AFOS Blog Rewind: Not everyone's a critic, which was why Fox's enormously funny The Critic didn't last

Last week, Uproxx posted a lengthy and enjoyable interview with longtime writing partners Al Jean and Mike Reiss about their short-lived but well-remembered creation, the '90s animated show The Critic. The show centered around Jay Sherman, a persnickety film critic nobody likes, except for Marty, Jay's 13-year-old son, and Margo, Jay's teenage foster sister, who both look up to Jay, and Jeremy Hawke, an easygoing Aussie B-movie star who considers Jay his best friend ever since he was the only critic who didn't trash his first movie. In the Uproxx article, Jean and Reiss recalled the main reason why The Critic lasted from only 1993 to 1995 (the new Fox network president at the time hated it) and the challenges of attempting to give Jay and the other Critic characters the same kind of revival Family Guy and Futurama experienced after they were cancelled by Fox too (three of The Critic's regular voice actors are no longer alive, and Reiss also points out that "Siskel and Ebert are dead and those kinds of shows don't exist anymore. Movie critics used to be all over TV and they used to wield great influence and they just don't"). So from March 18, 2008, here's a post about The Critic, originally posted under the title "'Now who wants to boogie with Baby '37?'"

This weekend, I was surprised to find an eight-hour ReelzChannel marathon of the short-lived animated series The Critic, James L. Brooks' second foray into animation after the success of The Simpsons. Created by Simpsons writers Al Jean and Mike Reiss, The Critic aired on ABC during its first season (1993-94) and then for its second and final season (1994-95), it went to die on Fox (where the show's "Hey! We're on Fox" gags were amusing, while on a non-Fox channel in reruns years later, uh... not so much). The show, which comes complete with Simpsonian catchphrases that never took off ("It stinks!," "Hotchie motchie!," the Chuck McCann-referencing "Hi guy!"), later enjoyed a cultish afterlife in webisode form and on both DVD and Comedy Central's animation lineup.

Throwback Thursday: The Simpsons Movie

Throwback Thursday begins today, the first day of the new year, on the AFOS blog. Every Thursday in 2015, I'll be randomly pulling out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket I saved. Then I'll discuss the movie on the ticket and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS.

Much of why 2007's The Simpsons Movie succeeds as both a Simpsons story and a movie is because the movie's writers, a murderers' row of veteran Simpsons scribes (including reclusive former Simpsons writer John Swartzwelder), didn't recycle too much material from its TV counterpart like one of the first genuine blockbusters based on a TV show, 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture, so boringly did. Sure, longtime Simpsons gags like Homer choking Bart, the chalkboard gag during the TV version's opening titles and Mr. Burns releasing the hounds are revisited in the movie, as is the light drama of the marital challenges Marge must deal with while living with the perpetually lazy man-child that is Homer, a thread that's been a part of the long-running animated show since 1990's "Life on the Fast Lane." But not once does The Simpsons Movie feel like a tired rehash of the show's greatest hits in the same way that Star Trek: TMP was a rehash of Kirk's battle of wits with a rogue space probe in the classic Trek episode "The Changeling"--or that many Simpsons episodes after season 8 (the show's last consistently great season) have been rehashes of plots from earlier episodes.

It helps that the story in The Simpsons Movie, which FXX included as part of the unprecedented 12-day Simpsons marathon that revived media interest in the show last summer, is both a story that The Simpsons, despite its post-season 8 habits of repetition and derivativeness, hadn't previously done and an ideal one for the scope of the big screen: Homer's clueless treatment of the environment gets Springfield into trouble with the EPA. But when the agency intervenes and makes an already crummy town an even crummier existence for the town's citizens--Simpsons creator Matt Groening and his fellow Simpsons Movie screenwriters enclosed an entire town in a giant dome two years before Stephen King did the same in his novel Under the Dome, which King actually first tried to write back in the '70s--an exiled, on-the-lam Homer must undo the damage he's done and save Springfield. Another bit of storytelling in the movie that the show hadn't done before was a surprisingly affecting subplot where Bart, tired once again of Homer's antics, considers adopting the kindly and deeply religious Flanders as his new father figure. Screw all those Squishees, Buzz Colas and Duff energy drinks Simpsons fans flocked to 7-Eleven for when the convenience store chain temporarily converted some of its stores into Kwik-E-Marts to promote The Simpsons Movie. What I really wanted more than any of those items was the cup of cocoa Flanders makes for Bart.





Both longtime Simpsons episode director David Silverman, who directed The Simpsons Movie, and the movie's writers clearly wanted to craft a large-scale comedic blockbuster in the mold of The Incredibles, Galaxy Quest and Ghostbusters (in fact, The Simpsons Movie's chief villain, voiced by frequent Simpsons guest star Albert Brooks, is an EPA employee, much like the main antagonist in Ghostbusters). They largely succeeded at crafting such a blockbuster. They went bigger and bolder with the action and the humor (many of my favorite sight gags in the movie, like the wide shot of the churchgoers in Rev. Lovejoy's parish and the customers in Moe's Tavern switching places, make clever use of the widescreen, thanks to Silverman being inspired by the widescreen compositions of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and Bad Day at Black Rock), but without neglecting the irreverence and sharp social satire of many of the show's funniest half-hours, whether it's 1997's "The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show" or "Homer Badman," the 1994 episode that, in one of my favorite Simpsons sight gags, turned Gentle Ben into a daytime talk show host. A great example of The Simpsons Movie's sharp social satire is an eerily prescient gag about NSA surveillance of phone calls, which is especially eerie and funny nowadays due to the NSA scandal.

Moments like that NSA scene or the church and bar gag bring us back to why we fell in love with The Simpsons in the first place and why we still catch the show on Fox from time to time, despite its many post-season 8 missteps, whether it's the show inanely revealing Principal Skinner to be an imposter or more recently, the Comic Book Guy getting married to a one-dimensional, clichéd-as-fuck Japanese geek girl (an ugly and unattractive white guy hooking up with a hot Asian woman: yeah, I haven't seen that before) or the show's bizarre attachment to Hank Azaria's increasingly dated character of Apu. That character really ought to be retired from the show ever since Simpsons fan Hari Kondabolu sparked an insightful discussion about why The Simpsons' primary Indian character is a tiresome stereotype and a "weird relic from another era" when his humorous Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell rant about Apu went viral ("A white guy doing an impression of a white guy making fun of my father! If I saw Hank Azaria do that voice at a party, I would kick the shit out of him!"), and Azaria surprisingly agreed with Kondabolu's criticisms.

The Simpsons Movie is as close as Simpsons co-executive producer James L. Brooks--who, outside of The Simpsons, is best known for smaller-scale, character-driven fare like The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, Broadcast News and As Good as It Gets--has gotten to making a crowd-pleasing action comedy. Brooks had more creative input in The Simpsons Movie than in more recent seasons of the show: for instance, he chose Hans Zimmer, his musical collaborator from the 1994 fiasco I'll Do Anything, As Good as It Gets and Spanglish, over longtime Simpsons series composer Alf Clausen for the task of composing the movie's score. Zimmer took Danny Elfman's Simpsons theme and etched out of it a charming new motif for Homer, the movie's most significant and memorable composition that's not "Spider-Pig." While I would have wanted to hear Clausen work his usual magic on The Simpsons Movie, Zimmer did a solid job musically bringing the characters to the big screen. (By the way, one Simpsons character who didn't make that jump to the big screen and should have was Rainier Wolfcastle, the star of the hilariously over-the-top McBain action flicks the Simpsons were frequently seen watching in the show's earlier seasons. The absence of McBain, a character I would have loved to have seen on the big screen, is the movie's biggest misstep. Rainier was replaced in the movie by a presidential version of the action star Rainier was a parody of, Arnold Schwarzenegger, voiced not by the former Cully-forn-ya governor himself but by Rainier's usual alter ego Harry Shearer.)

Brooks also directed the movie's voice actor recording sessions, something he hadn't done since The Simpsons' earlier seasons. His input, which veteran Simpsons writer Jon Vitti once noted was crucial in making the beloved 1991 episode "Lisa's Substitute" resonate with viewers, is most evident in the movie's most emotional moments, particularly a videotaped farewell message from Julie Kavner's quietly anguished Marge to Homer. "We were really trying to get to a woman who is completely broken and her spirit is defeated. I got there I guess by breaking the actress' spirit. She worked so hard at it and she wanted it to be as good and that's also a big impact Jim had on that whole scene," said Simpsons Movie co-writer Mike Scully to the Canadian site MoviesOnline in 2007. Kavner reportedly did between 100 and 150 takes for Marge's video message scene. The take that was used in the movie is perhaps her most sublime moment as a voice actor.

The perfectionism Silverman, Brooks and the writers aimed for in The Simpsons Movie's voice acting was also evident in the movie's outstanding animation work, which was divided among four different studios, including Film Roman, the primary animation studio for The Simpsons since its fourth season. Groening grumbled in 2013 that "[the movie] took us four years [to make] and it killed us." So it's unlikely we'll ever get that Simpsons Movie sequel Maggie was hinting at in the movie's end credits. But if the Simpsons characters' appearances on the big screen are limited to terrific theatrical shorts like 2012's Oscar-nominated Maggie solo short "The Longest Daycare," which Silverman also directed, then I don't mind the lack of a second Simpsons feature film.

"I can't believe we're paying to see something we get on TV for free. If you ask me, everybody in this theater is a giant sucker, especially you!," says Homer from his movie theater seat as he breaks the fourth wall at the start of the movie. Yes, Homer, you're a bit right. All of us who flocked to The Simpsons Movie in the theaters back in the summer of 2007 were giant suckers. But the still-funny Simpsons Movie is hardly a sham.

Selections from Hans Zimmer's Simpsons Movie score can be heard during the animation music block "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

Pop that brefnish: Time to look at hip-hop and R&B's immense love for the Taxi theme

The effects of brefnish

Nah Right posted last week a lengthy and interesting interview with jazz pianist Bob James, one of the most sampled musicians in hip-hop. What started out as a contentious relationship between James and beatmakers because of their tendency in the late '80s and early '90s to sample music without permission (James sued DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince over the unauthorized use of "Westchester Lady") has mellowed into something less hostile and gone in some unexpected directions. James started collaborating with former X-Ecutioners DJ Rob Swift and has now assembled the new release Rhodes Scholar: Jazz-Funk Classics 1974-1982, a compilation of his own most sampled instrumentals that's being marketed to newer fans who were first exposed to James through hip-hop.



James' 1975 cover of Paul Simon's "Take Me to the Mardi Gras," which the late Jam Master Jay flipped in Run-DMC's 1986 classic "Peter Piper," is included on Rhodes Scholar. So are "Nautilus," a 1974 tune James originally thought of as filler but has become one of his most frequently sampled compositions (it's looped in "Daytona 500," one of my favorite Ghostface Killah joints), and 1981's "Sign of the Times," which opens with a calliope solo by James that provided Prince Paul with a catchy hook for "Keepin' the Faith," a highlight of 1991's De La Soul Is Dead, my favorite De La Soul album. Of course, Rhodes Scholar would have been incomplete without the first James tune I ever heard, "Angela (Theme from Taxi)," which also has been frequently sampled by beatmakers.

Both "Angela" and "Groove for Julie," another theme James wrote for the still-hilarious sitcom about loser cabbies in Manhattan (a show that premiered 35 years ago on September 12, 1978--I didn't need Marilu Henner's highly superior autobiographical memory to verify that), are currently in rotation on "AFOS Prime" on AFOS. Why? Is it because I'm a smooth jazz softie? No, I'm hardly a smooth jazz softie, and who cares that it's smooth jazz? James' Taxi score music is just damn good.

"Sunshine Cab Company" by Noelle McClanahan

When the original Law & Order was filmed on location in New York City, TV reviewers would often say the city itself was like a seventh main character on L&O. Even though Taxi also took place in the Big Apple, you see very little of the actual city during Taxi.

That's because this studio-bound show was never filmed on location and never had any scenes outdoors due to the limitations enforced by three things: 1) the multi-camera sitcom format, 2) a modest budget ($260,000 per episode, much lower than the $1.5 million it cost to shoot each episode of the low-cost-by-today's-standards It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia in 2010) and 3) the Taxi producers' insistence on a realistic look (which was achieved by having all the cab scenes occur at night and shooting them on a pitch-black stage with remarkably convincing, stage play-style lighting effects to simulate passing lights, rather than shooting them against a cheesy-looking blue screen). So instead of New York, James' score music is the eighth character on this seven-member ensemble sitcom, and it does the job of establishing the troubled but oddly alluring late '70s/early '80s New York setting that the city itself couldn't do (outside of stock footage) because like many sitcoms at the time, Taxi was filmed in front of a live studio audience in Hollywood.

That's how integral James' music is to Taxi, even though you hear only 10 or 15 seconds of it during the zoom lens-reliant establishing shots that co-creator/showrunner James L. Brooks carried over from his previous sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show. James' groovetastic and mostly melancholy instrumentals--the sort of themes you'd encounter while watching a gritty poliziotto from Italy but not a multi-camera '70s sitcom--helped define and distinguish Taxi, its character-based humor and its distinctively bleak tone in the same way Henry Mancini's West Coast jazz sounds defined Peter Gunn, Angelo Badalamenti's ethereal and sometimes kitschy motifs defined Twin Peaks and Yoko Kanno's brassy, J-pop-meets-the-Knitting-Factory jams defined Cowboy Bebop.

The bleak tone was why both Taxi and the equally sophisticated and gritty Barney Miller stuck out like sore thumbs on the late '70s/early '80s ABC sitcom schedule, surrounded by much broader and more dumbed-down sitcoms like Happy Days, its gazillion spinoffs and Three's Company. It's also why Taxi continues to stick out like a sore thumb in reruns (good luck finding Taxi on cable, although I hear Me-TV network affiliates are rerunning it again) and continues to have a reputation as a slept-on classic, even though it influenced Taxi staff writers Glen and Les Charles' hit creation Cheers; the earlier seasons of The Simpsons, Brooks' biggest hit as a TV producer; the original Office; Party Down; and Community--and even though the animalistic asshole persona of Danny DeVito's Louie De Palma paved the way for misanthropic Larry David creations like Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm and even DeVito's own It's Always Sunny.

(Photo source: A.V. Club)

I abhor most older sitcoms with studio audience laughter or laugh tracks, a.k.a. canned laughter. But Taxi is one of the few I still revisit either on the CBS streaming service or in bootlegged form on YouTube (screw Paramount's DVDs of the show, which are disappointingly bare-bones and slightly butchered due to music rights issues) because the writing and acting on Taxi were always tops (even during that occasionally bumpy first season where the writers had trouble figuring out what to do with Randall Carver's John Burns, a proto-Woody Boyd who was written out of the show in the second season and replaced in the cast by a guest star from the previous season, the much more funny Christopher Lloyd as drug-addled Reverend Jim Ignatowski). It remains one of my favorite shows.

You read about--or if you're a masochist, you watch--a racist piece of shit like the Seth MacFarlane production Dads, and its lame-ass punchlines bum you out about many things, like the shabby state of multi-camera sitcoms today. None of these newer multi-cams--even with frequent Taxi director James Burrows at the helm of many of their pilots--measure up to Taxi. Quality writing and genuine laughs elude these multi-cams like the meaning of a yellow light during Reverend Jim's driver's license exam.



Taxi's more low-key and realistic side was represented by the characters of world-weary pragmatist Alex Rieger, ambitious single mom Elaine Nardo, aspiring actor Bobby Wheeler and thick-headed prizefighter Tony Banta and what current Dissolve writer Noel Murray referred to in a 2004 A.V. Club piece as "building small stories out of the cabbies' money troubles or their offbeat passengers while dealing more honestly and humorously with the indignity of a service economy." Some critics and even some Taxi fans felt that low-key and realistic side meshed awkwardly with the show's Simpsons-y, outlandish side. That other side consisted of Ignatowski's confused wordplay shtick and stoned hijinks; Latka Gravas and his split personality issues; the strange customs and brefnish-fueled pastimes of the unnamed Eastern European country Latka and his girlfriend/wife Simka emigrated from; and of course, tyrannical Louie and his various schemes. I never agreed that it was an awkward juxtaposition. I always thought the way Taxi juggled both sides was perfect. Speaking of perfection...

"And then there's that Bob James theme song, so pretty and forlorn, playing in the opening credits over an endless shot of a cab crossing a bridge and never getting anywhere," wrote Murray. "It's the whole mood and meaning of the show, established in less than a minute."

True. There are several interesting bits of trivia about that opening credits footage. Who's the driver inside that cab on the Queensboro Bridge (which, by the way, was renamed in 2010, in honor of former NYC mayor Ed Koch, an enemy of hip-hop culture who was famously put on blast by Spike Lee in Do the Right Thing)? He's none other than Tony Danza, and the Taxi producers culled the footage from the same shoot where they filmed the only scene shot on location in NYC in the show's history: Tony's amusingly brief "Memories of Cab 804" flashback to the moment when he stopped a passenger from jumping off the Queensboro Bridge. The problem with the footage that was chosen for the intro was that it was only 15 seconds long, which wasn't enough time to flash the credits of Taxi's sizable cast, so the editor looped the footage. It resulted in a clever and dark-humored encapsulation of the show's premise of working-class dreamers struggling to succeed. It also made the bridge as long as that airport runway in the climax of Furious 6.

The choice of "Angela" was another happy accident, and like the bridge footage, the tune wasn't originally intended for the opening credits. It was a theme James wrote for a character named Angela Matusa (Suzanne Kent), an obese and lonely phone operator Alex befriends in "Blind Date," one of the show's earliest episodes.

"Now who wants to boogie with Baby '37?"

This weekend, I was surprised to find an eight-hour ReelzChannel marathon of the short-lived animated series The Critic, James L. Brooks' second foray into animation after the success of The Simpsons. Created by Simpsons writers Al Jean and Mike Reiss, The Critic aired on ABC during its first season (1993-94) and then for its second and final season (1994-95), it went to die on Fox (where the show's "Hey! We're on Fox" gags were amusing, while on a non-Fox channel in reruns years later, uh... not so much). The show, which comes complete with Simpsonian catchphrases that never took off ("It stinks!," "Hotchie motchie!," the Chuck McCann-referencing "Hi guy!"), later enjoyed a cultish afterlife in webisode form and on both DVD and Comedy Central's animation lineup.

The ReelzChannel marathon reminded me how funny The Critic could be, though the rest of America didn't agree, including TV critics who found it difficult to warm up to the show like they had with The Simpsons. Even Matt Groening, Jean and Reiss' on-and-off-and-on-again boss, had gripes about The Critic. (The Simpsons creator opposed Brooks' idea of a Simpsons/Critic crossover show and took his name off the credits of that episode. Some of Groening's gripes are understandable. The crossover added more continuity errors to a series that was already drowning in them--in the Critic universe, the Simpsons characters were established as fictional.)

The titular loser is Jay Sherman (Jon Lovitz), the miserable host of a Manhattan-based movie review show that's constantly being tinkered with by cable network CEO Duke Phillips (Charles Napier), a Ted Turner-like chicken and waffle house magnate. While getting reacquainted with The Critic, I was struck by how the love/hate relationship between Jay and his intrusive boss seems to have been carried over in the dynamic between Liz the principled comedy writer and Jack the well-meaning but meddlesome network exec on 30 Rock (and like Duke, Jack thinks his favorite employee is gay). The big difference between Jay/Duke and Liz/Jack is that most of Jack's ideas have actually helped Liz's program The Girlie Show (Jack's hiring of movie star Tracy Jordan boosts the ratings of the rebranded TGS), while none of Duke's ideas have ever worked (one of my favorite Critic episodes--also the source of the classic Franklin Sherman line that I referenced in this post's title--involves Duke's insistence on pairing Jay with sidekicks, which range from a grizzly bear to a sassy black kid named "Lil' Shabazz").

Though it was given great time slots by both networks (ABC paired it with Home Improvement, while on Fox, it followed The Simpsons), why wasn't The Critic able to attract viewers like The Simpsons and King of the Hill did? There's a theory in a post by Jaime J. Weinman that could explain The Critic's inability to find an audience. He thinks 30 Rock is a ratings underperformer because it suffers from the same flaw that he says is also plaguing How I Met Your Mother: the central character, the one figure that the audience is supposed to identify with, is the show's weak link. (Weinman feels Liz and Ted, the "I" in How I Met Your Mother, lack presence as central characters--they're constantly overshadowed by the other characters on their respective shows--and the less patient viewers have abandoned these shows because they can't find any characteristics in the leads that they could relate to.) While I don't consider the characters of Liz or Ted to be the weak links (for me, the weak link on these ratings-addled cult shows has often been the stunt casting), I could see why Jay's irritable film critic persona could be off-putting to viewers because you know how much America loves film critics.

I also think The Critic failed to connect with viewers because of its offbeat cosmopolitan setting, which, for me, was one of the show's charms. The setting was reflected in everything from Hans Zimmer's sprightly, "Rhapsody in Blue"-inspired main title theme (an early taste of what was to come in his surprisingly enjoyable Simpsons Movie score) to the character design, a shout-out to the drawing styles of New York cartoonists like Al Hirschfeld and the New Yorker illustrators. Viewers tend to embrace animated sitcoms set in suburban neighborhoods (The Simpsons, King of the Hill, South Park, Family Guy) and avoid cartoons set in the city (The Critic, Futurama, The PJs), perhaps because the characters on these city shows have been too abrasive for their tastes, and Jay was no exception.

Here's another Weinman theory: viewers avoid darker-toned sitcoms (The Honeymooners and Brooks' own Taxi were ratings flops during their initial runs). The Critic was far from dark, but my God, Jay the adopted, divorced and luckless schlub suffered through life more often than Charlie Brown--even though he seemed to get as much tail as George Costanza.

Too bad viewers bolted because they couldn't stomach seeing those brash qualities in a prime-time cartoon. They missed out on other great elements of The Critic, like any gag involving the show's funniest character, Jay's WASPy adoptive father Franklin (Gerrit Graham), a former New York governor whose main vice while in office seemed to be cocktails rather than whores. Had The Critic continued for more than 23 episodes, I would have loved to have seen what else the writers had in store for the insane and eternally tipsy Franklin, who, like Ralph Wiggum on The Simpsons and Tracy on 30 Rock, lives in "a different and more wonderful universe than everyone around him," as the A.V. Club's Nathan Rabin once wrote about Ralph and Franklin. A couple of the secondary settings in Jay's fully realized universe could have functioned well as separate shows of their own, like the mansion where Jay's adoptive family lives or his son Marty's U.N. private school, where the kid from Easter Island can't catch a break and the African headmaster creepily laughs at his own jokes.

There was clearly more to the show than just the movie/TV/pop culture parody gags, some of which haven't aged well, while others are amazingly dead-on, like a sequence involving a musical version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame--this was two years before Disney released its animated song-and-dance version of Hunchback. (Speaking of which, the random movie/TV spoofs make more sense in the showbiz setting of The Critic than they do in the non-showbiz setting of Family Guy. My favorite Critic parody is a 007-style depiction of Fifth President James Monroe, who spits game at a damsel in distress with a Connery-esque "Welcome to the Era of Good Feelingsch.")

Critics who couldn't warm up to The Critic because they felt it lacked the heart of the earlier seasons of The Simpsons must have missed the poignant "Every Doris Has Her Day," the most Brooksian of all the Critic episodes (Brooks is credited with providing many of The Simpsons' more emotional moments). In that episode, Jay discovers a kindred spirit in his previously unfriendly, chain-smoking makeup artist Doris (the late Doris Grau, who also voiced Lunch Lady Doris on The Simpsons) and begins to think she's his birth mother. But to Jay's disappointment, DNA results prove otherwise. Now that's one juicy thread the Critic writers could have pursued if Fox hadn't killed the series: would Jay ever find his birth parents?

The series could have lasted longer had it been produced for a cable channel like IFC, which would have understood The Critic because IFC's specialty is original programming that satirizes showbiz (Greg the Bunny, The Minor Accomplishments of Jackie Woodman), and its audience consists primarily of Jay Sherman types. The Critic just had the misfortune of airing on a network that found it too crass and a network that found it too tame.

And that stinks.

Boogie with Baby '37 when The Critic airs Mondays at 6:30pm ET/3:30pm PT, 8:30pm ET/5:30pm PT and 11:30pm ET/8:30pm PT on ReelzChannel. Most DVR-worthy Critic episode: the break-up of Siskel and Ebert (who voiced themselves).