Hamlet Cleans Up

   From Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2.

   (to POLONIUS) Good my lord, will you see the players well bestowed?

   POLONIUS: My lord, I will use them according to their desert.

   HAMLET: God’s bodykins, man, much better. Use every man after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping?

   By the mid-nineteen-eighties I felt I could call myself a film animator. 

   I’d made a lot of TV commercials in New Zealand. Even made some in Africa, when I lived there in the seventies. Over the years I had honed my skills and learned my craft. I wasn’t the best there ever was, but I wasn’t bad.

   After nearly fifteen years at it, I was ready to become an overnight Show Business success.

   I wanted to try my hand at animation in the United States.

   New York City, to be precise., where I had a friend upon whose couch I could crash. 

   Maybe, if I was lucky and worked hard enough, I could play with the big boys of animation in the United States and work on feature films, or at least work on bigger things than 30 second TV commercials for peanut butter, ice cream cones or toilet bowl cleaners. 

   Cleaners! 

   Seems people need cleaners and cleanliness, for over the years I had made films that hawked the lot, a veritable universe of cleaners. Household, kitchen, driveway, roof, clothes, sink, dishes, toilet, wall, floor, glass, denture, face, hair, shoe, dog, cat, kitten, carpet, tile, engine, water, air, et cetera, et cetera. Every type of cleaner imaginable. To divide them inventorially, as Hamlet once said, would dizzy the arithmetic of memory. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, you bet, and we’ve got just the product for you to take care of that! Now with a clean, fresh scent! What a filthy world we live in, this goodly frame the earth, to judge by all the crap that’s advertised to clean it up with! 

   Get thee to a nunnery if you must, but no need to get on your knees with our new and improved scrubbing bubbles! Just spray and rinse away! 

“The rest is silence.”

    Ah, Shakespeare. You magnificent bastard!