(originally aired February 7, 1999)
Even at this point in the run, there’s still a dwindling sense of vitality in the Mike Scully run, with episodes that have elements and ideas within them that could actually work and be entertaining. Homer changing his name and getting wrapped up in the cultural elite? Farfetched, yes, but it’s possible. The problem here is that this episode is so lopsided that we spend two-thirds of the episode dwelling on the set-up, which is a lot less funny than the writers seem to think. The story begins with the family watching the new mid-season show “Police Cops” and being surprised to find the suave hotshot detective lead is named Homer Simpson. The entirety of act one is focused on Homer becoming a hometown celebrity, which he absolutely laps up, asserting that the fictional character was wholly based on himself. But watching the next episode of “Police Cops,” he’s shocked to find the character has been altered to be a bumbling idiot, leaving him to subject of constant mockery by the whole town. Unable to get the TV executives to change their show, Homer is left with one option: change his name to Max Power.

That short plot write-up is basically the entirety of the first two acts, and it plays as thinly as it sounds. Not even in the town of Springfield do I buy that not only would people care so much about Homer sharing the name of a TV character that it would make the paper, but Moe and the barflies seem to believe Homer’s bullshit about the producers of the show using him as inspiration. The same basically applies in the second act except in reverse, where the townspeople are making Homer’s life a living hell, mocking him and trying to goad him into saying his TV catchphrase. So Homer changes his name to Max Power, a moniker that grabs the attention of the fellow awesomely named Trent Steele, who invites him and Marge to an elegant garden party. Homer’s new name seems to have been enough to grant him access to Springfield’s cultural elite, something he takes full advantage of, until he gets himself stuck at their ecological rally to save the town’s redwoods from loggers.

The ending set piece with affluent people being activists for self-obsessed reasons is really a rich topic for comedy, but it’s localized to the last three minutes. Meanwhile we spend half the episode with the stupid “Police Cops” shit. Why didn’t they just have the Homer Simpson character be a doofus to begin with? They could’ve gotten their jokes, like Homer commenting how the dumb idiot character is nothing like him, gotten his name changed by act two, and developed his relationship and feelings toward his new social group better. There really isn’t any need for any of the material in the first act, it’s inconsequential to what the main story is. This is an episode that I think really could have worked if there hadn’t been so much time wasted getting to Max Power. Homer developing this other self in distancing himself from his TV persona, then desperately having to back out when he gets in too deep, it could have been kind of interesting. But instead he screams and yells and causes every tree in Springfield to collapse like dominoes. Much better.

Tidbits and Quotes
– I would like to see a bit of “All in the Family 1999” (“Aw, jeez, they got me livin’ with an African-American, a Semite-American, and a woman American there, and I’m glad! I loves youse all! I love everybody! I wish I’d saved my money from the first show…”)
– I like Homer’s enthusiasm for midseason TV, having written up a scorecard of two categories: Excellent Shows and Very Good Shows. But upon watching the first program “Admiral Baby,” Homer is struck with a bizarre feeling (“I never thought I’d say this about a TV show, but this is kind of stupid.”)
– Great ending of “Police Cops,” with Homer saying, “Arrest that guy!” after having just flung a bullet through the crook’s heart, and the credits card revealing the blood used in the show is real, donated by the Red Cross.
– A trend in the Scully years is Homer consistently being happy and sure of himself, which there’s a lot of in the first act, with his cocky attitude towards his peon friends, and saying he’s available when his high school prom queen calls him. I do like the callback to her later on (“This is our chance to rub elbows with Springfield’s young, hip power couples, like me and Debbie Pinson!”)
– All the scorn and mockery turns Homer into a crazy attic-dwelling hermit, for all of one scene. Again, not a lot of material here.
– At first I thought “Police Cops” was shot in Springfield, like Krusty’s show and other local productions are, but that wouldn’t make sense given that the producers probably wouldn’t have named the character after Homer if he was a local, semi-well known resident. So yeah, it seems Homer flew out to Hollywood somehow for a single scene. Whatever. At least it’s a funny scene, with the producers explaining how they came up with the idea of the show (“The thirteen of us began with a singular vision: Titanic meets Frasier.” “But then we found out that ABC had a similar project in development.”) Also the original name: “Badge Patrol.” (“But the network idiots didn’t want a show about high- tech badges that shoot laser beams!” “So we asked ourselves, ‘Who’s behind the badge?'” “Police…” “Cops…” “‘Police Cops.'”) Brilliant minds at work.
– Homer’s alternate names for himself are pretty amazing (Hercules Rockefeller, Rembrandt Q. Einstein, Handsome B. Wonderful), as is Judge Snyder’s decree to give Homer the only name he actually spelled correctly.
– There’s a few good bits with the family finding out about Homer’s name change: Homer callously commenting there are acids to burn off Marge’s tattoo of his name on her nether regions, learning about the right way, the wrong way, and the Max Power way (also the wrong way, but faster), and this raw but still hilarious line (“Nobody snuggles with Max Power. You strap yourself in and feel the G’s!”)
– I like Homer’s innocent revelation that he got Max Power off a hair dryer. It totally makes sense that that’s where he got it from.
– More celebrity name dropping, but it makes sense coming from a starstruck Marge to point out Woody Harrleson and Ed Begley, Jr. by name. Begley isn’t given much, though I do like his personal go-kart powered by his sense of self-satisfaction.
– Great moments with President Clinton, mentioning he’s done it with pigs (“Really, no foolin’, pigs!”) and telling Marge if she’s near the White House, she can find him in his tool shed out back.
– Trent Steele addresses his guests about taking up their cause, while an obnoxious and irritating Homer makes loud comments after each sentence. And no one says a word about it for some reason.
– The ending is so fucking stupid and makes no sense. Homer running in circles with the chain around him for what couldn’t have been more than a few minutes cutting through an entire redwood? Which then of course causes a chain reaction and knocks over every tree. Uggghh…

(originally aired January 21, 1999)
With a title that’s very much an omen, this episode is pretty bad. But I’ll be honest with you, I was expecting a lot worse. This is one of those episodes that stuck out to me as being absolutely atrocious, but it didn’t feel that level of terrible upon re-watch. Where shows like “Kidney Trouble” and “Viva Ned Flanders” were particularly offensive, this one was just kinda… whatever. Its lack of story and absolute squandering of its cast was disappointing, sure, but never to the point that I became upset. For its bombastic setting and cavalcade of guest stars, it was just very banal. The “fun” begins when Homer crosses paths with some schmuck named Wally Kogan, a travel agent with no discernible personality who invites him and his buddies to Miami for the Super Bowl. Before long, a collection of notable secondary characters are on their way to the game. We see a lot of familiar faces who make sense as football fans, but also many who don’t. Sideshow Mel? Comic Book Guy? Reverend Lovejoy? Burns’s lawyer? Something’s not quite right with the whole line-up.

But really, none of that matters since every single character exhibits no real personality throughout the episode, they’re just mindless sheep in Homer’s insane Super Bowl mob. While I suppose the point is that they’re like revved up football fans psyched for the game, it still feels like such wasted potential. You have a show filled with so many great side characters and not give any one of them their time to shine? Instead they’re identity-less, with each one saying a token line of expository dialogue here and there (“I can’t believe it! We’re actually in the winning locker room!” Thanks a lot, Ned, I didn’t notice.) It’s kind of amazing how much is in this episode, and yet how empty it feels. The whole second half of the show is Homer and company running from set piece to set piece, with isolated guest appearances from the likes of Dolly Parton and Rupert Murdoch. Nothing that happens is particularly funny, or in the least bit interesting. It’s just like a bunch of random crap that happens. Like I said earlier, nothing I can get too angry about, it’s just a bunch of dead air.

There’s something about this episode that feels very ominous, a show filled to the brim with useless guest star appearances with the hopes that they’ll be funny and eat up enough screen time that they don’t have to write as much story. But in the end, it all feels sort of empty. And the plot line doesn’t kill enough time, so the writers have to cram in a sub”plot” involving Marge and Lisa coloring eggs. I barely have much to comment on the main story, so I got nothing for this one. It’s just inoffensive and dry, with only the ridiculousness of Dan Castallaneta’s Vincent Price impersonation to help it along. By the end, the writers (all four of them!) try to cover their asses by having Pat Summerall and John Madden comment on the absurd and nonsensical nature of the episode, but that only serves to make the show out to be even worse in retrospect. “What a way to treat the loyal fans who put up with so much nonsense from this franchise!” Madden complains. No kidding. It’s a pretty damn awful episode, but some sporadically placed laughs help it slightly. Very slightly.

Tidbits and Quotes
– The post office opening is pretty much laugh-free. There’s a pretty crass line where the postman assures the kids that the days of disgruntled mailman shooting up the place are in the past, and Skinner comments, “Well, I’m just glad I work in an elementary school.” This episode aired a few months before the Colombine massacre, and what seemed to be a growing number of school shootings (at least from a media coverage standpoint anyway). I guess I can’t blame the writers for this being questionable in hindsight, but it’s a pretty distasteful joke nonetheless.
– I laughed at Homer mistaking ‘colonic’ with ‘colada,’ and singing “Escape” to that effect.
– Wally Kogan is named after the classic era writing team Jay Kogan and Wally Waladorsky. I’m sure they must be honored to have one of the dullest characters in the history of the series named after him. And poor Fred Willard with absolutely nothing to work with.
– I get the bit with Homer, Wally and Moe holding the mugs up to their mouths while mentioning the team names, a meta joke about how the show can just dub in whatever year’s teams with no concern about lip sync, like how they would update reruns of “Lisa the Greek” to include new dialogue with whatever two teams were at the Super Bowl that year. But it kind of felt too inside baseball.
– I love Harry Shearer’s nondescript Lenny noises when Homer pleads with him to go to the Super Bowl (“Naaaaaaah…”)
– The bit with Marge saying how glad she is Homer’s going to the Super Bowl feels off, kind of like a sign of things to come where she’d become more and more enabling of her husband’s insane hijinks.
– I like how Jerry “Lightfoot” McGee seems to be Dan Castellaneta doing his Grampa voice from Hey Arnold, a show created by Matt Groening’s brother-in-law.
– The only guest appearance I like is Troy Aikman as a caricaturist. I love his bizarre insistence of drawing everyone on dune buggies because it’s so stupid and random (“Everyone likes dune buggies!”)
– The absurd Super Bowl ad for the Catholic Church got the show in a lot of trouble back then. The joke is so obvious though, but you know how uptight fundamentalist groups are about things like humor and fun. It’s a pretty good gag, especially Lisa’s confused, slightly disgusted reaction.
– Dolly Parton’s explosive make-up, the gang running out of Murdoch’s skybox Looney Tunes style, them winding up in the locker room… the third act is absolute shit. The only bit I like is after they get out of jail, we get a montage of them running around like maniacs to “Song 2” by Blur, which is cut short by Moe stopping and saying, “We’ve been running around cheering for an hour! Where the hell’s the game?” It’s just really well timed and delivered.

(originally aired January 17, 1999)
Pretty much all the episodes in this season I either don’t remember that well, or just remember that they’re horrible. This fell into the former, and I was quite surprised at how much I really enjoyed it. It had a fairly solid premise and theme that played throughout, characterization was strong, lots of laughs throughout, satisfying conclusion… a pretty damn good episode, helped even more coming after the last couple of clunkers. We start on the baseball field where Homer mocks and berates the perennially losing hometown team the Isotopes, but is quick to jump on the bandwagon many months later when he finds out they made it to the championship game (Moe casually comments, “That sniper at the all-star game was a blessing in disguise.”) Following the ‘Topes win, Homer and his pals have an inebriated celebration, driving his car through the school and wrecking up the place. What I love most about this opening is that everything Homer does works: his petulant and childish demeanor regarding the game (“I’m gonna warm up the car.” “But there’s only been one pitch! “And it sucked”), his quick turn-around to supporting the team when everyone else does, and of course his drunk driving, and the spectacular sequence of his faulty memory regarding the drunken night prior (SCENE MISSING).

Chief Wiggum jumps to the conclusion that the damage at the school was caused by punk kids, thereby issuing a curfew for all minors to be indoors by sunset. The dynamic and building animosity between the children and adults sets in at the start of act two with Bart and Lisa adamantly against this unfair punishment, with Homer and Marge being less than supportive. This turmoil brings the kids of Springfield together as a collective in a way that makes sense. Together they agree to sneak out after dark to catch a drive-in screening of the new horror film “The Bloodening,” which is an amalgamation of classic scary movie tropes: a black-and-white picture allegedly unreleased to the public due to its content, and now showing with a registered nurse on staff (“trained in the treatment of terror.”) It features disturbingly soft-spoken little English kids using psychic powers to read the thoughts of the villagers, then brutally kill them. When the Springfield kids are caught by the police, they use the movie as their inspiration to enact revenge on the adults.

Through jury rigging the transmitter on the newly installed police billboard, the kids hijack the radio airwaves to put on a program revealing the dirty untold secrets of the people of Springfield. Even with Lisa in the group, this seems a little out there that they’d be able to do this, but it works so well within the story that I really don’t mind the improbability of it. The kids are caught, and it’s time for a big generational stand-off. By what means? Through song, of course. I’m not totally on board with this idea. The song isn’t terrible, but I feel like there could’ve been a better means of resolving the plot. But it does get us to the very ending that I love, where the seniors get everybody under curfew and “take back the streets.” So hey, while I can’t say this episode is perfect, it was really enjoyable, certainly at the top of the season 10 pile, though that’s not saying a whole lot. It at least proves that the writers still have some sense in them, but how much of it they can enact over a whole season seems to be questionable.

Tidbits and Quotes
– Pretty useless cameo at the beginning by Cyndi Lauper. I guess the joke is that she sings the national anthem to the tune of her hit song. I guess? But I like the announcer’s comment after she leaves the field and most of the people in the mostly empty stands take her lead (“Thank you, Cyndi Lauper! Just to remind you, folks, we do have a baseball game today.”)
– The baseball game was a great early sign for me as each scene had a joke that worked: the two players urine testing positive and them clinking their glasses, Marge’s mother’s advice to stick with your loser choices ’till the bitter end, the pitcher’s arm snapping (“That’s a rotator cuff, his career’s over!”), Babe Ruth the Fourth bunting, then getting tackled immediately, and Homer sitting outside in the car singing the childish edit of “Whistle While You Work.”
– I like this exchange on the car ride home (“With a little middle relief, they might even make the playoffs!” “You’ll be in your cold, cold grave before that ever happens.” “Homer, would you please stop talking about the childrens’ graves?”)
– Not only does he immediately change into a ‘Topes fan at the drop of a hat, Homer becomes one of those boorish obnoxious super fans for Kent Brockman’s news cast. I love Dan Castellaneta’s read for that bit (“It’s a great team, Kent! We never gave up hope! I wanna thank Jesus, and say hi to my special lady Marge. We did it, baby! Woo!”)
– Homer’s memory of what happened the night prior is fantastic, told in silent movie slides and everyone in old timey garb. He goes to Moe’s for a drink, SCENE MISSING, Homer dancing with some faeries around the maypole, SCENE MISSING, THE END. I love how the nice piano music comes to a loud end too.
– Homer has some great logic regarding blaming kids for everything (“If kids are so innocent, why is everything bad named after them? Acting childish, kidnapping, child abuse…” “What about adultery?” “Not until you’re older, son.”)
– There’s a really sweet scene in the middle of the show with Bart and Lisa bored in the house keeping a kite afloat with a fan. They let go and it wafts into the kitchen and gets caught in Marge’s hair. Without looking up from his paper, Homer comments, “Marge, kite.” It’s such a charming, funny bit that feels so alien in this bombastic, over-the-top season, I love this stuff.
– Wiggum forces the kids to clean off the new police billboard and leaves them with some great final words (“Let this be a lesson to you! Kids never learn!”)
– Lisa tunes the old radio past FDR’s war declaration speech after Pearl Harbor, and after a few seconds into the secret broadcast, Homer comments, “Boring! Go back to that infamy guy.”
– Amazing bit where the kids reveal Luann Van Houten has been cheating on Pyro with his brother Gyro. The two muscled men duke it out with giant cushioned sticks like true American Gladiators.
– Nice bit with another scandalous secret. “And guess who’s been practicing medicine without a license?” Hibbert looks worried. “That’s right: Homer Simpson!” A faint “D’oh!” is heard in the distance.
– I like the Crazy Old Man’s rantings running into the credits (“You wanna stop with the kicking? My pills are in that can! Good gravy, I don’t kick your things!”) All the way into the Gracie Films shush (“Don’t tell me to shush! You stupid lady!”)

(originally aired January 10, 1999)
One of the biggest crimes of the Mike Scully years is making me hate Homer. Or rather, the exaggerated cartoon version of himself he had become. But another aspect that made it even worse is that no one seemed to comment that his behavior was anything unusual. As obnoxious, inconsiderate and downright brain dead as the things he said and did were, no one around him would call him out on what really is clinically insane behavior. There’s so much wrong with this episode, rotten almost to its core, but what baffled me the most is that it seemed to center around canonizing this new crazy-go-nuts Homer, almost like a spiritual sequel to “Lost Our Lisa,” but instead of just the last three minutes, it’s the entire episode. But before all of that, our episode begins where Ned Flanders is goaded into a confession at church, revealing that he’s sixty years old, and has kept his youth by living a tame, risk-free life. This whole idea feels so silly, considering it steps on the idea he was raised by beatniks, but honestly, the episode gets so much worse from this point, it’s the least of my worries.

Ned feels he’s squandered his life by playing it safe, so who does he turn to? Captain Wacky, of course, who all of a sudden has in place a program for living on the edge, and decides to take Ned to Las Vegas. Much of the back half of the episode consists of Homer doing something incredibly stupid and irresponsible, and Flanders either not reacting to it at all, or asking how he could be so stupid and irresponsible not out of anger, but of reverent amazement. I was just plain stunned more than anything watching Homer not even bat an eye as he makes reckless turns while driving, gambles away all of Ned’s cash and credit cards, and inadvertently cause the death of Captain Lance Murdoch. He’s really beyond a cartoon character, because at least in a cartoon, there are usually some clear motives for what someone is doing. Here, I really don’t understand what Homer is doing through parts of this episode, he doesn’t act like anything closely resembling a human being. And again, no one seems to comment on this. Ned has become Homer’s sidekick, which is something that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

So our big third act climax is that during their wild Vegas night, Homer and Ned get married to two cocktail waitresses. Okay. Well considering they’re already married, then this new one is presumably not legally binding, so that’s it. They straighten it out and leave town. End of episode. Or we can have a big dumb chase sequence that makes absolutely no sense that ends with the two of them having to walk home through the desert. Yeah, that’ll work. I’m hard pressed to really add on or elaborate on anything. Most of the entire episode as I’ve said is Homer doing some absolutely moronic and Ned acting as his fawning lackey. From this, I assume that the writers think that Homer’s behavior in this episode was so hilarious that it could act as the crutch for the entire show. If that’s the case, then we are in big, big trouble from this point on. The throne for worst episode has a new owner and “Kidney Trouble” was only two episode ago. Oh dear.

Tidbits and Quotes
– I hate the beginning with blowing up Burns’s casino. The writers tried to cover their asses about how it makes no sense for it to be there after they moved the town, but it just serves to remind how much it wouldn’t make sense for them to move it, and also how the ending of that episode made no fucking sense. It’s just like they were saying, remember how that made no sense, and neither does this? Well let’s remind you. And then for some reason Don Rickles was still in the building when they blew it up. Okay.
– Perhaps the only good line from the episode comes from Reverend Lovejoy (“And, once again, tithing is ten percent off the top. That’s gross income, not net, please people, don’t force us to audit.”)
– The craziness starts when Homer stands up in church to put Ned on trial about apparently lying about his age, making an overly dramatic speech which everyone in church just sits quietly for and listens to. And all gasp in unison when appropriate. Why is this happening?
– An episode about Ned wanting to live life more dangerously is feasible, but it just doesn’t work here. I don’t buy his wanting to be more risky, and I certainly don’t like how he words it that he feels he’s wasted his life. That’s not the Ned I know and love.
– I guess Homer barbecuing a chicken over the chimney is something we expect is normal for him to do now. I don’t get it, when did he become Homer the Daredevil? When did this become normal behavior for him? If Homer wants a chicken, he whines for Marge to cook one for dinner. I don’t think he’d even have the energy to climb the ladder to the roof on his own volition.
– Homer talking to Ned in the car about living life impulsively pretty much mirrors the scene with him and Lisa in “Lost Our Lisa,” except it’s even more terrifying here since it’s happening with more than half of the episode left to go.
– Lance Murdoch’s lovely assistant appears to be the replacement Lisa from “Spin-Off Showcase.” Just interesting to note.
– During Murdoch’s stunt, Homer hilariously sits up from the ‘X’ to make sure Ned doesn’t spill his beer. Murdoch is startled and reacts, and ends up crashing his bike. His head is still encased with a safe, which I assume is a lightweight one to hold on his shoulders, but he flies off the bike and hits that wall so hard. Just from seeing it, and maybe it’s just me, but I think he’s dead. That impact felt so final to me, there’s no way he survived. And Homer walks away not giving a shit. At that point, my hatred towards him was seething.
– Alright, what’s left… Ned attempting suicide, wacky chase scene atop slot machines… oh, one last thing that was pointless was the Moody Blues cameo. Homer addresses them by name, and each band member gets one line each. In the coming seasons, we’ll be seeing that over and over and over again. Ugh…

(originally aired December 20, 1998)
Well look at that, another job for Homer! I don’t know how these ideas came to be, but I’m guessing that someone in the writer’s room said, “Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if Homer was a bodyguard?” And before someone answered “no,” another writer had written an outline already. This is certainly not a terrible episode, but it has the same kind of ridiculous plot turns and circumstances that most Homer-gets-a-job shows have, the biggest of which being who in their right mind would entrust Homer Simpson with their lives and why so many people would just go along with it like it’s normal. The guy can’t even run down a city block without becoming exhausted, he’s going to be muscle to the mayor? The impetus for this premise begins at the Springfield comic convention, which has a few good gags, but it only reminds me of the infinitely better “Three Men and a Comic Book.” There, it was a small town rinky dink operation, here it’s this massive event with big time guest star Mark Hamill and characters like Willie and Lenny and Carl are inexplicably there. When a riot breaks out, Homer, with no real provocation at all, screams and bursts through the crowd to save a trapped Mayor Quimby and Hamill. Quimby proceeds to fire his two loafing bodyguards and hire Homer in their place.

I’m of the belief that you can make any kind of story work, and as improbable as it sounds, Homer the bodyguard could have worked. He could have some kind of specific drive toward wanting the job, train a little bit, do his fair share of expected bumbling, confront some believable conflict and eventually end up back at square one as status quo dictates. So why does Homer want to be a bodyguard? Because Mayor Quimby pointed at him. Does he have go through any hardships for the position? He does go through training, but that’s like a minute and a half of screen time and we don’t really see Homer in action, or caring about it at all. Before long, he’s donned in full black and exacting the sleeper hold on his wife and children. Never mind the cruelty, or the fact they reuse the joke over and over, but really? He learned that? At this point, Homer is not so much a character anymore as he is a vehicle for whatever joke the writers need.

The main conflict arises at the midway point with Fat Tony. When Homer finds Quimby is allowing him to supply the local school with rat’s milk, he demands the operation be shut down. Fat Tony is  not pleased and makes a very obvious death threat towards him, over public air waves, no less. To take his mind of violence and gangsters, Homer takes Quimby out to a dinner theatre performing Guys and Dolls (with leading man Mark Hamill), where of course Fat Tony is there. The stage is set for some kind of suspense, but instead they squander it by having henchman Louie do a ridiculous dance routine on stage before accosting Homer, and have the pay-off be that during the fight, Fat Tony was pummeling Quimby with a baseball bat. Out in the open. Come on. When you play your entire episode silly and over-the-top, you run the risk of falling hard when the jokes don’t work, and boy do a lot of them not work. There are a few shining moments here and there, particularly with Hamill, but a lot of this is just too big a mess to salvage.

Tidbits and Quotes
– Again, I’ll say the treatment of the comic convention in “Three Men” was a lot better. Springfield’s a small time nothing burg, the biggest star they could get was the guy who played Fallout Boy, who is currently doing community theater. Here, not only did they get Mark Hamill, but also Neil Armstrong, Dr. Smith, and ALF! ALF! Armstrong’s agent is appalled that his client’s booth is getting no play against the likes of Doctor Who and Godzilla, crying that he’s an actual sci-fi hero. Armstrong himself isn’t thrilled either (“This is one small step towards firing your ass!”)
– Comic Book Guy gets a shining moment, griping that some uninformed fool has mixed up two separate series of Spider-Man comics. He then comes across a nerdy girl and a potential love connection (“Tell me, how do you feel about forty-five year-old virgins who still live with their parents?” “Comb the Sweet-Tarts out of your beard and you’re on.” “Don’t try to change me, baby.”)
– Lenny desperately wants to act out Star Wars with Mark Hamill? Why? Willie critiques Frink’s lightsaber sounds. Why? Again, it’s just whatever characters we can cram into a scene, regardless if they would believably be there or not.
– Here’s a distasteful Homer line (“Oh my God! Someone has to go back in for Maggie!” “Forget Maggie! She’s gone!”) Now compare this to “City of New York vs. Homer Simpson” where Homer drives alongside the carriage telling Marge, “Throw the kids! No time for the baby!” Same kind of line, but different context. Homer’s paranoia about the city has turned him into a crazy madman, so the line there makes sense and is actually funny. What’s going on in this episode? Nothing. Homer’s just an inconsiderate asshole for some reason.
– Nothing at the bodyguard school is funny. Homer screaming because he has to do push-ups? Meh. And I guess they thought the instructor singing the theme from The Bodyguard was hysterical.
– The best bit of the show is Homer learning the ropes his first day on the job: whilst driving, be sure to slow down when you see a hot babe on the sidewalk so Quimby can do cat call them (“Good work, Simpson! I couldn’t be happier with the way that went.”)
– There are a few good Quimby lines here, like asking Fat Tony for a nondescript briefcase instead of a sack with a dollar sign, and his outrage at finding out about the rats (“You promised me dog or higher!”)
– There’s o much dumb suspense in this episode. Homer bursts into the school and we get like a dozen shots of everyone drinking milk and him looking disgusted. I do like how he spots Bart who is about to use the craziest crazy straw I’ve ever seen, and Homer has a few seconds before the liquid reaches his precious son’s mouth.
– Stupid, stupid, second act break where Quimby gets flung out the window, because it makes perfect sense for someone to set up their treadmill right in front of their open window, so the fresh air hits their back while they’re exercising.
– I cringed when Homer informed Quimby not to fear, as he’s the best bodyguard in the business. When did his self-confidence sky rocket so much? Remember in “Homer Defined” the absolute shame he felt at being acknowledged as a hero for saving the town accidentally? If that were a season 10 episode, he would lap up the praise and demand all the town’s riches.
– We get the first appearance of the Frank Nelson “Yesss!” guy. Somehow he sort of became a regular character, but I kind of like him. I just love that voice.
– We get the great joke at the entrance of the theater (Mark Hamill is Nathan Detroit, Peppered Steak is the Entree), which is made funnier when Hamill is confronting a showboating Louie (“Hey, pal. That’s my head shot up there next to the pepper steak, and don’t you forget it.”)
– I like Hamill’s despair of being pigeonholed as Luke Skywalker regardless of context, and he does give it his all with the songs. I still love “Luke, Be a Jedi Tonight.” In high school, I was doing stage crew for Guys and Dolls, and no matter how many times I heard “Luck, Be a Lady Tonight,” I’d still think about Hamill yammering on about Chewy and the Ewoks.