Original airdate: September 28, 2025
The premise: Inspired by watching a 90s teen drama with her daughter, Marge lends Lisa her old clothes, making her a retro chic hit at school. She wins the favor of the fashion club, who hatch a scheme to ransack the attics of all the older women in Springfield for their trendy vintage clothes.
The reaction: In last season’s wrap-up post, I mused about in regards to my motivation for keeping up with this blog, it had shifted from genuine curiosity towards seeing how the show continued to evolve, de-evolve or stagnate, to now a sense of completionism, not wanting to randomly end it before the inevitable (?) series finale. Over the last couple years, the show has definitely been in a semi-revival period that a lot of fans seem to be very happy about, with episodes devolving into character relationships and emotional storylines. It was certainly novel at first for me, shocked that after so many years of the show seemingly content with coasting on first draft material, they were attempting to tackle some more hefty, emotionally potent story material. But now, it’s not that special anymore, and I find myself generally unmoved by this kind of stuff that never really pushed my buttons in the first place, and as such, I find it difficult to really meditate about in these reviews. This is certainly not a bad episode, which I guess is high praise for me to say, but it’s pretty unremarkable to me. Marge and Lisa bond over watching DVD boxsets of “Keagan’s Pond,” which only serves to remind me further that Homer and Marge are basically my contemporaries at this point (and that I’m an old son of a bitch), seeing as Marge waxes on fondly over watching this thinly veiled Dawson’s Creek parody as a young girl. Lisa’s hand-me-down 90s outfits from Marge makes her the talk of the school, getting her in with the fashion club. However, Marge finds herself slighted when Lisa blows off their date to “Nostalgia-Con” to hang out at home with her new friends. Marge flies off the handle when Lisa says she’s not cool, creating a big rift between mother and daughter. There’s been an alarming number of episodes where there’s conflict between Marge and Lisa where Marge acts uncomfortably mean and bitter to her daughter, and while this isn’t nearly as bad as other examples, it’s always weird to see, especially in this episode when Lisa’s slights are so minute, and Marge acts so cold and snippy in return (“There’s a lasagna in the fridge. Eat around the beef!”) Lisa and her new friends try to pull off a clothes heist all over town, but Lisa gets trapped in the last house with the police on her way. Enter Marge, who rescues Lisa via a ladder up the window onto a conveniently placed dingy, mirroring the characters from “Keagan’s Pond,” with Marge quoting the “I’ll be there” line back to Lisa like from the show… Yes, yes, this is all sweet and touching in a vacuum, but like many episodes of this ilk, I’m just not moved by it. Maybe it’s because I don’t buy the conflict between the two characters that this resolution doesn’t hit. Lisa “insults” Marge by saying they can mend her old clothes since they don’t fit her anymore anyway, to which Marge lets out an irate, “Ex-cuse me?” Like, yeah, you’re a grown adult and these are outfits for a child, does that count as a burn? Lisa standing Marge up is fine enough, but maybe if there was a more impactful ideological split between the two that they need to resolve, their reconciliation would be more meaningful. A pretty soft, but inoffensive premiere.
Three items of note:
– One of the fashion club members is Terri, but humorously not Sherri (“Keep walking, K-Mart!”) I’ve been so impressed by how well Grey DeLisle is able to nail Martin, but Sherri & Terri seem to be out of her range. They’re incredibly unique voices, I totally get they must be hard for anyone but Russi Taylor to hit. But similar to Alex Desert as Carl, they’re tonally similar matches that I’m sure I’ll eventually get used to. It’s also a bit weird to see Terri alongside the two new fashionable kid characters, who are uniquely and specifically dressed, and then you have Terri in her plain pink dress. I guess it’s meant to be part of the joke that one twin is considered fashionable but the identical one is not, but it’s also part of the now decades-long problem of new characters looking and dressing more like modern people and our regulars looking totally out of time in comparison. On a similar tangent, Marge now being a child of the 90s is pretty odd given her beehive hairdo, something that was a trend from decades older. She looks at a school picture of herself with her hair tied back, so maybe that explains it.
– In a sort-of subplot, Homer gets sucked into watching an over-the-top action show “Clincher,” an obviously stand-in for Amazon Prime’s Reacher. I don’t know how popular that show is, it seemed like a weird pull, but then again, it’s part of a long-running franchise of books and movies, and it doesn’t really need to be specifically Jack Reacher anyway, just a means to joke how all men are enthralled by shows of dudes being incredibly violent.
– For some reason, the mother-son dance was giving me flashbacks all the way back to season 17’s “Marge’s Son Poisoning,” where Marge and Bart’s close relationship came to an end before they were set to do a duet karaoke number for a talent show, and Marge steps in beforehand, urging Bart to be a kid and have some rambunctious fun, not wanting to end up like Skinner and Agnes. Here, Marge is much more pleased to be at such an event, also with Skinner and Agnes, ready to dance with her son to “Hungry Eyes” from Dirty Dancing. I have no real observation to make with this, other than I hate that I have specific memory recall from a season 17 episode of The Simpsons.
And breaking news: Today, Disney/20th Century Studios dropped a teaser poster for a Simpsons Movie sequel to be released in July 2027, almost twenty years after the first one. Seeing this news reminded me of how I felt when I saw the announcement that Futurama was returning on Hulu: absolutely nothing. Futurama‘s initial miraculous resurrection and The Simpsons Movie‘s impending release in the mid-2000s had me absolutely ecstatic as a high school senior, but now, I just have absolutely no interest in these shambling dinosaurs to continue to try and reignite a spark that has long since faded. Also, as of this latest season premiere, The Simpsons Movie is now officially part of the first half of the entire series, which makes me feel like I should be mummified and thrown in a sarcophagus. What will the premise of the sequel be? Will it be as successful as the first one? We’re a long ways out from finding out any of these answers, so I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Me Blog Write Good 
Welcome back, Mike. At least there’s only 15 episodes per season from now on (I guess 17 if you include the Disney+ specials).
Just out of curiosity, what possessed you to name the blog “Me Blog Write Good?” Is it a reference to a joke in the series?
The episode “Burns’ Heir” has a scene where Homer tries to get the kids to get that sweet, sweet inheritance money, and when Lisa is automatically eliminated on the grounds of being female, it’s up to Bart to curry favor. He reads Homer’s poorly written cue cards which are full of grammatical errors (“I bad want… money now, me sick.”, and Homer approves of this by going “Ooh, he card read good.”
Sean, you truly don’t know what joke this blog’s name references? Think back to the Season 5 episode where Bart (and others) are trying out to become Mr. Burns’s heir, if that helps.
Damn, the guy above beat me by four minutes…
It is an extremely random quote that I chose just as randomly, I don’t blame anyone for not getting it.
On a side note, I just loved how all the news sites started pumping out clickbait articles about how Marge returned to the show after her “death” last season. That and all the ones about Mr. Largo’s supposed death, even though that was clearly a joke.
The sequel would be a perfect way to end.
I mean 25 years ago would have been a perfect way to end, but this would be good too.
*28 years ago
Some of these premises just lose me from the word go. Why, why, WHY does Springfield Elementary have a high-end fashion club? It’s not about it being realistic or whatever, but this shit is so far removed from the actual experience of an 8-year-old in a run-down elementary school, that it’s like… what’s anyone getting from writing or watching this story? Clearly it wants to be a “””satire””” on teen fashion subculture, but doing it this way doesn’t fit the premise of The Simpsons: a show that uses satire to highlight the world as it really is and not the fantasy world TV sells us on. Plus it’s another “Lisa and Marge hate each other” storyline. What a wonderful time those always are!
But enough about Disney and FOX’s yellow corporate sludge, I want to talk about Tyrone Deise. If you don’t know who that is, he makes extremely elaborate Steamed Hams genre homages and shares them on Youtube, and just a couple weeks ago he adapted it into a 43-minute live action feature film in the style of My Dinner with Andre. It’s a great watch, both as a love letter to The Simpsons and My Dinner with Andre and as a low-budget movie in its own right, recontextualizing the show as the unreliably narrated but deceptively rich life Seymour Skinner has led without even realizing it. I can’t recommend it, and the rest of Deise’s work, enough. That is the true way in which the spirit of classic Simpsons lives on, through the creative spirit of the fans who’ve loved it. As long as that holds true, it couldn’t matter less how many seasons of mediocrity we have ahead of us on Sunday nights.
This is the first season premier I have watched since 31 and the first new episode I watched since THOH XXXIII (I think that’s the Death Note one), so a lot of what you say about them trying new things or having emotional stories flew over my head.
First off, the voices are horrible. I knew Marge had gotten bad as she was awful like ten years ago, but even Bart was atrocious. He sounds like he is going through puberty. Even Homer was different. At this point, they might as well just let AI take over as it would sound just as artificial as they do now.
Anyway, the episode just seemed to be going through the motions. I did like Bart’s comment about going to see a movie in the theater rather than wait 3 days for it to be on streaming for free, as that’s my biggest pet peeve right now. Studios complain people aren’t going to see movies in the theaters, but they’re the reason they aren’t. Superman was streaming barely 2 months later. Naked Gun was a month later. Honey Don’t was up not even a full month after it hit the big screen. I love seeing movies in the theater, but what’s the point nowadays when you aren’t even given time to see a movie there? Some movies are gone after 2 weeks, if that.
Them deciding to watch things on physical media was hilarious since physical media will forever be my go to format. It’d be nice if they would finally release this fucking show’s early seasons on BD!
Never seen Dawson’s Creek, so I’m not sure what they were going for here, but it was mildly funny in its ridiculousness. On the other hand, I have no idea at all what the heck Homer was watching nor why anyone the girls were robbing were enamored by it. It was just some blonde dude punching people, what is so special about it? In fact, that was really Homer’s only purpose in this episode, to distract cops with a movie? TV show? I have no idea. I don’t even understand what the whole thing was about Smithers. Then again, even Bart was rather pointless.
Marge was extremely cruel towards Lisa over nothing. Her telling her to eat around the meat in the lasagna just seemed out of character for Marge. In fact, I can’t even recall a single episode where Marge and Lisa were this mean spirited towards one another before. This was beyond just being upset with each other.
And then there was a lot of randomness going on. Marge just happens to walk into the classroom and just happens to see a map of a heist and just happens to have a boat and a ladder to save Lisa with? WHATDAWHAT?!
I can’t say I outright hated it, but outside of a few moments, I didn’t like it either. It just kind of exists. It’s there because they for some reason don’t want to end this show. I think the worst part was listening to the voice cast because Lisa was the only one who still sounded close enough to the real thing. Everyone else might as well have been recast as they’re just a cheap imitation.
‘going through the motions’ plus ‘been there, done that’ as there were times where this episode was reminding me of Lard of the Dance.
There’s an even worse Marge moment in Bart’s Brain from Season 35 where Homer mentions how she initially thought Lisa would go to hell when she became a vegetarian, only to have her say that she still thinks so. What the fuck?! That’s something Lois Griffin or Francine Smith would say, not Marge!
And I’m with you on physical media, not only is it yours forever without risk of it eventually being removed from whatever streaming service it’s on, but there’s a good chance the version of streaming has been altered or edited (Seasons 2 & 3 of The Muppet Show being examples for me).
I was honestly half expecting Marge to say that they never put Season 2 on DVD because the first season didn’t sell well which is a sad but true reality when it comes to DVD releases of shows either stopping due to low sales or taking extended periods of time between releases (Gargoyles Season 2 Volume 1 coming out in 2005, and Volume 2 not coming out until 2013 initially as a Disney Movie Club exclusive before getting a wide release 2 years later).
I don’t remember Lard of the Dance, which season was that from?
Season 10
“First off, the voices are horrible. I knew Marge had gotten bad as she was awful like ten years ago, but even Bart was atrocious. He sounds like he is going through puberty. Even Homer was different. At this point, they might as well just let AI take over as it would sound just as artificial as they do now.”
For the record, Julie Kavner recently turned 75, while Nancy Cartwright and Dan Castellaneta are both approaching 68.
Oh I know how old they are, which is too old to be voicing these characters anymore, especially since they refuse to age them. Bart sounds like he should be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in this recent episode.
When you mentioned on your blog about the first movie, I talked about back in the day, a franchise was successful when it finally had a motion picture (well… unless you were Mystery Science Theater 3000, then the movie practically killed your show) as you could have the box office success and then the home movie residuals… provided you actually made money on the box office, of course. The Simpsons had tried for years to make a movie, all the way back to Season 4 with Kamp Krusty being originally a movie pitch, and by the time the film came out in 2007, The Simpsons had gone way past its cultural peak. The sequel will be coming out in its 39th season! The cast is already in retirement age.
The funny thing is, nowadays, having a movie means nothing. Disney+ doesn’t even highlight The Simpsons Movie, and outside of that meme where Homer goes “the worst day of your life so far”, nobody talks about it. It’s far more lucrative for streaming services to have a TV series with shows with lots and lots of episodes to binge watch. Movie theaters are largely a thing of the past, and even huge films nowadays are going straight to steaming where companies can directly influence profit margins. But, whatever; Disney sees profit to be had with the yellow family and 2027 appears to be a period where they can start doing something at long last.
As for the episode itself, it’s rather strange for Lisa to be obsessive over fashion, at least in my opinion, given that a long time ago, there was an entire season premiere where Lisa felt like such things were way above her age. Not to mention the whole fact that her character design was based off of a cartoonist who wasn’t that good at human characters, yet nobody has bothered to give them a contemporary makeover in 40 years. But the only relationship we have her and Marge is antagonistic these days.
If you’re referring to Lard of the Dance, then yeah this episode kept reminding me of that one at certain points with it being a Lisa season premiere with characters voiced by random guest of the week and even having part of it’s climax at a school dance.
Unrelated, but I recognize your avatar now having watched Team Galaxy over the summer.
I’m glad you looked at it, and I’m glad in 2025 it finally got videos on YouTube talking about it. Nowadays the internet is so obsessed with 10 out of 10 and 1 out of 10 content that anything that’s “mid” is immediately cast aside as irrelevant. We need to have the perfectly cromulent more than ever. I wouldn’t recommend everyone going out of their way to watch the show because it’s the forgotten series of Marathon Media’s trilogy for a reason, but it exists, and I just like to keep the lights on. Hopefully I’ll get my blog going someday.
It seems as though Mike missed October 5’s episode.