741. The Many Saints of Springfield

Original airdate: February 19, 2023

The premise: Woefully unemployed, Ned Flanders accepts help from a generous benefactor, Fat Tony, to help re-open the Leftorium, but he is completely unaware of Tony’s actual line of work.

The reaction: I talked about in the last Fat Tony episode, “A Made Maggie,” that the character is basically completely out of juice. An Italian mafia parody in 1991, riding off of Goodfellas, and with the Godfather trilogy being of recent memory, made perfect sense. But those returns start diminishing the more the characters starts showing up and repeating the same jokes over and over. Tony and his boys are stuck in an endless loop of murderous euphemisms and speaking the same gibberish Italian as Mario and Luigi. They’re some of the more lifeless secondary characters the show has now in that there’s literally nothing new they can do with them (or at least want to do with them). And so, we get basically what is a remake of the second act of “Bart the Murderer” with Flanders working for the mob, except it’s incredibly vague and makes absolutely no sense. Fat Tony offers to help Ned with the Leftorium, and we see his goons threaten the clientele into buying things. I assume he is also using the business to help launder his money? We see Ned constantly talking with Tony, having dinner with him and his associates, as they all proceed to talk in vagaries about their illegal activities. And yeah, that’s the “joke,” but again, how many fucking times do we need to hear a made man talk in coded terms about whacking a guy? So what does Ned think of all this? When Bart worked for the mob, he’s just a dumb kid, so it made sense that he didn’t fully understand what Tony and his crew did. Ned is a grown man, what the hell is he thinking? The episode is ostensibly about Ned and Tony developing a friendship, and Ned’s faith in the goodness of others being tested, but there’s just no meat on this bone. Ned seemingly gets Tony to turn his life to God in the end, but Tony recants and orders Ned to be killed anyway, because he’s Fat Tony and nothing can ever change about him. The two characters don’t connect on any specific level: religion, their work, their values, absolutely nothing. It really feels like that just pulled two names out of a hat and said, alright, let’s pair these two up. This is an Al Jean-penned script, and the few episodes he’s written in the last five years or so have been hollow exercises desperately trying to look like they have an emotional core (“Daddicus Finch,” “Mothers and Other Strangers.”) While not as aggressively terrible as those two, this episode feels like the weakest of all, in that it’s showing Ned’s emotional turmoil, but it comes off as completely empty and meaningless.

Three items of note:
– We get another guest couch gag, a pretty long one, done by Stoopid Buddy Productions, the team behind Robot Chicken, where Homer falls through the couch cushions and turns into a little yarn Homer. It’s a cute segment, and as with most of these guest pieces, it makes me wish the show was just this now, guest animators and writers taking the characters and re-mixing them in new mediums, rather than the show itself which is like reheating a microwave dinner for the sixth time in a row. Yarn Homer encounters many lost items like his treasured Mickey Mantle baseball card, a Rubik’s cube, and most notably a TV Guide with ALF on the cover (as seen in “Homer’s Barbershop Quartet,”) with ALF voiced by creator Paul Fusco. Al Jean and Mike Reiss were writing for ALF immediately before leaving to develop The Simpsons, so this feels like a thirty-plus-year-old returning the favor to their old boss. I don’t know how old Fusco is, but he definitely sounds old and tired doing the ALF voice. The character inexplicably reappeared during a live gaming event in 2020 (as exhaustively covered by the late great writer/begrudging ALF expert Philip Reed), and it was so bizarre to see him there. I imagine a lot of people under 35 interested in games watched that stream and had no idea why a dirty bathmat was on-screen making Atari jokes. But I guess someone involved with planning the show knew a guy who knew a guy who knew Fusco, and knew he would dig ALF out of his closet for a hundred bucks. Fusco’s only credits in the last thirty years are random ALF cameos on other series and talk shows, so it’s a real mystery what the guy has been up to all these years. There was rumored talk of an ALF CG-animated/live action hybrid movie, but there’s been no word about that for a decade now, so it’s almost certainly dead. But if we’re ever graced with an ALF feature film between now and the end of The Simpsons, I will cover it. I think Philip would have wanted it that way.
– Ned tells the first part of his story in flashback to Marge, opening with mentioning how he used to be Bart’s teacher. Marge is surprised by this news, with Ned insisting it to be true, making a cheeky joke about the production code number for uber-fans to look up (“C-A-D-F-12. Those are his grades, and the days he was absent.”) Except they fucked up the joke, since the episode where Ned gets hired is XABF12. Anyway, this is the show’s admission of guilt of never having done anything with Ned being Bart’s teacher, and whatever, fair enough. I’m fine with them throwing their hands up about it; they might have had ideas of where to go with such a change, then thought differently of them, and now there’s a brand new fourth-grade teacher Mrs. What’s-her-name, who I’m sure will reappear sometime in the next eight years. Anyway, they show that Ned was fired for talking about Jesus in school and Superintendent Chalmers is appalled, just repeating the joke from “Sweet Seymour Skinner’s Baadaaasss Song.” Boring. Speaking of Bart’s class, we don’t even see him in the flashback. As a matter of fact, I don’t think Bart even had a line in this episode. Nancy Cartwright got in a few lines as Todd Flanders, so she definitely earned her enormous check for this show.
– Throughout the episode, we keep hearing little snippets of the score of The Simpsons Movie with the little motif used during the sad moments, particularly with Bart and Flanders. I don’t remember the show ever using movie music before this point (I don’t think they ever reprised “Spider-Pig” in Plopper’s three reappearances, did they?) It was surprising to just randomly hear a little bit of the Hans Zimmer score sprinkled throughout the episode, since even though Disney owns both the show and the movie, they still need to license the music from the film separately, but I would assume the hassle and price tag for that would be fairly negligable.