The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #53: Serta Counting Sheep

Shaun and his brethren weren't the only flock to emerge from the Aardman fold and attain superstardom. At the break of the new millennium, the Bristol-based animation studio found great success on the other side of the pond with a series of ads promoting Serta-brand mattresses. The premise of the campaign, devised by advertising agency Doner, had it that Serta mattresses were so fabulously comfortable that kipping on one might earn you a visit from a very irate band of sheep who objected to your choice of pad. These were no ordinary field-dwelling ovine, but the Counting Sheep, the woolly jumpers whom, in more restless times, you might traditionally have summoned to aid you in accessing the land of nod. These sheep thrived on insomnia, and it was their mission to keep your nights from getting too cushy for their comfort. In Serta, they'd found a formidable adversary, one they feared could potentially make the practice of sheep-counting obsolete, and they weren't shy about barging into the bedrooms of former clientele to make their dissatisfaction known. An aggressive business model that seldom worked out for our flock, although hilarious antics often ensued.

How many Counting Sheep there actually were was anybody's guess - in theory, their numbers could have stretched on indefinitely, depending on the wakefulness of the client they were serving. Each sheep was distinguishable by their identification number, spray-painted onto their fleeces in the style of their barnyard counterparts, and various distinct personalities emerged across the series. 1 was naturally the leader, and the most officiously outspoken of the sheep. 13 was inevitably a magnet for physical misfortune, while 36 was a father whose offspring required orthodontic work, 8 was a ditz and 86 was the black sheep (although not literally) of the group, who in one commercial was caught partaking in an illicit relaxation session upon a Serta, and was defenestrated by 1 for his infidelity. For the campaign's initial run the sheep were brought to life with Aardman's signature stop motion, combined with footage of live action humans, although later installments switched to using computer animation - meaning that the sheep unavoidably picked up something of the uncanny valley that I find lurks in all CG Aardman productions made to replicate Nick Park's style, and which is absolutely all over the movie Flushed Away (not so much Arthur Christmas, which isn't as beholden to Park's look).

The campaign had a bit of an ongoing story for the sheep, detailing the impact the Serta scourge had on their livelihood and the various measures they took to combat it. We followed them as they attempted to find alternative forms of employment, sought legal advice from an unscrupulous lawyer (I'm not sure if this was ever followed up with any ads detailing the court case he assured them they had), traded tales of hardship with a hobo, protested outside a mattress sale and outright sabotaged a couple of others. At their most classic, though, the ads were centred around the core scenario of the sheep hanging out in people's bedrooms and berating them for wanting to cut ties. It's a charmingly absurdist means of getting across the intended message that Serta mattresses are pleasurable to sleep on, but you've got to love how counter-intuitive it is in-universe. Get a Serta and the upshot seems to be that you'll have an indefinite number of talking sheep amassing around your bed and keeping you up by belligerently challenging your consumer choices. You've effectively traded in one form of sleeplessness for another, unless you had the foresight to acquire a guard dog like an unnamed lady in one ad, or to change your locks like the Hendersons. And, even if you were resting upon a Serta, just how well were you going to sleep knowing that these vengeful sheep might be wandering in at any time and glowering all over you? Adding to the awkwardness was that the conflict was often framed as being akin to the breakdown of a sexual relationship as opposed to a professional one, with orgasm innuendo cropping up at least twice. In one commercial, a client breaks the bad news that she's been faking her sleeplessness for months in order to appease the sheep. And in the aforementioned spot where 86 is caught cheating with a Serta mattress, he brings attention to himself with his wildly ecstatic shrieks about its luxuriousness (giving the momentary impression that he's engaged in a threesome with the Kandinskys). In both cases, the Serta is the irresistible temptation that lures you into backstabbing your bedfellows.

Here's the great paradox with the Serta Counting Sheep - their business practices might be obnoxious, but they themselves end up being loveable underdogs. You admire their spunk, and their willingness to fight for their established domain. They are the downtrodden little guys daring to take a stand, and you're rooting for them to prevail against the mattress giant threatening to slap them with irrelevancy. The most satisfying campaign installments were the ones where they managed to scrape a rare victory - for example, when they get Tom banished from the Serta and onto the couch by blowing to his wife that he's been lying to her about being at work all day to cover up his clandestine golfing session. Serta might fix five of the most common sleep problems, but it won't cleanse a shady soul. That was pretty ingenious of the sheep, and I wish them nothing but luck in pursuing this particular recourse, although it introduces further unsettling implications regarding the sheep's ability to spy on us and harvest our dirtiest secrets.

It's perhaps in part because of the sheep's intrinsically sympathetic nature that more recent Serta ads have tended to downplay the antagonistic angle and instead show them cuddling up on their mattresses and tucking human occupants in. It's actually kind of surreal if you've been following the flock's history and know that their in-character inclination really should have been to turf those people out. In the end the sheep became synonymous with the brand (with Serta having established a neat sideline in sheep merchandising), so it doesn't matter how much sense it makes from a narrative standpoint, but I wonder what the explanation would be in-universe for this unlikely truce? Did the sheep and Serta finally figure out how to make their respective trades coexist? Is the implication that the sheep are actually working for Serta now (in other words, helping to feed the beast that killed them)? Or maybe the flock's suppressed love of the mattress's softness finally got the better of them. For that was the single biggest shame in the Serta Sheep's closet - they were latent Serta cheerleaders all along, as evidenced in all instances where they could be enticed into making physical contact with the mattress, and were immediately taken by how fabulous it felt. Fact is that 86 wasn't a lost sheep. He was just slightly ahead of the curve in making his Serta adoration explicit.

There couldn't possibly be anything more awkward and unfortunate in the Serta Sheep's closet, could there? If so, I'm not confident I have the spoons.

Bart The Daredevil (aka Kids Say Such Stupid Things)

When discussing "Bart The Daredevil" (7F06), we might as well start right at the very end. The entire story, delightful as it may be, is all but an excuse to get us to that final twisted set-piece, in which Homer takes not one, but two excruciating tumbles down the wall of a steep gorge, encountering jagged rock after jagged rock and accumulating an increasing number of visible injuries. Debuting on December 6th 1990, this relatively early entry in the show's second season was by and far the most morbid Simpsons outing to date (outside of the original "Treehouse of Horror"). It set out to answer a burning question - what does consequence look like in the Simpsons universe? Creator Matt Groening had a vision of a more grounded cartoon than mainstream audiences were accustomed to, but what did this mean in practice? What differentiated the rules of The Simpsons from the more traditional cartoon physics that governed the realms of Porky Pig, Tom & Jerry and indeed Itchy & Scratchy? When you pricked a Simpson, did they bleed? Absolutely they did, as "Daredevil" demonstrated with wild abandon. When you poisoned them did they die? Probably, but the show was thankfully uninterested in exploring that particular extreme. "Daredevil" was rebellion enough, a gruesome exercise in establishing limitations, but also a gleefully subversive one in pushing boundaries. Homer might have failed at defying gravity, but The Simpsons itself was soaring to ever more giddy heights - with this sequence you can feel the show becoming more confident, more emboldened and more excited about exploring where else it could possibly go. The production crew would continue to regard it as a watershed moment in The Simpsons' development, judging by the large number of callbacks across the series. It naturally found a place in the show's first "Greatest Hits" complication "So It's Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show". It was also featured prominently in the faux behind-the-scenes documentary "Behind The Laughter" of Season 11, which largely revolved around a fictitious version of The Simpsons and contained precious few other references to events from the series we knew. In Season 13's "The Blunder Years", Lisa shot down Homer's attempt to revisit the occurrence with the objection, "Everyone's sick of that memory!" And the climax of The Simpsons Movie (2007) included a sequence where Homer and Bart both fell down the gorge, with considerably less gruesome results. There are probably more I'm overlooking. I'm pretty sure that, somewhere out there, there's also a fan theory proposing that Homer was really killed by the fall and everything that's happened since is part of an elaborate Waking Life-esque fantasy from within his dying brain. There's an element of the series that has always stayed in the gorge, haunted by that fateful leap that forever changed its trajectory.

The secret of the sequence is that it crafts such a deft balance between discomfort and hilarity. Homer's agonising pain is emphasised with each and every thud, yet his fall is played intrinsically for humor. The particulars are harrowing and grotesque - we'll likely be unsettled by that thick layer of blood accumulating around his mouth - but are accomplished with an incongruously farcical tone that offers one hell of a safety net. And when we're blessed with that absurdly gratuitous sight of the ambulance crashing and Homer going down the gorge a second time on a gurney, we know for certain that we couldn't be in more loving hands. In practice, there maybe isn't such a pronounced difference between the rules that govern the adventures of Itchy & Scratchy (wherein Itchy can brutally cut up Scratchy, but the cat is always back to normal by the next installment) and Homer's mishap here. In both cases, our reaction is coloured by an understanding that it is only a twisted joke and that any consequences will expire with the end of the story. When Homer ends up in traction, in a hospital bed adjacent to that of world-renowned daredevil Lance Murdock, and delivers to him the punchline of the episode ("You think you've got guts? Try raising my kids!"), we know that it is only a punchline, and not the beginning of a whole new chapter in Homer's life, the wheelchair years.

All the same, when we wind back the clock and consider how Homer got here, the path to the gorge is a grisly one all over, strewn with physical calamities, maimed children, and the threat that something even more horrific might transpire. Not only is Homer just one of several casualties, he doesn't even suffer the most gloriously over the top injury of that tally (that honor goes to Murdock, who's hospitalised after a mauling from an aquatic lion). The plot involves Bart witnessing one of Murdock's stunts and getting it into his head that he could be a world-renowned daredevil too. His first ill-calculated attempt to leap over the family car on his skateboard ends in disaster, resulting in a trip to the emergency room and stitches in his forehead, but this doesn't dissuade Bart. Instead, he finds the adrenalin rushes he gets from making these perilous leaps addictive, along with the rapturous applause he receives from his peers, prompting him to seek bigger and all the more stomach-churning thrills. Finally, he discovers the gorge and decides that this will be the challenge to end all challenges. Superficially, he acknowledges that it could also end his life then and there -  he announces to his peers his intention to jump the gorge with the concession that "there is a good possibility I will plunge to my bloody death" - but he hasn't absorbed the implications of this. To him, the prospect of things going horribly wrong is just something to be flaunted as part of the daredevil performance, a further attempt emulate the showmanship of Murdock, who kept his audience on the edge of their seats by similarly advertising that the spectacle they they were about to witness "may well be my grisly death." The one thing Bart does not understand is consequence. The problem Homer faces is in figuring out how to get across to his son that his reckless behaviour could reap truly regrettable results. How do you explain consequence to a child who's already convinced himself that if he leaps off a cliff it's no big deal?

On the one level, "Bart The Daredevil" is a tale of callow hero worship and how it impacts a person's values, for better or for worse. But at its core it's mainly about the trials and tribulations of child-rearing. It feels appropriate that it aired directly ahead of "Itchy & Scratchy & Marge" in the series' running order, as the two episodes play like deliberate sister stories. Both revolve around scenarios that are parental nightmares, in which children have started to answer to external authorities that conflict with the parent's own and maybe don't have the child's best interests at heart, raising the question of where and how the parent should draw the line. "Itchy & Scratchy & Marge" dealt with the ultra-topical concern of media violence, and as such was a more bitingly satirical installment, whereas "Daredevil" is a far goofier, more tender look at the relationship between Homer and Bart and how the former struggles to maintain control of his son. An allusion that hadn't occurred to me until I heard the DVD commentary was that this was as close as the series would get to doing a story in which substance addiction was the particular wedge being driven between them, with Bart seeking increasingly dangerous highs and Homer and Marge finding that they can't let him out of their sight without his compulsions tearing him away. In both cases, we have examples of children being led astray by a failure to understand consequence - or, more specifically, a failure to distinguish consequence in the real world from the kinds of consequences shown to them through popular entertainment. After Bart's first try at leaping over the car causes him minor injury, Dr Julius Hibbert, in his debut appearance (fun fact: Hibbert was originally written as a woman named Julia Hibbert, but was gender-flipped in subsequent drafts), attempts to set him straight by taking him on a tour of Ward C, a children's ward specially reserved for patients who've been more seriously injured attempting to imitate the happenings in  television, movies and the legitimate stage (among them, the cliche of the kid who broke his leg trying to fly like Superman raises its head). For now, most of these entertainment-addled children are dangers only to themselves. The flip-side to this parental nightmare - the possibility that media exposure might transform children into raging sociopaths who think that violence to others is glamorous or funny - would have to wait until "Itchy & Scratchy & Marge" to be examined in depth, but it gets a small nod here. At least one kid in the ward was injured through no fault of his own, but by his brother hitting him in the head with a wrench, mimicking the deciding blow in a televised wrestling match we saw at the start of the episode.

In Bart's case, the toxic influence doesn't come from television, although television plays its part in getting him to the arena where Murdock is performing. Bart and Homer are mutually drawn to a monster truck rally being held that Saturday at the Springfield Speedway by a commercial hyping the appearance of one Truckasaurus, a car-crushing robotic T-Rex modelled on the real-life Robosaurus. As the entire opening sequence is at pains to emphasise, Bart and Homer are governed by the same crudely exhilarating impulses, and neither one can resist something quite as ridiculously ostentatious as a giant robotic dinosaur that devours puny vehicles. Truckasaurus transpires to be something of a narrative fake-out. He's the carrot that lures the family to the speedway, but the female mud-pullers and of course the Lance Murdocks are what they stay for. His role in the story peaks early on, when the Simpsons accidentally drive out into the arena and are nearly destroyed by the hulking metal monster, in a sequence that doubles as a subtle PSA - even sharper than the one Murdock later explicitly delivers - about the importance of wearing a seatbelt (Maggie, the only family member to be buckled up, avoids being thrown around with the others).

This being a Season 2 installment, there's an emphasis on the slice of life elements of the story and on further mapping out the internal dynamics of the family. Before we get to the real narrative hooks, we have a preliminary conflict involving the family already having plans that Saturday to attend a school recital where Lisa is performing, ie: the very antithesis of the evening the boys have in mind. Sensing that her father might be tempted to skip her big night in favour of a date with Truckasaurus, Lisa presents him with a consequence of another variety: "I'll be playing my first solo; if you miss it on Saturday I advise you to start looking for a child therapist on Sunday." This might be a Bart and Homer episode, but it's still Lisa who gets all the best lines (there's also "I'm afraid the forces of history have changed wrestling - perhaps forever"^[1],  and "I'm sorry Bart, but if you got hurt or died, despite the extra attention I'd receive, I'd miss you."). Marge suggests that the timing might work out for them to attend both events, provided the recital doesn't overrun. And so they must go first to the recital, with Homer spending most of it glancing anxiously at his watch. The recital doesn't add anything in terms of Bart's impending daredevil arc, but feels like such an indispensable part of the overall picture, offering a brilliant window into the family's disparate priorities and adding in generous extra helpings of relatability, heart and energy. This is meant to be the boring portion of the evening, but it's really as much an exercise in glorious excess as the monster truck rally, culminating in a rousing rendition of Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" that manages to incorporate everything from a bourdon to the traditional cannon fire. The entire interlude also contains a lovely miniature arc for Lisa. While Homer is off bonding with Bart over their shared love of high-octane mayhem, all she wants is for him to see the value in what she does. And ultimately he does, if mostly on a subconscious level. As they're driving away from the recital and making haste toward the Speedway, Homer is unwittingly humming the aforementioned overture. "I reached him," Lisa observes, with a quiet elation that suggests this is a greater achievement than she'd dared to hope for. With that all-important box ticked, her attentions soon shift from her father to the worrying direction her brother's mind is leaning. Enter the man of the hour, Captain Lance Murdock.

Murdock, an Evel Knievel-type stunt rider with a penchant for dangerous leaps (and animal cruelty), has arrived in Springfield to perform what's billed as his most daring endeavor to date. He will jump over a water tank populated by all manner of unfriendly aquatic fauna (sharks, piranhas and electric eels), a drastically misplaced lion and, just to make the feat that extra bit more precarious, one drop of human blood. Bart, enraptured by the proposition, is the lone audience member who can bear to watch it play out. Murdock pulls off the stunt itself, but his showmanship ends up being his undoing, when he drives back up the ramp to take a bow and topples over into the tank. After that, he manages to swim to the side in one piece, only for the lion, of all things, to catch up with him and drag him back under. He's subsequently retrieved by paramedics, and summons enough strength to give the thumbs up sign to his audience before being carried away. This traumatic spectacle isn't enough to put a damper on the occasion - Marge comes away commenting what a fun-filled evening it was. And Bart's takeaway from Murdock's misfortune is that getting yourself brutally lacerated is a deeply noble business if you're able to make an entertaining display of it. Thus, his daredevil career is kicked into motion.

 

Anyone else reminded of that old NSPCC campaign?

It's hardly surprising that Murdock would leave such a strong impression on Bart. He appeals to the kid's  wayward, mayhem-thirsting nature. He's an intrepid rebel who goes about defying countless authorities - among them, nature, gravity and common sense - winning applause and admiration for his efforts. He lives life on the edge, repeatedly pushing himself to do what anyone else would consider courting disaster on a grotesque scale. He's exactly the kind of person whom Bart would idolise and aspire to be just like. When Bart has his first setback and is confronted by Dr Hibbert, he doesn't take the lecture as seriously as he should, because to him Hibbert's is just another authority to be defied (it's also a transparently two-faced one - see below). He returns to his skateboard, and before he knows it has seemingly perfected the art of the foolhardy jump. Having gotten this far, why would he be inclined to listen to anybody who tells him that he cannot leap over the gorge? Aren't they just imposing false limitations on his path to greatness?

Still, the notion that Bart's compulsion to tempt fate is all down to the toxic influence of the entertainment industry doesn't exactly ring true. There is another, more pressing problem facing Bart throughout the story, and that is the woeful lack of adult oversight or interest in what he's doing, until he's seemingly at the point of no return. When Bart first announces his desire to be a daredevil to Homer, Homer's immediate reaction is to laugh about how "kids say such stupid things", not taking into account that they also do stupid things. Marge likewise seems curiously relaxed over Bart's aspirations, based on how she shrugs off the circumstances behind his injury as a case of "Monkey see, Monkey do." One of Bart's stunts involves leaping over a sleeping Homer, who is entirely oblivious to what is going on. The most disturbing aspect of Dr Hibbert's tour is not what we see in Ward C, or even the horrors hinted to be lurking in the unseen Three Stooges ward, but Hibbert's jarringly callous conclusion that, "as tragic as all this is, it's a small price to pay for countless hours of top-notch entertainment," (to which Homer enthusiastically responds, "Amen!"). Bart would surely be shrewd enough to detect the hypocrisy in Hibbert's words - despite his seeming interest in Bart's well-being, he openly admits that good entertainment is a bigger priority. On learning of Bart's intention to jump the gorge, Otto initially sounds as though he's going to take an unusually serious tone ("As the only adult here I feel I should say something...") before lapsing right into character ("Cool!"). And of course the man who inspired his morbid fascinations turns out to be as mind-bogglingly irresponsible as everyone else. In an act of desperation Lisa takes Bart to see the hospitalised Murdock, hoping that he'll hear straight from the horse's mouth that daredevil stunts are to be performed strictly by the professionals. Alas, it backfires horribly when Murdock expressly encourages Bart to pursue his death-or-glory ambitions: "A lot of people are gonna be telling you you're crazy, and maybe they're right, but the fact of the matter is, bones heal, chicks dig scars, and the United States of America has the best doctor to daredevil ratio in the world!"

In an act of greater desperation, Lisa squeals to Homer and Marge, who get up to speed, too late, on how badly Bart's daredevil aspirations have escalated. Suddenly Homer must rise to the occasion and become the kind of authority figure who can out-impress Murdock in Bart's psyche. What tricks does he have at his disposal? He first tries taking the punitive approach and sending Bart to his room, but Bart, now totally impervious to his father's jurisdiction, openly flaunts that Homer can't keep tabs on him 24/7, and as soon as his back is turned, he'll be sneaking out to the gorge. Homer's next tactic, on the urging of Marge, is to reach out to Bart on a more emotive level, imploring him to promise to not head out to the gorge and to adhere to this as a matter of trust. He alludes to his history of perfunctory parenting when he tells him that this isn't "one of those phoney-baloney promises I don't expect you to keep." He wants Bart to know that there is something more at stake than the possibility of him plunging to his death. He could successfully make the jump across the gorge and become the toast of school-aged Springfield, and yet things would never be the same between himself and his father again. If he were to break this particular promise, he will have lost all credibility in Homer's eyes. Bart seems genuinely taken back by his father's ultimatum and ostensibly complies with wishes. But inevitably the call of the gorge proves too strong and he sneaks out anyway, to find his adoring fans (including Otto) waiting. Homer cottons on and follows Bart to the gorge, just in time to intercept his attempted leap. As it turns out, there is one further tactic that's occurred to Homer. He will take the skateboard and attempt to jump the gorge himself, so that Bart may experience the situation from his perspective.

What Homer's proposing is, objectively speaking, profoundly messed up, but there is a kind of twisted narrative logic to it. Bart's recklessness stems from his assumption that it doesn't matter what happens to him because he has (or so he thinks) made peace with the idea that putting himself at extreme risk is what being a daredevil entails. If he dies, he'll at least go out in a blaze of valorous glory. Homer forces him to see his actions from a wider perspective. It's one thing to conquer your fear of bad things happening to yourself, but try conquering your fear of bad things happening to those you love. Bart comes to understand something of the distress he's been causing his family, and the pain they would suffer if he were to be hurt or killed. Now that's consequence. Homer's gambit works, and the prospect of jumping the gorge loses its lustre for Bart. He pleads with his father not to jump, promising to give up his daredevil ways in return, and the two of them tenderly embrace. But of course no Simpsons ending is quite as straightforward as that. Homer is so relieved at having regained Bart's fidelity that he neglects to maintain control of the skateboard on which he's still standing. A momentary lapse of attention sends him hurtling down the slope and flying out over the gorge, getting us to our infamous climactic set-piece.

It's a bitter twist of fate that, having set out to force Bart into his own position of hand-wringing helplessness, Homer becomes immersed in Bart's delusions, although hardly a surprising one. We had already seen in that opening sequence just how fundamentally alike the Simpson boys are. Naturally, Homer would succumb to the same exhilaration as Bart while he's flying as deceptively high. When, for a glorious moment, it looks as though he might just make the jump, his terror dissipates and, like his son before him, he gets intoxicated from his own adrenalin. Very soon he's whopping about this bring the greatest thrill of his life and declaring himself king of the world, seven years before Leonardo DiCaprio did the same in Titanic. Whatever nobleness he might once have exuded in wanting to make the leap to save his son is all gone. What this means, in practice, is that Homer must learn the very brutal lesson that was formerly earmarked for Bart. His elation proves short-lived, for as he nears the other side he runs out of momentum and fails to close the gap. Had this happened to Bart, then it's unlikely that it would have been in any way funny. But since Homer was supposed to be the rational adult in this equation, there is far greater glee to be had in undercutting his hubris. What we get is a reversal on the story of Daedalus and Icarus, in which the parental figure who should have known better demonstrates that his own judgement can be as clouded by the stupefying lure of the sun, only for the gods to cut him down with even less mercy. He plummets painfully to earth, and the show enforces its reality by fully embracing the fact that it's a cartoon, giving us perhaps the grisliest twist of all. The possible outcome that was a mere moment ago being treated with grave serious - that Homer would attempt to jump in Bart's place and fall horribly - becomes a reality, and it's played not as a grievous development but as a great (albeit unsettling) joke, so that Homer, unlike Icarus, doesn't even have the dignity of going down tragically. The harshest consequence to all his suffering is that there is no real consequence, beyond the intense physical punishment he endures in the moment. He is not king of the world, but a cartoon doofus, and he exists purely to provide entertainment to the legions of spectators on the other side of the fourth wall.

In the final scene, Homer ends up even with Murdock, the character with whom he's been indirectly competing all this time to be viewed as the example that Bart should follow. Both are now in the exact same position, laid out in traction and exposed as injudicious adults who got to where they were not through acts of glory but through stark demonstrations of their vincibility. Kids say such stupid things, and they do such stupid things, but the adults clearly aren't above those same imprudent impulses and have failed to steer the kids right in so many ways. Homer still insists that the kids are the problem, when he delivers the punchline to Murdock, proposing that child-rearing is a prospect more daunting and hazardous than any stunt a daredevil could envision. "You think you've got guts? Try raising my kids!" We might think that assessment is a mite unfair on Maggie, who didn't do anything to hurt or inconvenience Homer throughout the episode (Lisa, I suppose, did have him sit through her recital). But just give her time. By the very next episode, Homer will be back to normal, and she'll be poised to hit him with a mallet and put him out of commission all over again. So Homer has a point. As the centre of this madcap universe, his life is a cycle of unending punishment that a character of the day like Murdock could never know. In other words, more Sisyphus than Icarus. Icarus only had to endure his cosmic pummelling once.

 

[1]  I'm still not 100% sure if that's a reference to the Cold War ending or a more specific comment on the historical reputation of Grigori Rasputin. For years, I presumed the latter but then it dawned on me it was more likely the former. But either interpretation works!

FACT: The Pirates Are Out To Get You

It's funny how campaigns on the issue of piracy had this erstwhile tendency to be leagues more apocalyptic than campaigns on issues that might strike you as being immediately more threatening. A few years back, we touched on the classic 1990s cautionary fable regarding Rebecca's pirated VHS experience - I'm still not 100% sure what was going on in that film, but I really did get the impression that the world was ending in that closing shot. In 2002, the Federation Against Copyright Theft got even more on the nose with a little piece called "The Pirates Are Out To Get You", the mere title of which says it all. The imperilled suburban innocence denoted by Rebecca's guileless giggling was now but a distant memory; this film might as well have taken place after the collapse of civilisation brought about by the foolish choices of Rebecca's unscrupulous parents, of which Rebecca herself appeared to have a chilling premonition at the end of her chapter. We find ourselves plunged into a burning hellscape, in the company of a pirate who might as well be the Devil himself. They didn't go so far as to give him pointy horns (although that wouldn't have been any less unsubtle), but he's got red-tinged skin and the glow of annihilation in his eyes. In place of his traditional pitchfork, he wields a brand in the shape of an X (for Forbidden!), which is first submerged in flame and then pointed at the camera, aaand it's not my imagination, is it? This anti-piracy film was intended as a parody of the Flaming Carlton Star? I mentioned in my coverage of that logo that the red-hot star-shaped brand was made all the more unnerving for the fact that we never saw the hand that moved it, enabling it to take on an uncanny life all of its own. Thanks to FACT, we get to discover if the alternative - seeing the sadistic thug with a penchant for scorching - is any more reassuring.

In lieu of turning the brute force of his weapon upon the audience, our demonic brand-wielder instead gets his kicks out of torching stacks of VHS tapes, film reels and CDs. A mere touch of the X is enough to engulf them in a flaming explosion that would make Michael Bay proud. The use of VHS makes the film feel curiously behind the times, as by 2002 the public were well along the process of tossing them out for DVDs, and countless VHS collections were meeting similarly miserable fates at landfill sites the world over. Being a VHS aficionado myself, I'll admit that the sight of all those tapes going up in flames makes my heart a little fluttery. (CDs? Torch as many of the snotty fuckers as you like. In this house it's vinyl or nothing.) By 2002, the Carlton Star had also been operation for long enough for audiences to be well-accustomed to kick-starting their watching experiences by having a burning iron shoved in their faces, so the idea was presumably to offer a startling subversion, with the (sorta) familiar imagery directing us to somewhere altogether more unimaginable. This is the Star's corrupted counterpart, signalling a dystopian world in which those pesky pirates, and not the advertisers, call the shots on what we see and hear - that being a slew of explosions and all the tell-tales noises of a society sinking deep into an apocalyptic chasm (sirens wailing, mobs chanting, gunfire rattling), indicating that our video-killer's actions have further-reaching consequences than a few melted copies of Bend It Like Beckham. I like the concept in theory, although it has to be said that the red hot X, in spite of its ability to make everything it comes into contact with to messily combust, lacks the awe-inspiring potency of its inspiration. We're issued a grim warning on the perils of letting the pirates brand us with their mark, yet "Pirates" doesn't make good on the implications of that threat - unlike the logo it's recalling, it never forces the viewer to endure the simulated experience of having the searing brand thrust directly upon them. It certainly puts a lot more emphasis on the fire visuals, making it a full-on nightmare for any pyrophobe unfortunate enough to find this lurking on the copy of Cheaper By The Dozen they rented, but compared to its counterpart, I never feel the creeping paranoia that the X-shaped brand is coming for me. The C-shaped brand (for Copyright!) that ultimately takes its place, once a bucket of cold water has put a stop to the mindless media-burning, is a slightly different story. Despite having just emerged from the same bucket of water that vanquished the X, it too ignites, with enough fury that it apparently causes the screen to burn out. It glows white rather than red, which I guess is intended to signify its purity, but the use of violent imagery to represent copyright is still jarring, meaning that it's not presented as a healing force that will put the world to rights, but an angry and vengeful one that's out to get you every bit as much as those pirates.

The film's most memorable component was its infamously foreboding monologue, which wasn't actually claiming anything that Rebecca's ordeal before it didn't. There, terrorism and organised crime were also said to be the beneficiaries of our dodgy video investments, although their invisibility made them more effective foes; the mere mention of the man at the market was ominous enough in context, but the suggestion that this only scratched the surface of a far more sinister agenda unfolding beyond the eyeline of Rebecca's ignorant parents was genuinely spine-chilling. The tactic was to prompt questions about the hidden costs of piracy and, through the highly emotive figure of Rebecca, what kind of world we were building for our children as a result. In attempting to provide more concrete answers to those questions, "Pirates" ends up feeling a lot more hyperbolic, in no small way because of its exceptionally bombastic choice of visual accompaniment (in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the specific charge that "piracy funds terrorism" had also become an especially loaded one). It was an even more drastic leap from "Daylight Robbery", the anti-piracy film we all got sick of seeing at the start of our tapes in the late 1990s, in which the pirates were represented by a cartoonishly belligerent market vendor who played like a nastier version of Del Boy from Only Fools and Horses. Obnoxious to the core, and not the kind of bloke you'd feel comfortable doing business with, but at least he was only a bloke and not the Devil incarnate, claiming your hard-earned fiver for a barely-functional copy of Trainspotting but sparing your soul. "Daylight Robbery" was a notably lighter kind of anti-piracy ad, its tactic being to present piracy as a particularly loathsome inconvenience as opposed to an all-destroying force, and it found room for humor in its featured scenario (the vendor claims that his trade was "advertised on Crimestoppers"). "Pirates", by comparison, takes the path of excess. The pirates are depicted not as unscrupulous criminals, but as unearthly demons on a mission to set the whole world ablaze, who get one step closer to succeeding every time someone fails to source their copy of Minority Report from a reputable retailer. Its message is conveyed with thoroughgoing seriousness, and yet its hyperbole is so hilariously bald-faced that it ends up getting the comedic edge on "Daylight".

For as much notoriety as its doom-laden monologue amassed, it has to be acknowledged that it is rather clunkily-constructed. There are snippets that work well enough, like the eerie ambiguity in the statement that piracy "will destroy our development and your future enjoyment." Obviously, they're talking about the jeopardy facing the entertainment industry, but after that mention of terrorism it's hard not to get the sense that they're alluding to the possible destruction of society as a whole. But the equation of those two concerns - the repeated criss-crossing between the proclamation that the very worst, most malignant kinds of people stand to overwhelmingly benefit from piracy and the affirmation that the film and music industries have everything to lose - is overall unwieldy (the use of explosive imagery to imply that these two concerns go hand in hand feels especially ham-fisted). It's further weighed down by the surplus of inelegant fire analogies - in addition to the aforementioned "Don't let them brand you with their mark!", there's "Don't let the pirates burn a hole in your pocket!" and "Don't touch the hot stuff. Cool is copyright!" (which immediately contradicted by the image of that C catching alight). You get the distinct impression that several different marketing slogans were proposed and, after a backstage deadlock on which was the punchiest, all of them were tossed into the final script, with the effect that they cancel one another out.

As easy as it is to poke fun at "Pirates" for its intensely over the top tone and production, its crudely nightmarish charm always makes it delightful for a nostalgic revisit. It also looks positively sophisticated when up against FACT's upcoming specimen for 2004, "You Wouldn't Steal a Car" (aka the worst anti-piracy film ever made). All I'll say is that it's impossible for me to watch that one and not hear Tweety Pie's voice echoing at the back of my head. "You wouldn't steal a car..." "Her don't know me vewy well, do her?!"

Logo Case Study: Carlton Screen Advertising (Flaming Carlton Star)

These days I often find myself remarking that advertising is a dead art. Which is obviously enormously hyperbolic of me, but it is the case that a lot of contemporary advertising just doesn't capture my imagination the way it used to. In part, I would argue that this is because we're living in the age of the touchy-feely ad (for which we can thank the root of all syrup-slathered evil, John Lewis), and I do not, in general, care for touchy-feely ads. But I do also have to acknowledge that, yeah, it's probably not a coincidence that the advertising era that made the greatest impression on me was the mid-90s through to the mid-00s, back when I was in the process of coming of age. Of course the ads of the 2020s aren't going to have quite the same magic as they had back then. I became an old fogey, and the world in general lost a wad of its lustre. I'm sure that, in 1996, some codger was shaking their head and muttering about how advertising was so much more epic when they were using iguanas to sell cigarettes, and not maggots to sell booze. All I know is that, once upon a time, watching the ad reel before a movie used to be an integral part of the cinemagoing experience for me. Remember that shrill woman in the car in those cinema sponsorship bumpers (from Volkswagen?) who used to yell out, "We're gonna miss the ads, that's the best bit!"? Clearly you were intended to sympathise more with her husband (who, IIRC, got out and abandoned her with the vehicle in motion in the final bumper) but I privately felt she spoke a lot of truth. Going to the movies and seeing the ad reel was like getting a grab bag of bonus miniature stories before the main feature, some weird, some terrifying, some absolutely baffling. I'd sometimes emerge chewing more upon that advertising than the film itself. But now, while I remain a staunch proponent of the theatrical experience, I often find my feet dragging in the foyer as the ads are about to start. To me, they're no longer an indispensable part of the package, but these annoying things you have to suffer through before the real fun begins - sentiments that I fear are inevitable around the onset of middle age. I'd be curious to know if kids today still get spooked by theatrical ads. Anything can seem scarier when it's magnified and in the dark, and you're susceptible enough to the sensory overload - how else can I explain being so deeply unsettled by an ad about a Lloyds cashpoint that played before Free Willy? Even some seasonal John Lewis drivel that's bending over backwards to give you the synthetic fuzzies might seem utterly horrifying when viewed through the right pair of eyes. All the same, I'd contend that a major reason why cinema ads seemed so much more spectacular in my favoured period had a lot to do with the company they kept back then, when the promos of the advertising companies themselves were epic little serotonin-inducers in their own right. As long as Pearl & Dean keep using Pete Moore's "Asteroid" as their jingle, a sliver of that grandeur may be preserved for future generations. But we've yet to find a worthy successor to Carlton Screen Advertising and their flaming Carlton star, which was as singularly commanding a cinematic visual as they come. Nothing said "You will fucking pay attention to what we're selling!" quite like having a red hot iron shoved in your face. Those were the days alright!

What made the Carlton Star so special? For a start, I can't claim that any other logo enticed me into to role-playing that I'm a criminal in olden times who's been sentenced to branding. That may sound like a strangely masochistic reaction, but I'm not sure what other narrative I was expected to attach to the sequence in question. We see a star-shaped iron being dunked into burning coals, then before you know it the thing's upon you. I can only speculate what infraction could warrant the barbaric penalty of having a star-shaped scar singed onto my face, but Carlton inflicted it on me with every trip to Cineworld. What exactly was the symbolism there? Were creators Lambie-Nairn seeking to convey some sly commentary on how advertising seeks to imprint on and commandeer our psyches? Was it deliberately likening the process to an act of brutal assault, implying that, by violently searing its mark upon us (or at least, giving the impression of doing so) it was laying claim to us, and to the impulses and desires that could be molded to make perfectly obedient consumers of us? This implicit message, whether conscious or not, is echoed in the logo's stinger, which arrived at the end of the ad reel to give the star the final word. This add-on was less dramatic than the main ident, showing only the star-shaped brand still pointed at the screen in a visibly cooler state, but (thanks in no small way to the eerie background drones), felt no less threatening. This was my final ominous reminder, as a branded medieval criminal, that the pain from my punitive burns might eventually lessen, but the mark wasn't going anywhere. The star insisted on lingering. I belonged to it now.

Needless to say, the Carlton Star left a terrifying impression on the fleets of kids who'd trekked innocently to their local UCI to see Pokémon: The First Movie. By the time it started showing up, in the late 1990s, I personally was already old enough and had spent enough of that time hanging out in cinemas to have acquired a taste for their little terrors, so the star was all catnip to me. It worked so well because it was so purely cinematic, assaulting the senses in the way that only the big screen can. It was bold, intense and awe-inspiring, kick-starting our presentation with a full-on demonstration of all that cinema can do; you'd come because you wanted an experience that can only be fully understood on an enlarged canvas, and you got that in spades with this thing. The mere sight of that brand entering those red hot embers was enough to get sweat trickling down your brow. Those burning coals felt so real and so tangible that they might as well have rolled off and set fire to the cinema curtains that were drawing back right as the logo was starting. You could practically smell them. It touched on a whole cavalcade of nerves (the primal fear of fire, the uncanny uncertainty in not seeing who was controlling the iron brand, which might as well be moving by itself, the visual and sonic severity of that climactic sizzle) but that's what made it such a perfect appetite whetter for the journey ahead. When the lights go down, you want to feel a little unsafe,  already on the edge of your seat in anticipation for where the experience could potentially take you. As a counterpoint to its aggressive intensity, it's also a stunningly beautiful logo. That final blend of showering yellows and swirling oranges never fails to make me gasp.

The Carlton Star enjoyed a healthy run, turning up the heat for UK cinemagoers until well into the 2000s. Alas, all good things must come to an end, and the light finally burned out in in 2008, when the UK operation of Carlton Screen Advertising was acquired by Odeon and Cineworld and rebranded as Digital Cinema Media. The Carlton Screen brand (and the star) remained active in Ireland until 2014, when Wide Eye Media (now Pearl & Dean Ireland) took its place. With the Carlton brand now obsolete on both sides of the Irish Sea, it's unlikely that the Carlton brand will be making a comeback any time soon. But like I say, once marked by its searing intensity, there was no way you were getting its imprint off you. Those of us who grew up with the logo will always bear the star-shaped scar somewhere upon our souls.

The logo had another curious legacy (of sorts), in that it was the seeming inspiration behind a 2002 campaign about how piracy would destroy us all. Was it as petrifying as the real deal? All will be revealed in time.

BT' 92: Get Through To Someone (The Bellows of Indifference)

Let's talk about the single greatest oddity of British Telecom's 1992 "Get Through To Someone" campaign. The edition that conceals it isn't half as unnerving as the one about the woman who frets that her daughter is freezing to death inside a student hall, but it is several times more confounding. On this occasion, we focus on a plucky would-be Lothario who's determined not to get through to someone - or rather, to get through to her by maintaining total radio silence. Our protagonist considers himself a pretty slick fella, and thinks it most beneath him to give his girlfriend a bell to let her know that he loves her, preferring to keep her interested by keeping her hanging. He's so slick, in fact, that he justifies his dubious tactic by misremembering a quote from the 1940 Marx brothers film Go West. "What's that line from the old film? Fanning the flames of desire with the bellows of indifference..." Go West is not explicitly cited, but the quotation in question is markedly similar to one uttered by Groucho Marx therein. Problem is, it's not an exact match; the actual line spoken by Groucho is: "The secret is never let her know you care. Never pursue her. Let her pursue you. Fan the flames of desire with the bellows of indifference!"  You might think this is a case of me being unreasonably pedantic, but where it gets perplexing is that we hear the snippet of dialogue playing in the protagonist's head, spoken in some suave, old timey actor's voice, and presented as though it were an extract of culled directly from the film itself. On top of everything else, that suave, old timey actor is audibly not Groucho Marx. Which begs a number of questions. Can we say for certain that Go West is the old film our protagonist has in mind? If not Groucho Marx, then whose voice is it? Is it a legitimate extract from some other classic picture in which a character makes a near-identical observation, using the exact same metaphors? Or is it just a faux dialogue extract, created to sound like it was taken from an old movie? Was the idea to have the protagonist seem additionally foolish, since his memories don't quite align with what's heard in the film itself, or was the intention here simply to allude to Go West without actually having to secure the rights to use any of it? That last one has the ring of plausibility, although why go to the trouble to create a faux extract when you could have had the protagonist (mis)remember it in his regular voice, creating much the same implications?

It should be noted that most ads in the "Get Through To Someone" campaign involved some element of paranoid or delusional fantasy, with characters fretting over the barrage of unknowns presented by their individual situations, before their fears were finally put to rest with a call and a sound of that soothing harmonica leitmotif. "Bellows" is something of an anomaly, in that the protagonist professes to be entirely at ease with a state of no communication. In lieu of a paranoid dream sequence, he gets an internal monologue, and his misquoting of Groucho Marx, in the wrong vocals, is the closest he gets to retreating into fantasy, with the misremembered details distinguishing his musings as a display of personal indulgence (those mysterious misplaced vocals representing his own attempt, as part of that internal monologue, to role play not as Marx, but as a more generically suave actor from Hollywood's golden age) and not objective memory. There seems to be a broader theme involving classic Hollywood; when Debbie calls, and his facade is totally punctured by the sudden surge of panic that has him lurching for the telephone, Sally the dog appears and creates an awkward, albeit jovially dispelled misunderstanding ("Sally, get off! No, no no, she's a dog. No, a sort of terrier type thing!"). Is it a coincidence that she is, specifically, a Cairn terrier, the breed most familiar to general audiences as that of Toto, the travelling companion of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz? These allusions to old Hollywood are emblematic of the protagonist's desire to immerse himself in a world of airy fantasy, exposed as foolish play pretence the instant reality comes calling and drags him straight back down into Kansas. There, he lives in disarray, surrounded by the contents of an upset fruit bowl, hounded by an over-enthusiastic terrier and suddenly very eager for the reaffirmation of Debbie's affections ("Debbie, listen to me," he implores at the end).

The especially fun part with these GTTS ads is noticing which aspect of the mise en scene works its way into the final arrangement, sharing the BT logo's status as the connective tissue between the featured parties, what function it serves within the characters' narrative and how it might be construed as symbolic of their relationship. In this case, it's the eye-catching knick knack that's foregrounded during the opening frames of the ad, an indoor water fountain comprised of a female figure, and droplets trickling all around the sides of her casing. Her foregrounding is juxtaposed with the protagonist's utterance of "Women...", indicating that she's to be seen as the embodiment of his professed views on the fairer sex. As with "Empty Nest Angst", I suspect that water is once again being used as a metaphor for sex, or at least for sexual desire, with this perfectly contained figurine encapsulated by her own ever-flowing desire serving as a telling reflection of how our protagonist envisions Debbie, treated mean and kept keen. But seems just as appropriate those non-stop trickles to be indicative of his own inner craving to connect with Debbie, barely concealed by his purported inclination to play it cool by emitting those bellows of indifference. In actuality, he's a chaotic geyser of ill-suppressed yearning. In the closing collage, the figure's image is situated so as to appear to be gazing from his direction and onto Debbie, a sly visual allegory for how transfixed by her he really is.

Homer's Barbershop Quartet (aka With A Little Help From My Friends)

 

On September 30th 1993, "Homer's Barbershop Quartet" (episode 9F21) aired, getting The Simpsons' fifth season off to a roaring start. They couldn't have picked a classier, more iconic debut if they'd tried,  and yet it wasn't always intended to lead the pack. The bigwigs at Fox had originally wanted "Homer Goes To College" to be the big season premiere, believing that the premise of Homer Simpson enacting a string of Animal House-style hi-jinks would prove irresistible to viewers, but in the end "Quartet" just had too much of an edge. By which I mean a guest appearance from a Beatle, with Homer's musical odyssey allowing him to cross paths with George Harrison a couple of times. Animal House parodies ain't got nothing on that! But then, as Harrison himself observes during his second appearance, "It's been done." It would be done again too. "Quartet" marked only the second occasion on which a Beatle had graced The Simpsons with their vocals, following Ringo Starr's appearance in "Brush With Greatness" of Season 2. Paul McCartney would later show up in "Lisa The Vegetarian" of Season 7, thus completing the surviving set (if John Lennon had lived to see the series, do you reckon they could have convinced him too?). What better way to cement the show's own status as a phenomenon for the ages than by having your legacy converge with that of another timeless phenomenon? Harrison's cameo is by and far the briefest and most frivolous of all the Beatles' guest appearances - whereas Starr and McCartney each enjoyed a prolonged interaction with one of the family and a meaningful impact on the resolution of their respective story, Harrison's role consists of popping up twice for a quick gag and immediately moving on. It's also more self-effacing than the other Beatles' appearances; Harrison receives none of the in-universe reverence afforded his bandmates, a great part of the joke being that no one even notices he's there (which is the very problem he faced as a Beatle, is is not?). It's a fitting summation of what's going on in the episode as a whole. The legend of The Beatles, those four Liverpool lads who became global sensations and changed the face of popular music forever, looms large over the events of "Quartet" but goes mostly unspoken. Outside of Harrison's appearances, the band is brought up explicitly only once, when Lisa asks if Homer's singing career was sunk because he screwed up like The Beatles and said his titular quartet was bigger than Jesus. (Objection! Only Lennon said that, not The Beatles as a collective, and while it triggered quite the backlash in the US at the time, it hardly brought about an end to the band. They hadn't even done Sgt Pepper's at that point.)

"Homer's Barbershop Quartet" opens with the family at a swap meet (or car boot sale, as we'd call it in the UK), where Bart and Lisa are perusing Comic Book Guy's stall and, after learning a little about the Rodent Invasion of the early 1960s, are surprised to dig out a record with Homer's face on the cover. Homer explains to them that, back in 1985, he was part of a barbershop quartet (alongside Skinner, Apu and Chief Wiggum) that used to perform regularly at Moe's. The group had a slow start, but eventually became a local sensation, at which point they were approached by a theatrical agent named Nigel who wanted to represent them, on the condition that they lose Wiggum, whom he considered "too Village People". On discovering Barney's hidden talent for singing, the group brought him in as a replacement and went on to record a hit record, "Baby on Board", under the name The Be Sharps. Alas, the taste of celebrity was sweet, but ultimately fleeting, and by the end of the summer the quartet had become an obscure footnote in music history. This is the story of their dramatic rise and fall.

We can technically count "Homer's Barbershop Quartet" as the fourth in the ongoing branch of "flashback episodes" that originated with "The Way We Was" of Season 2; doing so handily gives the branch a five-year streak that wasn't broken until Oakley and Weinstein took over as showrunners (one assumes that after "And Maggie Makes Three" they ran out of obvious subject matter). But "Quartet" would inevitably be the odd one out, in part because it's the only flashback episode, of that initial streak, that isn't focussed on the family. The other Simpsons are always somewhere at the back of Homer's mind throughout his rise to fame - there's a rather meagre subplot dealing with the mutual dissatisfaction that accompanies his being separated from his young family, but this has no discernible impact on how the episode ultimately resolves. But more glaring still is that is that the events of this particular flashback aren't events that conceivably fit with what we already know about the family. The other flashback episodes play out like the putting together of pieces in a puzzle, combining to give us the bigger story of the Simpsons' formation and how the family in its present state came to be. The questions they tackled were all very logical ones. How did Homer and Marge meet? How did they marry? What were the circumstances behind each of the children's births? How did Homer come to work at the nuclear power plant? When did the family move into Evergreen Terrace? "Quartet", by contrast, tells a story that is, by its own admission, a profoundly illogical thing to be retroactively working into the family's backstory this far into the series. Toward the end of the episode, Bart and Lisa (performing their intermittent duty as viewer substitutes) fire off a barrage of questions that directly attack the preposterousness of the tale their father has just related, the most insurmountable of which is, "How come we never heard about this until today?" Indeed. It would be one thing if a youthful Homer had been part of a music outfit that never went anywhere and left him a bit embarrassed as a thirtysomething. But for him to have been in a band that enjoyed chart success, toured Sweden, performed for the Statue of Liberty's centennial, won a Grammy, inspired a slew of tacky merchandise and still reunites for the occasional Dame Edna special...well, it surely wouldn't have taken this long to come up from an in-universe perspective? It's the kind of thing that should threaten to significantly rewire our perception of Homer as a character. Besides which, Santa's Little Helper is clearly glimpsed one of the flashbacks to 1985. The dog probably wasn't born until later in 80s, and he certainly didn't live with the Simpsons at this point, so CONTINUITY TORPEDOED! (Mind you, the dog in question is a different shade of brown to Santa's Little Helper, so is it possible the Simpsons owned another greyhound we'd also just never heard about? It would certainly be no more of a stretch than the mere existence of The Be Sharps.)

But then, The Be Sharps were not introduced with the intention that they have any serious ramifications for the series' world-building, as evidenced by how seldom they've been referenced in the seasons since. They were introduced purely so that The Simpsons could craft its own personalised love letter to The Beatles, and once we've accepted the distinctly self-contained nature of the story, its charms on that score are manifold. Writer Jeff Martin clearly had a great deal of passion for the Fab Four; that passion is palpable all throughout the script and certainly compensates for whatever conceptual quibbles we might have with the arrangement. If you know your Beatles history, then it's hard not to smile at some of the small ways in which the reality of the series is bent to accommodate the tribute - for example, Moe's Tavern was apparently known as "Moe's Cavern" in the summer of '85 - and the ways in which the quartet members act as embodiments of that history feels almost entirely natural and true to their characterisations. Wiggum is unambiguously the Pete Best of the equation, although none of the Be Sharps themselves serve as analogues for any one specific Beatle. Rather, they just recall bits and pieces of them wherever it fits. Barney starts out as Ringo, the newcomer, but ends up as John, with the Japanese conceptual artist girlfriend (about as on the nose as the allusions get, but at least it's consistent with what we'd later see in "A Star Is Burns", with Barney having an appreciation for the avant garde). Homer starts out as John, the de facto leader and the one who's already taken but encouraged to keep his marriage out of public knowledge, but by the end feels more like Paul (I love Macca, but I can totally hear that song about Mr T coming out of him). Apu being persuaded to adopt the pseudonym De Beaumarchais (on the grounds that Nahasapeemapetilon wouldn't fit on a marque, although De Beaumarchais isn't significantly shorter) likely alludes to "Ringo Starr" being the stage name of Richard Starkey. Skinner is tagged by the press as "the funny one", which was Ringo's designation back in the day (just as John was the smart one, Paul the cute one and George the quiet one). Various poses and fashion choices made by the band throughout directly echo the iconography of The Beatles - notably, a photo from the Let It Be recording sessions, which perfectly captured the divisions between the band members in its final days, here lovingly recreated right as the Be Sharps are nearing their breaking point. Most delectable of all, however, is the origin behind the band name "Be Sharps", chosen because it meets Skinner's requirement for "a name that's witty at first, but seems less funny each time you hear it". That's an accurate assessment of the pun in "Beatles", which is cute when you first notice it, but after a while you just forget is there.

What makes "Quartet" an interesting episode beyond the Beatles allusions is that it also represents a bit of bold experimentation in terms of broadening Homer's social connections. With the exception of Barney, with whom he was well-accustomed to palling around, the line-up of characters in The Be Sharps was a reasonably novel one. If a more contemporary Simpsons episode were to feature the premise of Homer forming a barbershop quartet, the remaining members would almost certainly be Moe, Lenny and Carl. All three of those characters work their way into "Quartet", but at this point in the series there seemed to be a general reluctance to use them much outside of their designated habitats of bar and power plant. Instead, the episode digs a little deeper into the supporting cast, pooling Springfieldians from various all of life in an attempt to settle on some new mates for Homer, some of which stuck while others didn't. "Quartet" seems to mark the turning point where Apu was depicted as one of Homer's close friends, and not simply the guy he'd interact with when he was out shopping for groceries, a move cemented later on in the season with "Homer and Apu". It seems far stranger to contemplate the possibility that the writers were toying with the idea of making Skinner a fixture of Homer's friendship circle, but there does appear to have been a genuine shift toward bringing those characters together during Season 5 - consider that he was included in Homer's vigilante group in "Homer The Vigilante", and they shared a hotel room while serving as jurors in "The Boy Who Knew Too Much". Skinner doesn't seem like the kind of guy who'd be in his element with Homer socially, but perhaps that was what made their combination so appealing. Skinner is the uptight straight guy who provides invaluable contrasts. When asked by a reporter if his aforementioned reputation as "the funny one" is justified, his deadpan, "Yes, yes it is," demonstrates why that's seriously no lie (it's also a bit strange how the reporter addresses him as "Principal Skinner", suggesting that his strict schoolmasterly persona has permeated his identity within the band too). The writers were onto something with the pairing, but I guess they just didn't know how to keep it going. As for Wiggum, while I don't feel there was such a conscious effort to make him one of Homer's friends in Season 5, it's worth noting that they would enjoy a more prolonged team-up in "Marge on The Lam".

Part of the underlying joke behind the Be Sharps is of course that barbershop is (as Bart points out) an old-fashioned music style associated predominantly with the turn of the century, and would have seemed really out of place within the popular music climate of the 1980s, despite Homer's insistence to the contrary ("Rock and roll had become stagnant. "Achy Breaky Heart" was seven years away. Something had to fill the void. And that something was Barbershop.") Still, our friend Bobby McFerrin had his own one-off chart success in 1988, so it wasn't as though there was no room for a cappella in the era of synthpop and New Romantics. And here's the secret ingredient that gives the episode that extra layer of conviction, for all its unlikelihoods - as a musical act, The Be Sharps are played more-or-less straight. Singing vocals were provided by then-current members of the Dapper Dans, the barbershop quartet that performs daily as part of Disneyland's Main Street Parade, and interlaced with those of Castellaneta, Azaria and Shearer, so they certainly have the mettle. "Baby on Board", the song Homer is inspired to pen after seeing Marge's latest purchase, a yellow warning sign designed to deter drivers from "intentionally ramming our car", has the benefit of sounding like an authentic a cappella standard and lampooning a contemporary obsession (much like Dexy's Midnight Runners, those "Baby on Board" signs stuck around for longer in the UK, but in the US I understand that their moment came and went in the mid-80s). Although maybe Homer was too quick to abandon that one about Geraldo and Al Capone's vault (somewhat anachronistically, given that the whole Mystery of Al Capone's Vaults fiasco wouldn't happen until April 1986).

"Quartet" is a delightful ride, although it has to be said that there's not a great deal to the story. You can tell, from the beginning, that the writers had difficulty stretching it to the full 22 minutes, because of what's going on with the couch gag; they mash three of them together, giving us something to the tune of a couch gag clip show. ("Cape Feare", its neighbouring episode, had the same problem, but used the more conventional solution of running the extra-long circus-themed variation). Conversely, it also feels like there are pieces missing from it; being one of the last episodes to emerge from Al Jean and Mike Reiss's turn as showrunners, it's got their trademark meandering structure, with not all of the narrative threads neatly combining. Did you notice, for example, that after a while the character of Nigel just disappears from the story altogether? He sets The Be Sharps up on the road to stardom and then apparently takes no interest while the group is disintegrating. It has crossed my mind that his absence might have been a deliberate choice, as an allusion to the death of Brian Epstein, but if we're meant to draw that conclusion it surely would have been helpful to have at least acknowledged him. There's also the matter of the Simpsons struggling while divided; a classic theme, but it doesn't really build to anything narrative-wise. The scene where Marge attempts to compensate for Homer's absence by constructing a dummy father for the young Bart and Lisa is a little unsettling and adds nothing (except for that timeline-muddling Santa's Little Helper appearance), but we do get a nice moment with Homer in his Hollywood hotel room, having a telephone conversation with baby Lisa about his Grammy success (Lisa, who at this stage can't be older than one, is already exhibiting precocious behaviours), before contemplating how much he's missing his family and how unfulfilling he's finding stardom. He's so disillusioned by that realisation that he attempts to give away the Grammy to a bellhop as a tip, only for the bellhop to reject it as not worth having. That joke at the Grammy's expense is as far as this particular thread goes - Homer's longing for his family doesn't come up at all in the third act, as much sense as it would have made to imply that his abilities as a songwriter waned because his heart wasn't in it - but I do like the moody, almost Hopper-esque tones that accompany his hotel-bound solitude. Meanwhile, there's an obvious parallel to be drawn between the raw deal Marge gets in the past and how direly underappreciated she still is in the present. In 1985, she's left alone with the kids and is purposely erased from Homer's public profile so that his teenybopper fans can retain their delusions of having a shot with him. In 1993, pay attention to what Marge is doing in the background of the framing narrative, and you'll see she's having yet another punishing time of it, forced to walk 12 miles when the family's car breaks down in the desert, and later receiving no help in changing the tire. Combine that with the sight gag in which Homer's parenting of toddler Bart consists of leaving him under a laundry basket in the basement, and the implicit message is that while Homer recognises that his real place is among the Simpsons clan, he can't help but take them for granted whenever he's with them.

Still, in the end the family becomes something of a red herring, to the point that they're given no payoff. The sequence where the quartet members, post-disbandment, are seen settling back into their regular lives is all padding, despite that hilarious bar order from our Yoko Ono parody, but does it strike you as strange that Homer's return to normality is all about him going back to the power plant (where he's implied to have killed Queenie the nuclear chicken...goddammit, Homer) and not reconnecting with the family for which he's been pining? The other Simpsons might be the gravitational pull that keeps Homer from feeling too at home in the world of celebrity, but they are not where the episode's real emotional grounding lies. Rather, the heart of the story lies with the friendships forged with his fellow Be Sharps during their moment of glory, and the feeling of nostalgic regret that ultimately emerges from Homer's recounting, as he looks back on those youthful ambitions that were never fully realised, and the good times that simply couldn't last. Whatever the underlying factor, The Be Sharps came to an end because their creative well ran dry, in spite of Barney's valiant attempts to take the barbershop genre to strange new places. The fateful moment that doomed them to obscurity came when Us Weekly declared them "Not" instead of "Hot". Here, it's possible to detect just a smidgen of the anxiety the series would explore in greater depth with "Bart Gets Famous", and which permeated much of Oakley and Weinstein's era - the idea that the Simpsons' own bubble might pop at any moment. Homer underscores the fickle nature of celebrity when he specifies that The Be Sharps' reign lasted for only five and a half weeks (which, mind you, seems a long time by today's standards). When Homer states that "what goes up must come down", only for Bart and Lisa to retort that Dean Martin, Tom Jones and Frank Sinatra were still going strong, it's hard to say if they're meant to represent the doggedly expectant fans or the defiant staff insisting that they'll keep going regardless. I don't believe such anxieties to be the real point of the episode, however. "Quartet" seems to me to be about something far less cynical than the idea that anything that reaches the top is destined for a sharp and brutal decline. As noted, it is an achingly sincere ode to the Beatles and the numerous lives their music touched. And it's just as sincere about the "what if" question that becomes particularly poignent as it nears its conclusion, when Homer feels compelled to get in touch with his fellow Be Sharps. What if it didn't have to end when it did? What if we could have made this last longer? What else could we have accomplished together? If we tried again, would anybody still care?

The thing I quibbled over earlier on this review, about how this isn't a backstory that logically fits with the the series, actually ends up working to its advantage. Hearing the story of The Be Sharps is akin to brushing up against an alternate reality, in which Homer gets to contemplate another road he might have pursued in life. It's a road he knows was never really for him, but he remains haunted by the suggestion that there was always something there of value, even if he couldn't get close to it for long. He's able to revisit that road, if only for a moment, by reigniting his connection with the friends with whom he once shared that common ambition. The episode ends with Homer meeting with the other Be Sharps on the rooftop of Moe's, where they give an impromptu performance of "Baby on Board" to the streets below, an obvious homage to The Beatles' rooftop concert of 30th January 1969, aka the band's final public performance. Crowds gather to watch, enraptured by what they're seeing. It's also hinted that Wiggum, who had to contend with being a media punching bag during The Be Sharps' success, might get his belated revenge, as he orders Lou to "Get the tear gas" (a nod to how the police intervened in The Beatles' own rooftop concert). Homer signs off by quoting Lennon: "I'd like to thank you on behalf of the group, and I hope we passed the audition." Barney laughs uproariously, then admits he doesn't get it - speaking, I suppose, for every audience member who was either too young or simply too unhip to know just what this episode was getting at.

The ending of "Homer's Barbershop Quartet" is a touching one on multiple levels. There is something immensely magical about the prospect of getting to go back and re-experience some bygone excitement from a time in our lives when things seemed so alive with possibilities. About giving something that seemed long-lost one final, unexpected breath of life. There's the faintest hint of knowing absurdity blended in with the wistful melancholy that accompanies The Be Sharps' reunion - within the show's internal universe, their turn in the spotlight didn't happen so long ago, and it's not as though Homer doesn't interact with two of the other members on a regular basis anyway. But then they're standing in for something far greater outside of the show's reality, that being our continuing cultural connection with The Beatles, a phenomenon that seems at once so tied up in a distant age and yet still so prevalent and perceptible in the present. In 1993, the possibility of The Beatles reuniting in this manner was long off the cards, for obvious reasons; we weren't then even 20 years removed from the band's official break-up, and already they represented something lost and irrecoverable. But their legacy refused to fade, both among the people who'd witnessed their rise to the top as it happened, and among the generations that had come along since, the Simpsons tribute being yet another step in that ongoing proliferation. "Quartet" is a heartfelt attempt, however quixotic, to recreate just a smidgeon of that Beatles magic by having Homer and co follow in their footsteps. The Simpsons might be the masters of deconstructing popular culture from all across the board, but I'm not sure how many other examples send out so sincere a statement of "We heard you. You mattered to us. Here's our little part in keeping your flame alive."

We'll end this review with a quote from Kurt Vonnegut: "I say in speech that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'The Beatles did'." True, and I'd like to think that Matt Groening and his crew achieved a bit of that too.

 

(PS: Looking at the episode's Wikipedia article, I can't help but notice that the current summary seems to grossly exaggerate the role that Barney's Japanese conceptual artist girlfriend plays in The Be Sharps' dissolution. Funny that.)

Intersections (Wheel of Misfortune)

As we've established, New Zealand's intersections were dangerous places to hang in the 2000s, and this campaign - quite possibly the most inspired of all NZ intersection campaigns - offered a really creative means of illustrating that point. "Wheel of Misfortune" was created in 2008 by agency Clemenger BBDO Wellington for Land Transport New Zealand (who'd inherited LTSA's mantle in 2004), and arguably represents the absolute peak of LTNZ's output. I'd go a step further and say that it represents peak road campaigning, period. When it comes to public information films (or whatever the equivalent international term would be), "Wheel of Misfortune" is one of the all-time greats. Top 10 material, definitely. Maybe even a contender for the Top 5. All of the right ingredients are there - an ingeniously novel set-up, spine-chilling atmosphere, beautifully crafted tension, flickers of grim humor and the kind of indelibly grisly climax that makes any PIF buff weak at the knees. What's more, it has a villain who could give the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water a run for its money. Here, the face of crossroads carnage is actor David Austin, playing a wordless, other-wordly carny who occupies the focal intersection and beckons drivers with the ultimate challenge - the opportunity to Risk It All, Risk It Here. Getting across without giving way is envisioned as a twisted carnival game, straight out of your darkest, most nutmeg-addled nightmares.

The premise of "Wheel of Misfortune" has it that whenever a driver navigating the intersection fails to give way, the other-worldly carny spins the titular big six wheel, determining their fate from five possible outcomes - Near Miss, Minor Crash, Major Crash, Death and an ultra-slim chance of Miracle. The original campaign installment followed a "rule of three" structure, teasing us with the evil possibilities while reserving the most brutal developments for last. The ad was broken up into three different segments, opening with a driver who, laughing with her passenger and presumably not paying adequate attention to the road, pulls out in front of a red van and gets a Near Miss on the wheel. A collision is averted, although the driver of the red van angrily sounds their horn, indicating their mistake. The second segment shows a driver making more sensible choices and crossing the intersection without prompting the carnie to spin the wheel (just as well, as I think he had a kid in the back). The final segment opens with a driver (who I've always thought looks a bit like Peter Gabriel) giving way and making it across the intersection safely, but has a second driver in a grey sedan attempt to cut across right after, throwing themselves directly into the path of a black sedan, and into the wheel's climactic wrath. And here's where the fun part begins - there are multiple versions of the ad, revealing the various possible repercussions for the hapless drivers based on what comes up on the wheel. It is, notably, always the same two vehicles involved in all instances (with a third unhappy vehicle getting dragged into the action in one variation), indicating that we are exploring the alternate consequences of the grey sedan driver's single rash decision, and not different outcomes for other drivers who prompt a wheel-spinning on different days. This is the Sliding Doors of road campaigns. Or Run Lola Run, since there are three possibilities shown.

The first of these variations, the "Death" ending, might be considered our default version, as it contains the most obvious narrative from a cautionary standpoint. We already got our tantalising glimpse of potential catastrophe with the opening segment; surely now it's time for them to hold nothing back and to reveal what absolute disasters we could potentially bring on ourselves. Here, the black sedan duly slams into the grey sedan (and its occupant) with full force, causing the vehicle to crunch and leaving an ominous trail of shattered glass in its wake. The action is intercut with the spinning wheel, and the eyes of the carny as he keenly awaits the results. For a moment, the final outcome seems uncertain, with the pointer resting on the final spoke between Major Crash and Death, but it gets that last little burst of momentum to flip over into the latter, sealing the grey sedan driver's terrible fate. Naturally, this is the very worst thing we see happen to the grey sedan, but it's not the only thing.

Another variation, the "Near Miss" ending, was a real unicorn. I'd seen someone describe it on an internet forum soon after the campaign started airing in New Zealand, stating that there was one version in which the grey vehicle narrowly cleared the black vehicle, only to get a police car on their tail. But I could never find this one on YouTube, and my hunt proved so fruitless that I started to doubt that it even existed. After all, they'd already demonstrated the "Near Miss" outcome with the first segment (albeit without the police getting involved), so wouldn't it be redundant to show it again at the end? Would it not reinforce the very misconception the campaign seemed designed to downplay, that it wasn't a big deal if you failed to give way, since your odds of being involved in a collision were low compared to your chances of getting across safely? I wondered if perhaps the author had misremembered the "Near Miss" variation, by conflating details from the opening segment with a legitimate ending. But no, I can confirm that it does exist, having eventually been signposted to an upload on Vimeo. Seeing the grey vehicle miss the black by the skin of its teeth, having scoured the net for it for so long, and knowing the other versions inside out, was frankly surreal. I can also confirm that it makes more sense in context as a variation, as the Near Miss in this case is a hell of a lot nearer than that in the opening segment, as signified by the pointer once again getting caught between two possible outcomes, Near Miss and Death. In this version, the pointer doesn't quite have the momentum to flip over, staying in Near Miss and averting the collision. It's nevertheless hair-raising to complete just how razor thin a line had divided the more desirable outcome from complete disaster. The "Near Miss" ending makes a point that was implicit in the opening segment (the first time the wheel is spun, you might notice that Death fell immediately after Near Miss, and that's certainly sobering) but not given quite so brutal an emphasis (since the first driver still lands safely in Near Miss). When you fail to give way on an intersection, not only are you playing a foolish game of chance, but the factors that separate one extreme from the other (whether you get out unscathed or get completely pulverised) could be totally miniscule. On top of that, the police indeed show up, indicating that the grey sedan driver will face consequences in the form of a fine. He's not getting to wherever he was headed any sooner.

The third and final variation is "Miracle", and this one basically feels like it's there for a bit of comic levity. This time around, the grey sedan's gambit causes the black sedan and a third vehicle approaching from the opposite direction to swerve in a desperate attempt to avoid collision, and somehow or other, it works. All three vehicles come to a safe standstill without making contact. Gentle choir music plays in order to hammer home the point that this is nothing short of miraculous. Clearly "Miracle" is intended to the jackpot outcome. It only occurs once on the wheel and takes up less space than the others, so the odds of landing on it are significantly smaller than the others. In practice, though, I'm not sure what makes "Miracle" any more of a jackpot than "Near Miss". Nobody gets hurt in either result, no damage is dealt to the vehicles, and both presumably entail heapings of stress for the people involved. Muting the cute music and looking at what actually happens in the "Miracle" ending, if I had been in one of those vehicles, I think I'd have found the experience considerably more traumatic than if I'd been in one of the vehicles in the opening segment. It may just be that "Miracle" falls between "Death" and "Major Crash", the two worst outcomes, so it represents your slim chance to get out of an extremely fucked situation. But there are evidently no winners in this game, just needless risks and varying extremes of punishment. (Some of which spilled over into the behind-the-scenes arena, with a stunt driver requiring hospital treatment during the filming of one of the endings, presumably the Death one.)

The outcomes of Minor Crash and Major Crash were not represented in the television ads, but did receive their own print ads.

At the time, I recall seeing a handful of online voices who claimed that the concept was flawed, since it implied that whether or not you get into an accident is all a matter of chance and had nothing to do with the driver's diligence. I can only assume that those viewers weren't paying close attention, because the ad makes it clear that the carny does not spin the wheel for drivers who don't make bad decisions. That is the whole purpose of the middle segment, where nothing happens, and that's a good thing. That the carny readies the wheel suggests that the second driver was at least tempted to cut across, but managed to resist, and is rewarded by getting to sit out the game. And he doesn't even ready the wheel for Peter Gabriel. We can think of his philosophy as being somewhat akin to that of the Mystery Man in Lost Highway, and how it was not his custom to go where he was not invited. By the same token, the carny does not subject anybody to the game who did not take him up on his offer in the first place, however unwittingly. He lets people make their own decisions, and if they choose wrong lets fate make the decisions from there. What makes Austin's performance especially chilling is the air of total impassiveness with which he imbues the character. Compared to the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, there's nothing to suggest that he derives any kind of sadistic relish from being a force of reckoning for these foolish and unwary drivers, but he goes about it with a steely, unflinching sense of duty that's every bit as ghoulish. 

In a campaign brimming with disturbing touches, it might be difficult to isolate the most disturbing, but here's a bit of gratuitous horror that always stands out to me - at the end of the ad, no matter what the variation, we'll get a final shot of the carny and his wheel in motion, signifying the interminable nature of the game, accompanied by a discernible, disembodied whispering. What the whispering is saying isn't fully intelligible, but you can definitely pick out a "Yeah, that wasn't worth it..." at the start. What's more, we hear that same disembodied whispering at the beginning of the third segment, as the ill-fated grey sedan pulls into view and the carny waits for Peter Gabriel to pass. Spooky, no question. But whose disembodied whispering is it? Arguably, it's the carny's internal monologue, which would align with it being juxtaposed with him, but that would imply a degree of emotional investment in the lives of these passing motorists that I don't think he makes. Presumably it's not the ghost of the grey sedan driver because a) we hear it in all versions of the ad, not just the one where he gets Death and b) we hear it prior to him making his stupid decision. It might be that it has no deeper narrative significance, and was incorporated as an extra bit of atmosphere to accentuate the viewers' goosebumps. I've got another theory, though, and it alludes to yet another layer of implicit horror that you might pick up on if you study the details closely. At the start of the ad, the pointer is already positioned on Death. Once the carny has had his first opportunity to spin the wheel and it's landed on Near Miss, we can see that it remains in that position at the start of both succeeding segments, until he has the chance to spin it again. If we read between the lines, then the implication is that the last unlucky sod to play the game before the events depicted in the ad had landed on Death. So I'd suggest it might be their ghost we're hearing, urging the other motorists not to make the same mistake. Maybe even multiple ghosts, all resigned to the same locale to collectively rue the one reckless blunder that cost them everything. I think the implication is definitely that the intersection is haunted, in one sense or another, a monument to the accumulated mistakes made by various individuals in the heat of the moment, the grim consequences of which are now echoing across eternity.

Despite the brilliance of the campaign, coupled with the morbid elegance of Austin's performance, the carny would not go on to have a long-running presence on New Zealand television (I don't know if the disestablishment of LTNZ in mid-2008 had anything to do with that). He appeared in just one further ad, in which he was shown to be stalking the same individual across various different intersections on different days, the omnipresent spectre of what could potentially go wrong, waiting for this patently conscientious driver to make the single slip-up for which he could be punished dearly. This ad did not have multiple endings, although there were different edits, the longer of which resulted in another driver who did not follow the protagonist's shining example, necessitating a spin of the wheel, although the ad cut away without showing us how they fared. That was the final curtain for the Kiwi intersection carny, yet he's never quite gone away. His face, his wheel, his eerie fairground leitmotif...it all still haunts me. There are days when I think I can just make out his silhouette from the corner of my eye, lingering on the roadside and anticipating every possible opening for calamity. Public information legends never retire, they merely enjoy an extended encore in the psyches of their viewers.