Talking Simpsons - Talk to the Audience?!? - April 2020

Episode Date: May 6, 2020

Another month has passed, so it's time once again for another episode of our community podcast! This time, we cover plenty of Simpsons news, like the grand arrival of the 4:3 aspect ratio on Disney+, a brand-new A.V. Club interview with longtime show runner Al Jean, the recently discovered Krustygate scandal in Who Shot Mr. Burns Part 1, and more! Plus, as always, we respond to your questions and comments from the last month of episodes. Keep hanging in there, and always remember to bless the wives! Support this podcast and get dozens of bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! And please follow the new official Twitter, @TalkSimpsonsPod!

I heartily endorse this event or product. Ahoy, ahoy everybody and welcome to Talk to the Audience where this is always death. I'm one of your hosts for this one, Bob Mackie, who is here with me today. Hey, it's Henry Gilbert. Homer as Krusty Truther. Ooh, we're in that gate right now. That gate is now opening. And yes, welcome to another episode of our monthly community podcast,

where we talk about news that's happening in our world and in the Simpsons world, and then read some of your questions and comments from the Patreon. So welcome. Yes, as you know, for 2020 and beyond, this is the final episode of the month for Talking Simpsons for the Patreon and the first episode of the month of talking simpsons for the patreon and the first episode of the month of talking simpsons for the free feed and we're having a lot of fun this month in our second month of quarantine this is the safe space we're allowed to talk about quarantine in and i was supposed to get married today this very day we're recording

this we were going to spring that on you as a crazy surprise but yes it's true talking simpsons was a long con to find me a wife. And that wife was going to be Nina Matsumoto. Unfortunately, I'm taking applications now. No. It didn't work out. No, no. Of course, I'm getting married again in the future or for the first time in the future.

No, it's, yeah, I would be on my first trip to Vancouver ever right now in a normal world. So I want all your pity. Give it to me. No, I feel bad for Bob. This has been a behind-the-scenes thing going through this entire time where we've been so productive in this

quarantine time, but also it just sucks the whole time watching it slowly. I'm so desperately lonely. But I still, as much as I want to hug Bob and comfort him, we have to keep our distance. It's true. But yes, I mean, we survived so far through, I counted, I think 41 days of quarantine. Wow.

Since it started March 17th for the Bay Area, at least. So we've made it this far. And it feels like time went by in a blink, but we've recorded like a thousand podcasts we really have like i'm i'm we're both currently living in june with podcasts it's it's actually we're so far ahead it makes me sometimes almost forget to post something in april because i'm like i'm in june now yeah and we recorded uh nine of the talking mission hills now so most of those were recorded in April. And we do warn you when we say relevant things to that time period. Yes, yes. So I mean, on a future one, please, I don't think Mission Hill, but please don't groan too much at our Tiger King talk when you hear it in June, because

you're like, oh, Tiger King, that was a million years ago. I think people are itching to hear us talk about Tiger King, but you will on one episode of Talking mission hill in the future i forget which one uh but uh but it's been a fun month at home at least but uh yeah i again i am i'm sorry for you and also you know friend of the show my pal nina yes we're hanging in there we hang out every night online in video games and we uh legally stream things to each other stick it to the man yeah that's uh well i mean it's it's hulu's fault for not being a Canada, I say. Exactly. Let's talk about news in the Simpsons world. So a silver lining to this horrible dark cloud we're living under is that finally, at the end of May, we will finally have four by three Simpsons in their correct aspect ratio.

And I couldn't be happier. Yeah, Disney finally went on the record and said, like, by the end of May, we'll do it. It'll be in four three. And it.3. And it's still so wrong. It just feels so wrong to me watching it in that crappy widescreenified version on Disney+. misplaced some dvds and had far fewer simpsons dvds than i thought because like i uh i wanted to watch i i hate doing notes on a widescreen version i try to never do it and you know for season one and season 10 the most recent ones i was of course using my dvds here we come to season 11 i pulled my box off the shelf i don't have disc one in the case i don't know where who stole disc one uh i mean i was careless with my dvds and i moved maybe it's like in a ps2 somewhere in the landfill yep yeah or my i had uh i in a landfill somewhere is a debug ps2 i just like i never gave back to

somebody i've got like a 300 pound debug ps3 in my closet from one up yeah if i ever want to drag that out it's the george forming girl one of course of course oh man you'd make some big money selling those there are so many ports on the back of that thing i don't even know what half of them are uh but yeah so i had to to buy my i had to rebuy dvds and let me tell you yeah i thought those dvds would be super available everywhere but at least in new, I think Disney is holding them back. I think Disney doesn't want people to buy those non-Disney approved extras that are on all those DVDs. So they're actually kind of out of print. If you wanted to buy season 11 brand new shrink wrapped on Amazon, a lot of people are just charging 50 bucks for it.

It's like toilet paper oh no no look for a simpsons episode about that in about nine months i think yeah but but i did get them on ebay so most people if you're if you are in the market to shore up your simpsons i mean it made me want to rebuy and make sure i have every season for sure again because it does feel like disney is holding them back now i i don't know yes so simpsons 19 is like retail like 29.95 or whatever on amazon but anything before that you're right it's like 50 bucks yeah it's yeah i bought all the ones i didn't have when 18 came out just to support the dvds and then uh 19 just came out last december i think like december of 2019 that makes me think how hard it was behind the scenes for al jean and the guys to get uh

season 19 on dvd if disney is this resistant to it but i'll tell you what we all complain about the head boxes and yes the head boxes are not a good idea but i'll tell you what for me at least i've moved about 30 times since I bought them. They never broke. They are so durable. They're made with about three pounds of plastic. Every DVD set after that are these awful little trapper keeper folders you have to just jam your filthy hands into to rip out a disc as it scrapes along the corners. It's an awful design.

And that's the rest of them for the rest of time. And you rip open the box. Just opening it, you damage the little flap it sucks yeah i uh i hate to blame al gore for this but i do think he got in great it started first with the futurama dvds yeah yeah i think he got in graining zero about all this plastic landfill created by these and so that's why they went with the eco-friendly paper ones that you just have to like yeah i i think that's why I didn't even know I didn't have disc one in my season 11 box, because how can I even open it to look in there? You just assume they're all in there. Yeah.

But saving the environment should not be on me. I do enough. Give me like a hefty DVD case. Disney Plus is to be believed, when the 4.3 aspect ratio gets on there, then folks won't have to put in their DVDs or perhaps settle for 2nova.net and have to avoid all the pop-ups for no one under 18 can play this game. Should I bleep that out? Okay, sure. If it's our only resource. No, no, no. For clips.

I only used it once. Oh, no, the clips are all off of Disney Plus. Oh all off at disney oh yeah i just want to see it in the right aspect ratio that's right but i bought the dvds now so it's fine and another great news uh playdate with destiny is now on disney plus for us all to enjoy question mark i didn't quite enjoy it very much well you know more information came out about it that made me dislike it more that oh really well to find out that they're like that it was a tease for an episode there was an episode this month like see more of my maggie with her boyfriend like so you had an extended sequence in an episode and embellished

it a little bit to make it a maggie short to put before onward i mean the thing about kids and babies doing adult things were all was always like a kind of humor, but the Horny Maggie stuff, I'm not into. And also, I could see the plan for this where it's like, okay, this is going to play before Onward, a huge Pixar movie that everyone's going to see because, of course, movie theaters will remain open for the next few months. And then once people see Onward for the third time, they're like, when is Baby Maggie going to fall in love for real? And then the TV episode will air and they'll get their resolution. History did not work out that way for them. Did not. No, no.

Though Onward remains the final film I saw in theaters before all this. But hey, now you guys can watch Playdate with Destiny 2. I'm curious what everybody thought of it now that they've seen it or could see it on disney plus i yes i maintain also still too cutesy poo but also yes trying to make like going on a date woman prepares for a date jokes with maggie with a baby in a diaper is kind of gross and spend more money on those things if you're gonna put it before a pixar movie don't have a tv looking thing before it they needed a little more money yeah yeah yeah uh so in other news there are i don't know if this is new because i saw this around christmas but i think they uh formalize it on disney plus and then okay there are now collections of episodes that are themed around certain things because yeah they at least

surfaced them more than yeah and i remember n Nina and I were going through them, and we couldn't figure out why some episodes were under certain categories. Like, the City of New York vs. Homer Simpsons was under Simpsons Predict the Future. And I was like, were they talking about the weird 9-11 conspiracy? Like, that's the only thing it could mean, but they can't possibly be doing that on Disney+. That really could be. I mean, maybe some intern stuck that in there. Well, I know that like in the predict the future thing too is the Kim and Alec one. And that's only for a one-off joke how in it of the Disney Corporation owns Fox. Like that's the source of that.

So some of the things in Simpsons predict the future are for like a 10 second sight gag or less than 10 second psychic so you won't necessarily remember it as a prediction of the future type episode so perhaps they they don't mean a 9-11 reference there they're like uh no um remember duff man or remember a guy driving you know somebody actually was filmed driving with a boot on their car recently maybe it was that uh but i or it is a 9-11 reference but yeah i guess you know it's smart of them to do those collections though it also shows you like oh here's a season 28 episode that apparently also predicted the future like the lady gaga one that's in there they make a joke about her doing a super Bowl halftime show.

And then two years later, she did the Super Bowl halftime show. I don't know if Bart to the Future is part of that Simpsons Predict the Future collection. That seems to avoid Donald Trump then, I suppose. Let's move on. So there's a new interview on the AV Club with one Alfred Jean. Yes. Talking about the state of the show today, working from home and so on. And it does seem like animated shows are the healthiest shows right now.

Yeah. Because people can really do a ton of this remotely, including voice acting. Like I saw Yardley Smith tweeting a few weeks ago, I just did my first voice acting from home. Wow. Yeah. I didn't see that. That's pretty cool. And a lot of the actors like Julie Kaffner and Harry Shearer have been doing that for

like a decade plus. So it's nothing new for a lot of these people. When I was reading that interview and he was talking about their work set up now, it made me feel 10 times luckier that we got to go to that table read. Like, there may never be another table read in that way. Yeah. I bet they'll think like, like yeah why are we meeting like this i mean it's tradition sure but this would be much easier if we just all were in a zoom meeting

together well i think in a post-quarantine world as i imagine it i think a lot of companies will be asking themselves like wait why do we have this office why do we do all this why do we have employees well that too yes yeah but so so i don't know maybe they'll never go back to that stinky writer's room again my my vow to our listeners is i have never zoomed to date and i will never zoom unless it's for money yes yeah we might be zooming soon actually all right in a way for money i guess i have to zoom but it's it's for the best it's not our choice to zoom but we're guests so we must and that's all the teasing I'll do right there. But that interview with Gene is interesting.

I did like hearing him update on how they're working right now. And I also liked him, you know, comment on the aspect ratio coming back. He had a fun thing to say of like, we listened to our fans. They wanted more DVDs with commentary. We did it. They wanted aspect ratio ratio we got it done uh though i mean he also that's where he gave all the details about the how the shortage just tying into a new episode and on top of that like he definitely still is the usual defensiveness he

has when he gets the obvious like if i'm aljean and i kept getting questions and interviews like i know this is what you've been working on for the last 20 years, but wasn't it great 30 years ago, and this sucks? I mean, we get the same, we get similar questions. I'm sure Al Jean has been getting

for the past 20 years, like, so you guys gonna quit? Yeah. Like, no. I very much enjoy podcasting, and the money as well is very nice. Jean, Jean has a good cover of just going, well, we did just win,

I almost did an Al Jean first edition. Wow, you see, I am. But he of just going, well, we did just win. I almost did an algae in the first session. Well, you see, I am. But he did say, we just won the Emmy for best animated thing. So if our standards have gone down, then the Emmy's has too, hasn't it? Also, as a comic book fan, I did really like his comparing himself to Steve Ditko, the co-creator of Spider-Man, how he said, like, you know, he's, he says,

basically, how can we compare to something you saw when you were 10? Like, how can anything new on the Simpsons compare to what you saw when you were a kid and it was all new to you? Like he's a big comic book fan. Al Jean is, he grew up reading Steve Ditko's's original spider-mans when they were

new and he's like that was how can any artist for him compare to the originator on spider-man comics so that's kind of how he's feeling that that way though he is certainly not steve ditko and that steve ditko quit after like five years and never came back yeah instead of just hanging around but al jean is more the stan lee yes yes he's he's quickly becoming one i'm sure he'll show up in cameos in like 20 years on the show hi i'm aljean uh so we are now currently as of this recording in the middle of a simpsons two-parter called war and peace the third two-parter simpson so we had who shot mr burns and then like god 23 years after that or 22 years after that, The Great Fatsby. That's right.

And then this. And I was reading the description of this and I haven't watched it. It could be good. But it's weird what they choose to make two-parters out of. This is about a priest comes to town to compete with Lovejoy, played by Pete Holmes. Yeah, well because clearly you've never listened to a Pete Holmes podcast once because

he always mentions how he's an ex-Catholic and his relationship to God. It's actually very important in his annoying bad stand-up. I don't like Pete Holmes. And I know that, I mean, people know who he is, but I figure if you're going to do a two-parter of The Simpsons, the third one in history, it should be around a bigger guest or a bigger event. But I guess The Great Fatsby really wasn't either? Not really, no. I mean, it was, it was you know was about hip-hop and stuff maybe they thought they got

we're gonna get better bigger hip-hop stars for it but and i guess it was a parody of the move or sorry the show empire which was very big that i have never seen oh yes that's true that's very true i well i think pete holmes is on this too it's It feels more in the range of a somewhat famous younger comedian who is – Younger being 47, however old he is. Well, he plays a 23-year-old in his show, which thankfully got canceled. But it does feel like one of those things where a younger comedian comes up to them at a party and says, Oh my God, I've loved the simpsons since forever i'd love i'll do the show anytime you want and then they they finally have a mom like

that's how that's how a lot of comedians did the show sorry he's 41 i apologize okay 41 he seriously plays mid-20s on crashing like it's ridiculous but uh yeah that war and peace one it's i i wonder how they choose to make something a uh a two-parter these days. Is it just like a script comes in long or does it get pitched as a two-parter? I am interested to see how they chose that. And our last bit of news is former co-showrunner Josh Weinstein shared a really cool guide on how to draw Lisa. I'm sorry, how not to draw Lisa from an old style guide. This is one of the things where I have to stop myself from being grumpy

because it's one of these images I've seen a billion times I'm sure it was reprinted in even like Simpsons Illustrated and it's easy to look up it's like here's how to draw Bart here's not how to draw Bart

and Homer and Lisa but it caught on because I think Yardley Smith was like oh this is so cool so I can't expect everyone to be as tuned in to like

film Roman style guides as I am I think even like Nina might have this because she has a lot of like the how to draw guides as i am i think even like nina might have this because she has a lot of like the how to draw characters right from film romans like books she has all that awesome stuff yeah i i this was not news to us but it going viral was news and it still always strikes me as as interesting to see you know you never think of a wrong way to draw the simpsons

because they're never officially drawn the wrong way. So when you see the examples in there, you're like, oh, wow, that's actually I see why you wouldn't draw Lisa that way. It's a fun drawing if you haven't seen it. Actually talking about Twitter, breaking Twitter news that we want to talk about, it happened one day before this recording. A post went viral that proclaimed that in the final shot of who shot Mr. Burns part two, when they pan over the audience saying like, everyone's a suspect in that one, uh,

you see crusty. And then Ned looks at crusty kind of sideways. Everyone's looking at each other, uh, suspiciously. A person threw out there that that is not Krusty. That is Homer in a Krusty outfit. And it was this Easter egg.

Nobody noticed this whole time. We missed it like three years ago whenever we covered that episode. And we went by. That's one of our longest non-guest episodes ever, I think, if not the longest. But yeah, so that got thrown out there. Me and you saw it several times. But Bill and Josh, the writers of the episode, they engaged with it too. And they said in no uncertain terms, that is not Homer. Homer is not supposed to look like Krusty. He's not drawn into the background. Bill Oakley even pulled out his old file of master list for clues. And one of them was none of the prime suspects, which includes, you know, Homer, Tito Puente, Smithers, none of them should appear in that pan over where everybody's suspicious so homer he they would have never said draw homer dressed as crusty there but it is undeniable that when you look at that design of crusty in that shot that looks like the season six homer as crusty drawing from homie the clown

i'm looking at your timeline to find it i can't does it have the crusty poof of hair on the top or the homer does have the poof okay but the nose is a smoking gun right nose is well it's two things one when reno crusty shows up he doesn't have his bow tie on so you could go like well he put on his bow tie for the next scene but second yes But second, yes, it is the painted nose instead of the circle nose on Homer or on Krusty. And so I propose that maybe Jeffrey Lynch intentionally drew that in there. But Bill Oakley came up or, you know, one of the animators. But Bill Oakley brought up, I think, a more believable excuse for it that overseas they drew that scene with Homer there and they were told to do a retake because Homer's not supposed to be there and so when they draw in Krusty they just draw over the Homer to make it easier to reanimate then draw the model of Krusty, which is different in certain ways from Homer.

And somebody who's done a lot of retakes like Bill, he would know common mistakes or common cheaper fixes that overseas studios will do. Yeah. So if you see people out there going, oh, hey, see this secret Easter egg from Who Shot Mr. Burns Part One? It is not an intended Easter egg. It was probably a mistake. Or someone on the animation side added an extra joke to it that Homer is dressed as Krusty. Maybe it was secretly David Merkin, who was always a little stinker about that murder mystery.

Well, so this one I threw out to Bill and Josh, and they didn't have a reply to because they weren't involved in it but you remember in springfield's most wanted that special oh yeah yeah yeah they actually do say and did you ever notice how homer and crusty look similar they throw that out as a red herring which that could just be they needed to fill 10 more seconds i i asked bill about it and bill's like well yeah that we didn't touch that that's a non-gracy thing we didn't do anything with that so he doesn't know why that's in there but that leads me to think intention was behind drawing crusty in that way in that shot and that somebody told them hey you know that's actually drawn to be homer in a crusty outfit so maybe put that in there in the clue list i i feel like you know that's actually drawn to be homer in a crusty outfit so maybe put that in there

in the clue list i i feel like you know this is a question for merkin merkin didn't uh lay in there either i think he was involved in that springfield's most wanted but anyway so that's the secret okay uh that's out there maybe one day jeffrey lynch will testify he can't he's not even how does he not have a linkedin that i can harass him i ask him to for an interview for just this purpose he's working under brad bird somewhere uh let's talk about news in our world so yes mission hill our talking mission hill rather is live now as of this recording the episodes one and two are up and then of course there'll be a new one every friday until we're out of episodes by like mid-July, I'm guessing, probably.

Yeah, yeah. Something like that. It's 13 broadcast episodes and then some extras. So, yeah, I'd say until July. And thanks to everybody that signed up for it. I think we're at a record high on Patreon. I do believe we are. Yeah, you're right.

Always nice to see everyone coming out to support us. And me and Bob have not been Andy French-style slackers. We have been Kevin French-style type A personalities. I've been blinging and blonging every morning and night. Yeah, no, Bob has taken the charge on these and done such a great job. Thank you. We're all working very, very hard because that's all we can do now. Yes, yeah.

And then when it's time to not work, I'm getting hell out of here, buddy. You're never coming back from Canada. I'm going to Hawaii if it's safe. That's one of the plans. Well, you know, you can hang out with all the lepers on the Leper Island. I don't want any of the Leper Islands, just the good ones. Let's talk about our schedule for What a Cartoon for next month. Yes.

So the first week will be us revisiting a series we've done before. So we're going to be doing the eighth season of beefs and butthead the 2011 reboot that's excellent very very sad they didn't make more but there are like 20 shorts from that or 22 shorts however many we're going to be doing two of those shorts for what a cartoon those shorts are going to be doomsday and dumb design so those are the two beefs and Butthead shorts from the 2011 run. I don't know where to find them now, but I'm sure they're

accessible somewhere online. Oh, I did a tiny bit of looking into it. It used to be they'd be streaming on the MTV website. No more. Yeah.

But you can. It was released on Blu-ray. You could buy the Blu-ray on Amazon. They just released those episodes on Blu-ray? Yeah, I think so. It's called like season,

I think it's called Volume 4, but it's Season 8. So if you go to Amazon as well, I believe it's called Volume 4 on there, maybe Season 8. But the episodes are in there too to buy digitally on Amazon too if you want that. And when you see the schedule up on the Patreon website, there's links in there to where to find them on Amazon at least. I'm using my torrented versions from nine years ago because i could not buy them i had to like just steal them online but i will check out that blu-ray i mean mtv doesn't want you to see them or anything yeah no i don't even know what they are anymore yeah that's actually what we talk a lot about on an

upcoming mission hill episode so after uh beefs and butthead we were going on to dragon ball the original dragon ball series episode 23 monster beast gear on so goku baby goku fighting a monster lots of fun yeah it's a premium patron request we have stayed away from dragon ball this whole time but actually we're recording this episode right after we're done with this and it's been a lot of fun to prepare for it i have so many dragon ball memories but we are going to have to institute a similar rule that we did on gundam which is you can't talk about stuff after this section of dragon ball or else we'll just talk about z the entire i've got to get home before sundown i will turn into a pumpkin tonight um but yes so yes uh dragon balls after that and then we have the early 2000s justice

league series the episode injustice for all part two that'll be the third week of may and the final week of may will be our uh what a cartoon movie preview for our movie for that month which is toy story 2 yes we knew that was gonna win but you know what we're doing it yeah it's a good movie to do i would have gladly done any of the others but i love toy story 2 and i'm excited yeah yes very excited to revisit that one yeah oh and just real quick about justice league yes this is regular justice league not justice league unlimited and we're doing the second half of the injustice for all episode from season one i I mean, you know, watch the first episode too,

just for context. But just again, to prevent the episode from being three and a half hours long, we're just going scene by scene through the second part of the two-parter. And we have some more interviews in the works. Be sure to check out our interview with John Vitti that just went up on the free feed earlier

and then on the Patreon about a week and a half ago. So we're very happy with that. What a great interview. We have more, perhaps, Mission Hill-related interviews coming along. Maybe. Yes. That's all I'll say. We've got some cool stuff lined up for sure. I think maybe it's helpful to us that everybody's working from home now that they're more receptive to doing phone interviews. And they just want to talk to somebody. Oh, a person. Yes. I'll remember 1999 with you.

I'd love to. I'll say anything. Just please call me. But yes, lots of fun stuff happening. We hope you're all doing okay out there. We are doing very well in terms of our productivity, but we would really love to go outside again and go to restaurants and bars and see movies, of course.

But we're working really hard for you to keep you entertained. And I've been subscribing to new podcasts, too. I've subscribed to two more Patreons since this all started, just to get more content. Yeah, you know, I think I signed up for a couple. I had been enjoying Gayest Episode ever on and off, but you've been telling me

the recent ones were really great, so I signed up for that Patreon to hear the full things. Their recent one about the King of the Hill gay radio episode was really great. Oh, I haven't heard that one yet. But yes, I'm not a hypocrite. I live off of Patreon, but I also subscribe to like 12 of them. Yeah, yeah.

Because I think this is the only way to live. The only real job is making podcasts. I think it really is. If you're a content creator. At least 100 a month I spend on Patreon. Me too. Yeah, yeah. Let's move on to questions for Talking Simpsons.

The first episode is part of our Season 1 Revisit. Homer's night out. And Brian Horton says, A $2 functioning spy camera would be possible in the early 90s. The most likely format would be a micro-110 camera. They were often marketed towards kids since they were so small. Just being a small piece of plastic, they attached directly to the 100-inch film cartridge and very cheap. The whole thing of film was around the size of a box of the normal roll of film, often with a keychain or a

lanyard attached so that you wouldn't lose it. I couldn't find any prices at the time, but in this Kellogg's Corn Flakes commercial from 1988, you can get a branded micro 110 camera without film for the cost of two proofs of purchase most pictures from these cameras weren't great looking but they were in color unlike bart's so there you have it proven wrong the spy kids spy camera technology uh was advanced back then and then we would eventually all have fun savers the 90s i guess i should have realized that fun savers that if those existed a two dollar children's camera you just chuck in the mailbox in six months that would exist i love fun savers you just you buy them and then you just drop off

the entire goddamn thing uh it's at the drugstore yeah i i love the the the many chemical smells when you open up that sealed package on a fun that'll get you somewhere uh so yeah sorry henry go ahead oh yes uh mr Neal said about this episode, oh no, I'm about to go way off topic. The William Costello record for Barnacle Bill doesn't actually come from the cartoon. In fact, in Beware of Barnacle Bill, Bluto plays the titular role,

and while Popeye does sing verses, they vary greatly from the record. What's interesting about the record is that after Costello was fired for being insufferable to work with he went to the uk and made a load of novelty records without explicitly calling the voice popeye skirting the law and exploiting the role he was ousted from to be fair he did the voice long before the Popeye cartoons as part of his vaudeville act, and as Gus Gorilla on the lost Betty Boop radio program. Most of notes, on one of these he sings, the merry-go-round broke down,

or the theme to Looney Tunes, which, wow, I gotta look that up. Do you hear Popeye sing that? The Popeye voice is great, and it's a voice born in the late 19th century. There's no one that sounds like that. Even imitators can't do the Popeye voice. Billy West, really, really close.

He's really good, and that is because Billy West tortures himself to be as much like his voice acting heroes as possible. And, I mean, Dave Coulier, he can't compare. Oh, God, he would do that constantly on that goddamn TV show. That and Bullwinkle, like these six-year-olds knew what it was i he got away with that stuff yeah i think he also professionally did popeye a couple times i believe he's i believe he's popeye on popeye and that's not uh maurice lamarche you know i'm gonna have to look this up i swear he did at least one i think that was the uh let me

just talk to you about the writers of full house by the way let's let's disparage them it's like when they couldn't find a way out of a scene, they're just like, that Uncle Joey is Popeye for about 15 seconds. Or Bullwinkle. That's about all he'd get away with. But are you looking it up? Yes. Is it Maurice LaMarche?

Let me look this up here. Okay, I'll tell you how I got mixed up. It was, yes, it was him in Popeye and Son. He only voiced Popeye in robot chicken appearances. Okay. So they'd hire him to do him on robot chicken. Apologies. I mean, I guess that's not really technically playing Popeye professionally.

Nor should he. No, no. So Nina Matsumoto says... Ooh, who's this? Hello. I give kudos to the writers for trying to deliver some kind of feminist message, but Homer's speech at the end is one of my pet peeves. The insinuation that you should respect women because they are wives, mothers, daughters,

whatever. Also, it wears me out whenever a guy says something along the lines of, I didn't care about feminism until I became a father to a little girl. You should respect women because women are people. They don't have to be anything to you. Yeah, it is like a message conjured by a room full of men in the late 80s. Like, women should be respected because of their association to men. Yeah, if you can't find it in yourself to respect a woman, think of your mother or sister or whatever.

Yeah, I agree. I think we were a little light on it in the episode. But because, you know, it comes from a nice place, but... Bless the wives! But Nina is very right that it is still a kind of chauvinistic position to be like, well, I respect women because I found a woman who is kind of me. I can see a part of myself in this daughter, so I now respect women. I like women because men are great and women are men adjacent.

Therefore, by the transit of property, women are partially great. At least four-fifths as great as men. Yeah, I thank you, Nina, for pointing that out. So next up, we got Crepes of Wrath. And Kat Heisberg is the first to reply to that saying i too didn't fly in a plane until after high school it was my mom's first flight too and she was 55 yesterday during our daily mental health pandemic run i was telling my boyfriend all the things that my parents told me were only for rich people when I was growing up.

They included flying, owning encyclopedias, owning a computer. Oddly enough, my dad convinced my mom to finally get a computer in the latest of the 1990s by telling her my sister and I could finally have access to an encyclopedia that way. Continuing on though, piano lessons, any premium cable channels, pay-per-view, non-free blockbuster rentals. Also, why I saw Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescues a zillion times. Staircases. I truly thought any of my friends who lived in two-story houses were millionaires. Camping and call waiting.

Ah, memory of growing up upper-lower middle class in Midwest. In the Midwest. Just as The Simpsons did for me as a young child bob's reflections on his seemingly similar upbringing make me feel far less alone i chose this uh comment because it's praising me by the way i am the voice of the working class next to games press millionaire cab bailey and podcasting billionaire henry gilbert now look i yes i did grow up with with parents who had two stories henry two stories a game room what's going on in the gilbert household where's that money coming

from in our florida house was only one story but it was quite large if i were to go now strangers live in it but if i were to go back to my childhood house after living in a one bedroom this entire time i would think i was rich i'd be, I could never own this house myself now. I never really thought that we were poor until I reflected upon it as an adult. And I'm like, wow, like,

uh, we didn't do all these things or have all these things that other people had, but they always tried to hide that we were poor until like the mid to late nineties. I don't know what happened. I kind of want to ask my mom, like what happened?

And we like suddenly had money, not a lot of money, but there was like a computer in the house. People were getting braces. There was a nose job in the mom, like, what happened? We, like, suddenly had money. Not a lot of money, but there was, like, a computer in the house. People were getting braces. There was a nose job in the situation. New cars and stuff. I'm like, did somebody, like, win a lawsuit and didn't tell me about it? I do think, though, things like piano lessons or premium cable channels or pay-per-view,

that actually was, like, my dad is just a cheap person who didn't. He would say, we can't afford would say we can't afford that we can't afford that and always uh he wasted money on tons of things and gamble all the time but uh you know my mom would still spoil us quite a lot but yeah i would hear some of those excuses we were spoiled within our means and it was like always that like staying home was always the cheapest option so yes of course we'll order a pizza you can rent videos but we're not going to go to the movies or to like disneyland or anything else like that so my now my family could afford like if we wanted to do a yearly trip to a theme park we totally could my dad never

wanted to do that so we went to like universal once and disneyland once and only went on cruises bob isn't that terrible for a yearly vacation now now we all know the secret truth of cruises it's just i mean we should have always known how filthy they are disgusting filthy this is the end of cruise lines here i think i'm gonna say good uh so uh gloomy cleric says and i will read this whole comment it's very long actually i i kind of snipped this from a longer comment about albania so if you want to learn more there's about two more paragraphs of this so it's about enver hosha that's the prime minister of albania from 1944 until 1985 if you remember adil's last name was hosha because that's the only albanian name they knew right and i don't know if that's actually information that's in the show itself or just like uh ancillary information

in a script or something like that they never say say, oh, Adil Hosha, hello. That's true. I think it is just off of the script page. So Hosha was super paranoid and thought Albania would be invaded by their enemies. The logic was that the bunkers would even out the odds in case of an invasion. Bunker construction was dangerous

and many workers died while constructing them. Albania was not really part of the Eastern Bloc. They were in the Warsaw Pact, but they withdrew in 1968 after the Warsaw Pact's invasion of Czechoslovakia They were the only country to ever formally withdraw from the Warsaw Pact Envir Hoxha was a huge Stalin fanboy He soured on the revolutionist turn of the Soviet Union when Khrushchev got into power So they broke relations with the Soviet Union afterwards

Interestingly enough, the only other big country Albania had relations with was China Hoosha flirted with maoism until nixon's visit to china he threw a fit and broke relations with china soon after and hosha died in 1985 and the communist government of albania fell in 1991 it was more of an international collapse because the party of labor the albanian communist party tried and failed to keep the country together after hosha died crazy to think that the only other famous albanian american besides jim belushi is martin the Albanian Communist Party tried and failed to keep the country together after Hosha died. Crazy to think that the only other famous Albanian-American besides Jim Belushi is Martin Shkreli. I forgot that guy was Albanian. I mean, Albanians don't want you to know that one of the worst people alive. Famous boy millionaire. Oh, God. I mean, I hope he's still in prison. I haven't kept up with him, thankfully so. But yeah, so I appreciate this because when talking about their government, I did kind of treat around the time the ussr fell but was

independent of it as a communist nation as well that's that's uh extra interesting to me and i bet the simpsons writers knew none of that now like uh jim belushi's from here we gotta write an episode let's go let's go i mean they got caught oh yes yeah as we i wish you know it's unfortunate our john vd interview came after we recorded that because he explained it all like oh why is this a messy ass episode because they wrote it in the room with no draft and he agrees it's not that great yeah so i don't feel like we were too hard on it and i think a lot of people agree with us uh so up next we have the talking mission hill pilot i don't think we're normally going to read a miniseries comments on

the air because we don't have a lot of time for that. We normally don't, but because this was in the Talking Simpsons slot for that month, we're going to read the comments from this. And Henry, you're up on the first one. Yeah. So Shy Ranger says, my family always had a strong stance against the sheltered behavior for drinking. They still made sure I followed the 21-year-old rule in public because the law is still the law, sadly. But when I was 18 and at home, they would always be like, hey, try this or want a little bit of this.

Their mindset was that trying to keep young adults completely sheltered from drinking would result in their shifting way too far into it once they got away. Now I'm away from my family. I'm going to drink as much as I can all the time rather than eating into it and having a notion of moderation. Yeah, I think that's been, from my observations of growing up, like the people who were strictest

with their kids, those kids instantly became alcoholics at 17. Yeah. Well, because you want to rebel. It's natural to try to rebel as a kid. Or once you have freedom, you also will run into, like, I don't even want to say bad influences, like I'm on the parent side, but I bet you will meet people who say, like, well, you've never drank before?

Come on, let's go drink in. And then you don't know how to handle it as well. I did have a friend who actually um or let's say quince who in high school he was the kevin type in the ap classes who you know was top of his class one of the best second he's out of high school in college and can drink he did become a wasteoid as as toby said remember my mom would buy me wine after I moved out, and alcohol and stuff like that. I mean, honestly, my parents drank more than...

They drank so liberally. I don't want to say they were not drunk, so I'm not saying that. I'm making the drinking, drinking motion. But they drank so liberally that, I don't know, beer was boring to me, or it smells gross. I hate the smell of beer. They probably just drank utter trash, every like boomer from that era yeah i think uh i think michelob was their brand usually yeah look yeah you know you uh this will i'm i'm really enjoying this uh

this quarantine as a chance to keep my favorite breweries in berkeley in business and then like every week or so i'll find a new one to walk to and bring back like a ton of beer like a ton of delicious designer beer uh i've been pretty i i don't think i've drank alcohol since this started yeah it's it's been that long probably the last time i drank alcohol if it was not us going oh no it was the last time cat was here on the day the axe fell all right recording we had there was was here on the day the axe fell. Oh, right. There was beer here, right? Yeah, on the Crepes of Wrath recording.

I broke out the last of the beers. Also, every time I go to the grocery store during this, I buy a new bottle of hard liquor. I usually only have one in my house, and I'll just slowly sip over that. Over the course of a week, it'd be gone. But now I have eight bottles of hard liquor, so I'm building a bar. In the future, I will get to party with that liquor boy you should get one of those madman style like office drinking uh my apartment is getting weird inside right okay lots of tiny improvements because it's like my little prison cell and i gotta spruce it up as much as possible i brought it i bought a

drill and a drill brush for uh for industrial cleaning of my shower and it's looking a lot better i bought a blackout curtain and i bought a jigger for pouring shots oh that's nice and some other fun yes uh isn't our lives exciting i'm just gonna list all of the new things i bought off of uh you know online shopping every month just to keep you updated on the state of my apartment i just got a new purple water bottle in the mail nice uh so yes darren says quick anecdote with other staff that work on this show which is mission hill uh dave filoni of clone wars who also carried on from this show into avatar the last airbender i didn't know that he's an alumni of my college and spoke there in 2009 while i was attending i asked him in the seminar about mission hill and he was surprised anyone would bring it up

but was excited to talk about how much he enjoyed his time on the show. I believe it's been a while. He mentioned being involved in storyboarding the opening credits. Oh, that's really cool. I didn't know that about Filoni. Damn, because, well, we only have been really talking about the directors, but, wow, it's...

This really was the training ground for Avatar The Last Airbender staff. it's seemingly except for bill and josh yeah except for bill and josh they were well probably that castle rock contract i'm guessing yeah yeah well even so like they wouldn't um to work on a nick show they'd probably have to leave the writers union i don't i would bet at least in the mid-2000s nickelodeon wasn't working with right with the wga so up next we have what a cartoon questions and our first ones are about the non-cartoon the adventures of pete and pete that was so much fun to do and again every year we'll do one non-cartoon cartoon but henry you're

up for the first comment here yeah it's not so much an april fool anymore i suppose but it's an april 1st early april uh tradition now and yes, on the Pete and Pete episode, our first comment is Mikey Cox says, I'm so happy you guys did this series. Like Nina, I am from Canada and never came across this gem of a show. I've watched a couple episodes and now am completely hooked.

Much like how I became with Strangers with Candy when you guys did that last year. Speaking of which, I have a bit of a belated strangers with candy anecdote when i started watching it the snooty blonde cheerleader captain struck me as being quite familiar when it occurred to me that she is the sister of a good friend of mine wow when i met him back in 2005 he mentioned she appeared in the show but as we were in korea i had no exposure to it and completely forgot about it i'm only i'm one of those people who has never met anyone famous

so now it's pretty neat to say that at the very least i've hung out with and got drunk with someone who was on strangers with candy so i can't say that for myself so i'm i'm jealous i did interview alan tudyk once and he was on two episodes of that show but i think that's the closest to stranger the candy i've got did you ask him about that i can't remember uh not so this this was on a tough night at san diego comic-con at fandom this was before you started working there sounded terrible completely understaffed you were sharing passes. There's a drug dealer in your hotel room. So it was a hot night and I had to go straight from

a panel to the party. And of course I can't just enjoy the party. I have to interview the celebrities when they show up. And I am of course very sweaty because I just ran from the San Diego Comic Con floor to the party.

And I'm wearing shorts and a Rick and Morty shirt that's getting sweatier and sweatier. But it is, of course, the Comic-Con exclusive one I got of them taking pictures with their gerbil anus. I have that one. I think you might have gotten me one. It's a quality shirt. But so when I got to interview people, Nathan Drake himself, I almost said Nathan Fillion, but Nathan Drake.

Nolan North? Nolan North. He really liked my Rick and Morty shirt because he is a cast member of Rick and Morty. But then Nathan Fillion and Alan Tudyk came together and I interviewed them. And Alan Tudyk, I had to keep on the topics because he's like, no, no, he's here for this to ask about this. But the second it was over, no, he's here for this to ask about this. But the second it was over, I was like, oh, man, this is so great. I have been a fan since I saw you on Stranger with the Candy.

And he's like, oh, wow, that's a deep memory. He's so good as the leader. He's so good. But I mean, this was like four years ago. This is before he became like the greatest voice actor. Like he's I'm watching that harley quinn show oh yeah he's multiple voices in it and rules is he the joker he's the joker and play face and several others so let's read our next comment for pete and pete and raymond fernandez says

pete and pete meant a lot to me as a teen i am directly in between the brothers ages so i could still see the perspective of both brothers i also live live in the Hudson River Valley of New York, and the show being filmed in North Jersey, only 30 minutes from where I lived, made the show feel very familiar to me because the neighborhoods looked like neighborhoods I saw growing up. Also, a bit of a correction, Nyack is not in Jersey, it is in Rockland County, New York. I was actually born in Nyack Hospital, which is on the western bank of the Hudson River, and you can see Sleepy Hollow, New York on the east bank from the hospital. So all of you Nyackettes, I apologize.

Again, I've never been to Jersey in my life. It's an interesting area to me. It's where my husband grew up, but I've never been there yet. I dream of a day when I can finally see the green the green state of new jersey garden state that uh zach uh what's his face braff old braff old braff it's you know that harley quinn show they just use zach braff like people just say the word zach braff and it's just funny they're just like oh it's zach braff at that's like and you just go zach braff go kickstart another movie scrubsy uh up next we have

our famous cartoon all-stars to the rescue podcast henry yes quite a fun 420 joe hudson is the first replier here and it's uh and they say because of the crossover i have at times been tempted to show this to my kids who despite being five and three are familiar with most of these characters after reintroducing myself to it though i'm a firm no they can seek it out when they're older and better able to process the cynicism here and you know all of these characters are mostly here because it would have been bad pr to say no ironic to roy disney as they would be accused of being pro drugs for kids i do somewhat wish it had gone even further though and incorporated the dare program into it so they could have saved

darren the dare bear for just the end really just so kids could have reacted with a who and have been left further confused by this mess of a psa i was never introduced to darren the dare bear i forgot his name but i mean i think i saw him around but i could just be remembering because i did watch that dare special that lauren mcmullen and other mission hill folks worked on for a klasky chupo which uh uh you'll actually hear about this in a mission hill to come but uh look up there's there is a dare special that is basically in episodes of rugrats meet simpsons but it's about not doing everybody that worked on mission hill was part of it i i didn't think of it as the uh cartoon all-stars to the rescue though as being like guys bullied by roy disney into

doing it but yeah i guess it is like why do you say no to doing a drug psa for the government and roy disney you're gonna make a lot of enemies that way so batman boy 11 says like most white people growing up as a teen i was stupidly judgmental about people smoking pot until partway through my senior year of high school when i mellowed out and realized a it's actually not really a problem and b who cares what other people do if it's not a harmful thing to the people around them i didn't partake in any myself until just under a year and a half ago with some friends and i've done it occasionally since then i just find it to be relaxing especially as someone with anxiety after watching this damn cartoon i did my duty and lit up immediately realizing i should have

done it to watch it but alas and yes i have to say that's um like i did not uh i have anxiety and it's really hard for me to relax and really like if i'm alone and just feeling antsy that's one way to get rid of it like in a healthy way and i can still like focus on things or watch things or clean or whatever it's just uh that's uh that's a very good uh medical use but you know what you don't need a medical reason you can just get high it's fun yeah get get high because you want to yeah like yeah i i pendulum swing between anxiety and then just a bunch of uh just pure laziness of like no i'm just it's it doesn't in certain states of mind it's very easy for me to just like yeah i'll just put on a podcast and play a game and five hours will pass i mean you know when you're self-employed or you've always had to hustle uh every second you're not doing something that makes money you're like what am i doing like what can i be doing to make money

and you need to shut that part of your brain up and sometimes you need that sticky icky yeah i mean i still do have that problem even just recently of like i could be watching anything right now i may as well watch something that will help me with the podcast in the coming weeks. So, yeah, I'll just watch that. That's why I pushed myself to play FF7 Remake while everybody was talking about it. And now I'm going to have to do a podcast about it anyway. I can't wait to talk about it. I guess my downtime is playing games I like for retronauts right now, but that's fine. No, I mean, hey, it is fun to make your job about a thing you love,

like, instead of, you know, having meetings or sweeping. I agree. So up next, we have Revolutionary Girl Utena. And Henry, you're up for this first comment. Oh, yes. Yeah. We got Guy Incognito says, you touched on the very close friendship between Utena and Wakaba

and noted on the kind of relationship is a fairly common trope in shoujo works. This trope is referred to as a class S relationship after a genre of literature and social phenomenon that arose in Japan in the early part of the 20th century, focusing on very intense, passionate, though generally non-sexual, friendships between adolescent girls. As noted on the episode, Class S relationships then, and largely now, though social views on homosexuality are changing, were viewed as an adolescent phase that girls were expected to grow out of as they became women and entered society. The Class S genre was influenced by the introduction of adolescent girl-focused literature from the West,

such as Little Women and A Little Princess, the creation and rapid spread of then-novel all-girls schools in Japan, and the newly formed all-female musical theater group, the Takarazuka Review, in which women played all the roles in their production, and whose actresses inspired adoration and love letters from female fans to the point that it became a scandal in the 1920s. Over time, the genre would serve as an influence to shoujo works in general, and to yuri works in particular so thank you that's some uh much needed context i think to like the queer themes in that

uh show yeah yeah and for so many other countless manga and anime i've seen before as well that's you know i i had guessed at some of these things but i didn't realize how core it was in you know um modern japanese history like from the 1900s onward especially the the influence of you know western works it's it's something that's always uh that's very interesting to me in general about japan with like what western works are famous there as opposed to here, because, you know, you can count on them to have heard of Anne of Green Gables like we would have, but like dog of Flanders,

not even very well known in like in England, even which is where it's from, but Japan loves dog of Flanders. Like, and, uh, it, you know,

a little, uh, little women too, that, that is a very similar style of intense female friendships that though they're all sisters in it. But when you watch the movie now, when I watched the most recent movie, I was like, why isn't Joe just gay? Like she had herself a girlfriend then. But obviously in the society they were in, then they really could.

I heard the movie is good. Those women are little. It's it's a really good movie i hope you haven't had one aspect of it spoiled for you because i'd like you to be surprised i know i know the the secret guy who's in it oh man it's the only thing anyone ever said well that's too bad i was surprised by it when that guy turned a corner and i was like what what though then god it! Then it took me out of it because I was like, oh, that guy's in here. Let's not ruin it. So last, we have

the SpongeBob SquarePants movie and Luis Ramirez says, while listening to the podcast, Bob and Henry debated the canonical status of the movie in relation to the series, but Steven Hillenburg, before he passed away, said that the movie was chronologically set at the very end of the SpongeBob show show probably to account for the fact that the show would end up continuing past

the third season against his wishes this explains why spongebob gets the promotion despite that being a big change to the status quo because chronologically nothing takes place after the movie anyway so yes he was putting he was drawing a line in the sand that nickelodeon kind of crossed but yeah he was still like with the show and consulting and stuff afterwards. So thinking in Dragon Ball style then, all the future episodes are just like how Dragon Ball Super takes place in between the second to last and last chapter of Dragon Ball Z. I forgot about that. Yeah. Yeah, because he hasn't met Oob yet in Dragon Ball Super.

So yeah, I guess that makes it the same way actually i think there is some super that takes place after that chapter please don't correct me anyway um yeah no that status quo change i like that he like it makes the movie matter a lot more like that's it's and it's such a funny gag that squidward's like well obviously at the end of a movie you're going to realize you didn't want to become a manager, right? And you're like, no, of course I want to be a manager. Yay! Great ending. And then SpongeBob dies.

Probably chimney sweeping, I think. So he got full of soot. He got full of soot. So we have one final comment from Shy Ranger. Henry, please take that one. Yes. So there are some complaints about the later years of spongebob episodes and luckily the few i've seen were not who ruined but

rather just how the show overall progressed in the later years my friend and i have watched every episode recently basically as a why not and while i really want to like later spongebob stuff i sadly do have many issues with the new stuff i'll save a long list and just point out my biggest issue during your guys's history of spongebob matthew jay pointed out how he loves that the show could slow down the pace when needed not always throwing things at kids and moving sadly new seasons have generally lost that touch a scene where sandy and mrs buff are just sitting having lunch you constantly see sandy bounce and move in her seat as if she had 20 cups of coffee which she didn't it comes out like they're worried kids will be bored seeing two girls hanging out for a minute so they're losing confidence a bit i think that

happens with almost every animated show that lasts more than 20 years yeah it's uh yeah it's unfortunate that but i think that is like you just are like or an executive is in their ear saying why isn't anybody moving a kid's gonna change a channel i'm five years old i'm changing this channel right now i'm watching what's on disney xd or whatever they're not even they're not even using a tv are you kidding oh yeah that's true they're sliding that app off their screen that's true yeah they the kid just said bad app and then went uh went to play uh the clash of clans they're they're in competition with everything now i would think executives are only more awful in those meetings now that they can complain about apps instead of other channels they can immediately monitor like the second you stop paying attention that's also oh my god the metrics they've got what sucks is

we don't get to know those metrics they're just the secret ones that everybody else knows but like i mean what if disney is talking to the simpsons saying like we've seen which are the most popular old episodes so you guys should make sequels to those and this is not a conversation you will make sequels to these please do it actually not please do it do it do it do it do it do it uh yes so thank you once again for joining us for another episode to talk to the audience i have to say we are so lucky to still be able to do this and we're doing very very well and we appreciate all of your support and we are working very hard super far in advance and i predict by the end of may we might have most of the summer done i think so i think we're pretty we've recorded some really cool stuff for the finale of season one and our

revisiting of that have a really cool guest lined up for our first one of season 11 too yes and i think you guys are all going to enjoy it as we reach june as well and of course the time sensitive stuff of course uh the time sensitive stuff of course is not recorded so we didn't like fix all the polls through august to record the movies we want to record no i promise you this is this is bob's wedding day right now this is the only fair election that will happen in america there are what a cartoon movie pool yeah no this cell because we're going to do it online i'm like like, I mean, November's going to be weird. I'm having a feeling.

It is. God, I hope May brings us some sort of normalcy to all of our lives. But yes, thank you so much for listening to another episode of Talk to the Audience, and we will see you next month. Thanks so much for listening. Wow. Infotainment.