The World's Most Horrifing Advertising Animals #48: YoGorilla and Friends

The Wella Gorilla might have gotten up to some fairly crazy shenanigans, but even his nightly schedule of abducting unresponsive humans from their apartment windows and taking them on hair-raising joyrides looks mighty sedate compared to the monkey business that went on in the YoGo universe. Meet YoGorilla, the star of a popular advertising campaign that graced Australian screens in the 1990s and 2000s. Its chief purpose was to incite cravings for the brand of chocolate-flavoured yoghurt/custard product that served as the underlying source of narrative tension in all of YoGorilla's adventures. But the creative minds at the helm were evidentially just as preoccupied with skewering the bombast of contemporary Hollywood blockbusters, which they accomplished with even more precision than those clips Jay Sherman would have the pleasure of roasting every week within The Critic. Speed, Cliffhanger, the Planet Hollywood restaurant franchise - absolutely no prisoners were taken in the ongoing struggle for dessert dominance.

YoGorilla was voiced by Paul Johnstone and, much like the product he was hawking, was an outlandish hybrid concoction, being part Bruce Willis, part Arnold Schwarzenegger and part Sylvester Stallone. He was basically your typical 1990s action hero - brawny, intrepid and with a penchant for causing as much destruction as he set out to rein in. Accompanying YoGorilla on his escapades was his sidekick Snake, a yellow serpent of extremely few words (there is at least one ad where Snake talks - the one where YoGorilla tries his hand at stand-up comedy - which isn't treated with as much in-universe shock as you might imagine). He also had a recurring love interest, whose name I was never able to catch, but I think she's a lion (she has a mane, so make of that what you will) and a recurring nemesis, canine terrorist Hans Doberman (a presumable nod to Hans Gruber, the character played by Alan Rickman in the original Die Hard). There were various other faces that kept popping up within the community, the most prominent being Gordon Gecko, a green lizard modelled after Michael Douglas's character in the movie Wall Street.  His shtick involved barking at his unseen associate Barry through his chunky 90s cellphone and watching aghast as his mode of transport was invariably made collateral in YoGorilla's unrelenting efforts to keep the local YoGo supplies from falling into Hans' nefarious paws (Hans' clear palate for the chocolate-based pudding is bothersome, given that he's a dog and such foods are therefore poison to him). There were also a trio of identical looking critters with fluffy white tops who appear in various bit parts throughout the series, and I draw a complete blank on what species they're supposed to be (Albino lions? Poodles? Polar bears?). The YoGo universe was nothing if not alive, and densely populated with figures all fated to collide with one another in a chaotic hodgepodge of dizzying action.

Really, I'm not sure if mere words can do justice to just how head-spinningly frenetic the results were, or just how ambitiously jam-packed each individual ad was with wall-to-wall gags. To experience a YoGorilla ad is to become immersed in a world with absurdity ricocheting from all directions. There's definitely something in there of the madcap, anything-goes humor of the Airplane! movies (making it appropriate that Otto the inflatable pilot even cameos in one of the ads). The gags are so off the wall, and come at you so thick and fast that you'll barely have time to process what's going before you're hit by another. Some of the ads were able to build up quite extensive narratives, and I believe it was common practice to break the longer ones up into two or three chunks, with overblown cliffhanger sign-offs imploring you to stay tuned for the next installment.

Of all the YoGorilla adventures, the entry that sticks out the most as a bona fide classic would be the Speed homage. This is in spite of the fact that Hans Doberman is conspicuously absent. It's never explained if he's responsible for putting that bomb on the bus; nevertheless, there is a bomb on the bus, and YoGorilla takes it upon himself to assert control of the situation, by forcibly boarding and yelling the bad news directly into in the bus driver's ear. The bus driver is yet another character whose exact species is indiscernible to me (facially he looks somewhat like a Chihuahua, but I'm not sure). His immediate reaction is to bail out by throwing himself out of the bus window; he's followed by a couple of sheep, in a gag that I'm not convinced has any deeper significance than to play into the idea of sheep as followers, but is a perfect example of just how delightfully, weirdly random the gags in this series could get. And it gets zanier still. Snake, who's sporting a wig in this ad, is tasked with filling in for Sandra Bullock, while the passengers manage to keep their cool by bonding over their shared love of YoGo products (YoGo GorillaMix, according to the labels). We get an appearance from Crocodile Dundee, with the twist that he's played by an actual crocodile, getting emotionally intimate with a beatnik hippo (a hip hippo?). There's also something going on between a parrot with a vanilla tub and a giraffe, but I've no idea what - for the life of me, I've never been able to pick out what the giraffe actually says after "Is that vanilla?" Honestly, he sounds drunk. Gordon Gecko makes his obligatory cameo, and the albino trio show up, attempting to earn two bob in exchange for wiping the speeding bus's windscreen. The whole thing is a non-stop parade of fast edits displaying the action from all angles, and intense close-ups of these grotesque claymation critters with their perpetually-popping eyeballs; it not only replicates the dynamism of an action blockbuster, but it frequently threatens to push the ad into borderline nightmare territory. The experience culminates in an explosive (quite literally) ending where they eventually stop the bus, quite forgetting about their bomb dilemma. The entailing visual is extreme, but the damage to the passengers and their YoGo seemingly quite minimal.

The second most notable ad in the YoGorilla campaign involves the yoghurt-hungry ape finding himself up against an extra terrestrial who looks something like the aliens from Mars Attacks! and has devious plans for Earth's YoGo supply. This one gets special mention for incorporating a scene where YoGorilla receives a call from then-President Bill Clinton (in the form of a rhinoceros), in which there is a surprisingly risqué reference to the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Of course. What food product doesn't want to have itself stand out by equating itself with presidential semen?

Lisa's Date With Density (aka She Don't Use Jelly)

Milhouse's presence might have been suspiciously downplayed in "A Milhouse Divided" (for an episode bearing his name in his title), but maybe the extra attention he'd receive in the subsequent Simpsons outing would go a little way in making up for that. "Lisa's Date With Density" (4F01) arrived hot on the heels of "A Milhouse Divided", airing on December 15th 1996 and blessing us with another well-observed story about relationship troubles, this time among the younger Springfieldians. It is in some respects the perfect accompaniment, but the placement is also a little jarring. It's important to keep in mind that the writers don't necessarily coordinate the precise order in which the episodes will air whilst brainstorming and writing them; certainly, there's nothing in "Lisa's Date With Density" to suggest that it was consciously written to come after the Van Houtens' divorce. There are no references, explicit or implicit, to the idea that Milhouse is having to deal with his parents' break-up in the backdrop of everything else he's going through here. "Density" gives Milhouse arguably his most substantial supporting role since Season 3's "Bart's Friend Falls In Love" (shining a much bigger light than before upon who he is outside of his dynamic with Bart), but it's also a particularly punishing installment for the young Van Houten. Having it come directly after "A Milhouse Divided" gives it that extra bite of cosmic cruelty, one of the pivotal jokes being that nobody seems to care much about how Milhouse feels. But it also lends a little added catharsis to the final scene, which allows Milhouse to have the last word (at least as far as the A-story is concerned), proving that he is, however abjectly, a survivor.

As with "A Milhouse Divided", the title of this episode warrants its own special mention. The wordplay is so subtle that if you only glance at it too quickly, it's easy to miss out on it altogether (ditto for "Realty Bites" of Season 9, which I still see people muddle with the title of the Winona Ryder movie). I'll confess that I initially misread it as "Lisa's Date with Destiny", and in my head I still think of that as the correct title. So apologies in advance if I accidentally refer to it as "Destiny" here. And yet, the confusion seems entirely appropriate, in that destiny is something that weights heavily on its central scenario. The outcome is a foregone conclusion, and that is essentially the point.

"Lisa's Date With Density" was, surprisingly, the first episode to centre on the premise of Lisa developing romantic feelings for one of her peers, an avenue already explored with Bart, in "Bart's Girlfriend" of Season 6. We'd seen her on the receiving end of Ralph Wiggum's awkward infatuations in "I Love Lisa", sure, but episodes that involved her putting her own heart on the line had tended to focus on her feelings for adult characters, be it her schoolgirl crush on her teacher Mr Bergstrom in "Lisa's Substitute" or her foretold engagement, in "Lisa's Wedding", to fellow college student Hugh in the far-off futuristic world of 2010. Nelson definitely feels like the perfect candidate Lisa's nascent stirrings, a kid so thoroughly unlike her in every shape and form that it holds that she would find him fascinating - a fascination that, as with so many prepubescent crushes, manifests first as intense irritation. Lisa sees Nelson making an exhibition of himself multiple times throughout the school day and is amazed at his gall and at his reckless compulsion to create a disruption at every opportunity. And then before she knows it, she can't take her eyes off him. As she attempts to rationalise it, "He's like a riddle wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in a vest." (He's also fond of ending communications with the flippant "Smell you later", and was there ever a more obnoxiously 1990s phrase? Will Smith said it in the opening to every episode of Fresh Prince of Bell Air, and Blue/Gary Oak said it incessantly in one of the earlier installments of Pokémon.) But Nelson is also the kind of character with the potential to rip Lisa right out of her comfort zone; any prospective association with him constitutes a risk for Lisa. As per the DVD commentary, it was a pairing that, much like Skinner and Krabappel, the writers had been kicking around for some time but had never figured out how to approach until the eighth season.

"Density" also takes advantage of the fact that, despite being one of the more prominent students at Springfield Elementary, Nelson was still a relative unknown. His status as a serious threat to the Simpsons kids had peaked all the way back in his introductory episode, "Bart The General" of Season 1, after which he was reinvigorated with his catchphrase, "Ha! Ha!", popping up all over as a force of almost cosmic derision. But there hadn't been any episodes since "General" that had focussed on him so extensively as a character, and certainly none that tried to get to grips with what, if anything, was lurking beneath his thuggish exterior. The possibility that Nelson might actually be a sensitive soul acting out as a bully was intermittently raised, but always played solely for humor (the revelation that he has a talent for home economics in "Lisa on Ice", his love of Andy Williams in "Bart on The Road", etc). "Density" was a fresh attempt to explore this question from a position of pathos (but not too much pathos). Nancy Cartwright gets to give a particularly nuanced Nelson performance, which surely compensated for the fact that "Density" is an unusually Bartless affair (he gets a small moment at the start when Skinner accuses him of vandalising Chalmers' Honda, but his only role within the actual narrative is a single scene where he cautions Lisa against an entanglement with Nelson).

Adding an extra dollop of pathos to the mix is that this story is actually about a love triangle, with Milhouse being the unhappy third party who's emphatically left out in the cold. I could be wrong about this, but I think "Density" was also the first episode to explore Milhouse's unrequited crush on Lisa, at least in the present. It built on an idea introduced in "Lisa's Wedding", which prophesied that an ill-fated teenage fling was in their future, going so far as to insinuate that Lisa would lose her virginity to Milhouse before unceremoniously dumping him. The adult Milhouse explicitly cites Lisa as his "one true love", but the entire premise of Hugh being Lisa's first love (ie: her first serious relationship) would indicate that she had no such delusions about where their puppy romance was headed (her implied willingness to get physically intimate, however, raises questions as to what actually went on between them). For now, all Milhouse wants is for Lisa to notice and respect him, but alas, her only interest is in using him as a middleman to pass love notes onto Nelson, ultimately resulting in a painful misunderstanding that has Milhouse hospitalised for most of the second half. The kid is our underdog, sweetly endearing in his unfounded hopefulness that Lisa will eventually latch onto his winning qualities, yet wretchedly upfront and utterly inept in his futile attempts at self-assertion. "But I'm ALL Milhouse!", he indignantly insists in response to Lisa's condescending assurance that she wants to bring out the Milhouse in Nelson. "Plus, my mom says I'm the handsomest guy in school." Kirk spent the entirety of the preceding episode demonstrating that he's out of touch with anything resembling dignity, and here we see how his son fares no better. Mr Largo puts it most succinctly when he firmly declares that "Nobody likes Milhouse!" - although it is suggested that Janey might secretly like him, and possibly also Uter. So much of how this episode plays out puts me in mind of a slightly meaner version of Peanuts, with its parade of tragic young lovers all grappling with feelings they can barely understand, helplessly infatuated with people who wouldn't give them the time of day, naively clinging to whatever shreds of hope they can get that they might actually be loved in return.

Milhouse does get a moment of explicit endorsement, albeit one that he isn't around to witness. Bart, during his only substantial scene, makes it clear that he sees Milhouse as a worthier choice of boyfriend for Lisa than Nelson. Lisa has a compelling counterargument: "Milhouse likes Vaseline on toast!" For a while there, a number of us naively assumed that this was included as a reference to The Flaming Lips' song "She Don't Use Jelly", but no. Showrunner Josh Weinstein confirms on the DVD commentary that it was inspired by a kid who would regularly board his school bus with a slice of Vaseline on toast at the ready...which was honestly more than I'd wanted to know. It's here that I'm going to plug the DVD commentary for "Lisa's Date With Density" as quite possibly the second most hilarious of all the Simpsons commentaries (the most hilarious being that of "Marge Be Not Proud", with its string of horror stories about working with Lawrence Tierney), if only for everyone else's aghast reactions when Weinstein shares this particular anecdote. (Weinstein: Apparently, you can do that...don't hold me responsible, but it's very healthy... Mike Scully: It's NOT very healthy!) Come to think of it, wasn't there a scene where Homer ingested an entire jar of petroleum jelly in the Season 4 episode "Lisa The Beauty Queen"? And this was before Weinstein even joined the show staff? Have the Simpsons writers known multiple people with this eccentric culinary inclination?

"Lisa's Date With Density" is yet another Season 8 installment that's often overlooked, with many fans shrugging it off for being overly straightforward. I will agree that the narrative trajectory with Lisa and Nelson has few genuine surprises, going pretty much exactly where you'd expect from the outset. Lisa falls for Nelson, believing that there's a nicer, more upstanding citizen to be wheedled out of him. For a fleeting moment it looks as though she might have succeeded, but in the end his badness (and the status quo) prevails. Lisa terminates their relationship and goes home, thank you and goodnight. A predictable plot needn't be a death knell, however. What makes this one great is just how beautifully it delves into the characters along away, and the small, revealing moments it brings to the surface. The suggestion that Nelson has feelings should not, in itself, come as much of a revelation. We'd recently seen ample evidence of that in "A Milhouse Divided", where he'd opened up about how his parents' marriage fell apart after his mother developed a weakness for throat lozenges. There, his moment of soul-bearing was double-edged; his tearful admission that, "By the end, her breath was so fresh, she wasn't really my mother any more", an absurd one, but with darker undertones when you take into account that his mother's partialities are being used as a family-friendly, Muntz-adverse allusion to drug addiction and how it warps a person. "Lisa's Date With Density" further explores the idea of Nelson coming from a troubled background, but with a more subtle hand. There's a scene where Lisa accompanies Nelson back to his house after school, and his parents are conspicuously absent, the only mention of them in the entire episode being Nelson's off-hand comment that they haven't had any visitors since his dad "went nuts". The dilapidated state of the property, and small details such as the stolen Kwik-E-Mart doormat, are allowed to speak for themselves and tell us as much as we need to know about what Nelson has had to live with off of screen. "Density" was undoubtedly the most sympathetic an episode had ever been toward Nelson at this stage, but it's a point that Scully's script smartly avoids overselling. It doesn't turn Nelson's life into a walking sob story. He receives no big moment of emotional breakdown, as he did in "A Milhouse Divided". The most we get are a couple of little hints that he regrets that things can't work out differently, but by the end it's clear that Nelson is fully resigned to being who he is - not because he's necessarily happier that way, but because being a reckless, belligerent outlaw is the only way he knows how to survive in the world that he's been raised in. And Lisa comes to understand that it maybe isn't on her to be interfering with that. She doesn't condemn Nelson for his failure to reform. She gets angry with him for lying to her, but the bulk of her annoyance is directed at her own idealistic thinking ("I was a fool to think I'd actually changed you. Maybe I was seeing things in you that weren't really there.")

Just as "Lisa's Date With Density" is often dismissed for being an aggressively straightforward story, so too is it often perceived as a more cynical episode than it really is, offering no possibility of redemption for Nelson at the end and having Lisa walk away sadly, realising she's been played a fool. To the contrary, I think this is hands down one of the season's most thoughtful, quiet and affecting character studies, eclipsed only by "Grade School Confidential" (both episodes were directed by Susie Dietter, who does a masterful job of bringing out the moodiness of their respective scenarios). The major difference being that, unlike "Grade School Confidential", the conclusions of this particular study don't point us to a happy ending. It's honest, but not excessively bitter in its conclusions, a point I would make by comparing it to another Lisa episode from Season 8. Just as I see "A Milhouse Divided" and "Grade School Confidential" as inverted reflections of one another, I would argue that "Density" has its own "twin" episode at the latter end of the season, that being "The Old Man and The Lisa". Both episodes involve Lisa entering into friendlier terms with typically antagonistic characters, believing there to be something redeemable about them, only to learn an unhappy lesson about leopards not changing their spots (it would happen with Sideshow Bob too, but that's quite a way off). Lisa takes Mr Burns' inevitable betrayal a lot harder than she does Nelson's, and why shouldn't she? What Burns did was so much more monstrously depraved, what he exposed Lisa to much more unspeakably traumatic. And it followed on from Lisa genuinely believing that the old man had changed and standing up for him against her family's mockery. Pure though her intentions might have been, there's a sense that she has debased herself by associating with Burns, and the only way for her cleanse her soul at the end is by rejecting his offer than she benefit financially from his misdeeds. "Old Man" is a thoroughly cynical slice of Simpsons life, the only brightness being in Lisa's ability to remain true to her morals. The way "Density" resolves is a lot more modest, but also more complex. There's no question that Nelson has done a bad and unpleasant thing with his malicious targetting of Skinner, but he isn't upheld as the clear-cut villain of the scenario (it helps that, unlike Burns' horrific mass porpoise slaughter, the coleslaw-heavy offensive on Skinner's property is played largely for humor). Nor does Lisa appear to have believed so sincerely in his capacity for change. She's prepared to give Nelson the benefit of the doubt when he shows up at her house in the early hours of the morning, insisting that he's been falsely accused, but does not sound overly shocked when the truth later outs. As with "Old Man", Lisa finds herself having to review her role in the equation, but all that's required here is for her to graciously go her own way, recognising that (unlike Burns), Nelson was never asking for her support in the first place. I don't see that as a cynical conclusion, but a sensitive one in which the characters come to some understanding about human weakness and their personal limitations. The point of "Density" is not that Nelson is an inherently bad apple, unworthy of anyone's affections. It implies that there's a reason for why he's the way he is, just as there's a reason why he's not looking to change that, one that goes a little further than the usual snag of "the character can't grow and improve because the status quo wouldn't allow it". And where Nelson rejects the possibility of change, Lisa takes the opportunity to do a little growing herself.

I also don't see "Density" as a sardonic refutation of the old cliche that love conquers all, a reading that dramatically overestimates what Lisa and Nelson have between them. Because let's be real here - they're kids, and there isn't a whole lot of substance to their attraction beyond curiosity and a passing fancy. They do form something of an emotional attachment, enough for Nelson to seem genuinely startled when Lisa initiates their break-up, but there isn't a sense that they were ever massively devoted to one another. I think it's far more accurate to say that while Lisa and Nelson both liked each other, in the end they just don't like each other enough. Nelson is certainly intrigued by Lisa, and by the freshness that her rose-coloured outlook brings to his table, but not so much that he would treat that as incentive to mend his ways. Likewise, Lisa might be captivated by Nelson's bad boy persona, but she cannot overlook the aspects of his behaviour that she finds troubling. And compared to "Lisa's Substitute", where Lisa was always leaving herself wide open to eventual heartbreak, here she seems to have always entered into the situation a little too warily to be overly hurt by the outcome. No tears are shed, and she and Nelson are able to part ways on basically amicable terms. Her final scene has her emotionally grazed, but already acknowledging the light at the end of the tunnel - for now, she's not interested in thinking about her next crush, but doesn't doubt that she will learn to open her heart up again.

Before then, we get plenty of awkward character moments where Lisa and Nelson each get to sit in one other's worlds and struggle to know what to make of them. Lisa is more vocal in her own philosophical discordance with what passes as normal in Nelson's realm - his ownership of a "Nuke The Whales" poster and his predilection for singing songs about teachers being brutally decapitated - but Nelson seems every bit as baffled by the various manifestations he encounters of Lisa's personality (while visiting her house, there's a background gag where he picks up her plush bear, as if he can't grasp what it's even for, and churlishly casts it aside). I'm in two minds on how to interpret that scene with Lisa trying to impress Nelson by coaxing Snowball II into acting like a baby, and failing. Lisa insists that the cat is usually very compliant with her role-playing, implying that Snowball II is possibly being thrown off by the negative energy in the room coming from Nelson (and the way Bart's eyeline follows the fleeing cat as he enters the scene is a really nice detail, as if he's already picking up on the disturbance). Or maybe there's a metaphor in there for what she's trying to do with Nelson - ie: forcing a bad-tempered animal into a part they are not inclined to play, and getting her face swatted for her efforts. Lisa's assumption that she can bring out the better qualities in Nelson is, notably, at odds with what she'd previously told Bart in "Bart's Girlfriend" about how it's naive to think you can change a person - although even there, her yearning for a surly young library assistant implied than she wasn't necessarily going to heed her own words. And to be fair to Lisa, she seems ready to take the obvious lesson midway through the episode, but gets pushed into persistence by Marge, who gives her daughter some flagrantly bad advice on the level of the teachings she initially tried to impress on her in "Moaning Lisa" (if Marge were being halfway sensible about this, she would tell Lisa that she's only 8 years old and shouldn't be too worried about finding a partner at her time in life). As with "Moaning Lisa", the advice very transparently stems from Marge's own insecurities about her life's choices. Agreeing with Lisa that it's impossible to change Nelson's fundamental character would be tantamount to admitting that she failed in her own aspirations of transforming the "loud, crude and piggish" Homer into "a whole new person". For evidence of how that's working out, we need look no further than the B-story, which has Homer acquiring an autodialler and using it to bug the town with an incessant message promising non-stop happiness in exchange for a dollar.

It's the "Happy Dude" subplot that slightly lowers the tone of "Density", making it feel like a less assured piece overall than "Grade School Confidential". It's reminiscent of Homer's sugar pile subplot in "Lisa's Rival", also written by Scully, in that it's conspicuously a silly B-story for the sake of a silly B-story, to bring levity to a more grounded Lisa adventure. There's an intermittent friction between the great, perceptive character observations for which Scully had such a knack as a writer and the excessively crass energy that would dominate the series during his impending turn as showrunner. "Lisa's Rival" arrived at a time when Homer was coming to feel less like an everyman than an out-and-out Looney Tune, but "Density" signalled the next logical step in his debasement, in having him be really kind of odious. You can certainly see the Homer of the Scully era creeping his way into the picture, with his wholly unrepentant efforts to scam his neighbours out of money (and later try to pass it off as Marge's doing). You could argue that he isn't doing anything too egregiously terrible, on the grounds that a) he's only asking for every dialled individual to send him a single dollar, not their life savings and b) nobody except the ridiculously gullible is going to fall for it anyway (we get no evidence of anyone actually responding besides Abe and Jasper). Yet he still manages to victimise the entire town by beleaguering them with his inane recording. "Density" also went some way in cementing Marge's role in this equation, by having her murmur disapprovingly and point out just how stupid and inconsiderate Homer is being, but otherwise stand back and let it happen. What was preventing her from unplugging the autodialler and dumping it in the trash while Homer's back was turned?

Still, Homer's seedy antics do allow for a few great character moments. Often quoted is Burns' avaricious musing: "One dollar for eternal happiness? I'd be happier with the dollar." Even better, for my money, is Apu's broadside, "A jolly rancher is not a sprinkle, sir! Perhaps in Shangri-la they are, but not here!" Best of all, though, is a sequence entailing a rare glimpse of marital discord within the Flanders' walls, with Maude getting progressively exasperated with Ned for his reluctance to unplug the phone and stop Happy Dude's nocturnal intrusions. A seldom cited but wonderful thing about Season 8 is that it gave Maggie Roswell, one of the show's more undervalued cast members, numerous chances to shine. Helen Lovejoy finally got to fulfil her antagonistic potential in "The Twisted World of Marge Simpson", while Luann Van Houten delivered a string of cutting one-liners about life with Kirk in "A Milhouse Divided".  Here, we have Maude's revelatory delivery of "If you don't unplug that phone right now, you're sleeping on the lawn!", demonstrating that even she finds Ned's deference awfully hard to bear at times. I'll also give the B-story points for the fact that, unlike the sugar pile in "Lisa's Rival", Happy Dude does have some bearing on how the A-story is resolved.There's a clever bit of narrative intersection in the third act, when Wiggum, Lou and Eddie raid the Simpsons' house, supposedly in pursuit of the coleslaw punks, leading to a dramatic fake-out where it looks like Wiggum might have killed Nelson, when in actuality he's shot the autodialler. Having busted Homer and thwarted Happy Dude, Wiggum considers that closure enough for the night and effectively decides to let Nelson and co go scot-free. Of course, Nelson still has to answer for what he did to Lisa.

Lisa can see that what Marge is saying about Homer is straight-up denial, yet that doesn't deter her from having a go at it with Nelson, convincing him to swap out his wardrobe for more presentable attire and waxing lyrical to him beneath the moonlight. Lisa's gestures might seem hopelessly ungainly, but they get results, at least in the short-term. Nelson kisses her, if only to buy a few moments of silence from Lisa's poetic musings, and discovers that he likes it. It's a development that immediately brings them into direct conflict with Jimbo, Dolph and Kearney (and produces the immortal two-liner: "You kissed a girl?" "That is so gay!"). Lisa assumes that the trio are a toxic influence on Nelson and, given that they are all visibly older than him (in Kearney's case, god only knows how much older), she's probably correct. But it's not hard to understand why Nelson might view things differently. In the absence of an attentive family, their camaraderie likely provides him with a sense of  belonging. He's unwilling to give that up, and appears to have zero qualms about participating in their hooliganism when Lisa isn't around. Which doesn't automatically mean that his feelings were Lisa were feigned. It's not that he chooses their fellowship over Lisa so much as he naively assumes that he can have them both. He wants the freedom to express himself the only way he knows how, though his antisocial actions, but he also seems to like the neutralising presence that Lisa brings to his life, and having the option of retreating back to it. Lisa's prior observation about him being an enigma wrapped in a vest stands by the end, since what Nelson wants isn't entirely clear-cut. His insistence that Lisa was always misguided in thinking that she could ever make an upstanding citizen out of him is compounded by his response when she asks him why he ever wanted to be with her. He admits that she was the first person who believed that there was latent good in him. He wasn't able to make that transition, and agrees that Lisa should not have expected it, but he nevertheless appreciated that she was willing to look at him and see more than just the same obnoxious hoodlum as everyone else. The possibility that he could at least be perceived differently is something that Nelson has clearly responded to, suggesting that there is a part of him that wishes that he could be a better person. He doesn't know how to get there, but his interactions with Lisa enabled him to at least rub shoulders with the suggestion. He rounds off his poignant admission with a bitter sting, by putting the onus on Lisa for her inevitable disappointment. "I guess you really blew that one, huh?" he states, insinuating that it really wasn't his fault if Lisa was projecting her mistaken assumptions onto him. Nelson isn't entirely blameless on that front - he did lie to Lisa and take advantage of her desire to see the best in him - but Lisa seems prepared to accept responsibility. She does not disagree with Nelson's observation, and walks away with no further hard feelings. From the looks of it, Nelson is sorry to see her go.

The final sequence, as Lisa makes her way back to Evergreen Terrace, visibly sadder but presumably a good deal wiser from her experience, is truly a thing of beauty, so haunting in its colours and so arousing in its direction and score. The evocative atmosphere, and the quiet sense of overall solitude, remind me a little of the sequence in "Moaning Lisa" when she sets out to find Bleeding Gums Murphy (and, as with "Moaning Lisa", we have the questionable sight of an 8-year-old girl wandering through town unaccompanied at a potentially dangerous hour). Along the way she's greeted by Milhouse, who emerges from his house to give his Shih Tzu an early morning toileting (I was going to label it another one-off pet, like Smithers' Yorkie, Lovejoy's sheepdog and Ralph's cat named Mittens, but according to the Simpsons Wiki, the Van Houtens' Shih Tzu has appeared in a few other places). He becomes the first to learn that she and Nelson are no longer an item, and asks her if she has anyone in mind for her next crush; she responds that it could be just anyone. It's a perfunctory answer that barely conceals Lisa's disinterest in the matter, but Milhouse takes it as confirmation that he has, against all odds, come out as the victor of the scenario. The final shot is a freeze frame of him leaping into the air (unwittingly throttling his dog in the process) in celebration of that rekindled hope for the possibility, however remote, that his place in the newly rising sun might be coming. It's a meagre prize, but Milhouse seizes it for all that it's worth, and we both pity and admire him all the better for it.

Tia Maria Wants A Pickle (featuring Stephen Dorff)

Another ad that played like a fully-formed horror narrative, delivering chills, tension and a devious twist all in less than a minute, was "Lure", an entry into the "Princess of Darkness" campaign for coffee liqueur brand Tia Maria. Much like Toyota's "Earthly Pleasure" MR2 Roadster ad, it arrived at the cusp of the Y2K, a time when I was particularly susceptible to the miniature nightmares that seemed to stalk the avenues of late night television. "Lure" was directed by Walter Stern, better known for his work helming music videos for David Bowie, The Prodigy and Massive Attack, and starred actor Stephen Dorff, playing a fashionable Hollywood pin-up who might as well be himself. He falls under the spell of a supernatural seductress whom I take to be the personification of the beverage being touted (although the liqueur itself also features as a central prop in her baleful ritual), and for this reason I shall refer to her as "Tia Maria".

"Lure" opens with an ad-within-an-ad; Dorff's mug gazes out from the pages of a trendy magazine, before we cut to reveal what the Hollywood heartthrob is up to in the present moment, nonchalantly browsing a downtown newsstand in the dead of night while attempting to strike up a perfunctory conversation with the indifferent vendor. All of a sudden he's been gripped by a force well beyond his comprehension, causing him to discard his coffee and the conversation and embark on a perilous journey into the ill-lit regions of the city. He seems totally numb to everything stirring in his immediate surroundings, be it the agitated German Shepherd dog that lunges at him from behind a fence (producing a harsh burst of noise in an otherwise eerily muted soundscape) or the mysterious female silhouette observing him from a distance as he approaches Tia Maria's apartment building. It was this specific detail that most spooked me at the time. It's not obvious what her presence has to do with anything - whether she is an associate of Tia Maria's, tasked with overseeing Dorff's arrival, a prospective predator eyeing him in accordance with her own agenda, or a casual bystander showing fleeting and harmless curiosity as he wanders past. All we can conclude is that she seems quite at ease in the darkness. To my mind, she's a scarier figure than the central Tia, for the way she hints at a larger narrative that's permitted to remain predominantly in the shadows, out of both sight and apprehension. There is an entire nocturnal underbelly at work within the streets of Los Angeles, although what it's actually up to is anybody's guess. Stern's direction captures that seedier side of the city, depicting it as not only grungy and forbidding, but ghoulish and uncanny. The trail of papers that litter Dorff's pathway and the graffiti-strewn walls in the backdrop seem indicative not of negligence and social disorder, but the aftermath of some kind of ruinous fury that's been manifesting off of screen. According to the ad's writer, Mike Boles, "Lure" took several cues from trends in contemporary psychological thrillers (it even shares some spatial DNA with David Fincher's Se7en, the apartment where Tia Maria resides having been used for the hotel scenes in that film), and there is something slickly cinematic in how it lays down its hypnotically hair-raising atmosphere, enticing us through an urban wilderness that's as treacherous and uncharted as any backwoods. The light featured throughout the ad, far from staving off the oppressiveness of the darkness, has a sickly, unnatural quality that offers little refuge. Even the characters lurking in its green, insectocutor glow have a ghostly inertia to them - the exchange between Dorff and the magazine vendor (the ad's only dialogue) is stilted and mechanical, suggesting that the two have little genuine interest in one another. It's as if the denizens already occupy a sleeping walking trance from which Tia's spell momentarily awakens Dorff, compelling him, however unwittingly, to look the true face of his environs directly in the eye. The visual punchline, revealing why Tia has summoned Dorff, provides a humorous tension diffuser, but one that does not entirely offset that sense of omnipresent menace.

The expectation the ad sets up, and then deftly subverts, is that Tia's interests in Dorff must be rooted in some malefic sexual appetite. Her cravings turn out to be for something else entirely - she's called Dorff in so that he can unfasten the lid on her pickle jar, after which she releases him from his trance and sends him on his way. There does still seem to be a lascivious subtext in terms of how her interactions with Dorf have played out - he's been objectified, lured in purely for the use of his body and then aloofly discarded - but one that's comically at odds with the sheer mundaneness of what she actually wants from the arrangement. "Lure" might just have functioned just as convincingly as an advertisement for a brand of pickles, but for the deliberate squeamishness of their inclusion. I've no doubt that pickles were chosen as the item of her fancy (as opposed to eggs or olives) so as to work in the additional gag of her chomping on a phallic object, a sly final signifier of her mastery over the stupefied Dorff. Whether we're to assume that Tia, for all her occult prowess, was unable to open that pesky jar herself, or was too idle to do so, the implication is that she's been browsing magazines for a desirable (and entirely disposable) personal jar opener in which the same manner as Dorff himself was scanning the newsstand for midnight reading material. Her readiness to entrance and employ unwary souls on such casual whims registers as both spooky and seductively admirable.

Above all, "Lure" seems fixated on the notion of gaze and with the perils of inviting it. People certainly notice Dorff as he weaves his way through the streets of Los Angeles toward Tia's apartment - a fellow nocturnal wanderer glances his way as he passes, and the distant silhouette takes an obvious interest in him. It's as if Dorff is perpetually being watched, by an audience to which he remains largely oblivious, and it's his status as a Hollywood hotshot that has made him so vulnerable; his willingness to live such an exposed existence is precisely what brings him to the manipulative attentions of Tia Maria. "Lure" leans into that idea of celebrities becoming flesh and blood advertisements, modelling a lifestyle and a set of aspirations that members of public are encouraged to emulate, but purports to put empowerment firmly in the hands of the onlooker. The celebrity becomes public property, a plaything to be bent and molded as the consumer pleases, while the elusive Tia lives the truly aspirational life, which involves being able to summon celebrities to do her menial bidding at a simple twirl of her fingers. The subversiveness of "Lure" lies in the insinuation that it is not Dorff's sex appeal per se that's being used to make the pivotal beverage look enticing, but the tantalizing cunning with which Tia is able to take advantage of him. The message, then, is that light is not your friend - the shadows may be foreboding, but they offer a wicked prosperity for those who are able to reside there.

LLoyds Cashpoint - Ad Rated U Going On 15

The following cinema ad for Llyods bank was rated U...the fact that it has a 15 certificate displayed front and centre for most of its duration notwithstanding. In practice, the distinction meant little to my childhood psyche, which naturally found it more unsettling than I suspect it would the vast majority of genuinely 15-rated content. A memory I was never quite able to repress involved waiting for Free Willy to start and having to sit through this creepy ad in which a disembodied voice was heard ranting against a black void about how much it sucked to not be an adult. Being a non-adult myself at the time I could relate to the basic sentiment; the voice itself seemed to deep and too morose to strike an assuredly familiar chord (the actor in question was blatantly a full-fledged adult), and the specifics of what he was saying were frequently lost on me (whatever liqueur chocolates were, he made them sound distinctly unenticing), but I could certainly appreciate how, as a kid, it bites to be confronted by just how up to your neck in your own limitations you are. Not being able to see certain films? Sure, I could connect with that. I remembered how surprised I was a year prior to learn that Batman Returns was off-limits. So when he laid down the ad's big poser - "What can you get at this age???" - I was genuinely curious to learn where this was going. The answer that ultimately flashed across the screen in big green lettering - "Your cash is being counted" - struck me as tauntingly abstract and frankly more ominous than reassuring. Not even the catharsis of seeing an orca leap to freedom was enough to dislodge that eerie, lingering sensation from my brain. Later that day, I asked my mother to explain what was meant by "Your cash is being counted" (such was her tireless burden back then); she told me that it alluded to the fact that you didn't need to be an adult to have a bank account. As a solution to the problem raised, it seemed mundane, not exactly a roaring consolation for not being able to watch any and every movie you might fancy. At the same time, it accounted for everything that I'd found so intuitively sinister about the experience. I had my own bank account, but all that really meant in practice was that there was a sum of money out there that supposedly belonged to me, but that I never saw and couldn't do a damned thing with. The void of the screen, and its foreboding promise that unseen forces were counting that money as we spoke, played into to that feeling of my assets existing in a weird kind of limbo, as someone else was pulling the strings, sizing up myself and my resources for god knows what ends. Your cash is being counted? It seemed a clear-cut threat - less about you taking control of your life and your resources and asserting your worth within society than The Powers That Be figuring out everything it needed to know about your worth in advance and all of your pawny potential.

When I finally had the chance to get reacquainted with the advert on YouTube (thanks to The Hall of Advertising), I noted that I'd recalled numerous details about it fairly accurately, but that as a child I had evidently failed to pick up on the pivotal sleight of hand, that being the unique way in which it plays around with the theatrical setting. Cinema curtains are seen to fall across the picture, obscuring the 15 certificate at the centre, before pulling back as the dark abyss of the cinema screen is seemingly transformed into that of a cashpoint machine. Yes, the actual significance of that "Your cash is being counted" statement makes a whole lot more sense to me now. Back then, I'd had zero experience in using a cashpoint, and so that visual trick, and all of the accompanying bleeps and bloops, seemed utterly alien to me. No wonder it had puzzled me so.

If there's a flaw in this ad, it's that it does pre-emptively answer its own question by waving that BBFC certificate in your face at the opening. What can you get at that age, he asks? Well, you could go and rent Freaked for a start. The focus on the age 15 does, on the one level, seem rather arbitrary. Sure, it makes witty use of the visual language of cinema, but a BBFC 12 certificate would have been just as valid for the specific point it's making. I got my first debit card when I was 11, and if the ad was for a specific saving scheme aimed at 15 year olds, then it doesn't make that clear. But then it was clearly intended to tap into that very specific frustration that accompanies mid-adolescence. Adulthood and all of its associated perks looms and appears tauntingly near and yet so far. You are, for all intents and purposes, still a child, and there's an awful lot that the law says you still aren't ready for (for good reason, in most cases - not being able to get married is cited as number two in the monologuer's grievances, but any 15 year old who's seriously concerned about marriage really needs to slow down). Under the BBFC's rating system, 15 is the last stop before you can access absolutely everything that the cinematic realm has to offer. You're mature enough for Freaked, but still too much of a kid for Carlito's Way. But you can bank with Lloyds right now, and that's something this ad insinuates is every bit as exciting. The allure here is that of financial freedom...to a point. Your cash that's being counted is going to have to come from somewhere, after all, and you are very limited in how you can obtain it. You also can't use it to buy liqueur chocolates.

The most interesting thing about this ad is in how it attempts to create a kind of cinematic spectacle out of something as hopelessly banal as pulling money from a cashpoint, by having the two screens appear to merge into one. Perhaps there's also an implicit narrative in there about the parallel experiences of waiting for adulthood to start and waiting for our feature presentation, naively assuming in both cases that that's where all the real fun begins. That may be a part of why this ad stayed with me for as long as it did - it is, in its own unnerving way, a persuasive ode to the perks of living in the present moment, making the most of what's accessible to you right now and not taking it as a given that all the goodies lie in what's being withheld from you. I don't know how many 15-year-olds were convinced that banking with Lloyds was really more exciting than most of the forbidden fruit listed off in the preceding monologue, but for my younger self, it managed to create a truly spooky and dislocating experience from the sights and sounds of an everyday cash machine. Back then, I appreciated that some of the most impactful elements of each theatrical outing were to be located not within the feature itself, but in the various unknown cracks that came before it. The world seems an inherently stranger and more intense place when viewed in big and in the dark, and when what it's showing is all still so new to you. Alas, what's thrilling and new today is tomorrow normal and taken for granted.

A Disney Christmas Gift (The Clock Watcher Cut)

 

If you're a younger Gen-Xer or an older Millennial, then you might have memories of a Disney compilation film that used to make the rounds during the festive season, under the title of A Disney Christmas Gift. First airing on CBS on December 4th 1982 as part of their regular Walt Disney slot, it contained a selection of shorts and clips from classic Disney films, linked by chintzy live action segments showcasing wind-up toys of Disney characters and the decorating touches at Disneyland. Only a limited number of the featured clips had any legitimate connection to the Christmas season, so artful snippets of voice-over narration (much of it in song) were applied to create the brittle illusion of a running festive theme - we're told, for example, that the winter sequence in Bambi happens on Bambi's first Christmas morning, even though there's nothing in the film itself to indicate this, nor any logical reason for these forest creatures to have any concept or knowledge of what Christmas is. The "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo" sequence from Cinderella was dubbed to have the Fairy Godmother shout out "Merry Christmas, Cinderella!" right before the fade-out (if you look closely you'll notice that her lips don't move), despite everything preceding it having absolutely sod-all to do with the festive season. The "You Can Fly" sequence from Peter Pan similarly doesn't happen at Christmas, but the characters explicitly reference the holiday in the lyrics, so I'll give it a pass. The most tangential thing on the menu is a clip from The Sword in The Stone (worked in as a vague allusion to the Nativity story - "another young king was born" - which is as overtly religious as the special gets) that doesn't exactly show off the best side of any of the principal characters, except maybe Archimedes the owl. Merlin throws a hissy fit and ditches Wart, for reasons that might not be obvious to anyone who hasn't seen the movie proper, and Wart proves to be a royally incompetent squire by forgetting to bring Kay's sword to the big sword-fighting tournament (we're not meant to side with Kay, but do you really blame him for being cheesed off with Wart about this?). The clip also ends abruptly, with a voice-over assuring us that "And so began the legend of King Arthur!" just as the development of Wart pulling the titular sword from the titular stone is barely getting started.

A Disney Christmas Gift was covered by the guy who does the annual Island of Misfit Christmas Specials feature (as “A Walt Disney Christmas”, which might be a legitimate alternate title). I enjoy his work and have a lot of respect for him, so I do mean it with the utmost most courtesy when I say that parts of his coverage are sort of misleading. The bit that I think is true is that Disney created the special because Mickey's Christmas Carol, which was at one point intended to air in its timeslot, was delayed due to an animators' strike, and A Disney Christmas Gift was an easy placeholder project to assemble cheaply and on the fly (note that Mickey's Christmas Carol wound up debuting not as a TV special, but as a theatrical short attached to the 1983 re-release of The Rescuers). But it simply isn't the case that Disney only aired this once and then canned it, nor is this special anywhere near as rare as he suggests...to the contrary, Disney proliferated the shit out of it on home video. In the 1980s it was available on every format you'd care to name, including CED, and it continued to see the light of day on the formats still standing (ie: VHS and LaserDisc) into the 1990s. I'd also point out that the special was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award For Outstanding Animated Program in 1984, so it was presumably well-received enough at the time (it lost to Garfield, who was king of that award until the Simpsons showed up).

The reason why A Disney Christmas Gift might be considered a misfit now is because this kind of cut and paste job inevitably looks redundant in an age where the original content is so readily accessible. I'd take a wild stab that that's why Disney never released it on DVD or Blu-Ray - by the time we'd reached the versatile disc era, A Disney Christmas Gift was long past boasting any especially rare or must-have material, unless you were nostalgic for the interstitials themselves. And its total absence on Disney+ absolutely doesn't knock me out. If you want to watch the scene with Bambi and Thumper ice skating then you can do it easily enough just by fiddling with a few buttons. It wasn't such an egregious practice in the 1980s, however - in fact, in the UK we had a regular feature called Disney Time which ran all the way from 1961 to 1998. For just shy of four decades, the BBC could whip up a bit of easy crowd-pleasing filler for their Bank Holiday programming by tossing together a few scenes from Disney movies and having a celebrity provide commentary in between (I am deeply sorry to have misplaced my recording of a 1989 edition with Frank Bruno introducing a featurette on the making of Oliver & Company...and I sure wish I'd had the foresight to tape the 1993 show with Mike Smith being stalked by some guy in a Jafar costume). For a while these cheesy-ass clip shows were the closest that an entire generation of us were going to get to seeing a lot of the features themselves. You have to remember that, at the time A Disney Christmas Gift debuted, only a scant number of Disney's animated titles were available on home video. It was a market they were initially approaching with extreme caution, since they were still set on re-releasing their animated features theatrically in a regular rotation, and feared that having them out there simultaneously on Betamax and VHS might undercut all of that (the Disney Vault system, whereby titles were only available for a strictly limited period before being locked away for the better part of a decade, was eventually adopted as a cunning means of perpetuating their catalog's mystique). In 1982, getting to watch Bambi flunk at skating from the comfort of your own living room would have been a rare enough treat in itself, and it remained the case for most of the decade.

Far more obscure than the original special, and what I really want to focus on here, is the truncated variant that aired during the latter end of the 1980s. When this variant first dropped is still a mystery to me; Wikipedia claims it debuted in 1987, while the Disney Wiki says 1986...one of them must be wrong, but I wouldn't like to say which. This was the version of A Disney Christmas Gift that I watched as a child (my family had it on an old VHS recording, I suspect from 1988, maybe 1989), and for a while, the only one that I ever knew existed. I'd be curious to know the story behind its being. It surely couldn't just be a case of them needing to trim down the original to fit a shorter timeslot, which could have been accomplished straightforwardly enough by shaving off a few excess clips. No, this was a complete top to bottom revamp. It feels like a case of somebody looking at the original and deciding that there was a far snappier version longing to get out of it. A few of the clips and shorts used in the original were retained, but some were dropped altogether and new ones added in. The most striking alteration, though, was in the interstitials. Gone were the live action segues, the renditions of "On Christmas Morning", the syrupy verses leading into each segment. Instead, footage from The Clock Watcher (1945), a Donald Duck short featured in the original special in its near-entirety, was here chopped up and redubbed to create a crude framing narrative, in which Donald was allegedly wrapping presents for the Disney characters seen in the clips. As Lisa Simpson would say, it seems new to the trusting eyes of impressionable youth.

Stumbling across the ORIGINAL version of A Disney Christmas Gift many years down the line was a disconcerting experience; the title certainly rang a bell, and I went into it fully expecting to get the version I'd known in my childhood. At the time, my memories of The Clock Watcher Cut (as I'm now fond of calling it) were vague and distant, and the 1982 original had that air of seeming familiar but also not quite right. It was like getting reacquainted with a program I had once viewed, but an off-kilter version from a parallel universe; so much of the content appeared to match, but the tone, pacing and presentation was all wrong. My most vivid memory was of Donald persistently arguing with an animate speaker pipe, so when we got to The Clock Watcher segment, I wondered if I had perhaps misremembered this as something that happened all throughout the special, as opposed to this one chunk. The tip-off that I hadn't came in how the segment ended. I'd remembered all too strongly how things between Donald and that speaker pipe ultimately went down. The 1982 special excises the short's final punchline entirely, making the ending appear to land at Donald's expense, whereas The Clock Watcher Cut incorporates the original closing gag with Donald getting his long-awaiting reckoning with the unseen individual at the other end of the pipe. I'd remembered that specific visual so clearly because it frankly baffled me as a child.

It might be helpful to establish what's really going on in The Clock Watcher, a short that's based around Donald working in the gift wrapping section of a department store, but didn't originally take place at Christmastime. Donald's boss (voiced by John Dehner in the original short) feeds him false cheer and passive aggressive chides through the speaker all day, while Donald does a deliberately half-assed job, eager for the clock to run out so that he can get out of there and go home. Quitting time eventually arrives, but Donald is ordered to work overtime and wrap an onslaught of last minute packages, whereupon he snaps and runs upstairs to pound the living snot out of his boss (and presumably hand in his letter of resignation right after), a development represented by a visual of the speaker disintegrating beneath the stress of all the bad vibrations. The Clock Watcher seen in A Disney Christmas Gift '82 was itself a heavily modified version of the 1945 release; for one, the original incorporated some uncomfortable racial humor, wherein Donald manipulates the "mouth" of the speaker to have it talk like a stereotypical African American, so that understandably had to go (note the abrupt transition between Donald's fiddling with the speaker and the subsequent moment where he's wrapping a chair). Also excised was the original's opening sequence, with Donald arriving at the Royal Bros department store, clocking in, leering at a mannequin in lingerie, and being subjected to the Royal Bros workforce song (I suspect this was done to make the scenario more concise by jumping directly to the gift wrapping, although they were probably quite glad to be rid of that mannequin too). And, of course, the final catharsis where Donald clobbers his boss is gone - I'm not sure why, but I would hazard a guess that they wanted to sand off the short's violent coda, mild though it was, to keep things good and genial for the holiday season.

The Clock Watcher Cut had no such qualms; it concludes in much the same manner as the original short, with Donald being ordered to work overtime and losing his temper, except that in this version the boss can be heard conceding and agreeing to leave the rest of the wrapping to Santa (seguing into the final short, The Night Before Christmas - see below). The visual of the speaker disintegrating is present and correct, and one that I really didn't know how to make sense of as a small child. I should emphasise that, back then, my callow brain couldn't quite grasp that the speaker was merely a device being used by an off-screen presence to communicate with Donald, and had instead accepted it as a character unto itself. And so when the speaker started falling apart at the end (I didn't then comprehend that Donald had anything to do with it, and assumed he'd just vacated the building in protest), it made me sad because I thought the speaker was randomly dying. Given his final assurances that Santa was on his way, my best interpretation was that Santa was currently trying to squeeze his way down the pipe, having mistaken him for a chimney, and the poor speaker couldn't withstand the pressure. Also noteworthy is that the voice coming through the speaker is nowhere near as obnoxious as in the original short - he certainly never misses the opportunity to rub it in that Donald's having to work on Christmas Eve (possibly for the benefit of anyone who'd tuned in during the last commercial break), but he doesn't pile on the smarm as heavily as his 1945 counterpart - making him less deserving of the brutal beating he takes at the end.

I don't know if this is a particularly contentious opinion, but I'd argue that The Clock Watcher Cut was the superior version of A Disney Christmas Gift. If somebody did indeed decide to revamp the special on the assumption that they could get a snappier show out of it...then congratulations, they succeeded. Both editions are fundamentally tacky collages, but Donald's ongoing contention with the speaker gives the arrangement a lot more bite than the twee interludes of the original, and who wouldn't empathise with Donald's frustration at being stuck in the workplace on Christmas Eve? A shame, then, that it's been regulated to the status of a mere footnote. The 1982 original might now be only a distant memory for a certain generation, but it had its turn at being touted as a holiday classic, whereas I'm not sure that its shorter equivalent received so much as one measly home video release. Alas, my family's copy from the late 80s appears to have fallen down the same black hole as Frank Bruno's plugging of Oliver & Company, but with a little digging, I was able to locate another recording, enabling me to revisit Disney's seasonal clip extravaganza more-or-less as I'd remembered it. For the benefit of anyone who's only familiar with A Disney Christmas Gift '82, here's an overview of what was featured in the Clock Watcher Cut (outside of the Clock Watcher interstitials themselves). Italicised are the clips and shorts that were NOT in the 1982 original.

• On Ice (1935): One of Donald's earliest shorts, and one he appears to be reliving as a traumatic flashback when the special begins. It ends with Goofy bonking him on the head, and we dissolve to find Donald throwing a fit in the present (which, in the original Clock Watcher short, was in response to hearing the morning rendition of the Royal Bros workforce song).
  
• Pluto's Christmas Tree (1952): Although Chip and Dale were initially introduced as nemeses for Pluto, their career with him was fairly brief, this being the last of only four shorts in which they got to go head to head with the yellow mutt. It's why I couldn't buy into those erroneous rumors from early last year that Pluto would be the villain of the 2022 Rescue Rangers movie (!), desiring revenge for all of the humiliation the chipmunks had caused him back in the day - his list of grievances would have been pretty minor compared to Donald's (and no, I couldn't fathom Donald being the villain either, although what they actually came up with was far more conceptually appalling). As it turns out, the real reason why Rescue Rangers '22 would never have cast Pluto as the villain is because that movie was dead set against acknowledging that there was Chip and Dale life before Rescue Rangers. Why, I've no idea, as Chip and Dale starred in some splendid shorts within their time, and Pluto's Christmas Tree is among the highlights. Classic ending where it looks as though a seasonal truce has been called between mouse, dog and chipmunk, only for Chip to get sick of Pluto's howling and to slap a "Do Not Open Til Xmas" sticker upon his snout. To this day the image of the silenced Pluto still puts me in the holiday spirit.
  
• Bambi (ice skating): Bambi is my favourite Disney movie, and I'm delighted to report that this year I finally accomplished my long-standing goal of seeing it on the big screen, when Disney re-released a few of their classics as part of their centennial celebration. Oh, but as a small child, before I'd had a chance to see it in its entirety, period, I used to positively HATE whenever any of these Disney clip affairs dropped a sequence with the wide-eyed fawn. For a while, all I knew about the flick was that one traumatic plot point everybody talked about, and I was always terrified that it was going to happen right then and there in the featured footage. Of course, it never did, nor do I believe that the people responsible for assembling these programs would have been callous enough to allow it. The creators of this special certainly had no intention of ruining everybody's Christmases and went with the safer option of Bambi and Thumper having fun in the snow (which is, incidentally, Bambi's last gasp of childhood innocence). Bambi sucks at ice skating, and I never tire of seeing it. As with the original Gift, we're told that it takes place on Bambi's first Christmas morning, and that Donald here had the snow delivered to Bambi by express delivery. My question there is how on earth would that have survived the transit?
  
• Peter Pan ("You Can Fly"): The character who was vilified (bizarrely, and somewhat skin-crawlingly) in the aforementioned Rescue Rangers '22 is featured here at a more innocent time in his career. This is the one area where I think A Disney Christmas Gift '82 actually outdoes the Clock Watcher Cut, since the latter doesn't show the full sequence, just the build-up with Peter telling Wendy, Michael and John to think happy thoughts and peppering them with Tinkerbell's sparkly dandruff. We fade-out right before the part where they fly above London and begin their journey to Neverland, ie: the big culminating pay-off of the sequence. The result doesn't feel quite as anticlimactic as the Sword in The Stone clip from the original, but it comes close. As this special would have it, the shadow Peter is attempting to affix to his shoes at the start is a spare one sent to him by Donald (and in such a tiny package too).
  
• The Three Caballeros (Las Posadas): Panchito tells Donald about the Mexican festival of Las Posadas, in which a procession recreates the journey of Mary and Joseph before celebrating by breaking out the piñata. If you've seen The Three Caballeros, you'll know that this is Disney's trippiest feature bar none (seriously, I don't know what Donald was on for most of it, but I want some), yet this particular clip isn't really representative of that - it is the most uncharacteristically restrained and solemn sequence in the original film. The subsequent moment, where Donald has a go at hitting a piñata, causing an array of mind-bending colour to rain down upon him, is our only inkling as to its real madcap nature. Its inclusion here no doubt enabled the special to claim a little extra educational merit, in providing a brief window into the different customs used to observe Christmas around the world.
  
• Toy Tinkers (1949): I'm surprised they kept Pluto's Christmas Tree and added in Toy Tinkers, because the two shorts have virtually the same premise - a character chops down a tree and contends with a Yulteide home invasion from Chip and Dale. Still, having the two shorts pretty much side by side allows for a fun contrast between Donald and Pluto's respective warfare styles, and it's clear why the former was more frequently favoured as an antagonist for the pesky sciurines. Pluto is, well, an animal about it, whereas Donald gets to be a much more knowing bastard in his tactics, particularly when playing the chipmunks off against each other. I doubt that trick with the disparately sized walnuts would have occurred to Pluto.
  
• Cinderella ("Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo"): The clip is the same as in the original Gift, right down to the unconvincing redub with the Fairy Godmother calling out, "Merry Christmas, Cinderella!" Here, Donald is tasked with sending out a package that reportedly contains "a wish come true for Cinderella", so we're perhaps to assume that the Fairy Godmother was smooshed up inside it.
  
• The Night Before Christmas (1933): Confession - I think my family's recording might have cut out just as this short was beginning, since I have no memory of it ever featuring in any of my childhood viewings. Anyway, you know the drill. 

 

A Sideshow Bob Kinda Christmas: Bobby, It's Cold Outside (aka I''ll Just Lay Here And Chew)

"Gone Boy" came as such a pleasant surprise to me that I was obviously approaching Bob's subsequent showing, in "Bobby, It's Cold Outside" (ZAB0F01) of Season 31, with some caution. Its predecessor concluded with Bob realising, with the help of an unnamed psychiatrist, that his Bart-slaying obsessions were senseless and unhealthy, and moving on to a new ambition of opening a flower shop. An epilogue set many years in the future showed an older but wiser Bob living a secluded existence in a lighthouse, haunted by memories of his former life and aware that he had a valuable lesson to share with anyone who'd care to hear it (which the Squeaky Voiced Teen didn't). Character development that suggests a positive outcome for Bob comes only sparingly, and is absolutely not something that I take for granted. I was pretty certain that "Bobby, It's Cold Outside" was going to not only undo all of that, but not even bother to address it. I'd been there before, you know - "Day of The Jackanapes" had gotten around Bob's prior peacemaking with Bart in "Brother From Another Series" by ignoring it altogether. Was I right to be so suspicious of this one? Yes and no. Bob's interest in floristry presumably hasn't stuck as a serious ambition and, more dishearteningly, his thought processes are once again hijacked by his pathological revenge fantasies against everyone's favourite shamus in short pants (at the start of the episode, we find him making festive decorations in the shape of Bart being gored, strangled or devoured by sharks). Yet the events of "Gone Boy" are not completely forgotten, and "Bobby, It's Cold Outside" actually does serve as a weird kind of sequel to that episode. There's a direct callback to the ending of "Gone Boy", in that Bob is already living in his lighthouse and wearing what looks to be the same sweater he had on during the flash forward. It isn't exactly a direct continuation of the same storyline, but the reappearance of that lighthouse reinforces the idea that it holds some kind of symbolic significance for Bob - presumably, his compulsion to distance himself, both physically and emotionally, from the rest of society. With that in mind, I guess I can look on his ongoing Bart fixation as playing into that same metaphor, it being the thing that's pushed him so far down the path of desolation, stranding him in his deranged fantasy world and disbarring him from experiencing any kind of functional life's purpose or affinities. Although a twist is yielded on the latter front. Remember Teen's indication, at the end of "Gone Boy", that Bob wasn't the only societal outcast who'd sought out the seclusion of a lighthouse abode? That he still had fifteen others like himself to deliver to that day? Well, we potentially get to meet one of them here. Having exiled himself to the outermost regions of civilisation, Bob gets the unexpected opportunity to make a connection, with someone who's perhaps not exactly a kindred spirit (her darkest secret is that she puts extra butter in her muffins), but is capable of accepting and embracing him for who he is.

Of course, it still annoys me, on mere principle, that Bob is already back to wanting to disembowel Bart, but the good news is that "Bobby, It's Cold Outside" isn't another "Cape Feare" knock-off, and it finds something more for Bob to do than his usual homicidal scheming. In fact, he isn't even the villain of this episode. Oh, but you know what's really a breath of fresh air about this one? He doesn't take a rake to the face. I'm deadly serious. There's a joke in there involving a rake, but for once it doesn't entail Bob being injured by it. Bart knocks him out with a giant lollipop and Homer boots him about inside a box, but that's all the physical abuse he endures in this one. HALLELUJAH! This truly is a Christmas miracle! As to who the real villain is, let's just say that "Bobby" finally gave us a scenario that Simpsons viewers had been baying to see for decades. I'm not sure if this is how they'd envisioned it playing out, but it happened.

Airing on December 15th 2019, this was Bob's second Christmas episode (unlike "Gone Boy", this one actually takes place during the festive period) and, at the time of writing, his last canon appearance. And if Bob was going to take a hiatus for a few years then this was honestly a really nice place in which to leave him. "Bobby" gets automatic credit for closing on what feels like an unambiguously optimistic note for our friend. Holy shit, Bob actually gets laid at the end of this one. That in itself is a very good thing, and I will happily accept it as an explanation for how he's been able to stay out of trouble for so long. I have noticed a pattern wherein Bob seems to be a lot more chill in situations where his sexual needs are being met. It obviously wasn't the case in "Black Widower", but there Bob wasn't really attracted to Selma and visibly struggled with the whole love-making side of his ruse. By contrast, in "The Italian Bob", where Bob and Francesca had a very active and mutually gratifying sex life, Bob seemed genuinely happy for a while. Then we have "Wedding For Disaster", a rare episode that has Bob show up casually and present no threat to anybody, right after he and Krusty were reportedly sleeping together..."for warmth" in Krusty's words. Yeah, I'll bet. ^[1] I'm not saying that I believe sexual frustration to be the root cause of Bob's personality flaws - just that, every now and then, a truly satisfying fuck clearly does wonders in relieving his symptoms.

On the subject of Bob's love life, we can thank "Bobby, It's Could Outside" for finally clarifying the status of Bob's marriage to Francesca, who hasn't been seen or referenced since "Funeral For A Fiend" of Season 19. She doesn't get so much as a shout-out here, either - Cassandra Patterson, his new lady love, makes explicit note of the fact that Bob isn't wearing a wedding ring, so it seems safe to assume that he and Francesca have officially called it quits (maybe his time with Krusty in "Wedding For Disaster" had something to do with it, we can only speculate). In other words, Bob's family arc just fizzled, and Francesca and Gino may never be seen again, the thought of which does not leave me unsentimental. It's ironic, because when "The Italian Bob" first aired, I remember seriously not liking the idea of Bob having a wife and son. For years, I'll admit that I'd harbored the same misconception about his sexual orientation as Homer. In our defence, Bob is queer-coded AF, as many classic animated villains are, and their insistence on making him heterosexual still seems kind of suspect to me. (For the record, I have Bob headcanoned as bisexual, and he and Krusty as bitter ex-lovers from the start of the series. I'm 100% convinced that their boys' night in in "Wedding For Disaster" wasn't the first occasion on which they fucked.) And then eventually I came around to it, right about the time that The Simpsons decided they were done with that entire thread. More accurately, I came around to Gino. Francesca I could take or leave; as a character she was serviceable, but there was nothing in her chemistry with Bob that ever crackled and had me thinking, "Yes! Absolutely! This is the girl for Bob!" Gino didn't have masses of depth either - he is only a toddler, after all - but the idea of Bob being a parent was one that slowly grew on me. I figured that it could be a good next step in bringing out a whole different side to his character. Of course it never happened, and by this point in time I suspect the writers have forgotten that Gino even exists. It's something I contemplated very recently, after watching "Pin Gal". Obviously this was nowhere near my biggest concern regarding that episode, but it didn't escape my notice that the Bowlarama had a portrait of Bob in its gallery, apparently participating in some kind of kids' bowling league, and he was pictured with Gerald, the baby with the one eyebrow, and not his own son. The implication there, I guess, is that Bob was dating Gerald's mother, which might be somebody's fanfic fodder, but to me it's just a missed opportunity to work in a nod to the littlest Terwilliger, however marginal. Because I'd like to think that Bob has maintained some form of relationship with Gino, even if he and Francesca are now history. Bob's got his share of shortcomings - he's mean to his brother, and his first marriage ended because he attempted to blow up his bride on their honeymoon - but the one thing I'd never pegged him for was a deadbeat dad. C'mon Bob, you do have some standards.

Alas, I'm not sure if even Bob remembers that Gino exists. Cassandra asks him if he's ever thought about children, and Gino blatantly doesn't cross Bob's mind. We see Bob's train of thought, and it goes directly to Bart, and to the various little moribund representations of him currently dangling from his Christmas tree. You know Bob, there was a time, way back in Season 1, when you came across as being very compassionate toward children. Although maybe that side of him hasn't completely evaporated. This episode involves Bob getting a gig playing Santa Claus at a local Christmas-themed amusement park, and using that guise to be a force of benevolence around the town. Like I say, he's not the villain.

While it's a lot less explicit on this point than "Gone Boy", "Bobby" continues its predecessor's basic themes in exploring Bob's duelling desires and what he genuinely wants out of life, and in that regard it is quite a neat little character study for him. The title of the episode, while obviously modelled on a controversial festive standard that will come up later on, alludes to a lonely third party's efforts to get closer to him - the bookends with Cassandra underscore the tension between his urge to remain immured in his homicidal obsessions and his willingness to broaden his horizons by opening up to an intimate relationship. Cassandra occupies the lighthouse nearest to Bob's and is terribly unsubtle in her own yearnings to be better acquainted with her neighbour; Bob has evidently decided she poses no threat to him (when he goes to answer the door, he instinctively takes a machete, but puts it down when he sees that it's her), but remains guarded against her. He is, after all, in hiding after breaking out of prison, and is acting on the assumption that Cassandra doesn't know who he is. Spoiler - she knows exactly who he is, and when she asks Bob if he has any dark secrets of his own, this is her attempt to impart this to him, and not just an excuse for an exposition dump, although we get that too. The circumstances under which Bob managed to escape are revealed in a flashback that also incorporates elements of "Cape Feare" (yeah, predictable) and "The Bob Next Door" (the really gross stuff, so if you have a problem with body horror you should look away). Turns out he knocked out a priest, stole his clothes and bicycle and pedalled his way out without being challenged (I assumed at first that the priest was visiting the prison, but the guard at the gates tells him to stay out of trouble, so I guess the implication is that he was a fellow inmate being released? Hmm). Yeah, it's silly, but it's still less of a contrivance than Bob's (largely unexplained) escape in "Gone Boy", and it did have me giggling, so it will suffice.

"Bobby" also has shades of "Brother From Another Series", in that it explores Bob's capacity to do good whilst having to deal with the suspicions of a prying Bart. Bob is scouted out for the role of Santa on account of his mellifluous baritone, and his ego naturally overrides his inclination to keep himself hidden. Then when the Simpsons visit the park, and Bart unwittingly strolls directly into his clutches (why Bart is so anxious to see Santa is not revealed, but we've already observed that the show tends to vacillate on how much reverence he has for the Santa mythos), there is absolutely no fighting his urge to reveal to him his true identity. He makes an opportune attempt to off his nemesis by strangling him with Christmas lights, but this is really the script getting what it clearly sees as an obligatory plot point out of the way. Bob discovers, not for the first time, that his killer instinct is not forthcoming, which he here attributes to his commitment to staying in character: "I am a trained method actor. I inhabit my roles, like Daniel Day-Lewis in Phantom Thread, or Mike Myers in The Love Guru!" Phantom Thread is a movie I could totally envision Bob enjoying. I'm surprised he'd even want to acknowledge The Love Guru, though.

I said in my piece on "Gone Boy" that Bob's dynamic with Bart had by then come to resemble that of Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner, but in this episode it's really more akin to that of Sam Sheepdog and Ralph Wolf. The characters are so accustomed to encountering one another that there's a certain degree of familiarity underpinning their interactions throughout. Bart attempts to expose Santa's identity but discovers that everyone else is entirely indifferent to the arrangement - if anything, Homer seems only too happy to have that common ground with Bob, pointing out that he also played Santa at the Springfield mall on a previous Yuletide. While Bart himself remains wary of Bob, even he doesn't attack his part as lone objector with quite the same level of frantic paranoia as he exhibited in "Brother From Another Series". I mean, he actually accepts a ride with Bob on this occasion, something I absolutely couldn't see him doing back then, whether or not he had a shotgun to brandish. And after all they've been through with Bob, it seems wild that the Simpsons would be so relaxed about having him inside their living room. But I also think of Sam and Ralph in terms of the idea that Bob sees himself as inhabiting a role. The episode operates on the conceit that he's in an unusually clement mood because he's so determined to be the embodiment of Santa - an explanation that's technically superfluous given how "Gone Boy" concluded, but my take is that Bob is less inhibited by the role of Santa than he is relishing the freedoms he's gained from stepping out of his designated role as town homicidal maniac. In doing so, he gets to be an asset to the community and experience a taste of what his psychiatrist previously alluded to when he asked Bob if he'd considered how his life might have gone had he devoted it to good. There is some unspoken sadness in the implication that this can only be temporary - Bob and the Simpsons demonstrate that they are entirely capable of getting along and functioning as a team, but it's tempered by the nagging knowledge that as soon as this narrative trajectory has run its course, they'll go back to being enemies again, for no deeper reason than that the Powers That Be demand it.

Meanwhile, there's this other story thread unfolding where Springfield is being ravaged by "The Ghost of Christmas Presents", a mysterious thief pillaging their online purchases from their doorsteps before they can access them. One of the victims is Lenny, who devises a plan to catch the thief by setting out a decoy package with an exploding dye marker inside. Unfortunately, the package ends up exploding in his hands, injuring him - quite badly; Carl finds him lying in a pool of his own blood in the aftermath - but he gets a glimpse of the looter and is able to identify them by writing the letters "SB" with his fluids. When word of this reaches Bart, he naturally assumes that "SB" refers to Sideshow Bob, and that his nemesis is out for revenge on the town by stealing Christmas (a scheme that frankly seems a bit banal for Bob's tastes). If this narrative misdirect is sounding familiar, it's because it was cheekily recycled from "Wedding For Disaster", where Homer was kidnapped and Bart and Lisa, on finding a keychain with the initials "S.B.", presumed Bob to be responsible (as it turned out, wrongly...Krusty was able to vouch for Bob's whereabouts when the kidnapping occurred). It could be that "Bobby" is making a deliberate callback to that episode, since there's a gag with Homer turning in Selma Bouvier, aka the real perpetrator of "Wedding For Disaster" (along with Patty), prompting the police to release their prior suspects Scott Bakula, Steve Ballmer and Sandra Bullock. In "Wedding For Disaster" there was an obvious flaw in Bart and Lisa's deduction, in that "S.B." aren't actually Bob's initials; Sideshow Bob isn't his real name, and I get the impression that Bob himself doesn't much care for the sobriquet, even if he is resigned to it. Here, Bart is working second-hand off of Lenny's identification, so I guess we can go easier on him. Bart returns to the Christmas park after dark and infiltrates Santa's workshop, hoping to find evidence of Bob's latest diabolical plan, but all he finds is a folder listing some rather dry life's goals. (I have a question - are these meant to be Bob's actual life goals, or just a character-building exercise for his performance as Santa? Because one of the listed actions is "Find birth father", and well...you're telling us that the man we met in "Funeral For A Fiend" wasn't Bob's biological father? Come on.) Bob shows up and vows to prove his innocence by assisting the Simpsons in pinpointing the real thief. He conceals himself inside a package (Bob is quite the contortionist, thanks to his background in clowning), which is subsequently stolen, and trailed by the Simpsons to a warehouse, where they discover that the culprits are...Smithers and Burns! Homer is quick to point out the blatant contrivance: "Since when does Smithers go first?" (No kidding; despite being our secondary antagonist, Smithers gets exactly one line this entire episode.)

That aforementioned scenario that Simpsons fans had been wanting to see for decades? Bob and Mr Burns finally meet. Viewers had always figured that if the show's two most prominent bad boys were ever to cross paths, we'd be in for a truly explosive match-up. I suspect most of them were anticipating that Bob and Burns would either team up in a nefarious alliance or to go head-to-head in an exhilarating face-off. So, what happens? Burns sits on Bob's knee and opens up about the emotional trauma his parents inflicted on him at Christmastime. Look, you've got to see the funny side. Burns recalls how, as a child, he was so starved for affection from his parents that he went to a Gimbels Department Store Santa and requested a hug from his mommy and a smile from his daddy. The store Santa, not seeing any reason why the young Monty wouldn't be getting these, told him that they'd surely be coming. Instead, Burns was packed off to boarding school on Christmas day, and both of his parents were dead by the time he returned. (Discontinuity alert! Burns' mater was alive during the events of "Homer The Smithers", remember?) Burns admits that he and Smithers were stealing the town's presents because he wanted everybody to experience the same Yuletide dejection that he did. "[My parents] never gave me anything except a hundred million dollars! Santa lied!" Bob has a diplomatic solution - using his skills as a dramatic thespian, he's able to convince the emotionally pliable Burns that he's the real Santa and that his mom and pop really did love him, their detached child-rearing style being the essential factor that made him so strong. Bob asks Burns to consider what's become of all the other billionaires of his day (Burns: "Broke, dead, a lot of #MeToo...") and points out that Burns himself has endured, thanks to his parents' love. It goes without saying that this whole sequence is swathed in a thick, thick layer of insincerity; it has it all, right down to a close-up shot of Burns shedding silent tears at Bob's blatant distortion of the truth and then experiencing an inevitable 180 degree change of heart. Manipulative sod that Bob is, what is clearly genuine is the relish with which he seizes the opportunity to act out the perfect Santa to ease Burns' pain, and that's goodwill enough. The seasonal spirit is transmitted from one misanthropic loner to another, and Burns resolves to return all of the stolen packages to everyone's doors, prompting the townspeople to sing his praises.

"Bobby, It's Cold Outside" is by no means a perfect episode, and I do have my share of nitpicks to dish out. There's a sequence with the Simpsons singing "Baby Shark" that's already looking kind of dated (are tots still into "Baby Shark"? My nieces outgrew that particular development stage long ago), and I could have lived without that sight gag where Bob kills a pelican, albeit by accident. And while I'm accustomed to criticising episodes made under Al Jean's watch for the abruptness of their endings, this one has basically the opposite problem, in that it seems to struggle in figuring out where to tie itself up. In part, this is to do with how the ending is structured, as there are three different story threads that are resolved separately in consecutive vignettes, giving the sense of an especially protracted conclusion. The Simpsons get a mundane wrap-up that involves Homer and Marge wanting to make out on the living room couch on Christmas morn but getting interrupted by their inconsiderate kids, who insist on creating bedlam with their presents. Then there's one where Burns meets Steve Ballmer at the airport, which is incredibly drawn-out and feels tacked on primarily to beef up Ballmer's guest role. Sandwiched in between is the ending that most matters, where Bob, the unsung hero of the season, receives his overdue share of the festive zest.

Now that Christmas Day has arrived and his obligations as the amusement park Santa have been fulfilled, Bob has little choice but to return to his lighthouse and resume his position as a societal exile. Yet, even with this being his seeming lot in life, he discovers that he doesn't have to be alone out here; there is someone who's prepared to receive him, not in the assumed guise of Santa, but as regular old Bob. He's resigned to spending his evening watching It's A Wonderful Life on the chattering cyclops (footage from the actual movie, not an animated parody, which is apparently a modern Simpsons thing; there was a small moment in "Gone Boy" where Bart watched real footage of a John F. Kennedy speech), and has gotten to the part where George Bailey blows up with his family. His sympathies are firmly with George ("That girl is pretty bad at the piano"). Just then, Cassandra comes knocking, wanting to give Bob a Christmas gift (a rake), and to reveal point blank that she knows all his dark secrets and is itching to kiss him. It becomes apparent at this point that Cassandra is a hybristophile, meaning that she finds Bob's criminal history a turn-on. Bob is still reluctant to let her in, and the ensuing interplay takes the form of a modified rendition of "Baby, It's Cold Outside", a call and response song written by Frank Loesser in 1944 that has since become a fixture of holiday albums. Traditionally performed as a duet between a male and female vocalist, who play a host and a guest respectively (known as "Wolf" and "Mouse" in the sheet music), it charts the former's efforts to dissuade the latter from ducking out of a romantic interlude prematurely by citing the inclement weather conditions. You'll be aware that there's been a ton of discourse surrounding this song in recent years, since the lyrics can be interpreted as alluding to a date rape scenario, with the line "Say, what's in this drink?" being a point of particular contention (that the participants are called "Wolf" and "Mouse" doesn't exactly dispel that sense of a predator-prey dynamic). The counterargument goes that the song was written as a subversive takedown of the social conventions of the 1940s (ie: the exchange is all foreplay, designed to bypass the expectation that a woman wouldn't spend the night with a man to whom she wasn't married), and while I find that credible, I can understand why it might still be uncomfortable listening for some. Here, Bob and Cassandra sing a gender-flipped version that's very attuned to contemporary concerns about the central scenario - Bob is, initially, the one trying to push Cassandra away and back into the cold, insisting that, "I'm being a gent...", but he comes around when Cassandra says the magic words: "I'm giving consent..." She's even willing to put that consent in writing, producing a contract that both parties sign (I've freeze-framed and tried to read what's on the contract, but alas, my eyes can't pick out much that's legible). Bob finally accepts her companionship, and while their tender moment is briefly interrupted by Captain McCallister, who's crashed his boat outside and needs them to turn the lights on, I've no doubt they resumed right after and were still on their hormonal high come Groundhog Day.

That's all very lovely, but if there's a festive song I'm going to predominantly associate with Bob, it's "Christmas Is Going To The Dogs" by Eels - you know, the one Max parties to in the Jim Carrey version of How The Grinch Stole Christmas. Granted, it was written to reflect a distinctly canine perspective, but the lyrics do seem to suit his morbid, gloomy outlook.

 

I said at the start of my "Gone Boy" review that Bob's wheels on the story and characterisation front had both been spinning for some time, and in spite of all the good work done with him in that episode and here, I have to stand by that statement, if only because I know that it will inevitably all be reset. What the 2020s will bring for Bob remains to be seen, but his recent Treehouse of Horror appearance was pivoted heavily on "Cape Feare" nostalgia, and I don't take that as a good sign. I would love for Cassandra to stick around and become Bob's long-term girlfriend, because I think she is good for him, but I fully expect her to go the way of Francesca and Gino and never be mentioned again. Still, whatever happens, the late 2010s were a surprisingly peachy time in Bob's life and I'm glad to have had them. I find it heartening that, after all my grievances in the 2000s, the show was able to go on to produce some further Bob installments that I've rather enjoyed, and the thought that he might have found happiness, however temporarily, is one I'm going to keep savouring for as long as I may. Soon after this aired, the world itself was completely changed - a pandemic was right around the corner, and before we knew it we'd all be as isolated as Bob and Cassandra. So in some respects this episode feels like the last dance of a more carefree age. I wouldn't praise "Bobby, It's Cold Outside" in the same breath as I would "Brother From Another Series" or "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming", but I am warmly disposed to it, and it has already become an annual holiday tradition in my household. And so, as Drederick Tatum (of all characters) observed, God bless Us, Every One!

 

[1] You're possibly going to tell me that Bob and Krusty didn't actually do the deed, they were were just sleeping in the same bed. But I don't know, I feel the writers were definitely taunting us to suppose otherwise, and that's good enough for me. Did I ever mention that I was an ardent Bob/Krusty shipper back in the day?