The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular (aka As The Weeks Went On, So Did The Cartoons)

It's been a while since I last talked about a Simpsons clip show on here. Long overdue is my coverage of the clip show that many fans (although not I) would rate as the strongest of a questionable bunch - "The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular" (3F31), which first aired December 3rd 1995 as part of the show's seventh season.

"138th Episode Spectacular" is a more challenging episode to analyse than "So It's Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show" or "Another Simpsons Clip Show", thanks to the total lack of anything resembling a traditional Simpsons plot. Whatever our feelings on the artistic merit or integrity of being served up a casserole of reheated clips in place of a completely fresh narrative, its predecessors do at least offer the family the opportunity for a little personal growth and reflection amid the forced reminiscing; the recycled material is structured, however vaguely, so as to be building toward something of meaning for the Simpsons in the present. "Spectacular" eschews a framing narrative in favour of linking segments with everyone's favourite C-list fish fetishist, Troy McClure, who in a bit of reality-blurring is presenting the celebration from the Springfield Civic Auditorium. Troy, who prior to this episode had never interacted with the Simpsons in person and should logically have no idea who these people even are (although that would all change soon enough), has temporarily detached himself from the show's internal universe in order to provide to provide an external commentary. As such, this boasts the distinction of being the series' first non-canonical episode outside of the Treehouse of Horrors. It's an obvious precursor to the criminally undervalued Season 8 offering "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase", which uses Troy in a very similar fashion. Both episodes are characterised by a veneer of showbiz phoniness purposely designed to signal creative bankruptcy, and Troy, with his feigned enthusiasm and fixed plastic smile, provides the perfect human face for that veneer. I suspect that the unusually protracted emphasis on Troy is a huge factor in why this episode enjoys a somewhat sunnier reputation than others of its ilk. Both of Phil Hartman's recurring characters are obviously firm fan favourites and, compared to Lionel Hutz, Troy rarely got the opportunity to be involved directly in episode plots, "Spectacular" being one of only three appearances in which he was used as more than just a one-scene side character. That in itself makes it quite a rare and precious thing.

"The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular" was written by Jon Vitti, who was no stranger to the clip show arena, having previously penned "Another Simpsons Clip Show". In both cases, Vitti was so uneasy about having his name attached to something so discreditable that he hid behind the moniker of a certain child-eating, shape-shifting clown (this time, director David Silverman followed suit and assumed the pseudonym Pound Foolish). Vitti admits on the DVD commentary that he felt more comfortable with how this one turned out, chiefly for the fact that it advertises its magpie nature upfront, whereas "Another" opens more deceptively, like any regular Simpsons episode. Vitti also feels that "Another" hampered itself by approaching the series with a degree of reverence that "Spectacular" utterly spurns. The killer clown doth sell "Another Simpsons Clip Show" too short, methinks, although there's no denying that "Spectacular" gave the show an opportunity to be inordinately uncharitable toward itself, one of its most infamous gags being a particularly brutal one at the expense of the late Bleeding Gums Murphy, whose passing was viewed as a more serious matter in the episode in which it occurred (although in that regard he still fared better than poor Dr Marvin Monroe, who wasn't even considered important enough to receive his own exit arc). Gruellingly honest "Spectacular" may be, but it's also one of the series' fluffier pieces, and probably the fluffiest of the entire classic era. For all of its self-deprecating charms, the lack of even a perfunctory narrative does mean that "Spectacular" inevitably comes off as a shallow affair, one that's fun but offers little substance beneath the novelties (say what you will about the two previous clip shows, there were stakes in both their cases). I would suggest, however, that there is, once again, an implicit narrative being conveyed amid the collaging - it's one that I think "Spin-Off Showcase" would tackle a whole lot better later on, but "Spectacular" still makes for a perfectly respectable test run.

All three classic era clip shows, regardless of how straight the face with which they play themselves, contain a particularly pivotal line of dialogue that accentuates the unmistakably sour intentions behind the reminiscing. In "So It's Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show", it was about attempting (perhaps in vain) to relive long lost summers. In "Another Simpsons Clip Show" it was about opening up old wounds - discovering that certain summers are perhaps better off lost. In "Spectacular", I think the ethos of the episode is best summed up in Troy's comment, "As the weeks went on, so did the cartoons" - a seemingly banal statement on the development of the Ullman shorts that encapsulates, in the tidiest of nutshells, the entire history of The Simpsons and a few of the contemporary anxieties about where it might be headed. In its predecessors, the most grudging attacks on the entire clip show exercise were reserved for the episode titles, and "Spectacular" is really no exception, the 138th episode being a conspiciously arbitrary milestone. There's nothing particularly special about that number, aside from the fact that it was, at the time, considered a big one for a show of this nature. "Hasn't this cartoon been running for an extraordinarily long amount of time?" seems to be the underlying point at the heart of "Spectacular", a question that speaks to the impressive strength and endurance of the series, but also to the eternal drudgery in having to keep the damned thing going. It was a tension that dominated much of Oakley and Weinstein's tenure as showrunners, the implicit problem one that Troy McClure would raise explicitly at the end of "Spin-Off Showcase" - how do you keep The Simpsons fresh and funny after so many years? "Spectacular" is not so much a celebration of the show's longevity as a public unmasking that openly invites us to see the cracks within the series, something perfectly encapsulated in the visual metaphor of the auditorium set, which has been done up to resemble the family's living room, and which, from certain angles, betrays intermittent glimpses of the dark, empty stage space beyond.

When I covered "So It's Come To This", I noted that the prolificness of the clip show in US television (at least back in the day) can be attributed to their conforming to the basic principles in George Ritzer's theory of McDonaldization, mainly efficiency (clip shows mean a higher episode count at lower costs) and predictability. The assumption behind clip shows is that audiences don't mind being offered the same material all over again because humans are naturally drawn to what is familiar and and will enjoy getting to relive all of their favourite gags in quick succession. In that regard, "Spectacular" is something of a boat rocker; it offers a very different clip show experience to its predecessors, in pooling from a more adventurous range of material. Only around the middle portion of the episode, when Troy answers a sampling of faux fan mail, does it settle for simply regurgitating the familiar, yielding a couple of demo reels for Homer's devolving intelligence and Smithers' closet sexuality. Elsewhere, the episode concerns itself with quite unchartered territory, extending way back beyond the usual boundaries to the series' roots and to the dark corners that had previously been concealed from public eyes. For viewers familiar only with the show in its current, stand-alone form, it was a rare (and potentially startling) opportunity to get acquainted with its origins as a series of crudely animated supporting skits on The Tracey Ullman Show - a step further back than the show, in its contemporary form, was perhaps comfortable with its memories being cast. Elsewhere, discarded footage from favourite episodes saw the light of day for the very first time (Troy's term, "Cut-out Classics", being an obvious oxymoron) and, most shockingly of all, we learned of the existence of an alternate solution to the previous summer's "Who Shot Mr Burns?" two-parter, in which Burns named a different suspect as his shooter. Unlike a more conventional clip show, its purpose is not to immerse you in the cozy glow of nostalgia, but instead to upset everything you thought you knew about The Simpsons. It is, in many respects, an anti-clip show, a clip show for people who don't like clip shows, not altogether dissimilar to the South Park episode "City on The Edge of Forever", in that it presents us with a version of The Simpsons were everything is fundamentally wrong at every turning - not least, the fictitious representation of series creator Matt Groening as a gun-toting crackpot who, unbeknownst to us, was feeding us subliminal right-wing messages in the opening sequence every week.

For me, the best of the clip shows will always be "Another Simpsons Clip Show" - I know that's not a popular opinion, but it's a hill I will nevertheless die on. It's the one that I think does the best job in illustrating the futility of retreating down memory lane and taking comfort in past adventures - adventures which, on closer inspection, have distinctly negative implications that might reverberate within the present. It is, however, of little surprise to me that "Spectacular" is the one most commonly favoured among fans. After all, it has a ton of footage that, at one time or another, you couldn't see anywhere else, almost to the point that I feel that the presence of so much novel material gives it an unfair advantage over the other clip shows. The question is, how does it hold up now, when the march of time and media have brutally chiselled away at a chunk of that novelty? 

Clip shows in general are today regarded as something of an outdated television convention - The Simpsons hasn't made one since "Gump Roast" of Season 13 - making more sense in an era when viewers would not have known if or when they would get to see their old favourites again. The increased availability of complete show inventories through DVD box sets and, more recently, streaming has somewhat robbed them of their function. In a post-DVD world, "Spectacular" is left with little advantage over its brethren - deleted scenes, alternate endings and all sorts of miscellaneous goodies that, in Troy's words, "You were never meant to see" can be easily accessed at the touch of two or three buttons. As Erik Adams notes in his review on the AV Club, the episode now has the air of a "glorified DVD extra...were it not for the extra work that went into the Troy McClure sequences, it’d be indistinguishable from a retrospective featurette whipped up for the Complete Seventh Season box set". A distinction "Spectacular" does retain is that it's still one of the very few venues in which you can legally see a selection of the Ullman shorts, although only two of these, "Good Night" and "Bathtime", are shown in their entirety. The Ullman shorts have remained a surprising obscurity across the years, although if you're really interested then uploads of those can be easily accessed online, albeit seldom in outstanding quality.

Ultimately, "Spectacular" is at its strongest when it does appear to be making some statement on the current status of the series, even if very little from the show's regular inventory is actually shown. Of all the Simpsons clip shows, this one feels the most consciously structured to comment pointedly on not only the development of the show and how far it had come, but also its imminent, possibly concurrent decline. Professor Lawrence Prince's hilariously concise observation that "Homer gets stupider every year", represented a common charge from fans on Homer's continued debasement over the years (the people expressing this concern back in 1995 did so not unreasonably, although I think that Bachman Turner Overdrive might have had apt words for them nevertheless). The selection of clips used to assess this point is somewhat lackadaisical - for Season 6, they used a clip from the "Treehouse of Horror V" segment "The Shinning", in which Homer's over the top behaviour is NOT a sign of excessive stupidity, but a well-observed parody of Jack Nicholson's scenery chewing in the role of Jack Torrance - but we nevertheless get a decent taste of how increasingly outlandish the series had gotten as it went along, starting in the relatively grounded world of "Blood Feud" and "Flaming Moe" and (discounting the Halloween clip) ending up with the plausibility stretchings of "Deep Space Homer" (put a pin in that, because it comes up elsewhere in the episode).

The episode as a whole takes us from the visual grotesqueness of "Good Night", and the show's messy birthings, to more-or-less the present day and the conceptual grotesqueness of "Who Shot Mr Burns?", an intriguing mystery that ended with the deliberately far-fetched revelation that a baby had pulled the trigger. It's important to note that the alternate scenario shown in "Spectacular"  - where Burns was wounded by his best friend Smithers - was a dummy ending created purely to keep the animators from leaking the answer, and never considered seriously as a possible solution to the mystery (I emphasise that, in part, because I find the mere suggestion of Smithers as the gunman to be profoundly upsetting). Nevertheless, we might ponder if its existence undermines the validity of the ending we were given, in illustrating just how arbitrarily things could be tweaked in another direction, or if it ends up vindicating the actual solution as the only one that makes any kind of narrative or intuitive sense. The thinly-veiled cultural reference in Troy's remark about ignoring Simpson DNA evidence aside, that actually isn't the issue with the Smithers solution - Burns still has his lollipop tussle with Maggie, so he could presumably have acquired her eyelash in much the same manner. The real issue has to do with how the gun used to shoot Burns ended up inside the Simpsons' car, which isn't accounted for in this version of events (and Smithers obviously kept the gun on him, if he still went on to shoot Jasper). But the DNA thread does, at best, get turned into rather a weak red herring, while Smithers' established alibi is casually fudged. Ultimately, though, the major selling point behind Maggie being the shooter is underlined in the flagrant ridiculousness of Burns and Smithers' relationship resuming normalcy outside of a 5% pay cut for the latter - she was one of the few characters who could do the deed and reasonably face no repercussions. There is the status quo to maintain (Marvin Monroe Memorial Hospital notwithstanding).

Of all the truly salacious tidbits on offer, I'd say that the "Cut-out Classics" hold up the least well. It's a fairly arbitrary selection of deleted scenes (if you've trawled through the extras for each season's DVD release, you'll know that they had a lot of options to choose from), with only two clips that really benefit from being recontextualised here. It is, in all cases, easy enough to deduce why they might have been cut - presumably, the writers had enough confidence in their comedic merit for them to have made it into full animation, but the majority of them are weird tangents that don't contribute anything to the overarching narrative. The deleted scene from "Krusty Gets Kancelled" is the only one that would have furthered the plot in any way, in that it contains the pivotal development promised by the title, but even then the final edit had more impact for omitting it. The excised scene from "Treehouse of Horror IV" gives Lionel Hutz more closure than he received in the version that aired, but I think the implication there - that he scarpered and had no intention of coming back - is far funnier than him returning to present Marge with an empty pizza box. Sometimes less is more.

Some of them may have been excised for slightly more complex reasons than needing to speed up the narrative flow. As per the DVD commentary, the clip from "Homer and Apu" was cut because Bollywood was deemed too esoteric a target for The Simpsons to be ribbing. The clip from "Burns' Heir" was cut because Richard Simmons was deemed too obvious a target for The Simpsons to be ribbing. And, let's face it, as delightfully unnerving as that robotic Simmons is, it would be an inanely out of character item for someone as zeitgeist-challenged as Burns to own. Whereas most of these cut-out classics I can readily swallow as once having conceivably been part of their respective episodes, there's something about that robotic Richard Simmons encounter that strikes me as intrinsically inauthentic - it's so over the top, left of field and at odds with the friction of the scene in question that it's difficult to contemplate it fitting in without the benefit of Troy's quotation marks. I am not questioning the legitimacy of the clip, but it does feel like it was always conceived to go along with a show of this nature than with its supposed mother episode. It comes across more as a parody of a deleted scene than an actual one, an alternate resolution to the stand-off between Homer and Burns that's deliberately jarring in how much sillier it is than anything leading up to it (I think there's a good reason why they saved this clip for last - it may be one of the most out-there Simpsons cut scenes, period). That the clip receives a callback at the end of the episode, when we're treated to a montage of naked Simpsons arranged to the same KC & The Sunshine Band track emitted by robot Simmons, merely reinforces the idea that the clip's natural environment was always right here amid the show at its loosest and most pointedly self-aware. And yet, it seems that one of the greatest legacies of "Spectacular" has been to permanently rewire many a viewer's perception of "Burns' Heir" - I've encountered a number of fans who report that, upon hearing Homer's challenge of "Do your worst!", they reflexively connect the dots to Burns' response in "Spectacular", and it feels jarring when Simmons doesn't appear (I won't lie, I do it myself). Something in their heads tells them that this is how the scene should play out. Which raises an interesting question - if a scene is excised, but we see it anyway, is it still a legitimate part of the episode? Does it potentially undermine the authenticity of the cut we were given? At the very least, it gives us a glimpse into what could have been (and, in the case of robotic Richard Simmons, was anyway, thanks to "Spectacular"), making the final product seem less like the definitive version, but just one of several possibilities.

The other deleted scene that I feel works a lot better here than it would have done in its original form, or even as a stand-alone DVD extra (albeit for very different reasons), is that of "Mother Simpson", an episode that would at the time still have been pretty fresh in viewers' minds, having aired only a couple of weeks prior to "Spectacular". It's also the most restrained cut-out of the bunch - no dancing robots or pornography-peddling clowns, just Homer and Mona sitting at the breakfast table, continuing their game of catch up after decades apart. Ostensibly, the punchline of the scene is in Homer assuring Mona that, despite working at a nuclear power plant, he does not, in practice, support the nuclear power industry on the grounds that he's such a lousy worker. But a far subtler gag occurs just before, when Homer references the events of "Deep Space Homer" of Season 5 and asks Mona if she was aware that, two years prior, he was blasted into space as part of a publicity-baiting mission by NASA. The pivotal beat is in Mona's casual response - "I read all about it...after all, it was national news" - which is, when all is said and done, a more passive-aggressive variation on Frank Grimes' overtly disgusted reaction on being related the exact same story a season later. In both cases, it's an acknowledgement on the show's part of how debased its own adherence to basic plausibility had become in recent seasons, with Homer the astronaut being their mutual watermark for the series at the very peak of its absurdity (although a baby gunning down an old man has got to come close). In its early years, the kinds of adventures the family were involved in were of the low-key variety that typically wouldn't extend far beyond the local papers, if they even made that. Since then, Homer has enjoyed exposure of such magnitude that even someone as supposedly out of the loop as Mona has a decent idea of what he's been doing. Such humor was a defining characteristic of the Oakley/Weinstein era, when the series was evidently building toward an existential crisis regarding its own longevity, a malaise that came to dominate a significant chunk of the atmosphere in Season 8 (see below). You can catch traces of it in Season 7, but it tended to be a bit more stealthily disguised - take Marge's pep talk to Bart and Lisa toward the end of "The Day The Violence Died", for example, the actual purpose of which was touched on a little in this entry - with Mona's line being one of the earliest, if not the earliest examples. It's probably for the best that it didn't make the final cut of "Mother Simpson" - such snarky self-deprecation would have felt out of place in one of the most sincere and heartfelt episodes of the entire series - but it's great that "Spectacular" managed to preserve that status nonetheless.

Mona's words have additional resonance in this episode, for their logical conclusion is something that Troy makes all-too explicit in his closing reflection: "Who knows what adventures they'll have between now and the time the show becomes unprofitable?" Judging by a few of the adventures the family had in Season 8, this was a question that was evidently causing the production crew a few sleepless nights (not that they were sleeping much anyway, on their work schedule). A quarter-century later, and Troy's grim prophesy has still not come to pass, but throughout Oakley and Weinstein's reign the series seemed increasing resigned to likelihood that it was nearing the end of its natural lifespan, with multiple episodes underlining the basic practicality as to what more there possibly was to do with these characters after so many years on the air. Troy's words are ostensibly optimistic, pointing to the many exciting possibilities that lie ahead, but are undercut by a stark and deliberately unsentimental reminder that everything, even a cartoon institution as formidable as The Simpsons, is ultimately mortal, and that profit has the final word on everything. But there is another implicit threat in that statement, and one that did prove far more prescient - the suggestion that the show would keep on going specifically until it became unprofitable, as opposed to bowing out because the best of its years were now behind it. With hindsight, Troy's statement wasn't a warning that the end was in sight, but that the insanity was only just beginning. You thought Homer going into space was stretching the limits? Do Bachman Turner Overdrive have words for you!

Milky Way: Red vs Blue (aka The Cars That Ate Paris, Texas)

If there was an advertising character who simultaneously terrified me and had my deepest sympathies, it's the Red Car from Milky Way's "Red vs Blue" campaign. The animated TV ad, which first appeared in 1989, depicted a race between two auto-mobiles, a red 1951 Buick Roadmaster and a blue 1959 Cadillac on an hours-long journey between the fictional towns of Lunchville and Dinnertown, located in some kind of alternate reality mid-century America. A mid-century America where the cars are not only living beings, but some are apparently predisposed to devouring anything unfortunate enough to come into close proximity with them. The ad was of course a cunningly-conceived metaphor, with Red and Blue symbolising two contrasting strategies for making it through the long, monotonous hours between lunch and dinner. Red is a compulsive snacker who consumes anything indiscriminately (from trucks to prickly trees, as we are both told and shown), while Blue eats only one item along route - the chocolate/nougat concoction manufactured by Mars and named for a galaxy - which gives him the energy to complete the journey without putting a dent in his appetite. Ultimately, the binge-eating Red is forced to drop out of the competition (literally), as he gets too overloaded to reach Dinner, while the leaner of our two sugar junkies speeds on to victory. You may already be detecting something slightly questionable about this whole scenario - it's not the broader issue as to why a car would be compelled to eat the local scenery in the first place, although we will get to that.

The ad ends with Blue passing a neon billboard proclaiming the Milky Way to be "The sweet you can eat between meals without ruining your appetite." It's not clear to me on what science Mars were basing this audacious claim; I kept my eyes peeled for a footnote or disclaimer and couldn't see one. I suspect it basically all came down to the fact that Milky Way bars were lighter in density than their close cousins, the Mars Bar and the Marathon. Or Snickers.

Not surprisingly, there was some backlash against the campaign from anti-sugar lobbyists, who questioned why Mars was positing a candy bar as a healthy between-meal snack. The Independent Television Commission sided with Mars, on the grounds that the ads clearly depicted indiscriminate snacking as a negative thing via the cautionary example of Red. I'm not sure if that ruling holds up to scrutiny, however, as Mars weren't exactly promoting healthy eating habits, but rather championing the lesser of two very blatant evils. The ad's perspective on nutrition is obviously quite superficial; a Milky Way is hailed as a sensible snacking choice because it "won't ruin your appetite", as opposed to how much good it actually does the body. We all know that there's a plethora of healthier options the Blue Car could have chosen over a Milky Way. And, let's face it, the explicit encouragement to eat candy in between meals always was something of a dubious marketing angle for a campaign targeted primarily at children. Keep in mind, though, that this was an era when junk food advertisers basically had free rein over children's media - they were, after all, what was keeping commercial kids' television afloat. The campaign lived on long enough to garner a sequel, this one science fiction themed, focussing on a race between a red meteor and a blue satellite. Same narrative, different dress, only in this case I cry foul, as it looks to me like the twin planets Boss n' Nova deliberately sabotaged the meteor's run. Where was the referee?!

When the campaign debuted, I would have been four years old, and I suspect the central metaphor was lost on me. Pretty much every food product advertised on television suggested that you would acquire super powers if you signed their figurative dotted line - whether that power entailed turning into a fuzzy yellow monster (Sugar Puffs), making your enemies flee in terror (Weetabix), or just making you inhumanly cacophonic (Trio) - and I doubt that I saw Blue Car's example as any different. I was much more preoccupied with the nature of the scenario and how freakishly disturbing it was. The idea of a living, breathing car that lunges at everything it passes and violently packs it into its non-existent digestive system is like something out of your darkest nightmares, or at least one of the more warped Monty Python sketches. And having Red eat a truck, of all things, certainly raises a barrage of uncomfortable questions. If the Red Car and the Blue Car are alive, then what reason is there to believe that the truck isn't either? And if it isn't alive, then isn't the implication that Red ate it with the driver inside? In either case, would that be considered murder? Or maybe just the law of the jungle in this auto-mobile society? To be fair, Blue did look pretty intimidated when the truck came into view, so an argument can possibly be made that Red swallowed in self-defence. It is admittedly difficult to assign moral value when you're dealing with anthropomorphic cars. But already I find this living auto-mobile universe to be infinitely more enthralling than Pixar's attempt.

The Red Car, of course, was supposed to come off as somewhat monstrous. We're clued in right from the start as to which of the two we're intended to sympathise with by the nature of their respect smiles (more of a grimace in Red's case) - they gave Red pointy predator teeth and Blue a cheesy, non-threatening grin. Here's the thing, though - as much as that Red Car and his insatiable voraciousness terrified me, he was always the one I sincerely rooted for. I'd like to say that I always knew, on a subconscious level, what that Blue Car was really up to, but I think that Red appealed to me because, in the end, his freaky eating habits were as endearing as they were alarming - that hair-raising moment where he swallows a truck and its hypothetical occupant whole was, on top of everything else, delightfully animated. Blue, by contrast, was frankly rather dull. He might have had all the glory, at least as far as the ad was concerned, but there's no question that Red had all the character. As such, I was always really bummed by that ending where he not only loses the race (inevitable though it was), he drops down a ravine and we never even learn if he came out again in one piece (and the frenzied way the narrator screams "Oh no, the bridge has gone!" was ultimately more chilling to me than anything Red himself got up to). There was a print version of the ad that showed up in various children's comics in the early 90s (nowhere were impressionable young eyes free from Mars's nefarious agenda) which had a less gruesome outcome for Red - there, he simply couldn't fit through a gate to the final location - but it's the principle, dammit. Red was a colourful anti-hero, while Blue was a flashy corporate shill.

Like this ad or lump it, it is a fondly-regarded classic, enough so that Red and Blue were later returned to television screens in 2009 in time for its twentieth anniversary. The world they lived in had visibly changed, however. For one, they were no longer competing in hours-long races between Lunchville and Dinnertown, but Playville and Light Town. And the explicit message being conveyed by Mars had undergone some notable revisions. 2009 was an entirely different ball game - after decades of bombarding children with non-stop encouragement to eat unhealthy food products, people were suddenly starting to get very jumpy about the consequences. Childhood obesity had become one of the hot issues of the day, and there were now much tighter restrictions on how junk foods were allowed to promote themselves. Any suggestion that candy bars could constitute a wholesome between-meals snack was now a huge no-no. In its place, we're told that Blue chose the Milky Way, not because it wouldn't spoil his appetite, but because it's "something that tastes just right", while the neon sign he passes at the end instructs us to "Lighten up and play." A common concession that junk food marketing now made was to include some kind of disclaimer about the importance of counterbalancing their consumption with regular physical activity, and I presume that the switch from Lunch/Dinner to Play/Light was an attempt to change the implied metaphor from between-meal snacking to rewards between exercise sessions. The implication now, I suppose, is that Red indulges so much that he leaves himself too bloated to participate in further activity. Which works well enough for the purposes of the metaphor I guess, although it does make me contemplate the irony that, by the very nature of that metaphor, Red was always a proponent of burning calories as you consumed them. He was, after all, up for running the hours-long route between Lunch/Play and Dinner/Light - the Buick was no couch potato.

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #35: Hooch Lemon Mosquito

Watching this bizarre TV ad from 1999, it's hard for me not to be put in mind of one of my favourite movies, Barton Fink, the first hour or so of which regularly checks in on the ongoing enmity between the title character and the strangely sinister mosquito with whom he's forced to share a hotel room. The mosquito in Barton Fink is never shown to be anything other than an ordinary mosquito - the most remarkable thing about it is that it's made it all the way to Los Angeles, which one character assures us is not its natural habitat - nor does it, in itself, amount to anything more than a mundane, if persistent, irritation for Barton. Yet the mosquito maintains an awfully unsettling presence for that first hour, in part because it's a minor menace that feels magnified within the empty inertia that defines Barton's initial Hollywood nightmare. It is this eerie, omnipresent force that Barton senses constantly but is never quite able to pinpoint. This Hooch ad focusses on another battle between man and mosquito, in which the balance is tipped thanks to the latter's taste for alcoholic lemonade. And, like Barton Fink, it really attempts to bring out the inherent horror in the notion that your helpless hide is but a waiting buffet to an opportunistic hematophage, this time with an overt savagery that has the 32-second ad playing more like a miniature slasher flick.

The alcopop, a sort of successor to the wine cooler that took off in the mid-1990s, immediately became one of the hot controversies of the day due to concerns that the beverages were being stealthily marketed with a view to enticing underage drinkers. They were the subject of a particularly vicious media outcry in the UK, and so immense was the backlash that many supermarket chains refused to stock the product altogether. Hooch, one of the most prominent alcopop brands, attempted to redress its negative image in 1999 with a campaign of unnerving ads aimed unambiguously at the adult set, albeit adults with a very visceral sense of humor; a sister ad that appeared at the same time had a patron at a trendy bar discovering that his Hooch-infused piss had the power to split urinals in half. The intended message, in both cases, is that Hooch indulgence is not for the squeamish.

As with Barton, we get a sense from the start that the unlucky blood bag in this scenario is being purposely targeted; the constant cutting back and forth between the man and mosquito gives the distinct impression that the latter has selected its prey from the outset, that the confrontation is inevitable and that this unsettled gentleman is up against a force much more powerful than himself. For all of the steely determination of our beastly invader, its mission is very nearly thwarted by the presence of a simple glass pane that stands between itself and its target, but a few gulps of Hooch Lemon are all that's needed to give that perfectly-honed killer instinct the cutting edge. Compared to Barton, who fought his own six-legged nemesis in a dingy hotel room, this man apparently enjoys quite the swanky lifestyle, getting to rest his head inside a chic-looking pad, although the pad evidentially takes on a very different character in the dead of night (it is admittedly hard, though, to imagine the surrounding landscape looking any less forbidding in the light of day). The assorted items that adorn the balcony are tell-tale signs of a leisurely diurnal existence, but the inside of the building seems uncomfortably barren, the drab grey slabs that dominate the interior giving off the sensation more of entrapment than recreation; a sweaty, gnawing claustrophobia that seems contrary to the spaciousness of the abode (in some respects it's not altogether different from how those soap-squirrelling minimalists lived). Unlike Barton Fink, which was all about immersing the viewer in the cut-price seediness of Barton's world, this ad centres upon the horrors of a hematophage encounter in the lap of ostensible luxury, a subversion emphasised in having the mosquito ultimately thwart the man by indulging in the symbols of his own decadence.

The ad ends with the mosquito landing its inevitable "kill", although it possibly oversells its absurdity in the visual punchline, which features a close-up shot of the victim screaming with an almost cartoon intensity (it's not altogether clear to me whether he's screaming in reaction to the mosquito bite, or because he slapped himself while attempting to take out the mosquito). Uncomfortable close-ups were featured prominently in the aforementioned ad set inside a trendy bar, although with nothing quite so jarring over-animated; I guess the visual of that urinal splitting in two was considered absurdity enough. Here, it ultimately works against the creeping atmosphere the ad spent the past 27 seconds sustaining; the sight of that Hooch-drinking mosquito is obviously ludicrous in itself, but there's a certain genuine, understated menace to it - a mounting sense of dread as to how the scenario will ultimately play out, and that overtly comical screaming shot, grotesque as is, always struck me as a tad anti-climactic. Edited from some TV broadcasts was the shot of the victim's female companion waking up screaming, having intuitively sensed that mosquito perform its malign business; compared to Audrey, who was sharing Barton's bed when his own mosquito conflict reached its climax, she might consider herself lucky.

Both the mosquito and urinal ads were directed by Eric Coigneoux. Among his other credits is a French ad for Eco Emballages involving a close encounter between a man and a bear. That one looks as though it might turn ugly, but the outcome is surprisingly wholesome.

Ident (aka Maybe I'm A-mazed...)

There can be few talents at Aardman more under-championed than Richard Starzak.The Bristol-based studio is so synonymous in popular consciousness with the work of Nick Park that it would be quite accurate to describe just about any of its non-Park talent as under-championed - not least studio founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton - but Starzak has always struck me as a particularly fascinating example, in part because he can be readily posited as a freakier, more sour-tasting counterpart to Park, epitomising the weirder body of work taking place at Aardman as Wallace and Gromit were winning the public's hearts. Back in 1989, when Park was preparing his breakout short Creature Comforts, Starzak (or Goleszowski as he was known at the time) was another rising claymation whiz getting the chance to flex his idiosyncratic muscles. Both had earned their stripes by working as animators on Aardman's most ambitious project to date, the apocalyptic Babylon, and each was given the opportunity to create their own five minute piece for the upcoming Channel 4 series Lip Synch, an anthology of five shorts designed to showcase the studio's individual talent. From the start, Starzak established himself as a darker, more surreal voice than any of his peers - his contribution, Ident, was by far the strangest of the five, an absurdist fantasy charting a day in the life of a beleaguered everyman as he navigates the walls of a maze and the dystopian society housed within, modifying his identity in an effort to blend in with the various social pockets he encounters, before his dog finally shows him that there may be a better way (maybe...).

Naturally, Ident didn't receive half the attention that Creature Comforts did, which is not say that it made no impact whatsoever. Like Creature Comforts, it did eventually lead to its own spin-off series...of sorts. Ident boasts the very first appearance of Rex the Runt, the two-dimensional plasticine hound who would go onto become Starzak's signature character throughout the 1990s, here featured as the pet of our chameleonic protagonist. It was followed by a trilogy of shorts exploring the further adventures of Rex, once he'd slipped the maze and learned to talk and walk upright - How Dinosaurs Became Extinct (1991), Dreams (1991) and North By North Pole (1996). Rex finally received his own full-fledged TV series in 1998, which the BBC bizarrely attempted to market as a kind of fill-in Wallace & Gromit, airing it in various lunchtime and early evening slots across the Xmas/New Year period. Brilliant though it was, Rex was never destined for the same kind of mass appeal as Wallace & Gromit - again, I fear that Starzak's humor was always too random, unsettling and off-the-wall compared to the altogether warmer eccentricities of Park's creation. This was 3 AM student insomniac television, awkwardly shoehorned into the niche of festive family entertainment; I'm not sure what stuffing-addled viewers made of it in the dying embers of 1998, but whenever Rex was repeated the BBC typically tended to squirrel it away in the late late hours.

Before he teamed up with Wendy, Bob and Vince, Rex led a humbler but stranger existence as the loyal companion of a phallic plasticine being living inside a labyrinthine dystopia. Compared to subsequent incarnations, this Rex is less anthropomorphic and largely behaves like an ordinary dog. He does not possess the gift of the gab, although in that regard he's at no more of a disadvantage than any of the maze's "human" inhabitants. Lord has stated that Aardman never settled on a unifying theme for Lip Synch, although the title suggests that dialogue and communication are of significance to all five shorts, and Ident is unique among them for containing no discernable dialogue (Barry Purves' contribution, Next, is an almost completely dialogue-free experience, but not quite). The characters all speak gibberish, although the nature of the gibberish changes according to the speaker. One character, who may be the protagonist's girlfriend, communicates by reciting letters of the alphabet in sequential order (although she skips the letter "g" for some reason). Another, presumably his boss, haughtily regurgitates the word "blah" over and over. The climax of the short has the protagonist head to the nearest watering hole, where he engages in drunken blather with its patrons (albeit before he's even touched a drop himself). Clearly, nothing of substance is communicated in their garbled murmurings, but the characters engage in rituals designed to give off the appearance of interchange, all the while revealing the fundamental disconnect between the participants. The failure of the protagonist and his girlfriend to see eye to eye results in both parties coming out worse for wear (and the possible breakdown of their relationship). The protagonist's display of over familiarity with his boss results in reproach. Masks are a recurring feature of interaction in the maze; the protagonist both annoys his girlfriend and appeases his boss by donning a mask and obscuring his true face. The backdrop his work environment consists of an assembly line of identical masks, suggesting that the protagonist is either involved in their manufacture, or (more likely) signifying the erosion of individual identity amid the capitalist grind.

In creating Ident, I strongly suspect that Starzak was influenced by Jan Švankmajer's 1983 film Dimensions of Dialogue, a collection of grotesque visual metaphors on the damages dealt by the inadequacies of human communication, particularly the manner in which the speakers aggressively distort one another's appearances as part of their pseudo-conversations. In Švankmajer's film, a succession of humanoid figures constructed from various household objects (vegetables, cooking utensils, office stationary) devour and regurgitate one another, grinding each other's basic components down until all differences are completely eradicated. The characters in Starzak's film endure a more comical but no less devastating evisceration, the emotional toll of all this assimilation being reflected the various scars accumulated by the protagonist throughout the course of the day. The discord with his girlfriend causes his face to be smeared with clown make-up (literally making a fool of him), while the mask he puts on for his boss appears to be altering the basic shape of his face, as his identity becomes conflated with the outward guise he is forced to assume for his daily survival. The characters do not literally consume one another, as in Švankmajer's film, but there is nevertheless a sense of them preying on one another's vulnerabilities in order to assert their own supremacy, with characters physically shrinking after enduring a particularly withering personal blow. Our protagonist is not an innocent in this process - in addition to the damage he unintentionally inflicts on his girlfriend by failing to understand her, he takes out his anger on a maze denizen significantly smaller than he; a denizen who approaches him to ask a question (he holds up a card with a question mark, which seems an appropriate reaction to the general situation), bringing an opportunity for connection and the sharing of knowledge, but whom the protagonist would sooner antagonise than attempt to understand. The inhabitants are a motley collection of figurative Minotaurs, brutally goring one another at evert turning, the grey, oppressive walls of the labyrinth signifying that they are all prisoners of their own conformity (entrapment and isolation are also central themes to at least three of the five shorts in Lip Synch).

As a counterpoint to the gloomy conventions of life within the labyrinth is the character of Rex, who does not exactly accompany the protagonist on his journey throughout the day, but the two of them have a tendency to keep running into one another. Rex is a faithful friend (although there are limits to his loyalty, as we see at the very end of the film), constantly seeking out his master and appearing to speak to some kind of latent urge that is contrary to the will of the maze. It could be because Rex is a dog, and therefore entirely lacking in human pretension. I suspect, though, that Rex is a largely symbolic character, a manifestation of the independent self our protagonist is repeatedly required to suppress in order to blend in inside the labyrinth. Rex signifies the protagonist at his purest and most honest toward himself. Significantly, the dog's appearances are usually heralded by the protagonist taking the time to examine himself in the mirror, reinforcing the idea that Rex "speaks" on behalf of his master's reflection. At the start of the short, Rex objects to the protagonist's (relatively low-key) efforts to smoothen out his wrinkles; he later barks aggressively when his master returns from his dispute with his girlfriend in full clown make-up, signifying the disparity between his inner and outward identities - he has become unrecognisable to himself. Although the dog and protagonist frequently appear to be at odds with one another, there is a surprising display of tenderness between the two when the latter is inebriated. He induces inebriation as purely a defence mechanism, to emulate the rituals of his peers, but just for a moment he lets his guard down and shows a smidgen of affinity for his overlooked friend.

It is ultimately through a mirror, and the guidance of Rex, that our protagonist is able to exit the labyrinth altogether. Rex demonstrates to him that the mirror is actually a portal to another world, if he can muster the gumption to cross through it. There is a strange duality to the very concept of a mirror providing the means of escape - the function of a mirror, after all, is to reinforce the concreteness of whatever environment is juxtaposed with it, the ubiquitousness of mirrors around the maze suggesting that they, like the masks, are tools of oppression, reflecting only the greyness of the walls and the inhabitants' inevitable slide into debasement. Rex's demonstration of what lies beyond the mirror is naturally a call to look past surface appearance, but also evokes the importance of self-empowerment and of taking charge of one's own destiny. Earlier in the film, we saw the protagonist pass a window revealing only the unending passages inside the maze, and obscure it with a picture of an altogether different world, a sunlit one with greenery and open spaces; a perfunctory and seemingly futile gesture of escapism, yet in the end he discovers that such a world was lying in wait for him the entire time. All that was keeping him boxed in were the limitations of his own mind. His earlier action constitutes a rejection of the maze, but in the most superficial way possible; the potential for ingenuity is in him, but at first fulfils no greater function than the masks, as a defensive means of covering up what is undesirable while leaving it fundamentally unaltered. At the end of the film, he finds a way out by acknowledging and fully embracing his potential as an individual, not simply as a means of escapism, but of empowerment to go against convention and change his circumstances.

Unfortunately, the basic limitations that have dogged him all the while are not so easily overcome. For all the beauty of that final revelation, Ident reaches a humorously - and disturbingly - pessimistic conclusion. The protagonist leaves the maze behind him and sets out in a new direction, only for the same cycle of hectoring and alienation to continue beyond its walls. He meets another figure who his double in almost every way, an encounter that at first appears to bring both parties joy, before they suddenly turn on one another. Given that the protagonist has seemingly escaped into his own psyche, this lashing out against his own doppelganger can be interpreted as an expression of self-loathing, a sign that he will never be contented with any reflection that he sees, and effectively always banging his head against the walls of a maze, whether literal or metaphorical. In the background we see the silhouette of Rex watching the entire sorry exchange play out, before he finally decides that his master is a hopeless case and goes his own way. Unlike Park's signature canine, Rex doesn't have the infinite amount of patience required to play guardian angel to an obtuse human (or whatever our protagonist is) and would sooner go and seek out his own pack.

As an endnote, when Creature Comforts received a spin-off television series in 2003, it was ironically Starzak, and not Park, who was the main driving force behind the project. While for the most part Starzak was able to keep his more acidic sensibilities to the sidelines, it seems that he had been interested in taking the concept in a darker direction; apparently, he wanted to do an episode based around animals in a vivisectionist lab, but the higher-ups talked him out of it.

Logo Case Study: Aardman, Meet Pandaman (aka Mommy, What's Wrong With That Man's Face?)

Aardman aren't typically renowned for being the kind of animation studio to propagate childhood nightmares (whether rightly or wrongly), but they made a solid (if largely unsung) contribution to the pantheon of disturbing production logos just around the point that their time in the sun was getting underway. This is what served as the company's logo during its breakout era, between the smashing success of Creature Comforts in 1989 and their initial efforts to ride the shoulders of the Hollywood giants at the dawn of the new millennium. This was the era that gave us the early Wallace & Gromit shorts, Adam, the Creature Comforts electricity campaign and a variety of strange and demented animated pieces from the increasing multitude of individual talent at the studio, and Aardman certainly weren't averse to scaring the wits out of their ever-expanding legions of fans. If you stuck around to the very end of The Wrong Trousers (as I made the mistake of doing), your reward was to be greeted with a smirking claymation face, about which there was something distinctly, unsettling, immediately wrong. I call this one "unsung" because I rarely see it featured in lists of scary production logos, but it passed the test as far as I was concerned.

The face in question had a large dotted bow-tie, a toothy, lopsided smile, and no discernable eyeballs, features that combined to make it look unspeakably uncanny. My initial assumption was that this mysterious figure was intended to be the "Aard Man" referenced in the studio's moniker (in actuality, the eponymous Aardman was an accident-prone superhero created by studio founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton for a skit they made for Vision On). For a while, I was in the habit of calling him "Pandaman", simply because the dark patches on either side of his nose reminded me of the eye patches on a giant panda, and from a distance I presumed that those curious features were supposed to be his eyes. All the same, I never really settled on how to make sense of this face, and it perturbed me so. Something about the smile struck me as downright unwholesome; the apparent lack of eyes gave the form a distinctly inhuman edge, as if some monstrous being had attempted to mimic human form and not quite managed to master the eyes. Instinctively, I always knew that Pandaman wanted to devour me whole; that an encounter with him would invariably result in winding up on the wrong side of those horrifying gnashers. In other words, he was right at home among the studio's output for the era, which was all about giving a beating heart to the weird and the eerie - check out the 2000 VHS/DVD release Aardman Classics to see what a diabolical little chocolate box it was.

Emphasis upon that beating heart, because as with many of Aardman's freakier pieces, its freakiness goes a long way in bolstering its charm. The fact remains that this is a deeply charming logo, although its charms are more apparent in the full animated version than in the still version that tended to bite the ankles of most productions. In the animated logo, we see the landscape from which Pandaman emerges coming together, and it's a green and vibrant land, brimming with all of the hand-crafted warmth one would expect from the claymation legends. As we encircle the plasticine grass, various cranes and pillars in the backdrop end up forming the frame around Pandaman and the Aardman lettering, when viewed from the pivotal angle, while Pandaman's uncanny mug and various two-dimensional clouds on wires drop down from above to complete the image. In a particularly endearing touch, that garish bow-tie transpires to be a butterfly that flutters gracefully toward his shirt. The accompanying music is a tad ominous, but also stirring, as if something wondrous is taking place. A particularly neat variant is featured at the beginning of the 1991 VHS release Aardman Animations Vol 1, which includes time-lapse photography of an animator putting the numerous components into place, before we zoom in and Pandaman gets to work his typically unearthly magic.

So far as I can tell, the Pandaman logo originated from the titles used for Aardman's series Lip Synch, a collection of five short pieces commissioned by Channel 4 in 1989 (in addition to Nick Park's Creature Comforts, by far the most famous and influential of the five, there was also Ident by Richard Starzak, Going Equipped and War Story, a couple of animated monologues by Peter Lord, and Next by Barry Purves, who at the time was working as a freelance animator on various Aardman projects). Each short was preceded by the unnerving image of a mouth appearing in a small beige frame and growling the words "Lip Synch", while one of the red spots from his conspicuous polka dot bow-tie rolled out and created the corresponding lettering. Many of Pandaman's characteristics were carried over from this face, including the bow-tie and the shadowy blotches around the jaws. Given the title of the series, the focus on the mouth makes total sense, although here the frame is so tightly boxed around the feature in question that his uncanny lack of eyes goes unrevealed. Which is not to say that the Lip Synch titles are any less unnerving than the Pandaman logo; the snarling, disembodied mouth is still pretty freaking monstrous, its enormous teeth no less carnivorous, the guttural manner in which it spits out the title appropriately inhuman.

By the late 1990s, Aardman were seeking a new look, and what's interesting is that they did initially appear interested in retaining Pandaman as a long-term emblem and incorporating his terrible form into future branding. The closing titles for the 1998 series Rex The Runt feature a different, two-dimensional logo, in which Pandaman is depicted shouting through a megaphone (although the logo is rendered in such a way as to downplay his monstrous features, so that he just looks like any regular human with a bow-tie). This was not to be, however. Pandaman disappeared shortly after and was long out of the picture by the time Chicken Run, Aardman's first theatrical feature film, debuted in 2000. Aardman presumably wanted their signature image to herald the bold new era they were currently entering, and subjecting mainstream family audiences to the delights of Pandaman in a theatrical setting was possibly deemed a step too far. Instead, he was replaced by a completely new concoction, in which various two-dimensional figures are shown rotating around the gears in a great machine, only to come to an immediate halt when a hand reached in and presses the central figure, a small black box with limbs and a head, and on its torso, a bright red star which was to serve as the company's new trademark going forward. There are few forms less objectionable than that of a star, but also few more generic, and the demented character of Pandaman is very much missed. Not that the gears logo (which itself appears to have fallen by the wayside) doesn't have a likeable ingenuity all of its own - it is, after all, more benign than Pandaman only so long as you don't focus on the tortured faces of the various forms trapped within those rotating cogs. There's a childhood nightmare to be derived from that, I'm sure.

Lily Takes A Walk Into The Urban Abyss (A Spooky Surprise Book)

One of the creepiest books I remember reading as a young child was Lily Takes A Walk by Satoshi Kitamura. So creepy, in fact, that it inevitably became an obsession of mine. The book tells the story of a girl named Lily who takes regular walks into the heathlands outside her town, accompanied by Nicky, her faithful Jack Russell terrier. We follow them on the return journey of one such walk, as they navigate their way through the assortment of streets and back to Lily's house in the fading evening light. Early on, Kitamura establishes the central irony that haunts the story: "Even if it begins to get dark on the way home, Lily is never scared because Nicky is there with her." Unfortunately, the sentiment isn't mutual, for Nicky encounters a great deal on their seemingly ordinary journey that scares the jittery terrier to his wits' end, and having Lily there is blatantly of little consolation to him.

Lily Takes A Walk is a particularly witty example of how the illustrations of a picture book can be used to create additional layers of meaning for the narrative therein. The text and illustrations appear to be playfully at odds with one another, for they are not quite telling the same story. If you were to listen to a reading of the book without looking at the pictures, then you would get an entirely genial account of a fairly nondescript journey from Point A to Point B, with the aforementioned reference to the dark providing the only hint of any potential peril. Lily does some shopping for her mother, greets a neighbour, admires the bats and the evening star, pauses briefly to watch the ducks on the canal, and finally reaches home, where she is welcomed by the reassuring smell of a hot supper cooking. The text offers a very straightforward representation of how Lily perceives the walk. All very pleasant, you might think, but what was the point? The visuals, however, convey what the experience is like for her companion Nicky, and it's a markedly different one. Nicky sees dangers that Lily does not, with every step of the journey revealing another menace, another terrible set of eyes trailed upon them. To begin with these spectres have a degree of subtlety about them, which makes Lily's obliviousness more understandable - there are aptly camouflaged monsters masquerading as commonplace objects like trees and letterboxes. Sometimes multiple objects appear to come together to create a single entity - on one page, for example, Nicky sees how the moon, a clock tower and a street light, when viewed from a particular angle, combine to create a buck-toothed, beady-eyed face in the sky, an absurd image that is nevertheless unsettling with its suggestion of clandestine surveillance. As we get closer to home, the monsters get bolder and more prominent, and Lily's obtuseness to the matter seems increasingly ridiculous. Sights toward the end of their journey include a giant tomato-drinking vampire (he lacks the trademark fangs, but he has a pale complexion, appears around the bats and bears a marginal resemblance to Bela Lugosi, so vampire seems a safe bet), the Loch Ness Monster's canal-dwelling cousin and a pack of monsters raiding the trash cans outside of her house (in one of the book's quirkiest visual gags, one of these creatures is recognisably a hippopotamus).

Lily Takes A Walk was published by Picture Corgi Books in 1987 as part of a series known as "Spooky Surprise Books".  So far as I can tell there were three other titles in this series - The Hairy Toe and Teeny Tiny by Amelia Rosato, both re-tellings of traditional horror yarns, and another title by Kitamura, Captain Toby. What they all have in common, besides a generally macabre theme (although Captain Toby is probably the least macabre of the lot) is a final, extended page folded over into a flap which the viewer is required to lift to reveal the story's closing visual punchline. In the case of Lily Takes A Walk, it's a befittingly odd punchline that utterly baffled me as a child and, even today, I'm not entirely sure how to make sense of it. But perhaps we can take a crack at it here.

There is an entire chapter dedicated to Lily Takes A Walk in the book Children Reading Pictures: Interpreting Visual Texts by Evelyn Azripe and Morag Styles, in which they document the reactions of young readers to the book. Some of their observations sync up with my own, others are much more divergent. Among the most interesting was the following: "...most readers were more concerned about the feelings of the over-imaginative dog than with the child, while at the same time laughing - not unkindly - at him. This also allows quite young readers to enjoy the experience of feeling a little more grown up and mature than the characters in the book." (p. 58). Interesting, because when I read this book as a small child I was very firmly on Nicky's side and the last thing I'd have done would be to laugh at him. It honestly never occurred to me that the demonic figures lurking on every street corner might only be figments of a paranoid mind - possibly pathologically so - whose facial recognition was working overtime. I guess back then I was very receptive to the idea that there might be hidden horrors lurking in the most mundane of places, monsters who were every bit as at home in modern cities as in secluded caves and marshes. I took it as a given that the dog was the smart and perceptive one, attuned to the terrifying reality of the world around him that passed his inattentive owner by, and that is the interpretation I still prefer. Throughout the former half of the journey, it seems reasonable enough to ascribe ambiguity to Nicky's perspective, when the monsters take the form of ostensibly commonplace objects, although it becomes harder to say what Nicky might otherwise be seeing when menaced by something as unambiguous as the canal monster. Moreover, if you read the illustrations as reflections of Nicky's dementia, then the story, while visually inventive, the story seems kind of funny and kind of sad but overall much less juicy. I am instead inclined to liken Lily's obliviousness throughout her walk to that of the hedgehog at the start of the 1975 film Hedgehog In The Fog, who is so accustomed to walking a particular route each evening to go stargazing with a friend that he fails to notice the owl that stalks him and gets frighteningly close on this particular journey. So too is Lily so comfortable with what has become a familiar routine to her that she repeatedly fails to pick up on the monstrosities lurking in plain sight - monstrosities that, perhaps disturbingly, only seem to get more and more conspicuous the closer she gets to the definitive comfort of home. Azripe and Styles observe that some readers see Lily's obliviousness to Nicky's fears as comparable to that of an insensitive parent, but contend that this "does not correspond to the representation of Lily as a child who enjoys the sunset and the stars and likes animals (even bats!)" This, though, strikes me as one of the story's great ironies - Lily does have a deep appreciation for the world around her and takes time to enjoy the various sights she encounters along the way, be it the evening star (or Dog Star), the swooping bats or Mrs Hall at her window. But her gaze is always averted away from the really critical event happening in every picture. There is another side to Lily's town that Lily herself lives in blissful ignorance of. She sees what she wants to see, or at least what she expects to see. The fact that this is all stated to be part of a regular routine raises questions as to what the walk typically looks like for Nicky. Is this the first time he's seen these monsters, or is he accustomed to the need to keep his guard up while walking? Is the implication that our heroes will go out again and Nicky will be subjected to the same nightmare visions on subsequent walks?

The plot of Lily Takes A Walk bears more than a passing resemblance to the classic 1948 Looney Tunes short Scaredy Cat, in which Porky Pig and Sylvester take up residence in a shadowy old manor where the previous occupants have apparently been dispatched by a cult of murderous murids, and Sylvester alone cottons onto the terrible danger they are in. In fact, I am half-inclined to interpret the puzzling ending of Kitamura's story as a tribute to Scaredy Cat - both involve nasty surprises from rodents with a flagrantly sick sense of humor. A major difference, however, is that Lily and Nicky's disparate perspectives never bring them into direct conflict as with Porky and Sylvester, with Lily remaining cheerfully oblivious not only to the nightmares on her street, but also to Nicky's corresponding behaviours. That, I suppose, is the poignancy nestled at the heart of Lily Takes A Walk - Nicky's total inability to open up and communicate his troubled perspective to Lily, in part because he lacks a voice to begin with, but also because Lily doesn't seem terribly interested in him. It would be unfair to suggest that Lily ignores Nicky altogether, for she talks to him regularly throughout their journey. The early pages make it clear that she values the dog's companionship, yet she pays him very little in the way of close attention. The one thing Lily consistently fails to do throughout the story is to look at Nicky, except on the title page, which Arizpe and Styles correctly identify as the only instance in the book in which Nicky displays any kind of positive energy: "The title page belies the cover in that the dog is actually looking quite happy to be going for a walk. Perhaps this is because they are just starting out or because Lily is actually looking at him for once." They're incorrect about that first point, as the illustration shows Lily and Nicky not starting out on their journey, but actually on the heath, the location in which we are told they will sometimes walk for hours and hours, but which is represented only briefly in the story proper.

The opening page is notable for being the only illustration in the entire book to conceal no discreet (or otherwise) menace (besides the aforementioned title page, and even that's up for debate - see below). We see Lily and Nicky on their way out to the heath, walking along a pavement and past an apparently ordinary tree. What's interesting about this page is that both characters are breaking the fourth wall and looking directly at the reader (it isn't the only time that Lily does this). On the next page, we jump to them already out on the heath, at the furthest point from home we'll find our heroes throughout the course of the story. It is, perhaps not coincidentally, the most serene and picturesque illustration in Kitamura's book - there is an atmospheric calm amid the lush greenery and open space of the heathland not replicated in any of the sights of the town, represented here by a small collection of buildings stretching off into the distance, beckoning our heroes with the reminder that they must ultimately return to its hold. Even here, there is a hidden disturbance, for as Nicky cocks his leg against a clump of grass he becomes aware of a snake gazing back at him from an adjacent tree. Compared to the menagerie of surreal delights awaiting our heroes on the route back home, the snake on the heath seems like a positively humdrum detail, a harmless (in all odds) and not entirely unexpected sight to encounter while out in the wilds (unlike that trash-hungry hippo at the end of the journey). Yet there is something undeniably sinister about the snake; it stares at Nicky with an intensity, and a crooked smile that suggest a conspiratorial nature to its appearance, as if it knows and enjoys the fact that only Nicky can see it. This page establishes the prevailing dynamic of the story - Lily is staring, apparently deep in contemplation, at the world around her, her back turned to both Nicky and the snake, and by extension the reader. This clues us in that though Lily may be the title character, it is Nicky with whom our sympathies are to be aligned.

The text, coupled with the slightly shadowy ambience of the illustration, indicate that Lily and Nicky have reached the end of their most recent session on the heath and will soon be preparing to make the dreaded (for Nicky, anyway) trek home. In this regard, the snake functions as a kind of omen of the terrors that lie ahead. The buildings in the distance too seem more like a threat of what is to come than a reassuring reminder that home is within walking distance. We might relate this illustration back to that on the title page, which presumably shows an earlier, more carefree point from their adventure, suggesting that, snakes aside, Nicky does actually enjoy the heath portion of their excursions. That is the other great irony of Kitamura's story - the implication that Nicky feels his safest when he is at his furthest from home. The necessity of having to return there is what poisons his particular Eden. The title page seems to represent the purest state for both Lily and Nicky, when the two are at their most mutually happy and untroubled, but even then we see a slight spot of trouble on the horizon in the form of a single building nestled off in the distance, its out of place appearance and multitude of dark windows making it seem like it is the hidden menace of this particular illustration.

I am very conscious that I recently wrote a little piece on the 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi, which also follows a trajectory from nature into urbanisation, with an implicit message that expansion of the latter is gradually eroding the former. Although I don't detect an overtly environmentalist theme to Kitamura's story, it too conveys a distrust of urbanisation, which stands in contrast to the relative serenity of the natural world. I suspect that, largely, Kitamura is having fun with the irony that the dangers get more egregious the closer Lily and Nicky get to home, but there is something distinctly haunting about the entire character of the urban landscape they traverse, even without Nicky's monsters there to personify its covertly unpleasant nature. It is notable, for instance, that the town does not appear to be particularly well-populated; early in her journey, Nicky interacts with a market vendor, who ends up being the only other form of human life we see stirring in the outside world. We are informed in the text that Lily waves to a neighbour, Mrs Hall, as she passes her window, but Mrs Hall is not represented in the illustrations. Instead, Lily appears to wave directly at the reader, in her second instance of fourth wall breaking, leading to a curious paradox where the reader temporarily assumes the role of Mrs Hall and is complicit in Lily's facade of a warm and cozy community, whilst getting a window-side view of Nicky and his buck-toothed sky monster. The only other resident glimpsed throughout the journey, for the eagle-eyed reader, is a figure staring out of a distant window in the vampire illustration. The lack of residents out on the streets might not strike us as overly unusual, given that most of the journey takes place at night, but even then only a minority of houses have lit windows. Most of the buildings stand in eerie darkness, raising the possibility that they aren't occupied at all. Kitamura depicts the town as a dead, artificial space filled with unnatural lifeforms. Conversely, in some cases these lifeforms take on natural guises, such as the monstrous tree Lily and Nicky pass, suggesting a nature that has been corrupted by the imposition of the town. In the case of the sky monster, we have the natural and the unnatural literally combining to create a great uncanny entity. Others, such as the snarling letterbox that devours and regurgitates letters, suggest a corruption of industry and technology, it having turned against its original purpose to facilitate communication. The enormous vampire emerging from an advertising billboard promoting a brand of tomato juice, meanwhile, puts a comically monstrous face on the kind of consumer culture examined in Koyaanisqatsi. While I am not fond of the interpretation that the monsters are merely figments of Nicky's imagination, I am prepared to accept them as symbolism for a darker, more distasteful side to this town and its absent community, of which Lily remains entirely innocent. It is a grunginess only vaguely hinted at in the town's darkened alleys and the various items of litter seen strewn across the streets.

Unfortunately for Nicky, the story does not stop once he and Lily reach the ostensible safety of home. After all, what makes us think he's going to be any safer indoors in the company of Lily and her parents? The following illustration shows a continuation of Nicky's plight, with Lily and her parents at the dinner table, as Lily, as per the text, describes everything she has seen on her walk, while Nicky, alone (or so he thinks) with his own food bowl at the corner of the room, makes a futile attempt to communicate his side of the story. His frantic expression, coupled with the barrage of speech bubbles containing images of the assortment of monsters he has seen on route (the snake is absent, suggesting that we should discount it as part of the pattern), convey his eagerness to be heard, but he is predictably paid no attention. The display of family unity in this illustration is tempered by Nicky's evident exclusion. It is also one of only two points in the story in which Lily is shown within the presence of adult supervision, the other being the market vendor who sells her a bunch of flowers. A question that never crossed my mind as a child but bothers me a lot as an adult is that of just how old is Lily intended to be. The assortment of toys in her bedroom suggest that she probably isn't older than 12, but that begs the question as to why her parents would allow her to go on these long, unsupervised treks through the darkness at all. I appreciate that some suspension of disbelief is often required with these books, but nowadays I can't help but see a slight subtext here about parental negligence, with Lily's obliviousness to Nicky's upset suggesting that she is inheriting, whether by nature of nurture, her parents' own casual attitude toward her. Crucially, in her parents' single appearance, her father's eyes are closed and her mother has her back to the reader, much like Lily in the early illustration upon the heath, suggesting that both maintain their own wilful blindness to the situation.

The disturbance in the dining room is the most low-key of the story, and you might not even notice it on your first read. There is a fifth presence in the room, not far from Nicky and his bowl, and apparently taking an interest in the dog. This time, Nicky himself doesn't even see it.

We're now onto the final page of the story, and here's where we finally get into the source of so much childhood confusion for me. I mentioned that a key characteristic of the Spooky Surprise was that the final page was always extended, the extended portion being folded over into a flap you had to lift to reveal the story's ultimate spooky surprise. In the case of Lily Takes A Walk, we find ourselves in Lily's bedroom, as she retires to bed following what has been (from her perspective) an entirely agreeable day. The folded portion of the page shows a rather miserable-looking Nicky in his dog basket; here, he doesn't look afraid so much as physically and emotionally weary. The final words of text take the form of the fondest of wishes from Lily to her dog: "Goodnight. Sleep well." We suspect there is little chance of that, however, even before we lift the flap, which reveals Nicky being startled yet again, this time by a swarm of mice who have crawled out from the skirting board, complete with their own miniature ladder so that they can access the top of his basket. As I say, there are definite shades of Scaredy Cat here.

What always puzzled me about this ending, as a child, had less to do with the intentions of the mice (it is unclear whether their actions are carried out in a misguided attempt to befriend the nervous dog or if they purposely enjoy unsettling him further) as the implications of that fold-out page. It was unclear to me which of the two illustrations I should take as the final one. After all, if you turned over the extended page the top of the flap, showing the exhausted Nicky, forms part of another illustration, in which the mice and their ladder are just visible from the skirting board. I was never entirely sure if this image was intended to be an extension of the original scene in Lily's bedroom, before we lift the flap to reveal the mice around Nicky's basket, or if it represents the aftermath, with the mice retreating back into the hole with their ladder, and Nicky resuming his previous expression, yet again weary of it all, not least that he allowed some mice to get the better of him. If the former, then the problem is that it is impossible to view the complete scene at once. If the latter, then it suggests a slightly more positive outcome for Nicky, who is at least shown being left in peace by one of his aggravators at the end of the story. And that makes all the difference, particularly when you're a young reader - at what point in the story do we leave poor Nicky? I own two other books from the Spooky Surprise series - Teeny Tiny and Captain Toby (currently, every single price tag I've seen on The Hairy Toe has been way too high) - and unfortunately they don't add any clarity to the situation, as in both their cases, the other side of the extended page is blank, other than what's on the flap.

Either way, the final message is clear - there can be no place of genuine safety for the beleaguered Nicky. Even Lily's ostensible shrine to childhood warmth and innocence offers little comfort. In some respects this is the venue that most evokes a wilderness, ironically so since it is at the heart of our urban labyrinth. Lily's room is populated by a variety of plush animals, she has a calendar depicting a scene not unlike the heath she has returned from, and on the wall, close to Nicky's basket, is a poster of a tiger wading through long grasses. But these too are unnerving images. The tiger in particular seems to have been deliberately positioned so as to appear to be looking at Nicky, giving us an uneasy sense of a predator stalking its prey. Most of the plush animals, meanwhile, have wide, frantic eyes, suggesting an unsettled environment in a state of constant vigilance. It seems to evoke the more brutal side of nature, as a place in which animals are obligated to watch their backs at all times for fear of predation - somewhat conversely, as it is positioned within the context of a child's optimum place of comfort. Among the flesh and blood animals within the room, we get a playful subversion of traditional predator/prey dynamics, with Nicky, a terrier, being terrorised by a pack of rodents. The mice, naturally, represent a breakdown of the barriers between wilderness and domesticity, with the irony that the wilderness recreated inside Lily's bedroom is not the same one lurking right outside her doorstep. The images in Lily's room suggest a nature that has been broken in and defanged, in spite of their uncanny aura. The plush toys and tiger poster constitute a domestic remodelling of a wilderness that either no longer exists or is slowly vanishing, and being replaced by a wilderness of a different kind, one far more twisted and perverse but so mundane and familiar to its inhabitants that they do not feel the same need for vigilance as our jungle friends, and its numerous horrors go unnoticed. Indeed, the real hidden menace in the bedroom illustration is not the mice, but rather the building we can just make out through the gap in Lily's window where the curtains have not been fully drawn. It is as if the building, with its characteristically darkened windows, is peering on our heroes as they settle down to sleep, a threatening reminder that they must eventually venture out and repeat the nightmarish cycle all over again.

The one truly heart-warming detail in the final illustration is the picture Lily has been drawing on her desk, a picture of Nicky. The dog really is number one in Lily's world. All the more poignant, then, that she never seems to pick up on his.

I Can't Dance (Genesis)

There exists a powerful symbiosis between advertising and popular music. Advertising has a well-established history of capitalising on the public's nostalgia and goodwill toward much-loved tunes in order to transfer some of that pre-existing emotional investment onto the products being hawked, while exposure in such a campaign can do wonders to make get any song, familiar or brand new, embedded into contemporary zeitgeist. Occasionally, you'll find a scenario that gets the process backwards, with a pop song that only exists at all by starting life as an advertising jingle. So much of the creative energy in advertising is fuelled by music, but how often do we find the boot on the other foot? Are there many pop songs out there that take advertising as the main source of their inspiration? I've already covered a couple of tracks by Negativland that satirise the tactics of soft drink commercials, but if we look for more mainstream examples then the first tune that comes to mind is the Genesis single "I Can't Dance". Released in 1991, the song offered a light-hearted potshot at trends in contemporary denim advertising, which was still riding a fashionable high that started when Nick Kamen walked into a 1950s laundrette in 1985 and stripped his Levi's 501 jeans (and everything else he was wearing, save his underpants) to the sounds of Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" (naturally, "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" was re-released and became a UK chart hit soon after).

In the early 1980s, the Levi's brand had lost much of its lustre with younger consumers, who'd tagged them as the kind of unhip clothing their parents wore, and the Kamen ad was conceived as a means of reinventing their image (come to think of it, Levi's was facing much the same problem in the late 1990s, only their response that time around involved a terminally depressed hamster; I still cannot fathom how anybody thought that was a good idea). The strategy paid off and sales of Levi's jeans increased by 800%. It was followed by a series of ads heavily emphasising the soundtrack of yesteryear and the sex appeal of their male protagonists. One of them, memorably, featured a young Brad Pitt greeting the desert highway in his boxers, which seemed to be recurring motif for the series.

The music video for "I Can't Dance" is best remembered for that knowingly awkward swagger that band members Phil Collins, Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks deploy whenever the chorus kicks in (thus accounting for the title), but the really fascinating element is of course when they take on the then-established conventions of designer jeans advertising. The lyrics of each individual verse and the corresponding visuals all lampoon a different contemporary jeans commercial, starting with that iconic spot for Bugle Boy jeans in which a female motorist briefly stops to ask a male hitch-hiker if he's wearing the brand in question before leaving him permanently in the dust. Also under the spotlight are a couple of ads for Levi's 501, one featuring a beach hunk who has his dog keep watch over his coveted jeans while he catches some waves, another following a 501 patron who slays the competition at a bar pool table and demonstrates his authority by getting his opponent to reveal (what else?) his underpants. Collins plays the denim-sporting protagonist in all three scenarios; things don't work out half as well for him as they did the heroes of the aforementioned Levi's ads, although he gets much the same treatment as that unfortunate Bugle wearer.

 Let's dig in a little deeper.

Hot sun beating down,
Burning my feet just walking around.
Hot sun makin' me sweat,
Gator's getting close, hasn't got me yet.

 

Of the triad of ads being sent up in this song, this one is represented the most tenuously in the lyrics. In fact, if not for the music video I doubt I would have connected it with the infamous Bugle Boy hitch-hiker ad. I think what particularly throws me off is the reference to this mysterious alligator that's apparently stalking our hero, something that occurs in neither the original commercial or the Genesis music video. As such, I draw a blank as to how it fits in here (I've heard it suggested by at least one person that the "gator" is a reference to the French clothing brand Lacoste, but I doubt that - for one thing, their mascot is a crocodile). In the video, the scenario plays out in a very similar fashion to the original ad, except here the motorist doubles back not to question Collins about his taste in denim, but to offer a ride to his reptilian cohort (an iguana, not an alligator). There's also a lot more emphasis on Collins getting showered with dust on both occasions that she passes him by; a running gag throughout this video involves Collins winding up on the receiving end of some form of slapstick/humiliation, subverting the cool and confident rebel archetype that was pivotal to the Levi's 501 campaign in particular. 

Next up... 

Blue jeans sittin' on the beach
Her dog's talking to me, but she's out of reach.
Ooh, she's got a body under that shirt
But all she wants to do is rub my face in the dirt.

 

This verse homages "Beach", a 1990 ad for Levi's 501 in which a dog is tasked with keeping watch over a pair of jeans while their mutual owner, a surfer, is off chasing waves. The dog performs its duties diligently, but falters when approached by a girl in a bikini who figures that the jeans are up for grabs. She gets as far as donning the jeans and turning to make her exit before the dog's protective urges are reignited, and it makes a sudden lunge at her ankles. At this point the dog's owner, a typically glamorous 501 hero, returns and diffuses the situation. He gives the dog the okay signal, and the three of them strut off together, one big happy beach family. The adventure is set to the sounds of "Can't Get Enough" by Bad Company.

 

The Genesis video tweaks the scenario marginally, so that the dog now belongs to the bikini wearer, who seems peeved to even acknowledge Collins' existence. The dog takes it upon itself to tussle with Collins for ownership of the jeans, with the result that Collins exits the beach with a bite-sized hole in one of the cheeks, a far cry from the triumphant adieu of our 501 surfer boy.

And finally...

 

Young punk spillin' beer on my shoes.
Fat guy's talkin' to me tryin' to steal my blues.
Thick smoke, see her smiling through.
I never thought so much could happen just shootin' pool.

 

The most recent addition to the 501 campaign at the time that "I Can't Dance" was conceived was "Pool Hall", in which a characteristic 501 protagonist runs afoul of a cue-wielding bar goon who cajoles him into gambling his precious jeans on a game of pool. Naturally, our young and glamorous hero turns out to be an absolute wizard at the pool table, much to the delight of an attractive bar maid who silently roots for him from across the room. To the victor the spoils; not only does he retain ownership of his jeans, but he gets the satisfaction of refusing a cash prize payment from his bewildered opponent and forces him to drop his (non-denim) trousers instead, confirming to the bar patrons that he wears boxers and not briefs. Characters shedding their pants to reveal the garments underneath was a recurring image in the 501 campaign, and could be empowering or degrading, depending on the context. Whatever a man wears around the lower half of his body is clearly posited as the height of his personal expression and autonomy. Kamen's willingness to voluntarily parade his near-naked form around a laundrette was the ultimate mark of confidence and poise, but elsewhere in the campaign we have multiple examples of one character depriving another of their dignity by denying them the privilege of a well-clad waist. Both the hero and villain of "Pool Hall" know how to hit each other where it hurts, hence why the sight of their opponent in their undergarments is worth so much more to them than money. In Brad Pitt's entry to the campaign, we see him turn the tables on a sadistic prison guard who gets a short-lived kick out of turning Pitt loose in just his boxers, symbolic impotency that's swiftly obliterated when rescue arrives in the form of Pitt's waiting girlfriend, who brought a spare pair of Levi's, and with it Pitt's restored prowess. Command a man's pants, according to the campaign, and you command the man. In the Genesis video the pool hall scenario goes in the other direction entirely, with the bar goon absolutely slaughtering Collins and forcing him to surrender his jeans, which frankly seems more realistic than the improbable David vs Goliath outcome in the original ad. Anyway, it's thanks to "Pool Hall" that "I Can't Dance" exists at all; apparently the song started life as a riff inspired by "Should I Stay or Should I Go" by The Clash, which was used as the soundtrack to this particular ad.

 

One thing you might notice about the trilogy of spots being lampooned here is that none of the protagonists therein had actually attempted to dance or sing. The Bugle Boy jeans ad doesn't quite fit the mold, as the hero does get to open his mouth, albeit briefly, but the 501 ads avoided dialogue altogether and let the classic rock track of the hour do the talking. So what exactly are Genesis getting at in mocking these well-dressed rebels for supposed deficiencies in abilities we never even see them take a crack at? Circle back to where this all began, with Nick Kamen in that laundrette. After selling an entire generation on the delights of Levi's 501, Kamen attempted to capitalise on his newfound acclaim by making the transition from model to pop musician, but the response was much more tepid than when he had Marvin Gaye do the heavy lifting. He found early success with the Madonna-penned "Each Time You Break My Heart", which reached number 5 in the UK charts in 1986, but the law of diminishing returns set in quickly for Kamen, and while he continued to net appreciative enough audiences in several European countries throughout the latter half of the decade, as far as his native Blighty was concerned all Kamen's flavour had already been licked dry. In the book 100 Greatest TV Ads, written by Mark Robinson to tie in with a popular Channel 4 program in 2000 (Channel 4 did a lot of these "100 Greatest" things when they had a couple of hours to fill in the 2000s, and they by and large made for very poor viewing, but this one at least appealed to the budding ad buff in me), TV presenter Kate Thornton is quoted surmising what went wrong for Kamen: "He broke the rule - he talked. We just liked looking at him. It was as simple as that...fundamentally he was to be looked at and lusted over - and never to be taken seriously." (p.121) That, in a tidy little nutshell, is the message of "I Can't Dance". The rebel in shrink-to-fit denim was a mythical figure that existed only in the most facile of surface detail. A fantasy world in which all ambient noise was conveniently filtered out by your favourite retro radio station, not merely for the purposes of exploiting nostalgia, but because any first-hand vocalisation from our well-dressed maverick would have ruptured the mystique and brought us crashing back down to reality. "I Can't Dance" was about taking a humorous look at the absurdities nestled beneath the artifice.

 

Robinson offers the following epilogue to Kamen's career: "He turned a new Levi's ad into a much-hyped media event and ended up eventually being replaced in 1999 by a fluffy yellow puppet called Flat Eric." Somewhere in between there was also that hiccup involving a hamster, but Robinson was tactful not to mention that.