The Rugrats' Guide To Terror - "What The Big People Do"

As we've established, Rugrats was a far freakier, more warped and more delectably grotesque show than people tend to give it credit for, and that's something that I intend to make the case for in a lot more detail over the coming months.  We'll start by going straight for the biggest formula milk-induced nightmare of them all - "What The Big People Do".  Contrary to what some Rugrats viewers might tell you, the single most terrifying episode of Rugrats was not the one where Tommy goes for a wander around a mail sorting office and happens upon the skeletal remains of a postal worker who got lost in the system (although we will get to that), but the one where he and Chuckie fantasise about what life would be like if they were adults.

Where really Rugrats excelled was in how it tackled the subject of irrational childhood fear, which comes in many different forms and guises.  The fear that something seriously unholy is lurking beneath your bed and gearing up devour your hide the second you close your eyes.  The fear that your parents have been replaced by robots.  The fear that the dog groomer is plotting to destroy your beloved pet.  Then there's the most diabolical fear of them all, perhaps because it's not quite so irrational as the others - namely, the fear that your body is gradually warping and changing beyond all recognition, to the extent that, eventually, you're destined to become one of those adults whose behaviour so baffles and alarms you.  "What The Big People Do" takes a look at this terrifying prospect, weighing up the pros and cons of adulthood from the perspective of two tykes with an overly-active imagination and a naive, yet not entirely innocent inkling of what adult life is like, leading to several nightmarish twists and turns along the way.  Of course, what makes "What The Big People Do" so terrifying is that it contains easily the most abrupt, unsettling and downright inexplicable ending to any episode of Rugrats, ever - even today, I can't entirely make of sense of it.

What prompts Tommy and Chuckie into fantasising about the ins and outs of adulthood is their frustration at not being able to play with Didi's lipstick "crayon".  Angelica, ever the sneak, had given it to them purely so that she could enjoy the satisfaction of seeing Didi confiscate it and tell them that lipstick is strictly "for big people" (Angelica then proceeds to taunt the babies in a manner so flagrant that I'm amazed that Didi tolerates it, but then Didi is a bit of a dope for not figuring out how her lipstick ended up in the babies' hands in the first place).  Chuckie comments on the injustice of being denied something jut because they're babies.  Tommy proclaims that if they were big people they could do anything they wanted, although Chuckie finds the notion of unlimited freedom to be a tad overwhelming, particularly Tommy's suggestion that they could take baths standing up.  Tommy attempts to expand Chuckie's insight into what being a grown up entails, by getting him to imagine waking up and starting the day off in a new, adult body, and thus the fantasty begins.  The first item of note is that, in imagining themselves as adults, Tommy and Chuckie simply implant their baby heads into adult bodies, meaning that their bodily proportions look really, eerily off and, as result, the fantasy takes on an even more deliciously surreal vibe.  Chuckie notices that he's wearing a bow tie and attempts to take it off, prompting Tommy to cry out in alarm that for an adult to remove their tie will result in their head falling off.  Okay, well that's a seriously fucked up image right there.  I mean, it's hilarious that Tommy has apparently drawn the conclusion that ties are there to keep adults' heads from falling off, but I do remember being incredibly freaked out by that whole notion as a kid, even if I was certainly old enough to know that it was bunk.  Chuckie comments (not unreasonably) that being an adult is a terrifying business, so Tommy attempts to win him over by reminding him of the lack of rules and boundaries in their newfound grown up lives - adults can throw their toys, squirt their milk and draw all over the walls to their hearts' content.  Tommy is, unwittingly, hitting upon that universal paradox of coming of age - growing up means more autonomy, but sadly losing a lot of the zest for life which always made that autonomy seem so appealing in the first place.  "What The Big People Do" explores that paradox to an extent, but it's not really the focus of the episode.

Chuckie and Tommy then attempt to prepare themselves an adult breakfast consisting of Reptar cereal and a cup of joe (aka mud - a small quirk, but after drinking the mud-coffee, Chuckie obtains a mud-mustache which he retains for the rest of the fantasy).  Tommy then looks down at his wrist (although he does not actually incorporate a wristwatch into his fantasy because, being a baby, Tommy is still too young to understand the concept of time) and realises that he and Chuckie have to go to Work.  Chuckie is reluctant, but Tommy insists that Work is fun and besides, he's eager to try out driving a car.  Chuckie, ever the sensible one, points out that Tommy doesn't know how to drive, but overlooks the fact that in fantasy land, anything goes.  Before he knows it, he's in the passenger seat next to Tommy, who's weaving about recklessly all over the road, causing a few crashes and possibly a few fatalities in the process.  Tommy insists that he's driving badly on purpose because he wants to get a ticket - being the naive little infant that he is, Tommy can't distinguish between a ticket to an event and a ticket for traffic violations, so he's pretty chuffed when a cop ("played" by Angelica) pulls him over and gives him a ticket to see Reptar on Ice.  Although I do enjoy the sheer ridiculousness of this sequence (particularly cop Angelica informing the babies that they were going "a thousand miles an hour"), I do have a slight quibble with this portion of the fantasy which I'll get to later on.  There's also a sight gag in which cop Angelica appears to be smoking a cigarette that's later revealed to be a sucker, which I suspect wouldn't get past the censors so easily today.

Tommy and Chuckie arrive at Work, which they envision as a surreal playground where big people fly kites and zip around on skateboards with caged canaries all day.  Chuckie, who always had a somewhat more grounded notion of what "work" meant, comments that he thought that it would be a bit harder, although Tommy insists that that's just a ruse adults insist on.  Chuckie recalls that his dad talks about "pushing paper" at Work, so he and Tommy imagine a room in which the adults are running around pushing heaps of paper with brooms for the fun of it.  There, they run into the grown up Phil and Lil and have a jolly good time for a while, but Lil warns them not to get too complacent - Work might look like it's all fun and games, but there's always the risk of winding up on the wrong side of The Boss.  Right on cue, a voice rings out from the intercom demanding that Tommy and Chuckie report to The Boss's office.

It's here that the fantasy takes a more overtly nightmarish turn, as Tommy and Chuckie wander down an ominous dark corridor adorned with portraits depicting numerous different boss archetypes, whose eyes (eerily) follow the two adult babies as they go.  Chuckie recalls that his dad voices a persistent fear every morning that The Boss is going to fire him - neither baby has any idea what "fire" actually means, in this context, but they've picked up that it's something absolutely heinous (note: we don't actually see Chas in this episode, but from the small number of references made to him we can discern that he leads a pretty miserable life).  They envision The Boss's office as big, dark and with a literal fire motif going on, giving the scene a wonderfully, chillingly hellish aura.  Anyway, wanna take a wild guess as to which rugrat is the evil Boss in Tommy and Chuckie's fantasy?  It's here that I'm going to lay down my only real criticism of this episode - namely, that since Angelica's already appeared earlier on in the fantasy as cop, it does lessen the impact somewhat when she reappears at the climax as Tommy and Chuckie's boss.  It's possible that they purposely chose to have all the authoritative roles in the fantasy be played by Angelica, so as to emphasise her as a kind of omnipresent tyrant in the babies' lives, but to me it speaks more about the paucity of characters they had to work with (note that this episode pre-dates Susie's addition to the cast).

If you didn't already see the Hell allusion then it becomes pretty unmissable when we meet Boss Angelica, with her pigtails turned upwards like devil horns.  Angelica is literally Satan in this fantasy - but, more than anything, she appears to be the voice of Tommy and Chuckie's insecurities about their ability to cut it in the adult world, taunting them by reminding them that they're not really big...just big babies.  Tommy argues that this isn't true and that she shouldn't be so mean to them, but Angelica demands that she can do and say whatever she wants and the babies are powerless to stop her because she's The Boss.  She declares that she could even have them fired, causing the office to erupt in flames as Angelica erupts in demonic laughter.  The message is clear, and not a particularly comforting one for the young viewers at home - you'll encounter bullies and tyrants at all stages of life, and being "big" does not necessarily make you any less defenceless to their cruelty.

Chuckie finally decides that he's had enough of the fantasy and beats a retreat for the safety of the elevator, insisting that he wants to be a little kid again.  Tommy follows, narrowly avoiding the hands of the various portrait bosses as they reach out and attempt to crush him.  Tommy assures Chuckie that now that they've made it back to the elevator they are safe, only for Angelica to show up with legions of bloodthirsty robot businessmen at her disposal.  I have no idea where those robot businessmen came from - unlike the portrait bosses, their existence was not established earlier on - but the second they show up the fantasy tips over full-scale from a slice of increasingly capricious freakiness into the stuff of your very worst nightmare.  It becomes downright gut-wrenching to watch Tommy and Chuckie as they attempt to flee the robot workforce, only to find their every escape route blocked and the building exit locked.  The entire sequence is so well staged, you can practically feel the panic and desperation leaking from every claustrophobic moment.  As Angelica and the robots close in on them, Tommy happens upon a potential escape clause - if the two of them can "punch the clock" (an act which the babies again envision all too literally) they can eject themselves from the fantasy.

Tommy and Chuckie find themselves back in their playpen, as babies, with Chuckie having been left so traumatised by the fantasy that he vows never to grow up.  Of course, the episode can't fade out by leaving its young audience with such a negative view of where they're ultimately headed, so Tommy tries to assure Chuckie that there are additional perks to being an adult which their fantasy didn't have time to cover - namely, that when you grow up you can get married and enjoy the excitement of starting a family of your own (actually, the way Tommy phrases it he makes it sound as if he considers the likelihood of getting married to be less than that of just having babies).  Chuckie feels reassured and admits that it might be nice to get married.  And then...

...and then we get that horrible, baffling, psychologically scarring cold sweat of an ending.  Angelica pops out from behind the curtain, Cynthia doll in one hand, toy alien in another, and shrieks, "Oh boys...time to play HOUSE!!", her pigtails suddenly curling upwards into the devil horns of her fantasy counterpart.  The episode concludes with Angelica laughing as if she's demonically possessed while Tommy and Chuckie scream and clutch one another in terror.  The end. Roll the inappropriately upbeat credits.

Honestly, I don't think I've been more baffled by the ending to any cartoon I've ever seen in my life (except maybe the Sky 1 edit of that Simpsons episode I covered a while ago, which probably doesn't count as I later discovered that it had been truncated beyond all comprehension).   Really, what is going on with Angelica at the end and why does the episode choose to round off on such an intensely unsettling note?  As a kid, it left me confused and incredibly unnerved; as an adult, it still leaves me confused and unnerved, although I'm better able to take a stab at what the writers were going for.  I think the clue is in Angelica proposing that the babies play "house", undermining Tommy's prior assurances about the benign safety of family life compared to the horrors of the work environment.  In other words, getting married would be a horrifying notion if your spouse ends up being anything like Angelica.  Arguably, there is a slightly misogynistic subtext to be had in there, so alternatively you can think of this ending as constituting one final, particularly intense scare following a fake out in which the babies thought they were safe - Tommy and Chuckie escape the horrors of their imagined adulthood only to realise that they're stuck in a neverending waking nightmare in the present.  In other words, life is hell no matter which stage of it you're at.  Again, not the most reassuring of messages to bow out on, but you do have to love Rugrats for insisting on that disturbance.

Carlton Your Doorman (1980)

I made a promise a short while back that I would take a closer look at Carlton Your Doorman, the only fully animated production to come out of MTM, should it ever show up in its entirety on the web.  Turns out I didn't have to wait long.   As I noted back in November, this had something of a reputation among animation fans for being a "lost" special, although these days I think that the term "lost" gets thrown around all too loosely, more often than not equating to "not currently on YouTube" (as opposed to, say, the lost episodes of Doctor Who, which really have been wiped from existence due to the BBC's former habit of routinely culling archive material).  I figured that if I waited long enough then it would surface eventually, and my gut instinct didn't let me down.  I'll state straight off the bat that I had high hopes for this special.  I've gone into a lot of these one-off animation projects not expecting anything too stellar but simply being interested in what they have to offer.  This one I genuinely thought might be a hidden gem; not only did it pick up a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program, but it also boasts the vocal talents of Lorenzo Music, whose work I've been admiring since about as far back as I've been watching television (I grew up on Garfield and Friends and a number of the original Garfield specials, so there's something about Lorenzo's voice that spells instant warmth and nostalgia for me).  From what small glimpses I could find of the special online, I also really dug the animation style, courtesy of Murakami Wolf Swenson, which features some gorgeously illustrative background detail (reminiscent of the lovingly-rendered New York scenery in The Critic).  And, even though I knew little of the special's source material (see below), I was genuinely fascinated by the concept of an animated special revolving around a bumbling doorman who'd previously existed on the sidelines of a different, live-action series.  Sorry to report, then, that I came away almost wishing that the special had stayed "lost" - not only did it not live up to my expectations, but I was surprised at just how much I kinda-sorta detested this one.  Carlton himself is not a particularly likeable character (there's a definite discrepancy throughout between Lorenzo's warm, disarming vocals and the sleazy, selfish, spineless prick of a character he's playing), which might have been less of a problem if the story he's saddled with hadn't been such a miscalculated downer.  Let's delve in a little deeper.

Carlton Your Doorman aired on CBS on 21st May 1980 and, as per its Wikipedia page, was never re-aired in the US (I'd take what that Wikipedia entry says with a pinch of salt, however - at the time of writing, it states that Carlton Your Doorman was "one of the last animated pilots to use a laugh track", which is a tad misleading as we know from Hound Town and The Jackie Bison Show that the practice was still clinging desperately to life a decade later).  The special was a spin-off of an MTM sitcom, Rhoda, which ran from 1974 to 1978, and focused on one of the show's supporting characters, Carlton the doorman.  And - confession time - I've never watched a single episode of Rhoda so, as with The Jackie Bison Show, I'll apologise in advance if my unfamiliarity with the source material means that I miss out on a bunch of obvious in-jokes.  I'm aware of this much -  in Rhoda, Carlton typically remained offscreen (my perfunctory research indicates that viewers did once catch a glimpse of him in a gorilla mask, but they never saw his face) and spoke to the other characters across an intercom.  Carlton Your Doorman was the first proper, full-on glimpse the world had of the character in the flesh, the twist being that Carlton appeared not as a flesh and blood human, but in the guise of an animated character (this accounts for why the special's opening sequence makes a point of building up very gradually to revealing Carlton's face, so as to squeeze every drop of anticipation from viewers who had followed over from Rhoda).  I'm not totally clear on whether Carlton Your Doorman was always envisioned as a one-off special or if this was intended as the pilot for a spin-off series that didn't happen - if the latter, then I'm frankly not losing too much sleep over what might have been.

Although Carlton Your Doorman initially looks as if it's going to be a lighthearted, if somewhat crude caper starring a perpetual loser, around the middle-mark it takes a deliberately shocking and morbid turn, which certainly piqued my interest, but I was disappointed and honestly a little dispirited by just how heartlessly it resolves itself.  In a nutshell, the plot involves Carlton accidentally killing the dog of his boss's wife while it's in his care and desperately trying to cover up this occurrence (not because he's looking to spare his boss's wife's feelings but because he's terrified of what will happen to him when his boss finds out).  Ultimately, however, he gets off the hook because his boss secretly disliked the dog and is glad to be rid of it (his wife, meanwhile, is blatantly very upset, but the script doesn't give a toss about her feelings because all that matters is that Carlton ends up well).  Oh, and did I mention that Carlton is a sex pest?  There's a bit in the opening credits where he's implied to sexually harass a woman while passing her on the way down to the subway, and it's every bit as jaw-droppingly uncomfortable as it sounds.  I'm aware that in 1980 there existed a somewhat more permissive attitude toward that kind of thing, but from a modern perspective a character who can't keep their hands to themselves is instantly going to lose a number of points on the likeability scale.  It doesn't help Carlton's case that it's his lusting after women and his refusal to accept a clear "no" from a female jogger that indirectly causes the dog to die.  This didn't necessarily have to be the death knell of the special, had it built up to some kind of meaningful character progression for Carlton, but unfortunately all that ever comes of it is that unbelievably callous ending, where all wrongdoings are excused because Carlton's boss is an even bigger jerk than he is, and which unfortunately serves to undo whatever good the special may have accomplished elsewhere.  But I'm getting ahead of things - let's go back and unravel how this entire demoralizing affair unfolds right from the beginning.

During the opening scene, we're introduced to the corporeal Carlton, along with two supporting characters - Ringo, Carlton's scrawny and vile-tempered cat, and Carlton's mother (Lurene Tuttle), a homeless bag lady who's normally seen with her hand in a trash can in search of discarded items of clothing to give to her son.  The two of them are probably most enjoyable characters of the special - Ringo you have to admire for his scrappy energy, and for regularly meeting Carlton with he disdain he deserves, while Mom's appearances are pulled off just the right levels of eye-popping, deadpan quirkiness.  She's used very sparingly throughout the special, but that's fine, as it means that her running gag isn't overdone.

After the opening credits, Carlton arrives at the apartment building where he works, and we run into his aforementioned boss, the gruff, cigar-chomping Mr Shaftman (Jack Somack).  He's none too thrilled with Carlton's performance of late, as yesterday Carlton neglected to walk his wife's dog, Punkin, leaving the dog to satisfy his bodily urges on the Shaftmans' carpet instead.  Carlton has also showed up today an hour late, and Mr Shaftman insists that he make up for it by staying an extra hour - this distresses Carlton, as he hasn't missed Happy Hour in three years.  As Mr Shaftman leaves, he warns Carlton that he's walking on very thin ice.

Carlton retires to the intercom room, and it becomes apparent (if it wasn't painfully obvious already) that he's not a very good doorman - one tenant, Mr Gleason (Paul Lichtman), complains about him having parked his car in a tow away zone, and Carlton lazily responds that he can't be blamed for the parking rules.  Carlton then gets a call from Mrs Shaftman (Lucille Meredith) who asks him to come up and collect Punkin for his walk.  Carlton does, but not before an extended gag in which we hear him noisily chugging down a can of booze across the intercom.  Carlton is apprehensive about setting foot in the Shaftmans' apartment because Mrs Shaftman has a tendency to try and seduce him whenever her husband isn't around.  It seems that Mrs Shaftman gets lonely whenever her gruff old husband leaves the building, and she's developed an unyielding lust for Carlton's sleazy young flesh, to the extent that when Carlton arrives, he finds her lying in wait naked in the bathtub and desperately trying to beckon him in with her (we don't get any glimpses of the naked Mrs Shaftman; nevertheless, it's at this point that it becomes crystal clear that this special never had any pretensions about being kid-friendly).  Mrs Shaftman's feelings for Carlton seem to be partially rooted in his reputation for being something of a horny menace himself; every other woman in the building has complained about Carlton hitting on them, so she wonders what makes her the exception.  Carlton counters that she's married and that while ordinarily he wouldn't let a silly little thing like that stand in the way of sexual conquest, she happens to be married to the one person whom he fears more than anything else in the world.  Carlton also refers to his own girlfriend, a beautician named Darlene, although he can't even bring himself to fake a convincing front of commitment toward her, even in the interests of keeping Mrs Shaftman at bay.

Carlton then collects the ill-fated dog Punkin, a scruffy, elderly little ankle-biter, and takes him for a walk in the park, where he runs into Mom, who's in the process of facing off against another bag lady for ownership of a discarded stocking.  He also spots a female jogger out for a run and...yeah, it's at this point that the story takes a sharp turn into particularly harrowing territory.  Carlton races after the jogger and attempts to pick her up with some vulgar chat-up lines, but she bluntly turns him down.  This doesn't deter Carlton, who continues to chase after her and hound her, all while ordering Punkin to keep up with him.  Unfortunately, the stamina doesn't come easily to such an elderly dog, and Punkin quickly winds up running to the point of exhaustion, whereupon he suffers a fatal heart attack and dies.

To the special's credit, Punkin's death is depicted in a sombre light immediately after the fact - there's a somewhat abrupt moment where Carlton attempts to will the dead dog (for whom rigor mortis has set in very quickly) back to life by dragging him behind him, which is played for laughs, but otherwise the music during this scene is sad and haunting, and it culminates in the tender image of Carlton picking up Punkin's body and cradling it in his arms.  A passing woman comments that Punkin is a cute dog and "so well-behaved", at which point Carlton is mournfully forced to admit that he's dead, and it's all pulled off so poignantly.  The sadness is so authentic that, the first time I saw this special, I genuinely believed that this would be the springboard to Carlton maturing, looking to take responsibility for his actions and seeking to better himself.  Unfortunately, no.  Enjoy this moment of  precious sensitivity, because it isn't going to last.

Actually, despite my above praise, I will say that the laugh track (which I've avoided commenting on up until now) is implemented very clumsily during the moments where Carlton stands over Punkin's dead body, and some of the stuff the "audience" appear to be reacting to (like the close-up image of Punkin's lifeless body featured above) seems disturbingly inappropriate.  In the following scene, we rejoin Carlton at a pet cemetery, where Punkin has been laid to rest, and watch him saying his goodbyes to the deceased dog - he seems entirely sincere as he addresses Punkin as "old friend" and implores him to tell the folks in the afterlife that his death wasn't Carlton's fault, but unfortunately it's undermined by the intrusiveness of that damned laugh track, which detracts from what could have been a genuinely heartfelt moment, however fleeting.  Carlton's self-centredness soon comes creeping back in when he complains about Punkin not being worth the $20 he's had to pay in cemetery fees (I know this was 1980 and all, but that honestly sounds like a bargain to me).

Carlton then sets about looking for a replacement for Punkin, hoping he can find a dog that bears enough of a resemblance to the deceased that he can pass it off as Punkin and the Shaftmans will be none the wiser.  Typically, sitcom plots and urban legends involving covert efforts to replace dead or missing pets don't end well, because the culprits invariably overlook some tiny detail which gives the game away (besides, anyone who's grown particularly close to their pet will almost certainly know the difference), and one senses that this is going to go down rather disastrously for Carlton.  He tries a dog pound, to no avail.  He then happens upon a pet shop, which has a dog for sale that's the spitting image of Punkin, only to learn that the dog has already been sold.  All of this stuff is pure filler, although the pet shop sequence does offer a few moments of pleasing quirkiness, thanks to the repartee between the owner and his verbose parrot.

His morning's worth of dog-hunting having proven entirely fruitless, Carlton retires to drown his troubles in another can of booze and complain to Ringo about his predicament.  He admits that he feels bad about Punkin but also has the view that he was an old dog, so it was just his time, which isn't entirely accurate.  Ultimately, he's more upset at what the consequences might be for him - namely, losing his job and having to face Mr Shaftman's wrath. Carlton then hits upon the wacky idea that he might be able to pass Ringo off as Punkin if he can give him a convincing enough makeover, whereupon he drags the reluctant cat over to see his aforementioned girlfriend, the beautician Darlene (Kay Cole).  Darlene works her magic and, through a series of techniques which look torturously painful for poor Ringo, manages to transform the cat into something resembling Punkin.  Carlton is so delighted that he professes his love for Darlene then and there, only to immediately turn tail on her when she suggests he quit drinking in exchange for the favour she just did him.  Instead, they reach a mutual agreement to have dinner together later that evening.

Carlton assures the miserable, disfigured Ringo that this will only be a temporary measure, until he's able to find another dog that looks like Punkin.  The obvious flaw in his plan, of course, is that Darlene couldn't do anything to modify Ringo's vocal cords - when he opens his mouth, cat noises still come out - so in order to pull of the deception, it's imperative that Ringo keep quiet.  Obviously, that's not going to happen.  When Carlton returns "Punkin" to Mrs Shaftman, she invites him into the apartment, ostensibly wishing to apologise for her behaviour from earlier, and all it takes is a few yowls from the furry imposter and an inconveniently-placed tray of sardines for the facade to come crashing down.   Mrs Shaftman demands to know what happened to her dog, at which point Carlton is finally forced to admit the truth.  Mrs Shaftman turns on Carlton in a display of devastated fury, just as Mr Shaftman arrives back at the apartment and learns of what happened.  He orders that Carlton go and wait out in the corridor, as Mrs Shaftman hisses her vengeful demands to her husband: "Fire him!  Have him arrested!  Kill him!"  As Mr Shaftman approaches him in the corridor, Carlton feebly tries to insist that what happened wasn't his fault.  Shaftman dourly observes that they had Punkin for fifteen years and that it won't be the same without him.  In what proves to be the special's deal breaker, he then lightens up in tone and professes that it will be wonderful.  The laugh track thinks that Mr Shaftman's unprecedented callousness is all great and hilarious, but as we've already established, this particular "audience" has extremely questionable taste.

Mr Shaftman states that he didn't care for Punkin because he barked a lot and because he made a mess on their carpet (but wait, wasn't that also Carlton's fault, for failing to walk him yesterday?).  He then adds that he can't hold Carlton responsible if Punkin died in his care, as he was an old dog.  Alright, that's a greatly less heartless perspective on things than the sentiments previously expressed, and I do wish that it had been his stance right from the beginning, but here's the problem - Carlton DID bring about Punkin's demise by forcing him to run much faster than his elderly body could cope with.  Punkin may have been old, but he could have lived for longer had Carlton been more sensitive to his needs.  This is something that the script gets around by simply ignoring in the end.  Perhaps Carlton could have pulled off this whole scenario if it was played as more of a mordant black comedy, but the final exchange between Carlton and Mr Shaftman is presented with total earnestness, as if we're meant to take it as a sign that he's not such a mean or scary boss after all.  Equally bothersome is just how casually Mrs Shaftman's feelings are cast aside in all of this.  Blatantly she loved her dog and is going to miss Punkin, yet the special doesn't do anything to address or remedy that.  Mrs Shaftman and her grief are completely forgotten as, in a moment which I suspect we're supposed to find genuinely heart-warming, Carlton and Mr Shaftman get unusually chummy and go off to bond over a bottle of champagne.  Frankly, I'm not surprised that Mr and Mrs Shaftman are having serious relationship problems.

In the final scene, we see Mom bringing Carlton a single glove she salvaged from the garbage.  Carlton seems to be in a generous mood, for he invites Mom to come and have dinner with himself and Darlene - I assume that this is the special's way of trying to hint that Carlton really is a swell guy deep down inside, even if we've just seen twenty-one minutes' worth of evidence to the contrary.  Meanwhile, Ringo is unhappy because he still looks like a dog and it'll apparently take two months for his appearance to return to normal.  Carlton jokes that until then Ringo shouldn't plan on any heavy dating, at which point the cat completely loses it and proceeds to maul his shiftless master's hide to ribbons.  The end.

The Verdict:

*Sigh*  I wanted to like this special.  I really did.  The ingredients were all there - a wonderful lead voice actor, appealing animation and an intriguing premise.  Instead, I'm left with the lingering question as to how such a crude and mean-spirited story managed to impress the powers-that-be enough to pick up an Emmy, beating out the Peanuts special She's a Good Skate, Charlie Brown, the Dr. Seuss-penned Pontoffel Pock, Where Are You? and The Pink Panther in: Olym-Pinks.  I'll hazard a guess that the judges gave it points for being "different" - in an age where animation was regarded almost exclusively as a kids' affair, populated largely by magical beings and anthropomorphic creatures, I can see why some might have found Carlton's offbeat, adult-orientated roughness to be refreshing, but unfortunately none of that holds up with time.  As a voice actor, Lorenzo Music oozes likeability, so it's a grand thing that he would go on to a prosperous career across the next decade voicing one of the most iconic cartoon characters of the era.  Carlton Your Dog Killer and Sex Pest's post-Rhoda career began and ended with this special, and that's equally grand.  I couldn't objectively call it a worse one-off special/failed pilot than Hound Town, but it does leave a far, far nastier taste in the mouth.

Benji The Hunted (1987) - I Told You I Was Freaky...

In my review of When The Wind Blows, I made some reference to Benji The Hunted being the film that killed off what remained of my childhood innocence after The Snowman had already left it slashed and beaten within an inch of its life.  Certainly, I think it's fair to say that I was never quite the same person again after being subjected to Benji and his eye-popping misadventures in the American wilderness.  If The Snowman opened my eyes to the sadness of the world, the fragility of life and the inevitability of death, then Benji The Hunted widened my scope on all of those things and also awakened to me to what a painfully cold and brutal place the world can be, particularly when you're small, defenceless and out on your own in the woods.  I have my mother to thank for renting the VHS when I was a small child, having seen the unassuming cover with the cute dog and fuzzy baby cougar snuggled up together and jumped to the conclusion that this would be a totally innocuous method of pacifying her sensitive, animal-loving kid for eighty-odd minutes on a weekend afternoon.  She no doubt regretted it when she later had to contend with me coming to her in floods of tears because of what happened to the baby cougar's mother.  This movie rattled me like crazy and, needless to say, will always hold a special place in my heart for it.

Benji The Hunted was the fourth theatrical film in a series created and directed by Joe Camp, which began in 1974 with Benji, an unassuming family flick that played a vital role in helping to restore commercial credibility to the G-rating, at the time regarded as "box office poison".  Audiences warmed to the titular mongrel, who packed all the heart of Lassie into a considerably shorter stature, and over the coming decade a variety of sequels and spin-offs were spawned.  Benji was originally played a dog named Higgins, although he passed away a year later and the role was subsequently filled by Higgins' daughter, Benjean, who starred in the films For The Love of Benji (1977) and Oh! Heavenly Dog (1980) along with a handful of television specials.  Benji The Hunted, the only Benji film to be released by Walt Disney Pictures, was the swansong of Benjean's career, and also the last Benji film for quite some time (Camp revived the series, briefly, with Benji: Off The Leash in 2004).  Higgins and Benjean were both trained by celebrated Hollywood animal trainer Frank Inn, who makes a few fleeting appearances as himself in Benji The Hunted.  In the film's opening scene, we're informed by a news reporter (Mary Beth McLaulin) that the canine superstar has been lost at sea while filming for an upcoming movie off the Oregon Coast and Inn, convinced that the hardy mutt has survived and made it to land, announces his intention to begin a helicopter search for him the following morning.  Benji's being lost and Inn's efforts to locate him initially look as if they're going to provide the basis for the entire plot but, past that opening sequence, the human rescue effort takes a backseat and forms only the vaguest of backdrops to the real substance of the story, which involves Benji caring for four baby cougars after their mother is killed by a hunter (Red Steagall).  Whenever Inn and his helicopter appear, it's either as an intrusion upon this natural wilderness or as a temptation that Benji must resist (if he returns to his life of domestication then who will look after those helpless baby cougars?).  Humans in general have a very minimal presence throughout the film and, aside from that opening and a couple of instances where Benji crosses paths with Steagall's hunter, it's almost entirely dialogue-free.  No twee Rex Allen-style narration, no tacky, awkwardly-imposed celebrity voice-overs (sorry, but I'm no fan of the Homeward Bound movies), just mountain upon mountain of engrossing animal photography.  This is not to say that Benji The Hunted handles its wordlessness with total deftness, but it does make for a more interesting viewing experience than a large bulk of Disney's live action output.

Obviously, a live action Disney flick about a dog who gets lost in the woods and babysits a litter of orphaned cougar cubs was never likely to register as high art, and it's fair to say that Benji The Hunted received a mixed reaction at best.  Roger Ebert infamously awarded the film a "thumbs up", although many, Gene Siskel included, were inclined to single this out as the low point of his reviewing career - there's a joke in an episode of The Critic where Siskel mocks Ebert by reminding him that he gave Benji The Hunted a glowing review, a jibe that appears to embarrass Ebert, for he immediately goes on the defensive: ("Hey, you liked Carnosaur!").  Halliwell's Film Guide, meanwhile, describes the film as a "freaky fable about a dog with a high IQ", which is entirely apt and probably my favourite concise plot synopsis of anything ever.  It goes without saying that realism isn't exactly high on Benji The Hunted's list of priorities, and we get a number of scenes where Benji solves problems using lateral thinking that would surely make him a super-genius among dogs (for example, he figures out that he can prevent a particularly troublesome cub from escaping through a crack in a den by blocking it with a pile of stones).  Such moments may be absurd, but they're also played with a kind of quirky charm that defies even the most cynical of viewers not to smile.

Really though, the most striking thing about this mutt isn't that he's ridiculously smart.  No, what makes Benji such a fish out of water in the Oregon wilderness is that he's just such a sweetheart to the core.  This is made clear when he witnesses the mother cougar being shot and immediately runs over to comfort her, sentiments which seem entirely alien to the wounded cougar as she beats him off in her pain and confusion.  It's one hell of a tough scene to watch, and every bit as harrowing to my adult sensibilities as to my six-year-old self.  Benji feels little other than warmth toward his fellow creature and cannot bear to see them suffer, even where this conflicts with his inner survivalist - as illustrated by a sequence where he chases down a rabbit but, having finally cornered the damned thing, his killer instincts fail him and Benji's natural response is to give the rabbit a fond licking.  This presents a bit of a quandary when Benji discovers that cougars, being carnivores, don't eat raspberries, but it's nothing that a bit of creative thinking won't solve.  For Benji quickly stumbles across the cabin of Red the hunter and takes to pilfering ready-killed pheasant carcasses from him.  We might just as readily question the morality of stealing food from another being's dinner plate, but look at it this way - the hunter deprived those baby cougars of their bringer of sustenance, so having him indirectly donate food to them is merely a matter of redressing the balance.

At first glance, Benji might strike one as a bit too soppy for life in the woods, but nope, Benji's remarkable heart, much like his remarkable brain, is nothing to be sniffed at.  Benji's kindness and devotion toward those baby cougars forms the soul of the film and, even if it is nestled beneath a thick layer of general all-round hokiness, it ends up being surprisingly moving.  You care deeply about these cougars (in fairness, it would be impossible not to care about something so wretchedly adorable) and Benji's unwavering compassion ultimately feels like a force of good prevailing in a world dominated by indifference and brutality.  Projecting morality onto the natural kingdom is always a tricky business, and the film can be a bit patchy in that regard (see below), but Benji's interactions with the cougars do provide the basis for a lovely moral fable about the power of compassion and of taking responsibility for those in need.  His goodness is not infallible - a particularly heart-breaking scene occurs when Benji is momentarily distracted by the reappearance of the helicopter and an eagle takes the opportunity to seize and make off with one of the baby cougars (something else to keep in mind if you have particularly sensitive children).  This the last we see of that particular cub; Benji is unable to save it, and the agony of his failure is overwhelming.  It's a horrifying moment, but extremely effective in underscoring the fragility of life out in the wilderness and how letting one's guard down only fleetingly can lead to tragedy.

Where the film falters is in its efforts to work in a recurring antagonist, a sort of four-legged antithesis to the inherent sweetness that Benji represents.  Although Red Steagall is responsible for the death of the mother cougar, he's not the villain of the story and when Benji encounters him a little later on he's played up as a surprisingly benign figure.  Instead, our major source of menace throughout the movie is a black timber wolf who gets it into his head that Benji and the cougar cubs might be an easy meal and stalks them tenaciously as they make their way across the wilderness.  Unfortunately, he fatally underestimates (literally, by the movie's end) just how freakishly, fiendishly high that IQ of Benji's is, as the tricky mutt uses lateral thinking to outwit him and send him packing on numerous occasions.  The wolf is frankly a bit dumb for not figuring out that Benji's extreme smarts make him more trouble than he's worth; nevertheless, he gets closer to the cougars with every try, until finally Benji's goodwill toward his fellow creature gets temporarily burned out and he resorts to bumping the wolf off by tricking him into jumping off a cliff.  Ultimately, you end up feeling a bit sorry for the poor wolf as he goes hurtling to his death.  It's not exactly his fault that he's a predator, and the film's attempts to project a sense of morality upon the happenings of the woods are at their utmost weakest whenever he's involved.  Of all the deaths in the movie, the wolf's is the most gratuitous and mean-spirited but it's by far the silliest-looking too.  The manner in which he dies is visually very reminiscent of something out of a Wile E. Coyote cartoon, and it's topped off by having him let out this incredibly hokey-sounding howl as he falls.  Horrifying though it is, I find it near-impossible not to laugh whenever I watch this particular scene.

Eventually, Benji figures out that there's another mother cougar in the woods with a single cub and attempts to bring the two families together in an effort to get her to adopt the orphaned cubs.  I'm not sure quite how realistic this scenario is - would a mother cougar really be inclined to take in babies that aren't carrying her own genes? - but perhaps we're supposed to read her only having one a cub as an indication that she's been through a few losses herself and is looking to fill the void.  Once again, to be a bit too nitpicky about realism would be somewhat out of the spirit with this kind of film.  The mother cougar proves entirely obliging and gives us our happy ending, enabling Benji to woof his goodbyes to the cubs and finally come out of hiding when Inn's helicopter next appears.  The film stops just before the long-anticipated reunion between Benji and Inn, but then that was never really what this story was about.

Getting back to Siskel and Ebert, the actual contention between the two on Benji The Hunted seemed to come down to whether or not it's reasonable to rate a children's film using different criteria to a film aimed at adult audiences - I notice that Ebert, while defensive of the film, is frustratingly coy on admitting whether or not he genuinely liked it as an adult or if he's just taking the "well, it wasn't really made for me" stance.  Myself, I can see eye-to-eye with both critics - Benji The Hunted is by no means a perfect film; nevertheless, I love it dearly and make no apologies in citing it as one of my all-time favourite guilty pleasure movies.  Unlike Siskel and Ebert, I had the luxury of being introduced to Benji The Hunted as a small child, so I've no doubt that a good chunk of my affection for it is wrapped up in nostalgia (albeit a tad ironically - this film upset the living snot out of me, after all), although there's still plenty of stuff in there that I can admire and recommend as an adult, and I think that Ebert is correct in singling out the nature photography as being particularly worthy of praise.  Where Benji The Hunted is at its strongest is where it trusts the charm of its animal cast and the beauty of its natural photography.  The imagery itself is variable - some of the scenes with Benji climbing up a mountain were blatantly filmed in a studio set with a cardboard backdrop, others are absolutely breathtaking - but overall it's a really lovely-looking film.  At times we get fleeting glimpses of wild animals who have no real purpose in the story other than to romp around and look enchanting - deer, ferrets, foxes, owls and raccoons  - creatures who are neither friend or foe to Benji but simply there to add the natural ambience and create a sense of a hidden world rich with all varieties of life.  Unfortunately, the film doesn't get the tone of this entirely right; one its biggest flaws is its over-reliance on Betty and Euel Box's somewhat incongruous score, which is meant to spell out the mood of each sequence and ensure that we pick up on what's funny and what's threatening, but serves to suck the subtly out of a number of scenes and undermine that natural ambience, and consists largely of generic, AC pop-style melodies on top of that.  I find myself deeply appreciative of the smattering of moments which use no music and instead trust the understated simplicity of the natural soundscapes to set the tone - they're precious, but much too brief.

The most noteworthy portion of the score is a Jan Hammer-esque theme that appears in some of the more action-y chase sequences and is pretty catchy, but still feels as if it would be better suited to a late night detective drama than to a Benji film.  It's in this emphasis on high-adrenaline chase sequences that I find myself siding with Siskel - there are simply too many of them, and their hectic, ham-fisted energy detracts from what's fundamentally quaint and charming about the story.  The film is at its best when it's happy to leisurely and gentle, with occasional flashes of harrowing brutality (eg: the eagle sequence) to underscore the daily battle for survival that's really taking place against this beguilingly whimsical backdrop; when it embraces the sweetness and melancholy of its central scenario and doesn't get too caught up in trying to be fast-paced and exciting.  Benji The Hunted can be a very muddled and hackneyed film in places, but I'd argue that ultimately it's the sweetness, the sadness and the whimsy which win out.  It has a heart of gold (except where that unfortunate wolf is concerned) and an endearingly quirky spirit, and I can certainly recommend it to anyone who enjoys a good, unpretenious backwoods yarn.  Though keep in mind that it will totally scar the sensitive, animal-loving nippers in your family for life.

On a final note, I've harped on about how horrible and upsetting the deaths are in this movie, and while they are very shocking in the context of the story, I can at least watch them with a clear conscience as, having studied them closely, I'm fairly confident that no animals were ever placed in any actual peril and that they were all the result of visual tricks and skillful editing.  Sadly, I can't say the same for a number of older Disney animal pics which seemed benign enough in my childhood, and which make me feel so uneasy now that I find them damned near-unwatchable. (The Incredible Journey, I'm looking at you...)

Children's Lessons In Mortality: Rugrats - "I Remember Melville"

I'm of the opinion that Rugrats is a seriously underappreciated cartoon.  It may seem odd to propose that a show that was once so phenomenally popular could be "underappreciated" but nevertheless I find that people tend to overlook just how brilliantly strange, twisted and edgy this series was in its heyday.  It went on for rather too long and added one or two highly divisive characters in its latter stages, so it could be that its reputation was tarnished beyond all repair, but anyone who recalls Rugrats as being little more than an extended diaper gag-fest would do well to revisit the earlier seasons and see just how sharply scripted and, above all, darkly weird a number of those episodes were.  Although fundamentally a kids' cartoon, Rugrats was able to weave in a ton of adult appeal, including some really esoteric gags which I suspect would be as lost on half the adults the audience as the children (one episode has Tommy getting separated from Grandpa Lou and winding up in the care of a couple of eccentric cat hoarders at a house called Grey Gardens), and the central conceit is one that children and adults should find equally beguiling - namely, just how daunting and bizarre a place the world can be when seen through the right pair of eyes.  Rugrats had that sense of childhood innocence and wonder down pat, but more impressive still is how vividly it encapsulates that sense of irrational childhood fear, deftly drawing you into the mentality of a toddler and having you appreciate why the most mundane of everyday occurrences would seem utterly terrifying from their perspective.  If you grew up with the series then odds are there's at least one Rugrats episode which gave you sleepless nights - in my case, it would be "What The Big People Do".  At some point, I fully intend to cover that episode and just how beautifully, nightmarishly fucked up the whole thing is.  For now though, let's continue our tour of children's lessons in mortality by looking at "I Remember Melville", the first of two death-orientated episodes yielded throughout the series' run.  For so edgy a cartoon was Rugrats that it gave us not just one, but two episodes which dealt very explicitly with the subject of loss, albeit from somewhat different angles.  "I Remember Melville" deals very much with raw grief and with navigating through the pain of loss, while the second episode, "Mother's Day", is more concerned with coming to terms with an absent relationship and reaffirming connections with someone already long passed.  In both cases, the bereaved character is Chuckie, which ties in with him being the most emotionally sensitive of the rugrats.

"I Remember Melville" has a similar premise to the Alvin & The Chipmunks episode "Cookie Chomper", in that it also uses the sudden death of a beloved pet as the basis for outlining the different stages of grieving, with the final assurance that, no matter the pain that loss entails, there is hope at the end of the tunnel.  I'd say that the depiction of grief here is quite a bit starker than that of "Cookie Chomper", however, and that the final lesson is reached and delivered through slightly less spelled-out and thus all the more satisfying means.  Both episodes are excellent in how they approach the subject of death, bereavement and, finally, renewal, although I give Rugrats extra points for adhering more to the principle of "show, don't tell" in its representation of the journey through the grieving process.  The ill-fated pet in this particular instance is a pill woodlouse named Melville, whom Chuckie adopts and whom the babies mistakenly identify throughout as a "bug" (woodlice are actually a type of crustacean, although in fairness I wouldn't expect a two-year-old to comprehend the difference).  It's probably fair to say that a pill woodlouse isn't going to garner the same degree of instant emotional attachment from most viewers as a conventionally adorable pet like Cookie the kitten (I say "most" because personally, being a big crustacean enthusiast, I can't help but immediately feel warmth toward the little isopod); nevertheless, the episode does a wonderful job of making us feel the strength of Chuckie's attachment to him and, through this, genuinely come to care about his fate.  To the rest of the world, Melville may seem small and insignificant, and he doesn't exactly show much in the way of personality in what little screen time he has - and yet, by the end of the episode, we've been through such an arduous emotional journey with Chuckie that the gravitas surrounding the loss of Melville feels entirely genuine.  We really do believe that his closest, most personal friend is being laid to rest.

The episode opens with Chuckie explaining to his fellow rugrats why Melville is the perfect pet and why he feels as strong a bond with him as Tommy does with Spike - Melville doesn't tease Chuckie or pass judgement on him, he's easy to talk to, and as an added bonus he doesn't have claws or teeth, which makes him less intimidating to Chuckie than other animals (it's also mentioned here that Chuckie's father has a fur allergy - I don't recall if they brought that up later on in the series when the Finsters adopted a poodle).  The obviously one-sided nature of Chuckie's devotions is played up in a somewhat comical fashion - despite Chuckie's assertion that Melville always listens to him, we know that Melville doesn't actually give a toss about his musings on eating fancy soap - but anyone who's ever given their heart to an animal companion will absolutely understand how he feels, and there's something immensely touching about just how much love and appreciation Chuckie has for this tiny being.  Which makes what happens next a little hard to bear.

In contrast to Cookie Chomper III, Melville meets his tragic demise fairly early on in the story.  He doesn't get much of a narrative arc in his living state - we see just enough footage to establish that Chuckie is totally enamored with the isopod, shortly after which Chuckie leaves Melville in the care of Tommy, Phil and Lil while he heads off to the outskirts of the yard to scout for more potential tidbits for Melville.  By this stage, Chuckie is now so devoted to meeting Melville's every need that he's assumed the mindset of a perpetually-fussing parent, dragging a suitcase full of Melville's stuff behind him and warning the prospective woodlouse-sitters that Melville gets cranky if he doesn't have his nap.  With Chuckie gone, Lil immediately proposes that they eat Melville, although a horrified Tommy is quick to put a stop to that (it would be a bad idea anyway - I've heard it said that woodlice taste like urine, although I'm not sure if I want to delve too deeply into the culinary habits of whoever verified that particular fact).  Instead, Tommy proposes that they teach Melville some new tricks in order to surprise Chuckie when he gets back, only to look down into the shoe box and see that the woodlouse has gone ominously belly-up.

Unlike Cookie Chomper III, no cause of death is ever established for Melville - his time had simply come, it would seem.  Lil cottons on quickly that Melville is now an ex-woodlouse, although Tommy, much like Paz The Penguin, is initially confused by the whole notion.  Lil explains that, "Dead is when you're asleep for a long time..." "...like forever," adds Phil.  Although Phil and Lil both appear to understand the permanence of death, their supposed solemnity is immediately undercut by the flippancy with which they detach from the situation and propose going back to making mud pies.  Phil and Lil have rather a callous attitude toward Melville (already evidenced by Lil's casual proposal that they consume him) although this does pay off toward the end of the episode.  Tommy alone recognises that Chuckie is going to be deeply distressed when he returns, and that the other babies can't just stand by and let that happen.  The three of them go in search of a replacement pet and happen upon a snail, although Phil is pessimistic about it passing for a Melville substitute.  "It's not really a bug, it's a snail," he muses.  Ahh, the irony.  "A bug's a bug", Lil insists, while Tommy places the snail in the shoe box and discreetly shifts Melville's body onto a nearby plastic shovel.  Note that, while Alvin & The Chipmunks was careful to keep Cookie's death and mangled body off-screen, here there's an awful lot of focus upon Melville's corpse, including several close-up shots of him lying motionless on his back.  You might think that a belly-up woodlouse makes for a less distressing sight than a dead kitten, but there is one particular shot in which we catch a glimpse of Melville's cold, lifeless eyes, and it's enormously grim.

Sure enough, when Chuckie returns he doesn't take the news too well and wants nothing to do with the slimy imposter in Melville's shoe box.  It's here that the different stages of grief first kick in, although Chuckie experiences them in a less structured manner than the three chipmunks, with Denial and Anger occurring at pretty much the same time.  Chuckie indignantly tosses the the snail (I hope that it landed softly, or else two minibeasts perished instead of just one) and demands that they return Melville.  There follows an extremely heart-rending sequence in which Chuckie attempts to bring Melville back to life by reanimating his corpse himself, moving him around and having him "perform" various circus tricks.  Tommy attempts to illustrate the difference between life and death to Chuckie by showing him a live earthworm and asking him to notice how it, unlike Melville, is capable of movement, but Chuckie continues to hear none of it.  He can only maintain the illusion for so long, however, and after having to prop Melville up one time too many, breaks down and tearfully admits that his beloved friend is dead.  Compared to the more understated reactions we saw from Alvin, Simon and Theodore to Cookie Chomper's passing, Chuckie's sudden, unrestrained outpouring of grief feels raw, searing and painfully authentic, not least his harrowing declaration that he'll, "never be happy again!"  Unlike Alvin, Simon and Theodore, Chuckie also isn't fortunate enough to have a learned parental figure like Dave Seville on hand to talk him through the grieving process, his companions being every bit as inexperienced in this field as he is.  Phil and Lil have a surface understanding of what death is, but are unable contemplate it too deeply.  Tommy is a notch more sensitive toward Chuckie's emotions, but naively assumes that the problem can be solved by having him banish all thoughts of Melville entirely.  Although Chuckie's friends do, in their way, prompt him along toward the right realisation, ultimately Chuckie has to figure all of this out for himself.

The following morning, Tommy, Phil & Lil recall that Chuckie was very upset yesterday and resolve to avoid saying anything that might remind him of Melville.  To their surprise, Chuckie shows up in apparently good spirits, insisting that his grief over Melville was yesterday's news that he's ready to move on with his life.  Obviously, Chuckie has merely slipped backwards a stage from Depression to Denial, but then, contrary to popular belief, the five stages of grief don't always follow smoothly in a straight line - often the road toward Acceptance is messy and chaotic.  Tommy suggests that the babies celebrate Chuckie's ostensible restoration by raiding the refrigerator for some chocolate pudding.  At this stage, I'm going to interrupt my commentary on Chuckie's grapplings with the grieving process to point out a really strange sight gag that occurs when Tommy opens the refrigerator to retrieve the tubs of pudding.  Sharp-eyed viewers might notice a milk carton amid the Pickles' victuals advertising the disappearance of one David "La Brea Tar Pits" Allen.  Evidently, there's a sly in-joke going on here.  The La Brea Tar Pits should, of course, be familiar to anybody who's seen the film Miracle Mile, but who's David Allen?  It seems a safe bet that this refers to David L. Allen, who worked as a design supervisor on a number of Rugrats episodes, although I'm still intrigued to learn what his connection was exactly to the La Brea Tar Pits.

Unfortunately, the taste of chocolate pudding is all that's needed to noisily shatter Chuckie's facade; he erupts into tears, recalling how he and Melville used to eat chocolate pudding together before the latter's tragic passing (all credit to Christine Cavanaugh, who does a splendid job in making Chuckie sound totally, gut-wrenchingly distraught in this scene).  Tommy suggests that the babies find something else to do which won't remind Chuckie of Melville, but Chuckie refuses.  He understands that inevitably he's going to feel sad whenever he thinks about Melville, but at the same time he realises that his own life needs to carry on and that he can't deny himself day-to-day pleasures like chocolate pudding just because he doesn't want to confront those emotions.  Moreover, he feels a personal obligation, as Melville's only friend, to keep his memory alive - as he poignantly points out to Tommy, Phil and Lil, "if I don't remember him, who will?"  This confuses Phil and Lil, who wonder how Chuckie can bear to burden himself with so much sadness.  Chuckie admits that, even though he knows that Melville has already gone, he feels that he still needs to properly say his goodbyes.  Thus, we see him finally move into the Searching stage, as the babies confront the issue head-on and attempt to bring a sense of closure to Melville's passing, by burying Melville in his shoe box in the Pickles' backyard and holding a miniature funeral service for him.  Phil and Lil offer to say a few words, and speak mournfully about all the fond times they observed Chuckie and Melville sharing.  It's here that we get our pay-off for their earlier flippancy, as Phil and Lil demonstrate that they have learned to genuinely care - only, to their surprise, Chuckie suddenly erupts with laughter in the middle of their speech, leading to a neat bit of role reversal in which Phil and Lil chide him for not showing Melville proper respect.  Chuckie apologises, but says that he couldn't help but laugh on being reminded of all the happiness that Melville brought into his life.  Here, Chuckie indicates that he's finally arrived at the Acceptance stage, stating that he feels reassured knowing that he can think of Melville and actually take joy and comfort in those memories.  He thanks Phil and Lil for helping him to realise this and, suddenly, they too feel overwhelmed with emotion and burst into tears.  The episode ends by panning upwards and showing one final, reassuring glimpse of the sun shining down upon the Pickles' neighbourhood, a reminder of the continuing cycle of life and of the promise of renewal brought by each new day.

Oh yes, and "I Remember Melville" is paired with a Rugrats story called "No More Cookies" in which Angelica asks the babies to help her kick her binge-eating addiction.  It's an odd combination, not least because "No More Cookies" is something of a weird episode, period.  Angelica fails to kick the habit, yells at the babies for allowing her to fail, and then the episode abruptly ends with nobody any the better or wiser.  It's possible they were going for something entirely lightweight to counterbalance the heartbreak of the Melville story, only "No More Cookies" manages to be downright unsettling, both in the sheer grotesqueness of Angelica's eating habits and in the fact that nothing actually gets resolved in the end.  The message seems to be that you can get through grief, but with addiction you're essentially doomed to keep on repeating the same cycle of self-destructive behaviours over and over.  Ah well, as I stated earlier, Rugrats was nothing if not skin-crawlingly freaky, and all the more distinguished for it.

The Jackie Bison Show (1990)

One thing you might have noticed about a lot of these failed prime-time cartoons from the early 90s is that they tended, overwhelmingly, to be about animals.  Irrespective of how good or bad each of them were, this may well have been their first mistake from a marketing standpoint.  Traditionally, animation and anthropomorphism have been the tightest of bedfellows, enjoying a rich and prosperous relationship that's spanned decade upon decade of film and television history, so naturally they might have seemed like a pretty safe starting point for devising a new cartoon to suit the sensibilities of modern 90s audiences.  But consider the adult animated shows that actually did catch on - The Simpsons, South Park, King of The Hill, Family Guy, etc - and you'll notice that they tended, overwhelmingly, to be about humans.  Duckman: Private Dick/Family Man is one of the rare examples of an adult cartoon starring an anthropomorphic animal that did well, and even then that was more of a cult success.  Unfortunately, animation has never really shaken the popular perception that it is, first and foremost, a children's medium, and stories about talking animals are saddled with a similar image problem (there are numerous people under the impression that Animal Farm by George Orwell is a children's book, with both film adaptations making the fatal mistake of playing the story in that direction).  So a prime-time cartoon in which the characters are talking animals might have a particularly hard time in getting past that knee-jerk reaction and persuading adults that it's worth their viewing.

Of course, it helps if your cartoon actually contains the slightest iota of a reason for adults to find it appealing in the first place.  Which is why Duckman did okay but Capitol Critters didn't.

After wisely passing up the mangy, worm-infested horror that was Hound Town, NBC took another stab at the re-emerging prime-time animation market the following year with a pastiche on The Jack Benny Program, featuring an anthropomorphic buffalo named Jackie (Stan Freberg) who hosted a popular variety show.   A one-off installment of The Jackie Bison Show aired on NBC on 2nd July 1990.  It was intended as the pilot for a potential Simpsons competitor, only it wasn't well-received and the series was not picked up, leaving The Simpsons unopposed in the prime-time animation game until 1992.  Nowadays The Jackie Bison Show is yet another long-forgotten obscurity, known only to those curious enough to have done their homework on the subject of early Simpsons-era animations that fell by the wayside.

Like Hound Town, The Jackie Bison Show uses a laugh track, a move which worked out rather poorly for Hound Town but is arguably a lot more justified here, given that it follows a show-within-a-show format and Jackie does indeed perform before a studio audience.  To make sense of this pilot, it helps enormously if you're familiar with the format of the The Jack Benny Program, which it mirrors in having an opening and closing monologue in which Jackie appears on stage to address his viewers, and a more traditional sitcom narrative sandwiched in between (confession time: I myself am not a seasoned Jack Benny viewer, although I did watch a small handful of episodes in preparation for this review, so please excuse me if I fail to pick up on any in-jokes which might be obvious to the hardcore fan).  If you can't get your head around the Jack Benny spoof, then you may get a tad confused as to where the show-within-a-show begins and ends, as the variety show material initially looks to be interwoven with scenes from Jackie's personal life - in actuality, it's all part of the same package, with Jackie "playing" a version of himself in the story segments of the episode.  Unlike Hound Town, which was far too crass and hackneyed to be going anywhere fast, I'd say that the set-up for The Jackie Bison Show actually did have a smidgen of potential.  There are a lot of fun things you could do with a show-within-a-show, particularly one featuring spoof newscasts and fake product placement - unfortunately, this isn't very well-realised and the resulting pilot has this weirdly tepid vibe all over.  It's not an altogether hideous effort, and at its very worst it makes for pleasant and inoffensive viewing, but as a cartoon comedy it's pretty limp.  The visual humour never comes together as it should, the dialogue lacks punch and while that laugh track goes off with merciless frequency, one simply gets the impression that Jackie's live audience are easily amused (actually, even they don't come off as all that enthusiastic - as laugh tracks go, this one sounds curiously muted).

The pilot opens with a short scene featuring Jackie's best friend and show announcer, a chameleon named Larry J. Lizard (Richard Karron), who gives us a concise rundown on Jackie's history while being interviewed by a human reporter (Harry Shearer) looking to dig up some dirt on the bull.  According to Larry, he and Jackie met while serving in the army and got their first bite of the showbiz apple participating in one of Bob Hope's USO shows.  After leaving the army, Jackie relocated to Hollywood to pursue a career as an entertainer and wound up becoming the first animal to host his own network TV show.  The reporter presses Larry to be a bit more sensational in what he reveals about Jackie, but an indignant Larry insists that Jackie is the greatest guy he's ever known and that he's always stood by him, even he checked into the Betty Frog Clinic for "moth abuse".  Haha, get it?  Moth = Meth, because he's a chameleon, and they're insectivores and all, and...oh wait, you didn't actually find that funny?  Well too bad, because 99% of the gags in this cartoon run along those exact same lines - namely, puns alluding to the fact that our main characters are a buffalo and a lizard.  Larry cuts the interview short, abruptly declaring that he has a show to announce, but mutters that if he's late again "that big bully'll fire me."  Not only is that a totally predictable punchline for rounding off the scene in question, but they also slipped in another of those dratted animal puns, because of course they would.  (Note: this is the only portion of the episode which doesn't appear to be part of the show-within-a-show, although it features a laugh track anyway.)

We then cut to the set of Jackie's show which, we are told, is coming to us live "from Television City in Wyoming".  Jackie appears onstage, extolling the virtues of a book entitled Achieving Inner Peace and how it's given him a much calmer handle on life, only to immediately undermine this when a telephone starts ringing from offstage and interrupts his opening monologue.  As it turns out, the call is from his new lady love, the sensuous Jill St. Fawn (Jane Singer), a play on Jill St. John, who's calling to let him know that her mother is back from Salt Lake City and is eager to meet him.  There's a bit of light sexual innuendo (that's how we make it plain that we're gunning for an adult audience, correct?) with Jill telling "Big Jack" that he "can't help but measure up".  Big Jack then turns things over to musical performer Nat King Kong (he's a gorilla, obviously) and His Orchestra.  The musical performances were a key component of The Jack Benny Program, although here poor Kong only gets to perform a couple of bars of generic jazz before Larry starts plugging one of the show's sponsors, a brand of breakfast cereal called Frosted Flies, of which he is apparently an avid consumer.  The show does intermittently dip into announcements for spoof products, which feels like it should have been a golden opportunity for a bit of wild and wacky parody, only here there doesn't seem to be much of a joke beyond the fact that Larry's a chameleon and as such he has an appetite for bugs over conventional cereal.  That "not a speck of mosquito" line is a nod to the advertising slogan for Alpo dog food, which claimed to contain "all beef and not a speck of cereal", but I'm not sure if substituting an item with the pertinent equivalent for a particular species of animal automatically constitutes humour in the way it's treated here.  Or is the gag that, to the human palate, the thought of downing a bowl of 100% flies would be no less disgusting than a bowl of flies with a few specks of mosquito added in?

With that, it's finally time to kick off the story portion of the show.  We rejoin Jackie one morning at his luxury prairie home (want to hazard a guess as to which classic western folk song he's singing as we fade into this scene?), where he's swapping pleasantries with Larry over the breakfast table.  Here, we get further product placement for that Frosted Flies cereal, although it's accompanied by a rather curious exchange in which Jackie suggests that Larry cut down on his fly consumption because, "You know what they eat?", and Larry admits that he tries not to think about it - curious, because you'd think they'd refrain from criticism of one of the show's key sponsors.  Also present is Franklin (Pat Paulsen), Jackie's pet canary, whose central shtick is that he resents being held in captivity (something he very clearly vocalises to Jackie and co) and is constantly trying to fly the coop.  The whole business with Franklin doesn't exactly sit well with me, because he's blatantly as sapient as any other animal in this cartoon, yet Jackie seems to have no qualms about holding him against his will inside a tiny birdcage - suggesting that either Jackie is guilty of kidnap/false imprisonment, or that there's something distinctly unequal about the distribution of rights in this universe.  After thwarting yet another escape attempt, Jackie tells Franklin that he's canary and as such should always be happy.  Franklin is also the snarker of the household and never misses an opportunity to put Jackie down and, honestly, who can blame him?  I see no reason why he should be gracious to his abductor about anything.

Jackie is in good spirits because his relationship will Jill St. Fawn is going well and he's considering popping the question to her.  Larry points out that he might be rushing into things and suggests that he's still on the rebound from his ill-fated relationship with Wheel of Fortune presenter Vanna White.  Jackie indicates that Vanna broke it off with him because she ultimately wasn't keen on marrying a cartoon bovine, which Larry sympathises with, on the grounds that it wouldn't bode well for their hypothetical offspring - "You know what happens when a person is half-real, half-cartoon?"  "You mean like Jerry Lewis?" Jackie quips.  Ouch.  Larry then suggests that Jill St. Fawn perhaps isn't the best match for Jackie and that there's someone better out there for him.  Enter Doris Doe (Rose Marie), Jackie's cervine personal assistant, and Larry winks slyly at the camera.  Yep, in the grand tradition of that most gut-wrenching of sitcom cliches, The Jackie Bison Show works in a will they/won't they.  Right from the start, we know that we're being conditioned to root for Jackie and Doris as a couple because the studio audience responds with approving applause the instant the latter appears, but the whole set-up leaves me feeling cold.  Based on this one installment, Doris seems heavily smitten with Jackie but he barely seems to notice her, so I'm not really seeing what hope they have.

Doris is crushed to learn that Jackie is madly in love with another cervine, but her misery is interrupted by the arrival of the local paperboy, a human kid referred to by everyone else as Felix The Boy (Gabriel Damon).  In my opinion he's easily the show's strangest element - not because he's one of the few prominent human characters in a cast predominantly populated by animals, but because he's given a weird amount of significance for a character who barely features at all throughout the course of the pilot.  Jackie apparently considers him important enough to include "a visit from Felix The Boy" in the list of upcoming highlights at the start of the show, like Doris he gets an adoring round of applause from the studio audience the instant he appears onscreen, and he even boasts his own line of in-universe merchandise, pausing the story in order to plug the latest addition, a Felix The Boy Swiss Army Watch.  Why this character is apparently so revered in the context of the show is absolutely baffling to me, but I'm inclined to assume that there's a massive in-joke that I'm just not getting (maybe Jack Benny fans can help me out here).  Felix The Boy also has a dog named Red (who's actually black and white, but perhaps it's a nod to that old chestnut about newspapers) - unlike Franklin, he doesn't vocalise any disdain for being another creature's property, but he seems to have it in for Jackie nonetheless and never misses an opportunity to sabotage his stuff.

Side-note: the newspaper Felix The Boy delivers is called The Daily Gnus, which is one the pilot's few puns that I actually kind of like.  Also, I give points for that vaguely amusing sight gag concerning the story apparently unimportant enough to be regulated to page 3.

After Felix The Boy's confusing diversion, we return to the main story and get a drawn-out non-dialogue sequence in which Jackie tries to pull off various ostentatious methods of proposing to Jill St. Fawn (sky-writing, a message on a blimp, etc) only to fail dramatically every time.  It's terribly dull and almost entirely pointless, its only somewhat useful purpose being to throw in a bit with a pie vendor which gets echoed again at the end of the episode.  At the end of the sequence, Jackie concludes that it would be far safer to invite Jill to dinner and pop the question to her there.  This is followed by another of the show's supporting segments, a spoof news update called "Elkwitness News".  Corny gags still abound, but there's a smattering of quirkiness to this segment which makes it one of the pilot's more successful skits, notably a spoof traffic update in which migrating animals are warned where to watch out for hunters.  The elk anchor promises they'll be back with more later, but sadly this is all we ever see of this particular team.

We return to Jackie's house to find him preparing for his proposal dinner with Jill, while Doris mournfully confides to Larry that she had always hoped that she and Jackie would be married one day.  There's a stab at a fourth wall-breaking gag where Jackie slams a door so hard that he disrupts the fabric of the episode, causing the picture to roll up and reveal a group of stagehands gambling behind the set - like so many of this pilot's attempts at zany visual humour, it probably seemed funny on paper but isn't pulled off with the necessary levels of panache.  Jill St. Fawn then arrives, and she's accompanied by her mother, Mrs St. Fawn (Jayne Meadows), who seems suspiciously captivated by the many valuable items and works of art on display around Jackie's house.  Jackie remains entirely oblivious to the fact that he's being courted purely for his money, but Doris and Larry aren't quite so obtuse and attempt to warn him, while Mrs St. Fawn is off confiding to her daughter that her alimony is about to run out and she'll be darned if they "end up in some petting zoo."  Jackie isn't prepared to accept criticism of the woman he's deeply in love with, warning Doris and Larry that they'll both be fired if they attempt to disrupt his proposal, and warning Franklin that he'll be dinner (whoo, dark).  When Jill and her mother return, Jackie finally pops the question and Mrs St. Fawn, after inspecting the size of the engagement ring, accepts on her daughter's behalf.  Larry attempts to be supportive of his friend's decision, but gets royally spurned when Jackie asks him to be his best man and Mrs St. Fawn scoffs that Jackie should choose someone "higher up on the food chain".  Instead of standing by his reptilian friend, Jackie laughs along with her, prompting Larry to figure that he's no longer wanted and to slink dejectedly away, muttering that he's "cold-blooded but not cold-hearted."

In the following scene, we get another of those stabs at zany humour that feels as if it should be absolutely cracking in theory but in practice falls kind of flat, in which Frank Sinatra Jr (playing himself, and in his regular flesh-and-blood form) telephones Jackie to personally berate him for his disloyalty to Larry.  Just as Frank is about to offer Jackie advice on how to turn things around, his side of the screen goes on the fritz and cuts out, leaving a message reading SPLIT SCREEN OUT OF ORDER.  Jackie is apparently moved enough to contact Larry, and they devise a plan to test if the St. Fawns' devotions are genuine. Long story short, they have Felix The Boy show up (again, he gets an instantaneous round of applause for reasons that elude me) with a paper bearing the headline that Jackie's now broke.  Larry and Doris then arrive, disguised as repossession agents, and proceed to start packing away Jackie's stuff, against the buffalo's protests.  Mrs St. Fawn and Jill are suddenly repulsed by Jackie (before the former denounces him, there's a pretty odd moment where she's seem crawling across the floor like a worm for some reason) and tells her daughter that she knows of a very rich boxer who just got divorced.  "Is it Mike Tyson?" Jill asks.  "Certainly not," replies her mother, "Vincent van Dog himself!"  Okay, that one kind of works.  Jackie is so upset by their betrayal that he starts motioning to sneeze - which, as Larry helpfully explains, is the absolute worst thing that can happen in this universe.  He presses a Sneeze Alarm, and we see images of the world outside erupting into an all-out panic - initially, this is done in cartoon form, but as the scene progresses it piles on an increasingly ridiculous amount of stock footage showing terrified humans running and ducking for cover.  Then, when Jackie does sneeze, we get footage of buildings blowing up, rocks collapsing onto cars, etc.  This, needless to say, is yet another gag built upon a promisingly zany concept that's handled rather perfunctorily in practice.  It fails because the energy just isn't there; I'm simply not buying that Jackie's sneezing really is responsible for all this mayhem, even via suspension of disbelief.  It's also safe to say that, had the pilot been picked up for a series, then Jackie's earth-shattering sneezes would have become a recurring deus ex machina.

Anyway, Jackie sneezes with such tremendous force that he also expels Jill St. Fawn and her gold-digging mother right out of the building, and sends them flying into the trolley of the pie vendor (I did say that he'd come up again), where they land in a sticky, undignified mess.  Larry, who's now well and truly reconciled with his buffalo chum, congratulates him on having pulled off the scheme successfully, but Jackie is disheartened about once again being left without a woman to share his life with.  In the story's final punchline, he asks Doris if she's free for dinner tonight, and when she delightedly declares that she is, he flippantly asks her what she'll be fixing.  If Jackie is aware of Doris's feelings for him then he's frankly a bit of a jerk.

In the show's closing monologue, Jackie reappears on stage and is joined by all of his chums (Franklin is present, but still confined to his cage).  There's a highly predictable bit where they psych him out into thinking that the headline announcing his bankruptcy was genuine, but it isn't long before they're all collapsing in laughter together, and Jackie signs off with the handy warning that drink and stampeding are a bad combination.  With that, we bid Jackie farewell forever.

Laugh Track Bafflers:

There are considerably less of these than in Hound Town - few of the jokes hit with what you'd call genuine precision, but for the most part I'm able to grasp the intention behind them.  I draw a blank as to why Doris declaring that she'll "rustle up some trail mix" gets a laugh, however.

The Verdict:

The Jackie Bison Show is an infinitely more genial attempt at an adult-orientated cartoon than Hound Town - the set-up may be a bit lost on anyone who's not familiar with The Jack Benny Program, but it's bright and cheerful and there's little here that actively rubs me the wrong way.  Ultimately, though, it commits the cardinal sin of simply not being very funny.  Really now, when you were competing with something as innovative and cutting edge as The Simpsons, you needed to have a lot more up your sleeve than just a string of corny wildlife puns.

Voices (1985)

Voices is a short film by Portland-based indie animator Joanna Priestley, which takes the form of an animated monologue, delivered by Priestley herself, on the subject of fear, anxiety and whether our thoughts and emotions are a reflection of the world we live in, or vice versa.  Priestley opens the film by inferring that she intends to do more than simply entertain the viewer with bright colours and cute cartoon characters, or to confound them with abstract symbolism that deliberately obscures what she is looking to say, but rather to address the viewer directly in as clear, intimate and as open a means as possible, a point illustrated by having her rotoscoped self-portrait dissolve temporarily into the underlying live action footage.  This is very much Priestley speaking straight from the heart.

The rotoscoped talking head technique was later revisited in Priestley's contribution to the compilation film Candyjam (1988), which she produced and directed with Joan Gratz, where it was used to entirely playful effect in humorously depicting the compulsions of a candy addict in denial ("Hey, good-looking bon bons!").  In Voices, we see Priestley utilising the freedom and flexibility of animation to make a point about the limitations (or lack of) of the human mind.  Priestley argues that our perception of ourselves and our environment is determined by what is already embedded in our minds, and illustrates this by having her animated counterpart morph continuously from one form to another as she discusses the anxieties all-too familiar to her own patterns of thinking (the use of rotoscoped animation to create a visual aesthetic that exists somewhere between reality and imagination is not too dissimilar to what would later be accomplished in Richard Linklater's feature film Waking Life).  For the most part, the short is lighthearted in tone, with the vibrant imagery reflecting the absurdities of Priestley's more irrational fears - the talking mirror which tauntingly vocalises her fear of aging while trying to escape from her grasp (Priestley's more creative and unconventional means of incorporating those cute cartoon characters she referenced earlier), the monstrous serpent who produces a barrage of incongruously mundane noises in demonstration of how a phobia of darkness can cause even the most benign of sounds to appear threatening.  Occasionally, the imagery takes on a more startling vibe, if only fleetingly - notably, its representation of a world defined by war, pain and famine as propagated by the media.

Voices' most curious arrives in the form of a non-verbal interlude following on from Priestley's musings about her self-image - we see Priestley (literally) go to pieces and reassemble as a Pablo Picasso-style portrait, before morphing into a jointed paper doll which dances against an abstract backdrop.  This is about the closest Priestly comes to that confounding symbolism she hinted earlier that he was seeking to avoid; significantly, this is the only portion of the short in which the titular "voices" are no longer the main driving force behind the action and the central figure is free to indulge in independent movement and expression.  It offers, one assumes, a fleeting glimpse of a soul unfettered by irrational worries, having rejected the aforementioned slew of meaningless concerns and embraced life in its flawed and chaotic glory.  Above all, Priestley seems keen to remind us that we should only take ourselves so seriously - a point summed up by having her animated portrait break out into spontaneous laughter as a teasing epilogue to her words.