Who Framed Roger Rabbit & Terrorvision

Judge Doom killed Bambi's mother, pass it on

In this episdoe we discussed Who Framed Roger Rabbit from 1988 and TerrorVision from 1986.

Our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com and we're on instagram @stillscaredpodcast! Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her music on her bandcamp. Outro music is by Jo Kelly, and you can find their music under the name Wendy Miasma on bandcamp. Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com

Transcript

Ren Welcome to Still Scared Talking Children's Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children's books, films and TV. I'm Ren Wednesday, my cohost is Adamy Whybray, today we’re joined by special guest Ava Foxfort, and we're talking about Who Framed Roger Rabbit from 1988 and Terror Version from 1986. Enjoy!

Ren Hi —

Ava I think that was the opposite of in time — oh shit you're going straight into an intro?

Adam That's fine. Hi, Ava!

Ava Hi!!

Ren Hi Adam, Hi Ren.

Ava Hi Ren!

Adam You are Ren.

Ren I am Ren. Okay, this is setting the scene perfectly for this episode —

Adam No, no, I have made a lot of notes. I have prepared.

Ren No, that's true. Adam has prepared, Adam has prepared. Maybe Ava has prepared?

Ava Define prepared. I haven't made notes, but I've never made notes in my life.

Adam OK, so we're discussing two films —

Ren Who Framed Roger Rabbit from 1988 and Terror Vision from 1986. And we decided to do this episode a long time ago and have now somewhat forgotten our reasoning.

Adam OK, so let me explain. So. I found Terrorvision on a list of supposed children's horror films on Letterboxed, which is a lie, it’s not.

Ava It's so not!

Adam Ok, but, but — my thinking is that Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a Disney film and it's PG rated, it’s a family film that is largely not going to be understandable by a child audience. I watched it as a child and it made me feel weird and troubled. And I probably didn't follow the plot because the plot of Who Framed Roger Rabbit is quite complex. It's like a Chinatown film noir conspiracy with lots of references to old cartoons that most kids watching in the late ‘80s wouldn't have got.

On the other hand, Terrorvision is clearly a film made sbstensibly for an adult audience that I don't think anyone over the age of 12 is going to enjoy.

Ava So we've got definitely an adult film — one of them is definitely a horror film. One of them is horrific if you see it as a child. I imagine both of them would be horrific if you saw them as a child.

Adam Well, that’s the thing, I think both of these films have a really kind of specific squick that is going to really impact you if you see it as a kid.

Ava And like, are we just going for similarly traumatising, is that the theme that we've got here? Yeah, but you didn't see this as a kid. Was anyone traumatised by Terrorvision as a child? Out of us three, we're allowed to answer for ourselves.

Adam Oh, no, I assumed none of you had. I mean, I thought you were talking for the audience.

Ren Yeah, I assume anyone who saw Terrorvison as a child was traumatised by it.

Adam I assume they're now locked up.

Ava The thing that was confusing to me about Terrorvision was there was quite a charming, childish humour to it, woven in between all of the deeply inappropriate humour.

Adam Well, that’s what I mean! I think a really juvenile film!

Ava It's incredibly juvenile, yeah.

Adam And ostensibly the main two characters end up being the child character and the teenagers. And also, we've talked time and time again, here me out, time and time again on this podcast, we've talked about plots in which the child characters are not believed, right? In which there's some kind of monster or some kind of demonic or supernatural presence, and a child insists and insists that it's real and all of the adults don't believe them. And the child's right and bad things happen to the adults. And that is exactly what the plot of this.

Ava Yeah, it does have a really classical children's narrative. Can we explicitly not make an argument for terrorism being child friendly? Like I think on a moral level —

Adam To be fair, on a moral leve that probably would rightfully get me barred from ever teaching again, I think. And that's definitely not the hill I want to die on, I don’t want to pin my teaching career on it, it’s terrible.

Ren Right, I need to introduce Ava.

Ava To who??

Adam She’s been on here before.

Ren She has been on here before, but it’s been a while.

Adam It’s been a while.

Ava It has been a while.

Ren Ava Foxfort, veteran of the Deptford Mice series. Which maybe you should go back and listen to, because it was quite an epic undertaking.

Adam I think they’re the best episodes we’ve ever done.

Ava Yeah, I mean, there's they are like absolutely some of the best children’s horror I’ve ever read. I remember reading it when I was little and genuinely getting horror. So yeah, go and listen to me, listen to more of me, I’m great. I’m Ava Foxfort, I'm a guest today. I'm very confused as to why I'm here and what we're doing.

Ren Thank you for coming back, Ava. I also don't know why we saw these two films and were like, Ava, let's get Ava for this. I don't know why.

Ava Like, I'm offended by the suggestion that Terrorvision —

Adam Yeah, I was going to say that that's probably not going to make you feel great about yourself. I mean, I don't know, maybe I I saw that Medusa character.

Ava I think I've got Medusa vibes. You know, I would really love that kind of rubberized snake outfit that she's got, I think it's a beautiful feast of costumery that I would 100% wear out.

Adam Well, exactly. So maybe that's why, that's the only justifiable reason I could think of.

Ava And Who Framed Roger Rabbit was a beloved film when I was little, so this was absolutely my jam. So half of this makes sense. The other half, I don't know what you think of me.

Adam Just Medusa, really. But Who Framed Roger Rabbit I watched as a kid, I definitely watched it more than once, but I found it was one of those films I was fascinated by but I found quite troubling. I don't think I loved it as a kid, I think. I think it worried me. What about you Ren?

Ren I saw it for the first time two days ago. So.

Ava Oh, that's an interesting perspective I'd like to hear your thoughts are on it, which I guess is what we're here for, so that's good.

Ren Yeah, all I knew coming in was that it combined animation and live action and that there is a sexy lady called Jessica Rabbit. That was the sum total of my knowledge.

Adam That's fair. That's probably the legacy of the film, right? In terms of what someone who hasn't seen Who Framed Roger Rabbit knows about it, I would say yeah, animation and live action and sexy Jessica Rabbit is probably what most people think.

Ava I mean, it's probably the origin of my lifetime affection for Bob Hoskins.

Adam Well, I was gonna say I was thinking this episode might be a meeting of the chapter of the Bob Hoskins Appreciation Society.

Ren Oh, it absolutely is. My appreciation obviously comes from the Terry Gilliam film Brazil, in which he plays one of the Central Services heating engineers. And he utters the classic line, which I'm sure I've already said on the podcast, because it's just absolutely embedded in my head: “Machines don't fix themselves.”

Ava Yeah, connection — because I did actually read the Wikipedia this morning. So that's a level in which I'm prepared. Terry Gilliam was up to direct Who Framed Roger Rabbit for a while. He was one of the first directors to be picked and he said it looked too difficult so he didn't do it.

Ren Yeah, it would absolutely never have got made --

Ava No way, absolutely no way. And it would have been terrible if it had been —

Ren And it would have taken 20 years to not get made.

Adam Well, we know that Robert Zemeckis’ main interest in filmmaking is having increasing amounts of special effects hopefully replace the work of actors and cinematographers until I'm assuming his end point is he just wants AI to do it. But at this point he was still having to do a lot of work because this is way before The Polar Express, right? It's way before Here. This is non-digital filmmaking.

So all of this film was achieved through optical printing. So what that means basically is it's all composite shots and so it was filmed with the live actors using these awful — and I encourage you to look this up — these horrible rubber stand-ins. I would love, you know, my jam would be a director’s cut of the film that’s just the version of this cut together with the horrible rubber versions of the characters being waved around by puppeteers. While the actors have to react to them.

And there's also, you know, mechanical arms and other things. But basically they filmed with the live actors and then the animators had to use this three tier animation process. So the characters were drawn and coloured and then the shadowing was added and then the texturing and the integration of the lighting in this film.

It's a film noir basically, so we should say this is set in 1947 Hollywood. And it's very much in the mould of something like Chinatown. You know, it's the LA of corruption and seedy bars and private eyes. And Bob Hoskins plays Eddie Valiant, who is a kind of down at heel detective who's hired to find proof that Roger Rabbit's wife is cheating on him with Marvin Acme, which is a great invention of this film. So if you've ever seen a Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons, remember that everything that Wiley Coyote bought had Acme on the side and was produced by Acme.

Well, it turns out that Marvin Acme is the factory owner who invents and produces all of these gag objects.

Ava There's a really lovely sub-theme running through everything about that intersection between these things — like the concept that this isn't just that we're using animation on top of live action, it's that we're living in a world where cartoons exist as pieces of entertainment. But they’re acted, by real physical embodiments of people, right?

And so having to have Acme and having to have all of the gag props available, all of the ridiculous impossible ideas that cartoons make possible, have them be real mass-produced objects, it's a really particularly — it's going to be the first time I'm saying it — textural, a textural kind of solidity.

Adam It really is yeah. Because these objects that are kind of squishy, like there's a lot of squash and stretch cartoon physics in this film, but obviously these are also real chunky objects and there's something really satisfying about seeing things like the cartoon hammers or those vinyl-like holes.

Ren I was thinking about the holes. Yeah.

Adam And that's all really satisfying. But yeah, so the process was they then did the the lighting and then they did the textural effects. Because the important thing was that the animated figures looked absolutely integrated into the real world. And I think that is pulled off to an astonishing degree, particularly, I think matching the lighting on the animated characters to the lighting on the real life actors, which is wild.

Ava I mean, this is like a famous term that originates here. I don't know how widely it's used, but there’sthat idea of knocking the lamp, right? So there's a scene where they're in the back of the bar and Bob Hoskins walks into the room and immediately head-butts the light fitting dangling from the ceiling, which means that then for an entire — quite elaborately shot scene — the light is just swinging around randomly.

Adam Yeah, through the whole scene, there's just this constant —

Ava And this makes sense from a noir point of view, right? Like noir is very much like built on that light and shadow. And so it makes sense for them to be doing things like this. But my God, have they made it hard for themselves. And knocking the lamp on the way in is the perfect symbol of that thing. And I have heard that used as the term for when people go the extra mile to kind of sell a visual effect or anything in a way that's just like, they made so many people's lives harder for themselves by making that decision.

Adam Oh yeah.

Ava And it doesn't technically add much to it apart from making it difficult, right? I mean, it gives it more vibrancy and life and movement, so it makes sense. But there's already a cartoon rabbit constantly bouncing off the walls and Bob Hoskins playing a perfect dead straight man to this. Like there's already that kinetic energy to the scene and to just add an extra layer of random difficulty, it's delightful. I really treasure all of the like little details of physicality throughout this film.

And I think I spotted them more watching it as an adult. Looking through and just being like: God, that's such a difficult way to do that, that's so delightful. One of my favourite gags in the whole film that I don't think I ever spotted as a child is that Jessica Rabbit obviously has quite a — I can't think of the right word — a structurally impressive bosom.

Adam I’ve seen the word ‘pneumatic’ used.

Ava Pneumatic. And at one point, Bob Hoskins is picking up something off the floor and comes back up and knocks his head back into them and they make a comedy drum noise. And it's a perfect bit of slapstick that's been delivered with someone who isn't there, right? Like, someone who isn't in that room. And Bob Hoskins has just had to pretend to knock his head on something, aware that what he's knocking his head on is someone's tits. It's incredible. It's so, so stupid. It's such a stupid film that takes itself so seriously, and I love that. I love that so much.

Adam Yeah. It's really committed to the bit. And I think it's that lack of cutting corners that really, really sells it. And I think mentioning that moment, it's Bob Hoskins, mine work. I think he came from a tumbling background.

Ren gasps Incredible.

Adam Like the amount of clowning he has to do with this film is astonishing.

Ava And that is set up within the world. Like I don't think I realised when I was little that he does have a past life as a clown. It’s narratively set up that Bob Hoskins character Eddie Valiant was originally part of Eddie and Teddy Valiant, a pair of clowns who were also cops for a while. And then private detectives, and then one of them died and oh God, there's a lot going on. It's quite efficient, but it's a dense film.

Adam It is dense, especially — well, whether this is a children's film is not very clear. So this was produced in a period where Disney were going through a real slump. So we have previously talked about 1985's The Black Cauldron. Which as we talked about at the time, was a financial black hole for Disney. And Disney in this period were making live action films, you know, this was before the so-called Disney Renaissance.

And in fact, a lot of the animators who worked on Who Framed Roger Roger Rabbit did go on to work on The Lion King and those films of the Disney Renaissance. But we're not there yet. So this is a period where Disney are under new management and they're trying to find a way to broaden their appeal. And this was made in collaboration with Steven Spielberg. And the effects here are by Industrial Light and Magic.

And you know, I think you can see that it's trying to take that Spielberg family-film formula, that Spielberg had done so well with ET and films like The Goonies and it is trying to get a very broad audience in. But in a in a way that I think is much preferable to what DreamWorks would then do with Shrek. Because in Shrek you've got these two different registers of the fairy tale stuff for the kids and the innuendo for the adults. Whereas here it's much more integrated.

There is a bit of, oh, OK, it's the cartoons for the kids and the film noir stuff for the adults, but you can't really extricate them at all. It's al lso mixed together.

Ava I’m still trying to work out exactly what my understanding of Patty Cake was as a child. Right, which here is used as a euphemism for sex, but also literally playing Patty Cake doing hand games — Acme and Jessica Rabbit are found in photos — and oh my God, this is another beautiful scene as well, isn't it? Because Roger gets the photos of them playing Patty Cake on the bed and then flips through them and flips through them so fast that they turn into an animation of that scene and it's like, Oh my God. Like you just shown us how animation works through the lens of photographs taken and being interacted with by a cartoon character. It's beautiful. It's really beautiful filmmaking.

Adam I heard you make a kind of “Ooh” noise when I mentioned tumbling, Ren, was that you thinking of Hoskins later in the film where he does his song and dance routine?

Ren No, I was just enchanted by the idea of Bob Hoskins tumbling, I think. I think that's just delightful. I'm glad that that I live in a world where that that happened.

Ava But it was generally like, I think I saw it noted that most of his work before this was quite hard, serious acting. He was like 10th or 13th choice for this role in a way that that feels quite harsh because he does also seem completely perfect for this role.

But they like tried to get Harrison Ford in, they tried to get Eddie Murphy in who apparently really regrets not taking that role. Bill Murray was famously impossible to contact, so he missed out on the opportunity to go for this. But you end up with Bob Hoskins.

Ren Yeah, look at this list: Robin Williams, Robert Redford, Jack Nicholson, Sylvester Stallone. Wallace Shawn!

Ava There's a lot of interesting versions of this film that could have been made, each of those suddenly turns into an entirely different thing! But I'm glad we got Bob because I suspect it improves the quality of the tumbling. I can't see Robert Redford doing a good tumble.

Adam No. So the film starts actually with an animation, right? So they clearly want to set up who this Roger Rabbit is because we're meant to kind of understand him immediately as, some kind of classic cartoon character, AKA, you know, Goofy, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, etcetera. So it starts with this short cartoon with Roger Rabbit and Baby Herman.

And actually they produced three Roger Rabbit films after the release of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and they all have that same structure of Roger Rabbit being some kind of pet rabbit/slash babysitter who has to look after baby Herman who blithely gets himself into lots of danger.

And Roger is a kind of perpetual victim, basically. He's a pretty pitiful character. He tries hard, but he's very nervous and everything goes wrong and he just gets beaten over the head again and again.

What I find interesting about the animation — so the lead animator was Richard Williams. Largely known, certainly online because there have been loads of YouTube videos about it, for the much compromised, very, very long production-running film The Thief and the Cobbler, but he was a sort of legendary animator.

And so he designed Roger Rabbit. And clearly, you know, Roger’s meant to have a lot of those iconographic elements of classic Disney cartoon characters. But really, I think the three Roger Rabbit films seem closer to Tom and Jerry. And this film here is very much like a Tom and Jerry short, but perhaps stylistically closer to a Tex Avery film.

Ava I mean it is one of the interesting things here, isn't it that shows up in the production notes, but also is visibly there is that this is a homage to quite a lot of different modes of animation at the same time, right? Like it's made by Disney in collaboration with Warner Brothers, is that right?

Adam Yeah, yeah. And apparently Spielberg himself had to do all the kind of business —

Ava Yeah, but managed to get all the different production houses, or a lot of the different production houses to offer characters. So this is one of the only times you will see certain characters together, because they would never do that. And then there’s this idea that getting Daffy and Donald together meant that they had to be portrayed as equally talented pianists.

Adam And you even get some of the old Fleischer characters crop up. You see Koko the Clown walk past on the street.

Ren Ah, do you?

Adam Yeah, and then you get quite a touching little bit with Betty Boop in the nightclub.

Ava The relationship between Betty Boop and Eddie is quite charming because it feels weirdly real. There’s the detail of how she's a bit down on her luck because nobody's into black and white cartoons these days. It's really sweet.

Adam I like the little figurine of Betty Boop he has on his desk.

Ava Aw, I hadn’t noticed that. That's lovely.

Adam Yes. But the animation we get to start is like, it's clearly structurally like a Tom and Jerry film, but it looks much more like the Animaniacs to me, almost. There's a lot of whizz-bang 3D effects.

It must have been a pain to animate because you've got the camera as it were, swooping around this kitchen, right? Like diving up, diving down, lots of distortion, you know, extreme close-ups and so on. And I think the 3D effects are immediately a bit unsettling. But it's also really important that they established that the cartoon world is also the real world, right, that this is a real 3D space.

And so at the end of the short, we then immediately enter the film studio and you see the camera men, and baby Sherman turns out to be played by, I don't know — he’s a toon, she's a baby, but he's got this gruff old man voice.

Ava Does it not say at one point he's got the lust of a 50 year old and the dinky of a three-year old?

Adam The dinky, yes.

Ava Which is unsettling!

Adam So apparently Richard Williams loved Baby Sherman and insisted on doing all of Baby Sherman —

Ren Herman, Sherman's in Terrorvision.

**Adam **Herman, sorry. But yes, did all of Herman's animation himself. But I mean, was he born? Presumably these toons, they're kind of ageless, right? I mean, they're talked about as being immortal, and previously nothing's been able to kill them. So presumably he's always existed as this old-man baby.

Ava I mean maybe at one point he was a baby-baby and his internal self has simply aged normally. Oh God, that's what a hideous life!

Adam I don't know, he seems to quite like being pushed around in the pram and stuff.

Ava It's hard to have a lot of sympathy for the lecherous baby, I'll be honest with you.

Adam He is, it should be noted, a very lecherous baby, which is is quite disturbing.

Ren Yeah, watching this for the first time the other day, it starts with this animation and I didn't know what was going to happen next. And then when they call cut and it zooms out —

Ava Because that could have been a pre-feature thing, right? Sometimes films just have a little cartoon in front of them, or films of that era. So it could have been that you can read that as a fake out.

Ren So it it did feel quite surprising and magical!

Adam Aw. Yeah. I mean, it really sells this cartoon world. I mean, I guess, and this has been written about before, but it feels like the cartoons are kind of segregated, right? You have some kind apartheid, or at least sort of Jim Crow like-situation. It never really commits itself to being a commentary on racism or anything like that, but it seems like the Toons are treated as second-class citizens at least.

Ava Yeah, I mean, but whilst also being functionally immortal and allowed to do whatever they want, apart from the villain judge. I mean I don't think it's delving there, but there are definitely interesting parallels to make because it's just so strange, it's so strange everything that they do.

How exploited are these workers? Like what does it matter if the creature is immortal? I think it was something that I was reading afterwards, but it implied a sort of melancholy to Roger Rabbit’s character because he's so focused on well, people will only like me if I make them laugh, right? There's some weird stuff going on. I'm just going to leave it at that.

Adam Oh, yeah. I mean, he sees it as his existential function, right? He later says, you know, “I’m a toon! I've got to make people laugh.” And there are moments of suspense in the film where it's really imperative that Roger doesn't laugh because it draws attention to him, but he can't help himself. Every fibre in his being because he's a toon is urging him to make jokes.

But also this is clearly a commentary on the 1940s studio system. So we've mentioned we see Dumbo and actually I’d not appreciated how complex this shot is, but we see Dumbo flying outside the window of Maroon's office. And you see Dumbo through the blinds. And that sounds simple enough, but they are animating Dumbo. So they're having to animate Dumbo, right, while leaving bits of Dumbo out and make it look completely real —

Ava — and having him interact with the blinds, right. That was one of the things that struck me there, is that the blinds are moving in response to Dumbo’s trunk. Whilst not being hooked up to anything else — it’s such odd bits of puppetry because the puppetry is aimed at physical objects throughout the film.

Adam Yeah, and apparently poor sweet Dumbo has been got on loan from Disney.

Ava Along with loads of the cast of Fantasia who then show up in the next scene just as background characters and people that Eddie bumps into.

Adam Yeah, the broom. You could see the broomsticks and the little demons from the end of Fantasia. Yeah, it's all those little Easter eggs that I think make it really, really charming.

But yeah, so Eddie's hired to investigate. And as we say, he finds that Jessica is playing patty cake with Marvin Acme. And then Acme is found murdered! And I guess all fingers point to Roger as the spurned husband.

Ren So Valiant is bought into — well, 'cause he id this job of taking the photos of Acme with Jessica Rabbit but he was very conflicted about it because he said he didn't want anything to do with toons after his brother had been murdered by a toon. But he's unwittingly drawn into this, and he finds Roger Rabbit in his bed. He has a Murphy bed.

Ava Which he pulls down for a nap in broad daylight. Middle of the day is just like right, now it's time for a lie down.

Adam Yeah, because they look like just a bunch of filing cabinets where he'd keep his case notes, don't they? Yeah and Roger obviously says, you know, I'm not guilty, I'm not guilty, I'm not a murderer! and then handcuffs himself to poor Eddie, so Eddie's bound to Roger, even if he doesn't want to be involved. And soon they're being investigated by the antagonist of this film, Judge Doom.

Ren Yeah and this, this is where the children's horror comes in —

Adam With Christopher Lloyd.

Ava Yeah, Christopher Lloyd being the Demon Headmaster, right?

Ren Very similar aesthetic, yeah!

Adam So obviously he'd previously been in Zemeckis’s Back to the Future, but here he's a much less benign character. He has these nasty, very white, very fake, false teeth.

Ava I mean, it's a brilliant bit of casting just in terms of how Christopher Lloyd very much looks like a cartoon character and very much is able to perform as a cartoon character, even ignoring the twist.

Adam Yeah, so we we don't know at this stage.

Ava No, but ignoring that, still to have him be that cartoonish whilst being this villain, this nasty, uncaring, unfeeling, monstrous character who is like — oh my word, the putting of the shoe, the animated squeaky shoe in the dip. It's got to be like the most horrific kicking the dog of of any TV show, of any show ever.

Like, right, we need to establish just how evil this guy is. Oh yeah, he's just going to torture this shoe for being in the way. Which I guess wouldn't normally be a problem.

Adam But it’s a living shoe.

Ava And it’s adorable!

Ren Voiced by Nancy Cartwright!

Ava Oh my god!

Adam Little Bart Simpson shoe with a little squeaky voice. Well, not a voice, just squeaks. Adorable big eyes. And Judge Doom wants to show off this dip he's developed because before now there's been no way to kill toons and he's developed this dip which — Does anyone remember what it’s made of?

Ava It’s turpentine and acetone are the two main ingredients, which is how you clean a cartoon cel, right? Like this is completely factually accurate. If you wanted to kill a cartoon, that is what you would need.

Adam And he has these little uncanny elements to his performance that make him scarier. Like, I don't know if you noticed, Ren, but he doesn't blink once in the film.

Ren No, I didn't notice.

Adam We later see his wild cartoon eyes, but this sets that up, he never blinks in the film. And they often used a fan. When he is on screen just to make his cape move slightly. So he’s just got these tiny littl elements that make him uncanny, basically. Even before we know he's a cartoon.

Ava Knowing the ending, I liked how many clues there were throughout. I think paying alert attention to certain details will give away the twist and mystery element of the things. But it's just that thing of it being a very tight script in a lot of ways. Like everything that is said has actually got some hidden meaning or is is pointing back towards something. So you really do get that like noir conspiracy vibe running through it.

Adam Oh yeah and that screenplay was revised a lot of times over several years. And I think actually for the better here because it doesn't feel focus grouped, you know, it's still very weird. But it doesn't have any fat at all, it’s a very lean kind of film. For instance that they used to be more weasels, they had to cut those down. There were seven weasels.

So the weasels are Judge Doom’s henchman, basically, this nasty little police force and they could have helped with the interrogations. And it was meant to be based on the seven dwarfs originally, so Richard Williams designed his own weasel versions of the dwarfs and it was like: greasy, sleazy, wheezy, slimy, etcetera but they had to cut them down.

Ren There’s so much you could say about this film, I think it is a masterpiece. So much care and effort has gone into this film, which I think is just good to experience as a human. Just like, someone's put so much love into this film, and it's such a weird result!

Ava You do feel that love for the effort that's gone into it, but also it itself is a love letter to this kind of bygone era. Like, you know, film noir wasn't hugely fashionable at that point. And it's just clearly very, very in love with the whole history of animation building up to it and really wanted to celebrate that, whilst also talking about the Hollywood system and corruption in there.

One of the things that delighted me while reading the Wikipedia, I mean delighted slash horrified, is that one of the big themes of this is actually the trams, right, the red car trams that run through Hollywood. Eddie uses one of them to hitch a ride right at the very beginning and then borrow some cigarettes from some children, which is a lovely little character detail that you get there.

Like he helps a little kid get onto the front of the trolley car. But this has just been brought up by Cloverleaf, who it turns out are part of this giant conspiracy and attempting to build a freeway through LA and this is legit, right? Like this is this is one of those little details that like, to me, it just felt like, oh, it just really knows my particular like anti-car bias and my desire for public transportation. Like it references how great LA's public transport is at the beginning and says it's the best in the world. And then this is because part of the narrative is that… Well, yeah, a syndicate of motor companies bought the red car, bought the real LA red car so that they could throw it out of business, so that they could build that freeway that runs along the route that the trams previously did. Like, it's legit. Like, it knows the history and it cares about the history in a way that I love. I love that sort of thing: the layers of detail that run into this essentially very silly “Oh, what if cartoon characters were real?” And it kind of wants to delve a little bit into what that means. Like there's something about the idea that like… Well, obviously Daffy and Donald would be, like, having to supplement their income, like playing bars in between shows. And of course, they'd have like, a really petty rivalry.

I don't know. It's, it's, it's so strange on so many levels and I really appreciate it for it.

Adam Well, you're sort of suggesting that it's a very deep and textured film, so should we should we do Texture of the Week?

Ava I had actually forgotten until we sat down that I had to come up with the best texture. So yeah. But yeah, that's true. I'm sure I can come up with something

//Adam, Ren and Ava sing 'Texture of the Week' in high-pitched cartoon voices.//

Adam Maybe I should change our voices so we're high-pitched like cartoons or something. Okay, so Ren, do you want to start?

Ren Yeah, I mean, I think. It's not… Obviously there's a lot of choice and I went for quite an obvious one, but… It's just that, the monster from TerrorVision. It was just so much texture. I couldn't, couldn't snub it for 'Texture of the Week'.

Adam OK, so we'll move on to TerrorVision. Yeah, one of the the main - I guess, antagonist of of the film - although it's it's just hungry really… is this monster? And I think it doesn't redeem the film, but the latex monster, you know, it's definitely worth seeing, seeing a picture of because as you say, it is disgusting.

Ren It's so wet.

Ava I mean like I would specifically nominate the first time you see the granddad's face pull out of the mouth of the beast, right. Like, that is a texture that is a texture unto itself.

Adam Yeah, the amount of like KY Jelly they must have like slathered onto his face is ridiculous.

So, so, so mine is… We mentioned the shoe toon being dipped. And so for me, it's the shoe toon blood sludge on the black glove. So, Judge Doom wears this one black glove like a true kind of fascist when he when he does his dipping and after he's dipped the shoe, he's got this awful kind of…

Ava Yeah, I mean, it's so lovely as well in that, like, that's coded as very much coded as blood. But presumably it's just the ink, right? It's the ink that's gone into this character just being now dissolved and oozing down his hand. But. Oh. Yeah, it's a good texture.

Adam Did you, did you manage to come up with one?

Ava Well, so I mean, basically I'm just going to shoehorn in my own childhood trauma as usual. So I think… Weirdly like my texture is just the texture of cartoon… like, that clean block cell shaded - however you want to frame it, the texture of cartoons to me is so disconcerting, and so the constant pulse between the texture of like a gritty film noir and an actual cartoon… Like at that fundamental level. When I was young - I think I've told Ren this before - I might have even mentioned it on this podcast before… When I was young, one of my recurring nightmares was simply pastel blocks of colour. Just huge. Abstract pastel box of colour suddenly turning to these jagged, raw, like the same shapes but with all of the joins between them now being this like monstrously like a different way of drawing. These colours, a different texture to those colours. So this is kind of why I'm always fascinated by the 'Texture of the Week' thing, to be perfectly honest, which is why I think it might have gone before. But like, nothing represents this disconcertingness of like constantly flipping between these different textures. That is through this film. And I remember being really unsettled with this film when I was little. I remember really loving it on one level, being fascinated by it and excited about cartoons getting to be chaotic in the real world. Like, it's genuinely magic. But then even before you get to the fact that these cartoons are being dipped in it, dipped in dip and destroyed in like, really viscerally disgusting ways that are really played as horrific. They're really played as painful and torturous. Even before you get that, just that mix of textures puts me in a slightly uncanny place that means that the whole film has this texture of like, fear to it. That doesn't come through in the same way as an adult at this point. I kind of can distance myself from that by discussing the technique and the themes. But as a child, I think I was genuinely really upset by it and genuinely like had that slightly… I don't know. I had this with a lot of things that I watched when I was little where I didn't quite understand everything that was going on, where there was this kind of transgression between what I understood and what I didn't. And then this was just one of those films that I had recorded off the telly. And that in itself is another real, real odd texture of like VHS tapes that you've watched 100 times and don't quite understand.

Ren Did it have adverts in it?

Ava I don't think this one did. It will have had something in the beginning and I think I got a BBC screening of it at some point. So it was it was fine for adverts but… But yeah. Just the way it is layered is fundamentally quite disconcerting because it is a bit too real and like, like how much would you freak out if you if a cartoon walked into the room right now? Like, just think for a moment, right? Roger Rabbit walks in through the door. It's not a good feeling. Like everything that you understand about the world has just been dismantled right in front of you.

Adam And obviously this layering gets flipped. So, well, just over halfway through the film in which Eddie has to go to Toontown. So, up to this point, we've had cartoons integrated into the real world, and then Eddie has to venture across into Toontown.

Ava Like going through the tunnels [with] like genuine dread on his face, right? Like it's the central horror of having to go back to Toontown when he hasn't been there since his brother died.

Adam It's this painted black tunnel. And they painted the whole tunnel black. And then he's driving through and then there's this astonishing shot where these red curtains come up at the end of the tunnel and suddenly you're in Toontown. And it's visually really zany, really wild. Like it looks like one of those… It looks like about three old Merry Melody cartoons - like those old Disney cartoons - come to life at once. And you've got loads of these characters like skipping around and cavorting. Little bird circling around Eddie's head. You know, the plants weaving and dancing and singing, all these animals singing. It's just incredibly overwhelming. I think that tht moment, to me, it's a bit like in The Wizard of Oz when you shift.

Av But they've already established this ominiousness about it, right? Like Eddie's relationship with Toontown is complicated enough that when they first visit the factory like, and he's, he's like, “I haven't been this close to Toontown in ages”. And then they've got just got a shot over the wall. And so you've got this wall and behind it you have this cavalcade of colour and drama. And so you have that initial hint of it and then this opening up into the full, the full red curtain effect and it's all singing at you, literally singing. And Eddie is horrified - like, oh, it's lovely.

Adam And it kind of visually obviously changes as well, because this is where we have switched into blue screening and it looks a little bit like this could have been an FMV game. I did maybe think a little bit of like FMV adventure games I've played, yeah. But yeah, it's still great. They had a different animation team do Toontown, so. A lot of this film was actually interestingly filmed in Britain, so a lot of it was filmed in London and apparently it was very cold. So they're having to, you know, bring in all these palm trees and make it look like, make it look like LA, very hot LA. And apparently, yeah, it was bitterly cold a lot of the time. And then they had Industrial Light and Magic doing their stuff and then also an animation unit in California as well.

Ava I thought the animation unit was based in the UK as well.

Adam Yeah, no, the animation unit just for Toontown.

Ava Brilliant.

Ren Amazing.

Ren There's a sort of weird layer of like with Toontown that like at Disneyland, or at least one of one of the Disneyland, probably several of the Disneylands, there is a Toon town.

Adam Oh my gosh.

Ren They've made a real little town that's in the style of an animated town. Recursive layers.

Ava Everything has so many layers here, right? It is that fascinating thing of like this film has been made by projecting layers on top of each other and it's got lots of layers. It's very clever. I like it.

Adam But it turns out that the murder was committed by Judge Doom and his goons and that it's all part of this conspiracy to sort of take control of Toontown so he can then demolish it, basically.

Ava Demolish it and build a freeway. Like, I do really enjoy the scene of Christopher Lloyd explaining how delighted he is by the concept of a freeway. Like just the idea of like, it'll be, it'll be huge and then there'll be loads of cheap motels and he describes this paradise in this like, absolutely hellish way that has the genuine fervour for it. But yeah, I like, I like it.

Adam Yeah, and, and Eddie, of course, says that only a toon could come up with an idea that crazy..

Ava Yeah. Which again, bear in mind, it's real. Like this is a real piece of infrastructure history. I mean, sorry, to be clear, Toontown is not real. The idea of building a freeway to replace the public infrastructure that was already there is very much a real, real historical moment. So I appreciate Eddie. I like Eddie a lot. Eddie and Teddy Valium. I love that they're Eddie and Teddy.

Adam And it turns out that it was it was Judge Doom who also killed his brother. And he reveals his high cackling voice and his red staring eyes.

Ava Yeah, one of my favourite little like odd little clever script based clues here is that there's two times in which the word simoleons (sic?) is used to mean money in this film, right. And the first one is describing how Judge Doom bribed his way into office. And the second one is describing what the toon who killed Eddie's brother stole from the heist where that murder happened. So it's just, I don't know how I spotted this, but it's so lovely to me as a detail that they just used that same, like, classic noir slang just to make that connection and make it possible to kind of like, solve the mystery yourself. I love it. I love it. I love it. Sorry, I'm a bit too excited about this film.

Ren Well, no, it's great.

Adam Something that they did have to take out, though, because obviously, you know, Disney had to sign off on all of this, as did the other, you know, other film executives from Warner Brothers and the other studios, and apparently in one iteration of the script - and the screenwriters… So there's an audio commentary on the 25th (I think) anniversary Blu-ray release. Well worth getting - loads of extras. It's got a commentary with Zemeckis, Frank Marshall, Jeffrey Price, Peter Seaman, Steve Starkey and Ken Ralston. The two writers say that they wanted it to be Judge Doom who killed Bambi's mother!! But yeah, apparently Disney wouldn't let them do that.

Ava Oh, that's brilliant.

Ren It seems so unlikely that this film was made.

Ava Like, oh, well, then it must come from that fact that Disney was in such a slump at that time, right? It is interesting, the idea that like, in some ways this was part of the kick-off of the Disney Renaissance, right? Like, this was, this was a real success at the time, despite probably being, I think, the most expensive animated feature of the up-to-date [moment] as it was created and that was before it went over budget. But it was a huge success and it was popular, and it did genuinely make people excited about cartoons. And it made some of the stuff that Disney then started producing - now thought of as the Disney Renaissance – [what] it was. It was a kick start to some of that. And yeah. That's weird and amazing, right? Because this is a very… like, every step of the way decisions have been made to make something very bizarre, to commit to that thing, to make it as real and specific as it is.

I've talked/ I talk a lot about the fact that, like, for me, great art isn't necessarily about being, like, functionally good. Which, to be clear, this film is. But it's about people making strong decisions and fully committing to them. And, like, this is 100% a film that has decided to make that powerful decision of, like, “No, we are going to treat this like it is a real world where humans and cartoons coexist. And we're going to attempt to base everything on that completely. We're going to go full film noir. We are not going to, like… we're not going to stay back from that. We're not going to be coy about that in any way. We are going to make it be a film full of comedy-slapstick, because those are the elements that we're bringing together.”

And it does it, and it did it, and it was a great success as a result. Unlike the film that I'm normally talking about, unlike the Bob Hoskins film that I'm normally talking about when I say “I like a film that makes a strong decision and commits to it”, which isn of course, Super Mario Brothers 1993. I like that Ren absolutely knew that was coming.

Adam You could always. We could always have you back on the podcast to discuss that.

Ren Oh, my God. Oh, my God. That would make sense. That would make more sense than me trying to discuss TerrorVision, which we're going to have to start doing in a minute.

Adam Right. Yeah, we are. We are, so, so, so Judge Doom…

Ava (interjecting) SEGUE!

Adam [Judge Doom] has poor Roger and Jessica tied up ready to receive the dip, but is revealed as a cartoon himself and ends up being dipped himself. So in a moment that recalls the “I'm melting” scene from The Wizard of Oz, the dip is released; floods this factory. And I will say this was a real factory. So this is one of the few, few locations that isn't a studio set actually. I really love the factory's location. It's got some really bizarre background details, like there's a giant pink elephant, presumably one of the pink elephants on parade, I guess from Dumbo.

Ava I thought it was interesting how much of this physical space you're introduced to. Like, we kind of start off with an earlier spot and they do a load of ''Chekhov's cartoon mallets''.

Adam Yeah, yeah. You can see all of those props earlier.

AvaYeah, you see the props and you kind of they're just a throwaway thing, but they're almost all used in that final confrontation. Which is beautifully located within that space and really, really feeds into the nature of it, and it's horrifying. Like Judge Doom dies horrifically twice. Absolutely horrifically.

Adam (interjecting) Steamrollered!

Ava Like actually seeing someone steamrollered because they've got because they've got glued with their foot and hands to it. It's an appalling death. And then even more disconcertingly you see him have to reinflate himself, like you see himself, like, peel up.

Adam Oh yeah, that's a lovely bit of stop-motion, actually. They have have him sort of 2D sort wibbling about. And then he has to inflate himself with helium like a balloon.

Ava Which finally forces his eyes to pop out.

Adam And and then, yeah, he, he, he's melted and, yeah, I almost chose the texture of Judge Doom's corpse actually as my texture because he really becomes complete mush - like [he] liquidises and then at the end there's this awful kind of plastic latex mask of his face. Just, just, just with all the kind of goop around it.

Ren Which reminded me of 'The Substance'.

Adam Yeah, weirdly, actually, yeah. And it is is the kind of goop that we get actually in television. So that's one thing that unites these two films. They're both very //goopy//.

//Ava snortles//

Ren Yeah. From a beloved classic with an astonishing amount of effort and care put in it to TerrorVision (1986).

Adam Which is probably the groddiest film I've ever seen. I was trying to settle on the word.

Ava I think grody is absolutely the word. I think you could define grody using this film.

Ren Yeah. Which as we sort of trailed at the beginning does have a solid children's horror core to it, but is then…. Unrelentingly and Dementedly Horny. To which?

Ava Not knowing anything going into this film, right? Like, I was kind of expecting. I don't, I don't know what I was expecting, but I was expecting children's horror. I don't know if you know this podcast. I believe it's supposed to be about children's horror. And which which kind of could have held up for quite a lot of the intro. Like, you see we're in space and the beast is being disposed of, but is being turned into electricity and then beamed and bounced around the universe towards us. That all adds up and then we've got this set up with some kids staying home.

Adam Exactly! You've got two children protagonists and adults not believing them. You've got goofy humour. It's already colourful. It looks like Pee Wee's Playhouse (that someone's pointed out online). I thought, yeah, that's true. How is this not children tolerated?

Ava Well, the thing is that you step into it… I stepped into it expecting children's horror. And just found the innuendos… Quite a lot of like kids' films or family films quite often like have those little bits of innuendo for the parents.

Adam Exactly.

Ava And so like it kind of fades in in a way where it's like initially… It's like, “Okay, this is a little bit of its era, bit dated. I wouldn't really have made that reference now. Wouldn't want to talk about grabbing heinies so quickly, but I can see how they're doing that double layer thing.

Adam Excuse me, Ava – and I will quote from 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit': “50 year old's lust with a three-year-old's dinky.”

Ava OK, that's one moment of feeling like a bit deeply problematic in the middle of this film. Whereas this is just constantly that! Like, early on when I was still not quite sure what I was watching. And I mean, I still don't know what I was watching, if I'm perfectly honest. I could see that the innuendos increased. At one point I was relieved because they talked about going out to swing and then made a joke about it being they were going to some dance lessons. And it was only later on revealed to be like, no, no, we're going to see some swingers.

This is going to be a major part of the movie, like a good like 15-to-20 minute chunk is going to be the mum and dad of this film [swinging]. One thing I would say is, is Ren, in your intro, I think you referred to it as… or you implied that 'Roger Rabbit' was something where a lot of effort had been put into it. And I think you were implying there was no effort put into this? And I don't think it's zero effort. Like, I think there's been an incredible amount of set design work in particular, like the physical. The props, the scenery and all of those elements are clearly like labours of love in a way that is almost certainly the only redeeming feature of this film.

Adam I want a survivalist bunker like that grandad's, to be honest. If we're going to have to, you know, see out a complete civilizational collapse, I want his bunker. His bunker's great. It's got all the stuff in it. It's a brilliant bunker. And I want the grandpa's costume, which is a military jacket with plastic soldier toys glued to it.

Ren You're going to fit in really, really well down at the survivalist community, Adam. Just rocking up the libertarian rally. Your waistcoat coated in little army man.

Ren I did have the note – like, what is this house?

Adam It's a palace.

Ren It is some kind of mansion, some kind of erotic desert mansion.

Adam Yeah, an erotic desert mansion.

Ava It's just a classic suburban house, Ren. I don't know what you're talking about.

Adam Well, well, well, the couple who arrive, the man says, “Oh, it's very Greek”. And, you know, the husband says, “No, it's Roman”. So it's clearly got this kind of Roman influence to it. There's a lot of sculptures. There's very tasteful art on the walls.

Ren I mean, lots of it in every room.

Ava Yeah, no, their filthy art isn't limited to the pleasure dome in any way, right? In a way that is disconcerting.

Adam It's like the art is kind of like if Andy Warhol designed like erotic clip art.

Ava Is there not one thing that's just four breasts on a circle?

Adam What I kind of find fascinating about this film is, as you say, like, it's got this relentless horniness… and yet it's one of… I mean, I might like, maybe if you were a kid, like, you know, you were starting, you know, you started puberty and you watched this, like, maybe you'd find some of it appealing. But I think it's probably the least sexy film about sex that I've ever seen.

Ava Yeah. No, nothing. Nothing is sexy.

Adam Yeah. It's astonishing.

Ava Nothing.

Adam Yeah. Umm, well, and also like, it is like, OK, maybe why I felt this had a children's horror feeling is it almost… (Adam struggles to articulate a difficult point.) It's like a child's idea of sex, right? The way the characters talk about sex. Like the husband, like, you know, seeing someone's breasts, goes “Holy tomatoes!” Come on. “That bikini is dynamite!”

Ren Yeah, yeah, I think that's a good way of describing it. It's kind of… Yeah, it's kind of like an 11-year-old's view of sex.

Ava And I think it, I think weirdly it does kind of commit to that in quite a few ways throughout the process. Not least the kind of, like, the revelatory horror of the fact that all of the parents have been taken over by aliens is essentially just mum, dad, their two swinging friends, and grandpa all in bed together covered in horrible alien goop. And having the kids walk in on this in a way, yeah, and play it quite blasé. But also the kids are clearly horrified.

Adam And Sherman, the youngest kid, the boy, he says “I thought it was a monster.” And the older teenage girl says “That's OK, Sherman. Someday you'll understand.”

Ava I don't think Sherman should have to understand that.

Adam Yeah. I mean, I think child protection services probably be be getting on that.

Ava There's definitely a failure, there's an institutional failure to recognise what is going on in this house. On several levels.

Adam Sherman seems happy enough… like, he loves his granddad and he loves playing around with guns. In terms of child actor with massive prop guns, I think this this film wins out because Sherman has to spend a lot of time with really proper lmilitary grade guns.

Ren Yeah, did either of you see the 'Bojack Horseman' episode where, like… Todd is asexual and he has he has a girlfriend who's also asexual and they have to go and meet her family it's like like this kind of comedy reversal where the family are all, like, enormously sexual and at every possible instance. And they're trying to tell, she's trying to tell her parents that she's [asexual]. Yeah, I felt like they were… This family is like that family.

Ava Yeah. Sherman could have easily grown up into Todd, right? Like, I mean, maybe, maybe not the libertarian gunman [part].

Susie's hair and costuming is utterly fabulous. If we're looking for some positive things for me to say about this film, like, oh my God, Susie looks incredible in this film. Like, it's like the perfect embodiment of 80s teen neon bouffant hair in multiple layers. Those little Madonna gloves. Yeah, everything perfect about the costuming there. She also went on to play Princess Joanna in 'Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure'. Which is a significantly better 80s film I'm going to say. I'm willing to put my flag in the ground there. Do we need? Were we trying to describe the plot? The satellite is broken. I don't know. The monsters come to Earth. The parents are swinging. Grandpa's. Grandpa's exposing his child to, like, finally pornographic Medusa Horror Night.

Adam Well, so Medusa is basically like a kind of parody of Elvira, as long as I could tell. Yeah. So, you know. Buxom presenter in revealing costume who makes lots of innuendo and presents horror films. Very low rent horror films, basically. If 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' is a love letter to film noir and classic animations, you could say this film is a love letter to kind of bad 50s horror and sci-fi basically.

Ava Well, I think it's a love letter to like… I think one of the things that does explain, like, the weird kind of nostalgic perviness of this is… I think it's a love letter to growing up in the 80s, right. And it's in the sense of, like, being a child exposed to media that you shouldn't and, like, being excited to stay up late and watch horror. Like, you know, this is clearly made by people who love horror films. And I think it is a real experience of, like, kids seeing this sooner. And like, I don't think it's like a sensitive satire, but I think that there is there's a satirical nature to how it's just saying, like, this is what kind of 80s capitalism the word wrought/ makes/ creates. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I don't want to defend this film much. I did quite enjoy it. Like, I cackled a lot. There were definite moments of cackling throughout. It makes strong choices and commits to them. So I guess I think it's high quality art, so…

Ren I did like the monster. Yeah, I like the monster.

Ava The monster's very good. The monster's, like, a giant boglin with an extra eye and bonus mouths that just appear whenever they need to.

Ren Yeah. So, the story is that these… the monster is called a hungry beast. And it's a kind of house pet that people have on this planet, but they are prone to mutation. And when they mutate, they have to be exterminated, which is done by transforming them into pure energy and beaming them to the furthest reaches of the galaxy.

Ava And unfortunately, in this case, the furthest reaches of the galaxy was Earth. Which was just a bureaucratic error that like… there's a very, very worried waste disposal alien.

Ren Yeah, the sanitation captain just keeps appearing on the TV to implore the people of Earth to turn off their devices.

Ava For the next 200 years. Like, please turn off your television for the next 200 years!

Ren Which I do think is a good children's horror plot.

Adam It is.

Ren Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. To come back to this, is it sponsored by Heineken?

Ava It must have been sponsored by Heineken. There was Heineken money in this. There's a lot of