Colonel Homer (aka Let's Break Some Hearts!)

Homer and Marge have had their marital stresses over the years, but here's a poser - on how many occasions have those stresses reached such critical condition that we've seen their relationship enter DEFCON 1? By that, I mean episodes in which their marriage is clearly in very real, very imminent danger of ending (and liquidating the status quo of the series along with it). If we limit our selection for now to only the show's "classic" era (Seasons 1 to 8), then I'd say there are at least three (actually, I'm surprised that my count is apparently that low). Those are "Life on The Fast Lane" of Season 1, "The War of The Simpsons" of Season 2 and "Secrets of a Successful Marriage" of Season 5 (in "Secrets of a Successful Marriage", they have their most angry and dramatic dispute, but it's also the least convincing of the lot; the terms under which they reconcile are also the most hokey, but I'll save that for if/when I cover that episode). There are numerous other episodes in which they have their momentary fall-outs, and occasionally their very bitter blowouts, eg: "Bart Gets Hit By A Car", where Homer gets awfully sulky with Marge in the third act, but you don't really sense that they're likely to hold it against one another forever. Then you have those episodes like "A Milhouse Divided", where Homer thinks their marriage is in danger but this isn't corroborated by any hard evidence from Marge's side. There are also episodes where Marge does seem quite prepared to stick it to Homer, such as "Some Enchanted Evening", but is easily dissuaded. On any of the occasions cited, we might have gone into DEFCON 2 or 3, but the situation doesn't quite seem critical enough to suggest that The End is nigh.

The three episodes I realise I haven't included are those in which Homer has his fidelities tested by any of the female Home-Wreckers (as they self-identified in "Team Homer") - Princess Kashmir of "Homer's Night Out", Lurleen Lumpkin of "Colonel Homer" and Mindy Simmons of "The Last Temptation of Homer". In fact, the universal running theme across all three instances of DEFCON 1 is that it was invariably Marge who was tempted to hit the destruct button on their relationship; the reverse would be utterly unthinkable. There's a lot in Homer's life that isn't perfect (his dead-end job and his troubled relationship with his father, to name only two), but as far as his wife is concerned he really hit the jackpot; there aren't many who would put up with even half of the nonsense that Marge does from Homer, and she causes him so little grief in return. I touched on this already in my coverage of "Simpson and Delilah", but due to the highly uneven nature of their relationship, it's so much trickier to have Homer contemplating infidelity than it is Marge, and any episode where Homer does take an interest in another woman has to deploy some form of buffer in order to make the situation seem marginally less dire. "Homer's Night Out" flat-out doesn't fit the bill because Kashmir and Homer aren't seriously entangled, and even though Marge and Homer do have a serious dispute (in which Marge, again, would have been the one more likely to initiate the end), the focus ultimately seems to shift more toward Homer's relationship with Bart. "The Last Temptation of Homer" sees Homer caught up in a mutual infatuation with Mindy, but he doesn't like the situation one bit and attempts to resist it every step of the way, only the universe won't let him be. Before that, though, we had "Colonel Homer" (8F19), where Homer befriends aspiring country singer Lurleen (voice of Beverly D'Angelo, who also had a major hand in writing Lurleen's music), who in return falls passionately in love with him, and here there's a bit more ambiguity as to what Homer wants out of the deal. Are we in danger of tipping over into DEFCON 1 territory? Well, Marge certainly seems to think so, but Homer straddles such an indistinct line between blissful innocence and lurid desires he doesn't know he has that it's difficult to gauge exactly what's compelling him to get so involved with Lurleen.

I've been meaning to talk about "Colonel Homer" for a while because, of the episodes in which Homer is seriously tempted by another woman, this one is the most obvious successor to "Life on The Fast Lane". The two episodes follow a near-identical story structure, wherein a non-isolated incident of marital strife leaves one adult Simpson feeling unappreciated and disaffected. Disaffected Simpson goes to a venue outside of their comfort zone, where they encounter a friendly Home-Wrecker who is instantly smitten with them. Disaffected Simpson enjoys the companionship of Home-Wrecker so much that they prioritise them over the rest of the family; meanwhile, the spouse of Disaffected Simpson grows increasingly suspicious about the situation and fearful for the future of their marriage. However, when Home-Wrecker gets serious about wanting to take their relationship to the next level, Disaffected Simpson faces a dilemma and ultimately rejects Home-Wrecker in favour of upholding their marriage. The key factor separating the two scenarios has to do with how well-attuned Disaffected Simpson is to the reality of their situation. Whereas Marge understood exactly what she was getting herself into with Jacques, here Homer spends the better part of the episode cheerfully oblivious to all three corners on this awkward love triangle; he has no idea why his spending so much time with Lurleen should bother Marge so, no awareness of the signals he's potentially sending Lurleen, and above all, no attunement as to what's really driving him the whole while. Homer is an innocent who doesn't realise just how culpable he is, and it's fascinating how much of a difference this makes to the tone of the episode overall. "Life on The Fast Lane" relies heavily on understatement and what the characters are unable to verbalise - there, a lot was made of the fact that Homer could never find the words to confront Marge directly about the situation with Jacques, and the best defence he could make for his marriage was a very muted compliment of Marge's sandwich-making technique. "Colonel Homer", by contrast, requires the characters to be much more forward - here, Marge very explicitly asks Homer if he is having an affair with Lurleen. Lurleen, meanwhile, openly flaunts her feelings for Homer in her music, and only when she sings "Bunk with me tonight," several times to Homer's face does the penny finally drop (about sixteen minutes into the episode).

This onslaught of overstatement is necessitated by Homer's complete lack of self-awareness; he's too dim to appreciate the meaning of his own narrative, so it's down to the two key female players to spell it out for him, and much of the drama, and indeed the humour, arises from the three of them having somewhat different interpretations of the same scenario (as opposed to "Life on The Fast Lane" where everybody was basically on the same page). It's for this reason that I think a lot of people seem to come away with the impression that Marge was overly defensive and kind of a stick in the mud throughout this episode. If I had a penny for every time I heard someone suggest that Marge was in the wrong, and that she should have just shut up and let Homer enjoy the thrill of being manager to a rising country star, then I'd at least have enough for a matinee and a small soda by now. But to those who think that Marge should have been contented being Homer's unquestioning cheerleader, I would implore you to listen closely to the lyrics of Lurleen's song, "I've Finally Bagged Me A Homer". She clearly isn't singing about baseball - not to mention that the "homer", or home run to which she ostensibly refers is also used as a popular sexual metaphor. What person in Marge's position wouldn't have ground their teeth like hell? Another factor that I think convinces some people that the threat is largely in Marge's head is that she's basically having to ruminate on it alone. Unlike "Life on The Fast Lane", which took time to illustrate how the increasingly realistic prospect of domestic upheaval was affecting all of the family (sans Maggie), "Colonel Homer" focuses almost exclusively on the adults in the equation; the closest the kids come to having any voice in this is in Bart's reflection that he's angry with Homer but can't help but love his swanky manager's suit. Actually, Moe gets to express more vulnerability than Bart and Lisa; he's pretty wounded to learn that Homer parked his keister on someone else's bar stool.

We've seen Marge become manifestly jealous of Homer in the past - in "Simpson and Delilah" she was disgruntled at the prospect of Homer getting a female PA and insisted that he hire a male applicant (unbeknownst to her, a gay one who also harbored feelings for Homer), but this is after Homer admits to her that all the young women he's interviewed have made kissy faces at him; her jealousy doesn't arise from nowhere. You could argue that Marge was here a little hasty in expressing her disapproval of Lurleen. You could also argue that Marge's own experience in being on the other end of this scenario has perhaps left her hyper-vigilant to the possibility that Homer could, under the right circumstances, do the same to her. But I don't believe that Marge's jealousy here is of her own making, or at all out of proportion. Just as it's clear that Lurleen is fixated on Homer, so too it's clear that Homer is fixated on her, even if he doesn't yet understand the true extent of his fixation. Marge is simply ahead of Homer in this particular game. She's is also a lot more vocal on the matter because her sense of indignation is stronger than was Homer's in "Life on The Fast Lane". One of the reasons why Homer there puts up such a limited fight for his marriage is because he knows, deep down, that he's possibly had this coming for some time. Marge, though, has long done her best to stand by Homer, and the possibility of him ditching her for another woman is simply unthinkable.

You can see the uneven nature of Homer and Marge's relationship in how the two instances of near-marital breakdown get started. In "Life on The Fast Lane" Marge gets mad at Homer because he forgets her birthday and buys her a gift that he does not even attempt to disguise was purchased for his own use (the episode makes it clear that this is just the tip of the iceberg). In "Colonel Homer", Homer gets mad at Marge after she calls him out for his boorish behaviour during a public screening of taut political thriller The Stockholm Affair, and their fellow theatre patrons very forcibly take Marge's side. Given that Homer's behaviours consisted of nosily slurping on his soda, loudly riffing on the movie's poor special effects and going so far as to announce the movie's plot twist so that the entire auditorium could hear, I don't think any reasonable viewer is going to hold Marge accountable for what happened. Nevertheless, it leaves Homer feeling pained and humiliated enough to want to drive far, far away from the family home, ultimately ending up at a seedy redneck bar where he meets Lurleen. Before he goes, Homer tells Marge that he has always carried himself "with a certain quiet dignity", which she deprived him of this evening. We know that this assertion is ridiculous - there was nothing quiet nor dignified about his behaviour at the Googolplex - so why is he so cheesed off at Marge? Homer's wounded pride stems from much the same obliviousness that carries him through the greater part of this episode - he didn't comprehend how his behaviour could be problematic for the other threatre patrons and was clearly was shocked by Marge's declaration that nobody wants to hear what he thinks, with the theatre audience confirming it. This strikes a particularly bitter nerve with Homer because it ties in with his deeper feelings of failure and personal disappointment; he tires of always being the screw-up, and he feels let-down by Marge's apparent failure to appreciate that. Which is where Lurleen comes in. Whereas Marge left Homer feeling small and insignificant, Lurleen validates his innermost pains by performing a song about them. Lurleen's song may be a downbeat ode to the quiet sorrows of everyday life, but her expression of solidarity fills Homer with an enormous sense of buoyancy. He feels justified in the knowledge that there is someone else out there who truly gets him.

"Colonel Homer" was written by series creator Matt Groening, who gets writing credits on the show relatively rarely, although on the DVD commentary track he admits that he received a lot of help from the rest of the writing team. The episode was inspired by the 1980 film Coal Miner's Daughter, in which D'Angelo portrayed country music superstar Patsy Cline (hence her casting here). Obviously, this episode takes multiple swipes at the world of country and western music, and in that regard there's probably a lot that goes over my head since it's a genre about which I know very little (although I recognise a dueling banjoist when I see one). But I get the distinct impression that Al Jean and Mike Reiss, then working as the series' showrunners, have this observation that country musicians are perhaps a little too candid about their personal lives within their music. I say that because there is a very similar joke in an episode of The Critic, "Sherman, Woman and Child". There, Jay befriends Alice Tompkins, a single mother who recently moved to New York from Knoxville, Tennessee after leaving her husband Cyrus, a country singer whom Alice suspected was cheating on her. What tipped Alice off? Cyrus was singing about it in his lyrics! He even went so far as to title his album I'm being unfaithful to my wife, Alice Tompkins. You heard me, Alice Tompkins. And you thought "Bagged Me A Homer" was a bit on the nose.

On the commentary track, Groening states that his intention here was to write an episode in which Homer is tempted away from the Simpson household by the prospect of a glamorous new career, but ultimately chooses to remain with his family. I've got to say, I'm not sure if that particular dilemma actually comes across in the finished episode - although Homer does talk about it being his life-long dream to manage a country singer (but, of course, he changes his life-long dream every week) and he clearly enjoys flaunting his space-age cowboy suit, it doesn't really feel as if it's the glamour that's pulling him on. The final dilemma feels closer to that of "Life on The Fast Lane", wherein Disaffected Simpson has the opportunity to redefine their lives, if they're able to trade in their current spouse for a suitor who could potentially take them in a whole new direction. Homer obviously doesn't get a lot of fulfillment out of his job at the plant, and it follows that he prefers managing Lurleen's career because it gives him a chance to do something with a bit more pizzazz, but given that this new career path is so heavily tied up in one individual it's somewhat challenging to separate his passion for the job over his personal feelings for Lurleen, and ultimately it is the latter that seems to take precedence in terms of the choice Homer has to make. (And since I've broached the subject, I have far less to say about that other unanswered question that hangs over this episode, concerning how Homer is able to balance his new career as a country music manager with his regular 9 to 5 job at the plant - perhaps he still has the same supervisor from "Dancin Homer", who was just as willing to get temporarily shot of him as they were back then. It's as good an explanation as any.)

On the commentary, they discuss how inherently unpalatable it is for Homer to even contemplate an extramarital affair, although they acknowledge that it's an entirely different kettle of fish where Marge is concerned, with which I obviously agree. They also observe that Marge's anger with Homer at the start of the episode is entirely justified, as most people in her position would have wanted to strangle Homer, which I think is likewise true. Finally, they state that the situation here remains wholesome, where Homer is concerned, because he's entirely oblivious to Lurleen's feelings and does not actually reciprocate them, aaaaand I'm not so sure if I agree with that. It seems to me that Homer IS attracted to Lurleen, only this attraction doesn't register on any conscious level until Lurleen makes her highly unambiguous move on him. Before then, Homer's infatuation with Lurleen plays out in his typically giddy, kid-like fashion, manifesting purely as boundless enthusiasm, and without him ever stopping to think about why he's so drawn to her and her music. And what Groening and his commentary buddies don't acknowledge is that Homer does indeed return to Lurleen after her initial attempt at propositioning him. He also rejects the first offer he gets from the representative of Rebel Yell Records who makes a bid for Lurleen's contract. For the final four minutes of the episode, Homer knows that he's playing with fire, and yet he's reluctant to let go of Lurleen, which implies that he is still undecided as to what he really wants. This begs the question as to what Homer supposes Lurleen could give him that Marge can't, considering that he already has such a sweet deal with her. I said in my coverage of "Simpson and Delilah" that there's nothing Marge could conceivably do that could drive Homer to seek fulfillment elsewhere, and I guess this episode puts that to the test. Despite Groening's words on the matter, I don't think it is the prospect of getting to accompany her further into stardom that has Homer momentarily tempted, but rather Homer's intuition that Lurleen, with her honeyed voice and sensitive song-writing abilities, has a better window into his soul than Marge. After all, Lurleen first wins Homer's attentions with her repeated insistence that, "Your wife don't understand you, but I do." Homer feels a connection with Lurleen because he senses that she, more so than Marge, empathises with what it's like to be a perpetual loser, forever disappointed with one's achievements (or lack thereof) in life. And yet, in the end it's Homer's perpetual loserdom that convinces him that he couldn't have asked for a more wonderful partner than Marge. When Lurleen makes her second attempt at propositioning him, she causes him to flashback through his pitiful history of non-stop romantic rejection, which culminates in Marge finally accepting him for who he is, and Homer realises that there is nobody more empathic and supportive than she. What ultimately prompts Homer to cut ties with Lurleen is not the realisation that she likes him, but rather his coming to terms with the fact that he feels the same way, and if he sticks around any longer, he'll end up crossing a line from which there can be no going back with the woman to whom he owes everything. So he removes himself from the situation, telling Lurleen that all he set out to do was to share her talent with the world, and leaving her future in the hands of the representative from Rebel Yell Records.

What complicates the scenario, and makes "Colonel Homer" such a powerful and multi-layered episode, is that Lurleen, for all her determination to come between Homer and Marge, does not come off as the villain - in fact, if you look at the episode from her perspective then it's a pretty heart-breaking affair. All of the Home-Wreckers except Kashmir end up facing rejection, but Lurleen's story is probably the most tragic of them all because she comes at it from such a stark position of vulnerability. Once again, it's up to the candidness of her song lyrics to do the talking, with titles such as "Don't Look Up My Dress Unless You Mean It", "I'm Basting A Turkey With My Tears" and "I'm Sick Of Your Lying Lips and False Teeth" going some way to reveal just how desolate her life has been up until now. On the DVD commentary, they joke about how ludicrous it is that Lurleen should be so infatuated with Homer when an attractive young woman like herself should be seriously out of his league, but to me it makes sense that Lurleen would like Homer because he's the only man who's ever shown her kindness, and she misinterprets his support and generosity as signs that he's interested in her (at one point Lurleen tells Homer that the concept of men being nice to her without expecting something in return is basically alien to her). She possibly also has Jacques' outsider perspective of Homer and Marge's marriage, in that it's based more on senseless attachment than on anything logical or functional, only from the opposite angle, as Lurleen assumes that Homer is the one who's grown weary of the situation and wants out. (I note that Lurleen - who is, incidentally, the only Home-Wrecker who gets to meet their rival first-hand - doesn't seem at all intimidated by Marge; not only does she kiss Homer right in front of her, she casually tosses off Marge's attempts to lay down her marital territory with that "MRS Homer Simpson" assertion). This is what makes her "Bagged Me A Homer" song so painfully double-edged. On the one hand, this very brazen declaration of her feelings for Homer and her assumption that he's going to be packing in his old life for her confirms Marge's worst fears and indicates that there is a very nasty collision course coming up on the horizon. But it also represents a very sudden, upbeat change in Lurleen's style, which speaks volumes about the shakiness of Lurleen's newfound optimism. She thinks that her life is about to turn around, not because her career is taking off, but because she's finally found a man who cares about her. Lurleen rallies her back-up musicians into the recording with the battle cry "Let's break some hearts!" and it's sadly obvious that the one heart she's setting up to be broken is her own. The ending, when it comes, is not going to be pretty.

Lurleen does actually get closure (which is more than Jacques received), and it's every bit as searingly poignant as we'd expect. Homer realises that he has to wash his hands of her, so he dumps her unceremoniously with the record label representative for the low, low price of $50. Homer misses out on the opportunity to at least squeeze a handsome sum from this emotionally traumatic experience, but accepts that he has something bigger at stake. The final sequence has Lurleen on TV, performing her final song, "Stand By Your Manager", in which she admits defeat, while Homer retreats from the public eye and back to Evergreen Terrace, where he reconciles with Marge. Lurleen gets her big televised break and is now presumably headed for greater things, while Homer willfully embraces his life of humble domesticity. The eyes of the world are now on Lurleen, and yet she's the one who ends up alone. Hard road for her, but then the status quo's a bitch.

So, to answer my initial question, we were certainly in DEFCON 2 for much of this episode, but did we ever cross over into DEFCON 1? It's a tough call; Homer's overall obliviousness and the ambiguity as to what he really wants with Lurleen can only provide a buffer for so far in; the potential tipping point occurs when Homer initially refuses to negotiate the ownership of Lurleen's contract. Not to mention the whole device of Homer's love life flashing before his eyes, which has associations with death. I don't think there's a point where Homer is ever totally convinced that he wants Lurleen over Marge (compared to "Life on The Fast Lane", where Marge did initially accept Jacques' invitation to get physical), which is why I'd still lean toward keeping it in DEFCON 2, but I do think we've gone as far up to the edge as we possibly can.

Finally, I want to say something about the line-up at the Googolplex, which is a really loving tribute to the inanity of the movie-going experience in the early 1990s (although I can't work out if I'll Fry Your Face III is meant to be an action movie or some kind of cannibalistic horror). If I had to choose between this dubious lot, then I would certainly be headed into The Smell in Room 19. It seems that the most popular movie is Look Who's Oinking, which is an obvious dig at the Look Who's Talking films starring John Travolta and that lady from Cheers that were hot at the time. Ordinarily, I'd make some kind of Philistines remark, except that I recently came dangerously close to purchasing the full set of those at a junk shop for the bargain price of 50p. I put it back when I realised that it was missing the disc with the movie where Herb Powell plays a talking dog. I guess I've forfeited my right to call anybody a Philistine for at least six months.

I Am Curious (Yellow): The Vexing Case of The Yellow Album (aka Things That Make You Go Hmmm!)

So, speaking of vanishing Prince numbers in projects associated with James L. Brooks...isn't it about time we discussed The Yellow Album, the Simpsons' lesser-known and (much-belated) follow-up to their 1990 hit record The Simpsons Sing The Blues?

Back in 1989, The Simpsons debuted as a standalone series and the world fell in love with it almost immediately. In particular, they fell in love with Bart's anarchic, t-shirt slogan-ready irreverence, and you can bet that corporate America was all poised to turn Bart's one-kid rebellion to their advantage. One of the most infamous products of this initial bout of Bartmania was a novelty pop song, "Do The Bartman", which spawned a popular music video and some years down the line was confirmed to have been co-written by Michael Jackson, who is referenced explicitly in the lyrics. (I hesitate to raise the question, but what exactly is the status of "Do The Bartman" in light of the decision made by the Simpsons heads back in March of this year? Has it gone into the same sin bin as "Stark Raving Dad"?). A worldwide smash, "Do The Bartman" wound up becoming the headline act for the album The Simpsons Sing The Blues (the brainchild of producer David Geffen, who later convinced Jackson Browne to take a stab at writing the title song to James L. Brooks' attempted musical I'll Do Anything), which appeared on shelves in December 1990 in time to exploit the lucrative Christmas markets and swiftly went double platinum. Nowadays, it's easy to dismiss the project as a cynical, meritless attempt to cash in on what at the time was foreseen as being only a momentary fad, but back then we all thought that The Bartman was the height of cool. In the years that followed the Simpsons themselves had absolutely no qualms about poking fun at this particularly gaudy chapter in their careers, the first really transparent example occurring in the Season 3 episode "Treehouse of Horror II", where the family become overnight sensations through the malefic powers of a severed monkey paw and put out an album entitled The Simpsons Go Calypso, complete with Homer and Marge singing a duet of "Man Smart (Woman Smarter)". The show took an even more viciously self-deprecating turn in the Season 5 episode "Bart Gets Famous", where Bart experiences an intense but ultimately short-lived period in the limelight through the equally malefic magic of hollow, easily marketed sloganeering, and gets to record an ersatz MC Hammer track in which he blathers his catchphrase over and over (elsewhere within the same season, Lisa laments that she would be mortified if anybody ever made a lousy product with the Simpsons name on it). Meanwhile, Krustophenia sits on the shelf.

The Simpsons Sing The Blues was such a runaway success that it was basically inevitable that talk would eventually turn to the possibility of a sequel. For a time Dame Rumour was all abuzz about a second Simpsons album being in the works, with contributions from Prince, Linda Ronstadt and C+C Music Factory, but this was nothing more than vaporware...until November 1998, when The Yellow Album randomly showed up out of the blue (albeit without a Prince track in sight). This prompted a few new questions as to what had taken it so long and why it had suddenly appeared now, long after the initial "Do The Bartman" star had faded (although the TV series was still going strong). The story Dame Rumour was now telling was that James L. Brooks was pushing for the album to be released back in 1993, whereas Matt Groening was extremely eager to can the entire project (although he co-wrote one of the tracks, "Ten Commandments of Bart"). From the looks of it, Groening had won out for years, and managed to keep the general populace from experiencing the delights of The Yellow Album, but I guess that in 1998 someone noticed that they had this album lying around and figured they might as well use it. Actually, Robert W. Getz, author of Unauthorised Guide To The Simpsons Collectables and Further Adventures in The Simpsons Collectibles, speculates that what finally enabled the album to see the light of day was the success of Songs In The Key of Springfield, a soundtrack album comprised of songs taken directly from the TV series, released by Rhino Records in 1997. A sequel, Go Simpsonic with The Simpsons, followed later in 1999, but I find it plausible that they yearned for something to fill that gap and keep the public's appetite for Simpsons music whetted, and The Yellow Album was all there and ready to go. If so, then The Yellow Album was effectively put out, not as a follow-up to its spiritual ancestor The Simpsons Sing The Blues, but to the first soundtrack album, despite their being such drastically different animals. With one, you get the multitude of affectionate Broadway parodies and general pop cultural riffing that encapsulated so much of the zest and spirit of the series over the years. The Yellow Album, by contrast, is a slickly-produced pop product, assembled with a clear air of bubblegum disposability that many are inclined to dismiss as contradictory to the entire Simpsons ethos. Make no mistake, this is not a universally beloved album among fans.

My parents bought me a copy of The Yellow Album for the Xmas of '98; back then, I had no idea that there had been a follow-up to The Simpsons Sing The Blues in the works, but even without knowing the backstory, I figured out very quickly that this album's existence was the result of a freaky tear in the space-time continuum. Several details betrayed the fact that it was intended for consumption by denizens of a much younger time in the 1990s. Firstly, there are numerous references made to the TV series throughout, although to nothing further than Season 4. Secondly, on the album cover we see a Krusty doll wearing a t-shirt with the slogan "Welcome Ren & Stimpy", although by 1998 The Ren & Stimpy Show had been out of production for three years and was already yesterday's news. Finally, there's the issue of the music itself, which feels like a perfectly-preserved time capsule of the kind of synthy, dance-orientated filler material you'd have found on many a pop album from a few years prior. Listening to The Yellow Album in the final days of 1998 was a disconcerting experience, like socialising with someone who'd been in a coma for years and was now staggering around, dazed and bewildered at how much the world had changed since they last laid eyes on it. I liked it, but it was so square.

Still, it has to be said that, however much mud fans and music critics were inclined to sling at The Yellow Album, the cover, a mock-up of The Beatles' 1967 game-changer Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, is undeniably brilliant. The album itself might have fallen through the cracks of zeitgeist and into an oblivion of general indifference, but the cover has a degree of cultural iconography all of its own. It was recreated as the couch gag for a couple of Season 8 episodes ("Bart After Dark" and "The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show" - although it was later swapped out in the latter for a Flintstones gag, in order to commemorate The Simpsons surpassing The Flintstones as the longest running primetime animated sitcom). In 2005, US artist Brian Donnelly, aka Kaws, created his own version of the cover, "The KAWS Album", in which the characters were all modified to have freaky X's over their eyes, and which in April 2019 sold for 14.8 million at a Hong Kong auction. They've got Sideshow Bob on there, which definitely makes me happy, but what's lovelier still is that they also have Karl (from "Simpson and Delilah"), making this one of the rare pieces of Simpsons merchandise out there to acknowledge his under-championed existence. Ditto Herb Powell. I'm aware that their being featured here is yet another symptom of the album being intended for a slightly earlier era, for back in 1993 their episodes were still relatively recent and there was a host of more prominent supporting characters who had yet to be introduced or cemented as series regulars, but in 1998 it was still pleasantly surprising to see such a loving throwback to some of those Springfieldian faces who hadn't been seen for so long.

The biggest mystery of The Yellow Album is of course the fate of that phantom Prince song. The track, entitled "My Name Is Bart", was a pastiche of Prince's own 1992 single "My Name Is Prince". Obviously, the Prince collaboration would have been the album's heavy-hitter, intended to equal their earlier success in working with Michael Jackson (even if they were unable to publicise Jackson's involvement at the time), so it seems egregious that this particular track should be the one unaccounted for when The Yellow Album finally clawed its way out of limbo. We know that the track was featured as part of the original package; it was included on some promo copies of the album, but for whatever reason was yanked from the commercial release. I'm not convinced that its inclusion would have enabled The Yellow Album to resonate any better with the general public - "My Name Is Prince" was already six years old by the time it appeared, and the album had certainly missed its opportunity to ride along on its coattails - but it feels incomplete without it. What The Yellow Album really feels as if it needs is some kind of a hook, an obvious stand-out track to give the project a better sense of structure and identity than just a random assortment of Simpsons-orientated pop.

Nathan Rabin of The AV Club covered the album as part of his Bureau of Regrettable Ideas, and made no bones about how little he cared for it. Much of what he says is entirely valid, although some of his criticisms are a little...peculiar? Specifically I'm talking about this one line:

"...remarkably, the title, redolent of hot, steaming urine, is one of the lesser miscalculations involved."

Err, you feeling well there, Rabin? At the very least, I hope that Rabin is consistent and had the exact same criticism of Yellow Submarine. I'm not even going to ask what kind of imagery The White Album must conjure up for him.

Rabin reserves most of his vitriol for The Yellow Album, although he is every bit as scathing toward The Simpsons Sing The Blues, which he dismisses as "ancillary merchandise, the equivalent of a poorly constructed Bart Simpson giveaway doll from Burger King." My response to that would be that even poorly constructed giveaway dolls from fast food outlets can have their pleasures. I'll confess that, although I'm well aware of the mercenary, corporate intentions behind the product, I actually do like The Simpsons Sing The Blues. It is something of a guilty pleasure, my perspective is undoubtedly coloured in no small way by my personal nostalgia, and I freely admit that there's a mind-numbing amount of filler in the track list, but absolutely nothing in me will ever allow myself to spurn it as a bad album. I'm enough of a sap to feel strangely moved by Lisa's rendition of Billie Holliday's "God Bless The Child", and Smithers gets an improvised guitar solo, so that's a plus point. And while "Do The Bartman" itself does sound unmistakably like a product of its time, the music video still has a special place in my heart (I mean, why wouldn't it? Sideshow Bob puts in an appearance, Jacques and Karl have a queer-baiting moment, and there's even a Willard reference, although you'd have to be particularly eagle-eyed to spot it).

The Yellow Album on the other hand...well, it doesn't have quite the same luxury of nostalgia. Nor did it come with any fun or witty visuals to help inject fresh life into any of its overproduced pop numbers (music videos were planned for the proposed 1993 release, but by 1998 those plans had obviously been ditched). Honestly, I think the album's best niche is as a simple curiosity piece. If you look at it less as a serious attempt to add something meaningful and innovative to the Simpsons legacy and more as a strange side-project that never quite came to full fruition, then perhaps it can inspire some degree of affection in you. It's an album that arrived so conspicuously in the wrong time and place as to suggest a disrupted or alternative universe, and not necessarily as bleak as the one Rabin identifies where "The Simpsons wasn’t a searing, trenchant satire of American culture and the hypocrisy and greed of our cultural institutions, but rather a cheesy vehicle for a novelty joke band." This is a bizarre case of an album that only half-exists; a puzzling paradox of What Might Have Been vs What Was But Not Really. Above all, The Yellow Album is just bemusing.

The opening track is "Love?", which is loosely based on the events of the Season 3 episode "Bart's Friend Falls In Love", and which was co-written by Robert Clivilles and David Cole of C+C Music Factory. It makes for an appropriate enough opener, since it's emblematic of the kind of problems that beset The Yellow Album as a whole, not least its obsolescence. By 1993 C+C Music Factory's sound was already starting to sound kind of dated, and by 1998 this obviously stood no chance of holding up. There is also a deep-rooted underlying weirdness that pervades this song, which I don't think is limited to Nelson Muntz's inexplicable cameo as Bart's mirror reflection, or that the refrain of "What's this word called love?" for years sounded like, "What's this spread called love?" to my ears (in fact, that's what I still hear). Something seems fundamentally off-kilter with the entire Simpsons universe, and that's a feeling that doesn't quite go away when the second track kicks in and Lisa starts singing her rendition of  "Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves", originally a 1985 hit for Eurythmics and Aretha Franklin, here with Ann & Nancy Wilson of Heart. With "My Name Is Bart" excised, the album doesn't have an obvious successor to "Do The Bartman"; the closest offering would be the Groening-written "Ten Commandments of Bart", which might have done the job had it only managed to be a couple of minutes shorter.

The Yellow Album boasts some weird-ass collaborations; for one, there's a more-or-less straight love duet between Homer Simpson and guest artist Linda Ronstadt (um?) but it doesn't compare to the penultimate track, "Every Summer With You", which is by far the most baffling song in the listing. Marge and Abe are apparently now an item (um?) and are singing about their desire to take a vacation at San Diego bay, and...oh wait, that's supposed to be Homer? So I guess the real mystery would be just what the heck was up with Dan on the day he recorded this (edit: it has since been brought to my attention that the track has actually been presented in the incorrect speed, so Dan's presumably not to blame, although he benefits the least from this particular inexplicability). Actually, despite just how distractingly off-colour Dan's performance sounds, this is probably my favourite track on the album; it's sweet, gentle and hasn't aged too hideously. It's also the only track in the album in which Marge appears (since "I Just Can't Help Myself", which features verses from the other three vocal family members, doesn't see fit to include her...that track is probably my least favourite, despite Bart referencing The Twilight Zone). My second favourite would be "She's Comin' Out Swingin'" by Lisa and The P-Funk All-Stars, which like "Ten Commandments" suffers from being overlong, but does at least incorporate the novelty of hearing Lisa converse with Dr Funkenstein about social security cards.

Elsewhere on The Yellow Album, we also get "Twenty-Four Hours A Day", a vaguely Bollywood-infused dance track performed by Apu, which was presumably intended to be the album's counterpart to its predecessor's "Look At All Those Idiots", in being the only track to momentarily peer at life outside of the Simpson household. I suspect that they purposely penned a song dedicated to one of Hank Azaria's characters to compensate for that fact he was left out of The Simpsons Sing The Blues. I happen to think that "Look At All Those Idiots", a surprisingly successful combination of contemporary dance-pop and Burns' searing contempt for his fellow man, is the superior of the two. Unlike The Simpsons Sing Blues, where only three supporting characters appeared - Burns, Smithers and Bleeding Gums Murphy - The Yellow Album pools from the show's ever-growing supporting cast fairly often, and numerous cameos abound, whether they make sense or not (although that aforementioned Nelson appearance is by far the most confusing).

The final track on the album is "Hail To Thee, Kamp Krusty", which was lifted from the Season 4 episode "Kamp Krusty", and closes this otherwise upbeat album on a bizarrely dark and unsettling note, in which Bart finally sees through the money-grubbing callousness of his idol Krusty The Clown and incites rebellion among his fellow campers. Nowadays the track inevitably carries a melancholic tone, thanks to the participation of the late Russi Taylor. For you see, The Yellow Album DOES feature a Prince, and his name is Martin. If nothing else, then "Hail To Thee, Kamp Krusty" is a wonderful place to hear Taylor deliver a star performance as her most prominent Simpsons character. Krusty, Otto, Lisa and Bart all get their turn in the spotlight, but it's Martin who really steals the show, as he belts out an indignant tirade after being subjected to the horrors of Krusty's weight loss program: "A pox on thee, clown Krusty/Your behaviour gives us pause/Your heart is hard/You have no regard/For the state's child labour laws!"

Perhaps the track's most vexing curiosity lies in Rabin's most astute criticism of The Yellow Album as a whole, namely that it is "a non-ironic version of the kind of mercenary cash-in The Simpsons has satirized mercilessly over the years, most notably via Krusty The Clown." This track, after all, does climax with Bart's disillusionment as a beleaguered consumer whose brand loyalty has caused him to suffer the ill-effects of one crummy tie-in product too many. As the track fades out, with the tortured cries of an enraged and malnourished Bart demanding the total annihilation of Kamp Krusty, it feels so dissonant, like the album suddenly took a sharp turning into a very run-down neighbourhood and decided to settle there. It's almost as if The Yellow Album has, on its death bed, become painfully self-aware and wants out.

What The Yellow Album ultimately offers is a beguiling collection of oddities, each more head-scratching than the last; its entire being is just way too perplexing for me to possibly dislike it, and I would wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone with an interest in the series' stranger, less successful offshoots (along with "Springfield's Most Wanted"). Coincidentally, The Yellow Album dropped on 24th November 1998, the exact same day as Chef Aid, that baffling tie-in album for the young and impudent South Park, which was currently enjoying its own equivalent of Bartmania and, like The Simpsons before it, desperately trying to squeeze out every last attainable dime while it lasted. I can't decide whether that put The Yellow Album at a disadvantage or not. On the one hand, South Park was very much the hot and edgy cartoon of the hour, and The Yellow Album must have seemed hopelessly dated and inept, a retroactive fad with a sound from yesteryear throwing itself into the same arena as those fresh and funky foul-mouths from Colorado. On the other hand, Chef Aid was such a poorly-assembled, unlistenable mess of an album (a disappointing proportion of the tracks had nothing to do with South Park and amounted to blatant guest whoring, linked in under the tenuous banner of a fictitious benefit concert) that The Yellow Album could only have scored points for being the lesser anticlimax. You may think that The Yellow Album had something of an identity crisis, in being very conspicuously born out of time, but Chef Aid is neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring.

Finally, am I the only person out there who would actually love to have heard the rendition of "Man Smart (Woman Smarter)" by Homer and Marge in full? Might have made for a wonderful hidden track on any subsequent Simpsons releases.

I'll Do Anything and A Dilly of a Pickle

Last time, when I covered Jackson Browne's role in attempting to bolster James L. Brooks' would-be musical I'll Do Anything, I said something that, with hindsight, might have come across as incredibly naive: "If, like me, you're into I'll Do Anything and yearn for the vaporised musical that never was, then any window you can get into what might have been is a precious thing." That last part is certainly true, but make no mistake - I'm not deluded enough to believe there's another soul on this planet who's anywhere near as invested in this blanked and blanked-out picture as I. Most people, if they're aware of the film at all, see only an unfortunate blip in Brooks' career, sandwiched in between the heavy-hitters Broadcast News and As Good As It Gets. I'm all alone in this idiosyncratic fixation of mine. The rest of the world will never know the joy of waiting for a VHS copy of Paul Mazursky's (equally effaced) 1993 feature The Pickle to arrive in the mail, just so as to view a two-minute trailer at the start hinting at the film as it was once meant to be, with all its Prince, King and O'Connor-written numbers intact. It was a unique experience that cost me $24. I leapt the chance to by The Pickle, following a tip-off as just what kinds of hidden treasures lay tucked away at the start of that tape. So when the VHS arrived, it was almost like I was uncovering this tiny pocket of oasis that had somehow survived an all-out apocalypse. I came away feeling truly giddy at the rare and wonderful world into which I had just glimpsed. I'll Do Anything, with Prince tunes and dancing studio hands, just as God (James L. Brooks) intended. It was only two minutes' worth of meagre, fleeting pieces, but it was as close to the actual thing as I was ever likely to get, and I was going to be happy with that, dammit. $24 well-spent. Only then I discovered that somebody had uploaded the entire opening to VHS release of The Pickle to YouTube a few months prior, meaning that I could have just gone online and watched the damned thing for free all along. Bum bum bum bum bum.

Do I have any regrets? Nah. I've previously been very upfront about how staunch an advocate I am for physical media. YouTube uploads come and ago, but I like having something solid, that I can hold in my hands, which stands as an artifact of Brooks' original vision. Tangible evidence that this buried musical was indeed once here. On top of which, the anticipation was a huge part of the thrill. And besides, I've now got a copy of this movie, The Pickle, which I likely wouldn't have happened across otherwise. It too has been buried by the sands of time. For good reason, you might say? I'm aware that, as Mazursky movies go, The Pickle doesn't exactly have the best of reputations, but the premise (high-minded director makes movie about giant space pickle) does at least sound intriguingly offbeat enough for me to give it 103 minutes of my time.

So how is the trailer? Obviously it's a very different beast with that vibrant, characteristically Prince backing track running throughout. In fact, it's startling just how immeasurably more alive this promo feels compared to the trailer that eventually surfaced for the final theatrical cut (which honed in more on the sentimental aspects of the film, at the expense of its sardonic love-hate missives to Hollywood). While the theatrical release seems narratively complete (more or less), I think you can tell that it was forced to expend a huge amount of its own blood upon the cutting room floor, leaving it in a functional but peculiarly languid state; here, it's borderline surreal just how much energy and freshness the trailer zips along with. This is a privileged look at a star-crossed picture that still believes in itself, shortly before the weight of the world swoops in and crushes its zestful spirit.

In addition to the film's infamously relinquished choreography, we also get a number of non-musical moments that weren't featured in the theatrical cut. These include:

• A scene where Burke grabs hold of a tree trunk and shakes leaves onto himself and Matt (the characters' attire indicates that this would have happened during the sequence where Burke first talks Matt into becoming his chauffeur).
• A scene with the younger (longer-haired) Matt and Beth kissing, at a more optimistic time in their relationship.
• A scene where Jeannie embraces Matt while exclaiming, "I love you so much".
• A moment with Matt prepping for his Mr Deeds screen test that isn't in the final montage.

The film rounds off with the unfulfilled promise that it would be "coming this Christmas". Sadly, no. The film missed the slated December 1993 release date and instead limped out into theatres, in its severely mutilated state, the following February, where it had its hide handed to it by a certain crass-com featuring a pet detective. But that's all spilled milk now. As things currently stand, a director's cut ever seeing the light of day seems like a futile pipe dream and, as such, this two-minute montage is probably the closest that most of us will ever get to experiencing the film pre-dismemberment. So get yourself a copy of The Pickle on VHS and cherish it dearly. Or, if you're not as bothered as me (and let's face it, you aren't) then click on that YouTube video while it lasts. But you'll never know the sheer thrill of having to wait fourteen days for a wad of magnetic tape to drop through your door just for a tantalising glimpse into an alternate universe where a forgotten ex-musical was allowed to be itself. That experience was purely mine.

I'll Do Anything (Jackson Browne Edition)

So, we've already gone into I'll Do Anything and the tantalising case history of the hip and modern musical about life in Hollywood in the 1990s that was forced to jettison its array of songs by Prince, Carole King and Sinead O'Conner when the world decided that it wasn't ready for that kind of thing. There are further twists to the tale, however, ever more fingers in this supremely sticky pie and, happily, even more outlets in which the ghost of the film, as originally envisioned, is able to live on in its transmuted afterlife. If you're a fan of singer-songwriter Jackson Browne, then odds are good that you own a copy of his 1993 album I'm Alive, tucked away on which is a rather stirring track with the title of none other than "I'll Do Anything". The shared moniker is no coincidence, for at one time this was apparently slated to be the title track to James L. Brooks' ill-fated ex-musical. Browne brought this up in an interview he gave to host Sam Jones in a 2014 installment of the DirecTV series Off Camera, and he certainly does talk the talk. I was able to get hold of the interview in podcast form, and transcribed below are Browne's words on the matter. Note that in the actual interview Browne has a tendency to wander off into semi-comprehensible waffling, which I've done my best to scale down on here:

Browne: Since you brought up "I'll Do Anything", that was written for a musical, for a movie, called I'll Do Anything...

Jones: You're kidding me.

Browne: ...which before it was over, before it was released, they took...yeah, James Brooks movie, starring, uh, Albert Brooks, Nick Nolte, and uh, they had a lot of great music in that movie, and they didn't have the title song. They didn't feel they had the title song. And I never, never sign up for this kind of thing 'cos I'm all about reducing expectations and I can't, like, get on...but um, actually [David] Geffin called me and said look, you might as well take a crack at this, because other people have done it but they don't have the song, and if you write it...they need the song, give it a shot, and it's a good movie...But the song was about...it was gonna be sung by Albert Brooks, and it was funny...

Jones: No kidding.

Browne: It was about Albert Brooks singing to a test audience. I'm...I'm gonna ruin this song for you, right now...

Jones: It's ruined already!

Browne: Okay. Because in the movie he's a record producer. "I don't make art films, I make popcorn films!" And he's singing to a test audience that's about to view his latest film. He's pleading with them for a good report. He's singing to them, "Think of all we've meant to each other." And I knew this would be funny if it was really like, this is person who was basically [an] amoral person, pleading to be considered somebody of, you know like, think of what we've meant to each other. He's already told you he...has the crassest of ideals, all he does is make money...But I mean, it didn't get used in the movie. For whatever reason they took all the music out and I was left with a song that I would not have written for myself.

Jones: No kidding.

Browne: I wouldn't have written that song, at that time. As a matter of fact, one of the reviewers of the album when it came out was like, this is a co-dependency anthem...like, I'll do anything, I'll make the place a place for you and me, it was very, as you say, desperate. And that's what was gonna be so funny...I kind of tricked myself. I never take that kind of assignment, I'm adverse to it. But in that case I wrote one of my favorite songs.

If, like me, you're into I'll Do Anything and yearn for the vaporised musical that never was, then any window you can get into what might have been is a precious thing. Browne's story offers an intriguing new twist, as the song in question seems slightly out of sync with everything we've heard about the title song from other sources. "Tommy" (not his real name), who claimed on Joe Baltake's blog The Passionate Moviegoer to have worked on the film as an extra, informs us that it was going to be a tap number, and Browne's contribution doesn't really sound like a song to which you could feasibly tap dance. It also doesn't match the refrains of "I'll Do Anything" heard throughout the trailer on the VHS release of The Pickle (more on that later), which doesn't credit Jackson Browne as a contributor. This suggests two possible scenarios - either the version of "I'll Do Anything" that appeared on Browne's I'm Alive was drastically rewritten from that created for use in the film, or Browne's offering was rejected in advance of the film's all-out musical purge (Browne is vague on the circumstances of the song's rejection, although he does make it sound as if it was part of the wider cull). Nevertheless, if this is an indication of how Burke's big number was at one point intended to sound, then it's an unexpectedly tender plea to envision coming out of such a graceless character. In that regard it plays the perfect trick on you. For context, the reason why Jones insists that the song has been "ruined" is that, before Browne explains to him the genesis of the track, he cites it as an example of a song to which he was able to relate differently at separate stages of his life - firstly, on a "desperate, romantic" level back in 1993 at the album's release, and later in terms of his parental devotion. But, by its inception, it's a song that harbours a fundamental insincerity; it's an ostensibly pretty tune that, on close scrutiny, reveals a tortured desperation lurking at its core (the protagonist is clearly insecure as to whether of the object of their devotions reciprocates their commitment - there's a lot of talk about another potentially taking their place), one that readily bleeds into the kind of wretched spinelessness exhibited by Burke's character. And since this is the title number, it also encapsulates the entire ethos of the picture - that is, the near-total degradation of what once were grand motives. Rob a bank, steal a tank - whatever it takes to secure our share of bones.

So the mystery deepens. And the film's assortment of ghostly runoffs gets ever more bountiful.

Night Gallery: Big Surprise (aka We dig the Furry Freak Brothers and the Twilight Zone)

Last time, I brought up this online article which I read about ten years ago, and which now looks to have vanished without a trace, decrying the 1980s Twilight Zone adaptation of Ray Bradbury's "The Burning Man" for being a pallid knock-off of the Night Gallery episode "Big Surprise". I consider "The Burning Man" to be pretty massively underrated, so naturally I couldn't let that pass without comment. Both stories certainly have a number of points in common - both are taut, tenses exercises in fairly minimalist horror, each roughly about eleven minutes long. Both involve deeply eccentric old men whose intentions, we suspect, are none too savoury for the gullible preteen children unfortunate enough to have crossed paths with them. Both also involve some form of unspeakable underground menace that's been threatening to claw its way up to the surface. But then, "The Burning Man" is no more of a recycling of "Big Surprise" than it is of "The Elevator" (or vice versa, given that Bradbury's short story came first), with which it also shares a few similar plot points (chiefly, that both come from a distinctly entomophobic vein). What "The Burning Man" is, when you strip it right down, is a variation on the old phantom hitchhiker legend, one which taps into numerous primal fears about venturing into the vast unknown, combining wary observations about nature's curiosities with shades of Biblical catastrophe in order to pit its hapless protagonists up against a particularly monstrous personification of the natural world. It's weird, it's unsettling and there's a likeable kind of elegance to its unyielding oddness. "Big Surprise" plays like one of those interactive campfire stories that went just a little too far - it feels, for better of worse, like the sick product of a diseased mind. Whose diseased mind, you ask? None other than I Am Legend author Richard Matheson, whose shorter pieces provided food for a number of horror anthologies throughout the latter half of the 20th century. Matheson wrote "Big Surprise" first as a short story in 1959, and later adapted a screenplay for Night Gallery in 1971, which was directed by Jeannot Szwarc.

Both tales, I think, are enormously underappreciated, but whereas I love "The Burning Man" with all of my heart, with "Big Surprise" it's much more of a fraught love/hate relationship. On the one hand, it would be just plain churlish to ignore just how beautifully, wonderfully executed a short-form horror "Big Surprise" is, just how ferociously it crawls under your skin and screws with your nerves. On the other hand, "Big Surprise" might just be the the most sickeningly ghoulish piece of horror television ever devised - it's mean and it's malevolent, and whenever I watch it, I inevitably end up feeling as if  my personal and emotional space has been thoroughly violated. I certainly get my heebie jeebies' worth from this thing, and I do have to hate it for that.

Serling's opening narration:

"Our painting reminds us that there's a strange fascination at digging holes alongside ancient oaks. You give the average man a shovel and an "X" on a map and the fantasies come thick and fast. Pirate gold, hidden confederate treasure, and sometimes the unexpected...and sometimes the unwelcome. Hence the title: Big Surprise."

"Big Surprise" concerns a trio of schoolkids, Chris (Vincent Van Patten), Jason (Marc Vahanian) and Dan (Eric Chase) who get cajoled into digging a really deep hole by local kook Mr Hawkins (John Carradine) on the promise that if they walk ten paces and dig four feet, they'll unearth a "big surprise". Carradine is so skin-crawlingly repellent as Mr Hawkins that he makes Roberts Blossom from "The Burning Man" seem sweet and chummy, for all of his feverish rantings about human locusts and a genetic evil eating panting white dogs. He singles out one child, Chris, in particular, possibly because he recognises him as the most easily-led of the trio, or the most fearful and therefore the ripest prey for his malevolent capering. Szwarc's direction wastes no time in aligning Chris's fear and distrust of Mr Hawkins with our own; early on, there's a tracking shot revealing Chris's perspective as Mr Hawkins beckons him ever closer, followed by a number of queasy close-up shots in which you can practically feel the hot breath of this leering, whiskered creep as he bears down upon you. But what's queasier than Hawkins himself is the sensation that Chris is caught tight between two conflicting urges; the sensible urge from deep within his gut which tells him to keep his distance, and his fear of being exposed as a sissy before his peers; thus, the tracking shot plays like a particularly gut-wrenching game of chicken, testing just how close we're prepared to get to Hawkins before the tension becomes unbearable. This is something of which Hawkins is all-too aware; when Chris insists that he's not afraid of anything, Hawkins practically growls, "That's a lie!" He knows that Chris, more than anything, fears being made a fool. And this is something that he's only too eager to exploit.

Like Chris, we spend the segment caught between conflicting sensations - that is, our intuitive understanding that whatever's buried four feet below the specified location will certainly be nothing good, and our lethal curiosity to find out for sure. As we get deeper and deeper into the run-time, we know that we're marching closer toward inevitable doom and yet we keep on rolling with it. At first, Jason and Dan are reluctant to accompany Chris in his digging, particularly the yo-yo slinging Jason, who believes that Hawkins is playing a prank at their expense, but Chris convinces them that Hawkins might be sincere about sharing the location of hidden treasure. So they grab some shovels and start digging. After digging tirelessly for hours and boring out what they believe to be four feet, Jason and Dan grow weary of the endeavor and abandon Chris, taunting him for his gullibility. Chris feels humiliated, but remains too firmly committed to the task at hand to be capable of backing out now. He continues to dig, all by his lonesome, and eventually his shovel hits something. Chris considers recalling Jason and Dan, but decides that after their desertion he is not obligated to share any of the potential spoils with them. He uncovers a casket, and the lid opens up to reveal...actually, I'm not going to spell it out here. If you've read this far, then odds are that you already know the outcome or don't mind spoilers, but the fact is that mere words couldn't possibly do justice to the raw, visceral nastiness of that final twist (although the outcome is hinted at the start of the segment, when Chris insists that he wouldn't go near Mr Hawkins for a million dollars).

Back in my forum-lurking days, I came across multiple comments from viewers who were entirely unsympathetic toward Chris, with some even going to far as to express hope that he was dragged down into the casket and buried underground as comeuppance for his greediness. Good grief, people can be harsh. For one thing, Chris is only a child, and what he's doing has hurt nobody except himself (and surely if we're going to be casting morality stones we might lob them at the so-called friends who ditched Chris and left him all by himself in the woods?). Secondly, Chris is all of us. He's still caught up in that game of chicken he was pressured into at the start of the segment, and it's ultimately his determination and all-consuming inability to admit defeat and abandon an obviously self-destructive situation that drives him, not his avarice (although it's his decision not to call back his friends that proves his biggest mistake; he leaves himself alone, and therefore highly vulnerable). Chris's weaknesses are human weaknesses. Besides which, do we really want to see Chris shown up by the aloof, too-cool-for-school Jason? Naturally we don't. We're complicit in this obdurateness.

"Big Surprise" fails to impress reviewer David Juhl, who describes it as a "decent segment [with a] dumb ending", and poses the following questions of the final reveal: "Is Hawkins a ghost? An illusion? What is he? Also, Chris was the one of the three who most believed what Hawkins told him, so why punish him with such a fright?" I interpret the story differently, however. I don't believe the intention is to "punish" Chris so much as to bait him and prey on him. He goes after Chris because he sees him as the most likely to get caught up in this game of chicken. As for the actual nature of old Mr Hawkins, I don't think that's really important. He's simply an unspeakable terror that insists on getting up close and personal and staring us straight in the face, daring us to look away as his fiendish gaze transfixes us in horror. What does Mr Hawkins intend to do with Chris? Molest him? Cannibalise him? Or has this all just been some kind of elaborate, gruesomely-conceived prank? Whatever it is, we know that the final situation doesn't exactly spell benignity and that, whether literally or metaphorically, Chris has effectively been digging his own grave out there.

It's a short segment, and yet a good portion of the narrative consists of the three kids digging relentlessly and getting nowhere. Szwarc does an excellent job of sustaining tension throughout, however, with a succession of fast cuts showing the frantic shoveling and mounting dirt piles, but more hauntingly still, the subtle wind that appears to get increasingly prominent the deeper the young protagonists dig, as if the local landscape anticipates a disturbance of a cataclysmic nature. There's a strong sense that trouble is brewing, which gets especially pointed during the pivotal moment where Chris finds himself deserted and alone, and takes pause to reflect on the fruitfulness of his endeavors before returning to the task with renewed vigor. The overhead shots dwarf the solitary Chris, giving us a dizzying glimpse of just how little and vulnerable his is, as the branches of the decaying trees stretch across him like the talons of a predatory betroth waiting to swoop in for the kill.

The final image, after we're treated to our titular "big surprise", shows Chris's perspective blurring into an atmospheric shot of clouds sweeping over a sunset as the world fades into darkness. It's an intriguing case of pathetic fallacy, but it adds a doubly ominous dimension to a story that was already unbearably diabolical, as if time and space are unraveling while the entire world plunges into black. What the hell did you dig up out there, Chris? Have you doomed us all? I made a point last time about how I didn't perceive Roberts Blossom's character in "The Burning Man" as the Anti-Christ, despite his indirectly likening himself to the Devil. Mr Hawkins...well, I don't know. He's whatever the sickest and most twisted recesses of your warped imagination want him to be. Nothing good. And that's enough.

Twilight Zone '85: The Burning Man (aka The Day of The Cicada)

So a funny thing happened a couple of months ago, when I reviewed the 1980s Twilight Zone  episode, "The Elevator", and insisted that it's an installment that gets very little love from fans. I said that, but I had a hard time corroborating it, since most of the fansites and articles I'd found roasting the episode a decade or so ago appear to have vanished without trace. Meanwhile, the few truly positive reviews, such as that of Postcards From The Zone, have stuck around, giving you the impression that the episode perhaps isn't quite as strongly reviled as I made out. You'll just have to take my word for it. What's also been snuffed from existence is an old article purporting to have singled out the ten worst episodes of the 1985 revival that had "The Burning Man" down at the No. 2 spot, comparing it unfavourably to the Night Gallery episode "Big Surprise", which the author also didn't seem to care for very much (I actually don't remember what it ranked as the very worst episode, but it may well have been "The Elevator"). Unlucky, because "The Burning Man" happens to be one of my all-time favourite TZ tales, across any of the program's incarnations. Whereas my feelings on "The Elevator" have remained fairly ambivalent (I have a greater appreciation for that story's subtext than I did several years ago, but it's still not top-tier TZ for me), I've long considered "The Burning Man" to be an extremely underrated short-form horror, not least because it has the distinction of being one of the few episodes of the 1980s Twilight Zone revival to have genuinely scared me. As a story, it's too flat-out weird and discombobulating to be cast aside, and it's in need of someone who's willing to champion the hell out of it.

"The Burning Man" was adapted from the Ray Bradbury short story of the same name, which can be located in Bradbury's 1976 anthology Long After Midnight. The teleplay, written by J.D. Feigelson (who also directed the episode), is extremely faithful to Bradbury's story, with most of the dialogue being transcribed word-for-word. Bradbury, of course, wrote the script for "The Elevator", and while "The Burning Man" is a vastly different Twilight Zone installment, tonally and thematically, the two stories actually have a surprising number of plot points in common. At the very least, the same basic template is there. They each involve two unwary individuals, blood relations in both cases, who venture out into some unknown, where they are menaced and - it's implied - ultimately devoured by an unnaturally gifted creepy-crawly. In that regard, "The Burning Man" is a far freakier tale of an arthropod kingdom out of whack.  The giant spider from "The Elevator" was the stuff of nightmares but it was, at the very least, just a regular dumb spider who happened to get lucky and swell to gargantuan size after stumbling across a bounty of mega-proteins. The bug in "The Burning Man" comes from an altogether darker, more uncanny region of the Zone, in that there's a lot that's grotesquely odd about him. For one, he seems to be in the midst an identity crisis, in that he's not certain whether he's a locust or a cicada and exhibits traits of both. Through some unknown, possibly demonic means, he's also taken on a humanoid form and possesses the gift the gab.

Unlike "The Elevator", "The Burning Man" is not a cautionary tale about mankind's treatment of the natural world. Rather, it's a straightforward horror playing into a number of fundamental primal fears about the dangers of leaving the familiar and traversing the other, the unpredictability of the wilderness versus the safety of the city, the sense that you are an encroacher in a land that operates according to vastly different laws, and that the people you might run into out there are not quite what they appear. If there's a cautionary message to be gleaned from "The Burning Man", it's about not pissing off hitch-hikers. Be nice to the bedraggled stowaways you encounter on the open highway, even if they are incredibly strange and weird you out with their prophetic ramblings, because you never know when you might actually be dealing with the human manifestation of a plague of ravenous locusts. Then again, Albert Brooks didn't do anything which could have conceivably incurred the wrath of Dan Aykroyd's hitch-hiker in Twilight Zone: The Movie and it didn't work out much better for him. So perhaps the Twilight Zone's actual position on the matter is that we'd all do well to simply remain at home. Where Mr Death will come calling for you anyway, as per the classic Twilight Zone episode, "Nothing In The Dark". If there's a universal message to be garnered from The Twilight Zone, it's that we're all screwed no matter what we do.

Our two hapless protagonists are Neva (Piper Laurie, best known for playing Margaret White in Brian De Palma's 1976 adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie) and her young nephew Doug (Andre Gower), who are looking to escape an intense summer heatwave by driving to a remote lake for an afternoon's swimming. Along the way they get flagged down by a spooky and disheveled old man who seems awfully rattled about something and wants a ride as fast away from his present location as possible. He's played by Roberts Blossom, a pretty wonderful character actor who built a career specialising in roles as kooky and eccentric loners - where you've almost certainly seen him is as Marley the South Bend Shovel Slayer from Home Alone. There, he spent much of the film manifesting the protagonist's worst fears - having free reign of your household is a lot less fun when the local serial killer has their eye on you - but he turned out to be entirely benevolent when Kevin actually spoke to him. Don't expect the same outcome here. From the go, his character in "The Burning Man" is insufferably garrulous, talking a lot but ostensibly making little sense. First, he rambles on about the intense heat and how it makes people behave strangely. Then he talks about the locusts who come about once every seventeen years and whether or not there could be such a thing as people who follow a similar cycle. Then he talks about what he defines as "genetic evil" - that is, people who have malevolence weaved so finely into their DNA that they are incapable of being anything but malevolent from the day they're born until they die. Then he starts talking about a terrible genetic evil that could crawl from the earth like a locust on an abnormally hot day like today and devour everything in sight. As his ramblings become increasingly frenzied and nonsensical, Neva grows ever less thrilled about having him along for the ride, but the guileless Doug is soon hanging on his every unhinged word. It's not surprising; he's the kind of unwanted travel companion who would either bug you out of your wits or scare you witless with his doom-laden monologues:

"Eat me some summer boy, summer, ma'am. Just devour it whole. Look at them trees, ain't they a whole dinner? Look at them fields of wheat, ain't that a feast? Them sunflowers by the road, by golly, there's breakfast. Tarpaper on the top of that house, there's lunch. And the lake, way up ahead, Jehoshaphat, that's dinner wine, drink it all!

Finally, when the old man starts raving about how this genetically evil human-locust will turn his insatiable appetite to dogs, cats and people (all entrees enjoyed by the spider in "The Elevator", incidentally), Neva reaches the end of her tether and boots him out of her car, warning him that she has all manner of religious artifacts that will protect her from demonic forces (this is a bluff, as she later admits to Doug). She and Doug then drive off, leaving the old man by the wayside, and enjoy a blissful afternoon at the lake. When the time comes for them to head back, Doug has second thoughts about what they might encounter on the return journey, remembering the old man's prophecy, but Neva assures him that no harm will come to them. As they drive along the road in the evening sun, they are stopped by a small boy in an immaculately clean white suit (Danny Cooksey), who claims to have been deserted by his family, and agree to give him a ride back into town. Further down the road, after darkness has completely set in, the boy leans over and whispers something into Neva's ear (inaudible to Doug and the viewer) which causes Neva to lose her composure. The car then inexplicably breaks down, leaving the occupants stranded by the roadside in the dead of night. The story ends with the young boy grinning with undisguised malevolence, and asking Neva and Doug if they've ever considered the possibility that there might be genetic evil in the world. The final image shows the car headlights fading to black as the sounds of cicadas in the outside world become overpowering and drown out all other sounds.

To understand this macabre story, it helps if you know something about the life cycle of the cicada, which is referenced prominently throughout, although this also leads us into our very first nitpick. The old man explicitly identifies the creatures as locusts, not cicadas, but these are two very different insects and only the cicada has the unique periodical lifestyle that involves spending thirteen or seventeen years (depending on the specific species) underground as an immature nymph and emerging en masse for a significantly shorter shot at life in adult form. The cicada's curious love of prime numbers is thought to be an anti-predation mechanism, evolved to prevent their life cycle from syncing up with those of other animals and giving cicada-eaters regular nourishment and population boosts. By contrast, locusts have a shorter life cycle of only a few months. Bradbury has conflated the two creatures, although this is something of a necessary evil, given that the locust carries a weighty symbolism all of its own. Although they are solitary insects for much of the time, certain environmental conditions can cause locusts congregate into ravenous, crop-devouring swarms of Biblical proportions. Blossom's character has characteristics of both insects - he's spent seventeen years underground, like a cicada, yet when he turns his attentions to the surrounding vegetation and starts raving about eating everything around him, he's pure locust; it's that hunger that signifies the terrible disaster looming on the horizon. At the same time, he remains recognisably a cicada, notably in his tendency to drive everyone around him to distraction with his incessant buzzing.

The unearthly twist in the story's tail is that the old man played by Blossom and the young boy who appears at the end are one and the same - he's a cicada/locust in human form, so the implication is that he's shed his nymph exoskeleton and revealed the fresh body lurking underneath (an outcome he'd previously hinted at when he mentioned to Doug that the hot weather makes you "feel as if you're gonna split wide open", and later explicitly described in the midst of his deranged, "Eat me some summer" monologue). What's curious is that the cycle seems to have happened in reverse for him - unlike the nymph cicada who emerges after many years underground and acquires a new adult form, the old man sheds his skin in order to become a juvenile; hence, there's a sense that he's able to keep on perpetuating himself and this is part of a highly preternatural cycle. The aspect of the story that has long puzzled me, however, has to do with just how much self-awareness our buggy friend possesses, at least in his initial form. When he first encounters Neva and Doug, the implication is that he's just crawled his way up from the ground after being submerged for all that time (in one of the few modifications to Bradbury's original story, we hear Neva specify that "it's the hottest July in sixteen or seventeen years", providing our first hint that we're up against something cyclic) hence why his clothes are so ragged. In the Twilight Zone episode, we good as see him emerging from the ground (rather, we hear the sounds of the earth shifting as he looms into view and surveys his surroundings quizzically), while in Bradbury's original text it's hinted that this wayward stranger has not had far to travel:

"For you could see where the old man had come across a field high with yellow grass baked and burnt by eight weeks of no rain. There was a path where the man had broken the grass and cleaved a passage to the road. The path went as far as one could see down to a dry swamp and an empty creek bed with nothing but baked hot stones in it and fried rock and melting sand."

The old man is the seventeen year evil he keeps raving about, begging the question as to whether he's aware that he's describing himself this entire time and, if so, is he genuinely afraid of what he's destined to come? And what are his reasons for hitching a ride with the two human passers-by, other than getting a giddy little kick out of watching them squirm before all hell inevitably breaks loose? There is definitely a startling change in the old man's demeanor when he launches into his "Eat me some summer" bit; thanks to Blossom's performance, he sounds as if he's savouring each individual mouthful as he goes, to the point that you can practically feel the flecks of saliva dripping from his tongue. For the first part of the story, there's meant to be ambiguity as to whether Blossom's character is a legitimate harbinger of doom or if he's simply a crazy lunatic whose brains are slowly frying in the heat, and the reality, by the end, looks to be a mixture of both. His character starts out confused and disorientated - he is, after all, a human-shaped bug who's emerged from after seventeen years (or longer) underground and into a particularly stifling heatwave. He possesses an innate knowledge of his uncanny life cycle and what this means for the world around him, but it's only as he begins surveying the local landscape and anticipating the impending destruction that the pieces appear to click into place and he falls in line with his voracious nature. It's the depraved, feverish energy that Blossom brings to the roles that makes "The Burning Man" so authentically terrifying; you get a sense that he's less a man than a terrible malignance rattling away inside an increasingly rickety human shell, becoming ever more frenzied as it attempts to claw its way into being. What is frighteningly evident is that at the very end of the story, when he returns in his rejuvenated form, he remembers his previous encounter with Neva and Doug - his final utterance of, "Have you ever wondered if there's such a thing as genetic evil in the world?", coupled with that extremely unpleasant grin he flashes, is way too pointed for him not to - and looks to have been lying in wait for them this entire time. Not only is he about to turn his insatiable cravings on the world around him, the implication is that he's deliberately targeting Neva and Doug for their previous transgression. And whereas as an old man our human cicada/locust was completely out of his frazzled insect mind, as a young boy he seems frighteningly calm, calculating and in control. He may be the human manifestation of a swarm of locusts poised upon the brink of an all-out Biblical disaster, but he's chillingly adept at keeping his true nature concealed well beneath the surface.

One thing I would note is that both locusts and cicadas are vegetarian and do not eat people. So obviously there is something far more malefic going on with this uncanny being than his simply being a locust/cicada in human skin. In other words, what twisted kind of energy is lurking beneath the insect lurking beneath the man? Although the old man does say something about Lucifer being born on a day like this, and the small grinning boy at the end of the story seems eerily reminiscent of Damien from The Omen, I don't believe that he's an Anti-Christ figure or that he's come to bring about the full-scale Apocalypse. What he old man describes sounds like a truly cataclysmic natural disaster, but not actually The End. Neva and Doug are certainly goners and it doesn't look good for the surrounding landscape, but I think the implication is that this all part of a cycle, the genetic evil having previously emerged on a scalding hot summer much like this seventeen years ago, and once its gorged itself it will go back underground and wait another seventeen years, before reemerging and directing his renewed frenzy at some other unsuspecting passers-by. So what are we really up against here? I think the clue to that lies in the old man's initial warning to Neva and Doug when he first hops aboard their car and cries out, "It's after us!" Neva asks him to elaborate, and he responds, "The sun, what do you think?" The sun is of course what Neva and Doug were initially looking to flee when first they set out for the lake, but its repressive glare follows them everywhere. I think it's accurate to suppose that the old man is the embodiment of, if not actually the sun itself, then the punishing heat that's slowly baking away the Earth and its inhabitants. This much is hinted when he reveals his especially baleful lust for the different kinds of flavours of humans incinerating - "Fried, cooked, boiled and parpoiled people! Sunburnt beauties of people!" he exclaims, almost as if he were reading from the menu options at a truck-stop cafe. He is the "burning" alluded to within the title, a white-hot intensity that threatens to engulf the land around him in a hideous blaze. He's a combination of so many disagreeable natural elements - the delirium of the sweltering heatwave, the ruinous gluttony of a plague of locusts, the incessant droning of cicadas - that in the end he comes across as the embodiment of a nature out of balance and warped to its most monstrous extreme.

 

Our burning man (or bug) is the malevolent spirit of a cruel, cruel summer, although what ultimately makes him disturbing is the seemingly contradictory means by which he launches his hotly-anticipated attack. The young boy we meet at the finale is, after all, the polar opposite of his former self - clean and neatly presented, quiet, peaceful and, until the very end, entirely unimposing. What's more is that he strikes in the hours of darkness, when the overpowering sunlight that fueled his voracious energy has vanished from the sky. He is no longer "burning", and yet he's reached the peak of his malignance. To that end, he is a twisted inversion on Rod Serling's narration at the conclusion of the aforementioned "Nothing In The Dark", in which we are assured that "there was nothing in the darkness that wasn't there when the lights were on". However raw, freakish and exposed the dementia of the world appears in the broad daylight, in the darkness that dementia does not dissipate, it merely lingers out of sight. The cyclic nature of things means that we have never obtained permanent safety; rather, we are only ever between states, and that whatever undesirable forces stalked us in one stage of the cycle will sooner or later come calling for us again. This is something that Doug understands when, having reached the ostensible safety of the lake, he contemplates the return journey that will have to made and asks Neva if there is an alternative route back into town. The danger will still be lying dormant, even if it has to wait another seventeen years.

To end on another nitpick, Fiegelson's teleplay does, unfortunately, retain by far the most bothersome portion of Bradbury's original text - specifically, when the old man starts talking about the possibility of seventeen year people, and then poses, "how about twenty-four year people, or fifty-seven year people?" That's just crazy talk, and I'll tell you why. Those are not prime numbers! Then again, the man in both the original story and the TZ episode is inconsistent and repeatedly changes the total number of years he's been underground, so his numerical understanding may be open to question.

Krusty's Fun House (aka Cinnamon, Don't Make This Harder Than It Already Is)

Isn't it always terrible when the two greatest loves of your life go to war with one another?

Something I've tried long and hard to repress about The Simpsons is that they once put out a video game where the main objective was to kill rats. By that, I don't mean a game in which a couple of levels entailed mowing down a few enemy sprites in the shape of rats as part of a grander adventure. Killing rats was actually the be all and end all of the game. Your pest control services were required in Springfield because Krusty the Clown was having a few rodent troubles, so splat every last one of 'em and go out for frosty chocolate milkshakes. And if you know me, you know why a game of that premise isn't very likely to worm its way into my affections. (If not - long and short of it, I'm a rat fancier and have a great amount of affection for the Rattus Norvegicus, so it all cuts a little too close to home.)

The game was called Krusty's Fun House and was released in 1992 for the NES, Amiga, Sega Master System and various other platforms (note: when it was released in 16-bit form for the Super SNES it was retitled Krusty's Super Fun House). Like all Simpsons games from that era, it was a meticulously crafted experience that perfectly captured the tone, heart and humour that the viewers the world over so loved and admired about the series. You remember that Simpsons episode where Krusty acquires a "fun house" (whatever that is) and a swarm of rats move in, so he and Bart must unite to exterminate the rats as well as all the snakes, flying pigs and laser gun-wielding cats that have snuck in along with them. What a classic. Right up there with that episode where Bart saves Earth from alien invasion by spray painting everything red and Smithers kidnaps baby Maggie. No, like most Simpsons games, it was a case of a lot of random shit happening that had very little to do with the series itself, because why the hell not? At the time, the initial wave of Simpson-mania was still in full swing, and I presume we were supposed to get off on the meagre thrill of getting to control a sprite in the shape of Bart Simpson (or one of his associates) and to not ask questions.

Here is the game synopsis, according to the blurb on the back of the box:

"Hey kids! Give a hoot! Help out your old pal Krusty the Clown! My official Krusty's Fun House is infested with rats! There are over 60 levels in this game, and they're all crawling with the little varmints! I've got my loyal cadets, Bart and Homer Simpson, Sideshow Mel and Corporal Punishment to guard the rat traps, but I need you to lead the filthy rodents into those traps! Then we blow 'em up! We incinerate 'em! We laser-blast 'em! We electrocute 'em! We Krusterize the little stinkers!!! Hoo boy!

Did I mention the snakes, aliens and flying pigs? Well, watch out for those riffraff! If you can't Krusterize 'em, at least avoid 'em...they're worse than the #@!*%! rats! Making Krusty's house vermin-free is not a pretty task, kiddy cadets - but someone's gotta do it!"

My god, what a barbaric universe we live in.

I never played this game as a child, but I do have memories of being taunted about its existence by another kid in my class who was aware of my murine sympathies. Back then, I was nowhere near as well-versed in The Simpsons as I am now, but I'd seen enough that the synopsis, as he explained it, struck me as being somehow very un-Simpsonsesque, so I was quite comfortable in dismissing that kid as a filthy attention-seeker. I clean forgot about it for many years, and it was only much later, when I was leafing through Robert W Getz's Unauthorised Guide To The Simpsons Collectables, that I got confirmation that it was more than just the depraved fantasy of a pimply schoolkid looking to undermine a rat-loving peer. D'oh! I decided that the best that I could do was simply turn a blind eye and try to suppress all knowledge that The Simpsons had made a game that went so flagrantly against my personal sensibilities.

It was then that I noticed Sideshow Bob on the cover, and with that my perception of the game changed completely. For a game boasting Krusty as the hero, Bob would indeed be the logical character to have featured as the main antagonist. So, is he responsible for this rat infestation? In which case, how so? Is he Willard? Does he have some kind of uncanny knack for getting rats to obey him and tear his enemies to shreds? I suddenly went from wanting to bury all conscious thought of this game to wanting to know every last detail about it. Because a game that sees the character for whom I feel the greatest affinity join forces with the animal for which I feel the greatest affinity is a game that I can absolutely get behind. I wouldn't have thought there was anything Bob could do to make himself any more endearing to me than he already is (except possibly account for his baffling behaviour in "Black Widower"), but the revelation that he's a rat fancier (even in a non-canonical video game) would certainly score him a whole mass of additional bonus points. Did I say that the two greatest loves of my life had gone to war with one another? Apparently not - Robert Terwilliger and murid kind were Together At Last, teaming up to fight low culture and plebeianism wherever it manifested. Get into that clown's fun house and rip 'em up.

...or not, because I watched a longplay of this video game on YouTube and the crushing reality is that Bob's not even in it. Or rather, he appears very indirectly as a background detail in one of the later levels, on a poster advertising poetry reading sessions for the incarcerated. While it's nice that he's featured to some capacity, he is not the antagonist, nor does he have any discernible connection to the rat invasion. So why, then, is he featured so prominently on the cover, smiling and rubbing his hands together as if everything is going according to plan? Sod knows. Sideshow Mel does actually feature in the game as one of Krusty's allies, so I could hazard a very generous guess that there was a crossed wire as to which of the Sideshows to include on the box art. But I think it's more likely that the same "anything goes" approach that was applied to the game itself was also extended to the promotional art. Bob is on the cover because why the hell not?

Well, that was a huge letdown. I didn't get my Springfield rat invasion as directed by Sideshow Bob. So many wonderful possibilities flushed down the sewer. But what delights does the game actually have to offer?

I think the important thing to keep in mind about Krusty's Fun House is that it isn't really a Simpsons game. Rather, it's a largely unconnected game that just so happens to have a few Simpsons characters in it. The whole theme of rodent extermination obviously ties in very precariously with those featured characters, and it doesn't help that the rats themselves, while bearing the characteristic Groening trademarks of bug eyes and socking great overbites, blatantly don't belong in the same world as Bart and Krusty. They are purple, bipedal and all-round very anthropomorphic, which makes them distinctively out-of-place in the Simpsons universe, where Groening was always very insistent that animals behave like actual animals. They certainly don't look like any rats we've seen in the series proper. You could argue, of course, that the alien antagonists from Bart vs. the Space Mutants were every bit as fantastical and far-out and, yeah, you would be absolutely right. But they were at least based on something pertaining to the series itself, however loosely, in that the Space Mutants are the villains of a horror sci-fi movie franchise that appears to lend itself to perpetual sequelisation, and with which Bart remains unshakably fascinated (for the first few seasons, anyway - I think the mutants may have dropped off the map as the series went on; if such a game were made today they would probably use Kodos and Kang). Those purple bipedal rats, however - where the hell did they come from? What on earth is there about Krusty's character suggesting that murids would be his natural adversary? Is there any internal logic to be extracted from this befuddling mass of randomness?

As it turns out, yes. Kind of. Krusty's Fun House makes slightly more sense, as a concept, when you realise that it was actually just the repackaged version of an unrelated game, Rat-Trap, which was created for the Commodore Amiga by the British game developers Audiogenic. There, you were playing as a purple-haired kid looking to rid his house of unwanted rodents by guiding them to various extermination devices and avoiding other adversaries, like snakes. Not only where the rats there purple and bipedal, they wore big red shoes, had red, clown-like noses and were pretty wretchedly adorable. How anybody could have relished their inevitable swatting is beyond me. The game was subsequently licensed to the US-based Acclaim Entertaiment, who already had numerous Simpsons titles under their belt (including the aforementioned Bart vs. the Space Mutants) and decided to continue their Springfield streak by giving Rat-Trap a lavish Simpsons make-over. Hence why we got the rather incongruous theme of pest control within a game purporting to be about Bart and co.

The key objectives of Rat-Trap remained intact. You had to navigate your way through various levels, solving mini-puzzles and creating paths that would guide the unwitting rats toward extermination devices operated by one of four Simpsons characters (Bart, Homer, Sideshow Mel and Corporal Punishment). And it has to be said that most of their methods of killing the rats are really, really cruel. As in, there's something very Itchy & Scratchy about it all. Homer has the most humane approach, in that he simply zaps the rats with some kind of laser device, but Bart spaghettifies the rats with a modified sieve, Punishment eats them alive, Mel pumps them up with oxygen until they explode, and JESUS CHRIST, what kind of sick game is this? Putting aside my personal feelings toward the species in question for just a moment, I do think that there's something about a Simpsons game dedicated to witnessing the characters killing animals in a sadistic and over-the-top fashion that seems incredibly out of the spirit of the series. Now, I wholly appreciate that it's only a game and that no rats, snakes or gun-wielding cats (guess those are the aliens) were actually harmed in the process, but this entire concept strikes me as being not at all within the natures of the characters we know and love. I suppose that's the justification for making the rats so anthropomorphic and cartoony - the less they look and act like real animals, the more splapsticky and less barbaric it becomes, at least in theory. In the game's introduction, Krusty gloats that the rats are really dumb and will follow any path that's laid out for them, but doesn't their extreme gullibility merely increase your pity for them?

On the subject of how accurately Krusty's Fun House represents its titular character, Sega Retro has this to say:

"Krusty's Fun House was an early Simpsons game, debuting in 1992. As such, the characters had not been fully developed, so at this point Krusty was simply a happy smiling clown rather than a man haunted by addiction and a dark past."

I would dispute that, in that Krusty has never been characterised as a "happy smiling clown". Krusty was one of the very few supporting characters to be introduced during the Simpsons' crudely drawn filler era; he made his first appearance in a short on The Tracey Ullman Show, where it was evident from the get-go that there was this huge discrepancy between his onstage persona and the person lurking beneath all that clown make-up. In his first appearance, the joke was that he was basically a thinly-disguised Homer variation; Bart worshiped him from afar but was disappointed to finally meet Krusty in the flesh and discover that grown-ups are alike all over. "Krusty Gets Busted", the first episode in the series proper to focus extensively on Krusty, moved firmly away from the initial "Krusty is Homer" idea and instead painted Krusty as a self-indulgent sell-out with an assortment of vulgar appetites (in Bob's words), whose debauched personal life was ostensibly at odds with his wholesome, fun-loving TV image...which honestly wasn't that wholesome, given that the physical abuse he inflicted on Bob was entirely genuine. One reason why I think "Krusty Gets Busted" is such a great episode is because it sets up a complex dynamic in which the moral divide between the heroes and villain isn't quite as black and white as one might assume. Krusty may not be a Kwik-E-Mart bandit, but there is nevertheless an obvious disparity between the Krusty whom Bart idolises and the Krusty who actually exists, and who is less interested in inspiring young minds than in conditioning them to be unquestioning consumers and choking their brain cells with senseless violence. Meanwhile Bob, who actually did the dastardly deed, has a sincere interest in providing children with quality, non-pandering entertainment (the sad thing is that it's Bob's genuine compassion for Bart that ends up setting the stage for their long-term enmity - if he hadn't invited him down to that Choices thing...). In fact, for all of my grievances about Krusty's Fun House being very far-removed from the spirit of The Simpsons, there is something eerily on form about having a smiling Krusty front a colourful, ostensibly light-hearted game with such a disturbing premise. One of the game's few authentically Simpsons touches is the array of posters adorning the walls of Krusty's titular fun house, hawking everything from Krusty Brand pacifiers to Ned Flanders' Leftorium (here called the "Left-o-rama"). Here, Duff is identified as a brand of cola (presumably because the presence of alcoholic beverages in a children's game would be a huge no) and for some reason Dimoxinil (the hair growth formula used by Homer in "Simpson and Delilah") is simply "Hair in a Drum". These posters provide charming little Easter eggs for devoted viewers and give the game some semblance of connection to the wider Simpsons universe, but they also feed perfectly into the air of commercial crassness (mixed with horrifying violence) that permeates Krusty's brand of entertainment from head to foot. It merely convinces me all the more that this game missed a serious trick in not having Bob be in cahoots with the rats. As if Bob, who is no stranger to the Krusty's depravities, wouldn't be able to sympathise with the misunderstood vermin his "happy" chum is so ruthlessly pummeling just to prop up his mercenary hellhole.

As for Bart, though, I totally can't see him going for this. Bart may revel in mayhem and destruction, but for the most part the series has wisely shied away from making him actively cruel to animals (which is a major factor separating him from Billy, the sociopathic little shit from Family Dog). And besides, later in the series - in the Season 8 episode "Homer's Enemy", to be more precise - we get a subplot where Bart buys a derelict factory that's infested with rats, and he completely tolerates them. So there.

And that's Krusty's Fun House, a game that seems custom designed so that smart-mouthed schoolkids would have ammunition with which to taunt their rodent-loving classmates, and an all-round confounding and unsettling footnote in history of The Simpsons. Perhaps if you can get past the unapologetically barbaric premise then the game itself is a perfectly fun and addictive one to play, but it's certainly not my cup of tea, nor do I suspect it would be tea for any of the characters with whom I identify. Lisa would hate this game. Willard would really hate this game, and possibly head with Ben and Socrates to rip up Audiogenic. Bob would consider it hopelessly plebeian and go back to his poetry recitals. I'll leave you with this heart-tugging image of Clancy Wiggum and Cinnamon, as a reminder that Springfield as a whole has way more of a murid affinity than Krusty's Fun House lets on.