exactly, about the hyena that should make it a coward? All of the negative characteristics listed in the PIF itself are things that you would reasonably expect to associate with any predator. I would hazard a guess that it's because hyenas are seen as predominantly scavengers and, as a rule, animals associated with scavenging tend not to have the best of reputations (the terms "vulture" and "jackal" have negative connotations of their own). People see them as sleazy opportunists, seeking out the fallen and mortally wounded and feasting off of their misery, while stealing from other, more "worthy" predators like lions and leopards, which are capable of doing their own dirty work. That is indeed the narrative COI is wanting to convey of the car criminal, depicted as a skulking beast roaming the shadows of car parks, searching for vehicles that haven't been adequately secured and won't give them much hassle. There is perhaps an implicit suggestion that such criminals are to be seen as more dishonorable than other brands of thief, since they don't have the guts to pull off a more ambitious raid, and want only the easiest of pickings.

Does the PIF mischaracterise the hyena by depicting it as a scavenger? Yes and no. The animals featured in COI's campaign are actually striped hyenas, which are not the most famous kind. They are smaller and have a slightly more wolf-like appearance than the spotted hyena, which is what most people think of when they picture a hyena, and the species represented in The Lion King. The campaign does, however, conflate the two - the animal seen in the logo at the end (and on car park signage) appears to have been modelled on a spotted hyena, and what's more, the audio heard throughout the PIF was taken from recordings of spotted hyenas. Striped hyenas are less vocal than their spotted cousins, and they don't make the infamous laughing noise that COI uses as the basis of their punchline: "Leave it unlocked, and they're laughing." Which is the other reason why hyenas were likely chosen as our metaphorical criminals - it's not hard to construe that noise as mockery, and as the car thieves revelling in their own sneakiness and how easy unwary motorists make it for them. The notion that hyenas are predominantly scavengers would be false in the case of spotted hyenas, which are efficient pack hunters and often have their kills stolen from them by the supposedly virtuous lions, but true in the case of the striped hyena (which is a far less social being). But what COI definitely does mischaracterise is the very process of scavenging, with its insinuation that it's a revolting or dishonorable means for a creature to sustain itself, when in reality scavengers play a vital role in removing rotting carcasses from environments and preventing the spread of disease. We might think them macabre, but they're really our benefactors.

The whole point, of course, was to make car thieves sound nefarious as hell, and like a threat you absolutely should be taking all of the necessary steps to safeguard yourself against. Much like Disney, I don't believe that COI made this campaign because they had it on their agenda to increase the public's hatred toward real hyenas (Yann Martel's intentions I'm less sure about), but they were certainly looking to exploit certain prejudices already harboured against them, and to seemingly affirm these.

It goes without saying that I disapprove of the tone of the campaign, and of the tactic of explicitly villainising the hyena to suit COI's narrative ends, but that doesn't mean I'm all negative about it. On a strictly atmospheric level, I find these PIFs to be pretty unknockable. I dig the dingy, sleazy aura of the car park; multi-storey car parks are spooky venues to have to navigate at the best of times, and "Hyenas" really nails that, depicting them as murky concrete wildernesses where all manner of hidden menaces could conceivably be lurking in the shadows. It's a setting that feels alarming, dangerous and alive. In fact, it always put me heavily mind of the panther sequence from the extended video to Michael Jackson's "Black or White" - with their similar juxtaposition of ill-lit streets, car vandalism and prowling predators, I had wondered if Jackson's video might even have been an influence on COI's campaign, although I suspect that the timing doesn't line up. As for how it uses its questionable anthropomorphisms outside of its slanderous voice-over, I'd rate it as more endearingly comical than the equivalent "Magpies" PIF. You don't get the same sense of the uncanny from these shady hyenas as you do those conniving birds - rather, it treads a wobbly line between the sinister and the just plain silly. When, in the main PIF, one hyena is shown in silhouette, with its teeth (and ambitions) bared at the unsecured vehicle, it is genuinely intimidating. When seen from a different angle, with the hyena poking its face through the open car window, apparently gawking at all the goodies to be pilfered, the tone shifts to something a little more cartoonish. And you do have to love how unashamedly goofy it gets in its final moments, when we have the ridiculous sight of the hyena strolling away with a car radio in its jaws. What does a hyena want with a car radio anyway? At least a magpie could use stolen lingerie for nesting material.

Their star turn as sordid car vandals might have been jolly good acting on their part, although sadly we do have it on record that the specific hyenas used in this campaign were not good parents. Two of the hyenas were a mated pair, and they had a cub that they rejected. We know this because the rejected cub, who was instead hand-reared, was featured in a segment on the CITV show Animal Crazy, presented by Neil Buchanan and Jenny Powell, in 1994. Which is, incidentally, where I first learned that hyenas are not dogs. Even within the context of them rejecting their offspring, there was something "humanising" (for lack of a better term) about the supposed car criminals being described as a mother and father and not simply the villains in a public information film. Buchanan mentioned something about how, due to the unpredictable nature of the hyenas, the set of the PIF had to be constructed inside a cage in order to protect the film crew - which does make me hungry for further behind the scenes information about how the hyenas were trained and the PIFs were filmed. There have got to be some fascinating tidbits to be shared.

In the meantime, we're still waiting for that showjumping hyena to come along and prove he's as elegant as any pony.