Original airdate: November 8, 2020

The premise: After Marge and the kids travel to Martha’s Vineyard without him, Homer meets Lilly, a fun-loving girl from England who falls head over heels for him.

The reaction: It’s uncommon nowadays that a guest star playing a character gets a huge role in an episode. Last season Michael Rappaport played Mike, baseball enthusiast, anger management candidate, and Homer’s biggest fan, a character that absolutely baffled me as to what his motivations were. Here, we have the exact same problem. From the beginning, this is ostensibly Lilly’s story, as we meet her in England and see that all of the men are just obsessed with her, with her having a natural ability to make anything fun. In fact, she’s literally excised to America specifically because she’s too great of a person. So from the start, she’s really not so much a character than a representation of an exciting, carefree life partner, a literal manic pixie dream girl for the men of the world. Traveling to Springfield, she arrives at Moe’s Tavern, and with just one look at Homer, she’s absolutely captivated. Homer, meanwhile, is despondent from Marge and the kids leaving him home alone. Lilly is ostensibly supposed to be lifting Homer out of his funk, but she doesn’t really do anything for him. She sings him a song, they have a picnic at the plant with Lenny and Carl, there’s a pointless diversion where Homer chaperones a date with her and Mr. Burns, but Lilly doesn’t connect with Homer in any way, nor does she represent anything specific for him to connect with. For the first half of the episode, Homer is just completely oblivious to Lilly’s advances, but in the second half, he’s clearly aware of his growing attraction to her. He’s shocked to find Marge has returned home early, and finds himself captivated by Lilly’s literal siren song over  the phone beckoning him to come over, basically just telling him she’ll make him food. Moments from reaching Lilly’s door, we see fantasy muses appear around Homer’s head beckoning him to her, holding scrolls reading different words. “Kindness” and “Boobies” are clear enough: she’s definitely a very nice, attractive woman, that would be appealing to most men. Then there’s “Humor,” which I don’t recall her making anybody laugh, especially Homer, despite Olivia Coleman doing her best in performing such a dull, empty character. But the killer is “Common Interests,” which we never, ever see. She likes to drink… and that’s really it. This feels especially damning to me as I just recently watched “The Last Temptation of Homer,” an episode all about Homer grappling with his feelings for a woman who shares his greatest vices. But forget about the classic era, season 28’s “Friends and Family” introduced Homer’s neighbor Julia. Although they were never romantically involved, it was a similar story of Homer forming a kinship with another woman, and it was all over their mutual love of overeating, drinking and hating Ned Flanders. It was a terrible show, but even that episode put in the necessary ingredients to attempt to have the story make sense. By the climax of this episode, we’re expected to believe Homer is seconds away from cheating on his wife for this absolute blank slate of a woman, and it absolutely does not work for that very reason.

Three items of note:
– I honestly don’t know what they were going for with the Lilly character. As I mentioned, she seems like just a manic pixie dream girl type, but since she doesn’t really affect Homer’s life in any real way, that doesn’t really check out. We see Lilly musing to herself, longing for Homer from afar, so are we supposed to relate to her in some way? That being said, we never know why she is specifically so turned on by Homer, outside of joke lines that give little insight (“Please let me win him, even briefly. It would be like having a lover and a child at the same time!”) (Wow that line is real creepy.) But Lilly isn’t a real character. We see she’s literally sought after by every single man who sees her, even being with and turning down Hollywood’s finest like Leonardo DiCaprio. Surely this could be an easy set-up for a story. She meets Homer, who is the only man who isn’t immediately smitten by her. She could take this one of two ways: either she’s relieved that a man could actually be interested as her as a person rather than just her looks, or she’s aghast that he’s not taken by her charms immediately, making him all that much more desirable. Homer’s a big lunkhead with not much of a wandering eye, so either of these scenarios would work with him, and both premises would communicate something different about Lilly as a person. Instead, we get nothing. Sometimes it really feels like these stories are half finished and they just throw in a bunch of jokes on top and call it a day.
– As Homer is seconds from grasping Lilly’s doorknob, she’s singing “la, la, la” into the phone, which then is replaced by Marge singing “la,  la, la” as Homer’s mind switches back to the love of his life. It’s quite the contrast from Coleman’s sweet siren song to the elderly Julie Kavner’s aggressively grating voice. I know I literally just talked about it on the season premiere, but this may be the worst Kavner has ever sounded throughout the entire episode. All of the characters definitely sound different as their actors have gotten older over thirty years, but the perpetually 36-year-old Marge very much sounds like an old crone at this point. And again, I feel so awful saying this, as I’m sure Julie Kavner is still giving it her absolute all, but this is just what happens when you get older. As many times as I’ve pointed this out, I feel like this is the first time Kavner’s aging voice actually negatively affected an episode, considering what we’re supposed to be hearing is the saintly voice of Homer’s dear wife pulling him back from the edge of infidelity, but it sounds just like the angry floor buffer at the Capital City Hotel. Unless that was supposed to be the joke? It definitely feels extra-exaggerated, but it was still hilariously off-putting either way.
– The ending features a crestfallen Lilly returning to London, sure she’ll never find love again,  until she meets Homer’s British doppelgänger (“Are you married, and would you shave off your mustache?” “Yes, and immediately.”) This reminded me of the ending of “Papa Don’t Leech,” the episode featuring Lurleen Lumpkin’s reappearance. Before Lurleen leaves the Simpson house, we see she’s now with a roadie Homer doppelgänger herself, an absolute lout who mooches beer money off her. In “Colonel Homer,” Lurleen was so taken by Homer because he was genuine to her, helping her with her career with no strings attached. In “Leech,” her realistic attraction is reduced to her just being super horny about men who look like Homer. In this episode, Lilly was attracted to Homer for absolutely no reason, so it makes perfect sense that she would find happiness with a Homer clone at the end, a pointless ending to a pointless episode.

6. Marge on the Lam

• “Marjorie, please! I enjoy all the meats of our cultural stew.”
• As Homer is desperately trying to reach for the soda can in the vending machine, I like how we cut back to Lenny and Carl’s blank expressions two times, then for no real reason, they run off in terror when Homer gets stuck (“He’s done for!”)
• The opera performing at Springfield High School definitely feels more appropriate than the fancy performance hall we saw back in “Bart the Genius.”
• I really like how Homer’s protests against Marge going out alone never comes off as chauvinistic. He’s more like a little kid asking his mom when she’ll be back. As we follow him wandering aimlessly by himself in his attempts at a fulfilling night out, we see that marriage has given his life a sort of comforting structure, and without Marge, he’s lost. It’s a sweet through-line running through the episode.
• Mr. Burns talking on the phone like a teenage girl from the 50s is one of those gags that’s just so bizarre, but it only works because it goes by so quickly. Random humor works best when it’s not dwelled upon, and also in this case, only if there’s some thread of logic to the joke (Burns being an old man whose mind is stuck in the past).
  
• It goes by really quick, but I love the gag at Shotkickers where we see Willie on the mechanical bull, yelling to anyone who’ll listen, “How come no one else’s chair is doing this?!”
• Marge’s awkward dancing at the underground club is really adorable.
  
• The tone switch between young Homer’s manic glee at smashing the weather machine and his dumbly serious fawning over Marge (“You got real purty hair…”) is so funny, but also weirdly sweet. Homer may love being a craven buffoon, but he loves it even more if Marge is there with him.
• “She’s become a crazed criminal just because I didn’t take her to the ballet!” “That’s exactly how Dillinger got started.”
• Kent Brockman’s bizarre on-air breakdown gives way to another amazing “Please Stand By” card.
  
• I’ve never seen Thelma & Louise so I really don’t know how closely the Marge/Ruth story mirrors the movie, outside the famous driving off a cliff ending. I guess Ruth was sort of retro-fit to fill the role of whichever one was the live wire, but it still stays in line with what little we learned about her from “New Kid on the Block.” I definitely feel like Ruth would have been a welcome recurring character, a great instigating element to push along Marge stories. Instead, she came back only one time ten seasons later as a female bodybuilder in that episode where Marge got roided up and rapes a whimpering Homer in their bed. Sigh.

7. Bart’s Inner Child

• What exactly is Krusty doing with a normal house in a residential area? Maybe it’s just for storing hot, under suspicion items like that trampoline of his. Whatever the reason, I love how serious he is once he offloads it to Homer, and of course his amazing reappearance when he aims a shotgun right at Homer from the porch (“You just keep right on drivin’.”)
• Very nice POV shot of Homer looking down on Marge from the trampoline.
  
• The first act features Homer at his silliest, a grown man who throws down everything at the chance to make a paltry couple bucks having neighborhood kids bounce on a trampoline. Between that and the Looney Tunes homage with him throwing it off a cliff, this is one ridiculous first act. But it works within the context of contrasting Homer’s spontaneous, childlike behavior with Marge’s grounded, worrywart nature, setting the plot into motion.
• Man, I love how absolutely painful some of the sound design is in this episode with kids eating shit off the trampoline. My favorite is when Wendell’s arm just smacks down on the metal bar with an incredibly loud hit, followed by his cry in anguish. It really sells just how much excruciating pain this demon trampoline is causing.
• It’s kind of interesting following Homer’s accusation that she’s too straight-laced and no fun, Marge sits up in bed, revealing she’s sleeping in the nude, which we’ve seen her do every so often. We also get a pretty obvious reuse of animation where in the following shot of Marge, we see the hem of her nightgown, since it’s an old shot they retimed the lip sync to.
• This little strut of Homer walking in and greeting his wife with, “What up, Marge?” is one of my favorite pieces of animation of the whole series. I guess it’s meant to re-establish how carefree Homer is versus Marge, and it’s so damn charming to me.
  
• Another slam dunk from Phil Hartman as Troy McClure in the Brad Goodman presentation. His reading of “My God, it’s like you’ve known me all my life!” always makes me laugh out loud.
• I still love the joke when the Simpsons pull up to the Brad Goodman seminar and Homer recaps why they’re there. It’s one of those gags that’s so weird and makes no sense if you’re not really thinking about how it’s commenting on how “unrealistically” shows and movies are structured that characters will repeat information for the benefit of the viewer to other characters who should already know said information. As TV has evolved over the decades, some cliches and narrative devices have grown as well, but there are still tropes like this that bug me. My biggest eye roll is when shows will unnaturally recap what’s happening immediately at the beginning of a new act after the commercial break. I understand why they do it, but sometimes it just sounds weird how a character will just reiterate what’s happening for no real reason. As much as I love the show, Bob’s Burgers is a big offender of this.
• Brad Goodman may not be as memorable as Hank Scorpio, but he’s a perfect Simpsons character with a ton of great lines (“I may not have a lot of ‘credentials’ or ‘training,’ but I’ll tell you one thing: I’m a PhD in pain.” “There’s no trick to it. It’s just a simple trick!”) He’s actually kind of a more grounded version of Lyle Lanley, a sweet-talking shyster who blows into town, hawks a feel-good solution and gets the hell out with a briefcase full of cash. While Lanley was a song-and-dance man selling an extravagant monorail, Goodman is a more realistic figure, an unqualified, soothing manipulator who, as Lisa keenly observes, is “just peddling a bunch of easy answers.”
• Thanks to this episode, I always pronounce “iced cream” like Mr. Burns.
• This is probably my favorite depiction of Springfield devolving into mob violence, where we see a bunch of our favorite characters slowly get more and more at each other’s throats (“You know, you really irritate me, Skinner, what with your store-bought haircut and excellent posture!”) I also love how in this episode and “Rosebud” we see how easily the mush-brained mob can be redirected (“They’re heading for the old mill!” “No, we’re not!” “Well, let’s go to the old mill anyway and get some cider!”)
• The McGarnigal ending feels like it was a late addition, especially since the last fifteen seconds are playing over an exterior shot of the house. I wonder if they had a different ending that they scrapped in favor of a funny TV parody.

8. Boy Scoutz N The Hood

• The honey roasted peanuts scene was included as a track on one of the old Simpsons soundtrack albums, and I honestly don’t know why. They would sometimes include dialogue leading in or out of songs from the show, but this is the only track that’s literally just an entire scene of dialogue with no music. It does immediately precede the “Springfield, Springfield” song, but there’s no narrative connective tissue between the two, so it still doesn’t make any sense. But having listened to those CDs over and over again, I can recite the entire scene flawlessly decades later. Who knows what that memory space could be better suited for? I’ll never know…
• In every 7-Eleven I’ve ever walked into, I always think they’re called Squishees before remembering they’re actually Slurpees. At my high school, they had a Slush Puppy machine in the cafeteria and I’d get slushies there all the time, and they were a greater ratio of syrup to ice than Slurpees were.
• I collected the Playmates Simpsons action figure line when I was younger, and one of the final figures they produce in the last wave was Brain Freeze Bart, modeled after Bart’s Squishee-induced freakout. It was such a weird choice for a variant, since removed from the episode’s context, he just looks really strange. But I still bought him anyway.
• The face on the Toothless Joe gum packaging is power plant employee Gummy Joe. Guess it’s a lucrative side hustle for him.
• Speaking of the Songs in the Key of Springfield CD, the “Springfield, Springfield” track has an extensive intro (Apu making the all-syrup Squishee) and outro (Bart finding out he joined the Junior Campers and the opening of act two at the kitchen table.) As a kid listening to it, I thought Bart’s line “I’ve made my bed, and now I’ve gotta weasel out of it” was about him literally making his bed.
• “EGGHEAD LIKES HIS BOOKY WOOK!”
  
• Speaking of Playmates, Scout Leader Flanders was another variant figure I had. I got into collecting the figures a year into their production, so I missed out on a lot of the major characters who were older and much harder to find or more expensive. That being the case, the variant figures released in later waves were good for me to have major secondary characters in my collection. But for every interesting or logical variant like Prison Sideshow Bob or Plow King Barney, you had more uninspiring ones like Scout Leader Flanders or… Resort Smithers.
• Bart’s debt collecting badge is an amazing blink-and-you’ll-miss-it joke.
  
• I think Ernest Borgnine is only second to Buzz Aldrin for greatest sport of a guest star who just gets ridiculed and abused. He’s literally introduced walking out of the bathroom, and things just continue to go downhill from there. He’s so funny though: his petering out laugh to cheer up his camper, his quiet defeat upon finding his pocket knife is missing when being cornered by a bear, and one of the best lines of the whole show (“Hey, where are the sissy and the bald guy goin’, huh?”) And if that wasn’t enough, the last scene is him getting killed by Jason Vorhees. Rest in peace, Mermaidman.
• My favorite Sea Captain jokes are the ones that show just how incompetent and miserable he really is. This might be his best random appearance, unable to even keep an inflatable raft afloat (“Yarrr, I don’t know what I’m doin’.”)
• It’s a great touch that we see Homer wearing a map as a paper hat in Bart’s fantasy about how he’d be a screw-up, then in reality, we see Homer doing just that, and ending up having his map hat get blown away.
• Sugar-posting became its own category for Simpsons shitposting, and it’s produced some amazing content.

9. The Last Temptation of Homer

• Bart’s faculty parking lot prank is definitely one of his smartest. It’s kind of another example of how he’s actually a pretty smart kid, just not in the way most adults probably want him to be.
• “It’s ‘photosynthesis’! Damn your feeble brain!”
• The emotional journey Homer goes through in this episode is just fantastic. At first, he’s completely stunned at his immediate physical attraction to Mindy and chooses to just ignore those feelings. When he finds them unavoidable, he tries everything he can to try to squash them, but it proves to be to no avail. As we get into act three with him and Mindy in Capital City, it’s as if the fates are manufacturing everything into place to get these two together, and Homer can feel it, and it’s torturous to him. While “Life in the Fast Lane” depicted Marge as semi-understandably conflicted about choosing Homer or Jacques in the end, it’s appropriate that the flip-side episode would have Homer thrust into a possible infidelity scenario through no fault or action of his own, instead of him just being a horny two-timer. Homer definitely works best when his perversions are more innocent, like him talking about being attracted to Wonder Woman, or him dreaming about naked… Marge. 
• “Homer, what’s with you? You’re talking during a coffee break!” “Yeah, you usually just take the box of donuts into the bathroom.”
• Who knew that bar napkins were so wise?
  
• I think Michelle Pfeiffer is kind of underrated as Mindy. Not only does she do a great job emulating Homer’s vocal mannerisms (her “Mmmm”s and “Can’t talk. Eating,”) but she also plays her just as flummoxed by her crush with Homer as he is to her. The scene with her and Homer in the hotel room at the end is really so beautifully acted, with her clearly open to having sex with Homer, but not wanting to unless he did, communicated in a quiet, honest way.
• Gotta love that Ringworm ad. I feel like they wrote out “National Ringworm Association” for the end card, realized the acronym was NRA, and threw in the “The Other N.R.A.” in as a bonus joke.
• “All I’m gonna use this bed for is sleeping, eating, and maybe building a little fort! That’s it!”
• Burns releasing his Wizard of Oz monkeys in response to Homer and Mindy ordering room service is not only a syndication cut, but I also definitely saw “Another Simpsons Clip Show” more times in syndication than this episode, so my brain not only forgets the monkeys scene, but it immediately jumps to Madame Chow’s, because that’s the scene that comes next in the clip show. Anyway, the joke’s not that great anyway, so whatever.
• The “As Seen on 60 Minutes” mention on the Springfield Power Plant booth is great. There’s also a bunch of copies of Burns’ book from “Blood Feud” for sale, which is a nice callback.
• Again, I just love the end scene with Homer and Mindy so much. And it’s lit so beautifully too. I absolutely love Homer’s innocent “Well… maybe I want to” regarding he and Mindy doing anything. Dan Castellaneta effortlessly imbues Homer’s voice clearly in turmoil with himself. He doesn’t know what he wants at that moment, and you can tell just in the performance.
  

10. $pringfield (or, How I l Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling)

• I love how Mr. Burns just awkwardly walks away from Henry Kissinger at his office door. He doesn’t even bother wasting energy shutting the door in his face. It’s also pretty sweet that we later hear that he walked into a wall without his glasses. That’s more karmic suffering than that detestable war criminal has gotten in real life.
• “I propose that I use what’s left of the town treasury to move to a more prosperous town and run for mayor. And, er, once elected, I will send for the rest of you.”
• Burns’ 24-hour laughing fit about the crippled Irishman is such a hilarious sequence. Him guffawing on his knees in church is one of the funniest images of the whole series.
  
• You know when you have false memories about something you remember watching, but it never actually happened? When we first see Burns Casino, after Burns mentions his new venture needs to have “sex appeal and a catchy name,” for some reason, my brain remembers a tag on that scene where someone says, “What a catchy name!” and Smithers standing next to him says, “What sex appeal!” Clearly, I am remembering this wrong, but every single time I watch this episode and get to that part, my brain thinks this imaginary scene is going to happen but it never does.
• Speaking of celebrities who are good sports, Gerry Cooney makes a pretty pathetic appearance, getting knocked the fuck out by Otto. I guess he’s known for his glass jaw? I don’t know anything about him, but I’m all for more celebrities getting punched in the face on TV.
• The Rich Texan makes his first appearance here, a character who would many seasons later get dusted off and reused ad nauseum (he shot his guns again and screamed “Yee-haw!” I love it when he does that!) But for now, he’s a great one-off character (“Homer, I want you to have my lucky hat. I wore it the day Kennedy was shot, and it always brings me good luck.” “Why thanks, Senator!”)
• Much ado has been made in the last year or so of The Simpsons predicting future events, most of which are bullshit, but the show most certainly called Roy getting mauled by that tiger a decade prior to it happening. Not the boldest prediction, but they still called it.
• There’s just so much going on in Homer’s “photographic memory.”
  
• The Rain Man scene definitely makes no sense if you don’t know the context, which is a real strike against it. Also, the punchline of Homer mimicking the Dustin Hoffman character’s autistic screaming fit doesn’t feel very appropriate nowadays. They’d have been better off cutting this and replacing it with the James Bond deleted scene, which is way funnier anyway.
• Gotta love Krusty’s herpes song. I also love how the scene just ends in bitter silence between disgruntled performer and disgruntled audience.
• “Freemasons run the country!!”
  
• The Boogeyman scene is the basis of yet another tremendous Dankmus remix. Also, if you haven’t gone to their account and binged all their remixes at this point, what the hell are you waiting for? Do you hate joy?
• Robert Goulet is a great example of an appropriately used guest star. It’s logical that he would arrive in Springfield because Burns paid him to play at his casino, and it’s funny seeing him get roped into playing in a kid’s treehouse (“You from the casino?” “I’m from a casino.” “Good enough, let’s go.”) His rendition of the kiddie version “Jingle Bells” is just lovely.
• I love the dramatic camera turn when Homer finally confronts Marge (“You broke a promise to your child!”) The whole episode has been mostly all goofs, but the effects of Marge’s addiction have been slowly building, leaving Homer a powderkeg that eventually erupts in him going wild in the casino, but when he finally settles back down (“Think before you say each word,”) the scene becomes appropriately serious, but just long enough for it to feel meaningful before the cruel hands of the status quo prevent any real change from happening (“Maybe I should get some professional help.” “No, no, that’s too expensive. Just don’t do it anymore.”)

Original airdate: November 1, 2020

The premise: In “Toy Gory,” Bart’s toys enact their revenge after being abused for too long. In “Into the Homer-verse,” an incident at the power plant results in a gathering of Homers from different dimensions. In “Be Nine, Rewind,” Lisa and Nelson find themselves reliving the same day over and over, trying to avoid death in the process.

The reaction: These are always the hardest write-ups to do, because my general criticisms of Treehouse of Horrors have been the same for years, and I don’t want to just repeat them over and over. Hell, I’m pretty sure I’ve used that sentence as my opener for the last four years at least. At least “Toy Gory” has pretty-looking CG on its side, similar to the Coraline “parody” they did a few years ago, but sadly used in service of a pretty dull story. The toys attack Bart and make him a living pull string toy, and then that’s the end. It feels like that should have been the midway point of the story. Bart basically acts like Sid from the first Toy Story, an absolute terror, ripping toys apart, but the climactic reveal of the toys being alive and confronting Sid in the movie is way more dramatic and eerie than this entire segment, so that feels like a bit of a failure. “Homer-verse” is yet another “parody” of a non-horror movie, and a pretty uninspired one. When I saw low-bit video game Homer, why couldn’t that have been Homer from The Simpsons arcade game? Have the other Homers be from other Simpsons media, or from other fantasy sequences over the course of 30 seasons? Especially since this is the 30th anniversary of Treehouse of Horrors, this felt like an appropriate opportunity to be totally meta, like all the different TOH universes are colliding (King Homer! Donuthead Homer! Grim Reaper Homer!) Instead, we get Hanna-Barbara Homer (jokes about Snagglepuss in 2020. Timely!) and Film Noir Homer, because it’s just like that movie they watched and ripped off… er, paid homage to. “Be Nine, Rewind” apes off of time loop movies, specifically the Happy Death Day films and the Netflix series Russian Doll (the segment opens with the same Harry Nilsson song that plays when time resets on Russian Doll.) Lisa and Nelson are stuck repeating Lisa’s birthday, and repeatedly kill themselves over and over trying to break the cycle. They even do the same wood chipper death from Happy Death Day 2U, except not as gleefully macabre as the protagonist in that film who threw herself in willingly, as part of a montage of her glibly accepting her death time and time again. More than half of the segment feels like them explaining the rules of their predicament and coming up with plans, and then later going to Comic Book Guy to list off a bunch of time loop movies, and the loop is broken by Nelson just randomly killing Gil? Whatever. These Halloween shows used to bum me out, but now I’ve just grown numb to how uninteresting they are.

Three items of note:
– This episode was written by writer/comedian Julia Prescott, who co-hosts the ‘Round Springfield podcast. She also co-hosts Stonecutters LA, a live monthly Simpsons trivia show in Los Angeles that I’ve gone to many, many times. Having seen her on-stage over the years, Julia is a very likable personality and clearly a super fan of the show, so I tried to go into this episode positively, hoping there would be some fresh voice to it, but alas, it felt exactly like all the recent Treehouse of Horrors to me. Just like when the show has had guest writers like Seth Rogan or Judd Apatow, something happens in the rewriting process that just homogenizes everything into a colorless slop, and I don’t know what that is. In fact, the season premiere “Undercover Burns” was also written by an outsider, David Cryan, a 29-year-old Canadian who reached out to Al Jean on Twitter to pitch ideas to him, which eventually led to him writing a freelance script. Between Prescott, Cryan, and recent staff hire Megan Amram, the hiring of younger writers who grew up creatively inspired by the show certainly feels like it would breathe new life into this old dinosaur, but as we’ve seen time and again, their episodes feel just as lame and tired as the ones written by the regular old stable of writers.
– The opening was exactly what I’d feared it would be: a ham-fisted anti-Trump election segment. Who is this appealing to? Trump is a moronic ghoul, but all the liberal comedic institutions just harp on the same “orange man bad” tropes, and now at this point, the “joke” is just literally scrolling a gigantic list on the screen of all of Trump’s transgressions and blunders over his presidency. Thinking about how they’ve done these terrible election cold opens the last decade or so, I thought even further back to “Citizen Kang,” an entire segment specifically featuring the 1996 presidential candidates Bill Clinton and Bob Dole. How was that different? Besides the humorous, subversive story (the classic “take me to your leader” demand being hung up because of the election, causing aliens to replace the candidates), the humor was derived from our political system and the election race itself, with only a few minor touches specific to that year’s candidates (Bob Dole’s unique speaking patterns, Ross Perot’s cameo.) Kang and Kodos’ perfect emulation of empty political jargon (“And always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!”), appealing to the broadest possible electorate (“Abortions for some, miniature American flags for all!”) and the travesty that is our two-party system (“I’m going to vote third party!” “Go ahead! Throw your vote away!”) are all things that are still painfully relevant six election cycles later, while this Trump-Biden opening will be dated immediately.
– Dr. Hibbert appears at the end of “Toy Gory,” still voiced by Harry Shearer. It seems like “Undercover Burns” is the switch-over point for the new voice actors, and this episode, “I, Carumbus,” and the upcoming “The 7 Beer Itch” were produced before it, so everything after that I assume will have the new voices. Later in “Be Nine, Rewind,” we get our first extended listen at Grey DeLisle’s Sherri and Terri (I think one of them had a quick line last season.) I think DeLisle’s Martin is pretty good, but Sherri and Terri… not so much. It’s a very distinct voice to try to match, and DeLisle is an incredibly talented performer, but it ends up sounding like a character from The Loud House or something. It’s as good as we’re gonna get though, so I guess it’s fine. No sense creating new characters in your thirty-second season when your actors die off, what’s the point?

1. Homer’s Barbershop Quartet

• The “I WILL NEVER WIN AN EMMY” chalkboard gag is a bit odd to me. Yes, they had lost the Primetime Animated Program Emmy the year previous, and this year they weren’t even nominated, but they already had two Emmys for their first two seasons. I guess they felt discouraged that their favor by the Academy seemed to have slipped after their initial explosion of success at the start of the series. The show wouldn’t nab another Emmy for another two years until season 6’s “Lisa’s Wedding.”
• The Springfield Swap Meet sign is my favorite visual sign gag of the series. The design of the trash cornucopia is absolute brilliance.
  
• In all the times I’ve gone to Disneyland, I’ve only seen the Dapper Dans perform twice. I really should ask them if they can do “Baby on Board.” All the original members who performed the singing for this show are presumably retired, but I wonder if the song is still in the newer Dans’ repertoire.
• Lovejoy’s “Ching-ching!” as the collection plate fills up during the Be Sharps’ set is so funny.
• It’s great that Apu’s new stage name, Apu de Beaumarchais, isn’t any shorter for a marquee, so it really was all in the name of whitewashing (“Isn’t it true that you’re really an Indian?” “By the many arms of Vishnu, I swear it is a lie!”)
• ”Far out, man. I haven’t seen a bong in years.” Not only did they show a bong on screen, Homer names it as such! How did they get away with this in 1993?
• “I would prefer we kept your marriage a secret. You see, a lot of women are going to want to have sex with you, and we want them to think they can.” “Well, if I explain it to Marge that way, I’m sure she’ll understand.” The smash cut to Marge crying is perfect. Also, I always thought her sobbing sounded weird here, almost like it was Julie Kavner not quite crying “in character.”
• “We had fame and fortune, now all we needed was the approval of record company low-lives.” Their relentless Grammy bashing I think is an extension of their saltiness about the Emmys. Or maybe they thought “The Simpsons Sing the Blues” got snubbed.
• I love this frame, recreated from the famous photo of the Beatles and Yoko Ono looking absolutely haggard in a recording studio.
  
• I like how the ending has Bart and Lisa making the same criticisms about the episode conflicting with series continuity as fans would make, and Homer just dismisses them and sends them off to bed. The show would do a lot more openly thumbing their nose up at fans, or anyone hoping to watch a coherent story on their televisions, but an episode like this I can go along with. It’s not like Homer was a mega rock star who was raking in millions. Although Grammy-winning, he was in a successful barbershop quartet, the very premise itself is a joke, so it’s not worth trying to piece together the timeline and go into detail answering all these questions.
• This episode is a classic for sure, but I think The Powerpuff Girls’ “Meet the Beat-Alls” is the superior Beatles parody, which must break a record for most pop culture references made in 11 minutes.

2. Cape Feare

• The “Up Late with McBain” announcer is a literal armband-wearing Nazi, which is pretty crazy. Rainer Wolfcastle is largely based on the Austrian Arnold Schwarzeneggar, so I don’t really know what that’s about. Years later, McBain would be viciously fighting those fiendish Commie-Nazis!
• I like that in the gag where everyone runs in as Homer reacts to the letter, we see a very Itchy-like mouse run in as well, even better considering the previous scene was an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon.
  
• This episode has the most egregious use of recycled, redubbed animation in the back-and-forth between Bart and Abe talking about Matlock and his false teeth. It’s such a lengthy conversation and isn’t particularly funny, so the fact that it was refitted animation makes it stand out even more.
• “Who’s someone you’ve been making irritating phone calls to for years?” “Linda Lavin?” “No, someone who didn’t deserve it!” Exactly why would a little boy be prank-calling the star of Alice, and how did he get her number? This definitely rings as a joke written by a writer with a weird bug of their ass about Lavin. Does anyone know what this joke is about?
• Bernard Herrmann’s Cape Fear theme is utilized to great effect here, and since this episode, it’s basically become Sideshow Bob’s theme music. I don’t know if they reorchestrated it just enough to be legally distinguishable, or if they had to pay for music rights, but either way, it’s such a chilling piece of music. My wife was recently watching Netflix’s Ratchet, and I was surprised to hear them straight up rip-off the Cape Fear theme and use it as part of their score several times. I guess The Simpsons basically did the same thing, but it feels different when a comedy lifts a piece of music in service of a parody, versus a serious-business drama/thriller. I kept expecting Kelsey Grammar to emerge from the shadows.
• “We object to the term ‘urine-soaked hellhole’ when you could have said, ‘pee pee-soaked heckhole.’” “Cheerfully withdrawn!”
• The scene at the movie theater always felt weird to me. I haven’t seen Cape Fear, but I know it’s lifted from the scene where Robert De Niro is smoking and laughing at Problem Child, where here it’s Bob doing the same but to an Ernest movie. I get it’s the famous scene from the movie, but Bob is such a culture snob that the idea of him guffawing at “Ernest Goes Somewhere Cheap” doesn’t compute with me. Or was he purposefully being obnoxious because he knew the Simpson family was there?
• Honestly, “Cape Feare” is probably my least favorite classic era Sideshow Bob episode. It suffers from two issues for me: one, the bulk of it really is just a bunch of gag scenes strung together, especially the first two acts, where the only story beats are Bart’s afraid and Bob gets out of prison. Disconnected jokes were certainly a trope of the Al Jean & Mike Reiss years, which they would proceed to carry on with them onto The Critic, but the structure doesn’t hold as soundly without a strong, focused story for the jokes to hang off of. Second, this is the only Bob episode without some kind of elaborate scheme or plot related to his character, so it really is just twenty-two minutes of this man chomping at the bit to viciously murder a ten-year-old boy, which is not nearly as interesting as his other stories.
• The Homer Thompson scene is so funny, and impossible for me to watch without thinking of the fantastic Dankmus remix.
• The legendary rake gag really does go on for too long. As far as elongated gags go, I prefer Bob getting trampled by the elephants. The absurdity of how many there are in a row is much better, and I’ve always loved this bit of animation where Bob’s face just bugs out as it’s getting stepped on.
  
• I love that Bart successfully stalls for time by appealing to Bob’s vanity, but the scene gets too silly for my tastes, with Bart reading the Playbill and the English flag unfurling behind Bob from God knows where.
• “It’s a good thing you drifted by this brothel!” Chief Wiggum shouts as he and his men are wearing bathrobes. I like that it’s just unspoken that the police force was busy fucking prostitutes.

3. Homer Goes to College

• “The watchdog of public safety. Is there any lower form of life?”
• Homer’s bee-stung butt is a fantastic drawing, but I love the scene prior where he chases after the bee, with his little float in the air before he lands and trounces down the hall.
  
• “Gentlemen, I’ve decided there will be no investigation, now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go away.” How fast Quimby says this line and exits frame is funny, but even better is the comically large $5000 price tag hanging off his new fur coat.
• I love the random time-filling TV commercial we hear Bart watching (“Finally, the great taste of Worchestire sauce… in a soft drink!” “Steaky!”)
• My friend and I in high school could recite “School of Hard Knockers” in its entirety, and I still can today.
• Mr. Burns really does have an impressive chair on the university board.
  
• It’s funny going back to read fan reviews around this era, as some of them were quick to bemoan what seemed like the declining point of the series. This episode seems to have been quite polarizing, if the reviews on the capsule at Simpsons Archive are to be believed. To me, Homer’s behavior in this episode is explained due to his slavish belief in college life being just as he knows it from television, contrasted with reality. He’s emulating what he thinks he should be acting like as a college man, but never goes far enough to become annoying. Even when he runs down the Dean with his car, there’s an innocent naivety to his actions, as wild as that sounds, like he didn’t intend for him to get seriously hurt.
• Homer laughing at the professor dropping his notes might be one of my favorite jokes of the whole series. I just love how long it goes, and that multiple sets of rows slowly turn to look back at this idiot.
• This episode has my favorite syndication cut, featuring the doomed construction project because of the six missing cinder blocks (“There’ll be no hospital, then, I’ll tell the children.”) It’s just so absurd.
• It’s funny that Richard Nixon has a featured role in this episode, and later in “Treehouse of Horror IV,” before dying just half a year later. It’s especially ironic in the latter, of course, appearing on the Jury of the Damned, despite his protests of not being dead yet.
• Hearing the “crazy noises” from Marge’s phone took me back to those halcyon days of early dial-up. Remember when you couldn’t make a phone call if you were logged on-line? Remember when you’d leave your computer on overnight to download a 150MB episode of Futurama off of Limewire? I do.
• Another memory of a by-gone era: missing something off live TV. Bart and Lisa freak out when they miss the climax of Itchy & Scratchy, but nowadays I’m sure there’s some kind of Krusty streaming service you can watch all ten thousand I&S episodes instantaneously or something. I’m surprised they haven’t done an episode like that yet.
• I like how the episode turns into Homer’s relationship with the nerds, and then as we get midway through act three, the actual plot sneaks back up on us as much as it does Homer in the form of his final exam.
• I miss little animation flourishes like Homer gleefully turning in his paper.
  
• The photos over the end credits of Homer’s full college experience are great. I like how they kind of give the college characters their well-earned due: the nerds take over the football field in a tank, and Homer and the Dean rock out behind a disgruntled Richard Nixon, the newest victim of the Bra Bomb.

4. Rosebud

• Upon being woken up, Mr. Burns tells Smithers, “The bedpan’s under my pillow.” I guess he moved that himself? And I hope it has a lid on it so his pillow isn’t soaking in his own pee. I never quite got this joke.
• It goes by kind of quick, but I like how after Homer’s story about how he always gets abused at Burns’ birthday parties, we see Marge has gone back to sleep and Homer shoots her annoyed look. 
• I just love Homer’s absolute glee in writing Burns’ roast speech, which then spills into him just trying to funny by insulting people (his impulsive “Okay, stupid!” response to Marge always makes me laugh). It all comes from this purely innocent, childlike place within Homer that’s really charming and infectious to watch.
• What a subhead. And where’d they get that photo?
  
• The Ramones scene is a classic. I like the drummer genuinely commenting, “Hey, I think they liked us!” after the set.
• I love the idea of Burns opening up all of those gifts we see strewn about his gigantic table as everyone just stands there and patiently watches, like a kid at a child’s birthday party, except it’s a mirthless mogul giving as little interest to a pile of gold coins as a dust buster.
• I love Burns’ face reacting to Homer pulling down his pants. It’s just the perfect mixture of confusion and rage and you just don’t know which emotion is going to overtake the other. I also love that his order is, “Destroy him.” Not take him off the stage, not beat him up, not even kill him. Destroy him.
  
• Hitler in his bunker screaming, “This is all your fault!!” at a stuffed bear will never be not funny.
• The final gag in act one where the camera zooms in on the 100% Cotton tag as a “mistake,” we hear the record scratch, then the camera searches for the Bobo tag really doesn’t work. I get what they were going for, but at least to me, it’s just too weird in execution.
• I don’t want to know what Burns intends to do with Smithers in the Bobo costume, but I have a feeling that Smithers wouldn’t have a problem with it.
• Homer being absolutely oblivious to Bobo is the subject of not one, but two absolutely fantastic scenes. The first scene with Kent Brockman’s on-the-nose news report is so funny, with continuous cuts to Homer’s absolutely blank face as Brockman is trying to make it as clear as possible what he should be doing. The second scene adds onto this by setting the scene perfectly for Homer to finally acknowledge that stuffed bear, but he still doesn’t quite get it for the first few seconds (“How long have we had these fish?!”)
• Professor Frink’s robot bear is an understandable syndication cut, but I still love how stupid it is. “BEAR WANT TO LIVE” was a common quote with my best friend and I, and I also like how the bear has a wind-up gear on its back, like it’s a gigantic mechanical toy.
• Something I don’t think I ever noticed: when we see the police and firefighters outside the Simpson house after Burns and Smithers’ first break-in attempt (“More cocoa, Mr. Burns?” “Yes!!”), you see the firetruck has just plowed through the Flanders’ front yard fence.
• The point of the conflict in act three is Homer choosing his family over money, but really, you could’ve just bought Maggie another teddy bear and called it a day. For one million dollars, I think she’d get over it. Hell, they have the joke where he tries to entice her with an empty box, and Maggie is actually interested in playing with it before Homer hogs it all to himself. Just give her the box! The box!
• A great blink-and-you’ll-miss-it gag: Otto watching a portable TV while clearly driving.
• Burns and Smithers’ sitcom is just so stupid on so many levels that I absolutely love it. And Harry Shearer’s “Yes” is the funniest goddamn thing ever.
• Burns confronting Maggie at the end is one of the best examples of the show being sincere and snarky at the same time. Burns’ plea to Maggie to not make the same mistake he made is surrounded by great gags (him not able to out-muscle a baby, the shutterbug reporters popping up behind the fence), but they never undercut that 100% sincere moment. Nor does the final Burns scene (“From now on, I’m only going to be good and kind to everyone!” “I’m sorry sir, I don’t have a pencil.” “Ehh, don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll remember it.”) Yes, we know Burns will go back to being a heartless monster in the next episode, but that doesn’t make his emotional climax any less meaningful.
• I always used to consider this my favorite episode, but now, I really don’t know. I love it dearly, don’t get me wrong, but I feel like it’s missing that strong character through-line that I maybe value more now than I did ten years ago. I love the idea of Mr. Burns finding no happiness in his immense wealth and chasing his carefree childhood innocence, but that raw nerve is only tapped in act one and at the very end of act three, and the rest is just a series of gags. They’re great gags, but I dunno. Of the episodes I’ve watched so far, “Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie” really stuck out to me as being a fantastic example of a show that balanced a really strong character story with gags, it’s kind of emerging as one of my new favorites. But I don’t know if I can really label one episode as my favorite anymore. The playing field is way too crowded with greatness to pick just one.

5. Treehouse of Horror IV

• I know next to nothing about Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, but Bart’s introductions to each segment are still really great. Completely removed from its context, the wraparounds still work as they’re intended. I also love all of the different paintings parodying famous works of art. My favorite is the recreation of Jacques-Louis David’s “The Death of Marat,” but instead of the deceased holding his final written letter, it’s a tired (or hung over) Homer with a grocery list. These paintings go by in the background as delightful little Easter eggs, unlike the recently aired “Now Museum, Now You Don’t,” an episode where the art history “parodies” were completely in the spotlight, and much, much more terrible.
• Devil Flanders’ “true” form is such a beautiful design (clearly inspired from Fantasia’s Chernabog), and I love that when he disappears in a puff of smoke, you can see Ned’s face in it just before he vanishes.
• Considering Homer’s words were “I’d sell my soul for a donut,” I don’t think him not eating the last bite counts as a loophole. He got the donut, the Devil gets his soul, that’s the transaction. But besides that point, why in the hell would he not just throw it away? Why keep it in the fridge? It’s almost as if this is some kind of ha-ha laugh-’em-up comedy show or something.
• This episode has got to be one of the most beautifully animated in the entire series, I feel like I could highlight every other scene and there’d be a great moment of note. The vortex in the Simpson kitchen, the trial, almost the entirety of act two on the bus, Count Burns’ castle, Bart as a vampire… I can’t post a hundred gifs, so I’ll just settle on Homer plunging into Hell.
  
• I love how the pets scamper as the fire lights from under them and forms Homer’s cage of flames. A lovely little touch they didn’t need to have.
• I think this is Lionel Hutz’s best appearance, every single bit with him is just hilarious, from his intro walking in, combing his hair with a fork (“I watched Matlock in a bar last night. The sound wasn’t on, but I think I got the gist of it”), his stressing of unbreakable not realizing it’s against his case, and his escape from the bathroom window. Even the deleted scenes with him we’d later see in “The 138th Episode Spectacular” are fantastic.
• What a great frame. It’s like a great piece of promo art within the show itself.
  
• Hutz is the MVP of act one, but runner up has got to be Blackbeard, from his fear of heights (“This chair be high, says I”), to his shameful admission of illiteracy (“My debauchery was my way of compensatin’!”)
• I love that in Bart’s nightmare, right before the crash, it flashes to show his skeleton before he wakes up.
  
• The gremlin is such a great design. I love how he’s clearly taking so much absolute joy in taking his time causing the impending death of a bus full of small children. Also great is how uncomfortable he is when Ned Flanders rescues and embraces him.
• I wanna see the segment about the dogs playing poker. Also, it’s great how we transition from the painting to see it hanging behind the Simpson couch at the beginning of the segment.
• I’ve spent every night this October watching a different spooky movie, but Bram Stoker’s Dracula really should have made the list. I’ve heard it’s really good, and I’m sure I’ll appreciate it even more because of this episode. Ehh, maybe next year.
• “Well, well, if it isn’t little… boy!” Just the right length of a pause. So funny.
• Boy, Burns must be a real deep sleeper to not even flinch at Homer repeatedly hammering a stake into his crotch.
• The Addams Family-style end credits is one of my favorite remixes, it perfectly blends the motifs of both theme tunes expertly.

17. Last Exit to Springfield

• “Ice to see you.” The McBain opening is perfect on its own, but also is a great lead-in to the villain mirroring Burns’ real-life cruelty. The moment of the guy about to eat cake getting shot, and the other guy happily about to eat it himself before getting killed is just wonderful.
  
• “Why must you turn my office into a house of lies?” They originally wanted the dentist to be played by Anthony Hopkins, clearly trying to allude to his recent successful role in Silence of the Lambs, but instead, we have Hank Azaria not quite doing a Hannibal Lector impression, but definitely capturing the spirit of it. The first act definitely nails the absolute terror of visiting the dentist through a child’s eyes (“Now the first thing I’ll be doing is chiseling some teeth out of your jawbone. Hold still while I gas you!”) We also get a great parody of the scene from Tim Burton’s Batman of Lisa laughing maniacally and smashing the mirror. I barely remember that movie, I really know the scene more from this version, and it works absolutely perfectly in-universe and within context, as all good parodies should be.
• I wonder if they extended “Dental plan!” “Lisa needs braces!” even longer to fill out time. I love how it just keeps going and going, another great joke explaining how long it takes for a thought to formulate within Homer’s thick skull.
• We get two great Mr. Burns monologues in act two: his “strange bedfellows” speech trying to appeal to Homer (“I don’t go in for these backdoor shenanigans. Sure, I’m flattered, maybe even a little curious, but the answer is no!”) and his euphemism-laced speech in his basement that makes Homer have to pee (“Now, it doesn’t take a whiz to know that you’re looking out for number one! Well, listen to me, and you’ll make a big splash very soon!”)
• The thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters gag is great, but why exactly is Burns doing this? To write the great American novel to make a bunch of money? He already wrote his memoir, why would have want to push for another book?
• Lenny grooving to “Classical Gas” is a great moment that’s been memed a bunch. I personally love the mash-up with it and the “Shooting Star” trend from a few years back.
• I could listen to Abe’s onion-belt story for an entire episode. Definitely his best ramble.
• “Look at him strutting around like he’s cock of the walk. Well, let me tell you, Homer Simpson is cock of nothing!”
• The montage music as Burns and Smithers run the plant themselves is my favorite piece of music in the entire series.
  
• In an episode filled with pop culture parodies, I feel like the Grinch speech at the end might have gone too far. Visually echoing the animated special with the workers joining hands in a circle as Burns dramatically gestures to listen, that’s all fine, but then he just starts to inexplicably rhyme as he reenacts the scene from the special going back and forth with Smithers/Max the dog. It goes from a clever allusion that works in context, to just them doing a semi-verbatim reference.
• “I’m beginning to think that Homer Simpson was not the brilliant tactician I thought.”
  
• Lots of people rank this episode incredibly high on their Best of lists, but I still don’t hold it as one of my favorites. I think the best episodes need a strong character through-line, a motivator pushing them through the story that feels like it matters. Homer is moved to lead the union solely so he doesn’t have to pay out of pocket for Lisa’s braces, but then the gag becomes that he’s just dumbly gliding through the rest of the story until it reaches its conclusion. As dumb as he is, Homer is at his best when he’s acting with some kind of agency. Not to say there’s not amazing stuff in this episode, of course there is, but I wouldn’t even say this is top 5 of season 4.

18. So It’s Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show

• One of the most interesting tidbits I recall from the DVD commentaries was on this episode, where they mentioned this clip show was born out of a meeting with FOX executives where they proposed that to ease up on their already rigorous production schedule, they would do four clip shows a season. The writers were understandably aghast at this, and eventually just this first one was produced. I get that FOX wanted as many episodes of the show as possible at that point, but that is a crazy idea. Did any sitcom ever do more than one clip show a season? Even in the days pre-reruns I’d imagine that would be tedious. But this is easily the best clip show (excluding “The 138th Episode Spectacular,” which I don’t consider a clip show), purely because act one is all new content. But it’s still a clip show, which by default, is still a little bit terrible. The only good clip shows are episodes specifically making fun of clip shows with all new material (Clerks The Animated Series’s second episode, Community’s “Paradigms of Human Memory.”)
• “God bless those pagans.”
• Anytime I narrowly avoid some kind of blunder, I always think, “I’d have looked quite the fool. An April fool, as it were.”
• “APRIL FO-”
  
• It always irrationally bothered me that they show a clip from the non-canonical “Treehouse of Horror.” Marge recalls that Homer always had “good coping skills,” then shows the scene of the family getting abducted by Kang and Kodos. I don’t quite see how that shows Homer’s coping skills. Also, Marge, how are you remembering that?
• “Marge, what if I wind up as some vegetable watching TV on the couch? My important work will never be completed.” “Society’s loss, I suppose.”
• Despite the middle section being littered with clips, at least there’s some semblance of a conclusion with Bart admitting what he did to Homer and getting strangled for it. It definitely feels more like a real episode than all the ensuing clip shows.

19. The Front

• “That’s as bad as the Itchy & Sambo cartoons of the late ‘30s!”
• This episode is the reason I never pick rock in Rock-Paper-Scissors (“Good old rock. Nothing beats that!”)
• I love how gigantic the Itchy & Scratchy scripts appear throughout the episode. Surely the transcripts of each episode have got to be, what, two, three pages long at best?
• Another too-obvious re-use of animation when the Harvard writer pokes his head in Roger Meyers’ office and gets hit in the head with the name placard a second time. The scene didn’t really need it, but this episode was notoriously short, so they had to pad the time somehow.
• “I did the Iggy!” is a quote that pops into my brain more times than I care to admit, for no real particular reason.
• My best friend in high school used “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing” as his senior yearbook quote. He truly was a greater super fan than I.
• Oddly, this episode features two guest star-voiced characters performed by series regulars. Hank Azaria takes over as Roger Meyers, Jr., doing a pretty good job, and Dan Castellaneta voices Artie Ziff. His “Jealous?” in particular is pretty spot on to Lovitz.
• This whole episode is basically the writers taking the piss out of themselves, so it’s only appropriate that they appear as themselves as the I&S writers. We also get a great line from what looks like Al Jean (”I wrote my thesis on life experience!”)
  
• Humans don’t appear that often in Itchy & Scratchy cartoons, but whenever they do, it’s cool that they’re flesh-toned, like this is the Simpsons universe’s version of weird technicolor cartoon characters.
• “Did you call the girl from the escort service?” “They said their insurance won’t cover you.” “Ohhh, that’s a fly in the ointment…”
• The other nominees at the comedy awards are all great in their own ways. First, “StrongDar, Master of Akom” is named after AKOM studios, the South Korean animation studio that made this show among many, many other 80s and 90s animated series. “How to Buy Action Figure Man” is the perfect distillation of the cartoons from the 80s made to sell toys, and they even nailed the awful look of those awful, awful cartoons (fact: all 80s cartoons are terrible.) And finally, a well-deserved shot at John K’s poor time management with the Ren & Stimpy season premiere clip still not finished yet. That fucker got a chance to revive his show a decade later on Spike TV, and he blew it again by not producing his shit fast enough.
  
• “I’m gonna write that sitcom about the sassy robot.” Seven years later, we got Futurama. Coincidence? Yes.
• We are now only four years away from the flash-forward at the end of Homer and Marge’s 50th high school reunion. Will the show still be running by then? Only time will tell.
• “The Adventures of Ned Flanders” is still fantastic. There’s a Twitter account that appropriately reposts the clip every Saturday morning.

20. Whacking Day

• The first act at the school is really stupendous. First, we get a proactive Skinner taking control prior to the superintendent’s visit by self-admittedly sweeping his problem students under the rug before contemplating leaving them to rot (“Would the world judge me harshly if I threw away the key?”) Then, we get our first look at Superintendent Chalmers, where Skinner walks a tightrope trying to keep up his ruse and make the man happy for the sake of his job, and perhaps a cushy promotion (“What do you think of the banners?” “Nothing but transparent toadying.” “It was the children’s idea. I tried to stop them.”) Skinner taking great pride in his rinky-dink school but living in fear of being scrutinized by a higher authority created a great dynamic, and he and Chalmers worked so well together. When they would start appearing together all the time, the two lost a lot of their edge, as they would devolve into just bitchy bickering that held no weight.
• Gotta love the sign outside the religious school: We Put the FUN in FUNdamentalist Dogma.) I also love the one squinty-eyed kid waving his fist.
  
• Abe’s German cabaret story may be his finest flashback ever (“Is that story true, Grampa?” “Well, most of it. I did wear a dress for a period in the ’40s. Oh, they had designers then!”)
• Reverend Lovejoy reading from the Bible to justify Whacking Day is such an important scene, perfectly encapsulated how people will willingly jump through the mental hoops necessary to make excuses for outdated beliefs and practices.
• Between “Mr. Plow,” her fantasizing about Jack Nicklaus, and now getting revved up by Homer’s whacking stick, this has been a very horny season for Marge.
• Homer with his cowboy hat and air horn is one of my favorite drawings of the entire series. It’s also my icon on Slack for work.
  
• “Gentlemen, start your whacking!” Thank goodness they got rid of that sexpot Miss Springfield and replaced her with a new character with the annoying fucking voice.
• Bart being homeschooled is separated from the Whacking Day storyline, but I like how they quietly lead into each other where we see Bart slowly developing a love of books, which gives the idea about luring the snakes into the house to save them.
• “I’m sick of you people! You’re nothing but a pack of fickle mush-heads!” “He’s right!” “Give us hell, Quimby!”

21. Marge in Chains

• The Juice Loosener is second only to the tombstone polish for best Troy McClure infomercial (“IT’S WHISPER QUIET!”)
• This episode re-emerged into the public consciousness recently due to the Osaka flu in the first act eerily mirroring the COVID pandemic. Too bad the virus isn’t actually a visible floating green cloud like it is in this episode, then it might be easier to avoid infection.
• The Itchy & Scratchy in this show is one of my favorites just because it’s so brutal. As all of Scratchy’s organs get ripped out of his body and tossed out the window, he swallows them back up and still ends up impaled on a cactus. The two needles through both his pupils is an especially disturbing touch.
  
• “No offense, but we’re putting that bitch on ice!” It’s never quite clear why Apu and Sanjay are so hellbent on getting Marge prosecuted. They know Marge is no actual threat to their business, but it doesn’t seem like they’re using her as a cautionary example to deter all shoplifting. It’s not like they get restitution for a guilty verdict either, at least they never say as much. While Apu wasn’t quite family friends with the Simpsons at this point, it still feels unnecessarily petty.
• Beautiful tribute to Psycho. I love the charcoal-like etchings on the close-up.
  
• “Let the record show that the witness made the ‘drinky-drinky’ motion.”
• Phil Hartman really is this show’s secret weapon. His stalling-for-time while taking his tie off is one of his finest moments.
• In spite of the title, there’s really not many scenes of Marge at the women’s prison, with the majority of the third act showing the Simpsons getting by without their matriarch. It feels like a bit of a missed opportunity to tell some sort of story, either with Marge finding prison a nice stress-free break from being a homemaker, or her docile personality butting heads with some of the gruffer inmates, maybe even reforming them, sort of like in “Take My Wife, Sleaze.” While writing this, I also remember they did another Marge in prison episode within the last five years. I don’t remember a thing about it, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that it sucked shit.
• The conclusion still puzzles me. A large crowd of people leave the bake sale disappointed that Marge’s Rice Krispie squares aren’t available. At the end of the day, a park ranger (?) remarks that they’re $15 short, “exactly” what Marge’s treats normally bring in. I guess Marge could be selling those for a buck a piece, but turning this into a joke kind of diminishes the point about the impact Marge makes on the community a bit. And I guess $15 is the crucial difference between being able to afford a Lincoln statue and a Jimmy Carter statue, which leads to mass rioting, and later, a town wide apology to Marge when she gets released. The ending reeks of burnt out writers trying to tie up a script at the end of the production season, and I mean that with great respect.

22. Krusty Gets Kancelled

• Another beautiful episode by David Silverman right from the get-go. The Gabbo show opening is pretty incredible, with the little dummy spinning and prancing around. Also, exactly what kind of character is Gabbo? He moves independently of his ventriloquist, which in this scene’s case could have been done in post production, I guess, but several times after we see him speaking and acting on his own. Arthur Crandall must have some kind of split personality or something.
• Krusty’s initial response to Gabbo with his own dummy is hilarious. Every time the kids scream, it gets even funnier. The dummy with the caved in head sprawled out in the middle of the audience is an amazing drawing.
  
• Quimby using Gabbo’s catchphrase to ameliorate himself after literally admitting to funding the murder of his political enemies is great enough, but made even better with the following day’s newspaper, “Two More Bodies Surface in Springfield Harbor” is a mere secondary headline to “Quimby Re-Elected in Landslide.”
• I’ve seen quite a few older Eastern European cartoons, and Worker & Parasite is pretty spot on to a lot of the look and feel of them. Krusty’s gobsmacked reaction is a solid go-to reaction image.
  
• The Gabbo’s “S.O.B.s” scene is so absolutely prescient to our current political and social climate. A public figure getting caught saying something damning, or being exposed as a hypocrite, absolutely doesn’t matter, as it’s forgotten in an hour when the next “big” thing happens. Also, if you’re popular and have a stronghold in your field, you can just get away with it, but if you’re lower on the totem pole, you’re out of luck, as is the case with Kent Brockman (another amazing smash cut to a newspaper where “Brockman Fired” is the subhead to GABBO.) As this episode points out, exposing your opponent doesn’t stop them, you have to beat them at their own game, a lesson I wish was actually being heeded to twenty-five years later.
• This episode kind of gave Crazy Old Man his “name” (“And now, the Crazy Old Man dancers!”) I don’t know if he was ever referred to this moniker again, but all supplemental material would call him Crazy Old Man. Then, for whatever reason, his name was switched to Old Jewish Man, I guess because the old name was too subtle. It’s one of those small changes in later seasons that just irrationally bother me, like when they switched Frink’s lab coat color from light green to white. It looked so much better in green!!
• It’s kind of a bummer that in this star-studded episode, the majority of the guest stars have passed on at this point. That’s been the case with the bulk of the guest stars so far in the series, but when they’re all together in one episode, it becomes a bit more somber.
• Why does Elizabeth Taylor have irises? I get she was known for her violet eyes, but it makes her look so damn weird. Also, I guess the joke with her is that, to make it seem slightly more realistic, not every celebrity Bart and Lisa asked said yes, and she later regretted it, but it always struck me as odd.
• Major kudos to Luke Perry, who suffers through maybe the most abuse of any guest star, for no other reason than Krusty’s burning jealousy. He really sells those screams and cries of agony (”My face! My valuable face!”) I also love the drawing of a disfigured Perry in Krusty’s fantasies.
  
• All the celebrities featured get their moments of being superhumanly awesome, but not only is it absurdist, but they’re all for the purpose of Krusty’s show being the biggest, most amazing thing ever on TV. Nowadays, a guest star doing something cool or amazing is just some dumb gag about how incredible they are and how much we should love them. Blecch.
• I always laugh at Flea yelling “HEY, MOE!!” It sounds slightly echoey, like he was screaming away from the mic when he recorded it, but that makes it even funnier to me.