Our One Halloween With Drexell's Class (Best Halloween Ever?)

We all know how it ended for Drexell's Class. By October 29th 1992 the ephemeral Fox sitcom had been consigned to the murky wastelands of cultural oblivion, its final gasp of recognition consisting of a backhanded send-off in The Simpsons' "Treehouse of Horror III", where it was depicted as lying six feet under at the Springfield Cemetery. But let's backtrack a year to October 31st 1991, when things were a little rosier for the Dabney Coleman vehicle, and it had the honor of rubbing shoulders with The Simpsons' preceding Halloween offering, "Treehouse of Horror II", aka The Greatest Treehouse of Horror Installment of All Time (not a universal opinion, but one I'll gladly stand by). As we reach the 30th anniversary of "Treehouse of Horror II", it remains as fresh, intelligent and as fiendishly delectable a Halloween special as it's ever been. One day I hope to have a crack at giving it the full and loving coverage it richly deserves. In 2022, maybe. This year, for whatever reason, I feel the urge to throw a curve and pay tribute to the smaller, forgotten program forever destined to languish in its shadow. "Best Halloween Ever" is is!

The premise behind Drexell's Class is that the protagonist, Otis Drexell (Coleman) was a convicted tax dodger living in Cedar Bluffs, Iowa, who was forced into a teaching post at the desperately understaffed Grantwood Elementary as part of the conditions of his suspended sentence, and now spends his working days trying to make a decent impression on his fifth-grade charges. Do they respect him as an authority figure? Hell no. Drexell found even greater antagonism among the school staff, particularly fellow teacher Roscoe Davies (Dakin Matthews) and Principal Francine Itkin (Randy Graff), who was swapped out for Principal Marilyn Ridge (Edie McClurg) later in the series' run. Drexell was also a bitter male divorcee, a common protagonist archetype in 1990s situation comedies (see also Friends, Frasier, The Critic, Stressed Eric), and had to cope with the challenges of being a single parent and raising two teenage daughters, Melissa (A.J. Langer) and Brenda (Brittany Murphy).

My curiosity regarding Drexell's Class was piqued by the aforementioned reference in "Treehouse of Horror III", but due to the relative obscurity of the series I have thus far been limited to whatever tidbits the VHS crowd have been merciful enough to upload to YouTube. At the time of writing I have seen exactly three and a half episodes out of a total eighteen. Which admittedly represents a very limited sampling of the series overall, but is still sufficient for me to have formed a decent impression of the basic set-up, what works about the show and what doesn't. The one really obvious thing Drexell's Class has going in its favour is that Coleman is a charismatic actor, and with the right material, one can imagine him finding quite a nice little niche for himself in television (some would say he'd already found the right material a decade prior with NBC's Buffalo Bill, which despite being warmly received and nominated for numerous Emmys did not get further than two seasons). The series' biggest weakness, IMO, is that the interplay between Drexell and his titular class isn't terribly compelling, in spite of Coleman's charisma. His young co-stars aren't to blame, either - it has more to do with how the characters are written, in that Drexell's pupils don't talk like real kids. Rather, they talk the way a cynical, middle-aged sitcom writer envisions children would talk when they need them to act as mirrors to cynical, middle-aged anxieties. For every would-be authoritative statement that exudes from Drexell's mouth, these kids always have some kind of slickly calculated, withering one-liner to knock him down a peg and get the laugh track hollering, and that gets wearisome quickly. I don't want to be overly critical of Drexell's Class, because it is, at its worst, fundamentally watchable; seldom laugh-out-loud funny, but it does make for a perfectly pleasant time-filler. At the same time, I'm not massively surprised by its failure to leave much of a dent in contemporary zeitgeist. Coleman aside, it doesn't have many truly outstanding qualities (Matthews, maybe).

I will, however, credit "Best Halloween Ever" with this much - it follows a similar format to the early Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror" installments, in having Drexell relate three different horror-themed stories to his incredulous pupils, and it does so in a manner that honestly makes better sense, in context, than at least half of those early Treehouse of Horrors, back when they felt obligated to incorporate some kind of framing narrative to account for their looser reality. Don't get me wrong, The Simpsons always had the superior product, but I've mentioned before that I always felt there was something intrinsically hokey about the implication that the family were telling stories about themselves (one reason why I'll got to bat for "Treehouse of Horror II" - having the characters dream their nightmare scenarios instead of voluntarily vocalising them bypasses that whole contrivance). Drexell shares the Simpsons' vanity - he casts himself in two out of three of his spooky stories, the remaining tale being a grisly bit of character assassination levelled at those aforementioned staffers with whom he does not get along. Like the original "Treehouse of Horror", "Best Halloween Ever" rounds things off with its own personalised tribute to a work from Edgar Allan Poe, "The Cask of Amontillado" in this case. All three stories have an obvious running theme, in that they reflect those cynical middle-aged anxieties with which Drexell grapples every day, the underlying joke being that the realities of adulthood are far more terrifying than the cliched yarns his guileless audience request about serial killers with hooks for hands. No, if schlocky stories detailing the kinds of gruesome smoothie recipes favoured by cannibals are enough to make your stomach churn, you're in for one heck of a shock when it comes to the horrors of work, marriage and the impending threat of empty nest syndrome.

The set-up for "Best Halloween Ever" is that the episode takes place on a particularly wet and windy Halloween - traditional recess has been cancelled and the reluctant Drexell is charged with keeping his restless students entertained indoors. Drexell also has Itkin on his case for parking his car in her designated spot, and she forces him to venture out into the storm during one commercial break to move it, causing Drexell to gripe that some higher power clearly has it in for him (as always in scenarios like this, it's not altogether clear if he's talking about a deity or the show's production crew). The kids demand that Drexell fill the time by telling them a few scary stories, although Drexell's horror palette is evidentially more nuanced than theirs - he hints there's plenty more horror located in life's banalities when he suggests that they try reading the ingredients list on their Twinkie wrappers. It's pointed out to Drexell that Mr Davies is telling scary stories to his class, to which Drexell responds, "Oh great, who wants to listen to a two hour lecture on why he never got married?" I'm not entirely sure what to take from that. Is the implication that Davies is gay (in which case Drexell is a bit of a homophobe - I note that he did earlier mock Davies for having a pedicure), or that Drexell anticipates that Davies is currently airing a wad of dirty laundry about the women in his life? If the latter, then how ironic, because Drexell will end up doing much the same thing soon enough. Eventually, he decides to bite, and tells a triad of stories that draw from the horrors of his own humdrum existence. I actually really like the premise of an older character attempting to explain adulthood to a young, barely receptive audience through a series of coded horror stories, but how does "Best Halloween Ever" rise to the potential?

The least interesting of the vignettes is the first one, a take on the creation of Frankenstein's monster that has Davies concocting an even greater abomination against nature, ie: Itkin. There's not much of a purpose here, other than to emphasise how much Drexell detests both characters' guts, although it does allow Matthews to partake in some reasonably enjoyable hamming. The kids aren't overly fazed by this story, so Drexell ups his game by telling them the story of his first marriage, and how Mrs Drexell transformed into a shrieking overbearing monster seemingly overnight - right about the point that the spark went out of their sex life and it dawned on him that their union actually meant signing up to contract of never-ending compromise and accountability. The idea here is to filter Drexell's embittered misogynistic grievances through the iconography of slasher pictures - so we have Mrs Drexell debut wielding a meat cleaver and wearing a Jason Voorhees hockey mask, and later still an in-law surfaces in the guise of Freddy Krueger. It's an inventive enough metaphor for the death of the honeymoon phase, the main shortcoming being that the writing is so stuffed full of corny one liners and trite caricatures regarding the banalities of marital strife - the compromise that proves to be Drexell's breaking point is that he leave the toilet seat down, for eff's sake - that it's difficult to say whether they're supposed to have quotation marks around them or not. It's not as though the rest of Drexell's Class is overwhelmingly devoid of corny one liners, after all. At least there's a fair amount of kitsch value to be found amid the frugally-budgeted nightmare visuals. Despite Drexell's blatant biases as narrator, I think that my sympathies are ultimately with Mrs Drexell - if you ask me, Drexell made the crueller demand of the two, in that he apparently insisted on a pet-free household. The monster! Drexell shortly discovers that his grudging disillusionment is no match for the jaded indifference with which these children are accustomed to living - the real punchline to Drexell's marriage story comes not from the Freddy Krueger-dressed in-law, but the reaction from the pupil who points out that, "How's that story supposed to scare me? I see stuff like that every day." Touché.

Drexell's third attempt to scare his class witless involves how he allegedly dealt with a teenage menace named Chad whose interest in his daughter Melissa had woken up his jealous paternal urges. This is a call-back to a scene at the beginning of the episode, when we saw Chad show up and forwardly court Melissa at the breakfast table, to Drexell's evident disapproval. So he took care him, so he claims, the same way Monstesor took care of Fortunato, by luring him down into the basement and sealing him behind a wall of brick and mortar. In Fortunato's case, it was never made clear quite what he'd done to warrant such a grisly retribution from Monstesor. Here, Chad's crime is two-fold - he seeks to supplant Drexell, not merely in Melissa's affections, but as the household's dominant male, a point he makes by brazenly draping himself across Drexell's territory and insinuating that he's getting past his prime ("I respect my elders, and frankly you're overqualified"). But he also makes Drexell uncomfortably aware of his teenage daughter's changing physique - at one point, Chad shares the bold observation that Melissa has a "great body", with which Drexell hastily agrees before self-awareness has his teeth gritting. His entombment of Chad thus comes off not merely as a measure to deny Melissa her developing sexuality, but an attempt to repress his own latent stirrings, so squeamishly personified by the smug little challenger stretched out on his recliner. Initially, Drexell counters Chad's defiance by returning home with a copy of the then-recently released The Little Mermaid on VHS; Disney, naturally, signifies the realm of sanitised childhood innocence to which Drexell would love to permanently regulate Melissa and Brenda, a yearning he weaponises more brutally when he has Chad sealed behind that wall - unlike Monstesor, who dropped a burning torch through the last remaining gap before sealing Fortunato in for good, Drexell throws in a live rat with the allusive name of Mickey (no rats were harmed in the making of this episode; the one Drexell is holding is visibly made out of rubber). I actually think the entire arrangement is highly unfair on Mickey, a point that Drexell at least remorsefully acknowledges. (I also note that, despite the very obvious "Cask of Amontillado" allusions, the segment is apparently not, at the time of writing, considered notable enough to be listed in the list of adaptations in the story's Wikipedia page.)

On this occasion, the children are vaguely unsettled by Drexell's story, pondering if he might actually be twisted enough to have pulled something like that. Their ruminations are interrupted by the storm outside, which reaches its apocalyptic climax in bringing down a tree upon the school's parking lot. Drexell is certain that this was an act of divine judgement directed at him (either from a deity or the show's production), but is elated when he realises that he outwitted it on this occasion - it struck too late, and wound up flattening Itkin's car in place of his own. It's almost as if the universe was aspiring to take Drexell down a peg, as a counterbalance to the alleged assertion of dominance in his story, but had momentarily overlooked how the pieces had just been rearranged. This leaves Drexell emboldened enough to take his good fortunes a step further. At the end of the episode, a sample of his class show up to his house for some trick or treating; they find it apparently deserted, but there is a note helpfully directing them to the basement. There, they find a bowl of Halloween candy set out before, of all ungodly things, a brick wall. The kids decide to call Drexell's bluff, and go up to the bowl and start helping themselves to candy, not twigging that they are blatantly being set up; sure enough, they hear moaning from behind that wall and immediately flee in terror. We cut behind the wall to reveal - who else? - Drexell standing there and puffing a cigar, defiantly blowing smoke into the stupefied cosmos, delighted to have it quaking in terror at him for a change.

 

 

Anyway, for all my griping about the artificial banter between Drexell and his class being my least favourite aspect of the series, it's actually not so prevalent in this particular episode. The most groan-inducing exchange occurs early on, when one pupil interprets Drexell's complaints about young hooligans descending on decent neighbourhoods as indication that the Guns N' Roses tour is hitting town.

The Beast Must Die (aka You Deserve A Break Today)

The Beast Must Die, Paul Annett's 1974 addition to the well-stocked horror canon of the Shepperton-based Amicus Productions, opens with a truly idiosyncratic prologue. We are greeted by the voice of Valentine Dyall, who informs us that, "This film is a detective story in which YOU are the detective. The question is not "Who is the murderer?" but "Who is the werewolf?" The distinction is, perhaps, a redundant one, given that, for the purposes of this story, "murderer" and "werewolf" amount to much the same thing. A body count is piling up, one of our established cast is responsible, but they're adept enough to keep their identity just out of view. "After all the clues have been shown--you will get a chance to give your answer," continues Dyall, before urging us to "Watch for the Werewolf Break!", and that's where the fun really begins.

The prologue, promising lurid spookhouse thrills within the parameters of a whodunnit, sets the tone for the film's unusual genre mash-up - part kooky monster B movie, part country house mystery, part pulpy action thriller. The one thing The Beast Must Die is not, in truth, is much of a horror flick. There are stretches of darkness and smatterings of gore, but Douglas Gamley's funky, upbeat score suggests something more in line with such contemporary UK adventure series as The Avengers and Strange Report, and there is great emphasis throughout on extended action-orientated set-pieces, including an opening aerial pursuit and one or two motor chases thrown in for good measure (although this occur between long stretches of slower-moving action in which the characters are permitted to marinate in their own paranoia). What The Beast Must Die unabashedly is is a pure, unadulterated slice of 1970s kitsch, buoyed along by a silly, if undeniably charming gimmick, and it will be best appreciated among those who understand that suspense is at its most delectable when washed down with copious amounts of gimcrack.

The Beast Must Die was adapted from a short story by James Blish, "There Shall Be No Darkness" (incidentally, it has no connection to the Cecil Day-Lewis novel of the same name, recently adapted into a five-part mini series for Britbox), and has shades both Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None and Richard Connell's The Most Dangerous Game, two literary staples that have been plundered exhaustively for their potential as perfectly recyclable thrillers. The variations Annett brings to the table involve millionaire hunter Tom Newcliffe (Calvin Lockhart), who, bored with bagging more conventional game, invites an assortment of eccentrics for a three-day excursion at his isolated country home, with the intention that one of the party will become his next prey - although which, from the outset, is a complete mystery to him. Newcliffe has carefully selected his guests on the basis of their possible connection to lycanthropy; he is aware that he is housing at least one werewolf in his midst and, with a brilliant full moon on the horizon, intends to expose the clandestine beast so that he can go up against the actual most dangerous game. The candidates include Professor Lundgren (Peter Cushing), a leading expert on the alleged science behind the werewolf transformation, disgraced diplomat Arthur Bennington (Charles Gray), unassuming concert pianist Jan Gilmore (Michael Gambon), his lady companion Davina (Ciaran Madden), and Paul Foote (Tom Chadbon), an artistic hipster with little shame over his history of experimentally dabbling in cannibalism. The guests swiftly discover that they are trapped on Newcliffe's estate, with surveillance cameras and patrol helicopters tracking their every move, and as the days pass by and the nocturnal shape-shifting inevitably occurs, Newcliffe struggles to match his wits against those of the shut-in beast, an obsession that proves unsettling to his wife Caroline (Marlene Clark, dubbed with the voice of Annie Ross). The beast, seemingly fully capable of staying at least one step ahead of its pursuer, obligingly claims a few casualties along the way, narrowing down our list of possible suspects, until at last we reach our climax, a good old-fashioned drawing room denouement in which the survivors all gather together for a final round of finger-pointing. First, though, we get the promised Werewolf Break, and what a beguiling oddity it is.

The story behind the inclusion of the Werewolf Break goes something like this: the original cut submitted by Annett contained no such device, and producer Milton Subotsky was so unimpressed with what he saw that he felt compelled to add in a little flavour of his own, hitting upon the idea of an interactive element in which the viewer was challenged to come to a conclusion over the identity of the werewolf just before it was revealed to them. It was a technique he borrowed directly from the book of William Castle, who had similarly paused the action with the visual of a ticking clock for his 1961 film Homicidal. Known as the "Fright Break", the conceit was that Castle was putting the film on the hold for the benefit of those who might not want to stick around for the horrifying climax, with the promise of a full refund waiting for them outside in the theatre lobby - the catch being that if you took Castle up on his offer, you were forced to suffer the indignity of exiting through "Coward's Corner" and signing a document formalising your status as a bona fide coward (if you were willing to endure all of that then I'd say you had guts). In the case of The Beast Must Die, the film is halted for a full minute while images of the possible candidates are flashed upon the screen; the latter 30 seconds are accompanied by a visual countdown which leads us back into the action. Subotsky was reportedly satisfied with the result, insisting that he'd salvaged the picture, but Annett has gone on record as saying that he was deeply opposed to it, believing it completely took all the wind from the tension he'd been artfully building for the climax. I think it's fair to say that history has vindicated Subotsky, however, the Werewolf Break being the one aspect of The Beast Must Die that everybody remembers, something Annett himself openly admits on the film's Blu-ray commentary. He also acknowledges that at least one big-name critic (Leonard Maltin) was won over by the gimmick (alas, Maltin looks to have been in the minority; other critics were intrigued by the Werewolf Break but felt that the rest of the film fell short of it).

The central mystery is not a massively robust one, but it's not a total cheat either - so long as you've an eye for keeping track of which characters were in which vicinity and when, you should be able to have a reasonable stab at it. For those interested in experiencing the mystery fresh, I would advise the following:

• I will not be revealing the answer here, so you may read on without fear of spoilers. I will, however, exert my bragging rights in proclaiming, with no false modesty, that I gave the correct answer during my first viewing (again, it's not an exceedingly complicated mystery, provided you pay close enough attention to the characters).
  
• Do NOT, under any circumstances, be tempted to watch the theatrical trailer before you begin. It emphasises the mystery, and the presence of the Werewolf Break; unfortunately, whoever edited it made the self-defeating blunder of including - and lingering on - at least one visual that makes it painfully obvious who the werewolf is. The faces of all possible candidates are shown, and juxtaposed with footage of the werewolf gradually transforming back into human form, and all but the most inattentive of viewers could very easily match the correct mugshot with the face lurking behind the ever-decreasing layer of fur.
  

 

Still, the curiosity at the heart of The Beast Must Die has less to do with the identity of the werewolf than with the presence of that Werewolf Break; why should such a simple gimmick, visibly crowbarred in after the fact, add so immeasurably to our enjoyment of the picture? After all, it's not as though Subotsky's trick comprises anything other than a rundown of information the viewer already knows - that the werewolf has to be one of the listed individuals. One can understand Annett's reservations; the appearance of the break removes the viewer from the immediacy of the story, getting them to contemplate the narrative action from a wholly artificial vantage point. Unlike Castle's Fright Break, which was designed to prompt some kind of visible action (or, more likely, inaction) from its audience, werewolf watchers would, so far as I can tell, have received no real opportunity to "give" their answer, unless they were bold enough to yell it at the screen. The idea behind the break appears to be more to goad the viewer into committing to an answer, if only within the privacy of their own heads, enhancing their investment in the mystery and having the stakes feel a whisker more personal.

Perhaps emphasising the mystery element of the film was necessary in order to divert the viewer from its deficiencies as a horror picture - more specifically, its deficiencies regarding the beast itself, quite possibly the least terrifying werewolf you'll ever set eyes on. To divulge the nature of the titular beast would not be much of a spoiler, as a still of the creature is featured in Dyall's opening announcement. We can see even there that our monstrous wolf is quite blatantly a dog wrapped up in layers of fabric, and looking like it's on its way to some downmarket cosplaying convention, a point that numerous contemporary critics were unable to see past - among them, Gene Siskel, who wittily described the monster as a "spray-painted collie" (he gets the breed wrong - the dog in question looks more like a German Shepherd - but his interpretation is nevertheless hilariously astute). On top of everything else, the "werewolf" is portrayed by such a happy, friendly, loving-looking dog, the kind you wouldn't be adverse to keeping as a family pet - there's a scene where it pounces on one unfortunate victim, supposedly to tear their throat out, and looks more as though it's trying to engage them in some kind of doggy ballet. You will not feel much menace in the presence of this mutt, but its technical shoddiness no doubt contributes enormously to the film's kitschy appeal. And besides, there are other reasons why the dog's generally buoyant spirits are of great reassurance to me. There is only sequence in which the "wolf" displays anything resembling genuine aggression - when it is confronted by the Newcliffes' own dog - and, on the Blu-ray commentary, Annett confirmed my worst suspicions in indicating that their skirmish was not simulated; Annett insists that neither animal was harmed (although we do see them make physical contact), but admits that the dogs were provoked into snapping at one another, which is obviously not cool.

The real monster of The Beast Must Die is not our amicable-looking werewolf. It is, as in life, the ticking clock, which obligingly appears for the second half of the Werewolf Break to indicate how much time we have remaining before the story resumes and validates (or invalidates) our detective prowess. The visual of the clock is another beguiling detail that adds a strange degree of menace to the Break - its eerie effectiveness is hinted in Annett's musings, on the Blu-Ray commentary, as he ponders its significance to viewers "when they're eating their takeaway curries half-arsed on a Saturday night, when the film was often on television, [and] probably think this is some sort of clock telling them go to bed." The clock signifies the voice of authority, however implicitly, demanding a response by reminding us of the very finite time we have allocated. With its appearance, not only do we find ourselves plucked out of the narrative setting, but confronted with a queasy amount of cinematic dead space, in which there is nothing to be heard but the tick of the clock, as the faces of our prospective werewolves continue to fade in and out in succession (only one of them, Foote, produces a smirk that seems to mirror the knowing audacity of the gimmick). Castle's Fright Break, by contrast, used the sound of a beating heart, itself an uncomfortable reminder of the fragility of human existence, but viewers had the additional reassurance of voice-over narration to guide them through the process, finally exalting them as "a brave audience". In the Werewolf Break, Dyall is content to leave the viewer suspended in that uneasy narrative gulf, with only their own contemplation and the unrelenting march of time closing in on them. The real purpose of the Break, we presume, is less about giving the viewer space in which to review the preceding evidence than immersing them in cold uncertainty; brakes are slammed on the narrative momentum purely to give that uncertainty a greater vehemence than would otherwise have been merited.

The Beast Must Die might also be seen as a novel hybrid on the temporal front, swathed in characteristically 1970s dress while (thanks to Subotsky's post-production tinkering) looking back fondly on the B pictures of the previous decade, and with at least one component with which it might be regarded as positively ahead of its time - it boasts the rare distinction, for its era, of being a mainstream-skewing British production led by a black protagonist, albeit a fairly unsympathetic one (how nice a guy is Newcliffe if he's willing to falsely imprison and endanger a bunch of people just to kick-start a few adrenalin rushes?) Apparently, Lockhart's casting represented Amicus' response to the rising popularity of the blaxploitation picture in the US, in particular, the recent box office success of the similarly horror-orientated Blacula (1972), and when The Beast Must Die received a Stateside VHS release in the 1980s, it did so under the alternate moniker Black Werewolf, possibly in an effort to link it more directly to the movement. As Black Werewolf, the picture also jettisoned its pivotal Werewolf Break, giving viewers the opportunity to experience the film as the director originally intended - which is to say, probably a lot less flavoursome. As part of the trade-off, however, Black Werewolf did receive one heck of an electrifying cover (do a Google image search on "Black Werewolf VHS"; you're going to love what you see), one that can only have left newcomers hoping to see something a bit more salaciously-charged feeling sorely disappointed (but then what VHS cover from that era didn't promise more than it could deliver?).

To say a few words about the wider casting, although the characters of The Beast Must Die lack the strong personalities of those of the Agatha Christie story it's loosely replicating, the ensemble are charismatic enough to carry it through; in addition to Lockhart, standouts include established Amicus regular Cushing and Chadbon, who plays the bohemian Foote with an air of transparently defensive smugness.

Still tiptoeing cautiously around the matter of the werewolf mystery and how it ultimately resolves itself, I can disclose that The Beast Must Die ends up reaffirming that man, and not beast, is indeed the most dangerous game. And that, most unfortunately for him, he's also his own worst enemy.

Aren't Parents Great???: The Care Bears vs Death and Deadbeats (aka Dark Heart Saved From Drowning)

For a group of beings so dedicated to extolling the values of kindness and friendship, the Care Bears sure seem to have made a lot of enemies out there. A race of touchy-feely ursines who lived up in the clouds in the kingdom of Care-a-Lot and kept a watchful eye on the emotional well-being of the people below, the bears were introduced in 1982 for a line of greetings cards by American Greetings, and within three short years had elevated to the level of superstardom that merited a theatrical feature, courtesy of Canadian animation studio Nelvana. Today, that film has enduring notoriety as the harbinger for what is popularly perceived as the animation industry's darkest hour. A lot has been made of how the surprisingly strong box office of The Care Bears Movie in 1985 absolutely smashed that of Disney's offering for that year, the ill-fated and much-maligned The Black Cauldron, which is cited less as proof of the Care Bears' merits than as the definitive indicator of how Disney, once the reigning masters of the industry, had hit rock bottom in losing to the most unworthy of competition. Mark Whitehead, in The Pocket Essential: Animation, describes The Care Bears Movie as the very worst example of the animation medium, which I personally think is a bit harsh. (Then again, he also called Animaniacs a "cynical corporate monstrosity"  and thought the Creature Comforts adverts were promoting British Gas, so can we really trust his judgement?) Elsewhere, it was not at all uncommon for cartoons in the late 80s and early 90s, still reeling from the state of the industry just a few years prior, to take pot-shots at the Care Bears and their ilk in order to demonstrate that they were above this sickly sweet nonsense. For example, The Care Bears Movie and its successors received an utterly brutal (and hilarious) send up in the Rugrats episode "At The Movies", when Tommy and friends are taken to see a screening of "The Dummi Bears in The Land Without Smiles", an inanely saccharine pic about a group of strangely familiar cloud-dwelling ursines who shoot happy thoughts at the children down below. Which was positively affectionate compared to the bad hand dealt to Fluffy and Uranus, a pair of unsubtle Care Bears pastiches whose only function in Duckman: Private Dick/Family Man was to be violently murdered by the title character every week.

It's not so hard to comprehend why these sweet and non-threatening bears would prove such a ripe target for scorn and parody.  The Care Bears were the unmistakable product of the 1980s, a time when children's programming was dominated by covert commercials attempting to sell them unsightly junk, The Care Bears Movie being one of the first attempts to bring that insidious plush-shilling magic to the big screen (Rainbow Brite, Transformers, My Little Pony and G.I. Joe were all quick to follow in its footsteps). The specific raison d'être of The Care Bears Movie was to plug the Care Bear Cousins, a new line of spin-off toys enabling a variety of non-bear species, including lions, monkeys and rabbits, to get in on the fuzzy sentiments (no rats, though, which is blatant discrimination). The picture does little to disguise its merchandising motives - the entire second act consists of the Care Bears taking a detour in their mission purely so that they can be introduced to the Cousins on an individual basis (and even then, there are more new plushies to shill than the film has time for, so a few of the Cousins have to settle for afterthought status in the act's closing musical number). The Care Bears also came about at a time when the go-to formula for cartoons was to replicate Hanna-Barbera's take on Peyo's The Smurfs, meaning that we got a ton of shows about a community of cute fantastical creatures up against some hammy-ass villain who objected to their relentless preciousness (the villain being the character with whom anyone outside of the target demographic was most likely to identify). If you like your cartoons to be creator-driven and with a little bite, then the decade didn't have a massive amount to offer you.

So yes, I understand the cynicism. And yet, despite knowing and seeing all too clearly the odious commercial ploy at the cold beating heart of the franchise, these bears get no bile from me (or at least the original 80s Bears don't...I've got harsher words to say about their revival in the 2000s). Fact of the matter is, The Care Bears Movie is guaranteed a special place in my heart by virtue of it being the first movie I can remember seeing - on a VHS tape my family bought at Marks & Spencer. And to three-year-old me, this thing seemed like an absolute epic. Even today, when that opening song by Carole King starts up...I can't help it, it sends shivers down my spine for how vividly it's able to transport me to such an early time in my life. My own long-decayed childhood innocence is tied up in this picture, so revisiting it is always a sad and haunting experience for me. The film's first sequel, Care Bears Movie II: A New Generation (1986), doesn't hold quite the same degree of personal nostalgia (I saw it a couple of times as a child, but at an older age, when my interests had largely moved on from the Care Bears), but I still kind of love that one on the grounds that it's such a delirious guilty pleasure. There was one other theatrical Care Bears feature made by Nelvana, The Care Bears Adventure In Wonderland (1987), but that one was not a part of my childhood - I was in my 20s by the time I saw it, and the only detail I remember at all is how thoroughly disturbed I was when I noticed that Grumpy Bear's bathroom had no toilet.

I got to thinking about The Care Bears Movie and Care Bears Movie II: A New Generation after that piece I wrote about the absence of traditional parental figures in Oliver & Company, because it seems to me that many of the exact same issues apply here. The paradox, in the case of The Care Bears Movie, is that one of the final morals, as articulated by a character in the penultimate scene, is "Aren't parents great?", yet the film as a whole seems curiously devoid of evidence as such, much as it is curiously devoid of parental figures, period. There are actually only three adult humans with speaking roles in the entire movie, two of whom are confined to the opening and closing bookends, while the other spends the majority of the narrative in a magic-induced coma. A New Generation, meanwhile, has no such characters at all - its narrative universe is populated entirely by children, Care Bears and the odd shape-shifting incubus. This absence of adults is seldom directly commented on, but there is something implicitly haunting about the scenario; in both pictures, children are imperilled by entities who specifically latch onto and manipulate their lonely despair while the adults aren't watching, either because that oversight is unavailable, or because the adults in this world simply don't care, and it falls upon the Care Bears to pick up the slack. And while the films reinforce the necessity of that oversight, in teaching children to distinguish between right and wrong and supporting them through adversity (even when such vital duties are being fulfilled by the Care Bears in the parents' stead), overall I'm inclined to see them as dealing with the realisation, still incipient in the target demographic, that such surveillance could well be fallible - there's a bigger world out there and sooner or later they're going to be pushed out into it.

First, though, a short note about Care Bear genders: with a few scant exceptions where the gender is entirely evident (eg: Grumpy Bear, Grams Bear and Brave Heart Lion) or where pronouns are helpfully dropped (eg: Wish Bear, Bedtime Bear and Playful Heart Monkey) most of the Care Bears/Care Bear Cousins are androgynous. The overwhelming majority of them are clearly voiced by female voice actors, but I would hesitate to make the call as to whether the characters are meant to be male or female. Take the nasally-sounding Friend Bear, for example - growing up, I always assumed they were female, but nowadays I'm 50/50 on the matter. My preliminary research also indicates that there isn't actually a whole lot of consistency regarding Care Bear genders across the different incarnations anyway; Funshine Bear, for one, has regularly alternated between male and female according to the whims of each individual writer. So unless I'm 100% certain, I'm largely going to avoid referring to individual Care Bears with gender-specific pronouns.

The Care Bears Movie opens in a world that, at first glance, appears to have little to do with those candy-coloured ursines living up in the clouds. Instead, we find ourselves in a foster home down on Earth, where a man named Mr Cherrywood (voice of Mickey Rooney, the most high-profile name in the film's casting) is tucking in his charges for the night and, on their request, regales them with a story they've clearly heard on multiple evenings prior, about the Care Bears and how they saved a bunch of wayward children from succumbing to the forces of despair. Two bears, Friend Bear (Eva Almos) and Secret Bear (Anni Evans), have travelled down to Earth to meet a pair of young siblings, Kim (Cree Summer) and Jason (Sunny Bensen Thrasher), who've closed off their hearts as a self-protective measure after losing their parents, and try to convince them that there is still plenty of good in the world worth caring about. Kim and Jason initially reject their offer of friendship, but end up being accidentally dragged along to Care-a-Lot when the Bears' new teleportation device, the Rainbow Rescue Beam, malfunctions, and are quickly won over by the geniality of the Bears' community. Meanwhile, Tenderheart Bear (Billie Mae Richards) is out on another mission to help Nicholas (Hadley Kay), a socially unpopular teenager wanting desperately for company and self-esteem. Nicholas works as a backstage assistant to a carnival magician, Mr Fettucini (Brian George), and has ambitions of taking the stage himself one day, but is held back by his clumsiness and all-round lack of self-confidence. Unfortunately, Tenderheart isn't the only fantastical being in the vicinity who's heard Nicholas's cries and is eager to exert their influence - in one of Fettucini's crates, he uncovers an old book of ancient magic that so happens to be possessed by a mysterious Spirit (Jackie Borroughs), who assures Nicholas that with her supernatural powers he can force anybody to like him. Tenderheart senses something rotten about this whole arrangement and objects, but he sticks his oar in too late - Nicholas is already enraptured by the Spirit's proposition. The Spirit incapacitates Mr Fettucini by putting him into a deep sleep and encourages Nicholas to take the stage in his absence. Naturally, the Spirit's interests were never in helping Nicholas to gain his big break, but in using him as a pawn in her nefarious scheme to rid the world of caring - she sabotages his act, causing his audience to laugh at him, then plays on his desire for retaliation by having him cast a spell to make them all feel as rotten as he does. On her urging, Nicholas continues to work his anti-compassion magic, with increasingly disastrous effects on humankind's capacity for caring - and on Care-a-Lot, where sharp increases in human misery apparently manifest in the form of non-stop natural disasters.

What's never made clear, at any point, is what the Spirit actually stands to gain from any of this; the film presumes that its audience will be satisfied with the understanding that she is simply a badness to be overcome (one that seems custom-designed to infuriate the Care Bears, in explicitly advocating everything that they do not), with no deeper explanation necessary. The Spirit is probably best understood as a metaphorical villain, a manifestation of the very worst case scenario. This applies to not merely the Care Bears' in-universe fears about a world devoid of caring, but to contemporary parental fears about the various corruptive influences waiting to command the minds of ingenuous youths should they venture too far from their authority. Given the nature of the Spirit's villainy - she lures Nicholas to the dark side by selling him on the merits of real magic and getting him to recite incantations and invoke forces that he does not remotely understand - you don't have to squint terribly hard to see a parallel with the Satanic Panic that had 1980s America wringing its hands over allegations (fuelled by the Christian fundamentalist voices that dominated the era) that rock music and Dungeons & Dragons were enticing teenagers to the occult, all while devil-worshipping cults were secretly in operation at your local daycare. Tenderheart flat-out tells Nicholas that "Magic isn't the answer", a line that feels like it was inserted, if not necessarily as a sincere message to younger viewers who might be inclined to view otherwise, then as lip service to the conservative middle-class parents who were largely responsible for putting cash down to see the film. Still, The Care Bears Movie doesn't just restrict its allusions to moral hysteria about the supposed omnipresence of the occult in everyday society - as Nicholas falls increasingly under the influence of the Spirit, he develops these ominous dark patches under his eyes that cause him to resemble a heroin addict, and is reduced to scavenging around the garbage at the ruined carnival, desperate for the components needed for his next fix. The Spirit represents whatever it is that you don't want supplanting your parental sovereignty in your children's brains, with the world without caring being the logical extension of this corruption.

Putting a wrench in the Spirit's plans for total emotive conquest are Kim and Jason, who remain unaffected by Nicholas' spells due to their close proximity to the Care Bears. Although Kim and Jason have learned that they've a pair of prospective adoptive parents lined up for them back on Earth, they're reluctant to resume their lives while their new friends are facing such a dire emergency, and offer to assist the Care Bears in their fight against Nicholas and the Spirit. Unfortunately, further malfunctioning from the Rainbow Rescue Beam has them stranded in a mysterious land known as the Forest of Feelings, along with Friend Bear and Secret Bear, while the remaining Care Bears can only set off down a nearby river in the hope of reaching them. Meanwhile, Nicholas is goaded into summoning up another spirit, one who can shape-shift into different forms (anticipating the villain of Care Bears Movie II, who has the exact same ability), to hunt out Kim and Jason during their accidental excursion through the Forest of Feelings. The second spirit's actual purpose is to bridge the otherwise complete disconnect between the main conflict with Nicholas and the Spirit and the entire second act, which serves only to push us away from the task at hand so that we can get those Cousins on board. The Bears get into various jams, so that Swift Heart, Cozy Heart et al. can appear and use their individual talents to help them. Then onto Earth for a climactic showdown.

An aspect of The Care Bears Movie that stands out as almost endearingly quaint is its severely limited scope - for a film in which the emotional and social well-being of the entire world is allegedly at stake, we see very little evidence of this first-hand. "Earth", in this picture, seems to consist almost exclusively of the carnival where Nicholas works; when the carnival falls into ruin as a result of Nicholas' spell, it becomes our shorthand for that world without caring, with its symbols of broken childhood innocence and joy buried underneath the rubble of despair. While I'm sure there were a few budgetary constraints dictating these narrative restrictions, the underlying explanation is that the crisis in question isn't really about saving the world, but preventing Nicholas from being totally consumed by his allegorical addiction; this much is verbalised during the final confrontation, when Nicholas' ultimate spell fails to take full effect due to Kim and Jason still being at large, and the Care Bears specifically declare that there is still time to save him. Which they intend to do by staging a grand, rainbow-powered intervention to make Nicholas kick his socially undesirable habit.

In The Care Bears Movie, and Care Bears Movie II, the absence of caring manifests as anger and destructiveness, as opposed to mere apathy, with children (and, in the sequel, animals) running amuck and aggressively turning on anything in their paths (how the adult world is affected is not depicted, which is probably just as well). It's the kind of negative energy that the film's young demographic can recognise and respond to, albeit one that I suspect does not even touch upon the true horrors as to what a world drained of all benevolence would look like, if all our apocalypse really comes down to is a few unruly children needing to be reined in at a fairground. To my adult sensibilities, the film feels more effective in its subtler explorations of childhood angst, notably the despondence underpinning the Bears' early interactions with Kim and Jason, and the insecurity that makes Nicholas so susceptible to the wheedling of the Spirit. Just as Nicholas' character trajectory trades on parental fears about losing one's children to external contamination, Kim and Jason's looks to the opposite end of the spectrum, by addressing childhood concerns about the limitations of parental care. Before the film begins, they have experienced a trauma that has taught them something of the impermanence of life. The absence of their parents is addressed in only the vaguest, most tactful of terms - we're told that they "went away", but it's not altogether clear what we're supposed to take from that. It could be a nice, tot-friendly euphemism for indicating that they're dead, and that does seem to be the most common interpretation (the Wikipedia synopsis claims they were killed in a car accident, but that's more specificity than the film itself offers). Personally, it was always my impression that their parents were alive but had relinquished care of them. I base that partly on the fact that there does seem to be a real resentment toward their AWOL parents bubbling below the surface of their initial Care Bear encounter (which, granted, could still apply if they were dead) - Jason assures Friend Bear and Secret Bear that "people you care for" will "always let you down". In either case, Jason does have a valid point - forming any kind of emotional attachment inevitably comes with an element of risk, and he and Kim have not developed the resilience to be capable of facing up to that risk.

The film sets up a potent dilemma for Kim and Jason, but arguably finds too easy a solution. Before the first act is over, the orphans have already had their jolly getaway in Care-a-Lot and been fully converted to the path of love and caring. Mr Cherrywood's insistence that "their troubles were over" feels glib, given that the troubles in question (coping with parental death or abandonment) are not something we would expect to be remedied with an overnight fix. Somewhat inevitably, Kim and Jason become less interesting characters for the remainder of the film - they do not have an outstanding amount of personality between them, nor is there a whole lot differentiating their characters. At the start of the film, Friend Bear tells us something of their individual interests and ambitions ("Kim reads a lot and wants to be a nurse when she grows up, and Jason, you want to be a jet pilot") but none of this has any bearing on the plot. The closest either gets to a singular character arc is in Tenderheart's decision to entrust the key to the lock on the Spirit's book to Jason, but he could just as easily have given it to Kim and it wouldn't have changed a thing. Only at the climax, when Kim and Jason succeed in convincing Nicholas to come down from his power trip with a display of empathy (they remember how it felt to believe that there was nothing in life worth caring about), do they begin to feel like characters again and less like McGuffins.

Once again, the story's real interests are centred around the wayward Nicholas, whose parents are likewise completely absent, although no explanation is given in their case. The closest thing he has to a guardian is his boss Mr Fettucini - he functions as a kind of substitute parent to Nicholas, one who initially affords him little tolerance for his shortcomings, and Nicholas' movement to the dark side is clearly linked to Fettucini's failure to provide him with positive guidance, leaving the void wide open for less benevolent forces to fill. And, for what her villainy lacks in dimension, there is something eerily authentic in the way the Spirit succeeds in stringing the reluctant Nicholas along, particularly when we reach the part where she convinces him that he is to blame for what happened and will be held accountable if he does not finish what he started. At its heart, The Care Bears Movie deals with a barrage of anxieties that relate to the nascent awareness of its young audience that things cannot stay the same forever, and that parental protection may not always be there to shield them from life's misfortunes - these anxieties include the inevitability of having to deal with a world outside of the domestic sphere, the problem of distinguishing between a potential danger and a prospective friend, and of learning to trust in one's merits and survive on one's own. The role of the Care Bears in all of this is to function as a kind of stand-in for that parental guidance, wherever it is unavailable, offering judgement and a moral compass to children whose understanding of the world is still in progress. Invaluable though this input is, the ultimate necessity for the child to stand on their own is acknowledged via the limitations that are placed on the Care Bears' powers. In times of adversity, the Care Bears' best recourse is to stand together and unleash their "Care Bear Stare" - beams of positive energy are emitted from the symbols on their abdomens, which apparently have the power to ward off malevolent forces, and, in an obvious call to the importance of unity, become increasingly powerful the more Care Bears join in (this is elucidated as the Care Bears' ability to articulate their feelings, and the Cousins have an arc in the third act in which they wonder how they too can do the same, before finally settling on calling in unison). Using their patented Stare, the Care Bears are eventually able to repel the shape-shifting spirit that's been on their tail all throughout the second act. Problem is, when you later see them unleashing this same power on the teenage Nicholas, it registers more obviously as, if not an act of violence, then certainly a display of aggressive force. This hard line assertion of authority proves ineffective against Nicholas and the Spirit; what Nicholas does respond to is the understanding he receives from his peers in the form of Kim and Jason, who are actively defying Tenderheart's instructions in choosing to get close to the confrontation. The children, and not their stand-in parents, are thus privileged with the narrative's definitive redemptive power, which is posited as the triumph of empathy over forceful control.

Despite the display of unity between Nicholas, Kim and Jason at the film's climax, the final outcome seems to propel their parties in opposite directions. Kim and Jason are permitted to reclaim the childhood innocence that was taken from them too soon, in the form of their new adoptive parents. The parents are treated as a kind of status symbol, indicators that order has been restored, both to the world as a whole, and to Kim and Jason individually - hence Kim's rather cringeworthy line, "Aren't parents great?" Meanwhile, Nicholas is reconciled with his parental substitute, Mr Fettucini, but there is an equality to their final arrangement that conveys a working partnership as much as a familial unity, indicating that Nicholas has taken his first real steps toward adulthood. Fettucini has undergone a change of heart that is not explicitly linked to the intervention of the Care Bears in any way; he has decided to let Nicholas perform with him onstage - inspired, so he claims, by the wonderful dream he was having while all hell was breaking lose around his unconscious body. Unlike Kim and Jason, Nicholas does not require restoration to the security of the traditional family unit, and is instead satisfied with the reassurance that "someone would be watching over him at all times" - there is still a place his life for that kind of parental oversight, if by proxy via the Care Bears, but at a respectful distance that allows him to forge his own way.

Afterwards, we return to Mr Cherrywood, who is nearing the end of his story and is bemused that, once again, his charges have all nodded off before he could reveal the most important detail - that is, what ultimately became of Nicholas. This takes us into the movie's big twist, which, to be fair, you probably saw coming from the outset - Mr Cherrywood muses that, "I guess all they need to know is that he too lived happily ever after...happier than I ever thought I could be." In case you still didn't grasp the significance of that, his wife walks in and obligingly stipulates that, "Nicholas, these children should have been in bed ages ago." It's a nice, gentle twist that, as I say, won't feel terribly gob-smacking to anybody over the age of five (I actually don't remember if I had any strong reaction to the revelation as a three-year-old). Not only is there an obvious physical resemblance between the two, in the opening bookend numerous hints are dropped that Mr Cherrywood is an ex-circus performer - he does a juggling trick for the children and wishes that their dreams be filled with various circus-related staples, and the hat that he wears while telling his story is identical to one Nicholas wears when performing his magic act. The revelation demonstrates how Nicholas, our former junkie turned sweater-wearing patriarch, internalised his experience with the Care Bears, to the extent that he now carries on their legacy by providing that same kind of stand-in guidance to children whose own parental relations have, for whatever reason, broken down. And just when you were supposing that his whole account really was just a fanciful allegory for how he overcame addiction in his youth and was molded into an upstanding citizen, who should transpire to have been lurking outside the window the entire time but his old buddy Tenderheart Bear, who is still keeping tabs on Nicholas after all these years.

Exactly how many years might actually be a matter of some contention. I note that, in addition to having information about the fate of Kim and Jason's biological parents that is not included in the film, Wikipedia is strangely specific about the story's time frame - as per its synopsis, the framing narrative with Mr Cherrywood and his charges takes place in 1984, while the main story is set 17 years prior, in 1967. I've no idea where that came from - if there are any hard indicators of the respective temporal settings in the film itself, they passed me by - but that doesn't really track with Mr Cherrywood's presumed age in the framing story. It's never specified how old Nicholas is supposed to be during his brush with the occult, but I would estimate 17 at the oldest. And if only 17 years have passed in the interim, that would make him 34 in the modern day. You're kidding, he looks at least 50! If the framing story is meant to be set in the mid-1980s, then it would make far more sense for the main story to have taken place in the 1940s or 1950s. But then The Care Bears Movie never strikes me as a period piece in any way - it is, after all, aimed at a demographic too young to understand anything much beyond the present, and as such it seems to be set in an all-purpose childhood that does not tie itself to any specific era, nor seem radically removed from the one to which modern kids would relate. Incidentally, it's a popular assumption that Mrs Cherrywood is the grown-up Kim, given the passable physical resemblance between the two of them, although Nicholas isn't obliging enough to confirm it, addressing her only as "Mrs Cherrywood". It's an implication I can do without, for the same reason I could have done without just about everything in that epilogue to the final Harry Potter book - this idea, endemic in children's fiction, that everybody ends up getting married to people they grew up with as kids, while not exactly unheard of in real life, does seem awfully twee. But then criticising a property like the Care Bears for tweeness would be the very height of churlishness (Harry Potter has fewer excuses, but that's another story).

Nelvana continued their Care Bears streak the following year with Care Bears Movie II: A New Generation. Although this picture is nominally a sequel to the original, it's a tremendous challenge trying to consolidate the two narratives into a coherent timeline. The second movie provides a common origin story for both the Care Bears and the Care Bear Cousins, one that flat-out contradicts the events of its predecessor, which hinged on the idea that the two tribes were entirely oblivious to the other's existence until now. A New Generation saw the franchise reboot itself right out the gate, in a particularly confusing case of same characters, different continuity. It also recycles a generous number of story beats from the original, to the point that it could ostensibly be taken as a remake, at least for the first two thirds. The Care Bears befriend a couple of children, Dawn (Alyson Court) and John (Michael Fantini), who might as well be Kim and Jason all over again, only minus the traumatic backstory, and reinstate their lost confidence. Meanwhile, a particularly dejected child - a girl this time, named Christy (Cree Summer) - has her own pleas for acceptance answered by a very different kind of being, a malevolent shape-shifting entity named Dark Heart (Hadley Kay), who is intent on eliminating the Care Bears and manipulates the impressionable Christy into doing his bidding. Like the Spirit before him, Dark Heart is a Satanically-coded villain - whatever guise he assumes, he's always an ominous shade of red, and his dubious deal takes the form of a Faustian bargain, enabling Christy to surpass her peers in exchange for her allegiances. Also like the Spirit, his motivation for wanting to rid the world of all positive feeling is never established, although in Dark Heart's case it is at least suggested that he has a long-standing vendetta with the Care Bear elders, True Heart Bear (Maxine Miller) and Noble Heart Horse (Pam Hyatt), that he's anxious to settle. The greatest differentiating factor lies in the dynamic between pawn and villain - Dark Heart appears to Christy in the form of a human child, giving her the thinly-held illusion that she's dealing with one of her peers, and it's as clear as day that the film's producers fully intended for their young audience to ship the two as a couple. This has a significant bearing on the final outcome of the story - whereas the original ends with Nicholas rejecting the Spirit and literally closing the book on her, A New Generation ends with Christy managing to re-educate Dark Heart by teaching him something unexpected about the quality of mercy. Ostensibly, Christy is the sequel's analogue to Nicholas, with the twist that Dark Heart was the story's real lost child all along (an outcome telegraphed in the fact that he shares the same voice as Nicholas), a metaphor fully realised in the film's conclusion. When, ultimately, Dark Heart loses his malefic powers and finds himself permanently stranded in his human form, he treats it as a cause for tremendous celebration.

Like its predecessor, the Earthly events in A New Generation are restricted to a single setting, a summer camp, which also becomes a wasteland of uncaring as the villain exerts their influence. A summer camp, though, doesn't offer quite the same sense of delirious childhood thrills as a carnival - rather, it's fraught with anxieties over parental separation and banishment from home into the dark unknown (no coincidence that by 1986 it was already a well-established setting for slasher movies). A New Generation goes a step further in doing away with a purpose for parents in this universe altogether. Unlike the original, there are no adult humans in A New Generation; instead, the children appear to run the camp by themselves, in a Lord of The Flies type scenario, with the most capable child, or "camp champ", attaining the privilege of getting to order their inferiors about, a status that Christy covets to her detriment. True Heart and Noble Heart fulfil vital roles as parental figures to the Bears and the Cousins, but down on Earth parents are such a non-issue that when Dark Heart becomes a child full-time, it's never established how he's going to survive in the world, given that he has no family or means of support. The substitute family unit comprised of Dawn, John, Christy and Dark Heart (another awkward question that's never addressed...is he still going to answer to that baleful moniker?) is regarded as security enough. Dark Heart is last seen declaring his intention to remain at the camp and create an equal society where everybody is recognised as camp champ. The impermanence of life is again acknowledged through the coming of age of the Bears and Cousins, which occurs alongside Dark Heart's dealings at the camp, but the camp itself seems to exist within an endless summer in which the occupants never have to acknowledge the realities of the world beyond...if indeed there is a beyond at all. The final outcome presents a compromise between the two alternate states represented at the end of The Care Bears Movie, privileging the children of A New Generation with the dual status of adulthood and childhood at once and enabling them to affirm their independence while remaining perpetually in their utopia of youthful purity. The recovery of youthful innocence, as symbolised through Dark Heart's transformation, is posited as redemptive in the face of life's despair, a point reinforced in the film's closing song, "Forever Young" (no, not the one about impending nuclear war), which emphasises a correlation between staying a child at heart and staying receptive to one's emotions.

The limitations of the parental oversight embodied by the Care Bears are tested to a much greater degree in A New Generation. The film has an anti-violence message, even more pronounced than that of the original, in that it implicates not only Dark Heart, but also the Care Bears themselves in the wrongdoing. In the film's third act, True Heart and Noble Heart make the misguided decision to abandon their charges to pursue a weakened Dark Heart (unaware that they are being tricked into following his shadow) with the intention of finishing off his evil for good. It's never explicitly stated, but they do mean to kill him, right? This is clearly at odds with Christy's philosophy, vindicated at the end of the film, that all living things, good or bad, are entitled to a basic degree of compassion. Hence why she is unable to abandon the hopelessly accident-prone Dark Heart when he is on course for a watery grave, a point Christy uses to reassert her moral superiority over him, recognising how much she has compromised herself through their association ("Maybe that's the only difference between us"). Later, during the climactic confrontation between Dark Heart and the Care Bears, Christy intervenes and gets caught in the crossfire, and is potentially killed (or petrified/enchanted...it's admittedly difficult to tell). Dark Heart ceases his attack and implores the Care Bears to reverse the process, but they regretfully tell him that this is beyond their power. This prompts Dark Heart to ask the Care Bears a question to which they seemingly have no answer - "What good is all your love, your caring, if it cannot save this child?" - and I have encountered at least one person who found the implications of that objectionable. Would the kind and loving values that the Care Bears stand for really have been rendered meaningless if they were unable to pull off something as miraculous as raising the dead (or petrified/enchanted)? Or are the Bears perhaps being called out for their hypocrisy, given that they were unable to see in Dark Heart what Christy did - that is, the vulnerable person (or whatever he is) underneath? It's in Dark Heart's guileless response to the issue of death that we see shades of the same anger articulated by Kim and Jason at the start of the original film; they're all characters who are experiencing loss for the first time and have no idea how to process it. Once again, we are offered too easy a solution, albeit one that invites the active input of the audience to demonstrate their own capacity for caring. In a plot point lifted wholesale from Tinkerbell's resurrection in Peter Pan, the viewer is urged to join in with the Care Bears as they all cry out in unison how much they care, in an act of defiance against the tragedy that threatens to claim their friend. It goes without saying that Christy will be fine whether you put in the effort for her or not. All that matters is that her demonic boyfriend is eventually able to add his own voice to the crowd, and that proves to be the tipping point. Christy is revived, and Dark Heart can never go back to what he was.

Hokey? You bet. It also allows the film to duck out of answering the surprisingly weighty question put to the Care Bears by Dark Heart. But again, when you're dealing with a property like the Care Bears, a little hokiness goes along with the territory. And besides, this device does appear to be a fairly prevalent one in children's media. Thirteen years later we saw the exact same plot point show up in Pokemon: The First Movie - no explicit call for audience participation this time, but Ash/Satoshi is revived from a similarly unresponsive state by the oddly unpleasant creatures (Halliwell's description, not mine) who gather around his smoking corpse and weep for him in unison. Given that this is in total defiance of how death works in the real world, I wonder what it is about this device that should make it so appealing to these movies' creators? There is, perhaps, something deeply harrowing about the wish fulfilment, the desire to override grief by desperately pleading with the cosmos that it not be so, the takeaway being that it's in this shared helplessness in the scheme of things that we should recognise our unity, and consequently our strength.

And since the film tiptoes up to the issue of mortality without ever quite venturing in, I'm left with another question regarding Dark Heart - given the ingenuousness of his comprehension of death while Christy's life is on the line, when he becomes fully human at the end of the film...does he appreciate that death is an inevitable part of the package? Or is that whole matter negated with it being endlessly summer around here?

19 & Vietnam Requiem

Paul Hardcastle's "19" was an unlikely hit back in 1985. An innovative mixture of spoken word collaging and Afrika Bambaataa-style electro, the track made a few concessions to the pop crowd - in Hardcastle's words, "I added a bit of jazz and a nice melody" - but the dialogue, with its explicit emphasis on death, PTSD and, above all, the grim statistic that the average age of the US combat soldier during the Vietnam War had been "N-n-n-nineteen", seemed all but guaranteed to turn off mainstream palates. Instead, the record struck a nerve with the zeitgeist of the time - boosted, in no small way, by the renewed interest in the subject following the tenth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War - and went on to top the charts in multiple countries. Copious remixes have been created across the years, enough to fill up an entire compilation album for the record's 30th anniversary in 2015. Among these remixes are the "History Keeps Repeating Itself" version Hardcastle created in 2010 for the record's 25th anniversary, in which he drew parallels between the war in Vietnam and the current conflict in Afghanistan, and the PTSD mix created in support of the charity Talking2Minds in 2015.

The source of the track's dialogue was a 1982 documentary, Vietnam Requiem, directed by Jonas McCord and Bill Couturie and produced by ABC News as part of its long-running Closeup series. Narrated by Peter Thomas (the most prominent voice heard throughout Hardcastle's track), the 48-minute film focusses on one of several harrowing legacies of the Vietnam War - the high arrest rates among Vietnam veterans, which, the documentary tells us, are almost double those of non-veterans of the same age. Vietnam Requiem is comprised largely of talking heads pieces with five veterans who, at the time of the documentary, were each serving prison terms of varying lengths, but none of whom, Thomas stresses, had any history of criminal behaviour prior to their service in Vietnam. Interspersed among their accounts are snippets from archival ABC News broadcasts and stock footage of the combat, as Thomas draws continuous comparisons between the experiences of the Vietnam vets and those of their predecessors in World War II, identifying various factors that, added together, might account for the heightened sense of alienation felt by the former. The existence of Hardcastle's track was a source of some contention among the documentary's creators; not only did the use of audio samples result in legal hurdles, for which, according to the track's promoter Ken Grunbaum, there were no precedents, and which resulted in them having to pay royalties to Thomas, but ABC objected when the track's music video became its own remix project, collaging footage from the original documentary. But whether ABC likes or loathes it, the record remains a significant component of the documentary's legacy, and the success of Hardcastle's track can only have increased its profile among the general public.

The most prominent of the interviewees in Vietnam Requiem is Albert "Peewee" Dobbs, a former US Army sergeant currently serving a seven and a half year sentence for attempted armed robbery, who has the distinction of being the only soldier to be represented in the featured combat footage. Peewee is also the only veteran of the five who gets to recount the circumstances surrounding his crime in any kind of detail - for the remaining four, the actual nature of the crime is strategically concealed until the very end of the documentary, when we learn that they range from second degree assault to aggravated rape, the magnitude of their sentences from 2-6 to life. Strategic, I suspect, because the intention was for us to see the human first, and for their fall from grace to play less like the defining aspect of their story than a sombre epilogue which, given the bigger picture, has an air of haunting inevitability about it. The documentary hinges on the gulf between what is explicitly expressed and the emotional horror always lingering at the back of every monologue; the question as to what happened to these men, post-Vietnam, is both left dangling and, on another more intuitive level, answered all too starkly. It's an approach that, nevertheless, might end up backfiring for some viewers, as it risks rendering the documentary somewhat disingenuous, given its near-total unwillingness to confront the criminal component of its narrative directly. This was something that contemporary reviewer Tom Shales was highly critical of in his write-up for the Washington Post: "the precise link between combat duty in Vietnam and the fate of these five men is never clearly established; the program doesn't even look into it...when one learns that two of the men are serving time for rape, a great deal more explanation is necessary than is given."

I had a similar reaction to Shales regarding those final revelations, although it is difficult not to moved by many of the stories told in Vietnam Requiem, and by the means through which it targets another form of disingenuousness - the disingenuousness in society's inability, or unwillingness to comprehend the gulf between Peewee the model soldier and Peewee the attempted armed robber. At the start of the documentary we hear that Peewee was heavily decorated for heroism on return and, as per his presidential citation, his "devotion to duty and personal courage were in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service, and reflect great credit on himself, his unit and the United States Army." We later learn a disturbing story about Pee Wee during combat that seems far more in keeping with the traumatic realities of war - how, on one occasion, he brutally slaughtered a family of civilians on the assumption that they had been complicit in a Viet Cong ambush in which seventeen of his friends were killed. Peewee reflects that they paid the price purely because they happened to be present at a time when he thirsted for retaliation; he was driven by the impulsive belief that they had no right to live when so many of his companions had died, and that "somehow I had the right to make that decision". Peewee also ruminates on the extent to which he remains a prisoner of that moment, in a manner that clearly extends beyond the circumstances of his literal imprisonment. "Now I see those people just as clearly every night as I did on that day, and they're just as real as I am, or as anyone else is...and now when it rains I can smell death." Peewee's words, so haunting in their sombre articulacy, are counterbalanced by the more bluntly grotesque terms used by one anonymous witness to Peewee's tirade, who comments that "he turned them into jellyfish". What made the incident particularly appalling was the utter mundaneness with which it was apparently regarded at the time: "these officers looked over their shoulders like he had just dropped a two by four off the back of a pick-up truck on a job site."

Perhaps the documentary's preliminary point that War is Hell does not come as much of a revelation to us, but Vietnam Requiem has powerful words to say about the human willingness to dehumanise the other in times of conflict. This is something that Peewee reflects on at the end of the film, when he observes that "It seemed somehow like it was some kind of equation, how many human lives equals a human life, how many of your buddies equals one Vietnamese." Although his voice is far more sidelined compared to Peewee's, another interviewee, James McAllister, reflects on how it felt to return home and find himself the dehumanised other in another conflict that was still going on upon his own soil - the racial discrimination that he faced as an African American, which added to his sense of bitter disillusionment. Where Vietnam Requiem best succeeds is in the picture that emerges in the back-end of the documentary of the vets' inability to readjust to the world they had left behind. Having walked and observed the tissue-thin line between life and death, omnipresent in the arena of armed conflict, in which the human form can be reduced to something resembling beached jellyfish within the blink of an eye, the relative quietude of everyday living offered not a return to normalcy, but a banishment into unreality - exacerbated, Thomas states, among other things, by the brief window in which the veterans were expected to acclimatise from combat in the jungle to life in the suburbs. Unlike their WWII counterparts, who had largely returned home together in troop ships, soldiers typically left Vietnam alone, by commercial jet, within 48 hours of combat. The contrast between the two worlds was overwhelming - in Peewee's words: "Mom looked the same, apple pie tastes just as good. It wasn't home...it seemed that I had come from the most real place in the world. Maybe the only real place in the world, where things were measured in terms of lives and deaths." At this point, the talking heads sequences extends to members of Peewee's family, who reflect the fundamental incompatibility between the Peewee who returned and the ordinary life he had, for a time, attempted to resume. We learn that Peewee had attempted to redefine himself as a family man and, in one unsettling anecdote, came dangerously close to inadvertently strangling his wife one night during a particularly vivid flashback.

A striking motif that appears throughout the final quarter of the documentary is that of a sunset viewed through the oppressive mesh of a chain-link fence - symbolic, one presumes, of the dual entrapment of its subjects, captives of walls both literal and emotional, and of that faded, inaccessible future Peewee alludes to when he ruminates on the human cost of war, and the part of himself that perished along with those lives he was once so accustomed to taking: "You stop and you think about the sons, and the dreams, that aren't gonna be any more. Not just the people that you killed and the lives that you killed. And that does it for your own." Peewee's final words (prominently sampled in the "Final Story" remix of Hardcastle's track) are, "All we want to do is come home, that's all." Juxtaposed with the film's closing image, which shows a fence stretching off into the distance amid the increasing darkness of the night sky, presided over by the silhouettes of two watch towers, this seems a forlorn prospect. The film's unspoken conclusion is that there is no longer a home for any of these subjects, only  containment; their experiences have left them cut off and stranded in a no man's land, still too entrenched in the nightmare to be able to relate to the present, which itself offers only the bitter disillusionment of squandered hope and ruptured innocence. The literal prison fences glimpsed at the end seem to perfectly exemplify that state.

The crucial bit of data that took centre stage in Hardcastle's track - the documentary's claim that the average age of the soldiers was 19 - is here regarded as just one of many unhappy pieces of context. According to Hardcastle, this figure became the track's central hook due to limitations in contemporary sampling technology - he needed a sound bite that effectively told the entire story in two seconds, and the ages of the soldiers (seven years younger than their WWII equivalents) stood out as one of the most essential details. The emphasis on the number 19, and the youth of the subjects in question, is terribly troubling. 19, we would all agree, is a tragically young age to die. It is likewise a tragically young age to die the kind of figurative death explored in Vietnam Requiem. The number, in Hardcastle's track, becomes an exemplification of the no man's land in which the documentary subjects remain stranded, a shorthand for everything cruel and nightmarish about their situation; the manner in which the track fixates on and repeats the word conveys something of how that nightmare can only reverberate in the present. The voices we hear are mired in their experiences at 19, in the most chilling possible way - they were both too young to die, and old before their time.

All Singing, All Dancing (aka Last Night At La La Land)

When "All Singing, All Dancing" (aka episode 5F24) first aired on January 4th 1998, it was the fourth installment in what, at the time, looked to be an established tradition of Simpsons clip shows. By now it seemed an accepted wisdom that these things were going to show up every other season or so (whether the fans appreciated them or not). In actuality, "All Singing, All Dancing" would prove to be the penultimate specimen in a doomed lineage - after this, clip shows as a practice just faded out, resurfacing briefly for a final hurrah (if you could call it that) with Season 13's "Gump Roast". It's well-documented (since they bring it up in every pertinent DVD commentary) that the production staff were not fond of the format and only made them out of executive obligation; in the case of "All Singing, All Dancing", it is perhaps a testament to how little they thought of the end-product that they trotted it out at a time when viewers might have been too preoccupied with getting the new year in order after the barrage of seasonal hangovers to worry terribly about that week's lack of original Simpsons content.

"All Singing, All Dancing" dropped midway through Season 9, a very patchy transitional period for the series consisting of holdovers from the Oakley-Weinstein era, the early days of Mike Scully's reign of terror and guest appearances from former showrunners Al Jean, Mike Reiss and David Mirkin (the last of whom oversaw "All Singing, All Dancing"). It's no secret that I don't much care for Season 9 as a whole; there's a lot I could say about the various missteps that were made that pushed the series off of course, but for now I'll just sum up my number one grievance -  this was the first season in five years not to feature an appearance from Sideshow Bob. Season 9 was an upsettingly Bob-free experience - Seasons 2 and 4, which had no actual Bob episodes, at least had the decency to give him non-speaking cameos. The sole acknowledgement he received in all of Season 9 was a very fleeting shout-out in "This Little Wiggy". Didn't that just jinx things good and proper?

The DVD cover art, though, is precious.

Being a clip show, you can bet that "All Singing, All Dancing" is seldom rated as one of the higher points of a wobbly season. There is, however, a valid sentiment underpinning this oft-maligned, music-driven mash-up - which is to say, hasn't The Simpsons yielded some legitimately brilliant sonic compositions over the years? "Who Needs The Kwik-E-Mart?" and "The Monorail Song" are both diabolical in their infectiousness. And face it, the only reason you rate "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" as highly as you do is because of Burns' "See My Vest" number (cards on table, is there really anything else about that episode that sticks out to you at all? Aside from maybe the Shar Pei?). It seems a waste, really, that The Simpsons Movie contained no comparable song and dance sequences - one can only imagine what they might have accomplished working within a theatrical scope - something I can only attribute to the animated musical being considered the trough of fashion in 2007.

The episode opens with Homer returning from the video store with the family's evening entertainment; Marge had requested Forest Whittaker's Waiting To Exhale (1995), starring Whitney Houston, while Lisa's heart was set on the back-up option, Douglas McGrath's adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma (1996), starring Gwyneth Paltrow. Both are disappointed by his actual choice, Joshua Logan's Paint Your Wagon (1969), starring Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin, which Homer assumes will be a regular carnage-filled shoot-em-up western. But then, as we'd already seen in "Fear of Flying", Homer is a poor judge when it comes to deciphering the nature of a movie from its cover and title. He's appalled to discover that Paint Your Wagon is actually - get this - a musical, and that the characters solve their problems through singing and dancing instead of gruesome bloodbaths. Homer expresses his disdain for the picture by ejecting the rented VHS tape into the trash and denouncing singing as "the lowest form of communication", whereupon Marge and Lisa (who'd rated Paint Your Wagon as toe-tappin' fun) try to convince him of the powerful musical streak that runs deep throughout the town, backing up their point by referring to various euphonious interludes from previous adventures. The grand and inevitable irony being that this entire argument takes the form of a song.

Although these Simpsons clip shows are something that I've covered in the past with disproportionate passion (bolstered by the knowledge that nobody else on Earth is likely to share that passion, so if I don't provide them with such fawning, drawn-out analyses, who will?), I will state upfront that I never had any intention of extending that devotion to "All Singing, All Dancing". By the time we get to this one - and even more so with the final clip show, "Gump Roast" - I find my that my patience is somewhat tested and my opinions start aligning with the majority, which is to say that I'd sooner be watching a regular episode. I did, however, have a slight change of heart which made me want to go back and examine this one a little deeper. Out of sheer curiosity, I'd gone to look up the AV Club's review of "All Singing, All Dancing" and, after quite a bit of double-checking, determined that no such item existed. To the contrary, the AV Club has reviews for every Simpsons episode from Season 1 to 9 except this one lonesome pariah, which they appear to have very deliberately and stealthily skipped over, leaping directly from "Miracle on Evergreen Terrace" to "Bart Carny" with no acknowledgement of all the musical fruitiness sandwiched in between. Odd, because they deemed all three previous clip shows worthy of their own individual write-ups. Did they really consider it such an impossibly daunting task to have to spin out a few paragraphs on this one? What was it about "All Singing, All Dancing" that made it so especially exasperating that the AV Club were compelled to throw in the towel, completism be damned? I felt as though a gauntlet was being extended to me, to delve in and see if this episode could withstand any kind of protracted probing. I guess the AV Club's omission awakened some deep protective instinct in me - which might not be enough to actually bring me around to "All Singing, All Dancing", mind, but I'm willing to give it a fair shake.

While I consider it somewhat brazen that they skipped it altogether (if you're going to be undertaking that kind of rigid, episode-by-episode analysis, then I'm not sure you're really in a position to be differentiating between worthy and unworthy episodes), I can sympathise with the AV Club's trepidation. "All Singing, All Dancing" is a gut-wrenching episode to anybody looking to say anything at all substantial, and at length, because it hinges on quite possibly the thinnest premise the series had boasted up until this point. There's very little plot linking the clips together - once we get past the Paint Your Wagon opening (which is really good), the family just discuss (in song form) how much they love/hate singing, between "music videos" culled from previous episodes. The selection of clips itself is honestly pretty solid - if you just want to review a collection of musical highs from the series back-to-back, then "All Singing" mightn't be too offensive - but judged as a Frankenstein entity on its own terms, there is a certain frothiness about it, as liable to irritate as to disarm. Overall, I think that most of the entertainment value I've derived from "All Singing, All Dancing" comes not from the content of the episode itself, but from how two members of my own family each related to it:

1. For a while (possibly still) this was my brother's pick for the prestigious title of Worst. Episode. Ever. He had no profound objection to any of the previous three clip shows, but took tremendous issue with this one. Which largely seemed to be on account of Bart's line, "Springfield swings like a pendulum do!" That line REALLY pissed him off. Not that I can blame him - those are some pretty atrocious lyrics.
   
2. Generally speaking, my dad hates musicals, and would no doubt sympathise with Homer's stance therein. There are, however, two musicals for which he's willing to make an exception - the stage version of Les Misérables (the less said to him about the 2012 film adaptation the better) and...I shit you not, Joshua Logan's Paint Your Wagon. I don't think he's ever seen this particular episode, but I recall him being somewhat disappointed to learn that it was sent up on The Simpsons. Of course, it goes without saying that the footage we see here is pure pastiche (like the version of Alive Marge watches in "Fear of Flying"), and that the real Paint Your Wagon isn't exactly like this (for one thing, the plot of the film does not actually revolve around the painting of a wagon) - although if you came to it expecting something more along the lines of The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, you were in for a rude awakening. Also, as per some backstage accounts, Lee Marvin was perpetually drunk and violent during the making of the film.
   

The gimmick of having the family sing their connective dialogue, making the episode a mini-musical in its own right, while distinctive and ambitious, is not particularly successful. The reason why it doesn't work honestly has very little to do with the quality of the music itself. Arguably, the episode is hamstrung in the sense that none of the original musical sequences (with the possible exception of the Paint Your Wagon number) are half as enjoyable or as memorable as the material from which it's pooling, but one particularly abominable "pendulum do" line notwithstanding, I'd say they're perfectly serviceable from a strictly sonic standpoint. No, the real limitation that this show nosedives right into and never overcomes has to do with the staging. The Simpsons spend the entirety of the episode inside their living room, meaning that "All Singing" doesn't exactly have a great deal to work with in terms of bringing these new interludes to life. Bart performs the occasional stilted jig (expect nothing as grand as his fancy foot work in "Homer vs Patty and Selma") and at one point Lisa does a big dramatic slide across the floor, but overall there is a conspicuous lack of visual energy and imagination behind the musical sequences. Got to keep those production costs down, I suppose. It's true that "Another Simpsons Clip Show" also restricted most of the "original" action (a lot of which was redubbed from recycled footage anyway) to the family's breakfast table. But then "Another Simpsons Clip Show" was never attempting to be anything so showy or elaborate as a 22-minute musical. By its very nature, we would expect a musical to engage in a little kinetic amplification, to present the family's world from a different, more stylised perspective and to elevate itself above the humdrum - something obviously well beyond this cost-cutting project's resources. It's a problem that I fear had always doomed "All Singing" to failure.

The best the episode can do to enliven the situation is to have Snake (the only supporting cast member to appear outside of the recycled footage) intermittently jump in through the window and threaten the family with a shotgun. And, to give credit where it's due, the first time this happens it is genuinely startling and unexpected. Unfortunately, Snake's involvement amounts something of a gigantic fake-out - when he first appears, he suggests a darker impending plot development that never materialises. Instead, it becomes a running gag that Snake shows up before every ad break, only to abruptly disappear as soon as the episode resumes. Still, this is the most playful that "All Singing" is willing to get with the concept, and one can only imagine how much livelier it could have been had it managed to get the Simpsons out of their living room and interacting with more of their neighbours.

As a musical, "All Singing" feels deficient. As a clip show...what it's lacking is the same degree of self-criticism, or at least malaise that made its predecessors so compelling (in my books, anyway). The most we get on that front is a rare instance at the end in which the family straight-up break the fourth wall (something seldom done outside of Halloween episodes) to rally beneath a banner explicitly advertising the episode as "The Simpsons Clip Show #4", having proclaimed that "It really does blow...when a long-running series does a cheesy clip show!" All of the Simpsons clip shows contained some obligatory reference to what an inherently cheap and tacky concept the clip show be ("138th Episode Spectacular" was less explicit on this point than the others, but its hokey set-up and the presence of Troy is more than substitute enough), but the pointed acknowledgement of the show's established longevity is the only inkling we get of the series expressing any kind of winking unease about its own status.

The most intriguing thing that "All Singing" has going for it as a clip show is the aura of suspicion that it might have been forced into production for even more dubious reasons than its predecessors. This is all purely speculation, but a lot of fans theorize that the musically-themed collage was conceived as a marketing tool for the series soundtrack album, Songs In The Key of Springfield, which had been released only the year prior. Now, Songs In The Key of Springfield had hit the shelves in March 1997, whereas "All Singing" first aired in January 1998, so we did have the better part of a year's gap between the two (also noteworthy: Songs In The Key of Springfield only covers the first seven seasons of the show, and "All Singing" does include one track that came after - "We Put The Spring In Springfield" from Season 8's "Bart After Dark"). Most die hard fans who wanted the album would presumably have noticed and acquired their copies by then, so at best "All Singing" was going to speak to more casual viewers who might have forgotten how infectious some of the show's original music could be, if they hadn't heard it in a while. A sequel, Go Simpsonic with The Simpsons, later followed, but that was still the better part of two years away. Heck, The Yellow Album wasn't even seeing the light of day until the opposite end of the year. So if the raison d'etre of "All Singing" was indeed to maximise the sales of tie-in shiny discs, then it wasn't strategically issued to line up with a period of peak hype for Simpsons music. The timing is still close enough to raise eyebrows, however, and I personally do find it hard to believe that there wasn't some connection, even if it's as basic as the (moderate) success of Songs In The Key of Springfield convincing the writers that there was an exploitable theme here.

I say that, of course, as if clip shows in general aren't elongated commercials, albeit not always with the intention of selling you something so tangible. The key reason such episodes exist in the first place is because they're cheap and easy from a production standpoint, and in the pre-DVD/streaming age, they might even have been welcomed by viewers impatient to wait until the next re-run to revisit a favourite scene (although weren't you setting your VCR for these things? - see below). But they do serve an additional function as show reels for the general series, enabling you not only to relive favourite moments but to also glimpse what else you might have missed the first time around, with the hope of enticing you into watching those re-runs. And yet there is something about "All Singing, All Dancing" that feels particularly disposable, which might have to do with the lack of any kind of compelling or meaningful conflict at the story's centre (is it really such a big deal if Homer doesn't like musicals?). Erik Adams, in his review of "The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular" on the AV Club, described that installment as a "glorified DVD extra", and I feel that goes double for "All Singing, All Dancing". All you need are onscreen lyrics and some Simpson-ised equivalent of a bouncing Mickey Mouse head (bouncing doughnut, perhaps?) and you'd have yourself a pretty neat analogue to those Sing-along featurettes that Disney used to churn out regularly during the VHS era. 

Although, speaking of VHS, there is another small yet critical element of "All Singing, All Dancing" that sets it apart from all previous clip shows, and that's that this is the first occasion in which the family have actually dredged up archival footage on tape, under the pretense that it comes from their home movie collection, rather than reminisce purely from memory. Apparently, Marge has VHS recordings of the musical sequences from "Homer's Barbershop Quartet", "Bart After Dark" and "Boy Scoutz 'N The Hood" that she could just conveniently pull out and show to Homer and Bart as proof of their respective melodic inclinations (she doesn't even have to scroll through the tape to find the footage she needs). This aspect honestly strikes me as way more hokey and far-fetched than the central premise of the family singing, as it hinges on the dubious notion that somebody at the time just happened to have a camera and was recording the whole thing - and isn't it uncanny how the perspective of this invisible, in-universe cameraman also happens to match everything we saw in the episodes proper, frame for frame? Which of course plays entirely knowingly into the artificial nature of clip show and musical alike. The episode hangs on an underlying thread of fourth wall breaking (subtler than the explicit instance that occurs at the end), with Marge's "family videos" being a sly nod to the series itself, and the family relating to it as their viewers do - not as collection of personal anecdotes springing from organic reminiscence, but as a series of archival recordings to be rewound and revisited at any time (very few of the featured episodes were commercially available on VHS at the time - certainly, none were in the US - but I'm sure most of us long-term viewers had built up our own extensive home recorded libraries by now). This compliments not only the contrivances of the clip show, but also the make-up of the clips themselves. For there is another reason why Marge couldn't plausibly possess home recordings of the overwhelming majority of the featured clips - most of them were non-diegetic. Meaning that it makes zero sense for the family to be reminiscing about them, period. That is the tremendous irony at the heart of "All Singing, All Dancing" - there is no singing, and no dancing. Okay, that is something of an exaggeration, as we do find the occasional diegetic track in here. But most of what we see is, in Homer's words, "fake and phony and totally wrong."

Before pursuing this point any further, it is necessary to make the distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic audio, for The Simpsons has spawned ample musical content over the years that could be divided into both camps. In a nutshell, diegetic audio refers to any sound that occurs with the reality of the characters' world, whereas non-diegetic refers to audio that exists purely for the viewer's benefit and one would assume is not actually part of the characters' experiences in-universe. So, for example, whenever Lisa blows on her saxophone, it's diegetic - she has the physical instrument, and the characters in the vicinity are hearing and responding to the sounds coming out of it. Alf Clausen's scores, on the other hand, are non-diegetic - there's no reason to believe that the characters can hear them. Likewise, I would presume that Sideshow Bob isn't actually broadcasting a certain Bernard Herrmann leitmotif wherever he goes. When it comes to musical numbers where characters randomly burst into song and everyone conveniently just happens to know all the words and choreography, it gets a little less clear-cut - we might assume that if the characters are doing the singing, then they can hear themselves in-universe. Yet the very contradictions that make the musical sequence so appealing (or repellent, if you take Homer's view) - the sleight of hand through which freshness and spontaneity can be suggested from what would, in actuality, require hours of painstaking orchestration and rehearsing - inevitably calls into question the reality of what we're seeing. It seems fair to conclude that such sequences represent an idealised or exaggerated version of the participants' lives, rather than the lives they're actually living. Asking how the characters happen to know all the words and where the music is coming from is about as futile as asking to whom the artless monologuers in Alan Bennett's Talking Heads are actually talking - in both cases, I think we can accept that this is all a theatrical device for representing the characters' inner voices. So the singing is non-diegetic in the sense that the characters presumably aren't really doing it in context, but rather temporarily shifting into a kind of fantasy space where they get to flaunt their emotional states to the fullest (remember what James L. Brooks, when discussing his ex-musical I'll Do Anything, said about how musicals, despite their inherent artifice, bring you closer to  the truth).

Of the nine musical clips featured in "All Singing, All Dancing", only three could be considered truly diegetic - "Baby on Board" (from "Homer's Barbershop Quartet"), "Send In The Clowns" (from "Krusty Gets Kancelled") and "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" (from "Bart Sells His Soul"). In those three instances, there were clearly established circumstances under which the characters were performing their respective tunes in-universe. "We Do" from "Homer The Great" is more of a grey area - it's possible that the Stonecutters really do have this obnoxious club chant that they belt out as part of their evening ritual, but with no obvious source for all that highly-orchestrated music that goes along with it I am compelled to put this on the at least partially non-diegetic pile. The remaining five all occupy that weird limbo between reality and non-reality, which we might as well call La La Land. In the case of the "Springfield, Springfield" sequence from "Boy Scoutz 'N The Hood", this particular visit to La La Land was intended as a signifier for Bart and Milhouse's sugar-addled state (itself a family-friendly shorthand for an acid high), so definitely not the kind of objective reality that any Springfieldian was going to have captured on tape. So think about what actually is going on in this episode - the Simpsons aren't embarking on a nostalgic journey through authentic family memories, but are instead witnessing embarrassing projections of their own inner psyches, visualised and laid bare for all to see. For a seemingly frivolous clip show, it delves into some seriously twisted Black Mirror-esque nightmare zone. The idea would be every bit as at home in a Halloween show.

The Simpsons itself has a proud history of deliberately blurring the barriers between the diegetic and the non-diegetic for comic effect; several of the featured sequences had punchlines in their original forms, in which the characters made some kind of immediate callback to the song and to its improbable placement within the narrative progression, although only the punchline from "Who Needs The Kwik-E-Mart?" of "Homer and Apu" appears intact in "All Singing, All Dancing". This particular track, possibly the most insanely catchy in the Simpsons repertoire, was really all an elaborate set-up to a gag mocking the glibness behind the theatrical convention of implying emotional and narrative closure through an upbeat song and dance number. We learn that, contra everything expressed in the sequence, Apu is pining for his old job at the Kwik-E-Mart - to the chagrin of Homer, who despises being lied to through song. A similar gag occurs in "Bart After Dark", where the artifice of the musical number is once again used to convey a kind of narrative insincerity; the very idea communicated in "We Put The Spring In Springfield" is obviously bogus - double entendres asides, this random burlesque house that we've never seen before nor have any any real emotional investment in is blatantly not the nexus of the community we've been tracking for the past seven years - but the real punchline of the sequence follows right after, when Marge, who was absent during the performance, has a hard time comprehending why her fellow moral guardians would do a complete 180 on the basis of a song. She asks the townspeople if they can sing it again, only to be told by Ned that, "it really was one of those spur the moment things."

Compared to the full tracklisting on Songs In The Key of Springfield, the selection of songs in "All Singing, All Dancing" can't help but feel a little lopsided. You can only cram so many tracks into into 22 minutes and have time for a vague framing story, but it does strike me as a glaring omission that we get no examples of Lisa and Marge's individual singing talents among the featured clips - in fact, Lisa's only contribution, outside of the framing narrative, is her single line in "Who Needs The Kwik-E-Mart?" (Marge does marginally better, in that she also gets a line in "The Monorail Song"). You know what I happen to think is one of the greatest musical sequences in Simpsons history? Lisa's rendition of Carole King's "Jazzman" in "Round Springfield", which was definitely the track that got the most attention on my personal copy of Songs In The Key of Springfield. Yeardley Smith's performance is delightful; she brings a strength and a vulnerability to the song that's purely Lisa. So what's the reason for its exclusion here? Is it because it's not an original song? Possibly not, since neither are "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" or "Send In The Clowns" (although Krusty's version of the latter does use mostly modified lyrics - I do love me some Stephen Sondheim, and A Little Night Music is one of my all-time favourite musicals...but I can't tell you how disappointed I was when I first learned that the actual version of that song does not contain the words "schmaltz by the bowlful"). Was it a bias towards the more comedy-orientated tracks? More than likely. On Marge's side, I feel aggrieved on behalf of the entire "Oh, Streetcar!" songbook.

You might also notice that the oldest clip featured in "All Singing, All Dancing" is "The Monorail Song" from "Marge vs The Monorail" of Season 4, meaning that the earliest seasons get completely snubbed. That much I'll put down to the fact that the kind of heavily stylised, Broadway-esque numbers on which "All Singing" predominantly hangs its hat didn't really seep into the series' DNA until around the fourth season, when the show adopted a much more flexible sense of reality. The early seasons had no shortage of musical interludes, as such Lisa's duet with Bleeding Gums Murphy in "Moaning Lisa" and Lurleen Lumpkin's repertoire in "Colonel Homer", but these tended to be mostly diegetic in nature. For a while, the track that had the most fun on the diegesis-blurring front was probably Tony Bennett's ode to an unidentified capital city in "Dancin' Homer". At the beginning of Season 4, the aforementioned "Oh, Streetcar!" musical from "A Streetcar Named Marge" enabled the series to do a fully diegetic parody of the conventions of musical theatre (complete with a horrendously, albeit infectiously glib wrap-up song). The point at which it became acceptable for Springfieldians to spontaneously burst into song and prance around as though their lives obeyed the same rules as musical theatre...I'm not 100% certain, but I think that "Marge vs The Monorail" might actually have been the first of its kind in that regard. There, it wasn't entirely left of field, in that the entire set-up of the episode was derived from a Broadway musical, The Music Man, with "The Monorail Song" being a nod to a specific number therein, "Ya Got Trouble". And that's just as true for many of the non-diegetic musical numbers that followed in its footsteps - they're there because homage permits it. The central conflict of "Bart After Dark" was taken from another musical, The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas, so I guess it made sense for the climax to take the form of a song and dance number. "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" was The Simpsons' affectionate take on Disney - mostly One Hundred and One Dalmatians, but Burns' unsubtle pilfering of the melody to "Be Our Guest" from Beauty & The Beast still goes along with the general theme. In all cases, it's evident that the production team had a tremendous amount of admiration for the subjects they're spoofing, and it's on these terms that "All Singing, All Dancing" is probably best understood - as a testament to what a fabulous collective love letter The Simpsons has been to the musical form throughout its run. That inconsequential frothiness I've picketed against - well, maybe it does ultimately play into the basic territory of the musical. The family spends most of the episode in La La Land, where they go to re-examine memories that would otherwise be inaccessible to them, and the outing has an appropriately ephemeral quality about it. It's something that happens within its own fanciful space before immediately evaporating into thin air, and that's arguably a pretty accurate replication of the evanescent nature of the non-diegetic song and dance number. I still feel that the episode's boxed-in scope does it no favours, but perhaps it's as lightweight as it is by cunning design, and I've been underestimating it all this time.

Finally, something the series had started experimenting with all of a sudden come Season 9 was the concept of having the characters interact with the closing credits - they'd already trialled this a few episodes previously with "Bart Star", which had Homer dismissing the various names in the credits and finally rebuking the "Sshh" lady in the Gracie Films logo. "All Singing" contains a variation on that gag, where Snake gets irate whenever the music gets too loud for his liking and fires off his gun. Which takes us into this episode's other really notorious element. Personally, I am weary of this whole "Simpsons predicted it" bandwagon - I think a lot of these so-called "predictions" amount to either vague coincidences or instances of history tiresomely repeating itself. Nevertheless, I (like everybody else) can't help but shudder upon hearing Snake fire his gun just as Phil Hartman's name appears on screen. There are two shots, which to my morbid brain registers horribly as signifiers of the individual bullets that killed Hartman and Omdahl respectively. It's almost poetic, in the most distressing possible way.