Original airdate: March 14, 2021
The premise: Through flashback, we see 90s teenage Homer’s dreams of being DJ to a Showbiz Pizza-esque robot band fall apart. In the present, the Simpson family’s efforts to recover the old robots to lift Homer’s spirits are dashed when they fall into the hands of J.J. Abrams, looking to reboot the property into a film series. Homer now has a new life’s purpose: to troll the movie online in efforts to stop it from being made.
The reaction: Holy shit, this episode was all over the fucking map. By the midpoint, I was just staring in confusion as to where the hell it was going and what the point of it all was. Can you even understand that premise I wrote up there? I watched the damn episode and I barely understand it. Act one is almost all flashback, as we see teenage Homer, now living in the 1990s, working as DJ at a Showbiz Pizza-type restaurant with an animatronic band. When he gets the chance to perform his own remixes with the characters, it becomes a true dream come true for him, until the establishment is shut down. In present-day, Homer is devastated when this memory gets triggered, causing the other Simpsons to try and track down the four robots to cheer Homer up. The episode presents this idea that this memory of Homer’s is so foundational that it causes him to have this severe emotional breakdown, but it’s just so incredibly stupid, and feels so far removed from what we know about Homer that it’s impossible to have any kind of investment. In fairness, Homer was in the Be Sharps, but being creative in any way is not really a big part of his character. You’d think being in a world famous music group in your 20s would be more important that dicking around with some pizza robots, but who knows where that shit lines up the timeline anymore, if at all. The final robot is absconded by J.J. Abrams’ people, and after hearing Homer’s sob story, he takes them all away to create a CG animated reboot. Now we’re into act three and I’m struggling to figure out just what the fuck is happening. Homer spends almost all of the following year becoming an obese slob obsessing over his Reddit board trashing Abrams’ upcoming movie, spurned on by Comic Book Guy, teaching him the ways of being an over-critical fan shitting on Hollywood reboot culture. So now it’s about Homer’s obsession about the creative integrity of the pizza robots? He himself was “rebooting” the characters as a teenager by making them contemporary to the 90s, having them sing “Whoomp! There It Is” in new hip-hop outfits, so how is this any different? It’s the sacred memory in his mind that’s most important to him, and Abrams’ new movie is an excuse for him to lash out to him for “ruining” it. But what the fuck does any of this matter? Why does he give a shit? In the end, Marge gets Abe to apologize for being a shitty dad, and Homer realizes that’s where his trauma came from all along. Oh fuck, whatever. Boy oh boy was this a huge turd. It’s for sure one of the worst of the season, though I don’t really hate it too much since it was just more baffling than anything. It was just a big confusing mess.
Three items of note:
– So I guess we have to talk about the floating timeline again. Some fans will complain about showing Homer as a teenager in the 90s as a contradiction, but it really isn’t. If Homer is 36 (or 38?) now in present day, then he was born in the 1980s, that’s just how it has to work. I don’t care about any of that as a concept (repeated references to Abe and Skinner still having served in WWII and Vietnam despite the increasingly illogical time difference is a different story.) My problem is what is the point of showing teen Homer in the 90s? The show already ran through the 90s, satirizing current day culture along the way. Perhaps looking back at the decade with a 2021 lens could make it different, but the first act is content enough to settle with namedropping Crystal Pepsi and Digital Underground and calling it a day. It’s the same problem with “That 90s Show” back in the day, it was just an exercise to see how many 90s references they could make in a story where Homer invents grunge music for some reason. I wonder why The Simpsons wasn’t doing on-the-nose reference humor in its early years? I guess they were too busy actually writing stories. For those keeping score at home, “That 90s Show” was written by Matt Selman, and now over a decade later, this episode was executive produced by him, so I guess he didn’t really progress much. Also, the fucking pizza robot band not only feels like material that’s been played on so many other shows from years and years ago (Dexter’s Lab’s “Chubby Cheese” comes to mind), but on this very show too. The Wall E. Weasel set piece in the first act of “Radio Bart” has dozens of jokes, and the robot band’s birthday song has been etched into my brain for life. To contrast, the pizza band here sings “Rock Around the Clock” with “pizza” replacing every third word. Solid writing.
– Act two starts with a seemingly normal Homer leaving the breakfast table for work. Marge nearly breaks down into tears, knowing that he’s devastated inside. Then we see little memories of all the fun things Homer used to do that he’s not doing, and then Moe randomly appears at the Simpson house and gives more memories. “He’s missing his youthful spirit! That spark that makes him who he is!” Marge croaks. This has to be the most egregious example of “tell, not show” this show has done in a while. This whole episode is basically about Homer’s obsessive emotional attachment to these pizza robots, and here we just have Marge and Moe explain how Homer is feeling, rather than actually see it from Homer in any way. After contently leaving for work, we don’t see Homer again for six more minutes.
If you want to see a story about people who truly, deeply care about their cherished memories of watching pizza robots, check out the documentary about the Rockafire Explosion, the Showbiz Pizza robot band. It’s a truly fascinating look at these people who revel in the nostalgia of their youth, and the lengths they’ve gone to to hold onto those good feelings. It really feels like this episode was directly inspired by the documentary, except they did an absolute shit job “adapting” it. Do yourself a favor and give it a watch, it’s really engaging and has a lot of charm, even as someone who’s never stepped foot in a Showbiz Pizza or a Chuck E. Cheese.
– I feel like it’s been a while since we’ve had a mega celebrity voice themselves in an episode that is just a sickening, fawning love letter to how great they are. John Legend and Crissy Teigan from a few seasons ago comes close, but they were more or less a cameo, while J.J. Abrams is pivotal to the plot of the latter half of the episode. There’s some gentle ribbing with the introduction of Abrams’ underlings, scouring Springfield for nostalgic kitsch to fuel Abrams’ creative vision, but their worshipful reverence of their boss don’t really feel like jokes to me (“Master of story!” “He’s the ultimate architect of cinematic universes!”) He sets up shop in Springfield in a huge warehouse with a loving staff, instantaneously buys the IP rights to the pizza robots and gets to make his “Agents of P.I.Z.Z.A.” movie without a hitch, winning over Homer in the end. Abrams’ pursuit in making a soulless piece of colorful cinematic tripe designed to deceptively pull at nostalgic heartstrings, and yet the third act paints Homer as the villain, aligning him with Comic Book Guy as an irritable Internet nerd never satisfied with any big budget Hollywood adaptation. It’s almost like the show is running damage control for Abrams and his critics, it’s really pathetic. One of the worst “jokes” is where Abrams lists off the gag names of all the digital effects studios who toiled away on his movie (Dream Prison, Indentured Servi-Dudes, Mr. No-Health-Care’s Wonder Emporium, “and too many others to count… or pay.” A guy in the audience shouts, “Yeah!”) It’s paying lip service to how VFX artists work horrible hours and get paid shit for it, but it’s coming out of the mouth of J.J. Abrams, big time Hollywood director/producer, who has serious industry pull to actually do something about this problem with the movies he produces, and instead, he just makes a joke about it. I speak as someone who used to work in VFX (and funnily enough, actually worked on one of Abrams’ movies) and has experienced firsthand the grueling hours and stressful work environment. I hold no grudge against Abrams, but it would be like if the producers of Sausage Party showed up in “Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie,” touring the Korean animation sweatshop instead of Kent Brockman. Like, ha ha, let’s laugh at these poor digital effects artists and how miserable their lives are because the major movie studios underbid for contracts the VFX houses need to stay in business, but those GODDAMN INTERNET TROLLS, they’re the real problem! Just terrible.
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At first, after I watched this episode I thought it was mediocre. Then after thinking about I started to realize how much it sucked. Like the story just randomly keeps introducing characters and plotlines that are so different than before. Maybe, what would’ve been more interesting is to have Homer boycott the movie because JJ Abrams made him the main villain in the film, but of course, they have to paint Abrams as a saint. On another note, after you pointed out how Selman always going for the emotional endings I couldn’t help, but think about how dumb this one was. Like Grampa has barely been in the episode, and then just randomly shows up at the end to say sorry. Like where did he even come from? Finally, next week is the 700th episode, and even though it will most likely suck I’m still excited to see it. I’m interested if there gonna release any promotional posters like they did for the 600th episode because those were pretty cool. As for the plot for next week, it looks like Marge has a fight with Homer so he stays with the Flanders. The only part I’m actually interested in is seeing Maude Flanders again because it’s been a hot minute since we’ve seen her have a prominent role in an episode.
This is the Season 32 episode I was looking forward to the most due to its unusual title (Similar to Season 30’s “E My Sports” which is still one of the worst episodes ever) But looking at that synopsis, it ended up being even more nonsensical than I could’ve imagined from an episode titled “Do Pizzabots Dream of Electric Guitars?” My brain hurts right now. Can’t wait for the next meaningless milestone next Sunday.
This episode is the literal definition of “Why?” incarnate. Everything about it has the flow of “Here’s a handful of scenes, we need to string them together somehow!” And it’s surprising you didn’t mention things like how Julie Kavner’s voice sound even worse than it has before, or that Gil’s a drug dealer/junkie.
“One of the worst “jokes” is where Abrams lists off the gag names of all the digital effects studios who toiled away on his movie”
That bit reminded me about how Nelson Shin and AKOM got offended at the Banksy couch gag several seasons back. It just felt like another fuck you to the animation industry from Selman and crew because they have no idea what it’s like to actually work in the trenches of any animation pipeline. VFX is basically the American/European equivalent of the Anime industry in Japan in terms of working conditions and piss-poor management. And what could have been a potshot at such studios who actually do underpay their staff and do questionable business practices like the Technicolor family of studios just comes off as ill-informed and dare I say it, mean-spirited to a fault.
That Dexter’s Laboratory episode is a classic… “Stinkin’ hunka mustard, yeah yeah yeah!”
It’s pretty sad when an episode of a kid’s cartoon has more depth than an episode of The Simpsons. But that’s the way it’s been for almost 25 years now.
My favorite Chuck-E-Cheese type of parody is Bloaty’s Pizza Hog from Invader Zim. Personally, I think they should have just retired the trope after that, there’s not much you could do that could possibly top it.
No women who are in their mid-30s today dress like Marge. To be fair, no women Marge’s age dressed like her back in 1987 either. Who the hell wears a long green dress and pearls as part of their everyday outfit?
Even the ‘90s seems too far back in time for Homer to have been a teenager then, really. That’s terrifying. Even if Homer was born in 1982 or 1983, it’d have to be the very end of the decade for him to be the same age that he was in “The Way We Was”. And the references you gave don’t support it being 1999 (Crystal Pepsi was sold in the US from ‘92 to ‘94).
No the dates actually check. If Homer is 14 in 1994, he was born in 1980 and is 40 (going on 41 now.) Recall that this was probably written a year ago (so it’s 2020 and he’s 39-40, the age they’ve had Homer and Marge be for awhile, even if they didn’t start out that age.)
Like the jockey elves, I sometimes like things just because they are that wacky/bizarre so this was okay in my book. It doesn’t feel very Simpson-y but at least it didn’t bore me.
If you guys wanna see more discussion about this you should see Matt Selman’s Twitter. He posted something on Saturday to promote the new episode and was swarmed by people on Twitter addressing the timeline of the show in which he tweeted back many people addressing their concerns.
I don’t remember him being aged up again to 40. Does anyone remember an episode that referenced this?
The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace where Homer is lamenting he didn’t do much with his life, unlike Edison. He says he’s 38, then Marge corrects him as 39.
Homer: 38 years, and that’s all I have to show for it.
Marge: You’re 39.
Homer: *screams, curls into fetal position, whimpers*
-The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace
… you’ll get to it soon enough. Homer has a midlife crisis for the most asinine of reasons and calls random highway operator “Marge” during a breakdown.
I figured just from seeing that picture of 90s Homer on Facebook this was gonna be a bad episode (or at least, worse than usual). From the look of it, I wasn’t disappointed. And there’s really so much a goddamn plot they could dig from the reboot plot. They could just as easily make fun of the fact that these franchises are constantly going no matter how little a fanbase (unless, like Terminator: Dark Fate, it pisses people off to the point where they just don’t show up), how it damn near poisons the point of the original to a certain extent, and how we act like we “want” original ideas, but when stuff from companies like A24 come out with that, we all respond “oh, cool I guess… HOLY CRAP, STAR WARS!!!” (and even when something original does succeed, studios will do everything in their power to ignore why it was a success- I.e, any Christopher Nolan film). But then again, they can’t exactly do that when they’re owned by the KING of reboots, can they?
I know it’s mentioned here occasionally about how the show’s lead times make current pop culture references dated by the time the show comes out compared to something like South Park which has a much shorter turnaround. This episode feels like a reaction to the viral videos of people rebuilding their own Rock-afire Explosion in their basements. That was, what, five years ago now? Way to miss the window, Simpsons.
Also, as far as I remember, neither Showbiz or Chuck E Cheese had a DJ. I would be a little older than this version of Homer* and I had friends who worked at Chuck’s. No DJ, but one was hired because he fit the rat costume. That seems like a more likely storyline for Homer.
And, coincidentally, I watched Radio Bart over the weekend. The Wall E. Weasel bit is pretty accurate to what I remember going to visit my friends who worked at Chuck’s at that time. They were pretty decrepit and lame.
*I just realized I am wearing a Digital Underground shirt, no lie.
Matt and Trey from South Park were in a video some time ago where they gave advice regarding storytelling: https://youtu.be/vGUNqq3jVLg
Basically they say that your story shouldn’t just be ‘and then X happened and then X happened’ and so on.
The current Simpsons writers clearly never learned this because it’s a problems in most of these modern episodes. Either that or they just don’t care and it’s all about the gags, which would be fine if the gags were funny (spoiler: they’re not).
Al Jean’s philosophy always seemed to be “And then X happened” since I’d say he and Mike Reiss were doing the disjointed set pieces to set up the main story given their preference towards pop culture references. We just ignored it for the longest time cause the jokes were funny back in the day. The Simpsons became a series that didn’t like to use things to set up stories, rather to set up scenes; if a character had money troubles, they just so happened to find the exact amount of cash needed to move the story along. Need to get to a destination? Suddenly transportation! Plot thread going nowhere? Resolved cause a wizard did it.
This episode doesn’t know what it wants to be, and that’s an issue with plenty of recent episodes. Homer was a DJ for a robotic pizza combo, and that made him happy… then the place closed, but he forgot about it for years. Ignoring the “floating timeline” stuff I threw out the window years ago, we just had an episode the previous week about Homer getting involved in the music industry, not to mention a much better story could be had about Homer’s weird obsession with nostalgia and how it’s hurting the family on an emotional and financial level (which that Rockafire Explosion documentary makes you feel, intentionally or not), which for a lot of people who have these goals in life, is something that has come up far too often. But, again, that’s what I call a “big boy topic”, so let’s have J.J. Abrams show up so we can extol the virtues of what an amazing filmmaker he is & instead square the blame on manchildren who are never pleased. Only difference between an Al Jean episode and a Matt Selman episode is every Selman episode must end with a forced sentimental ending that tricks you into thinking the show still has a heart.
And I agree; the bit about Abrams mocking VFX studios clearly comes from a place of well-off douchebags who don’t have to worry about when their next paycheck is coming in, which reminds me too much of the “Baby Bernie” bit earlier in the season; The Simpsons writers can be extremely tone-deaf to the industry when it’s not a problem that affects them on a personal level.
Okay look away if you don’t want spoilers, but the promo for the 700th episode reveals a lot. It will most likely be a Marge-Homer marriage crisis episode as Marge is seen yelling at Homer at the end of the promo. There’s seem to be a lot of gags in the episode too. Barney breaks into Moe’s Bar as a ninja, some Power Plant stuff, an Itchy and Scratchy bit, and a Groundskeeper Willie joke. However, the promo also spoils the episode as it is revealed that Homer helps Maude deliver Todd, and as there thanks Ned and Maude give Todd Homer as a middle name. It would be sweet, but it seems very random. If you would like to watch the promo it’s on the Animation Domination On Fox Youtube Channel.
With all of the hints throughout the years that Homer has a thing for Maude, that’s a bit of a weird thing to come up with.
I know what you mean with scenes like when Homer goes “Maude, Eh”, or the scene with Homer, Maude, and the peanut bowl. I’ll leave that scene to explain itself. Watching the trailer again there’s another really weird scene where Maude has Jesus’s face. I wish I was joking, but I’m not.
Why didn’t they just make the pizza place Wall-E-Weasel’s? Why bother creating a new Chuck-E-Cheese clone when a perfectly good one already exists in the Simpsons universe? Makes you wonder if the current writers even watched the classic era episodes, let alone remember them.
Yeah, I doubt the current writers are even aware of that episode.
I don’t like floating timelines, or rather, I don’t like when they shine a light on them in this manner. It just seems like a really dumb excuse to justify the characters not aging when they could just… stop having flashback episodes and never specify what year it is? That sounds a lot simpler to me.
But also, it’s weird how they constantly try to rewrite history, but also still act like the first 8 seasons are still events that really happened in the show’s continuity. You can’t have it both ways, the first 8 seasons flat out told you they were set in the 90s multiple times! Are you gonna go back and rewrite those?
But also, I never thought it made much sense for Homer and Marge to be 36 to begin with, they both look old enough to be MY parents! XD
I will say though, all of my complaints are generally a symptom of how outdated The Simpsons feels at this point and how no show should really last THAT long. What modern kid still uses a slingshot?