VHS Verve: Benji (Takes a Dive) at Marlineland (aka Benji strikes a blow for western capitalism)

Benji, the huggable hero who went on to traumatise an entire generation of kids (not to mention provoke one of the most heated exchanges of all time between Siskel and Ebert) with his 1987 film Benji The Hunted, starred in a curious variety of projects throughout his career, but none more mind-bendingly bizarre than this ABC special from 1981. It's such an eye-popping head trip that it makes Benji The Hunted (that freaky fable about a dog with a high IQ) seem entirely conventional by comparison. This special didn't feature in my own childhood, but if it had done, I'm pretty sure I'd be debating years later whether it actually happened or was simply the result of some abnormal neurological activity induced by consuming one Panda Pop drink too many. By all accounts, it doesn't feel real. Even when it's right there unfolding before your eyes, it's a challenge to contemplate that such a thing could ever actually exist. It's utterly bonkers from start to finish.

Note that, at this stage in "his" career (and indeed, for most of "his" career), Benji was played by a female dog named Benjean, the original Benji having passed away a year after release of the first Benji film. As with all Benji productions, the special was helmed by Joe Camp.

Benji (Takes a Dive) at Marineland first aired on ABC on 10th May 1981, and was later released on home video as part of the Children's Video Library range, along with another Benji special, Benji at Work. The special takes place at the Marineland aquarium in Florida, the major draw being that Benji has traveled there with the intention of becoming the first dog ever to scuba dive (or so we're told - I'm aware that people who take their dogs scuba diving are a thing, but I couldn't say with certainty if Benjean was officially the first dog ever to take up the practice). The big problem is that Benji only gets to scuba dive at the end of the special, and this doesn't yield more than a couple of minutes worth of footage. The special itself is twenty-two minutes long, so the obvious challenge Camp had was in how to fill up the remaining time. Talk a bit about the technical aspects of scuba diving and how you facilitate things so that a dog can accomplish it? Nah, that would surely bore the kids at home to tears. Give us some background information on the history and work of the Marineland aquarium? Sounds just a bit too conventional. Why not just throw some random nonsense together involving singing fruits, communist dachshunds and some of the cheapest, most grotesquely-rendered sock puppets you've ever laid eyes on? Ding-ding-ding, we have a winner!

That's right, there are singing fruits in this thing. Why? I have no idea. Don't ask me what Camp was smoking when he wrote this.

So Benji has gone to Marineland to become the first dog ever to scuba dive, and lurking in wait for him on the beach are the two puppets who'll be guiding us through this historic occasion: Lana Afghana, a mermaid variant who happens to be part fish, part Afghan hound, and Benji's "manager" B.W. Puggit, a Texan pug. These two are not a pretty sight. On the visual appeal metre, I'd place them squarely beneath the Feebles and the Huggas, but somewhere slightly above the Pipkins (that's the British puppet series, not the novelty duo). Their distinctly frugal, homemade quality (like they were cobbled together from whatever odds and ends Camp found lying around his basement) is already hard enough to bear, but what really pushes them into all-out nightmare territory are their awkward and highly distracting mouth movements. Lana's jaws flop about gracelessly in a manner that barely syncs up with her dialogue, and whenever Puggit speaks his entire snout breaks out into an unsightly collection of twists and wrinkles, almost as if his mouth is a vortex through which the rest of his face is frantically trying to escape. There's a running gag throughout the special where Lana repeatedly smacks Puggit with her fishy tail, either to fend off his unwanted advances (which is somewhat problematic from a modern perspective, but at least Lana remains wholly on top of the situation) or because of his tendency to waffle on self-importantly. Puggit informs Lana that Benji has volunteered to make the historic dive as a gesture to promote unity between the species, but when Lana interviews Benji first-hand, he "tells" her that he's in it purely for the fun of it.

Composer Jesse Davis (who had previously performed a song for Camp's 1976 film Hawmps!) then treats us to a calypso interlude featuring his back-up band, The Mulberry Squares, and that's where our musical fruit come in. The name "Mulberry Squares" is an obvious nod to Camp's production company, Mulberry Square Productions, although making the band into literal pieces of anthropomorphic fruit possibly carries the pun a bit far. Honestly, I can just about grasp of the relevance of having two canine sock puppets present a program about a scuba diving dog. It's silly, but it's cute (the idea that is, not the sock puppets themselves). I can cope with one of the dog puppets being part fish because of that whole aquatic connection. But it's when these singing fruit appear onscreen that the special truly betrays its intentions of dragging the viewer down the path of complete and utter absurdity. Like, what? What the devil is this, Camp?

The song that Jesse Davis and the Sausage Party Rejects are performing contains numerous refrains of the line, "I don't know, can a dog survive when he scuba dives?" On second thought, perhaps the singing fruit were added in an effort to distract kids from the unsettling insinuation that Benji might perish if his scuba diving adventure goes at all haywire. I get that the idea is to hype up how bold and adventurous Benji is for "wanting" to accomplish this amazing feat, but with all the emphasis they put on the indeterminate outcome they make it sound as if Benji is being used as some kind of test subject here.

The first signs of our paper-thin story thread finally surface when we meet our villain, a dachshund-type puppet named Boris Todeth. Most references I've come across to this special have Boris down as some kind of Nazi dog (presumably because of his militaristic uniform and German accent), but this being 1981 the Cold War was far more topical than Nazi Germany, so I suspect he's actually supposed to be a Soviet spy (and doing a bang up job of looking entirely inconspicuous if he is). Boris comments that he'll never allow a "western capitalist" dog to be the first at anything and sets about to sabotage Benji's mission by stealing his specialist equipment. We then get a short sequence in which Benji comes nose-to-nose with some dolphins at the aquarium and doesn't seem to like them much. Jesse Davis starts up with a reprise of his number, whereupon Benji finally tires of his discouragement and sends him hurtling into the dolphin pool.

Lana and Puggit are talking to Mareineland manager Cecil Walker (himself), who informs them he's invited several major newspapers and television networks to cover Benji's historic dive, but a number of them have questioned the authenticity of the event, some even suspecting it of being nothing more than a cheap publicity stunt. To determine the odds of this, Lana switches over to Jimmy The Beak, a bookmaker who happens to be a rather lopsided-looking bird puppet (as if there's something seriously off with his balance receptors). Jimmy muses that if it were actually possible for a dog to scuba dive then conventional wisdom might dictate that older celebrity dogs like Rin Tin Tin and Lassie would have accomplished it by now, but gives odds of 8/5 in favour of the dive being genuine on the grounds that it often pays to root for the underdog. Meanwhile, Boris learns that Benji's all-important custom-made diving equipment is being guarded by a shark and eventually manages to swipe it after feeding the shark sleeping pills (this does not occur onscreen, with Boris conveniently cackling about his dastardly misdeed for the audience's benefit, but perhaps that's for the best).

He then looks up and sees Benji "confronting" him from the wall of the tank (in actuality Benji doesn't look like he's paying much attention at all) and knocks him into the water (I'm not sure, but I don't think Benjean was expecting that to happen). As Benji scrambles for dry land, Boris finds Lana and announces that he, and not Benji, will be making the historic dive, then attempts to make a move on her. Repulsed, Lana smacks him with her fishy tail and sends the Stasi fleabag flying - whereupon he magically transforms into a rubber ring with ears. I'm not kidding, they literally dress up a rubber ring in clothing similar to Boris's and throw it to the dolphins to bat around for a bit. To call it hilariously shoddy-looking would be a serious understatement.

Benji gets up to a bit of water-skiing, while Boris manages to escape the dolphins and elude Benji on a skateboard (the techniques used to hold Boris on that skateboard are a lot better than rubber ring effects). Boris makes it to a platform above another tank and taunts Benji by announcing his plan to put on the diving gear there and then and dive in, instantly wrecking Benji's chances of being the first dog ever to scuba dive. Suddenly Lana appears and tosses a fish into Boris's mouth, prompting a dolphin to leap up from the tank below and grab the fish, dragging Boris down into the water with it and giving Benji the opportunity to retrieve his stolen diving equipment.

Finally, after all that madcap puppet filler, we get what we came here to see: Benji donning a helmet and oxygen kit and going for an underwater paddle. As far as I can tell, the footage of Benjean scuba diving is genuine, though it is interspersed with footage of sharks and other marine life that Benjean blatantly had no contact with in real life (which were presumably thrown in in the interests of adding more variety to the visuals). Jesse Davis performs another song and lingers around the underwater observation area with his fruit chums, but this sequence is very light on puppet antics, instead allowing the viewer space to marvel at the sheer beauty of Benjean's underwater movements. It's an extremely charming sequence; there's something about the gentle grace of that submerged doggie paddle that's just so wonderfully soothing to the spirit.

The special rounds off with a brief epilogue, in which Benji hops onto a boat with Jesse Davis and sails off into the sunset, as Cecil Walker and the assorted puppet characters bid him farewell from the beach and a close-up shot of Lana reveals a solitary tear rolling down her frugal felt cheek.

The Verdict:

Remarkably, the moment where the dog puts on a scuba suit and goes for an underwater dive turned out to be most sensible aspect of this entire special. The rest of it is so hypnotically goofy it makes Goofy look like Pluto and, needless to say, you have to love it for that. There wasn't a massive amount of tonal consistency between the various projects Benji cropped up in throughout his career, but this one surely takes the cake for sheer, unabashed absurdity. It's hard to imagine any Benji adventure getting any stranger and more wildly surreal than this one.

...then again, there was that TV series where Benji was best buds with a WALL-E prototype and a kid from outer space. Well, let's consider these things one at a time.

Animation Oscar Bite 2003: A Tale of Two Spirits

75th Academy Awards - 23rd March 2003

The contenders: Ice Age, Lilo & Stitch, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, Spirited Away, Treasure Planet

The winner: Spirited Away

The rightful winner: Spirited Away

The barrel-scraper: Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron

Other Notes:

I remember this result taking a number of people by surprise back in 2003, largely because Spirited Away was seen as something as a "dark horse" entry in the build-up to the ceremony. Studio Ghibli are a well-recognised name now, sure, but prior to Spirited Away's success at the Oscars, they didn't have a great deal of familiarity in the west outside of diehard anime buffs and those who'd picked up the VHS release of Kiki's Delivery Service back in 1998. The English dub of the film had already received a theatrical release in September 2002, but it took that Academy Award for it to turn heads and give Hayao Mizazaki a sudden, much-deserved surge in popularity among Western audiences, softening the heart of many an anime skeptic who'd written the form off as catering strictly to greasy fanboys and hyperactive seven-year-olds.

With hindsight, Spirited Away's win feels like a total no-brainer, as none of the other nominees come anywhere close to it. A miraculous marriage of visual richness and narrative subtlety, it tells an enormously moving coming of age story without ever having to overstate its protagonist's progression from sullen brat to assured heroine, while the spirit world it creates is convincingly otherworldly, offering just the right balance of whimsical intrigue and grotesque disconcertion. Of the remaining nominees, Disney's Lilo & Stitch offered the worthiest competition, with its charmingly offbeat combination of contemporary family drama and sci-fi anarchy, but it all feels somewhat small fry and inelegant compared to the sweeping grandeur of Spirited Away. Ice Age, the debut feature of the 20th Century Fox-owned Blue Sky Studios, arrived at a time when the sheer novelty of CG animation was apparently still enough that audiences were willing to overlook its predictable and unambitious story (honestly, if not for the fact that Blue Sky insists on churning out another useless sequel every few years, I suspect that the original Ice Age would have been long-forgotten by now). Disney's Treasure Planet was a notorious flop and had a massive hand in the demise of 2D animation in general (see below), but critics did respond positively to its visuals. But for all of their faults, those films seem like Citizen Kane compared to DreamWorks Animation's Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, which is one of the worst animated features ever to come out of Hollywood (Don Bluth - you're forgiven. It's this horsey movie which really grinds my gears). What I find particularly repellent about Spirit is that it was blatantly conceived with the same misguided intentions of roping a Best Picture nomination that fuelled Jeffrey Katzenberg's thought processes during the production of Disney's Pocahontas, and with even more toe-curling results. People give Pocahontas a lot of flack, but I find that I can only be so hard on it, because it was made with a basic level of storytelling competence which Spirit would absolutely kill for. In the end, Spirit had to settle for a measly Best Animated Feature nomination, and even that made a complete mockery of everything it was up against (the depressing thing? Spirit is only the second worst animated feature ever to have snagged a nomination in this category. Just wait until we get to the 2005 ceremony...)

Finally, you might have noticed that, with the single exception of Ice Age, the nominees this year were largely dominated by traditional 2D. You are advised not to get too attached to this state of affairs. 3D hadn't quite edged 2D out of the multiplexes yet, but the transition was well underway - Spirit: Stallion of The Cimarron was to be DreamWorks' penultimate 2D feature, while all Disney had left on that front (prior the short-lived revival between 2009 and 2011) were a couple of leftover projects that had been grappling with story development issues since the 1990s. To date, Spirited Away remains the only traditional 2D animated film to have picked up this award, which should tell you something about just how exceedingly rare it likewise is for a non-Hollywood film to triumph in this category; pretty soon, those were all that fans of the traditional style would have left to turn to for their two dimensional fix.

The Hugga Bunch (1985)

Much like Poochie the Poodle, The Hugga Bunch is one of those 1980s toy lines that I have no first-hand memories of from my own childhood but later became familiar with through other people's nostalgia. They were a range of cuddly dolls whose big gimmick was that they could move their arms in a hugging motion when their heads were titled, and each came with a mini doll of their own known as a "Huglet". Created in the mid-80s by Kenner and Hallmark, I presume they were intended to be Hallmark's answer to American Greetings' enormously successful Care Bears range. Like the Care Bears, their ethos was all about encouraging people to express their emotions in a positive way (by buying greetings cards and other related merchandise), only they were a bit more hands-on in their approach, focusing specifically on the redemptive power of warm and loving physical contact. As far as the Hugga Bunch are concerned, there are very few problems in this world that can't be solved by taking time out to hug one another. What really caught my eye about this line had less to do with the toys themselves than the sheer number of people who were including The Hugga Bunch TV special from 1985 among lists of things that scared them out of their wits as a child. Apparently this was one heck of a strange and disconcerting slice of television, and it's haunted the psyche of many an 80s kid since its initial airing. Now my curiosity truly was piqued.

If the Hugga Bunch's Wikipedia page is to be believed, then this special broke a record for being the most expensive ever to be produced at the time, being made on a budget of $1.4 million. The efforts paid off on the awards front, with the special earning a Primetime Emmy Award for its visual effects. Its premise, on the other hand, is not an amazingly innovative one - as you watch it, you'll no doubt find yourself compiling a huge mental checklist of the various plot points and concepts that were borrowed from Alice, Oz, Narnia and any other fantasy story where a child is plucked from their humdrum existence and winds up in a bizarre land where everything is mixed up or backwards, and then learns some lesson about what was really important in their lives all along. It does, however, have a genuinely poignant (and realistic) problem at its heart - namely, a young child's heightening awareness of her grandmother's mortality.

The protagonist of the special is Bridget Severson (Gennie James), a young girl who lives with her parents (Mark Withers, Susan Mullen), older brother Andrew (Carl Steven) and her beloved Grams (Natalie Masters). The special opens with Bridget explaining to the viewer that she's feeling confused because her parents have unexpectedly bestowed some pretty swanky gifts upon herself and Andrew, but it's neither Christmas or her birthday, and there's something about the whole scenario she finds uncomfortably reminiscent of being given ice cream "to take away the yucky taste of medicine". She shares her concerns with Andrew, a computer junkie who isn't much into public displays of affection (he tends to recoil at physical contact, which would make him a Hugga's worst enemy), and he tells her that the family are planning to send Grams to a retirement home. As he puts it, "like a horse who's too old for anything, so they just put 'em in a field, let 'em eat and enjoy their life, until they grow old and die." Bridget is horrified, both by the situation and by Andrew's rather unsentimental take on it.

Neither Mr or Mrs Severson are actually that hot on the idea of sending Grams away; the antagonist of the special (at least on the human side of things) is Aunt Ruth (Kelly Britt), who's eager to have Grams shipped off for reasons that are never actually made clear. Grams indicates that she's open to moving as she feels like she's constantly getting in the family's way, but I'm not sure why Ruth has such a vested interest in getting shot of her. Bridget confronts Grams, who explains that she won't be leaving the family, simply going to live elsewhere with people her own age. Bridget protests that she wants Grams to stay with her forever and ever. One of the reasons she feels so close to Grams is that she's the only member of the household who enjoys hugging; Andrew scorns it, Mr and Mrs Severson are always too busy and Aunt Ruth complains that it will mess up her hair. Grams assures her that everyone needs a hug once in a while and somewhere there's a magical place called The Land of Hugs where everyone sits around hugging all day long.

Bridget does have one other problem - that is, the strange whistling that comes from her bedroom mirror every time she stands in front of it and hugs her toy penguin, Sweet William. Earlier in the special, she tried to share this with her brother and mother and got the predictable response ("You're a weirdo!" "You have a nice imagination, honey..."). But of course Bridget is no fantasist and eventually she discovers that her hugging has the power to open up a gateway into Hugga Land. It's here that the Hugga Bunch themselves enter the story - as Bridget goes to investigate she's greeted by the disembodied head of a Hugga poking its way through her mirror and is understandably freaked out. Suddenly, it becomes crystal clear to me why this special caused so much anxiety for kids in the 1980s - the puppets have this definite "possessed toy" vibe about them, with their stiff mannerisms, freaky felt faces and imposing plastic eyes, and the sight of a fully animated Hugga head cut off from its body is the kind of unwelcome lingering image you'll be encountering in your nightmares long after. Huggas are creepy-looking beings and I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the suggestion that a bunch of them might be secretly watching me through my bedroom mirror. Are they at least courteous enough to turn away while I'm undressing?

The Hugga eventually heaves her entire self through the mirror and introduces herself as Huggins (voice of Tony Castillo), leader of the Huggas. Bridget questions how hugging in front of her mirror could possibly open up a portal to a fantasy land populated by humanoid plush toys, but Huggins describes this as a "basic, perplexiconic, chemical miracle" (basically, a lot of nonsense dressed up to sound smart and technical). Huggins explains that she decided to cross over into Bridget's world because she senses that she has troubles and wants to help her, although surprisingly the issue that's really been eating Bridget up of late (Grams moving out) gets completely ignored to begin with, as Bridget instead complains about Andrew and what a stick in the mud he is when he comes to hugging. Huggins believes that she could win Andrew over but as they head over to his bedroom Bridget remembers that Andrew has baseball practice this time of week. Bridget warns Huggins that Andrew will freak out if he knows she's been in his room but curiously doesn't seem to think Andrew will mind if she gives Huggins one of his baseball caps. We then get a few minutes of filler in which Bridget loses Huggins and Huggins nearly gets killed by trying to hide in the laundry and being dumped in the washing machine by Ms Severson; fortunately, Bridget finds her and manages to intervene before the spin cycle gets fully underway.

As Bridget is drying the dampened Huggins, Grams walks past her room with a couple of suitcases in hand, sees what's going on, smiles affectionately and walks on (wait, so she's not in the least bit disturbed by the sight of her granddaughter bonding with this grotesque, visibly animated freak of nature?). Bridget notices that something is up and races after her. Grams delivers the bad news: she's decided to accept Aunt Ruth's suggestion that she move out to a retirement home and will be leaving at 16:30 this afternoon. Heartbroken, Bridget returns to Huggins and laments how sad it is that Grams has to leave the family simply because she's old. Huggins, who doesn't much understand the concept of aging, insists that hugging is the universal elixir to all ills, although Bridget isn't quite so naive and assures her that even hugging has its limits. Huggins's second suggestion is that Bridget cross over into Hugga Land and seek the advice of a mysterious being known as The Book Worm, who is extremely erudite and often supplies the Huggas with answers to the questions that stump them. Bridget is reluctant to follow Huggins through the mirror, fearing that she might not be able to return to her own world; Huggins doesn't reassure her that she will, but convinces her that it might be her only chance to help her Grams.

Once in Hugga Land, they meet a male Hugga, Hugsy (voice of Tony Urbano), whom Huggins casually gifts with Andrew's baseball cap (even though it's blatantly not hers to give away), and the three of them make their way around. Straight away, I can see why this special wound up costing such a packet and why it secured an Emmy for its visual effects - the hugely elaborate sets aren't exactly Hollywood-worthy, but they do have this high-end children's theatre aesthetic that manages to be charming in its own way. Bridget is introduced to a whole bunch of other Huggas who won't be of any actual narrative importance, but hey, we've got a whole toy line to promote here; the least we can do is get everyone name-checked. So she meets Tickles, Impkins and Tweaker and they regale her with a song about the virtues of hugging, just to kill a few minutes. The Huglets likewise weren't incorporated into the story in any meaningful way, but they get an obligatory cameo just to tie in with the toy line (actually, I suspect the reason the Huglets were sidelined in this special is because it would have made the puppetry far too complicated if the Huggas had always kept them on hand a la the toys).

Huggins and Hugsy accompany Bridget to the Book Worm's information booth, where Bridget explains the situation and asks what she can do to restore her grandmother's youth. The Book Worm (voice uncredited, but according to IMDb it's Richard Haydn) comments that Bridget's question is a first as no one grows old in Hugga Land, but he consults his encyclopedia, which states that the aging of grandmothers can be slowed with regular displays of affection and, most importantly, the knowledge that they are needed. Bridget argues that her Grams is due to leave the house this very afternoon and she needs a quick fix. The Book Worm again consults his encyclopedia for Instant Youth and reads that it can be brought about by consuming fruit from the Youngberry Tree. The two catches? Firstly, the fruit will disappear if it ever makes contact with the ground. Secondly, the only Youngberry Tree grows in the Country of Shrugs, a dark and dangerous land which the Huggas generally make a point of steering clear of. The Country of Shrugs is ruled by the evil Queen Admira who has little tolerance for hugs and tends to subdue her enemies by turning them into statues. I did mention that the plot was derivative of a number of other children's fantasy stories and, well, it's been more than two decades since I read any of those Chronicles of Narnia books, but I'm pretty certain that one of those involved a boy searching for a special fruit that could cure his terminally ill mother. What makes this particular scenario intriguing to me is that I'm curious to see how they're ultimately going to address the whole problem with Grams aging. I have a feeling that Grams will not be made to leave the family simply because Aunt Ruth (for reasons known only to her) has convinced her that she's not wanted, but at the same time the special can't seriously run with Book Worm's proposition that love and affection will actually slow the aging process. Eventually, Bridget's going to have to face up to the fact that Grams getting older is part of a natural cycle and that obviously she can't be around forever. All the hugs in the world won't change that - the important thing, I would argue, is that Bridget and her family don't take Grams for granted while she's there.

The Book Worm reveals that the only route into the Country of Shrugs from Hugga Land is down an ominous-looking portal. Bridget hesitates, but decides that she has no choice if she wishes to help Grams. Huggins and Hugsy agree to accompany her, and the three of them leap down the portal, ending up in the Country of Shrugs where a conveniently-placed road sign instructs them to "Follow The Sidewalk". As it turns out, the sidewalk in question really is turned on its side, which isn't an issue as the laws of gravity evidently work a little differently around here. The trio presses onward in the direction of the Queen's castle, managing to keep their spirits high by pausing now and then to dispense hugs to one another. As they near the castle, they encounter an obstacle in the form of the Hairy Behemoth, a giant, fire-breathing mammoth that's blocking their path. Hugsy isn't intimidated by the horrifying brute, reasoning that the Behemoth is "just another animal. And animals need love as much as we do. Maybe he's never been hugged before..." Umm, I'd agree insofar that animals are as deserving of respect as humans, but Hugsy's exact approach seems a little...Timothy Treadwell? Seriously kids, if you approach a wild animal as Hugsy does and attempt to physically embrace it, it'll assume that you're either trying to predate it or challenge it for its territory; either way, it won't end well for you. Fortunately for Hugsy, his gambit pays off, transforming the terrible mammoth into a much smaller, entirely benign and unusually forgetful elephant named Hodgepodge (his voice actor isn't credited, but whoever it is is clearly trying to emulate Ed Wynn). Turns out, the Queen had him under a spell and a warm loving hug was just what was needed to lift it. In gratitude, Hodgepodge offers to guide them into the castle. Conveniently, there are no other guards outside the entrance, just a very unfriendly sign reading, "Small people will be digested."

Once inside, Bridget and her friends find the Youngberry Tree locked inside a glass case, but are immediately rushed at by a band of goblin-like creatures armed with sparklers. They then come face to face with Queen Admira herself (Aarika Wells), whose design was blatantly modeled on the evil queen from Disney's Snow White. Wells plays Admira with a pantomime hamminess that's a hoot to watch...which is handy, because I also find Bridget to be unbearably obnoxious in this particular scene. Every time Admira addresses her she backchats with something brash and smart alecky (eg: she insists that she doesn't have to kneel before Admira because she's an American citizen and it's written in their constitution, as if she genuinely expects the sovereign of the Country of Shrugs to give a flying fuck about such things. Then when Admira compliments her on her prettiness she makes a point of not thanking her because "I'm just born with it and it's all luck.") I suppose the intention was to present Bridget as this feisty girl who's not cowed or impressed by the Queen's grandiosity, but it just makes her look like an entitled little snot, particularly as she then goes on to request that Admira do her a favour and give her some of her valuable Youngberrys as a hand-out. Frankly, my sympathies are squarely with Admira when she refuses.

Admira explains that she herself has exclusive rights to the Youngberry Tree because she depends on near-constant consumption of its fruit to maintain her youthful looks (could be worse - she could be an advocate for the Elizabeth Bathory method). She also makes it clear that she despises hugging and enforces strict laws in her kingdom that prevent anyone from so much as touching (if no physical contact is permitted whatsoever, then I do wonder how the denizens of this world reproduce, but I suppose that that's less likely to cross the minds of the six-year-old audience this is aimed at). Admira takes a break from her stand-off with Bridget to unlock the tree and pick a couple of the berries, one of which she consumes on the spot (turns out they taste vile, but Admira's willing to tolerate that for the sake of her complexion), while she squirrels the other away in a jar for later.

Eventually, Admira tires of Bridget and decides to turn her into a statue, commenting that she's doing her a favour as she'll get to remain young and pretty forever. It's here that we get some vague meditation on the downside of wanting to halt change and freeze things in a single state for all time, as Bridget realises with horror that without prospect of growth or change she would cease to have any kind of life at all. An evil queen who vanquishes enemies but turning them to stone is another plot element obviously borrowed from Narnia, but I do like the additional symbolism it takes on here, even if the special doesn't explicitly link it to the main message. Arguably, Admira's entire character arc is designed to show up that desire to fight the natural order in a bad light, given that she's locked herself into an existence where she's basically enslaved by her dependence on these foul-tasting berries, but then again we've been told that the Hugga also don't age and they're quite contented with their lifestyle of non-stop hugging, so I guess Admira's problem is that she's obsessed only with preserving surface beauty, not relationships. Note that, while you can clearly see where that budget went in terms of set designs, the petrification effects are a bit more ropy, consisting of a combination of freeze frame images and having James stand as still as she possibly can when others are moving around her (which isn't entirely seamless - you can clearly see her twitching on occasion). Huggins, Hugsy and Hodgepodge are banished to the castle dungeon but manage to escape thanks to Hodgepodge's incredible strength. They sneak back to the petrified Bridget and are sad because they think they've lost her forever, but as the Huggas reach out and cling to her frozen body in their sorrow, there's a flash of sparkles and suddenly Bridget is as right as rain. Silly Huggas, momentarily doubting the power of their own ethos.

The Huggas suggest they escape the castle while they have the chance, but Bridget laments what a shame it would be to go away empty-handed after getting this close to the Youngberry Tree. Then she notices that Admira actually left the key to the glass case lying right beside it, and - goddamn, how can Admira be so lax about protecting something she's so dependent on? Bridget unlocks the case, fills a jar with as many berries as possible and flees with her friends when they hear Admira approaching. Naturally, Admira freaks out, even more so when she notices that Bridget has left the key alongside the tree within the glass case, which is already closing. She lunges toward it in desperation, but is unable to reach it in time and gets her arm jammed inside the case. If you were expecting Admira to be won over by the power of hugging, much as Hodgepodge was then...think again, as her actual fate is a lot more shocking. Trapped and unable to pop one of her precious berries on time, she instantaneously shrivels up and dies. In the end I'm not sure which lingering question bugs me more; if it was worth all the effort to obtain the youngberries when their effects are so painfully short-lived, or what the hell was the point of the youngberry that Admira purposely stored away for later. I was fairly certain that was going to have some kind of plot significance, but nope, it's never even mentioned again.

Back in Hugga Land, the Huggas are celebrating Bridget's success and safe return, but she can't stick around because Grams will be leaving shortly. Unfortunately, as she steps back through the mirror with Huggins and Hugsy, she trips over and falls, spilling the jar of youngberries across her bedroom floor, where they promptly disappear, just as the Book Worm warned they would. Obviously Bridget isn't too happy, but the Huggas reassure her that love and affection are more effective than magic berries and that what's important now is that she shows her Grams how much she cares about her while she has the chance. On her way downstairs, Bridget encounters Andrew and suggests he do the same with the added threat that she'll shun him for life if he fails (wow, harsh). Bridget heads into the living room to find Grams with her bags all packed, bidding goodbye to Mr and Mrs Severson. She goes up and hugs Grams and tells her that she loves her. Grams gives some parting advice to Andrew not to ruin his eyes by staring too long at his computer because staying healthy is more important than knowledge (there's something about that entire statement that I find incredibly obnoxious; why does it have to be an either/or situation?). At that, Andrew suddenly breaks down into an uncontrollable state of sobbing and hugs Grams, telling her that he doesn't want her to leave. Bridget joins in and the parents, seeing how torn up their children are, are overcome themselves. As they all collapse in a giant group hug, Aunt Ruth waltzes in and is initially unmoved by their display of emotion, but in the end even she succumbs. The family all unified in their agreement that they love Grams and like having her around, there's no way they'll be shipping her off to a retirement home now. All thanks to the magic of hugging.

Actually, something which never comes up which I could've sworn would've been a major plot point is whether Grams was actually in on the whole Hugga thing. It's established that she lived in the house for a long time with her late husband before the rest of the family moved in, she referenced this place called the Land of Hugs and she didn't seem in the least bit perturbed earlier on in the story when she encountered a living Hugga RIGHT BEFORE HER EYES...so might she have known all along that her house contained a portal to this magical land? I was honestly expecting that to be a revelation at the end of the story, but nothing ever comes of it. We do, however, get an epilogue which addresses the special's other big loose end (well, except for the purpose of Admira's extra berry, that is), ie: how will Andrew react when he notices that one of his baseball caps had mysteriously disappeared? As he storms into Bridget's room and demands the truth, Bridget realises that she forgot all about the hat and makes some perfunctory effort to explain the whole incident to Andrew. Then she hears a familiar whistling coming from the mirror and the hat is slipped back to her while Andrew's back is conveniently turned (this time, I'm not sure how that worked as no one was actually hugging nearby). Confused, Andrew departs with the hat in total silence, as Bridget stands by the mirror and waves affectionately to her friends on the other side.

Actually, I do have one other lingering question - back at Queen Admira's castle, there was that sign reading, "Small people will be digested." Digested by what, exactly? Those goblin creatures with sparklers? Queen Admira herself? Does she go for the Elizabeth Bathory method after all?

The Verdict:

In the end the special is kind of vague on the whole issue it raises about the aging process and having to face up the mortality of loved ones, to the extent that it basically ducks out of the question altogether. Obviously hugging isn't the universal remedy to all ills the Huggas crack it up to be, but I guess the whole idea was that the Seversons were dooming Grams to a premature oblivion by making her feel that she wasn't wanted around the house any more because of her age. Mr Severson declares at the end that, "You're only as young as you are loved!", the implication being that a person dies a metaphorical death the instant they're made to feel that they've used up whatever usefulness they had on Earth and there's nothing left for them to do other than to sit around awaiting their literal demise. The scenario with Grams having to move out is executed in a very hokey manner, in part because Aunt Ruth is a straw antagonist who wants Grams gone for apparently no deeper reason than "she needs to be with people her own age!", but the relationship between Bridget and Grams is conveyed with enough gentle sincerity that it offers genuine emotional resonance (Andrew and the remaining Seversons' last-minute emotional breakdowns are a lot less convincing, but obviously we need to facilitate that happy ending).

It goes without saying that The Hugga Bunch is extremely evangelical about the virtues of hugging, and if you're the kind of person who gets turned off by an abundance of mawkishness, the freaky Hugga puppetry likely won't be enough to off-set that for you. If, on the other hand, you're a hardcore connoisseur of 1980s cheese, then it has everything - nightmarish imagery, beautifully tacky set designs, the dippiest script in the world, not to mention some delectably hammy acting. Check it out pronto, and never feel entirely at ease gazing into your own bedroom mirror again.

Animation Oscar Bite 2002: The Ogre Has Landed

Oscar bait season is now officially upon us, and to mark the occasion I thought I'd start a brand new retrospective looking back at the history of the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, which I have followed eagerly since its inception in 2002. This category is still a relatively recent addition to the Academy Awards; prior to 2002, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences felt that the feature animation industry was too small to make such a category worthwhile (in fact, when the category was finally added, it came with the clause that it would not be presented in years where fewer than eight eligible films were submitted for consideration, although that has yet to happen). My intention is to have this completed by the Academy Awards ceremony of 2018 (with a view to covering that year's results some time in the aftermath), although whether I'll succeed or not is another matter. Without further ado, let's take a look at that fateful night on 24th March 2002 when animation history was made...

74th Academy Awards  - 24th March 2002

 

The contenders: Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, Monsters, Inc, Shrek

The winner: Shrek

The rightful winner: Monsters, Inc

The barrel-scraper: Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius

(Note: "The rightful winner" refers to the film that I personally feel should have taken the honors that year. Sometimes it accords with the Academy's choice, sometimes not. "The barrel-scraper" refers to an entry whose very nomination for an award of this prestige seems somewhat dubious. Obviously such things are entirely subjective.)


Other Notes:

The Academy Award for Best Animated Feature started life with arguably its most controversial move to date, ie: the honoring of DreamWorks Animation's Shrek over Pixar's Monsters, Inc. It's a decision which seems myopic with hindsight - Shrek had stirred up endless enthusiasm back in 2001, but I think it's fair to say that time has not been particularly kind to the gruesome green ogre, or to DreamWorks Animation in general (who'd have guessed that a reliance on flavour-of-the-month cultural references and celebrity voiceovers would make your films look really dated in sixteen years' time?) and that Monsters, Inc now holds up as by far the stronger picture. But in the early 00s it felt pretty earth-shattering, because Hollywood animation was undergoing a serious shake-up, and the studio that would lead the way in the dawning 21st century was not yet set in stone. The Disney Renaissance that had dominated the 1990s had now run out of steam, as evidenced by the weak box office performances of The Emperor's New Groove and Atlantis: The Lost Empire, while Disney's underlings at Pixar looked to be blossoming into something really quite special. The respective critical and commercial successes of A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2 and Monsters, Inc had proven that their early triumph with Toy Story was no fluke, and already there was speculation that Pixar might end up dethroning Disney as the kings of Hollywood animation, with 3D animation replacing 2D as the industry standard. To put it in the words of Randall Boggs, the villain of Monsters, Inc, "Hear that? It's the winds of change."

There was, however, a potential fly in the ointment for Pixar, in the form of erstwhile Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg. After parting ways with the house of mouse, he had co-founded DreamWorks Animation in 1994 and now was dead set on exploiting the public's waning goodwill toward traditional Disney and their growing fascination with CG animation. DreamWorks had ostensibly stolen Pixar's thunder (and by extension Disney's) once before in 1998 when their first all-CG feature Antz had managed to reach theatres ahead of Pixar's A Bug's Life (an achievement that mattered little in the long-term). The monster-sized box office success of Shrek in 2001, coupled with its subsequent victory at the Academy Awards, meant that, for just a moment, Pixar's future as the leaders of the animation pack seemed a little in doubt. Perhaps DreamWorks was the studio destined for eminence. But no, the Academy got it wrong and I think they're only too aware of their mistake, because, sixteen years on, they've yet to honor DreamWorks Animation with the award again (unless you care to count Wallace & Gromit: Curse of The Were-Rabbit, which was very much an Aardman baby) and in subsequent years Katzenberg's crew would have a hard enough time just getting an invite to the occasion. Pixar, meanwhile, currently have eight wins under their belt.

My understanding is that DreamWorks were actually quite sour that Academy Awards season because rumour had it that Shrek was in the running for a Best Picture nomination (haha, seriously?) but that didn't happen. A good thing too - even at the time, I never understood the public's infatuation with Shrek. The animation wasn't in in the slightest bit appealing, Donkey irritated the living snot out of me, it opens with that GODAWFUL Smash Mouth song, and the film's raison d'être as Katzenberg's bitter, angry middle finger to his former colleagues at Disney was both transparent and extremely off-putting (seriously, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut had fun at the expense of Renaissance Disney without being anywhere near this savage). Whereas Monsters, Inc felt like a lovely, gentle story from the heart, Shrek was born from a place of genuine spite, and that's something I could never get past about it.

The Disney-Pixar/DreamWorks rivalry dominated the occasion so much that the third nominee, Nickelodeon Movies' Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, is typically regarded as a mere footnote, if it's remembered at all. The feature spin-off of a series of Nickelodeon shorts, it seems distinctly out of place among this line-up, which is symptomatic of a problem that dogged the category in its early years - namely, that so few animated features were released on an annual basis that you tended to get at least one or two dubious entries simply to fill out slots in the nominations list. Now, I personally have never seen Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius (or the collection of shorts it was based on), so I can make no actual judgement of the film itself, but I think it was always obvious from the outset that it wasn't in the same league as the two big-hitters it was up against and stood absolutely no chance (nevertheless, this kind of "filler" nominee would reach far more ridiculous heights the following year, when that steaming pile of horse shit Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron wound up in the running). It no doubt benefited from Disney's failure to submit their own major release for that year, the traditionally-animated Atlantis: The Lost Empire, for consideration in the first place. Atlantis had gone down like a lead balloon at the box office and hadn't uniformly impressed the critics (all the same, the clout of the Disney brand might have afforded it an ounce more prestige on the awards front than a relatively low-rent production like Jimmy Neutron), prompting Disney to apparently conclude that Monsters, Inc was the only pony worth their betting on.

Back in the early 00s a lot of animation fans were confident that this 3D animation thing was just a passing fad and that traditional animation would endure and eventually make a comeback. That hasn't happened, of course (and I personally have lost all hope that it will), but it is interesting to note how dramatically fortunes have since shifted among the major Hollywood animation studios. Not only did DreamWorks Animation ultimately fail to overshadow Pixar, but they've dwindled quite massively in popularity in recent years, with many of their films struggling to turn a profit at the box office - in fact, Illumination have pretty much replaced them as Disney/Pixar's greatest competition. Lately, Pixar have also lost some of their lustre - all in all, they're still heavy-hitters, but they've had their share of weak or disappointing features, and they no longer seem quite as bullet-proof as they did once upon a time. Conversely, Disney went through some pretty rough years in the 00s and it took them a long time to find their footing in the changing animation marketplace, but they're currently enjoying the kind of success they hadn't seen since the Renaissance days (not to mention, three out of the last four wins for Best Animated Feature went to them). Ain't no happily ever afters in this business; merely The Circle of Life.

VHS Verve: Meet The Feebles (1989)

Long before he took the world by storm with his Lord of the Rings trilogy and made epic cinema big and sexy again, Kiwi director Peter Jackson specialised in decidedly oddball pictures geared heavily toward grossing his audiences out, and none of his films accomplished this with quite as much perverse panache as Meet The Feebles, a savagely affectionate (or affectionately savage) pastiche of Jim Henson's The Muppets. Alas, Meet The Feebles is also one of Jackson's lesser-known films - it bombed on release in 1989 and only gained a halfway substantial amount of attention after Lord of The Rings made Jackson a household name - which maybe isn't so surprising given how unashamedly esoteric it is. Whether or not you enjoy this film might depend on how much tolerance you have for seeing puppet animals barf and take big heavy leaks on one another, how open-minded you are toward interspecies sex (an element which is suggested wholesale by the Muppets themselves, mind) or how much of a masochistic sicko you are in general. If you pass that test, then it's a must-see.

The first thing to note is that Meet The Feebles is nothing like Avenue Q, a Broadway musical which also functioned as an adult-orientated pastiche on Henson, more specifically Sesame Street. For all its sauciness, Avenue Q was imbued with a warmth and tenderness toward its characters which Meet The Feebles goes well out of its way to avoid. Instead, Meet The Feebles uses the inhuman, otherworldly qualities of the Muppets as the stuff of horror, making you feel as if you're watching an alien race put on a play about humankind's very worst vices - there is something slickly Aesopian about the entire affair, with the sheer, unabashed ugliness of the puppetry giving physical form to that depravity. That's how I see it, anyway. Speaking as someone who was raised on Henson properties but also saw something weirdly grotesque and threatening in their fuzzy felt faces as a child, I have a boundless appreciation for Jackson's demented vision. Meet The Feebles is a film which speaks to the little kid in me who was once too scared to watch Fraggle Rock because the bit in the opening sequence where Junior Gorg seizes Gobo was hella spine-chilling (nowadays, I love Fraggle Rock and the deep irony is that Junior Gorg is my favourite character) and who was deathly afraid of anything involving Miss Piggy for not knowing when her violent temper might erupt. I can only assume that Jackson felt an inkling of that fear himself, and yearned to create a picture that carried that Muppety uncanniness out to its absolute extreme. All in all, I see the film less as the darkly gruesome black comedy it's typically pegged for, and more as the most disorientating, doggedly grotesque of horror films. I don't think I'm alone on that, for Halliwell's Film Guide has it listed a "semi-pornographic horror with Muppet-like creatures that is determined to offend." (Not so sure about the "semi-pornographic" angle, though - yes, there's a truck-load of fairly graphic sight gags involving interspecies bonking, but it's no more pornographic in practice than was Ralph Bakshi's Fritz The Cat. As for the film's potential to offend, ironically I'd say that the most offensive thing happens essentially by accident and involves the two characters we're supposed to see as the most wholesome).

Meet The Feebles is an absolute freak show of a flick that sets out to immerse the viewer in as intensely uncomfortable an experience as possible. The close-up shots of those mangy, moth-eaten puppets are so frightfully, monstrously surreal that it transcends into the kind of nightmarish fever dream territory that has you wailing out in disbelief at what you're seeing. It's such a bizarrely unique piece of film-making that a number of critics were left stumped by it - the Time Out review gave props to the obvious craft that went into the puppetry and song-writing but questioned if it was worth the effort when it was ultimately in service of "a string of gags about vomiting, pissing, shitting, jissom pressure, bunnilingus, and knicker-sniffing anteaters?" Meet The Feebles revels in everything that's gross and nasty about the human condition, including its assorted bodily functions, and inevitably that's going to alienate a few people. In many respects I think that Meet The Feebles was a bit ahead of its time - in a post-South Park world its combination of absurdity and extreme gross-out vulgarity doesn't seem quite so out there, but then film's unapologetic commitment to its own hypnotic ugliness takes it down an altogether darker, creepier path than Parker and Stone's infamous creation. Meet The Feebles was never destined to be anything other than fringe viewing, and it's essential that you approach it with an already very twisted demeanor.

Meet The Feebles follows the assorted exploits of a troupe of sleazy animal performers as they prepare to put on a big variety show in the hopes of landing a syndicated television series. Their two biggest draws are Harry (Ross Jolly), a sexually promiscuous leporine, and hippopotamus diva Heidi (voiced by Mark Hadlow, with Danny Mulheron providing her physical movements), who's instantly recognisable as the troupe's answer to Miss Piggy. If you thought that Kermit and Piggy's relationship seemed a bit rocky at times, that's nothing compared to the emotionally tortured nightmare that is Heidi's partnership with her boss and lover Mr. Bletch (Peter Vere-Jones), the villainous walrus manager of the club (funnily enough my VHS copy of the film identifies him as an otter, but no, I'd say those tusks are a dead giveaway). While the Feebles are rehearsing their big opening number, Bletch is in his office aggressively banging his feline mistress Samantha (Donna Akersten). Words cannot describe just how eye-poppingly bizarre it is seeing this big hefty walrus going at it with this tiny, fragile-looking cat (I'm not sure, but I think this may have been the original Hot Skitty on Wailord Action). Bletch has secretly lost whatever pull he once felt toward Heidi but is reluctant to drop her altogether due to her importance to the show. Samantha tires of Bletch's stalling and tries to undo Heidi herself with some backstage cattiness that has Heidi retreating to her dressing room in a cake-binging dejection. Her despair eventually transforms into a Miss Piggy-style rage that reaches breathtakingly murderous heights. In the meantime, Bletch has his flippers tied with other concerns, such a shady drugs deal with a golf-playing pig (Stuart Devenie), and producing the underground porn films directed by his best mate Trevor the rat (Brian Sergent), which feature a cow with oversized udders indulging in S&M activities with a whip-wielding weta. I did tell you this thing was offbeat.

The other major story thread involves the troupe's newcomer, a chivalrous but naive and painfully shy hedgehog named Robert (Hadlow) whose excitement at the mere prospect of being featured in the Feebles line up soon begins to grate on the rest of the crew, particularly the pretentious vulpine director Sebastian (Devenie). Fortunately, Robert finds a friendly mentor in theatre veteran Arthur the worm (Vere-Jones) and a potential love interest in pretty chorus girl poodle Lucille (Akersten). Robert's innocence and playful enthusiasm stand in direct contrast to the sheer depravity unfolding all around him and is presumably intended to provide the film with some form of emotional catharsis - a small dash of earnestness so that not even a world as mangy and flea-bitten as the Feebles' is entirely devoid of sunshine. After all, the film clearly intends for the viewer to sympathise with Robert and root for his sweet sincerity to win the day (even when it also expects us to laugh at his speech impediment). Unfortunately, Robert's so-called virtue also winds up yielding the film's most problematic element - the cute little hedgehog turns out to be frankly a bit of a judgemental twat, as evidenced when he catches Trevor in the process of drugging and raping Lucille (hoping to lure her into his underground porn ring) and is swift to blame and shame the victim. Underneath all that cat-banging, drugs running and underpants-sniffing, Meet The Feebles is actually a surprisingly black-and-white morality story, so searingly condemning in its exploration of human vice that it again feels like the work of an alien race passing a very harsh judgement on the failings of humanity; among them, its weakness for a little tipple. Lucille gets raped by Trevor and rebuffed by Robert because she loosens her morals just enough to accept a glass of champagne from the former, and regrettably the film seems to regard the outcome as nothing less than her inevitable comeuppance for giving in to the devil's drink (and the lure of potential celebrity) in the first place. Later, when she tries to explain the situation to Robert, he dismisses her for her wine-drinking every bit as much as her ostensible promiscuity. "You dwink", he sneers, and refuses to hear her out. Even the love-conquers-all direction their arc finally takes doesn't quite offset the sourness of this plot point. It's a sourness of a different, entirely less delectable ilk to the pickled-in-piss ugliness that dominates the rest of the film.

There are a handful of smaller story strands, including one involving Harry contracting a mysterious, potentially fatal venereal disease and attempting to fend off an intrusive paparazzi housefly (Sergent) with an insatiable taste for dirt (figuratively and literally - the fly provides the film with possibly its most revolting visual joke, and that's certainly saying something). In another subplot clearly inspired by Gonzo and Camilla from The Muppets, we have a chicken named Sandy (Devenie) attempting to slap Sid the elephant (Mark Wright) with a paternity suit because he refuses to acknowledge their freakish chimera offspring as his own. This is interspersed with Sebastian's efforts to direct the all-important show, which keeps threatening to fall apart due to the cast's tendency to kill, injure or otherwise incapacitate themselves.

The narrative zips continuously from one demented escapade to another, its twisted energy deriving from how consistently the tone threatens to tip over from the crass and menacing into the outright bone-chilling. A prime example would be during the scene where Madame Bovine, the porn star cow, accidentally kills her weta co-star by sitting on him. Trevor shrugs it off, suggesting they can sell the footage as a snuff film, then proceeds to feed the crushed weta carcass to a monstrous, tremor-like lifeform that just so happens to be lurking down in the theatre basement (like, what the hell is that thing?! Are you going to explain it to me, movie?). Special acknowledgement goes to Peter Dasent's low-key score, which really emphasises the sinister, uneasy undercurrent that permeates the film. The puppetry is obviously cruder and more limited than what a Jim Henson production could have accomplished, but it's still pulled off with a remarkable slickness and incorporates some joyously mind-bending set-pieces, one of the high points being a sequence in which Bletch and Trevor face off against a giant spider (which is way cooler than when Sean Astin did it in Return of The King) and then take on a cetacean crime boss by driving their vehicle directly through his viscera. Whether or not you're won over by the film's warped sense of humor, it's hard to not come away with an overwhelming sense of admiration for just how determinedly different it is, how thoroughly it believes in its own nauseating vision, in going all-out to milk as much devilish lunacy as it possibly can within its technical limitations, and how little it evidently cared about delivering a commercial product. It's that real sense of love and commitment toward its vulgar craft that gives Feebles its heart and soul, and enables it to endure as such a wicked curiosity, one that's aged more gracefully than Bakshi's Fritz The Cat, and certainly has more to recommend it than that one-joke wonder Sausage Party. It's the kind of malfunctioning fairground ride that might have you up-chucking every bit as violently as Harry does during one of the musical numbers, but by god, you can't help but marvel at its moxie.

The film's underpinnings as a pitiless morality story come to a head at the climax where - spoilers - Heidi loses every last shred of self-restraint and resorts to machine-gunning the rest of the troupe in a murderous rampage. She comes down on them like the belated judgement of a higher power that's grown weary of their antics and has resorted to pulverizing their vice-ridden hides in a bloodbath of apocalyptic proportions, and it's surely not a coincidence that it's mainly the "nicer" Feebles who are spared her wrath - Robert, Lucille, Arthur, Sid (who does the right thing eventually) and Sebastian (a bit of an anomaly, but then he's not quite as horrible as some of the others). Above all, Feebles is keen to emphasise the importance of living cleanly and not succumbing to the temptations of hedonism, addictive substances and empty celebrity, lest you get done in by a machine gun-wielding hippopotamus. An appropriately maniacal finale to this most singular of pictures or a heavy-handed betrayal of the film's anarchic, free-wheeling spirit? Frankly I'm left too scarred for life to give a damn.

South Park: Hell on Earth 2006 (aka That Darned Dahmer)

With the US release of My Friend Dahmer just days away and with Halloween just around the corner, now seems like the perfect time to take a look at the Milwaukee cannibal's "guest" appearance in the  South Park episode "Hell on Earth 2006", which first aired on 25th October 2006 as part of the series' tenth season.

"Hell on Earth 2006" is what I would describe as a "busy" episode, in that it has at least four different story strands going on at once, none of which are especially well-developed. Ultimately it plays more like a series of vignettes, loosely connected around the overarching theme that Satan is planning to throw a big Halloween bash up on Earth and grows increasingly petulant when things don't go his way. This is a parody of the MTV reality series My Super Sweet 16, with Satan ultimately concluding that he's above the depravity of the spoiled divas featured on that show. There's also some stuff about the Catholic Church attempting to crash Satan's party and Butters using a mirror to summon the ghost of Biggie Smalls, but none of that's particularly important.

In the strand we're focusing on, Jeffrey Dahmer is released from Hell, along with fellow deceased serial killers Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy, to pick up a Ferrari cake for Satan's party. Naturally, they fail to accomplish this ostensibly simple task when their urge to kill gets in the way, and the whole thing swiftly transforms into a dark pastiche of The Three Stooges, with Bundy assuming the role of Moe, Dahmer of Larry and Gacy of Curly. The three killers do what they can to salvage the increasingly grisly situation, but darn it, those danged murderous urges just won't stay in check. If the whole set-up sounds incredibly distasteful, remember that we're in South Park country, baby. Actually, this episode is probably best-known for the controversy it provoked on its initial airing, due to its flippant depiction of the death of Australian TV star Steve Irwin less than two months after he died (he shows up as a guest at Satan's party, complete with a string ray sticking out of his heart), which many viewers condemned as "too soon" (the Irwin moment does explicitly comment on the issue of mocking something too soon after the event, although you can very well argue that Trey and Matt were looking to have their cake and eat it). There's a line in the Woody Allen film Crimes and Misdemeanors proposing that "Comedy is tragedy plus time" (which was presumably reworked from the Karl Marx quote, "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce"), and I guess that Trey Parker and Matt Stone were able to bear that out with this considerably less controversial story arc casting three historic serial killers in a Three Stooges style caper. The whole thing is a drawn-out exercise in pushing the boundaries of bad taste, but there is something weirdly beguiling about the sheer insanity of it all.

The big question, or at least the one I'm the most preoccupied with, is how accurate this episode's depiction of Jeffrey Dahmer is to the facts about the man himself, and that's what I'm going to examine in the space below. I could talk about Bundy and Gacy too, but I'm not nearly as well-versed on those guys.

First off, a disclaimer, just to make it totally clear that I'm well aware that South Park wasn't striving for accuracy and that everything that happens in this episode does so purely in the interests of humour. The fact that it involves three dead serial killers going to collect a giant cake shaped like an automobile is a pretty big tip-off. But does anyone really mind if I nitpick it anyway?

Here, Dahmer is voiced by Matt Stone and - surprise! - he sounds nothing like the actual Jeffrey Dahmer. Mind you, I think that Stone was looking less to emulate Dahmer's real voice than he was Larry from The Three Stooges. To be fair to Stone, his efforts are still infinitely less weird than what Trey Parker calls a Jeffrey Dahmer impression.

The three killers first enter the scene about eight minutes into the episode, when Satan decides that he wants a Ferrari cake at his party and his assistant Azazel calls forth "Hell's most evil souls" to go up to the Bakery Napoleon on Earth to retrieve it and deliver it to the party. As each killer steps forward, a newspaper headline flashes onscreen, giving the viewer some vague insight into his own particular misdeeds.

When Dahmer appears, his newspaper headline reads "17 bodies found in...". Straight off the bat, we have our first inaccuracy, for Dahmer's list of victims did indeed number at seventeen, but not all of their bodies were found (particularly as Dahmer didn't immediately take to his practice of hoarding preserved body parts). Notably, the remains of Steven Tuomi, Dahmer's second victim, have never been found to this day, and Dahmer was not charged with his death due to the lack of concrete evidence - even Dahmer's own confession on the matter was considered shaky. (Incidentally, if you think that seventeen is a shocking figure, Dahmer actually had the lowest kill count out of this particular trio of killers.)

So, Dahmer, Bundy and Gacy head up to Earth to retrieve that Ferrari cake, and I've got to say, I'm not sure exactly how this supposed to work, even in context. Are they returning to Earth as ghosts or have they been given brand new corporeal bodies? I'm assuming the latter, given that their ability to interact with the material world doesn't seem at all impaired or out of the ordinary. They go to the Bakery Napoleon, but things immediately take a nasty turn when Gacy and Dahmer impulsively stab the staff at the bakery, leaving the three killers with no one to help them load the Ferrari cake onto their pick-up vehicle, and some Three Stooges-esque scuffling ensues.

The massive inaccuracy the entire "Three Murderers" story arc hinges on is the whole idea that they can't accomplish simple tasks because they're compelled to gruesomely butcher every person they encounter on sight. In reality, all three men operated according to strict MOs and did not kill this indiscriminately - if Dahmer, Bundy and Gacy had gone around stabbing people willy-nilly, as is depicted here, they would have each been caught very quickly. All three killers were methodical enough to conceal their murderous activities within the context of their ostensibly ordinary lives - indeed, a crucial part of what defines a serial killer is that "cool off" period that occurs between each murder, in which the killer goes back to their "normal" life before the urge to kill resurfaces. Certainly, stabbing random strangers on the spot was not Dahmer's style. He was very selective in the victims he targeted (young males with a physique that appealed to him), and his preferred method was to lure them back to Apartment 213, drug them and then strangle them in their sleep. Dahmer also did not kill because he enjoyed the act of killing, but because he wanted complete control over his victims and to do what he willed with their bodies. Something that's also not represented here is how entwined Dahmer's activities were with his alcoholism.

Later, when the three killers are attempting to load the cake onto the vehicle themselves, a random stranger offers them his assistance and gets gorily stabbed by Gacy for his trouble. When Bundy berates Gacy for this, he states that he did it for Dahmer, because "he likes havin' sex with dead bodies". Bundy then turns around and notices Dahmer getting duly intimate with the dead man's digestive system.

Bundy: Dahmer! Stop having sex with them intestines!

Dahmer: What good are intestines if you can't have sex with them?

Okay, that part is 100% true. Dahmer did have a morbid fascination with the viscera in particular, and he got up to some really gruesome things with his victims' guts. Although I doubt that the man in question would have been Dahmer's type.

Bundy points out that they now have a dead body to dispose of, lest they attract unwanted attention. As they tend to the body, Dahmer gets hold of a severed hand and begins to nibble at it compulsively, much to Bundy's annoyance - this is a reference to Dahmer's true-life cannibalism, although again this was a bit more methodical than Dahmer simply being compelled to nibble away at any loose bit of human flesh he got hold of (Dahmer ate the body parts of some of his victims as a means of furthering his sense of intimacy with them - he also cooked it in advance). Unfortunately for the three killers, they're so engrossed in the task at hand (or rather, in physically pounding one another when it doesn't go so well) they forget that they never finished loading the Ferrari cake onto the truck and it winds up getting splattered over Bundy, Dahmer and Gacy in a glorious mess. Bundy berates Gacy when he cheerfully samples the ruined cake, as Dahmer laments what deep trouble they're now in.

 

In their final skit, Bundy, Dahmer and Gacy are in the bakery kitchen, having resolved to create a new Ferrari cake entirely from scratch within the twenty minutes they have remaining. Dahmer quips that he knows he's up to the task because he once enrolled in an Italian cookery class, but ultimately quit because, "There weren't enough Italians to eat!" Something tells me that the real Dahmer would have been way too introverted to have participated in an Italian cookery class, even if he'd had the opportunity (there's also the implication here that his cannibalism was driven by a simple taste for human flesh rather than his ritualistic behaviours), but then he's clearly joking and some sources indicate that Dahmer did have a very weird sense of humour (though he wasn't exactly what you'd call a jolly soul), so I'll give "Hell on Earth 2006" this one. (Actually, the real reason why Dahmer might have been handy in the production of confectionery is because he worked in a chocolate factory.)

The gruesome finale sees the three killers ultimately turning their murderous compulsions on one another. When Gacy refuses to get 10,000 eggs for the Ferrari cake, Bundy finally tires of his clowning and rips his eyeballs from their sockets. This angers Dahmer, who stabs Bundy in the gut with a kitchen blade and blows a raspberry at him. Bundy retaliates by cutting off Dahmer's exposed tongue, but Dahmer manages to take Bundy out by stabbing him upwards through the jaw. Meanwhile Gacy, who can't see what's going on, starts swinging a rolling pin blindly and ends up brutally bludgeoning Dahmer. This is no doubt an intentional reference to how Dahmer died in real life; he was bludgeoned by another prison inmate and succumbed to his injuries before he could receive medical attention. Here, I'm not sure quite what the deal is, because all three men are technically already dead, but it's the last we see of them in this episode. In the end Satan decides that he doesn't need anything as ridiculously decadent as a Ferrari cake to have an enjoyable Halloween party, and the other story strands do converge in the final scene, but the "Three Murderers" arc ends with Dahmer and Bundy in crumpled, bloodied heaps with Gacy still waving that rolling pin blindly. Too bad they couldn't make the party.

Logo Case Study: Children's Video Library

In my last entry, I brought up the Children's Video Library, a sub-label of 1980s home video distributors Vestron Video dedicated exclusively to their kid-friendly titles. It's a name you're likely to be hearing a lot more of on here, as I recently acquired a whole bunch of their releases, so we may as well start by taking a look at their logo.

It's...not exactly the most advanced logo we've seen from this era. Cheap and charming is what they're pretty much going for, with very basic animation on the balloons and titles. The only potentially frightening element here is in the ominous black void from which the balloons materialise (although at least we don't feel as if we're being pulled into it, a la the Mickey sorcerer logo), but that's all negated by the soothing choice of music, defined by the Closing Logos Group wiki as "Irish-sounding". Hmm? It's a flute rendition of "Girls and Boys Come Out To Play", a traditional folk rhyme. All in all I'd describe this as a fairly innocuous logo.

Click here for a (by no means complete) glimpse of the titles the Children's Video Library had to offer. A nice mixture of toyetic specials, storybook adaptations and the occasional title that looks eye-poppingly nightmarish. Some real must-have material, in other words.

"When are they gonna get to the fireworks factory?!": The original Poochie cartoon from 1984

If you were a kid in the early 1980s, then perhaps you remember a time when Poochie wasn't this cartoon dog in sunshades who epitomised everything pandering and misguided about committee thinking and was instead a completely different cartoon dog in sunshades designed to entice you into buying dolls, stampers and other similarly gaudy plastic products. The Poochie to whom I refer was a fluffy pink-and-white poodle created by Mattel in the early 80s, whose big shtick seemed to be that she lived the kind of ultra chic lifestyle that preteen girls are encouraged to want to emulate. Poochie's likeness adorned a variety of toys, stationary and vanity products targeted at the aforementioned demographic, some of which can be glimpsed in the commercial below:

As 1980s toy fads go, Poochie has fared less well than many of her contemporaries - unlike My Little Pony, Care Bears and Transformers, there haven't really been any notable attempts to revive the character for subsequent generations. Poochie looks to be permanently consigned to the 80s, along with fellow forgotten fads the Wuzzles, the Glo Friends and the Keypers. I'm not convinced that her staying power was all that hot even in her decade of origin - by the time I'd come along and was actually old enough to have an awareness of contemporary toy trends, in the latter stages of the 80s, it seems that Poochie fervor had already long dissipated. I have no first-hand memories of the character or her products whatsoever (though I remember the Wuzzles, Glo Friends and Keypers vividly enough). I learned of Poochie's existence many years later while browsing through the personal webpages of some 80s toy collectors, and upon first laying eyes on the fluffy pink pup I didn't experience even the slightest jolt of recognition. Clearly I got to the 1980s too late to get acquainted with this flash-in-the-pan fleabag. (Note that while Poochie appears to have achieved only very fleeting success in the US and UK, I'm told that she was a real heavy-hitter in Italy, which is corroborated by the large number of eBay auctions for Poochie merchandise I've seen coming from Italian sellers. I'm curious to know what it was about Poochie that made her resonate so strongly with Italian zeitgeist.)

Poochie's career peaked in the summer of 84 when she received her very own one-off animated television special, courtesy of our good friends at DiC, which was later released on home video as part of the Children's Video Library series. I haven't been able to uncover a huge deal of background information on this special, but the loose story threads and open-ended nature of the ending make it super obvious that this was the pilot for a proposed TV series that wasn't picked up for whatever reason. As with all discarded pilots, there's that big "what if?" question that looms over it and makes it a fascinating oddity in its own right, so let's dig in and get a sense of the Poochie toon that might have been had fortune swung in the pretty pup's favour.

The plot of the special is vaguely similar to Disney's 1977 film The Rescuers, in that it involves Poochie (voiced here by Ellen Gerstell) receiving letters from children in dire situations and setting out on globe-trotting adventures to lend them a paw. If you're wondering how these kids happened to get hold of Poochie's address in the first place, in her regular occupation she's the agony aunt of a popular New York-based magazine, World Now. Poochie got the job because she's the pet of the magazine editor, E.G., a man so reclusive that the rest of the World Now staff have never actually seen his face and just go about their business on the assumption that he's still scribbling dutifully away in his office on the top floor. In actuality, E.G. left a while ago under extremely vague circumstances (we're told that he's off "doing important stuff"), leaving his pet poodle to run the enterprise in his absence (what self-respecting eccentric millionaire would do otherwise?). The World Now staff are also unaware that Poochie is anything other than an ordinary (albeit heavily privileged) canine, as that's all she behaves like in their presence, and just assume that it's really E.G. who answers the letters in the Dear Poochie column. The only beings who know the truth about Poochie are her two artificially intelligent assistants, Hermes (Neil Ross) and Zipcode (Fred Travalena). That's right, Poochie has a couple of robot buddies in this special. How...random? Or how transparently an attempt to ride on the coattails of the Star Wars mania that was still very influential in 1984? Hermes in particular has a strong C-3PO vibe, in that he's a golden humanoid, enormously uptight and tends to look down on the less sophisticated Zipcode. I suspect that these Star Wars-esque robots may have been added in to broaden the appeal of the cartoon somewhat, in hopes of making this brand targeted exclusively toward girls a bit more accessible for boys (I've long assumed that Spike the dragon was conceived for My Little Pony with a similar purpose in mind). For what it's worth, I do like the robots. They definitely feel like a product of their time, but they're a quirky, colourful touch, and Hermes' fussiness provides a nice contrast to Poochie's calmer disposition.

The special opens, in true Rescuers fashion, with our young human waif Danny (Katie Leigh) fleeing from his potential captors through the streets of Cairo, Egypt, and managing to stall them for long enough to drop a stamped addressed envelope into a mailbox. "Help me Poochie, you're the last chance I have," he pleads plaintively as he sends the letter on its way. We get a very clear glimpse of the address on the envelope, so viewers at home could, in theory, have sent their own mail to Poochie. I wonder how many letters with this address were sitting in dead letter offices in the mid-1980s?

We then cut straight to New York, where Poochie is heading up to the top office of the World News building to continue her letter-answering duties. We get some reference to a "Poochie translator", implying that Poochie isn't actually capable of human speech and some babel fish device is translating her yips and growls into a language everyone else can understand. It's never really explained where the vast array of space age technology that Poochie has access to came from, but I guess the implication is that E.G. is some of kind of technical whizz who designed all this stuff in between his regular job of managing a magazine.

Zipcode reads out the first letter of the day, which consists of typical nondescript agony aunt fluff:

"Dear Poochie, I like the boy next to me in class. But he is shy and I am too. How can I start a conversation with him? Signed Susie"

Poochie's advice:

"Dear Susie, write a little note saying something funny and nice to him. Stick it on his locker so he sees it. It will help you both get started. Signed Poochie."

With the next letter, we go from 0 to 100 real quick:

"Dear Poochie, my dad is an archeologist. We were deep down in a pyramid when all of a sudden my dad disappeared. I searched everywhere for him but he's nowhere. I'm still looking. I don't have money. I'm hungry too. And some strange looking men are chasing me! Please help me! Help me! Signed Danny Evans. Letter postmarked Cairo, Egypt. No return address on envelope."

Poochie suggests that they make an imminent trip to Cairo to look for Danny. Hermes is reluctant, insisting that E.G. is counting on them to run the magazine in his absence. Poochie reminds him of E.G.'s exact instructions by hitting a button and activating a hologram of E.G., announcing that he left Poochie in charge of his business and worldly goods with the expectation that she uses them to help others in need, just as he would do. We learn E.G.'s real name (Edward Gregory Prince) but next to nothing else about him. Note that when I mentioned earlier that there are some loose story threads in this special, the deal with E.G. (or lack of) was more-or-less what I had in mind. In addition to the incredibly vague reasons given for his absence, there's a moment where Poochie asks if there's been any recent communication from E.G. and is informed by Hermes that there hasn't. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but I get the impression that we're meant to think there's something amiss there; that something has happened to E.G. and that his whereabouts and reasons for leaving would have been subjects for subsequent episodes. The world will never know.

Poochie and Hermes board a private jet to Cairo, with Hermes disguising himself as a human by pulling a mask over his head (Zipcode has to sit the adventure out, presumably because his non-humanoid design would make him too conspicuous). We also see Hermes tinkering with a dial on his wrist and declaring, "this time I'll use my normal British accent." There's the implication here that Hermes has a diverse range of voices and personas he could switch to any time by modifying his controls, and that we might actually have gotten to see this in action had the pilot been picked up for a series. Too bad. As it happens, the closest we get to seeing Hermes putting his vocal modification powers to use is when he attempts to communicate with a native Egyptian dog about Danny's whereabouts, only his animal translation device is unfortunately set to "cat" and it doesn't go too well for him.

Shortly after arriving in Cairo, they meet up with Poochie's local contact, a scruffy mongrel named Ali. We know he's her Cairo contact because he randomly introduces himself as such to her after Poochie is shown to have gotten fully acquainted with him, giving us the distinctive taste of weird and clunky exposition. Ali states that he'll lead them to the pyramid of Nikniknoton (I really hope they made that name up; otherwise I just butchered the spelling of an actual historical Pharaoh's moniker), uttering cryptically that he hopes it's not too late "to save them from the curse of the Pharaoh". Ali leads them to the pyramid but will go no further - actually, it's never made clear why Ali believes that taking them to the pyramid will help them find Danny (he certainly never said anything about a Nikniknoton in his letter). Poochie and Hermes head inside and find a sarcophagus (which for some reason they insist on calling a "mummy case", presumably on the assumption that the target audience wouldn't know what a sarcophagus was). Hermes picks up a signal indicating that something is hiding inside the "mummy case", which Poochie insists they open. Although Poochie and Hermes have a very amicable relationship for the most part, occasionally Hermes will be reluctant to go along with Poochie and she'll angrily remind him that he's technically her subordinate; this happens when Hermes is nervous about opening the "mummy case" and Poochie tells him it's an order. Inside, they find Danny, who's initially confused that this pink and white poodle and weirdly robotic man happened to be wandering around the pyramid, but quickly deduces who they are.

Danny explains that he was exploring the pyramid with his father and had turned his back for a second while his father was reading some hieroglyphics (thankfully, the special gives its viewers enough credit as to actually use the word "hieroglyphics") only to turn around and find him gone. Hermes twigs that there's a button concealed among the hieroglyphics which activates a revolving door; behind this, they discover a secret passageway leading to the underground city of the Nikites, an ancient civilisation who've dedicated the past few millennia to protecting the Pharaoh and his pyramid. Turns out that they don't take particularly kindly to intruders, as Hermes and Danny discover when they get separated from Poochie and are captured by the Nikites, who confine them to a cell along with Danny's father. Danny has a happy reunion with his pop, informing him that he received help after sending a letter to Dear Poochie, which Mr Evans apparently doesn't see unlikely or bizarre enough to question. Instead, he breaks the really bad news - the Nikites are so dedicated to preserving the tomb of the Pharaoh that all intruders are mercilessly disposed of via sacrificial ceremony.

The Nikites are led by a young high priestess named Koom (Jennifer Darling, whom you might recall was also the voice of Muffin the basset hound in Hound Town) who actually feels bad about killing people and wants to reinstate an old procedure where intruders merely had their memories wiped with a mystical flower. Her council are reluctant, advising her that the flower has not been used for a very long time and bringing it back now would be deemed too risky. Conflicted, Koom turns to a statue of Osiris, the Egyptian god of the dead, and implores him to show her the way by giving her a sign (actually, in this special, Osiris is incorrectly identified as a goddess for some reason). She sees Poochie gazing down at her from atop the statue of Osiris and is uplifted, thinking that this strange pink and white dog is the sign from Osiris, but when she attempts to point this out to her underlings immediately discovers that the dog has vanished into thin air. They turn and casually walk away like they were listening to the ramblings of a deluded lunatic. Evidently having a sound mind isn't a top requirement in being high priestess of the Nikites.

Hermes, Danny and Mr Evans are brought out for sacrifice and discover that the process involves being mummified and sealed in a tomb in order to join the Pharaoh on his journey through eternity. Here, the mummification process apparently consists of little more than wrapping the subject up in bandages - in real life it was, of course, quite a bit messier, but obviously there are limits as to what you can show in a kids' cartoon (all the same, they missed a great potential scene where the Nikites attempted to remove Hermes' vital organs only to find nothing but gears and circuits). Anyway, long story short, Poochie comes up with a plan to set them free and then has Hermes fire off some lasers from his finger tips, creating an impressive and awe-inspiring light show as she stands atop the Nikites' temple (is that close enough to a fireworks factory for you?). Poochie declares herself to be a messenger of Osiris and proclaims that Osiris wants a stop to the sacrifices and for the Forgotten Flower to be used in their place. Koom, who recognises Poochie as the mysterious dog she saw earlier, is only too happy to oblige.

As Koom is all poised to use the Forgotten Flower on Danny, he asks, regretfully, if he will lose all memory of her. "Yes", says Koom, sadly, but she assures him that they will see each other again in their dreams. This exchange is a little weird, since it implies that Koom and Danny have formed a kind of emotional connection which is never even hinted at earlier on in the special (outside of Koom expressing particular unease at the thought of sacrificing Danny due to his age). Danny takes a whiff of the flower, which knocks him unconscious, and the Nikites place his motionless body aboard a boat, ready to be cast adrift on a river that will transport them back to the outside world, then do the same with Mr Evans. Hermes reminds Poochie, who has concealed herself aboard the boat, that the memory-erasing gases of the flower will have no effect on him, so she advises him to fake it. Later, Danny and Mr Evans awaken to find that they've washed up on dry land along with Poochie and Hermes. Danny remarks that he had a dream about a girl and discovers that he's wearing a strange pendant with hieroglyphics around his neck; Mr Evans checks it out and translates the message as, "Someone somewhere will remember you forever, signed Koom." Again, there's this emphasis on Koom and Danny having formed this deep and powerful bond which never actually received any onscreen development. Furthermore, Ali's mention of "the curse of the Pharaoh" was never exactly clarified - the threat the Nikites posed didn't actually have anything to do with a curse, so was a reference this some local superstition used to explain why people who entered the pyramid were prone to disappearing? Now that I think about it, there's a lot about Danny and his Egypt adventure that doesn't quite add up...presumably, he'd escaped from the pyramid at the start and the Nikites were chasing him, but how did he then wind up back inside the pyramid and inside the sarcophagus? Did the Nikites catch him and put him there? Did he he purposely go back and hide? And how did Ali know where to find him? I honestly do like this special and think that it has a number of strengths, but airtight plotting definitely isn't one of them.

Their mission completed, Poochie and Hermes head back to New York to answer a whole new batch of letters. Hermes hopes that they won't receive any more urgent ones which require them to head off on another jet-setting adventure, but the gods of agony aunt correspondence don't appear to be looking on him too favourably right now. The special ends, much like The Rescuers, with our heroes receiving yet another plea for help (also like The Rescuers, we never actually learn the details of the second plea) and taking to the skies yet again to aid those in need. Sadly, this was the last the world ever saw of Poochie in animated form (bar maybe a few toy commercials). Maybe she and Hermes didn't make it back this time around.

The Verdict:

So...why the hell wasn't this pilot picked up for a TV series? It's awesome! Okay, the plot has that distinctively 1980s cheese-coated tang about it, in that it's somewhat moldy and riddled with holes (it would've been nice if we'd actually gotten to see Koom and Danny bonding, for example) but if you're willing to leave your brain at the door for twenty-odd minutes then there's a whole bounty of charmingly goofy pleasures to be mined from here, and Poochie and Hermes are surprisingly fun and likeable characters. It frustrates me no end to think that there's a parallel universe somewhere where kids were able to enjoy a full series of weekly adventures with Poochie, Hermes and Zipcode and I'll never be able to get there. Then again, maybe it's the same universe where Hound Town became a long-running series and The Simpsons was immediately cancelled when the producers got a glimpse of how the initial animation for "Some Enchanted Evening" turned out. Sometimes you're better off with what you've got.