Season Three Revisited (Part One)

1. Stark Raving Dad

• Ah, the forbidden episode. I don’t really have much to say about the specifics of this show getting pulled, but its omission from Disney+ poses a larger question as to what exactly streaming services are. They’re not really media libraries or archives; at this point more than ever, they’re a replacement for television, and as such, their content “needs” to reflect the concerns and sensibilities of a modern audience. But if you’re watching an older movie or TV show, you kind of have to be cognizant of the time of which it was made, and to some extent, accept it. But I could argue back and forth with myself about this forever, so I’ll just say it’s a bummer in the case of this episode, since it’s really, really good.
• “Something’s wrong. Dad died!” “No, no, he’s fine!” “Well, whaddya know, I’m relieved.” The opening exchange between Bart and Lisa is so charming, where Bart teases his sister about the horrors of getting older (“Your legs start to go, candy doesn’t taste as good anymore…”) while Lisa innocently browbeats him into submission to agree to actually get her a birthday present this year.
• I love that you pay two bucks for the Krusty Hotline to listen to a clown laugh and laugh and laugh and that’s it (“Thanks for calling, kids! A new message every day!”)
• What a shot.
  
• Marvin Monroe appears once again to promote his personal psychiatric brand in the form of his specialized personality test (“Twenty simple questions that will determine exactly how crazy or ‘meshuggeneh’ someone is.”) The good doctor has another season or so left in him before he fell off the face of the series, which is a shame because I’ve enjoyed all of his appearances thus far. I don’t know if Harry Shearer complaining how hard the voice was to do was the catalyst for writing him off, but either way, it’s a bit of a shame.
• There’s a quick bit where we see Marge at her vanity using hairspray on her enormous beehive. She empties a can, then opens a drawer filled with more, and starts on a new can. We also see several emptied cans strewn over the top of the counter. It’s a really solid joke that doesn’t draw too much attention to itself, which almost makes it better, as this is just a regular routine for Marge that we’re looking in on.
• Casting Michael Jackson, the biggest celebrity in the history of anything, as a deluded mental patient is absolute brilliance. Given the chance to get the King of Pop on their show, any other series would have turned it into a fawning celebrity jerk-off fest, but not The Simpsons. Well, not yet anyway (see “Lisa Goes Gaga,” and hundreds of other episodes.)
• I remember thinking the joke with the Chief was funny long before I even saw One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, back when the show knew you had to make parodies funny in and of themselves, instead of just copying popular movies shot for shot and calling that a joke.
• “I’m with your father in a mental institution.” “Uh huh. And is Elvis with you?” “Could be. It’s a big hospital.” Michael Jackson isn’t much of an actor, but his flat, almost innocent (so to speak…) delivery ends up helping some of the punchlines (“You’re nothing but a big fat mental patient!” “You’d be amazed how often I hear that.”)
• Pretty dark joke with Bart fondly fantasizing about his drooling lobotomized father (still wearing his pink shirt, a nice touch.) But to his credit, he snaps out of it (“Well, there’s probably a down side I don’t see.”)
• Bart playing with the phone cord is another of those little acting moments I really appreciate. What kid hasn’t twanged that cord while on the phone? (except kids born after 2000 or so who have no idea what a landline is.)
  
• It’s so funny hearing one of the upset crowd members react to “Michael Jackson”’s reveal with “He’s white!” Not only is this years before Jackson’s, shall we say, “pigment transition,” but the man is clearly yellow. It’s always strange when characters on this show are referred to as “white.” I get it when they’re making a joke about “white people,” but it does kind of break the reality of the show a little bit.
• It’s a great touch that Bart wakes Lisa up by plugging her nose in her sleep, just as she did to him to wake him up at the beginning of the episode.

2. Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington

• Of course Homer is the sort of dunce who would believe a phony sweepstakes check is real (“See where it says VOID VOID VOID’ and ‘This is not a check’, ‘Cash value one twentieth of a cent,’ ‘Mr. Banker, do not honor’…”)
• I love the drawing of the Reading Digest cartoon. It’s always so interesting whenever this show depicts what comics, cartoons and animation looks like within an already animated show. Also great is the title, Motoring Ms.-Haps, a cartoon seemingly entirely about how women are awful drivers. It’s like The Lockharts, but worse.
  
• The first act is a shining example of how Homer’s mind works. When he takes an interest in something, not only does he become completely obsessed with it, it’s almost like he can’t remember a time without it, as we see him admonishing the kids for being glued to the TV, something he himself was surely doing mere days ago. All of this also makes it all the funnier when Homer is just as quick to jettison his new love, as he tosses his Reading Digest in the trash upon being ineligible for the essay contest, despite spending every waking moment of the last few days fawning over the magazine.
• There’s a very lovely scene where Marge tries to help Lisa, who’s frustrated with her essay. She suggests she take a bike ride, but is unsure whether that’s “cool” anymore, or even if saying “cool” is cool. Lisa chuckles while assuring her mother that those things are in fact cool. It’s just so sweetly acted between the two characters with Lisa politely humoring her mother.
• “We the purple? What the hell was that?”
• “Brevity is… wit” has got to be one of the greatest sight gags of the entire series.
• The VIP badges scene between Homer and Faith, the editor of Reading Digest, is so funny, but also really serves to show how damn good Maggie Roswell is, her increasing level of frustration at Homer’s questions is just perfect. Around the time FOX fired her, Tress MacNeille would later slip in to perform a bulk of the show’s one-off female characters, and she is a tremendously accomplished voice actress in her own right, but her characters are typically a lot more blunt and caricatured, missing some of the more subtle nuances of Roswell’s voices.
  
• The ending of act two is really powerful with Lisa sobbing and tearing her essay up as she witnesses blatant government corruption play out before her own eyes. Sadly, all I could think about while watching it, at the time I’m writing this, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo posted the gif of Lisa in that scene in response to something at the DNC, I don’t really know what. Without opening up a political can of worms, I’ll just say something I hopefully believe everyone can agree: conservatives are not allowed to use Simpsons memes. I remember in 2016 when I tragically watched forty seconds of that video of Ted Cruz doing Simpsons impressions, that disgusting little worm made me want to puke. But as I said, I don’t want to get political…
• Lisa’s jaded fantasy of the fat cats and swine in government is so beautifully animated, with the cross-hatched New Yorker style played against “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”
  
• The ending where Lisa’s scathing essay gets Bob Arnold expelled from Congress within a day was intentionally absurdist in depicting how quickly, efficiently and righteously the US government operates (“You work fast.” “I work for Uncle Sam!”), but watching it in 2020, it almost feels sad how completely alien the scene feels. You can just imagine the upswing of support that Arnold would get by his colleagues, screaming about how people are trying to “cancel” him.
• “Imprisoned Congressman Becomes Born-Again Christian.”
• “Cesspool on the POTOMAC” was robbed. Trong Van Din can suck it.

3. When Flanders Failed

• “Look, I don’t care if Ned Flanders is the nicest guy in the world, he’s a jerk, end of story!” From the get-go, this really does feel like a sequel to “Dead Putting Society,” featuring Homer’s blind hatred toward Ned. I don’t think it’s quite as good as “Putting,” but hey, it’s a high bar.
• Homer is such a huge prick in the first act, but at least some of it is excused by being motivated to come to the BBQ in the first place by sheer gluttony, as he grabs a plate of burgers and goes to eat them under a tree like a child. I love that at the end of the act, when he laughs maniacally with his mouth full of food, Ned and Maude look on and then turn away, looking visibly concerned at their crazed neighbor.
  
• The random French waiter dog tripping on Scratchy’s severed head at the end of the I&S cartoon always makes me laugh.
• One of the game cabinets in the background at the mall arcade is Robert Goulet Destroyer, another game I wish existed in some real-world form.
• “No, I do not know what Schadenfreude is. Please tell me, because I’m dying to know!” An absolutely perfect line reading from Dan Castellaneta, just dripping in sarcasm. Also he mispronounces it of course, sounding more like schaden-frawde.
• Homer’s war against vending machine apples lends itself to such a great scene: his sternly written note, the fact that there’s only two notes in the complaint box, suggesting regular employees don’t dare rock the boat and risk upsetting old man Burns (the other note being a plant from Smithers, “Keep that handsome owner out of sight, he’s distracting the female employees,”) and Burns mocking Homer on his way out (“Tell my secretary that you could have a free apple!”) It’s just so damn petty, but perfectly in line that Burns would ridicule such a ridiculous request from a lowly subordinate.
• “I’m sure you did nothing to discourage this, you scavenger of human misery.” Damn, Lisa don’t play.
• I love the Barney’s Bowl-O-Rama jingle on the TV (“For entertainment and exercise!”) It feels like they had to kill a few seconds without animating anything and just came up with it on the fly.
• Homer comes off as pretty cruel through a lot of the episode, but what makes the episode work is that we see him slowly come around to considering helping Ned out before he reaches his lowest point. When the bill collector erroneously comes to his door instead of Ned’s and complains about his right-handed ledger, Homer is about to tell him about the Leftorium before he gets interrupted. Later, he returns all the stuff he bought from Ned only to find their house has been foreclosed. So when Homer vows to finally help Ned, it was actually built to that point.
• “Hello, Jerry? Homer Simpson. Remember last month when I paid back that loan? Well, now I need you to do a favor for me!”
• I love how quickly this guy springs to life off the couch after hearing the call to action (“Ned Flanders is in trouble?!”)
  
• The ending is already pretty schmaltzy in its tribute to It’s a Wonderful Life, but closing with the big “Put On A Happy Face” sing-a-long is pushing it too far. I actually shut it off right when the song started.

4. Bart the Murderer

• From the very first time I saw it as a kid up till now, I love the Chocolate Frosted Krusty Flakes slogan, “Only Sugar Has More Sugar!”
• Just a wonderful piece of animation of Bart running to the bus. The POV from inside, the bounce in his run, the pitch perfect timing of it slamming shut just as he gets up to it… brilliant.
  
• “Bart Simpson, you’re late. Go fill out a tardy slip.” “But I’m only five… ten, twenty… forty minutes! That’s pretty damn late!”
• Love this shot.
  
• Regarding the horse race scene, it’s great that this early in the series, the show is making fun of its own popularity and its more gimmicky elements, like Bart’s various catchphrases, which polluted commercials and merchandising far more pervasively than they appeared in the actual show.
• I remember from the audio commentary of this episode, they mentioned how the FOX censors forbade them from showing Bart mix drinks on camera, so they staged him hidden behind the bar, which honestly I think is much funnier, as you see just the top of his spiky head whipping up a drink.
• I kind of miss the slightly more competent Chief Wiggum who would angrily go toe-to-toe with Mayor Quimby and who sort of, kind of knew what he was doing. Sometimes characters are funnier when they’re brazen and confident, while simultaneously being distracted and kind of clueless (“Fat Tony is a cancer on this fair city. He is the cancer, and I am the… um… What cures cancer?”)
• Flowers By Irene. That’s all.
• On a similar note as Wiggum, Principal Skinner also used to be more serious and authoritative, which made him a much greater foil to Bart. Hell, in this episode, he doesn’t even flinch when the goddamn mafia walks into his office (“You Skinner?” “I’m Principal Skinner, yes. And how, may I ask, did you get past the hall monitors?”) Again, a grown man way too invested in the marginal amount of disciplinary authority afforded by his job is far more interesting and funny than the spineless little turd he’d eventually devolve into.
• It’s really wonderful how the kids of Springfield Elementary immediately cheer upon hearing Skinner is missing, presumed dead, and later speculate on his cause of death on the playground, acting exactly like shitty little kids would.
• Bart’s nightmare is a really fantastic sequence, and as always, pulls no punches in making jokes about the execution of a small child, placing a couple phone books on the electric chair seat to get Bart at the proper height. We’re at episode 30 and we’ve seen Bart get killed, what, three times? Four times if you count the “Deep, Deep Trouble” music video?
• “Did you kill my principal?” “Uh, Chinese guy with a moustache?” I like that no bones are made about the fact that, yes, Fat Tony does indeed kill people. A lot of people.
• Great newspaper art.
  
• Skinner’s ridiculous story always cracks me up in how exhaustively detailed it is, and how proud he is to recount each and every one of those details. The best is how he talks about making a game of how many times he could bounce the basketball, just as he tied to sell Bart at the beginning of the episode on a game of how many envelopes he could lick in an hour. Skinner really is that fucking boring.

5. Homer Defined

• The Krusty card is one of those jokes that gets funnier and more absurd the more you think about it. How did this get produced? Was Krusty hungover and horny when he approved it? What did Bart think when he bought it? I also love that it’s specifically a card for a ten-year-old, just to make matters clear that, hey, this nice pair of bongos is just for you, kid.
  
• I love love love the scenes of Burns and Smithers chit-chatting about their respective weekends. It was pretty uncommon this early in the show’s life to see a couple of non-Simpsons just living their lives and talking amongst each other. We get an insight into Smithers’ sad but content bachelor life with his ironically named Yorkshire terrier Hercules, and we get to hear Burns’ critique on modern day cinema (“Call me old-fashioned, but movies were sexier when actors kept their clothes on. Vilma Banky could do more for me with one raised eyebrow…”) We get a similar scene when Otto high-fives Apu walking into the Kwik-E-Mart and the two have a brief back-and-forth. Even this early into the series, Springfield is filled with colorful characters, and seeing how they react to one another is all part of the fun.
• “Simpson, eh? Good man? Intelligent?” “Actually, sir, he was hired under Project Bootstrap.” “Thank you, President Ford.” Definitely a joke I didn’t understand as a kid, for obvious reasons. I remember reading it quoted in the Simpsons Complete Guide and doubly not understanding it, as it’s hard to read Burns as sarcastic when it’s in print.
• Here’s another great additive acting moment: when Marge is praying, Maggie mimics her mother’s prayer hands and quickly falls to the floor in a thud. It’s never addressed, and I don’t even know if I really picked up on it before, but now that I have, I love it.
  
• “Will I ever see you again?” “Sure, baby. Next meltdown.” Ahh, now that’s good sleaze.
• “This reporter promises to be more trusting and less vigilant in the future.” Pretty much sums up most of the major new outlets.
• The key component of this episode is that Homer feels tremendous shame and knows he’s a fraud, something that would barely register in modern depictions of Homer. He’d wolf down that prize ham without a second thought, but here, it’s even funnier that he’s so overwhelmed with self-loathing, not even food can cheer him up (“How are you enjoying your ham, Homie?” “Tastes so bitter, it’s like ashes in my mouth.” “Hmmm. It’s actually more of a honey glaze.”) I also like how his guilt is pushed even further by Lisa’s newfound admiration toward him, making him more embittered with himself (“What is it? What are you doing?” “Looking at you with quiet awe.” “Well, as long as it’s quiet.”)
  
• “Mrs. Van Houten? I’m Bart’s mother. We met in the emergency room when the boys drank paint?” I like that Marge’s plea to let Bart hang out with Milhouse again is openly admitted to his mother that their sons are misfit losers who don’t have any other friends besides each other. Also, the ending of this subplot is the absolute perfect example of this show having its cake and eating it too in regards to balancing earned sentimentality with raw comedy. Bart is thrilled that Milhouse wants to hang out again, and knows it was his mother’s doing (“Thanks for sticking up for me.” “What makes you think it was me?” “Who else would?”) It’s an honestly sweet and heartwarming moment. Then Marge tells Bart to play nice, and we all know where this is going. Bart unboxes his BB gun from under his bed, cocks it with very loud and ominous sound effects before he bolts off to cause some godforsaken mischief. Truly great stuff.

6. Like Father, Like Clown

• I always get a little curious the incredibly rare times we see Krusty’s other sidekicks, Corporal Punishment and Tina Ballerina. What are their roles on the show? Considering how great a character Sideshow Mel is off-camera, who are these people? What are they like?
• Speaking of Krusty’s people, we get to meet his lovesick yet beleaguered assistant Ms. Pennycandy, who is just great with her limited screen time. She’s clearly fed up with her boss (“How can he hurt someone who loves him so?” “Oh, Mrs. Simpson, I’ve wasted my womanhood asking that same question.”) But when she lays down an ultimatum and Krusty begrudgingly caves, she goes right back to fawning over him.
• I like that we had a direct callback to “Krusty Gets Busted” in that Krusty agreed to have dinner with Bart in thanks for helping clear his name, but we’re also told this is the fifth time he’s canceled that engagement, so it’s almost like the year and a half between the airdates of “Busted” and this episode has actually passed, even though of course it hasn’t since nobody’s aged.
• “I always suspected that nothing in life mattered. Now I know for sure.”
• I laugh every time when Krusty does his “Shave and a Haircut” knock, horn honks and laughs, Homer dumbly asks, “You think it’s him?”
• Another gag I never got until years later was the good Rabbi catching his son spraying himself with seltzer in the bathroom. I haven’t seen The Jazz Singer, but I assume this isn’t a parody of the scene where the father catches his son jacking off and shooting a money shot all over himself.
• “A rabbi would never exaggerate! A rabbi composes. He creates thoughts. He tells stories that may never have happened. But he does not exaggerate!”
• What a miserable scene at this bus station. The conceit of a rich and powerful celebrity feeling empty inside isn’t exactly novel, but it feels a little more potent when it’s a guy who never takes off his clown makeup.
  
• I love this bit of animation of the DJ when the first “Gabbin’ About God” caller asks the panelists if they still firmly believe in God despite all the hurt and suffering in the world. Just in his reaction, you get the sense that he fields this same dumb question almost every single show, and he’s just tired of it. Also bonus points for his Foghat T-shirt.
  
• I never noticed it until now, but the shop where Bart gets his Rabbi costume is Yiddle’s, the same joke shop that enamored Krusty when he was a child. The owner (Yiddle, presumably) is even shown to be a much older man, presumably having this store for decades. As he admits, he loves his work.
• “What’s the one thing rabbis prize above everything else?” “Those stupid hats?”
• I love that Krusty introduces the Rabbi as his “estranged father,” followed by the kids cheering wildly for this elderly holy man appearing behind the curtain. They’re as excited about this serious family reunion as they would be for any of Krusty’s goofy pratfalls.