The Call of The Simpsons (aka The Simpsons Have Entered The Forest)

Something that really is astounding about The Simpsons' premier season is the sheer variety of stories it was capable of offering straight off the bat. It took its core premise (a modern suburban family who were far from perfect, but able to stand by one another) in a host of directions, delving into each character's unique perspective within that equation and seeing what new angles could be applied. Who'd have thought that you could follow up "Moaning Lisa", a moody and melancholic exploration of childhood angst, with "The Call of The Simpsons" (7G09), the closest thing that fledgling year would produce to an all-out farce, and for the two stories not to feel as though they came from entirely disparate universes? Of the original 13 installments (and arguably beyond), "Call" is the one that most revels in the absurdity of its cartoon world, so much so that it might be easy to dismiss it as an overly lightweight affair. Landing midway through the season, on February 18th 1990, it is what producer Mike Reiss describes on the DVD commentary as that archetypal camping episode that most animated series like to do at about seven or eight episodes in, just to switch up the scenery and manufacture a few easy escapades: "Nobody's copying anyone, it's just something you feel...oh gee, that's a natural, let's throw them in the woods and see what happens." I can't say that I've noticed such a distinct pattern myself. South Park took barely any time to throw Stan, Kenny, Kyle and Eric into the wilderness, The Critic waited as long as episode 18 to pack Jay and Marty off to fat camp, and I don't remember the Binfords from Family Dog going camping at all (come to think of it, The PJs had a camping story in their ninth episode, although the joke there was that they never actually left the projects). But The Simpsons certainly makes the most of the alleged cliche, seizing the opportunity to be as feral as it pleases once civilisation is a speck on the horizon. If you think Homer and co are an uncultivated bunch within the comfort of their own neighbourhood, then what further indelicacies could Mother Nature possibly tease out of them? 

I should preface my review of "The Call of The Simpsons" by noting that this is a significant episode for me personally as it was the first Simpsons episode I ever saw, some time in 1991 when the show was being held captive in the UK as a satellite exclusive (causing the awe Bart feels here for an RV with a satellite dish to hit a particularly bittersweet spot). If you didn't have Sky, then you weren't completely out of luck - Fox Video had come to the rescue with a series of VHS releases containing two episodes apiece. My brother had gotten hold of a tape that had this and "Bart The Genius", so I finally got to see the series that my classmates had been raving about for months. Of the two, "Genius" resonated with me a little better, if only because the school-centred narrative was always going to be more relatable as a child (even if that hamster joke caught me way off guard), but "Call" wasn't a bad place to start - it's fun, it's colourful and it gives you a strong impression of who each of the core family are. What I find most remarkable about the experience, with hindsight, is contemplating that there ever was a time when the lack of a couch gag in the opening would not have struck me as at all peculiar - here, the Simpsons rush in and sit down and...nothing happens. Watching it now, it practically becomes a joke within itself. Judging by the level of inconsistency the first season had with implementing the opening titles, it took the producers a while to settle into a rhythm that pleased them; a handful of episodes forewent the standard sequence altogether, and the seventh installment seems a random place to be inserting the "default" version with no additional mayhem (surely it would have made more sense to have started with that one and let the couch gags get progressively wilder as they went along?). Of all the episodes they could have stuck it in front of, this one feels like by and far the most deceptive.

"The Call of The Simpsons" was writer John Swartzwelder's second contribution to the series, following "Bart The General", an episode that started out with a scenario so small and relatable (having to stand up to a school bully) before kicking it up to an audacious extreme. Already he seemed to be cementing a reputation as the writer who went bigger and broader than everyone else, testing the limits of what could be achieved in this animated reality without breaking the sense that the characters lived in the real world and not some cartoon fantasy realm. Which is not to say that goofy antics were his particular trade - his next script would be "Life on The Fast Lane", the most subtle and adult-skewing of the original season, and yet another outing that pushed the envelope in terms of what the series could do, albeit more in terms of its drama than its humor. Gutsiness was Swartzwelder's trade. He was willing to write episodes that, one way or another, took big swings that made you sit up and notice. "Call" is a markedly stronger entry on the narrative front than "General', which as an episode had a lot going for it, but also a conspicuous amount of padding. The plotting of "Call" still isn't the tightest, particularly in the middle act when the family gets lost in the wilderness and the script does a wad of meandering between their three separate story stands, but it has more going on (so much so that there was apparently talk of expanding it a two-parter at one point), and comes together nicely for a hysterical third act that makes the pint-sized, water balloon-wielding platoon from "General" look like a subdued and sensible solution to that story's problem. It gets so wild and over the top, in fact, that the ending presented a particular challenge in terms of how to finally bring it back down to earth. The philosophy of early Simpsons was that episodes could be hilarious, they could be harrowing and they could be hair-raising, but the one requirement was that they always be human. You needed to be able to identify in some way with what the family was going through. The plot trajectory of "Call" is based around Homer's humanity being slowly stripped from him, first by nature and then by something even more razor-fanged (a media circus), with the extreme outcome that he's mistaken for the cryptid Bigfoot and the scientific community are left debating on whether he's to be classified as an underachieving human or a brilliant beast. And sure, what could be more relatable? Isn't that what humanity basically is at the end of the day? A brilliant beast? We all know that there's a little bit of Homer in all of us.

The episode's title is an obvious nod to Jack London's 1903 novel The Call of The Wild, concerning a collie-St Bernard hybrid going feral and learning to live among wolves against the backdrop of the Klondike Gold Rush. As such, it contains the implicit joke that for the Simpsons, trading civilisation for the wilderness represents a kind of homecoming. As a premise, it recalls one of the early Tracey Ullman shorts, "Zoo Story", in which Homer takes the family to a zoo and encourages them to laugh at the dumb antics of a troop of monkeys who bear an uncanny resemblance to themselves. The gag was in how the Simpsons already evoked the most primitive, crude and grotesque aspects of human nature, to the extent that they barely seemed any more evolved than their simian counterparts (and that one of the monkeys was able to trade places with Bart and make it all the way to the backseat of the family's car without them noticing). The barrier between society and zoo exhibit is really that thin. Above all, "Call" strikes me as being the less sentimental, summer-themed cousin of "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire", in that it puts Homer through a series of humiliating trials designed to squeeze out his every remaining drop of dignity, on this occasion denying him the triumph of a sweetly redemptive ending (while allowing him to salvage a small scrap of pride, thanks to Marge). As with the Christmas show, a recurring bugbear of Homer's existence is the need to keep up with the Joneses, or rather the Flanderseseses, with the entire conflict being set into motion by Ned's acquisition of a swanky new RV. This was only Ned's second appearance, and while he would become a far more rounded character with the following season's "Dead Putting Society", for now his raison d'etre remains to lure out Homer's green-eyed monster with his splashy consumerism. He is, nevertheless, presented in a more favourable light than in "Roasting", where he came off as kind of insensitive toward the Simpsons' financial struggles. Here he gives Homer friendly advice on how to acquire an RV of his own via credit. And when Homer later shows up with the only RV his spotty credit history would allow, a dented hunk of used junk with no satellite dish, Ned is nothing but polite about it, wishing Homer well and betraying not even the faintest inkling of derision or snobbery. Homer's begrudging of Ned, while nowhere near as bitterly expressed as in "Roasting", is also a whole lot pettier. There's no reason why he shouldn't want his own RV, especially after learning how it could be within his means, but he seeks out the biggest and most extravagant model on the market with the explicit intention of rubbing it in Ned's face. Unlike "Roasting", where his motivations were rooted in giving his family the best possible Christmas, here he pretty much sets himself up for a fall from the outset.

The RV shopping excursion is the most unassuming segment of the story, but arguably also the most momentous. It marks the first occasion on which Albert Brooks would lend his vocal talents and ad libbing prowess to the series, kicking off one of its longest and richest of guest shot legacies (one that only Kelsey Grammer, Jon Lovitz, Joe Mantegna and Phil Hartman could feasibly rival), although in the beginning he was somewhat coy about getting on board the Simpsons train. At this point the show still had everything to prove as a lowly cartoon attempting to cut it in an adult domain. Animation in the 1980s was widely regarded as an inferior diversion for undemanding kiddies, and Brooks wasn't certain if he wanted to risk bringing that kind of stigma upon his name, so he chose to be credited as A. Brooks instead. It's a movie that has frankly always amused me. He wasn't the only early guest to have those misgivings - Dustin Hoffman also declined an overt credit for his contribution to "Lisa's Substitute", but Hoffman went with a more thorough disguise, using an entirely fabricated moniker with a hidden pun that hinted playfully at the artifice. In Brooks' case, I kinda feel that this is the equivalent of that Pokémon episode where Team Rocket attempt to hoodwink Ash and co by slipping on green jackets over their regular attire. James L. Brooks and Albert Brooks (no relation) were known best buds who frequently appeared in one another's projects (James was in Albert's Real Life and Modern Romance, and Albert in James' Terms of Endearment and Broadcast News), so I doubt that anybody who paid attention to the credits would have been doing a whole lot of head scratching as to who this mysterious A. Brooks might have been. Whatever trepidation Brooks might once have felt over his Simpsons associations has naturally long since dissipated, although A. Brooks has remained his traditional credit, a throwback to the days when this was all radically new territory and the show's breakout success had seemed like the longest of long shots.

The first of Brooks' Simpsons incarnations is an RV salesman named Bob who hides his grasping intentions behind the glad handing persona of a cowboy whose pearly whites are on constant display. He might actually be the least iconic of Brooks' roles (of the classic era anyhow), which I'm inclined to put down to his being upstaged by not just one but two characters within the space of a few episodes - an infinitely more memorable character voiced by A. Brooks and an infinitely more memorable character named Bob. Granted, I've a strong bias in favour of both of those guys in general, but I doubt that I'm saying anything particularly out of line here. Comparing them seems almost unfair - Jacques and Sideshow Bob are major presences in their respective outings, being the actual driving forces behind their pivotal conflicts, whereas Cowboy Bob has a far more modest part, appearing only for a few minutes near the start and bowing out before the first act is even through. That puts him at another disadvantage, since by the time the episode's over, so much else has happened that an RV salesman who talks and dresses like a cowboy no longer feels like the strangest thing about it and he isn't so fresh on your mind. Even so, Brooks' performance is an absolute blast, and you can tell he's having a great deal of fun in that recording booth, replicating every oily dealer who'd ever flung a dubious deal his way. Bob certainly knows how to work Homer like a sucker, smothering him with praise and affability while intermittently hinting at his fishier agenda ("I don't own this place, even though my name's up there....long story, but that doesn't matter"). Occasionally, Bob is even taken back by the extent of Homer's naivety; "Ever known a siren to be good?" he murmurs in disbelief, when Homer asks if the wailing signals emitted by the computer reviewing his credit history mean that he's been approved. Having exposed Homer's underlying sheepishness, he goes in mercilessly for the kill ("You're never going to own a better RV...This is it for you, you know? It's this or a wagon"). Significantly, when he shows Homer the beat-up RV and goads him into committing to buy without consulting his family (having detected that Marge isn't keen on making an impulse purchase, and certainly not on that RV), he tells him that "If you have to talk with those humans out there, there's something wrong with all of us." Within context, he's alluding to his earlier attempt to butter Homer up by comparing him to the Greek god Zeus, but he also foreshadows how this story will eventually unfold, with Homer being cast out from the human race (and not because he's mistaken for something more elevated). Having dared to dream that he might be destined for a more esteemed standard of living, he's about to take one heck of a sharp plummet downward. Being forced to settle for something much less than the Behemoth was only the beginning.

Still, he's invested in his scrappy little clunker (to the chagrin of his family) and is determined to make the most of it, proudly displaying it to Ned and indulging in the play pretence that he's made his perpetually sunny neighbour squirm with jealousy. Taking his reluctant family on a camping trip in the woods is an extension of that same posturing - having acquired an RV, he needs to be seen to use it, and to throw its weight around. It becomes swiftly apparent that he's no idea what he's doing, however. First he endangers his family by making the rash decision to drive off road and into a river, insisting that the RV is equipped for any terrain (all while incongruously whistling the tune to "The Happy Wanderer"). Then, in a wonderfully executed sequence (one that genuinely made me gasp on my first viewing), he comes to a random standstill, only for it to be revealed that he's driven right up to the edge of a cliff, and the RV is now teetering dangerously into the drop. The family are able to vacate in the nick of time (in an emphatic rejection of Homer's authority, they don't even wait for him to give the signal to clamber out), but alas, there's no saving the vehicle itself. The poor RV doesn't even make it to the second act, and through no fault of whatever deficiencies it had before ending up in Homer's hands.

Needless to say, we don't hold quite the same degree of sympathy for Homer as we did in "Roasting". Both episodes are littered with examples of the universe being seemingly out to get him, but he gets into this predicament as a result of his own recklessness and disregard for his family's wishes. There's no dispute that he's ripe for a royal humbling. He's nevertheless the character with whom we most closely identify throughout the adventure, and the script does a nice job of treading that middle ground with him, exposing him as fundamentally foolish at every turning, but also painfully aware of his failings and desperately wanting to do better. It's not just his pride that's under constant attack, but also his attempts to put on a brave face for the rest of his family to disguise the perilousness of their situation, now that they're stranded out in the wilderness with no idea how far they are from the nearest port of call. They are repeatedly reassured that Homer is "an experienced woodsman", but we're given no context for that statement. What prior experience does he have exactly? Possibly none at all (the only thing he's able to accomplish with any proficiency is to apply mud and leaves to his waist to cover up his nakedness). There's a particularly slick sequence where he wanders away to lament in private how he's doomed them all, only to be done in by his own echo, which not only makes his despair entirely audible to his family, but becomes the taunting voice of self-admonishment. Unfortunately for Homer, "Call" is no redemptive story where he can go off into the woods and discover himself. Or rather, he does discover himself, and what's lurking fundamentally within his nature, but not through his mastery of the wilderness; instead, this is a tale of how the wilderness beats him down and claims him as its own.

The middle act sees the family dividing off in various splinter groups, with Homer and Bart venturing out to find help while Marge and Lisa stay put and await rescue. Nobody makes the horrifying realisation that Maggie is on her own in the woods since they all assume she's with the other party (with Lisa being the only one who expresses any doubt about the situation). But not to worry. In the strangest of narrative developments (of not only this episode but quite possibly the entire season), she falls in with a family of grizzlies and gets to spend a day or two living the life of a feral child.

Of the three narrative strands, my favourite is the one that receives the least amount of screentime, that being the subplot about Marge and Lisa, and the blissfully untroubled time they have of it compared to the Simpson men. It was actually the subject of a little bit of a mystery, when the first edition of The Simpsons: A Complete Guide To Our Favorite Family was published in 1997 and included a snippet of dialogue between Marge and Lisa that was nowhere in the finished episode (and which was removed from subsequent editions). Somehow or other they've gotten onto the subject of where babies come from, with Lisa admitting that she doesn't know, but that she once heard a disturbing story about it in the school yard, and Marge responding, "Well, it's true, I'm afraid." For the longest time, I'd wondered if something had been cut from the version we'd had on tape, and was relieved when I learned that the entire fandom was as baffled by its inclusion in A Complete Guide. On the DVD commentary it is mentioned that there was originally more to the Marge-Lisa story, but that it was largely trimmed to accommodate for more of A. Brooks' ad libbing. Among the excised material were homages to Swiss Family Robinson and an extended version of the nocturnal sequence where Marge and Lisa are bedding down beside their campfire, in which they had an entire discussion about boys and, one would presume, the facts of life. As indispensable as Brooks' contribution was, I can't help but feel a little mournful for the additional Marge-Lisa rapport we were denied. Even that tiny tidbit that somehow wormed its way into the official reference guide drips with an irresistible emotional honesty. Arguably, it is a stretch that a girl as precocious as Lisa (even one with the relative innocence of a child) wouldn't already have some understanding of how reproduction works, but Marge's response is pure gold, and I'd have loved to have seen it within its proper context. Between this, the central conflict in "Moaning Lisa" and the small scene they had in "Some Enchanted Evening", Marge and Lisa felt like they had the most wholesome and earnest of the early family connections, making it a shame that their relationship wouldn't get so much focussed exploration going forward.

The subplot with Maggie and her ursine foster family is also a real highlight, peppering the episode with quirky intervals of non-verbal storytelling. Groening's aversion to the presence of anthropomorphism within The Simpsons is well-documented, and there are certainly instances of that in here (one of the bears makes the "stop" gesture by holding up its paw), but overall this thread is intrinsically too weird to feel excessively Disneyesque - not least because it's suggested that Maggie is able to subdue the voracious predators through the power of her pacifier. Again, this is in stark contrast to the reception Homer gets from the animal kingdom; his attempts to hunt for rabbits leave him not only with an empty belly, but in possible need of a rabies shot, when he ventures into the bushes and gets attacked by a rabbit, a raccoon, a snake and a chipmunk in unison. (It's interesting how cartoonier the designs for Simpsons animals were in the beginning; the bears don't look significantly different to the one we'd later see in "Much Apu About Nothing" of Season 7, but the rabbits here more closely resemble the characters from Groening's Life In Hell than the relatively naturalistic bunny Lisa pursues at the start of "Lisa's Wedding"). A repeated theme is Homer's posturing being cut down whenever he advocates conquering the wilderness through traditionally masculine methods (hunting, showing no fear, etc), while the Simpson women have better luck using approaches that are more genteel (Marge and Lisa are able to transform the woodland floor into their personal living room, while Maggie finds affinity with a grizzly by introducing it to her personal mechanism for relieving oral fixation). As Marge, Lisa and Maggie are able to make the wilds around them a little more civil, Homer becomes progressively less civilised, first losing his clothing after being carried down a river, then his power of intelligible communication after impulsively stuffing the contents of a beehive into his mouth, and finally becoming so drenched in sludge that a nearby camper with a videocam no longer recognises him as human, but as the legendary ape-man Bigfoot. In no time, the footage he filmed is all over the media, and people are flocking to the woods in the hopes of bagging the creature for a substantial reward.

One of the quirks of being set mostly outside of Springfield is that "Call' features very little world-building among the show's supporting cast, with Ned, Todd Flanders and Dr Marvin Monroe being the only recurring regulars to appear, and all of them in minimal roles. Of note is a news anchor who could be described as a proto Kent Brockman, although he wouldn't be formally introduced until "Krusty Gets Busted". There's also an entire scene with an anonymous couple voiced by Hank Azaria and Maggie Roswell, who unlike the Simpsons are disappointed with how tedious their camp-out in the wilderness is proving (unaware that the bears are looting their supplies to provide for Maggie). Their generic designs suggest that they were never intended to be anything other than one-scene wonders, but the performances and chemistry from Azaria and Roswell are so sparkling that I wouldn't have been averse to seeing more from these characters. If the episode were made in any of the later seasons, their roles would undoubtedly have been filled by more established Springfieldians, although it's hard to envision who exactly would have taken their place. Kirk and Luann Van Houten could have worked, in terms nailing of the couple's tetchy dynamic, though they'd have needed to somehow have a baby with them (Milhouse's demeanour can be on the infantile side at times, but he surely doesn't still require a bottle?). 

In its third act, "Call" becomes particularly uproarious, for it's here that The Simpsons takes its first big shot at skewering that most evergreen of topics, media sensationalism and the subsequent mass hysteria.  Already it's something that the series handles with so much sharpness and panache (the Bigfoot newsflash upstaging a presidential address, followed by the array of side-splitting tabloid headlines when Marge, having been located by the park rangers, attempts to explain that "Bigfoot" is really her husband Homer, only for her pleas to be misconstrued by reporters as declaration of a scandalous interspecies relationship). The eventual outcome sees Homer and Bart trekking their way into the Bigfoot hunters' base (having bumped into Maggie along the way, necessitating a genuinely poignant farewell scene between the babe and her adopted family), where Homer continues to be mistaken for the cryptid and is taken out with a tranquilliser dart (and he doesn't even get to go down with dignity, urging Bart to avenge his death right before snoring up a storm). Having been beaten into submission by the wilderness, he finds that reintegrating back into civilisation won't be as easy as all that. Civilisation now lives in fear of him, regarding him as the "missing link" that stands halfway between both worlds, a grotesque reminder of the bestial side of human nature that has always been at home in the wilds; his untamed exterior no doubt holds up a perfect mirror to their own mindless frenzy on being confronted with the seemingly inexplicable. It is ironic that Homer should inspire so much awe and terror, as he clearly ranks quite low on the evolutionary ladder within both settings - he couldn't outdo Ned as a suburban consumer, and outdoors he got his butt kicked by an assortment of fluffy woodland critters. 

Even after a week under observation in a laboratory, he hasn't completely dispelled the comical misunderstanding. The authorities have evidently decided that to keep him any longer would amount to false imprisonment, but the scientific community is still on the fence, with Dr Marvin Monroe (who before the introduction of Professor Frink was the show's go-to scientific representative, whether it made sense or not) and a panel of supposed experts (one German, one French and one British) continuing to butt heads over the question of Homer's humanity. They can agree that he is, at best, a below average man or, at worst, a brilliant beast, or should that be the other way around? Naturally, it is enormously silly that these esteemed eggheads can't all crack the obvious truth that Homer isn't Bigfoot, but it builds into a subtler gag about life returning to normal for Homer, in spite of his absurdest of ordeals - no matter what the scientists have to say on the matter, the only real consequence to him in practice is the prospect of having to go back to work and face a ribbing from his colleagues. Marge consoles him by suggesting that he take pride in being a "brilliant beast", a statement that, in this bedroom-bound context, carries possible sexual undertones (the fade-out with Marge switching out the light puts me leerily in mind of the ending to "Lisa's Substitute"), but mainly accentuates the value in not necessarily conforming to society's expectations while being a survivor nevertheless. Homer might have been looked down upon by man and nature alike, but he's met their respective challenges by simply getting by.

Nowadays, the thing that most sticks out about "The Call of The Simpsons" is how it takes the cake for having probably the highest proportion of truly morbid jokes of any Season 1 entry (the nocturnal rock walk in "Homer's Odyssey" being its only serious competition). Bart's reaction to Homer's efforts to construct a makeshift snare from a contorted tree branch - "What are we gonna do? Hang ourselves?" - is still so hilariously startling. There's also the gruesome thud made by the hapless rabbit that gets flung halfway across the forest by the aforementioned trap (which is too over the top to be anywhere near as traumatic as the allotted fate of the control hamster in "Bart The Genius", but still somewhat troubling in the moment), the buzzards circling around the family on their entry into the wilds, and this low-key exchange between Bart and Homer: "Are we ever gonna be there?" "How would I know?!" It's rough out there, so come prepared.

Door (End of Snivvelyzashuns)

End of world narratives were to be David Anderson's speciality during his time creating experimental animations for Channel 4. Starting with 1986's Dreamless Sleep, his contribution to David Hopkins' Sweet Disaster series, he showed a flair for conveying the disquietude of a hauntingly fragile reality on the brink of unravelling. In the dwindling stages of the decade he teamed up with American author Russell Hoban, and a brace of five minute pieces was formed under the banner of Deadtime Stories For Big Folk. The first of these was Deadsy from 1989, which went on to inspire the "Mark" entry of the "Drinking & Driving Wrecks Lives" series of PIFs. The second was Door from 1990, a grisly tale of ill-advised choices that is, for me, as perfect an animated short as they come. The busy, overstuffed and wildly abstract nature of the visuals (created through a combination of stop motion animation and pixelation) keeps us swamped in a nightmarish mix of stimuli, yet it never detracts from the elegant and poetic simplicity of the narrative. The agitated atmosphere gets increasingly sinister as it goes, culminating in the kind of ghoulish punchline that could only work in animation, and which has really stuck with me over the years.

Though overtly apocalyptic, Door does not explicitly link its narrative to the topic of nuclear war, giving it a more mystically parabolic flavour next to its predecessors. Dreamless Sleep had centred on a couple who'd awakened shortly before the detonating of a nuclear weapon, sensing that something in their environment is profoundly amiss but being unable to pinpoint the source until the blinding flash of oblivion was upon them; like When The Wind Blows from the same year, it made a harrowing statement by bringing the all-encompassing matter of nuclear war to the personal level, from the perspective of innocents who were powerless to change their fate. Deadsy took a more comprehensively allegorical approach, relating a humorously macabre monologue about a gender-bending personification of death and nuclear proliferation, and their quest to win over the entire world (their grim spectre also haunts the action in Door, where they put in a cameo appearance). In Door the threat of nuclear annihilation exists on an entirely subtextual level. The central characters, an unnamed man and woman, discover a key marked with a tag, "This Is The Wun". After much deliberation on its meaning, the woman suggests that "This Is The Wun" indicates that this is the key to the one door that should never be opened, lest it unleashes something with the power to warp their reality beyond all recognition. Sadly, their inability to agree on how to manage this most gargantuan of responsibilities reaps devastating consequences. You don't have to reach in far to locate the nuclear allegory, although it can be interpreted quite a bit more broadly than that, evoking as it does the stories of Pandora’s box and the Garden of Eden (for a welcome change, it is here the male figure who makes the fatal move and dooms everyone), suggesting that there may be something innate in the human psyche that compels it toward its own destruction. Compared to Deadsy, where vanity and the lust for domination were the driving forces for cataclysm, the snake in this particular Eden (which isn’t exactly a paradise to begin with, mind) is simple curiosity. The risk is in going so far, in our quest to keep pushing ourselves beyond our limits, that we end up crossing a line from which there can be no going back. Door explores the possibility of how a single and all-too human error might seal not only our own undoing, but cast the whole world into ruin along with us - very pertinent in an age where destroying the world had apparently become as straightforward as pressing a button.

As with Deadsy, Hoban himself takes up narration duties in Door, voicing a couple of characters who remain offscreen until the closing moments, one of whom is relating the cautionary tale of the “wun” key you had better not mess with to the other. Our first hint that these are specifically the voices of a post-apocalyptic landscape comes with their speaking in the slurred, degraded dialect that previously appeared in Hoban’s 1980 novel Riddley Walker (Hoban reasoned that people would hardly be speaking in BBC English following the collapse of civilisation and another dark age), and which I will state upfront that I will not attempt to accurately transcribe here. Connoisseur Video, the people behind the 1992 VHS release David Anderson: Works On Film, were nice enough to include a full transcript of the Deadsy monologue on the inner sleeve, in Hoban’s degraded survivor tongue, but they didn’t bestow that same honor on Door. The dialogue remains close enough to contemporary English that it is still intelligible, so I will be treating it as though it were more or less the same, but for the two key phrases: “This is the wun”, in relation to that very special key, and “the end of snivvelyzashuns we knowit”, the outcome that the characters most fear. We hear the story of the man and the woman (represented by two-dimensional cut out figures), who inhabit a world ("a great big some kind of place") consisting of innumerable doors and have many adventures navigating the surprises they conceal. Even before they discover the key that has the power to dramatically alter their destiny, there is something terrifying and intensely alien about this world, depicted as a sphere covered in a surreal hodgepodge of doors, none of which seem to offer any clear path or exit, only a deepening of chaotic entrapment. It resembles a puzzle box, of the sort that is liable to confound anybody curious or masochistic enough to try engaging with it. At one point a door swings open to reveal a figure positioned within a corridor who is seemingly incapable of doing anything but banging their head interminably against a brick wall, a sign that they've encountered a few dead ends too many. Some of the doors conceal pleasant surprises, which the man and the woman enjoy, while others are direct portals into nightmares ("You opened them, you would just keep falling for a long time"). 

On the making of documentary that appears on the Connoisseur Video release, Anderson shares that he came to the project wanting to explore human relationships and what causes us to self-destruct at an interpersonal level, with Hoban being the one who chose to take that interest in destruction to more cosmic heights. Door actually feels like a perfect amalgamation of their respective fascinations, with the script placing a great deal of emphasis on the interplay between the man and the woman (it's never stated, but we presume that they are a married couple) and their constant bickering, as interminable as anything the maze of doors has to offer. The clue that they are a husband and wife arises from the distinctly humorous nature of their arguing, indicating that they have spent just little too long in one another's company ("Sometimes they would say, why did we ever come here anyhow? Then one of them would say it wasn't my idea, and the other one would say, well it wasn't mine neither, maybe we could go some other place. Only they didn't know any other place."). Their adventures within the world of doors becomes a metaphor for navigating through life within a partnership, with all the highs, lows, surprises and tedium it may bring. As we join them, it isn't exactly trouble in paradise; their relationship doesn't yet feel that it's corrupted, but it has reached a point of stagnation that is wearying, but ultimately survivable. It is the discovery of the wun key that drives an irreparable distance between them, with the woman's cautiousness conflicting with the man's impatience. She suggests that they at least sleep on it before making any decisions, but he is unwilling to do even that and sneaks away with the key, intending to seek out the wun door and uncover the answer by himself. This amounts to an act of infidelity (it isn't a stretch to see the act of inserting a key into a keyhole as a penetrative one), and effectively severs their partnership; his search for the door takes him far away from the woman and they are not reunited. On an allegorical level, their relationship is a reminder that we are all in this wun world together and need to figure out how to make it work; the division over the key indicates the failure of conflicting parties to handle a mutual responsibility that should perhaps never have fallen into the hands of mere mortals to begin with, one that stands between life as we know it and total devastation. Eventually, the man finds a strange rotating door and attempts to get close enough to locate the keyhole - in doing so, the narrator tells us, he ended up getting sucked in by its spinning motion and was dragged into the ground to his demise. A fortunate turn of events, for the woman was right about this being the wun key you had better not mess with, and if the man had gotten any further it would have meant nothing less than "the end of snivvelyzashuns we knowit!"

At this point the narrator's companion speaks up, challenging him on whether he's certain that the man didn't get as far as inserting the key into the keyhole. The narrator responds that he doesn't think that he did. His companion then makes the short's most haunting observation - if the man did commit the reckless deed and bring about the end of snivvelyzashuns, they would not be in a position to even know the difference. The final sequence pulls back to show the sphere of doors, now busted and disintegrating, as the narrator and his companion are revealed to be a couple of disembodied, heavily decayed heads drifting through the debris of the ruined world. The narrator reiterates that he doesn't think the man opened the door. "Wow, what a lucky us," says his companion, and the film fades to black.

 

On the VHS documentary, Anderson clarifies that he saw the epilogue as happening several centuries after the events involving the mysterious key, with the talking skulls representing the subsequent generations who've lived with the consequences ever since. Within context, they can hardly be described as survivors, given their advanced state of decay; rather, they are fragments of the damaged landscape that have been floating in infinity for so long that they've lost sight of what that landscape once was. The bitter irony is that the "snivvelyzashuns" in question already ended long ago, and what they now know is barely civilisation at all. Their continued existence speaks not to the resilience of humankind (if these skulls could even be defined as human), but to the elongation of its decline, their inability to distinguish between the so-called snivvelyzashuns of then and now indicating yet another layer of that protracted decay. The legend of the man and the woman with the wun key might be exactly that - a mere legend, now that the world is far-removed enough from whatever events first set it on its course of irreversible deterioration, but its purpose has been subverted, not to preserve the truth but to reassure listeners that the world was actually saved. It becomes a denial of a reality that should perhaps be all too stark, but which is ultimately too bleak to accept. Door closes, then, by presenting us with a paradox, in the contrast between the man's fatal need to know what lurked behind that wun door and the skulls' desperate need to not know the truth of their hopeless situation. Curiosity might be the factor that propels us to our ruination, but having opened those doors that would have been better off remaining closed, to what extent would we sooner remain ignorant of the consequences? Which proclivity is stronger - our need to know, to understand and keep pushing ourselves into unmapped worlds, or the ability to close our eyes when we're on the cusp of uncovering something truly unpalatable? It is also possible to project a degree of conscious irony onto the second skull's closing statement, as though he wishes that the current state of snivvelyzashuns would be brought to an end.

I honestly don't remember when I first saw Door. I first knowingly came across it in 2012, back when I had started my mission to locate each of the Sweet Disaster series, which led me to check out some of Anderson’s other, less elusive projects, and I found that it had this instant and uncanny sense of familiarity, like the thing had already been haunting me for the better part of my existence. It is possible that I had seen it, or at least an excerpt from it, somewhere before and not quite taken it in (I don’t know if you-know-who would have covered it in his Cartoon Club), but I'd like to think that its freaky ambience just struck a chord with me because it felt so reminiscent of some half-remembered nightmare I'd once had (there is a third option, which is that I’d seen the McEwans lager ad that Anderson later animated using many of the same sets as Door). I do recall becoming utterly obsessed with it then and there in 2012. Not because I was fearing any imminent apocalypse, but because I was, at that point in my life, having a hard time coping with uncertainty in a more generalised sense (in a way that leaves you wide open to intrusive thinking), and I found the ending chilling but also strangely cathartic. I didn’t know if I saw something defiantly reassuring in the concept of being damned and unable to tell the difference, or if that inability represented an entrapment in itself, if you couldn't see beyond it and had no lingering appreciation for what was lost - I just liked that the characters acknowledged that they would have no way of knowing either way. It seemed exonerating, a reminder of how we're all just crumbs of debris floating around in space with only a narrow inkling of the bigger picture (both on a cosmic and on a personal level), and in those circumstances there's not a whole lot we can do other than to learn to trust whatever our own judgement is telling us. What a lucky us indeed.

Guided Muscle (aka Incredulous Coyotes Need Not Apply)

If I were to pick out one short that, for me, represented the absolute cream of the Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner crop, I'd inevitably go to Chuck Jones' 1955 masterpiece Guided Muscle, a choice that I'll confess has relatively little to do with the coyote's endeavours to stop that infernal ground cuckoo in its tracks. Guided Muscle is like an exquisite sandwich, its filling wedged between two particularly flavoursome slices of bread. The filling is still an essential and gratifying part of the experience, but it's the bread I'm really here for. As a young child, I had Guided Muscle on a VHS tape along with eight other Coyote and Road Runner shorts (part of a series of Looney Tunes releases put out by Videolog to coincide with Bug Bunny's 50th birthday); it always stood out to me as the single biggest oddity of that collection, all on account of how it was bookended, with an opening sequence I found strangely unsettling (in the best possible way) and a closing punchline that for a long while just left me baffled. We might as well start with the ending, for it is the juicier of the two - after suffering one defeat too many in his ever-fruitless pursuit of the road-runner and becoming charred by an explosion he had devised, set up and activated, a visibly irate Wile withdraws from the chase, producing a sign that reads, "Wanted: One gullible coyote. Apply to Manager of this theater." He then signs off by pulling the "That's All Folks!" card across the screen. Cue "Merry-Go-Round Broke Down".

What's going on here might seem blatantly obvious to adult eyes, but appreciate that, at seven years old, this was a difficult joke for me to wrap my head around for three different reasons:

1. I was unaware of some of the ways in which American English differed from British English, and couldn't be 100% certain that a "theater" was actually the same thing as a "theatre". On top of which, I would have been thinking of a theatre in terms of a playhouse rather than a cinema.
2. At that age, I also had no idea what "gullible" meant.
3. Like a lot of children who grew up watching Looney Tunes shorts on television or VHS, I had little inkling of how old they actually were, or of the fact that they hailed from another era completely, where cartoons were screened theatrically before feature films. I would have assumed that they were made for television like every other cartoon I was in the business of watching. Gags where characters interacted with a film strip and a white screen still made a degree of sense (I appreciated that the characters were bending reality and going beyond the confines of their world), but something like this I had no real reference for.

Eventually I figured out that what Wile was doing here was tending his resignation, and over time all of the other details became clear. It (briefly) put the fanciful, none-too-serious notion into my head that it wasn't necessarily the same coyote we saw chasing the road-runner in every short - Guided Muscle was only the third cartoon on this tape, so did that mean for that the remaining six we were seeing how that gullible new applicant was faring? A darker thought crossed my mind that the coyote perhaps wasn't surviving some of the more extreme of his backfired schemes and was being repeatedly replaced by lookalikes in between shorts (I mean, doppelgangers were out there - just look to the Ralph Wolf shorts). On that note, how could I be certain it was even the same road-runner being chased every time? What if the coyote was obtaining the occasional victory when no one was watching and new specimens were coming along to fill the void? After all, this is the closest a Looney Tunes series got to replicating the kind of set-up you saw in nature documentaries (the constant use of Acme products notwithstanding) - the subjects didn't talk and were observed in their natural habitat, engaging in the same age-old battle of hunger vs elusiveness that's defined the rhythm of life for countless generations of predator and prey. The individual participants were constantly changing, even if the basic narrative remained the same. Obviously, I appreciate that none of that idle thinking holds water, for Looney Tunes shorts typically adhere to their own self-contained continuity. What happens in one is unlikely to have any direct bearing on the next. Case in point, Guided Muscle was already the seventh of the coyote vs road-runner shorts, yet the opening sequence gives the impression that Wile is encountering Road and getting acquainted with his incredible acceleration for the very first time. In that regard, I like the way in which it tells a complete story and how the opening and closing sequences, while they may not directly echo one another, show Wile's fixation coming full circle. 

The intention behind the opening sequence was much less of a puzzle to me as a child - that Wile was apparently desperate enough to be preparing a discarded tin can as a meal spoke volumes about his impoverishment and how badly he was eating in general - but it always disturbed me, even if he ultimately stops short of attempting to eat this most exotic of delicacies. What makes the sequence so glorious is how beautifully straight it's initially played, with the coyote going about his business with the can as if this were the most normal behaviour on Earth. There's no hint of any kind of craze or desperation in his eyes. It's only when he sits down to try cutting the damned thing with a knife and fork that his expression warps into something significantly more exaggerated, as the grim reality of his situation sinks in. The abruptness of this transition is what really spooked me about this sequence, not least for how Wile breaks the fourth wall, shooting his demoralised gaze directly at the viewer as if the awareness that he's being watched has made him self-conscious of his own wretchedness. He cannot face his audience and degrade himself any further. There is, in addition, an excessive amount of red around Wile's eyes during this particular moment, due to what I presume to an inking error, but it adds fortuitously to the overall uncanniness of the scene. Another detail I particularly love is the broken bottle of pink liquid positioned to the right of the coyote's dinner plate that's obviously intended to give the appearance of a fine rosé wine, although who knows it actually contains? Wile discards it along with the can, indicating that whatever it was, it likely wasn't more palatable.

Wile's assigned Latin name, Eatibus almost anythingus, informs us that he isn't exactly a picky eater, but we've already witnessed where his limits lie. He's not reckless enough to try forcing something as inedible as a tin can (no matter how thoroughly boiled) through his digestive system. By the same token, he decides at the end of the short that he isn't reckless enough to keep pursuing the road-runner and suffering injury after injury in his attempt to pinpoint some kind of fatal chink in the bird's armour - to do so would be as delusional as his prior belief that he could cure his hunger pains by chowing down discarded tin cans. The problem of his hunger remains unresolved, but he he's least seen the futility of his chasing and taken a step back (for now, anyhow). I will admit, even if the ending is no longer a point of confusion to me, that there is a degree to which I still find it somewhat troubling, specifically in the notice's request for a "gullible" coyote. There is subtle humor in the implication that the hypothetical applicant would have to be self-aware enough to recognise themselves as gullible, but it also indicates that the position is to be regarded as a trap, raising questions about who is the predator in this scenario and who is the real prey. Although Wile initially sees Road as his salvation, he is in fact the perfect bait, luring Wile ever deeper down the path of Sisyphean endeavour. He's on a quest to attain the unattainable, doing things a little differently every time, determined to keep going long after he's exhausted every possible option. It's what makes the scrawny fleabag so endearing. But it's also what, according to Chuck Jones, in the series of (contested) rules he reportedly laid out for the series, makes him such a thoroughgoing fanatic, citing George Santayana's definition of the fanatic as "one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim."

It's in Wile's apparent resignation at the end of Guided Muscle that we see shades of the grind experienced by the coyote's aforementioned doppelganger, Ralph Wolf, with the implication that his designated role as the predator in this equation is a job like any other. Of course, the Sam and Ralph shorts were entirely firm on where the boundaries lay between the characters' personal and professional lives, by having the wolf and sheepdog drop their antagonistic demeanours the second the clock struck 5pm and head off home to their neat suburban houses, wishing each other well for the evening. In Wile's case, and in spite of Jones' insistence that he could stop any time if he weren't a fanatic, it's not clear if walking away is even an option. Compared to Sam and Ralph, there is no other world for him to retreat to, and no differentiation between the characters' assumed and "real" personas. What does the coyote even have to do in his sparse terrain other than to fixate on catching the road-runner (or experiment with tin cans)? Something I've always enjoyed about the Coyote and Road Runner shorts is their purity - the characters never ventured beyond their stretch of the desert and for the most part seemed to be the only inhabitants that actually dwelt there. Rarely do other parties get involved, the only persistent hint of a world that exists beyond coming in the supply of Acme products that Wile is (inexplicably) able to have sent his way, and even then, their products appear to exist purely in service of the coyote's endeavours, given their peculiar and often niche nature. One of my favourite gags in Guided Muscle occurs when Wile resolves to try tarring and feathering the road-runner and consults a publication entitled How To Tar And Feather A Road Runner; the existence of such a book should be ludicrous enough in itself, but the subtitle indicating that demand for the book is such that it's already in its 10th printing takes the joke to the next level. Another sequence involves an outside intrusion in the form of the red truck that comes thundering down the narrow road Wile has just greased, although you get the uncanny impression that this truck (not unlike that from the movie Duel) exists not as a means of mobility for any flesh and blood participant of some broader universe, but as force of calamity pulled from nowhere to inflict further misfortune upon our hero. The road runs throughout the desert, not as a means for travellers to pass through it, but foremost to the lay the grounds for the ongoing chase (such conditions are, after all, demanded by the very name that one of the parties bears, both as an individual and as a species).

One of the great underlying absurdities of the Sam and Ralph shorts was in the question of who was actually employing the two canines to go to war with one another on a daily basis from 8 to 5 - the depiction of a sheepdog as a working stiff made a degree of sense, but what kind of sheep farming business would also be hiring a wolf to stir up conflict within that time? One interpretation is that it's all being orchestrated for the benefit of the viewer, so that we could derive amusement from their ostensible enmity, until they've fulfilled the day's quota for cartoon mayhem and get to retire for the night. The ending to Guided Muscle, with its more explicit reference to the physical space from which the short's original audience would have observed the action, has Wile exhibiting such a self-awareness that entertaining the viewer is own his raison d'être, acknowledging that his giving up on Road Runner requires another coyote to take this place. Such is our fascination with seeing a malnourished coyote suffer endless pratfalls in pursuit of a terrestrial cuckoo. I like to think that by the end of the short he's dropped more than just the delusion that the road-runner is a viable quarry. Up until now, Wile has obviously regarded the viewer as his ally and confidant, judging by the series of gestures and glances he directs toward the camera as he goes about his predatory business. The first of his ill-fated schemes, which involves affixing an arrowhead to his nose and firing himself with a large bow, contains a particularly harrowing (and hilarious) moment where he turns his head elatedly toward the viewer, expecting them to share in his excitement that things are running according to plan, only to get blind-sided by the saguaro cactus directly in front of him (which proceeds to fall off of a cliff, taking him down with it). His trust in the audience is flagrantly misplaced. In the end, Wile appears to have fallen out of love with the viewer as much as he has the concept of consuming Road, having seen though the exploitative nature of their relationship. Any coyote applying to fill in his position would need to be gullible, not just in the belief that they can actually catch the road-runner, but in the belief that showbiz is glamorous and the audience is on their side and not deriving a tremendous kick from their ill fortune.

Conversely, the coyote is also the party with whom the viewer overwhelmingly identifies, which makes that relationship an intrinsically masochistic one. By now it's pretty well-established that if you were rooting for the road-runner, you were doing it wrong, when it's Wile who possesses all of the attractive qualities. The vulnerabilities, the drive to attain something better than the hand life dealt him, and the dogged attachment to his beloved pipe dream, no matter how thoroughly and repeatedly the universe insists on bending to beat it out of him. He keeps going, hoping that with enough persistence and variation he will procure a better result and taste the kind of success the world seems intent on denying him. For that reason, he has our sympathies, and it's easy to see in him a mirror to our own fallibilities, adding an extra shade to the coyote's final implication of the audience in Guided Muscle. By evoking the audience's immediate space, and indicating that the application process would be happening right there within their very theatre, he is evoking the viewer's own potential as a candidate to take his place. The short ends with the insinuation that the viewer, like the coyote, is at risk of becoming caught in a trap of their own making. The bait is laid out right in front of them, even as it calls attention to its deceptive nature with its specification for a gullible applicant. Of course, the signage also specifies that the applicant should be a coyote (this part is underlined for emphasis), which would appear to automatically disqualify all of us non-coyotes in the theatre. But perhaps we could become coyotes, if only a figurative sense. Scrawny little underdogs who believe we deserve better and won't let that light of tenacity go out, even as the odds are perpetually stacked against us. How do we know when we've crossed the slippery line from hard graft and determination into self-destructive obsession? If eating discarded tin cans is our only alternative, does it make any difference either way? 

Logo Case Study: Pixar's Luxo Lamp

2026 marks the fortieth anniversary of Pixar's founding (when the Graphics Group, a special effects team that made up part of Lucasfilm's Computer Division, was acquired by Steve Jobs and established as an independent company), so what better time to pay tribute to the plucky little desk lamp who's been attached to their output for as long as they've been making feature films?

I can remember a time when the existence of Luxo Jr. was a secret, an intriguing little Easter egg you'd be rewarded with should you make it all the way through the closing credits on the VHS release of Toy Story. Nowadays, we're fully accustomed to the lamp popping in at the start of each Pixar release as well as after, but that wasn't the case with their premier feature. Although Toy Story was heavily touted in its marketing as the first completely computer-animated feature film, Pixar themselves had essentially no brand recognition among the general public in the mid-1990s, and there does seem to have been a mindset that it should be packaged foremost as a Disney film - as something bold, new and exciting, but under the warmth and familiarity of the Disney banner. On the original print of Toy Story, the Disney logo had the opening all to itself, while the Pixar logo was tucked away discreetly at the tail-end of the picture. And quite frankly, that's where little Luxo thrived. For me, the hopping lamp was poetic, a perfectly quirky manifestation of the fact that we were venturing a little far beyond our comfort zone and were getting dangerously close to the spooky oblivion that awaited at the end of every VHS tape. He came bounding into view, eager to play with the I in the text that spelled out the company's name, only for these larks to be cut short by the I's inability to withstand his rambunctious thumping atop it, before some unseen power turned the lights out on him. Luxo Jr., now substituting for the ravaged I, would direct his bulb toward the camera (his eye, for all intents and purposes, so a possible visual pun), emitting a final warm glow into the abyss, before that too was extinguished with a genial click. At the time, Disney were in the business of inserting extra previews at the end of their tapes, so we still had a couple of items to get through before we would also be plunged into total blackness (in this case, a promo for the few blessed Disney releases that got to live permanently outside of the vault, and an ad for an interactive Toy Story CD Rom that supposed that Woody and Buzz might emerge from your PC screen as soon as you left the room), but the refuge and excitement of the main feature was now behind us. I can think of few closing logos that quite so slickly captured that feeling of "Show's over, eject" as the frisky desk lamp that saw out Toy Story.

Of course, as Pixar's stature in the entertainment industry grew there was no reason to keep Luxo confined to the pictures' sign-offs, and he became a familiar, reassuring sight in their introductions as well (including updated prints of the first Toy Story). For the most part, the sequence works as aptly as an opener, with the enthusiasm the lamp exhibits at the prospect of getting to tamper with the Pixar lettering mirroring the audience's anticipation for whatever experience the studio is about to serve up next. All the same, an important distinction was maintained between the opening and closing versions of the logo, indicating that the powers that be were entirely aware of the special power the lamp's antics had exuded at the end of their original feature. In the standard opening version of the logo, the sequence simply fades to black as Luxo's gaze turns directly toward the cinema. The intense glow in the darkness and the concluding click happen only in the end version, preserving their association with that sense of finality. I will admit to being a total purist when it comes to the latter version of the logo, meaning that I strongly disapprove of any variant in which music from the end-credits continues to play as little Luxo makes his entrance. I don't mind one iota when the reverse occurs, and the opening version of the logo is overlaid with the score from the film's beginnings, but as I see it, the sound design is too quintessential a part of the closing experience to jettison. It wasn't just the click and the total immersion in darkness that signalled that we'd reached the end of this particular journey. Every last thud and squishing sound that accompanied Luxo's movements, in addition to making the logo feel all the more alive, also emphasised the vast emptiness of the space around him, like he was hopping around a deserted venue after everyone else at Pixar had packed up and gone home for the night. The narrative I always projected onto the sequence was that Luxo was looking to eke a scrap of added enjoyment from the experience, not wanting the thrill of the feature we'd just watched be over, but his efforts were brought to an abrupt halt once he'd obliterated the I, at which point he was left shut inside the Pixar studio as the last of the employees switched off the lights. Which perhaps sounds a little bleak, but I was fairly confident that the last click was voluntary, and that Luxo was embracing in the darkness, signifying the completion of this particular Pixar project, and the promise of the next one to come. The lamp wasn't deserted, merely dormant.

I know that there are a number of folks out there who report finding Luxo Jr. unnerving in their school-aged years, on account of that fourth wall-breaking moment where he surveys you with his glowing, inhuman "eye", but in the main I think his impact on viewers was overwhelmingly disarming. I was utterly fascinated by the character - never mind toys, there was something innately beautiful in the suggestion that desk lamps could be brought to life and exhibit playful personalities. It all made sense, for you could look at a desk lamp and pick out the outline of a creature, with a head, elongated neck and foot, and Pixar were really able to make the most of that, imbuing their subject with a convincing heart and motion without the need to implement additional anthropomorphic features. It's all in the movements and the gestures - the eager spontaneity as he races into the picture and the lettering appears to catch his attention, the frantic confusion as he attempts to pinpoint the flattened I, and the stunned abashment with which his displacement of the unfortunate letter sinks in. Meanwhile, the various little creaks and clangs emitted by Luxo's metallic form are assertions of his fundamental otherness; in working within the limitations of something as inanimate and inhuman as a lamp, Pixar managed to give him a vitality and expressiveness that is uniquely his own. The patch of light that accompanies Luxo and is carefully matched to his every movement (a demonstration of Pixar's capacity to have light and shadow interact with their computer-generated landscapes) is another invaluable touch. 

At the time, I was vaguely aware that the character had originated from a short film, Luxo Jr. (John Lassester, 1986), thanks to a documentary I'd seen close to the UK release of Toy Story in the spring of 1996. I'm pretty sure Luxo Jr. came up somewhere in that, although my main interest in said documentary had been in getting glimpses of the upcoming feature and a lot of the background information went over my head (still, I've distinct memories of gasping when they played the test footage Lasseter had prepared for a proposed adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are, and being properly gutted when they subsequently indicated that the project had been canned). Like many people, I didn't see the short in its entirety until it did the theatrical rounds, attached to Pixar's 1999 release Toy Story 2 (though it had previously been available on the 1996 VHS release Tiny Toy Stories), with added text explaining that "This is why we have a hopping lamp in our logo", as if it had been a matter of serious confusion beforehand. Originally created as a technical demonstration of what the Pixar Image Computer could do, it creates an irresistible narrative, cramming a lot into its efficient two minute running time - the bond between Luxo Jr. and his "parent" lamp Luxo Sr., Luxo Jr.'s education on death, or at least consequence (thankfully, the ball he flattens doesn't actually appear to be alive), and the endearing visual punchline where Jr. rebounds from his setback and with the renewed confidence to take on an even bigger escapade in the form of that beach ball. Some of the narrative detail from the short was transplanted directly into the logo - notably Junior flattening the I in the same manner in which he does the smaller ball, although in the original short it was Luxo Sr. who made the fourth wall-breaking gesture of looking directly to the camera. The electrical cord that trailed Luxo Jr. in the original short (another crucial feature in establishing the characters' "lampness") was not incorporated into the logo, presumably in the interests of greater fluidity.

The logo worked its magic, implanting the Pixar brand name firmly inside my skull and getting me genuinely excited for what might be next on the studio's horizon. It offered such an intriguing contrast to Disney's logo - one was elegant and grandiose, while the other was quirky and ultra-modern - making it clear early on that Pixar's output was going to have a touch and character quite distinct from that of the Mouse. It was likewise a much busier logo than the grey shape that had accompanied Pixar's preceding projects, boldly announcing that a new dynamic era had begun. Mind you, the Beveled Square with a Dent still has its charm. It seems like such a primitive piece of computer animation now, but once upon a time it was the future.

Safeway: Little Harry Learns His ABCs

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Man Who Blew Away (One Foot In The Grave)

 Content warning: Suicide

The Christmas of 1994 was a Christmas quite unlike any other, all on account of what was happening at Victor Meldrew's house that year. 

One Foot In The Grave was then riding high among the cream of the contemporary Britcom crop. The previous year's special, "One Foot In The Algarve", had been a major ratings success, and you can bet that the BBC were eager to maintain that momentum with another festive special in 1994. Series creator and writer David Renwick didn't have time to devise a stand-alone special from scratch, but suggested that one of the scripts he'd been working on for the upcoming Series 5 could potentially be expanded to 40 minutes. The episode in question was "The Man Who Blew Away". Legions of Meldrew devotees tuned in to BBC One at 21:00 on 25th December, eager for another extended round of wacky hilarity with the irascible sixtysomething, and by 21:40 were sitting there in stunned silence, struggling to wrap their heads around what they had seen and keep a day's worth of Yuletide dining down. The episode garnered immediate notoriety, guaranteed to come up in conversations to the tune of "Can you believe THAT went out on Christmas Day?" for years to come.

If you are unfamiliar with this episode, then I fear that the content warning at the top of this page might have given the game away. The plot involves Victor and Margaret accommodating a house guest with suicidal tendencies, and having to talk him out of his latest attempt, which involves him climbing around naked upon their roof. Then in the epilogue they receive news that he made a subsequent attempt soon after leaving their company and on this occasion he succeeded. The episode promptly ends. Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas!

In fairness, One Foot In The Grave had dabbled in some gloomy subjects in previous Christmas specials. "Who's Listening?" from 1990 contained a subplot dealing with the Yuletide struggles of a bereaved young family (albeit one that ended happily, by way of a deus ex machina). Pippa's pregnancy arc in "The Man in The Long Black Coat" from 1991 ended on a note of immense pathos, with her being injured in a bus crash and suffering a miscarriage. The thing is, neither of those specials had aired on Christmas Day itself. There was traditionally a safe enough buffer between the peak of the festive celebrations and Renwick's morbid indulgences. Even the ambitious, feature-length (and relatively breezy) "Algarve" had to make do with a Boxing Day slot. "The Man Who Blew Away" was the first One Foot In The Grave special to have the honor of going out on 25th December, and it yielded what has to be one of the show's most unapologetically downbeat endings ever (bested only by the final episode, "Things Aren't Simple Any More", which at least had mercy enough to sign off to the triumphant sounds of The Travelling Wilburys). It all makes a little more sense when you consider that it wasn't originally written to be a Christmas installment, but at the same time, there was something incredibly on brand about the series using that prime Yuletide slot to leave the nation not merely depressed, but seriously perturbed into the bargain. The ending to "The Man Who Blew Away" isn't only tragic, it's also deeply unsettling. A large part of that has to do with the song that accompanies the closing credits, "The Laughing Policeman" by Charles Penrose, a classic music hall song from 1922 (itself an adaptation of "The Laughing Song", recorded by African American singer George W. Johnson in 1890). The song had shown up at an earlier junction in the story, where it was nothing more than an insomnia-inflicting irritation to Victor and Margaret, but it acquires much darker overtones when it's repeated in the outro. Renwick remarks on the DVD commentary that he's always thought there to be something terribly "macabre" about the song - not because of the hysterical, borderline-crazed laughter that makes up the chorus, but because of the clicking noises going on in the background, which he reckons are evocative of something you'd find in the horror comedy series The League of Gentlemen. 

The irony is that I vividly remember watching the episode's festive premiere as a child and not finding the experience anywhere near as dark or disturbing as I should have done, on account of "The Laughing Policeman". I should explain that my school's Christmas show for that year had been themed around music hall, and "The Laughing Policeman" was one of the songs we'd performed. A really fun song to perform it was too. So when it cropped up in this episode, I was positively buzzing. It was something that I knew, and the excitement of that performance was still very fresh on my mind, so naturally I gravitated straight to it. When we heard the news at the end that Victor and Margaret's friend had died, I did think it was a weirdly sad way to cap off the episode. But then "The Laughing Policeman" started up again in the credits and it cheered me right up. It was only when I revisited the episode in the early 00s that it hit me what the real intention had been. You weren't supposed to laugh at the Laughing Policeman. The Laughing Policeman laughs at you. "The Man Who Blew Away" feels, more savagely than any other edition of One Foot In The Grave, like a story where the last laugh is squarely on the viewer. Which makes it all the more ballsy that it went out on Christmas Day. 

The circumstances of the episode's airing is a detail that will forever colour it, giving it a greater infamy than it would have acquired had it aired according to Renwick's original plans. But looking at "The Man Who Blew Away" thirty-one years after the fact, it holds up as more than just a twisted joke that rattled some 15 million people on the Christmas of 1994. The thing that always made it worthy of that coveted Xmas slot is that it stands out as one of the very strongest installments of One Foot In The Grave. A lot of that is down to the doomed character, Mr Foskett, and how wonderfully portrayed he is by Brian Murphy. He is one of the most hauntingly complicated figures ever to grace the series, at once ridiculous and tragic. Creating a character who is both soul-crushingly tedious and uproariously hilarious can be a challenge enough in itself, but Murphy pulls it off effortlessly, all while imbuing Foskett with a multi-layered pathos that has us running the whole gamut of emotions. On the one hand, we empathise fully with the Meldrews in finding the man unbearable and in wanting to give him as wide a berth as possible. On the surface his behaviour is beyond infuriating. He shows up on their doorstep and expects to be immediately accommodated, then talks at mind-numbing length about every nondescript detail in his own life, never letting anybody else get a word in edgeways. At the same time, we become increasingly aware that Foskett's rabid neediness stems from forlorn desperation; that this is a deeply damaged man teetering on the edge, and his various imposing tendencies amount to cries for help that the Meldrews are ill-equipped to provide. We become uneasy about where this story might be headed, and rightly so. We're still able to get in plenty of laughs at Foskett's expense, but this is all turned back on us in the final scene, when we are implicated, along with the Meldrews, as part of the wider unsympathetic milieu that consigned this poor fellow to oblivion. 

Mr Foskett is the narrative centrepiece of "The Man Who Blew Away", but the funny thing is that he doesn't appear until 22 minutes in. That's over midway through the episode. What's more, his arrival comes completely out of the blue, making it every bit as jarring for the viewer as for the Meldrews. There hadn't been so much as a throwaway mention of the character in any of the preceding scenes, so when Victor receives a telephone call and hears Foskett on the other end, we have no context for who he even is, other than that the mere sound of his voice is enough to make Victor jolt upwards in terror. His being there represents an intrusion from a terrible chapter in the Meldrews' past they had considered long buried; it's revealed to be such an absurdly minor chapter at that, but one that's left deep psychological scars on them both. Foskett was a fellow guest at a boarding house the Meldrews had stayed at during a trip to Weston-super-Mare seventeen years ago, and the bulk of their interactions came from him having to walk through their bedroom every night to access the bathroom. Obviously he talked their ears off then, and demanded their contact details so that they could keep in touch when their holidays were over. The Meldrews gave him a false address and hoped that would be the end of it. Foskett has tracked them down anyway. He might not manage this until the latter end of the story, but what's clever about that first half is that you can look back and identity how it's been building toward his appearance through its artful use of foreshadowing. The opening sequence has Margaret returning home to find that Victor has neglected to bring in the washing, and their clothes have blown all over the snow-covered garden. Among them are a pair of socks frozen into the shape of a boomerang. "I'd throw these socks away," Margaret grumbles, "Except they'd probably keep coming back."

On the commentary, Renwick states that one of the modifications made to his original script was the inclusion of snow in the outdoor scenes, to give the impression of a festive setting. Even so, "The Man Who Blew Away" does not actually appear to take place at Christmastime (which was not at all unfitting, since "Who's Listening?" was the only OFITG Christmas special that did - the specials were more an opportunity to tell stories on a grander scale than your regular episode). The only direct artifacts of the festive season are the box of Christmas crackers and reels of wrapping paper that feature in an early sequence, recent purchases from the Happy Shopper (a defunct convenience store brand that has since been supplanted by Premier), suggesting that the events of the special fall somewhere close to Christmas, although there is ambiguity regarding the precise proximity. Does it take place in the early winter, before the decorations have gone up, or in the aftermath, with Margaret having purchased marked-down crackers and paper in the January sales, so as to have cheap supplies ready for the following Christmas? I lean toward the latter, largely on account of the box of Milk Tray chocolates Victor is seen working through at the start (and in such a classy fashion, by skewering them with cocktail stick and dunking them in his tea), as it seems like the kind of seasonal gift that you might still have left over in the early days of January. Such details feel like arbitrary concessions thrown in to make an otherwise disconnected story a little more superficially Christmassy, although a great gag is mined from the presence of the crackers, when Victor opens one to find that someone has slipped an insulting joke inside - "What's the difference between Victor Meldrew and a chef who keeps dropping his pancakes? Answer: They're both useless tossers!" (Adding insult to injury is that the pranksters have failed to construct the joke correctly; as Victor points out, it should be "Why is Victor Meldrew like a chef who keeps dropping his pancakes?").

Renwick's other major modification was to pad out the initial sequence in the Meldrews' living room, and if "The Man Who Blew Away" has any real shortcoming, it's that the story takes a long time to get going. Even so, the protracted opening doesn't feel like time wasted, with the slowburn enabling the more outlandish material to land with greater impact - notably, when Victor casually approaches a drawer and pulls out an arm, a weird and macabre gag that falls within a sequence of lower-key moments and is not immediately explained. As it turns out, Victor has lately been the target of a string of bizarre pranks, with false limbs being left around his bin and garage to give the appearance of bodies stuffed within. Not only does the resolution of this narrative strand dovetail with Foskett's arrival, the repeated emphasis on disconnected body parts neatly foreshadows the grotesque visual on which the episode will end.

In spite of the misadventures with the clothes, the limbs and the crackers, the Meldrews are in an overall buoyant mood, because their car has been stolen. This is a very good thing, because if you watched "The Beast In The Cage", you might recall how much Victor struggled with their dsyfunctional Honda. As we join the Meldrews, the car has been gone for three months and they are planning which new vehicle to buy with the anticipated insurance settlement. That is, until their good cheer is interrupted by a telephone call, bringing the bad news that their Honda has been found, in one piece...and in Finland. This prompts a truly uproarious reaction from Victor: "FINLAND??? That car couldn't get to FINCHLEY!!!" The events of the Honda narrative, which occupies the first half of the episode, have no direction connection to anything that later goes on with Foskett, but we can see how the seeds are being sown for his eventual appearance. Coupled with Margaret's observation about the frozen socks, a running theme is being established regarding unrelenting nuisances finding their way back to Meldrews as they think they are rid of them. Meanwhile, there is a subplot unfolding next door with Patrick and Pippa, as the former prepares for an engagement with a couple of prospective business contractors. It's a relatively small part of the story, but it climaxes with the episode's most hysterical visual gag, which occurs once Foskett has made it out onto the Meldrews' roof, and which I wouldn't dare spoil here.

Between the unwelcome intrusions of the Honda and Foskett, there is a further bugbear to contend with in the form of Mr and Mrs Aylesbury, an unseen couple who live across the street from the Meldrews, and who apparently have a penchant for throwing raucous parties into the early hours. It's here that "The Laughing Policeman" first comes into play - right after a deceptive silence in which the Meldrews think the party has died down and the ordeal is finally over. The really nerve-grinding part is during the chorus, when the party guests all join in with the deranged laughing (before, as per Victor's account, spilling out onto the front lawn to do Chuck Berry duck walks). For as hilarious as this entire sequence is, I will say that it is the part of the episode that requires the greatest suspension of disbelief (yes, even more so than the stolen Honda showing up in Finland), on account of Victor's observation about no one else on the street is remotely bothered besides themselves. That much is a bit hard to swallow. I could see the Swaineys maybe shrugging this off, but there's no way that Patrick and Pippa wouldn't be just as wound up and inconvenienced as Victor and Margaret, particularly with it coinciding with Patrick's important business preparation. You just to have buy into the premise that this is another instance of universe conspiring purely to make life harder for Victor (and by extension Margaret), and that the Trenches are somehow impervious (since they are typically only affected wherever it will make Victor look worse). In this case, the universe's malice manifests as delirious laughter, permeating the Meldrews' walls and mocking their futility in the face of such unabating chaos. The one consolation for their sleepless night is that it's followed by Sunday morning, and under normal circumstances they would have no obligation to get up early. Under normal circumstances. This is of course where Mr Foskett chooses to rear his head, the seismic disaster in relation to which all other grievances - the inescapable Honda, The Laughing Policeman - have been mere rumblings on the horizon. This is also where the episode really shifts into full gear, with every last moment hitting with utter precision. Time could so easily have diluted the impact of that one joke where Foskett is revealed to be calling on a mobile from outside the Meldrews' front door, coming as it did from an age where mobiles were less prolific and this would have been more unexpected, and yet the timing and the delivery are so perfect that it still feels every bit as fresh as it did back then.

Foskett claims that he'd happened to be in the area visiting his sister-in-law and, having looked up the Meldrews' real address in a telephone book, had decided to call in on them. During the extended, one-sided game of catch-up he has them play, he reveals that his first marriage broke down soon after that holiday in Weston-super-Mare, resulting in the loss of his job and in thirteen separate suicide attempts, but that he's since picked his life up, remarried and has two wonderful sons. Foskett's gushing about his newfound familial bliss brings its own extraneous misfortune for Victor and Margaret. When Victor opens the door, he finds Foskett accompanied by two pre-teen boys and, assuming them to be the sons in question, the Meldrews let them in and offer them breakfast, only for them to take advantage of their hospitality and eat well beyond their fill of jam tarts and roast potatoes. And then it turns out that they aren't even Foskett's sons, but local children who were responsible for the pranks with the fake limbs (and also the Christmas cracker) and were sent by their father to apologise. As the dust settles from that misunderstanding, Victor finds Foskett in the hallway, looking very pale and shaken. He'd gone to make a telephone call to his wife Loretta, who'd declined to come to the Meldrews' on account of having a migraine, only to discover that she and the boys have taken the opportunity to make a bolt for it and abandon him for good. All of his talk about having found happiness with a new family was a sham; they couldn't stand him any more than anyone else he ever encountered.

Following a further mishap, where Foskett retreats to the kitchen for a class of water but ends up collapsing onto a pile of scattered rubbish, the Meldrews allow him to clean up with a bath, but are all the while thinking of how to awkwardly get rid of him, with Margaret suggesting they ring for a taxi. It dawns on her that it maybe wasn't a good idea to let Foskett lock himself inside the bathroom and out of their sight, given his extensive history of suicidal behaviour. Victor thinks she's overreacting, until he goes outside and sees Foskett out on the roof wearing only a towel, threatening to throw himself off. He ultimately has second thoughts, but not without slipping, losing the towel and having to dangle naked from the roof gutter. This is the narrative's major set-piece, with the tension and comic absurdity exquisitely nailed by Susan Belbin's direction, so that even the admittedly rather naff-looking night sky effects don't take us out of the moment. 

In the epilogue, set a short while after the ordeal, we learn that Victor and Margaret are making a habit of leaving their Honda unsecured, in the hopes of it being stolen again, although Victor is questioning the purpose, noting that any keys left in the ignition have been invariably returned by would-be Good Samaritans. Foskett, on the other hand, will not be back, at least not in the flesh; the Meldrews receive a package containing an update on their old friend, and it's revealed that he made his fifteenth and final suicide attempt after leaving with the police and sadly succumbed to his injuries in hospital. Before his death, Foskett shared that there was one thing that brought him comfort in his darkest hour - his friendship with the Meldrews, the kindness they had shown him on that day, and how pleased they had evidently been to see him after all these years.

Foskett remains something of a puzzle, and we are left wondering if he was perhaps considerably less oblivious than he let on. He comes off as a man in deep denial, commenting on how strange it was that the address the Meldrews had given him turned out to be bogus but convincing himself that he'd written it down wrong. This raises the question as to what really precipitated his arrival at their door - did his family's total abandonment of him come as such a surprise to him, or was it the result of a much more prolonged marital breakdown? It dawns on us that Foskett might have deliberately sought out the Meldrews because he knew that something like this would be coming and felt the need to be with friends when the dreaded news broke. The knowledge that his first marriage had ended soon after the holiday in Weston-super-Mare underscores the likelihood that he was having marital problems back then too, and that his interactions with the Meldrews had amounted to much the same thing. On both occasions, he'd been reaching out to Victor and Margaret, and while they'd sat and endured his company through gritted teeth, all they'd privately desired was to have him out of their lives. That a couple he'd known for a brief spell seventeen years ago should be the only people he could think to turn to tells its own desolate story. The most haunting thing about Foskett? We never even learn his full name. He talks at great length about his vast collection of antique dentures and his allergy to sticky tape, yet that one all-important detail never slips through. The Meldrews were all he had left in the end, and they weren't even on first name terms with the man. He is of course the figure alluded to in the episode title - the opening sequence, in which the onscreen title was juxtaposed with a discarded newspaper page with coverage of local weddings, had foreshadowed Foskett's marital woes as the factor that would drive him over the edge, while also subtly implanting the image of him as a soul drifting feebly upon the breeze, briefly fluttering into people's lives only to be swept out again into the ether. He is a man with a knack for alienating every single person he comes into contact with, with no lasting ties or connections to keep him grounded in any particular social setting. Much like that stray newspaper page, he is discarded rubbish, professing to carry joyous news but totally unwanted and destined to shortly become nothing. It is a haunting allusion, calling to mind how little the Meldrews, or indeed we the audience really knew him, in spite of the tremendous deal he had to say about himself. To The Meldrews, he was an annoyance that came into their lives for a day, while to us he was a momentary diversion to be laughed at, but the gravitas of Margaret's final reading impresses the sobering notion that this was a life, now lost because nobody cared enough to hold onto it. He can also be likened to the scattered washing found by Margaret in the beginning, with the lack of eyes upon him (both literal and metaphorical) leading to his terminal ruin. 

Foskett's belief that he'd found camaraderie with Victor and Margaret is by far the episode's cruellest irony, but of course Renwick isn't going to bow out without inflicting one further instance of cosmic misfortune upon the Meldrews. They open up the package to find that, as Foskett's last remaining allies, he has entrusted them with his legacy in the form of his collection of antique dentures, in which Victor had politely feigned interest in an earlier scene. The final visual of those assorted cabinets of lovingly displayed pearlies creates an uneasy connection between smiling and death, for these are not merely the worldly remains of Foskett himself, but the synthetic snickers of countless owners long departed, all grinning mindlessly from beyond the grave. An underlying theme of "The Man Who Blew Away" is the idea of laughter as a reflexive coping mechanism geared toward masking grim realities and staving off the omnipresent darkness of life. The knowledge that we're all going to die and the likelihood that life is absurd are as inescapable as the Meldrews' Honda; we have to find a way of keeping the pain at bay somehow. The episode ends with Victor expressing newfound sympathy for Mr and Mrs Aylesbury, for he now understands their need to stay up laughing with Charles Penrose into the early hours, and suggests that if he and Margaret cannot follow their example, they too risk sinking into suicidal despair. The final moments, naturally, produce no laughter from either party, only an awkward silence followed by a characteristically morbid punchline, in which Victor asks Margaret where she's keeping the sleeping pills. We linger on one last shot of Foskett's collection before dissolving into the closing credits, where the familiar tortoise footage is accompanied by a reprise of "The Laughing Policeman" in lieu of the usual Eric Idle-sung theme song. Previously a manifestation of the universe's mockery of Victor and Margaret, it now becomes something altogether more sinister - our own laughter and craving for escapism has been implicated in this process of addled diversion, making these hysterical wails of irrepressible anguish an eerie caricture of our own damnation. The presence of those tortoises only adds to the final uncanniness; their significance was explained by Renwick on the commentary for "The Beast In The Cage", where he notes that they are specifically giant tortoises, which are one of the most long-lived of animal species and thus symbols of longevity. Juxtaposed with Penrose's howls, they suggest suffering of a particularly interminable variety, of having lived so long and seen so much lunacy.

Which was certainly an uncomfortable point at which to leave us in the late hours of Christmas, although it should be noted that it did little to sour the public's appetite for further seasonal installments with Victor and Margaret. A festive edition of One Foot In The Grave Christmas would remain an annual event for the duration of the mid-90s, with three further specials, "The Wisdom of The Witch", "Starbound" and "Endgame" airing in the succeeding years (of which only "Starbound" missed out on a Christmas Day slot). Renwick would never again attempt anything with quite the same bitterly downbeat flavour as "The Man Who Blew Away", however, at least not within the festive specials. The upsets of Series 6 were still to come (including an echoing of the themes of "The Man Who Blew Away" in the episode "Tales of Terror"), but those were a good few years away yet.

Finally, since I'm such a VHS nerd, I've spent an unhealthy amount of time scrutinising the Meldrews' living room cabinet to see if I can identify which tapes they have in their collection. I'm not 100% sure, but I think that's The Addams Family there on the bottom right. Neat, the Meldrews have good taste then.