(originally aired September 27, 2009)
Just like Ricky Gervais before them, this episode was written by two guest writers: Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the comedy duo behind Superbad and Pineapple Express. And just like last time, I’m sure there’s about 3% of their draft that ended up on screen after getting ripped to shreds through many rounds in the writer’s room. Why get comedy writers to make scripts for you if you’re only going to water them down to be as indistinguishable as the rest of the slop? Bart and Milhouse find out Comic Book Guy has a secret hobby: writing his own superhero comics, and they encourage him to self-publish them. They are, of course, instantly successful, and he manages to print them in large quantities and sell them to comic shops all over the globe… and in space. Bereft of original ideas, Hollywood options Everyman is a movie, and CBG demands he be able to choose the actor who plays the lead. Guess who gets the part? Whoever could it be? Homer the movie star! Ugh.
This episode is about the production and release of an entire feature film, and it still feels like nothing is happening, and the little that is is ridiculous. CBG wanted a schlubby average Joe to play Everyman, but now the studio feels Homer needs to get into perfect physical shape. I guess they gloss over this by showing how CBG has gone Hollywood, but then later we see him protesting the disaster of a production. Whatever. Homer gets ridiculously buff for the part, then weeks into production he’s randomly tempted by a craft services cart and gets overweight again. None of the hundreds of people working on this major blockbuster film noticed or said anything as Homer ballooned back to his normal obese frame, and worse than that, they just pushed the movie into release where his weight fluctuates literally from shot to shot. I’ll say again for the thousandth time, I can’t take any of this shit seriously if the episode itself doesn’t. Having been gracious enough to give this series another shot, I remember watching this one, and just feeling nothing. The magic from this show I once loved was now completely gone. I have no idea why it took me so frigging long to see it.
Tidbits and Quotes
– Comic Book Guy was once shrewd and quick-witted, able to undermine all of his customers and their bullshit. Now he falls for Bart tricking him about not knowing Spider-Man was a comic before it was a movie.
– I couldn’t stop thinking of how shitty an idea Everyman the superhero was. I mean, I guess it works as CBG’s creation, although I think he would make fun of something like this. But then, how is it going to work as a movie if a studio would have to acquire the rights to all these other superheroes for him to absorb their powers from their comic books? It just doesn’t seem like it would work, but then again, I’m sure no one in the writer’s room even bothered to bring this up. Nor does it really matter, really.
– Outside Ginormous Pictures is a poster for Star Wars Episode VII: The Apology. Again, it’s the Star Wars-Cosmic Wars dilemma again. The poster even has that goddamn George Lucas stand-in character on it we saw in that other episode… whatever his name was… ugh.
– Homer as Everyman looks nothing like CBG’s comic. They changed everything about it. You’d think this would be easy satire of Hollywood usurping a creative property and fucking up everything about it, but it’s barely even scratched upon.
– I did laugh at the shot outside the Kwik-E-Mart as Homer’s vomit plasters the inside windows, played in complete silence.
– There’s great, great irony on the Everyman test screening marquee (“Tell Us How To Do Our Job”) considering what happened with The Simpsons Movie, but I don’t think that was the intention of the writers.
Me Blog Write Good 
Not quite the same thing as a guy touching a comic to get powers, but we DO already have heroes who can do what Everyman can, more or less. Rogue on the X-Men can steal your powers — permanently if she does it to long — by just TOUCHING you. Also, Spawn can essentially do EVERYTHING, EVER, AT ANY TIME TIME, WHENEVER HE WANTS… he just has that demon counter thing where if he does too much he goes back to Hell. I’m sure there’s a trillion examples. I’m tired. This episode sucks.
I preferred this story when it was called “Radioactive Man”.
Mickey Rooney >>> Seth Rogen
Yes and the bad editing scene was done way better in that episode too.
Jiminy Jillikers!
I did too, but both Radioactive Man and this episode had crummy, lifeless digital animation. The only saving grace was that Radioactive Man had that flashback of the campy 1970s Radioactive Man where Radioactive Man and Fallout Boy fight The Scoutmaster (who looks and acts like Paul Lynde) and the ending where it turns out Hollywood is a beautiful place filled with flowers and rainbows while “Lean on Me” plays.
Would you please stop complaining about the “lifeless” digital animation? Do not let that take away from what you liked about the rest of the episode.
– I couldn’t stop thinking of how shitty an idea Everyman the superhero was. I mean, I guess it works as CBG’s creation, although I think he would make fun of something like this. But then, how is it going to work as a movie if a studio would have to acquire the rights to all these other superheroes for him to absorb their powers from their comic books? It just doesn’t seem like it would work, but then again, I’m sure no one in the writer’s room even bothered to bring this up. Nor does it really matter, really. I’m more offended just that it’s a dumb idea.
Just the fact it’s called everyman… YAWN! also Family Guy made fun of a writer calling their character John Everyman back in 2001…
Also, CBG hates the everyman and considers himself superior in nearly every way. This is not the sort of fantasy someone like him would have.
This episode sounds wretched but I actually like CBG’s idea for a comic. You could use made-up comics if you had to. It’s fun in a campy way, like “Dial H for Hero.”
“None of the hundreds of people working on this major blockbuster film noticed or said anything as Homer ballooned into his normal obese frame, and worse than that, pushed the movie into release where his weight flagrantly fluctuates literally from shot to shot.”
I thought that bit was pretty good, though much like a lot of modern episodes, they stretched the gag longer than it needed to.
I hate this episode almost as much as I hate Seth Rogen. I think the guy is unfunny, his movies are nothing more than about guys trying to get laid and making countless sex jokes, and he is just overall a douchebag who is full of himself. The episode itself is just a rip-off of “Radioactive Man,” but it is done in such a boring way.
Anyway, I was surprised to see this review up and it is kind of nice. Not sure what made you change your mind so quickly, but it was nice.
He didn’t change his mind. He was always going to review this episode. #444 is his stopping point. 🙂
If you do not like Seth Rogen’s movies, then that probably shows you why he would not be good at writing an episode of The Simpsons making fun of superhero movies either. I almost liked it before, and some parts were very amusing, but the plot barely had any sense of direction because despite how shallow the story was, it was written in such a nuanced way where I was not sure if it wanted to make a point about unfaithful Hollywood adaptations or not. Maybe it was trying to make fun of rushed productions who do not care about shot continuity in actors’ weight. It could have had a point to make about CBG questioning if he should allow people who change his vision of Everyman to give him more creative control in directing the sequel by pretending he thought the first movie was good, but it did not go far enough by only showing that in the end scene and one other scene in the middle.
Sorry to go against the flow here, but I actually enjoyed this episode. It’s nothing spectacular, but I found the jokes funny. ZS is lucky to even pull that off, especially considering season 20.
i just can say in “Radioactive Man”, the editing scene is one of my favourite ever, while watching the editing scene in this episode i felt like embarrassed for the writers, i felt sorry for them, because i knew it should have been funny but it looked so dull, pathetic and rough, like they really didnt know how to do it but they tried their best
I checked out this episode out of curiosity. I can believe it’s something Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg would write. The fact that Marge and Lisa get maybe about half a dozen lines between them suggests that…
I hate the way people call CBG “Comic Book Guy” like it’s his real name. It’s just really really lazy.
It makes sense if you figure no one bothered to ask his name and he’s only ever said it to Flanders. Where it would be lazy is if his wife refers to him as Comic Book Guy. Surely she should know his real name.
Eh. More realistically, they’d call him Comic Store Guy, I think. It’s well-established that many of our characters like comics (Bart, Milhouse, Martin) so CBG isn’t the only comics guy. He is the only one with a store, though
There are a couple of things I like in this episode, like Cbg reading to his adopted cambodian orphan by saying “nanny produce the child and the story book” and the bin of previous studio heads.
Everyman also amused me with the “power absorbtion power, absorb!” line, and just for how bad an idea it actually was, as well as “everyman 2, rise of the revenge!”, though then again I freely admit I really! don’t like the modern trend of big flat super hero films so anything which even vaguely attempps to micky take I will probably view in a favouriable light, albeit the Simpsons have parodied super heroes in general far better in the past.
I really! didn’t care for Homer’s trainer though, why is suddenly saying one thing then reversing on it supposed to be funny? his enthusiastic “goodbye” and then whispered to homer “bad bye” just made him look obnoxious, and the line about “I’ll train you, and leave you and train you again, that’s how I make my money” was so out of left field making him seem like a creepy drug pusher for some reason.
All in all there are worse episodes of zombie simpsons, but then again there are always! worse episodes of Zombie simpsons :D.
I would be interested in reading the original draft to this episode before the Zombie writers destroyed its humor and soul.
Just because we have a new guest writer doesn’t automatically make their episode better than the rest, but that would be a real bummer in the summer if FOX really did ruin a good storyline because they had a rule against having any good episodes after Season 20, they wanted to play things way too safe, or their IQ wasn’t high enough to understand the other writers’ brilliance. But maybe Seth and Evan figured they could just write any old The Simpsons episode about superhero comic book film adaptations inserting themselves because anything is good enough for FOX now. For all we know, David M. Stern had already deteriorated to the level of current The Simpsons writers when he wrote Kamp Krustier because he couldn’t write anything better.
And these two are the same guys who later wrote Sausage Party, an animated film for adults a lot better than this episode that wouldn’t work so well if animated films were more diverse in topics instead of treating animation as a genre.
Evan and Seth did write it with the intent to satirize how common comic book superhero movies are and Hollywood studios ruining them with unfaithful adaptations based on what they think their audiences want to see more than the source material. However, I have considered the possibility that their original draft had little humour and no soul to begin because they only half-baked their execution, even and especially with feedback from the other writers of The Simpsons.
Maybe Homer the Whopper is sort of misunderstood. I mean, I have not yet seen Radioactive Man from 14 years before to see how worse Homer the Whopper is by comparison, but I think Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s execution of this storyline was more unique or more meaningful than it appears at first glance. They timed Homer the Whopper well with FOX premiering Dragonball: Evolution in the same year, and taking none of the original Dragonball creator Akira Toriyama’s suggestions to change Dragonball for the better when it did not capture the world or the characteristics of his anime series, so while the episode Homer the Whopper was not too interesting to watch on its own, it has more soul and intelligence than we think to be satire of (1) Lazy Hollywood producers who are tapped for ideas and want to buy the rights to adapt a comic, but not care about being a faithful adaptation of it because they want Everyman to look more empowering and fit like other superheroes, (2) People who are bad at editing movies together because they do not want to proofread over dumb scripts or photos of actors with an inconsistent weight, and (3) One that has aged the most like fine wine with superhero fatigue in the 2020s, studio heads who know they made a bad superhero movie that is one big joke, but want the author of the comics to pretend to give that movie a positive review for the shills so he can have more creative control on the second movie.
I was disappointed that we would have no Everyman 2, but after coming back to re-watch Homer the Whopper 14 years later with a different perspective after superhero films became much more common than they were back when Homer the Whopper originally aired, I can leave the episode with a better taste in my mouth because I understand that the dubiously shown lesson of the story was that Comic Book Guy refused to sell his soul to Hollywood, after seeing what a derivative and incompetent travesty an Everyman movie really is, plus the catch that they did not let Homer keep on his usual weight to make his Everyman character truer to the Everyman comics. The new lesson I decided to take away from Homer the Whopper, is that either some superhero stories are not good enough for a movie when they are already an uninspired, tired idea in conception, or a less cynical take to have on this story, which is that story artists who have a niche audience can retain some artistic integrity if they shut down the possibility of more bad screen adaptations of their books or their comics, and do not compromise their own work to appeal to a broader audience who does not prefer to have an overweight everyman be a superhero for a change.
Now that I have thought over Homer the Whopper more carefully and learned a bit more about the intentions behind the original script, I realized three rather unfortunate facts about Homer the Whopper existing at all. One, FOX should not continue to let outside celebrities write episode scripts if they focus more on their own guest roles than having a clear, complete or consistent vision for the stories they want to tell. Two, Evan and Seth went so far up their heinies in wanting to satirize how Hollywood studios ruin superhero films, that the second half of this episode reads more like a superficial checklist of cliched negligence of filmmaking errors than an actual intelligent or clever satire narrative with a compelling conflict. Three, Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen were far too ahead of their time when they made Homer the Whopper, because their Appletv+. The Studio is much better at Hollywood satire and proves they wrote Homer the Whopper 15 years too early without the experience to write satirical stories through a more nuanced lens.
What really hurts about Homer the Whopper’s un-nuanced take on incompetent Hollywood studios ruining superhero films is that it raises a lot of good ideas for jokes and story beats, yet leans into almost none of them because it has no consistent vision or coherent narrative to function for me as a common-folk viewer to enjoy it. Homer the Whopper has a nonexistent conflict because the Ginormous studio executive producers and employees plus Lyle McCarthy who were intended to be the antagonists, are more passive than active in how they cause the problems for their own film production.
Comic Book Guy appears in Homer the Whopper much less than he deserved to be because Seth Rogen wants his Lyle McCarthy character to have more screen time after he started to train Homer. That is not to say I did not enjoy their scenes together. In fact, I liked seeing Homer pitch different types of familiar exercise montages to Lyle. The bait-and-switch with One-Week Wonder losing their chance to adapt Everyman because Ginormous bought the rights three weeks ago made for a clever punchline, and the Everyman film’s unscripted scene in which Avery’s belly pops out after Avery/Homer denies being Everyman was one nugget of comedy gold in the otherwise empty comedy mine of Homer the Whopper. I said that Homer the Whopper’s intended conflict was nonexistent because its hugest wasted opportunity was that Comic Book Guy and Lyle McCarthy never interact onscreen.
This episode script that Seth Rogen wrote for himself to play Homer’s fitness trainer and to satirize Hollywood pandering to movie theater audiences who want a different sort of Everyman, never takes advantage of the opportunity for Comic Book Guy to debate Lyle McCarthy face-to-face on how Homer Simpson/Avery Mann should look on film. If Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen had this in their original draft, then I feel sorry for them to lose that good material, but if they never thought about it, then shame on them. I would enjoy Homer the Whopper much more if CBG called Lyle and impersonated the voice of Turtle from Entourage on this phone call, asking Lyle to help him lose weight as a distraction to help Homer gain weight on his own in Lyle’s absence. Here, we have a real existing conflict of Creative Visionary versus Mass Market Appeal, one which directly addresses creative differences on how Everyman should look. This is how it would make more sense for Ginormous Pictures to continue filming different Everyman scenes (and one of the same scenes) with fat Avery Mann, while lacking the budget to re-record every earlier scene with thin Avery Mann.
Bart and Milhouse inspired CBG to publish Everyman in the beginning, so if they watched Everyman in movie theaters together in the ending and they were let down by the final result because it was unfaithful to the comics and had an incoherent story that was all over the place. Instead of Homer trying to lose weight by drinking expired buttermilk, it would serve a more important story purpose if Comic Book Guy pulls Homer aside at the film studio and acts like a supervillain as he congratulates Homer in secret for putting on weight because it is truer to the look of Avery Mann in his own comic source material. Even without CBG and Lyle directly crossing paths like I mentioned earlier, a secret weight gain pep talk from CBG would give Homer a relatable conflict when he is not sure who he must listen to, but he has a counter-motivation to continue acting with more weight than when he started because it keeps him true to Comic Book Guy’s vision if Homer Simpson acts as “Everywhereman” instead of Everyman. That was the missing link in CBG’s part of Homer the Whopper, which we should have seen the minute before security tossed him out with the other former studio heads. I might make a really excellent story editor someday, since I put more effort, soul and thought into the story of Homer the Whopper than its actual writers did.