I Think I'll Drive To Work Today, Mrs Jones... (Nissan Primera)

The immediate aftermath of Peugeot's "Drive of Your Life" ad saw a number of interesting (or utterly banal, depending on your outlook) attempts to replicate the formula, not least from Peugeot themselves. Few of these imitations launched with quite the same degree of grandiose self-indulgence as the Peugeot spot - booking out an entire three minute News at Ten ad break for its debut in February 1996 was a stunt that seemed to turn enough heads while garnering little adulation from the press - but the intrinsic narrative was set in stone. Your everyday journey from Point A to Point B was represented as an opportunity for spiritual cleansing - the time when you got to cast off your established identity and embrace your full aptitude as the kind of liberated soul who drives X vehicle. The idea, I suppose, being that your car was a transitory vessel for moving in between two static poles, your time therein a precious and ephemeral phase in which nothing was fixed and solid and you could momentarily defy definition and simply be an individual riding a wave of unspent potential. The outcome of your diurnal routines were unlikely to change in any substantial way just because you were embarking on them in a flash new set of wheels, a fact that I doubt many consumers were truly unwise to - what auto manufacturers were attempting to sell you (besides the obvious) was a moment, and how to purportedly make the most of it.

This ad for the Nissan Primera feels more modest in tone than its Peugeot counterpart, ditching its more abstract elements (there's no obvious equivalent here to our so-called average person's Nicolas Roeg-drenched fantasies of pursuing a girl in a red coat), although the central energy is much the same. A nondescript businessman's morning commute to work becomes a transcendent ritual in which he gets to revel in his yearning for some kind of higher fulfilment. "Lifted" by Lighthouse Family is used as an analogue to M People (both acts were commonly lumped into what at the time was derisively categorised as "coffee table music"), with the succession of pretty accompanying visuals once again evoking the sensation of watching a truncated music video (on the subject of the actual "Lifted" music video...anyone else consider it slightly curious that it takes place in an arid desert when the lyrics explicitly and repeatedly reference rain?). The grand twist here being that our protagonist works from a home-based office, alongside his wife, meaning that he was out there facing the world just for the hell of it. The Nissan answers a very different need in his life - one which, having been working from home for the better part of two years now, I can certainly comprehend. When, early in 2020, venues that encouraged mass gatherings became forbidden territory and we were all regulated to our own private spaces, the loss of that daily commute came as an unexpected blow; more than just a functional necessity, it provided an opportunity to connect with the outside world and reaffirm that we were all a part of something larger. I know a number of people who were still setting out every morning, if only to immediately turn tail and head back home - if nothing else, it offered alleviation from staring at the same four walls all day. In this guy's case...well, a person could do a lot worse than having to stare at the swanky-looking walls he has around him. But the basic human need is duly recognised.

Viewing this ad in 2021, it's hard not to see it through the lens of the post-COVID world, in that the great outside the hero traverses seems puzzlingly deserted. You do see the silhouettes of what looks like a trio of cyclists as he first sets out on his journey, but otherwise he's got the entire road, and the world as a whole, entirely to himself. Even when he reaches the city, which we might initially assume to be his stopping point, there's nary another soul in sight. The brand new morning looks fresh as a daisy, golden and picturesque, but there's something very eerie, even borderline post-apocalyptic about the conspicuous lack of life stirring therein. The obvious answer is that the outside world exists here purely for the benefit of our protagonist; when he heads out for his symbolic commute, he isn't so much escaping his self-contained bubble as wallowing in an extension of it. The bigger picture is, for all intents and purposes, his own private and personalised backyard, with no other humans with their own intersecting agendas there to smudge up his pristine view.

Still, what really intrigues (and unnerves) me about this spot is how the couple therein play like worldlier counterparts to our minimalist chums who, at around the same point in advertising history, were down in their spartan lair, struggling to come to terms with their shameful addiction to Imperial Leather. Again, same energy. This couple, in direct contrast, have an unashamed hankering for luxuries, but the world they inhabit seems every bit as jarringly surreal, cut off from anything resembling conventional civilisation and steeped in a mind-bending artificiality. As the ad opens, and we find our leads contemplating the day ahead from the comfort of their ultramodern bedroom, their reflections are fleetingly glimpsed amid the bizarrely fluid purple mise en scene, cluing us in that there is an element of duality at play. Like those minimalists, they speak to one another in a stilted manner that suggests both are playing up to their assumed roles; visually, there is enough of a contrast between the couple's casual and working environs, even if they are apparently both situated underneath the same roof (one is flamboyant, borderline illusory and something of an eyesore, while the other is ordered and decorous, if no less elaborate), although it is curious that they insist upon the formality of addressing one another as "Mr Jones" and "Mrs Jones" in both modes (thus telegraphing the ad's plot twist at the start). I would hazard a guess this done to facilitate a closing echo, so that the viewer would be crystal clear on the revelation that his wife and his colleague are indeed the same person - and besides, compared to the Imperial Leather couple, I suspect that their repeated insistence on these austere monikers is intended to come off as more playful than sinister (implying that the novelty of being both marital and business partners has yet to wear off for them). The suggestion of artifice does, nevertheless, go along perfectly with the general queasiness of that purple decor; it plays like an illusion, a dream from which our protagonist is required jar himself loose every morning as he eases himself down to Earth, traversing the open and unpopulated road back to reality (and, potentially, on into some other falsehood) in his trusty Nissan. Which Mr Jones and Mrs Jones, if either, represent the "real" people and which are just roles they are obligated to play in between is immaterial - as with the Imperial Leather ad, human relationships are depicted as a drawn-out ritual of gestures and insincerity, with intimacy with the product in question representing a momentary gasp of clarity amid it all. Our protagonist finds his release in an act of ostensible play pretence - that he needs to drive himself to work - by intermittently purging his identity to that of a Nissan driver on his way to somewhere. That he isn't discovering much out there except a mirror to his own wanderlusting ego is likewise immaterial.

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #38: They're Dogs! And They're Playing Poker!

What exactly is the deal with those dogs playing poker anyway?

We're all familiar with the gag in the Simpsons episode "Treehouse of Horror IV", where Homer is so unsettled by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge's demented visions of canine recreation that he's driven to delirium. Like so many perfectly-executed and enduring Simpsons moments, what we're inevitably left with is a case of full-blown cultural hijacking - it's now virtually impossible to lay eyes on Coolidge's works in any other context and not immediately have Homer's hysterical objections bellowing through your skull (much as it's now impossible not to think of Marge's reaction upon seeing another infamous and much-replicated specimen of animal-orientated visual art). In the case of Homer and those poker-playing dogs, there was always one question lurking at the back of my mind that, for a long time, I was never quite able to satisfy - what, precisely, is the joke here? Other than the really obvious gag (one that I'm confident Coolidge was 100% in on) that the entire premise of dogs playing poker is kind of inherently absurd? No question that they are silly paintings, and at least part of the sequence's appeal lies in the incongruity in seeing such silly images evoking such strong reactions - not only does Homer completely lose his marbles over the thing, but Bart, spoofing Rod Serling in Night Gallery, informs us that the original story that would have tied directly into the Coolidge painting had to be scrapped because it was too horrific. And yet the intensity of Homer's shrieking has me oddly convinced that there is an intrinsic evil to be unpicked from the images - so much so that when the same image (a replication of Coolidge's most famous dog painting, A Friend In Need) later resurfaced in "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds", it lends a sinister undercurrent to what would otherwise be a fairly twee sequence of Disneyesque pet courtship. Coolidge's pictures depict a wholly innocuous anthropomorphism - the dogs are behaving like humans, one assumes, for no deeper reason than it making for a cute and amusing visual (compare it to Sir Edwin Landseer's 1840 painting Laying Down The Law, commonly cited as a conceptual forbearer to Coolidge's pictures, which also has naturalistic-looking dogs participating in distinctly human activities, but with a more obviously satirical bent). Homer's visceral reaction to the painting seems to stem from the idea that this kind of lightweight anthropomorphism is, in fact, highly disturbing, as it represents a grotesque subversion on the natural order of things - a point that is later echoed (albeit possibly unintentionally on The Simpsons' part) at the very end of the episode, when Santa's Little Helper engages in what is supposed to be a Snoopy-style jig, but it looks more as though he warrants an urgent visit from Dr Karras.

Still, the effectiveness of the gag is rooted in something quite a bit juicier than Homer detecting evil in an ostensibly dubious source. The Simpsons' was, after all, far from the only cultural voice to send up the works of Coolidge with a fervour that walks a fine line between derision and fascination. The paintings were previously a source of contention between Sam Malone and Diane Chambers in the sitcom Cheers, with the former guilelessly professing to notice something new every time he looked at them. In Larry Shue's 1984 play The Foreigner, a character objects to being put up in a motel room where Coolidge's pictures adorn the walls. In 2002, the Chrysler Museum of Art's idea of an April Fool's prank was to issue a press release claiming that they intended to acquire and exhibit all of the original paintings in their galleries - the mere suggestion that images of dogs playing poker belonged in an institution dedicated to serious art was intended to put you in bawling hysterics not altogether dissimilar to those modelled by Homer. Clearly, there is something about the seemingly harmless gambling mutts that touches a nerve in a lot of people. Coolidge's paintings are an iconic part of Americana, yet America as a whole has a curious love/hate relationship with the images; this much appears to rest on an intuitive consensus that the pictures, while immediately recognisable and highly ubiquitous, are - in total honesty - not actually all that good. They're cute, certainly, but they exude a seedy vulgarity that lets you know, wherever you see one, that you're not in the classiest neck of the woods. Perhaps it's this combination of conceptual fluffiness and visual vulgarity that makes them so successful, and that has enabled Coolidge's dogs to worm their way into so many houses and derelict hotels - there is something undeniably compelling in their unabashed kitschiness. They are, in the words of Jackson Arn of Artsy, "the very definition of a guilty pleasure, the artistic equivalent of a Big Mac and fries." I suspect that this is the real reason why Homer is so terrified by the sight of them - they represent a kind of cultural nightmare, a gleeful celebration of bad taste as it is ceaselessly reproduced and permitted to permeate walls far and wide.

Here's a fun fact about Coolidge's dogs - not only are they horrifying animals, they are Horrifying Advertising Animals, and might even be seen as precursors to the 37 specimens I have covered prior in this series. See, Coolidge didn't create so many images of poker-playing dogs because he found the idea amusing - he had a ulterior motive, in hoping that these wily mutts would charm you into changing your shopping and consumption habits. Coolidge created his original dogs-playing-poker painting, Poker Game, as a stand alone piece in 1984, and might never have revisited the concept had he not later been approached by publishing company Brown & Bigelow in 1903, and commissioned to create sixteen further images as promotional tools for cigars. Not all of the subsequent sixteen show dogs playing poker (some show the dogs at baseball games, ballroom dancing and grappling with a broken-down auto-mobile) but it's the card-handling curs that became the most deeply ingrained in public consciousness. Perhaps it's because these images are the most prominently narrative-driven of the bunch - we get a glimpse into the tensions of the game, and of the underhanded tactics being deployed by the dogs in their tabletop war.

The images have become so iconic in their own right that it was somewhat inevitable that a modern advertising campaign would eventually capitalise on that cultural recognition and appropriate them to their own ends. In the late 1990s, the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network ran a series of promos for their Monday Night Football slot that brought Coolidge's dogs to life, using a combination of real dogs and the wonders of cutting-edge technology. CGI was used to animate the characters' mouths - in case you ever wondered what those dogs actually spoke about in between their poker pursuits (as it turns out, nothing of substance). The premise here was that the dogs got together for their Monday night poker sessions and had televised sports blaring in the backdrop, momentarily commanding their attentions from the cards on the table.

The ESPN promos were directed by Joe Pytka, and were recreated from two particular Coolidge paintings, A Bold Bluff and Waterloo, in which the poker participants are a St Bernard, bulldog, boxer, collie and Great Dane. As with the original images, the main tension at the table appears to be between the St Bernard and the bulldog (who has an instantly familiar voice - has it cropped up previously in our tour of advertising critters, per chance?). The one prominent detail in Coolidge's art that has been omitted from the ESPN promos is that the dogs have all kicked their unhealthy smoking habits. Unsurprisingly so - the dogs might have been designed with the very intention of instilling such habits, but sensibilities had moved on, and contemporary viewers were less likely to be charmed by the sight of a cute dog puffing on a stick of nicotine. The promos got around the big issue these dogs would have come up against, even if they could comprehend the rules of the game - that is, they would never be able to survey their hands with their opposable thumb-less paws - by creating a pair of animatronic paws for each dog. The paws look kind of stiff and jerky, and it's an amusing stretch to entertain them actually being attached to the dogs in question, but any commercial using Coolridge's art as its basis is obviously going to benefit from a little low-rent grotesqueness.

Indeed. It is perhaps also entirely befitting for a campaign lifted from such a notoriously unrepentant slice of low art that the promos have a distinctly ersatz flavour to them. Don't get me wrong, Pytka and his team did a splendid job in recreating the Coolridge originals so lovingly in a three-dimensional world; it is, nevertheless, difficult to watch the ads without being put in mind of the Swamp Gang campaign that was making such waves for Budweiser at the time, and which was built upon much the same formula - wacky talking animals giving their sardonic commentary while the product in question is hawked in the backdrop. The ESPN promos were fun and likeable, but with a whisker less wit and invention than their reptilian/amphibian counterparts down at the bayou. Then again, it's not as though these poker-loving mutts had very much to prove. Their status as a cultural juggernaut was already long cemented; so long as they captured enough of the source's weirdly delectable kitsch, it would be enough to set tails wagging (or curling between your legs, depending on your impressions of said source). Only time will if, come the dawn of the 22nd Century, artefacts from the Swamp Gang are inspiring such farcically mixed emotions in the hearts of onlookers.

Living In The Bottle: Timeless Time (One Foot In The Grave)

Let's talk about another television staple that holds particular fascination for me: the bottle episode. Like our old buddy, the clip show, the budget-friendly nature of the bottle episode has made it a popular go-to across the decades for producers looking to squeeze out an installment or two with as little fuss as possible. The term "bottle episode" was coined by Outer Limits producer Leslie Stevens, who likened the experience of creating such an episode to coaxing a genie out of a bottle - the idea is that you're looking to generate magic from extremely limited resources, with bottle episodes typically restricting their action to a single location and to non-extra cast members (although there are no hard rules about what you can and cannot do). As such, there tends to be something about them that resembles the aura of theatre as much as television, with their slow-burning, minimalist emphasis on enclosed spaces and intensive character dialogues, and there is often tremendous relish to be had in seeing how they rise to the challenge. TV shows of all stripes have tried their hand at the form, and there are certain shows that consist of nothing but bottle episodes (eg: the anthology series Inside No. 9, which was directly inspired by the enjoyment its creators Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton had in making a bottle episode for their preceding series, Psychoville) - I can, however, think of relatively few series that perfected the art of the bottle quite so beautifully and as hauntingly as David Renwick's classic BBC sitcom, One Foot In The Grave.

One Foot In The Grave follows Victor Meldrew (Richard Wilson) a sixtysomething ex-security guard forced into premature retirement (aka redundancy), who now spends his days attempting, entirely in vain, to reassert his value in a society that has callously discarded him, butting heads with just about everyone he encounters and frequently getting the goat of his similarly peevish but more reserved wife Margaret (Annette Crosbie). Other recurring characters include Jean Warboys (Doreen Mantle), Margaret's insufferably scatter-brained best friend, Patrick and Pippa Trench (Angus Deayton and Janine Duvitski), the younger couple next door who seem sadly fated to become Victor and Margaret later in life (giving a healthy shot of irony to the long-running enmity between Victor and Patrick) and Nick Swainey (Owen Brenman), the Meldrews' other neighbour, a deeply eccentric, excessively upbeat charity worker who presents as if he were the bastard love child of Ned Flanders and Norman Bates (and was compared to the latter in the episode "In Luton Airport No One Can Hear You Scream"). The humor blends absurdism (Victor is often the victim of freakishly bad luck) with periodic morbidness - the topic of mortality was an oft-explored one (in fairness, the series title is a dead giveaway), and the series demonstrated just how squeamish it was prepared to get on the matter right from the second episode, "The Big Sleep", when the Meldrews have an emotionally scarring experience at a yoga class. One Foot In The Grave could get very dark in places, to a point that regularly tested the sensibilities of its viewers (my own personal threshold was reached in the episode "We Have Put Her Living In The Tomb", which is the one episode I cannot bring myself to revisit; I do not do dead pets, sorry). A particularly laudable aspect of the series was its willingness to stick to its guns in its thoroughly unsentimental depiction of ageing, relationships and humanity in general (the first Christmas episode, "Who's Listening", being a glaring exception where it surrendered to sentimentality wholesale...on the flip side, you've really got to admire the balls of any sitcom that would exhibit a story as horrific as "The Man Who Blew Away" as festive entertainment).

It's become something of a cliche to point this out when discussing the series, but Victor is a misunderstood protagonist, in that he's often represented in popular consciousness as an unpleasant old man taking knee-jerk umbrage with everyone and everything around him. No question that Victor has a mean temper. But he does not, in all other regards, strike me as a mean person. The thing about Victor is that he's actually quite good-hearted underneath it all. He has a strong sense of justice, and a large deal of his indignation at the general indifference and inconsideration of the world (in his words, "the bloody-minded soddishness of people") is honestly righteous - it's more that he doesn't make life easy for himself with his tendency to leap head-first into confrontations he can never win. On occasions where Victor is excessively cruel (as he was to a bereaved video store clerk in "Who's Listening" and to his brother in "The Broken Reflection") he will end up recognising this and feeling remorse. On top of which, the more closely you watch the series, the more apparent it becomes that Margaret is actually the more bitter and cynical of the two - living with Victor and the perpetual calamity he brings is certainly no picnic, but she's cold to Victor in ways that he does not reciprocate. Then again, Margaret has suffered some pretty appalling misfortunes in her time (and would continue to do so throughout the course of the series) - misfortunes that extend well beyond her marriage to the impossibly accident-prone Victor, and of which the initial bottle episode, "Timeless Time", merely scratches the surface.

One Foot In The Grave debuted on 4th January 1990 and ran for six series, the last of which aired on 20th November 2000 (note: there was a long hiatus between Series 5 and 6, although a number of stand alone Christmas specials appeared in the interim). From Series 2 onward, it became a tradition to have one bottle episode per series, and these were typically written to a formula - they took place in real time, with Victor and Margaret trapped in some kind of unpleasant or claustrophobic situation that, toward the end of the episode, they would reflect on mournfully as an apt metaphor for the trajectory their lives had taken in general (usually foreshadowed in the episode title). Inevitably, the central situation was never resolved, and the episode would fade out with it still continuing. The series liked to mix up this formula - one such episode, "The Trial" of Series 4, dispensed with Margaret altogether and consisted simply of Victor murmuring to himself in his living room for half an hour (it wound up being one of the funniest episodes of the series, too). An advantage of bottle episodes, besides their frugality, is that they allowed for more in-depth character contemplation - with all this dead space to fill, Victor and Margaret were given the opportunity to expand on their backstories in greater detail than a regular episode would have had room for. "Timeless Time", which debuted on 15th November 1990 as the closing episode of Series 2, is notable not only for being the very first of the bottle episodes, but also the only occasion in which the Meldrews openly discuss a personal tragedy from their past that, while never brought up again, inevitably puts a whole new lens on our interpretation of the characters in the present. Not a lot happens in "Timeless Time", and yet it feels like one of the most monumental of all the series.

"Timeless Time" takes place entirely in the Meldrew's bedroom in the early hours of the morning; Victor is suffering from a bout of insomnia (potentially triggered by a bad reaction to the dubious dish of Spaghetti Al Pacino served the previous night at his mother-in-law's), and as an inevitable knock-on effect, so is Margaret. In its sleep-deprived state, Victor's mind begins wandering into all kinds of ludicrous territory, as he attempts to make sense of some of life's most troubling paradoxes - namely, the elusiveness of time, and the inexplicable teaspoon he always discovers while draining the sink after washing up (Victor's fixation on the matter is such that at one point he even drifts off long enough to visualise the Loch Ness Monster as a 60-ft teaspoon). Naturally, "Timeless Time" is a mostly dialogue-driven affair, although it does incorporate some elements of the absurdist slapstick for which the series is well-known - most notably, when Victor is forced to venture outside to turn off his car alarm, loses a slipper and accidentally puts on a semi-decayed hedgehog carcass (I noted that the series could be quite brutal in its treatment of animals, but at least in this instance the hedgehog would have been long out of its misery before Victor got to it; not so much the cat who later has the disintegrating hedgehog dumped on it). Which does make me wonder what kind of cheap and nasty slippers Victor must be accustomed to wearing, if he seriously couldn't tell the difference. "Timeless Time" also contains (I think) the first reference to Ronnie and Mildred, a couple of "friends" of the Meldrew's who would later appear in person (much to the Meldrew's revulsion) in the Series 3 finale, "The Worst Horror of All". Here, it's established that the Meldrews have a stash of unopened Christmas presents from Ronnie and Meldrew in their closet; Victor's boredom reaches such unendurable heights that he seriously contemplates tackling this, but ultimately decides that he hasn't the stomach for it. In the 1996 Christmas special "Starbound" it was revealed that their hoard of unopened gifts has only increased and that, worryingly, one of them has started to smell.

The scenario of "Timeless Time" entails the Meldrews lying still, both literally and figuratively, as time continues to pass them by. With their prospects of a restful night's sleep seeming increasingly doubtful, they're left with only two options - gaze helplessly into the darkened void all around them, or jabber inanely about whatever of life's various annoyances or banalities happen to worm into their fatigued heads. All five of the series' bottle episodes deal, to some capacity, with Victor squaring off against stagnation, but "Timeless Time" may be the entry in which that stagnation is most saliently reflected in his surroundings, with a predominant feeling of nothingness. Nothing, so Victor tells us, is all that exists, before elucidating his theory on why time is merely an illusion - "The future doesn't exist, because it hasn't happened yet. The past doesn't exist, because it's already over. And the present doesn't exist, because as soon as you start to think about it, it's already become the past." Victor's frustrations on the impersonal nature of time, along with his seeming inability to seize the moment and live meaningfully within it, are entirely relatable. And yet what he and Margaret articulate throughout the course of the episode would appear to disprove all of his assertions. Clearly, the past and the future are very existent, as two equally oppressive states between which the Meldrews are perpetually sandwiched. They are haunted by the emotional baggage they have accumulated in their six decades on Earth, and by the inevitability of their own demises - and Victor is troubled to hear that he has already been consigned to the grave, or rather his cremated remains to the floor of Allied Carpets, in the distorted perception of a former acquaintance. Or perhaps it's more a case that Victor and Margaret live in the Eternal Now, the eternity of that now having become more inescapable as time has gone on. From their assorted journeys down memory lane, there are numerous ways in which their present situation seems largely unchanged from its humble beginnings - at one point, they reminisce about the first night on which they ever slept together, which was also defined by its sleeplessness. For Victor, the standout memory of the evening was being kept awake by a dripping tap, while Margaret recalls Victor's bed-hogging inconsideration as the source of her own insomnia (although at the time she had somehow convinced herself that this was all part of the romantic ritual). The paradox at the heart of the episode is how Victor and Margaret have remained trapped in their personal inertia while still feeling the onslaught of the relentless flow of time. Time has taken its toll on themselves and the world that they once knew, just as it has taken its toll on the world in which "Timeless Time" itself takes place (referenced in "Timeless Time" and no longer with us: Stephen Hawking, Mike Hope, Albie Keen, Reg Varney, Allied Carpets). The world may keep on turning, but where have they actually gotten in any of this?

The major revelation occurs toward the end of the episode, when Victor, ranting about the indignities of tabloid journalism, makes some flippant reference to the Biblical slaughter of the innocents ("no British babies believed to be involved") followed by an awkward silence where he realises that he's broached a forbidden subject and has upset Margaret. He apologises for going too far. Margaret responds by admitting that, "I was thinking about him just this morning," and talks about her chance encounter with a man named Michael, who works for an insurance firm and has a daughter just starting at secondary school. She then refers to somebody named Stuart and wonders if he too would have pursed a career in insurance. It's never explicitly stated, but we're given enough information to piece together that Stuart was Victor and Margaret's son, who died as a child. Michael, meanwhile, was the baby of another woman Margaret met in the maternity ward where she gave birth to Stuart; seeing him as an adult decades later has clearly been an eye-opener for her, not just as a further reminder of the unabating passage of time, but because he provides a ghostly mirror to the point in life where Stuart would have been if he had lived.

As noted, the loss of Stuart and the grief with which the Meldrews have lived ever since was never touched on at any other point in the series. The closest we'd previously gotten to addressing the matter of their apparent lack of descendants was slightly earlier in Series 2, in the episode "Who Will Buy?", when Victor rebuffed a door-to-door salesman, whose sales pitch contained a reference to their hypothetical grandchildren, with the rejoinder: "How do you know I've got grandchildren? I might be completely sterile!" Which at the time might have passed as nothing more than your typically churlish Victor-ism, although with this information in mind it's easy to see how the salesman's presumptions might have touched a nerve in him. Surprisingly, Stuart is not brought up in the one episode where some reference to him would have felt entirely pertinent, ie: the 1991 Christmas special "The Man In The Long Black Coat", where Pippa is pregnant but ultimately suffers a miscarriage. From what little we learn in "Timeless Time", it seems that this is a subject the Meldrews prefer generally not to talk about; life has gone on since Stuart and their bereavement is something they've had to accommodate in that, but the rawness of that loss is still every bit as potent, demonstrating how the past is indeed alive and kicking in the present. It is unknown how old Stuart was when died, but Margaret's line, "she was coming out just as I was going in", gives me the ominous feeling that he possibly didn't even make it out of the hospital. It's in Michael and his mother and the wistful feelings they inspire in Margaret that we see another facet of time not factored into Victor's earlier equation - namely, the future that once might have been - and how this too has heavy bearing upon the now. Judging by the tenderness with which Margaret describes her encounter with Michael, the meeting has been of some comfort to her, as if she has glimpsed vicariously, through Michael's entirely prosaic existence, a parallel universe in which Stuart survived to adulthood and the two of them were able to enjoy a relationship that spanned so many touchstones in both of their lives. There is, nevertheless, one element in which his mother's life seems to synch up hauntingly with Margaret's own - Michael will soon be leaving the area, prompting the empathic remark that: "She'll miss him; she never had any others". Life is comprised of meetings and partings at all stages, but perhaps in this statement we also see an indirect acknowledgement of Margaret's own need to come to come to terms with her loss and accept that this outcome never was.

The mention of Stuart segues into a broader discussion about how easy it was for the characters to take life for granted when it seemed that they had all the time in the world. Margaret makes a particularly astute observation when she recalls that, "A year was an eternity when you were a child. The time between one Christmas and the next." In the end, the absent Stuart seems emblematic of the more general sense of thwarted potential that pervades the episode. The central problem of a sleepless night becomes a metaphor for grand life plans that never came to fruition; Victor's frustrated tallying of the number of prospective hours' sleep he still has remaining an acknowledgement of his increasingly limited time on Earth. Meanwhile, the rattle of distant milk bottles that Victor bemoans as "the beginning of the end" is a comical shorthand for the cold hand of death slowly but surely crawling its way toward him. There is something wryly paradoxical in seeing the dawning of a new day, more conventionally interpreted as a symbol of renewal, posited as a prelude to impending oblivion. This duality is emphasised in a visual gag at the end of the episode, when we see the light of dawn through the bedroom window, accompanied by the last of the intrusions they have to deal with from the neighbourhood fauna, a sparrow energetically heralding the new day. Having plumbed the depths of the Meldrews' darkest, most tightly-guarded sorrows, we are apparently being offered our light at the end of the tunnel - Victor is quick to dismiss the sparrow (who has apparently woken him on previous mornings) as yet another in his endless list of daily annoyances, but Margaret suggests that the bird's singing might hold the key to their salvation. And as affecting as that fleeting talk of Stuart is, it's in its final three minutes that I personally feel that "Timeless Time" comes into its poignantly understated own, as Victor and Margaret figure out where to go from here.

The sparrow at the end of "Timeless Time" recalls the titular Darkling Thrush described in Thomas Hardy's 1900 poem (originally titled "By The Century's Deathbed"), in which Hardy relates his apprehension on approaching the end of a cultural era. The narrator of Hardy's poem describes walking through a barren winter landscape, in which most of the natural world appears to reflect his own nihilistic outlook. The song of a solitary thrush provides the sole contradiction, a twitching of life in overwhelming decay, causing the narrator to ponder if perhaps there is a small glimmer of hope that lurks beyond his comprehension:

"So little cause for carolings

      Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

      Afar or nigh around,

That I could think there trembled through

      His happy good-night air

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

      And I was unaware."

 

Like Hardy's thrush, the sparrow sounds out at what the Meldrews presume to be the irrevocable waning of their time, and Margaret shares the narrator's romantic interpretation of the significance of birdsong, as a beacon of hope amid a wasteland of endless despair. Ostensibly, "Timeless Time" might ultimately be perceived as a meditation on finding the courage to face a new day in an ongoing cycle in which monotony, misery and mortality are all so omnipresent. This seems to be the conclusion Margaret points toward when she suggests that the sparrow's life is no less gruelling or humdrum than their own: "All he does is eat burned bits of toast and a few worms...still got plenty to sing about, evidently." It is an observation with which Victor does not disagree. Nevertheless, the episode's fade-out offers a disturbance to this glimmer of optimism, in characteristically sardonic One Foot In The Grave fashion. Margaret chooses this moment to raise with Victor the first of the many (we presume) troubles he can expect to face in the incoming day: "You won't be able to have porridge for breakfast tomorrow. We're out of milk." The dwindling resources in the Meldrews' food larder serves as further indication of the ever-decreasing cache of things they have to look forward to in life, but Victor isn't quite willing to throw in the towel. He insists that he'll settle for the powdered milk they had previously discussed receiving as a free sample, whereupon Margaret drops her final bombshell: "We're also out of porridge." Victor then proposes that he might try worms on toast "for a change", having previously ruminated on whether the bird's unpalatable diet was directly responsible for its morning enthusiasm - this, though, registers less as a resolve to find a brand new outlook on life than it does a grudging resignation to his miserable lot; in his own bitterly sarcastic way, Victor conveys a Zen-like acceptance for the drudgery that undoubtedly lies ahead. "We'll open a new can in the morning," says Margaret stoically. "Yes," Victor murmurs, "We always seem to...", and the episode ends. 

The final punchline of the episode is a play on the idiom "to open a can of worms", meaning to create a whole new set of problems in attempting to solve an existing one; a closing expression of pessimism that naturally tempers whatever willingness the Meldrews might have displayed in bracing themselves for the imminent new day. Rattle of distant milk bottles aside, the new morning brings not oblivion, but a continuation of their daily routine, and the need to go out and engage with what Victor had only just described as pure ritual. The real horrors that Victor anticipates, however, are to be located in life's unpredictabilities - the assortment of opportunities for things to go spectacularly wrong as he and Margaret attempt to make the most of their ostensible new beginning. The quest for variety, and the possibility of a fresh start, so "Timeless Time" tells us, is all worms. And it makes for one heck of an unappetising breakfast on burned toast.

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?