Talking Simpsons - Talk to the Audience?!? - April 2024

Episode Date: May 1, 2024

We've reached the end of the month, which means it's once again time for another installment of our community podcast! Join us as we discuss the deaths of Simpsons digital comics, Larry the barfly, and O.J., retrospectives on Matt Groening's indie zine roots and Mission Mill, and the possibility of a Pluto-style streaming Simpsons channel. And, as always, we read and respond to your questions and comments from the most recent round of episodes. It's all happening on Talk to the Audience?!?, where this is always death.

I heartily endorse this event or product. of Harvard billionaires, Bob Mackey, who is here with me today as always. Delisted from the Apple Store, Henry Gilbert. And yes, this is Talk to Our Audience, our community podcast. Welcome. We do this at the end of the month on the Patreon feed, the beginning of the month on the free feed. And in this podcast, we talk about what's happening in the Simpsons world, what's happening in our world. And then we respond to your questions and comments from the last month's worth of episodes.

And as season 35 is winding down it's another slower news month though we still have a hell of a lot to talk about and a lot of death there's a lot of death this month the yeah there's two giant uh dark deadly stories in this one but otherwise it's also it's uh that, the Simpsons episodes are really just like treacling out in what should be a very busy time. I guess it's still leftover slowdown from the the WGA strike, I would bet. Yeah, we'll talk about it. But there's very few left in this broadcast season to go through. But yeah, it's been it was a fun it was a fun start of spring, I think, for both of us, though, at least. Yes, yes.

I'm enjoying... We both live in colder climates with weather, with actual weather. So I'm enjoying, as much as I did miss the seasons when I moved to the Bay Area, I'm enjoying the return of the sun. So it's more like Berkeley now in Vancouver than it's ever been. I'm sure everyone is so curious about this, the weather report. The always timely weather report. Yes.

Right now it is, I don't know, like 12 degrees Celsius. I don't understand this. We can talk about the new episodes, though, because Henry, we don't have to cover this one in great detail, because Henry, he was on the podcast Minion Death Cult, talked about this in great detail, the episode Night of the Living Wage. Yeah, it was awesome for the MDC guys to invite us both on. Bob was having a good time in Milwaukee, so he couldn't make it. But yes, I repped us both there.

And it was an interesting episode. I even read a whole article by, or an interview with the writer of the episode, who talked about how he was specifically inspired by Last Exit to Springfield and wanted to do one about what labor organizing is now. And unlike some other episodes of Simpsons where they try to talk about current day things, this one actually felt like it knew what was going on with, with labor unions in the app world today. And they actually made the billionaire villain evil in the show too. Like just no,

no question, evil, bad guy who you want to see bad things happen to. No two sides to it. And we will steer you to Minion Death Cult for more conversations about that. I'm sure if Henry was on it, it's a three hour episode, right? I made it about at least 90 minutes. Yes. Well, well, they asked me of like, well, hey, what is the deal with Mr. Largo? And I was like, well, I have to give you the whole character history of Mr. Largo now, I suppose. Well, this next one is hot off the presses. Cremains of the Day.

We're recording this the day after it aired. And in this one, Homer, Moe, Lenny, and Carl go on a road trip to scatter the ashes of an old friend. And trivia, which popular Simpsons character recently died? If you said Larry, you are incorrect. He was never popular. Yes, because Larry the barfly is now Larry the dead guy because they killed him off well we need an urgent update on Sam the barfly but I did want to tell everyone out there Larry the barfly was in the first broadcast episode he predates so many other characters yeah and if you're going by production order he was in Homer'ser's odyssey episode three

so very very early character still had that funky season one design with the flesh colored hair um yeah it's just uh they chose i guess just a random background guy to kill maybe a guy with two or three lines in the entire series and that i always thought I could never remember where they said his name is Larry in the show like I'd always see it on websites and I'd be like did they actually ever say this or is this from you know trading cards and books and all that or character model sheets where he used to just be you know barfly one or two but yeah I was surprised they killed uh i was it was interesting they wanted to do a death episode though i was really annoyed that barney was written out of it or like he's they they made sure to be like well barney's not here it's like what shouldn't the

biggest drunk have something to say about larry dying yeah yeah it was a it was a strange absence and i i did want to say that uh i subscribe to the two larry theories because we just covered dufflis uh there's a shot in dufflis where uh homer is ready to drink again and we see all the bar flies muttering and mumbling over their beers it's a shot with two larrys so the second larry is still at large okay good so he's never truly gone this larry it it was a fine little honestly i wish the third act was not like a wacky adventure yeah that was strange i i really liked the road trip portion uh the exploration of who was larry but then it turned into a caper with jewels and i got less interested in it i thought the other stuff was very well observed and funny but yeah uh interesting choice i guess the simpsons they love killing unpopular characters

not not so much that the characters are actively unpopular just a very obscure characters i guess is a better way to put it yeah guys who have melded into the background for decades who rarely ever have lines like and they they just kill kill to be like, oh, you never even noticed this guy. I also did, if I may complain very pedantically, Moe has never gambled on sports before, despite running the sports gambling for the entire town in Lisa the Greek. I guess maybe he just is a a bookie he doesn't he doesn't you know get high from his own supply as it were i get all right i could see that but also at this the idea that homer mo lenny and carl are like you know a quartet to go on adventures and stuff like that that i feel like has just been a thing in the last like five years or so

yeah i guess it's just to give give Homer someone to hang out with besides Bart. Some adult friends. But it was all right most of the time, though I definitely preferred Night of the Living Wage of the two. So, yeah, that is it for Season 35 so far. Three more to air as of this recording. So I want to give a tip of the hat to patron Rubbercat for this news item.

Bongo Digital Storefronts, Simpsons World and Futurama Land, both shut down this month. And according to Reddit, if you linked your accounts from these apps to Comixology or Amazon at some point in the past, you can still access your digital titles.

And by the way, the last few issues of Futurama Comics were digital only, I think in like 2017. So yes, the Bongo Comics Group, that was Matt Groening's, I believe, 1993 creation to publish Simpsons-related comics. At this point, there are no unique apps for those on any storefronts they're all they've all been shut down and uh bob mackie has some speculation about this so i want to remind folks about a previous news item the long delayed disenchantment comics they were once planned for an app that never came into being my grand theory is which I feel is a pretty obvious intuition here,

I think Matt Gerani wanted to unify all of his comics IP under one app, but couldn't due to rights issues. And so the Disenchantment app was canceled. And this also explains why he's done nothing with his new label, Bapper Books. Titan Comics is releasing the Disenchantment comics, and Abrams Books is releasing the Treehouse of Horror hardcover reprints. So that is my speculation. The

era of Matt Groening having infinite publishing rights for Simpsons properties and related IP is over. The United publishing thing makes a ton of sense that he planned all this stuff for disenchantment comics but i could also see that uh fox not fox disney wouldn't want a

netflix comic published with simpsons comics but also though i mean simpsons publishing in general books books are worth more now maybe than they were like five years ago the publishing business is on the upswing and I think I've always thought Disney does not like that Fox thought there was no money in in Simpsons comics and book rights and let Groening have it when the thing started but though I think it's it's a credit to Groaning like he what made him famous and made him you know moderately uh wealthy or he he definitely was a well-off comic artist by independent comic artist standards was that he really did understand how to sell uh Life in Hell as books like he was a very successful bookseller uh and I think he came into Simpsons in the in the late 80s knowing how to sell books and there was real money.

And he maybe even thought, well, after this Simpsons thing dies after like three months, I can still publish Simpsons books and they'll be all mine. Yeah, but as of now, no. I mean, I'm sure these are still available in some way. Like perhaps Amazon's comic storefront, you can still buy these. But yeah, the era is over there is no more unique Bongo apps to download these comics it's so sad I've

said it before on here when we've seen the slow destruction of all the last parts of Bongo though it's nice those reprints are happening of some of the comics but yeah the Bongo is a huge part of my childhood like i was you know uh the 10 going into 11 when they launched it in 93 and i was we were both regular

readers of simpsons illustrated so when bongo launched i was like wow simpsons comics just as i'm the biggest comic fan i I had been as a kid. And seeing it all go away is just sad. Sad to see. Yeah. Who knows what's going to happen? Who knows if we'll see any new comics? I don't think Disney cares about that world.

They don't really care about physical media that much either. So I don't feel very hopeful about the future of Simpsons or Futurama or Disenchantment Comics. No, it's, you know, Disney. Disney lets their Star Wars stuff be at Marvel. They let Marvel continue to publish comics because it is a profitable business. And they let reprints happen of Duck Comics and all that stuff to the hardcore super nerds but uh simpson seems to be in a weird a weird spot i think they i would think they think there's got to be at least a little money in some sort of uh simpson's book but uh not not yet no i'll tell you what there's more money in in putting out a dvd and they won't even do that and they won't that's true yeah oof yep sorry to bring

everyone down so uh bongo dead guess who else is dead larry and as well as uh oj simpson is dead uh yes uh the juice is no longer loose folks uh but yeah seriously successful double murderer and you know moderately successful sportsman o O.J. Simpson passed away this month. A successful kidnapper, too. Oh, kidnapper, right. Was A.C. Cowling just along for the ride? Oh, no, I'm talking about the thing he actually did go to jail for. They called it a kidnapping, which this is from the incredible

Made in America 10-hour documentary, but that when he went to a sports memorabilia in las vegas and said you can't leave the room give me back my stuff that is defined as kidnapping like you tell somebody you can't leave the room you're kidnapping false imprisonment or something like that yeah i think that's too yeah technical well he's not a folks he's not a good guy no hold the fort i'm reading more about O.J. here. Yes. And I wanted to point out that,

I wanted to talk about this because it felt like The Simpsons was the one show that had a very light touch when it came to O.J. Because I was a kid when this happened. I was 12 when it happened. This is when I'm watching every sitcom, SNL, Mad TV, reading Mad Magazine and Cracked, watching all the late night shows. I was so intimately familiar with all of the elements of this double murder as a child.

And The Simpsons, maybe because of their production timeline, they didn't want to say anything that could make them look stupid or that would be dated. Maybe that's what saved them from just having three years worth of OJ jokes. I can only think of a few uh i can think of the joke about dna evidence i can think of the joke about uh i believe it's in round springfield where uh lionel hutz assembles the dream team of lawyers to represent bart and one of them is an alan dershowitz parody and maybe like one more but they were very very light on oj except after he uh the trial like in the early aughts that's when like what is oj doing now kind of check is that that's what those are the jokes that they make at that point but nothing really during the oj fever of of not it was really

like 94 to 95 it wasn't that much time yeah i uh especially when you've got a character whose name is your characters like his name is simpson and they're the simpsons uh yeah no we're actually about to do uh in uh coming up in our episodes we're recording for season 13 is the the south park parody that has a very direct oj uh reference in it when they're parodying south park right right as a joke as to say like oh south park is tacky and they would do an oj joke yes yeah at this point in history but yeah they uh and of course in uh listen to our last exit to springfield podcast coming up in the, uh, this next month, because you will learn the story of how OJ Simpson was almost on the Simpsons about a year, but would have aired, uh, almost

exactly a year before, uh, the murder of, uh, of, of Nicole Brown and the other guy, Ron Goldman, Ron Goldman. Thank you, Henry. What you were not watching all of these things I just mentioned? Oh, I was all the time. I also like Ron Goldman's dad. He was in the news so much, his ridiculous mustache. It's hard to forget him, but I was going to just say, and that waiter, the unfortunate waiter. Season one of Mr. Show, Cato Kaelin makes a cameo in a sketch, and the crowd explodes.

Yeah, it was the craziest thing to experience as kids. It was right up there with 9-11 as a crazy thing to have happen, except it was happening, I guess, actually, just like 9-11. Basically, for a year-long thing, it was just news for i guess actually just like 9-11 basically for a year-long thing it was just news for a year straight and it never stopped i so did you get to watch the verdict in your classroom bob yes yes this is a elder millennial uh shared moment of history where i mean i don't know now, I'm like, why? I guess this was so important culturally that we needed to be there. But the TV was wheeled in and we got to see it. And I went to I mean, I didn't live in like the sticks or whatever.

Some people were less enlightened. There was the fear that if O.J. was found guilty, a certain demographic of people would quote unquote get revenge that those are those are the those are the whispers i heard and i think even jokes were made about that at the time yeah no i remember well and as a kid i didn't get this uh i didn't understand you know the the i learned what racist cops were as a child from oh me too oh why wait why is this uh why did this cop uh why aren't people believing him now it's like well he said a bad word and then you i i think i learned the the the weight of the the n-word at that point which i i'm saying i was an innocent child i suppose i i just had heard that word so much from uh friends parents no man no well well that's funny bob uh you that you got to at least watch it in uh class they wouldn't let us watch it in class the at our

school they were worried that i think they were worried about reactions from from white and not white students at it so uh but our teacher when it happened wrote because she wanted to know and it was a white older white woman teacher just to give demographic sense for her she wanted to know too as soon as she learned it from i think somebody came into class and told her like passed a message then she wrote on the board not guilty uh to guilty to let us all know. And then there was no focusing in the rest of the class. No, yeah. In my Catholic school, eighth grade, St. Luke's Elementary School, yeah, we got to learn about the verdict in real time.

Man, that was, see, we were just out of high school when 9-11 happened, so we couldn't watch that in class. We don't have that shared memory. Too bad. Yes. happened so we couldn't watch that in class but we don't have that shared memory dude too bad yes but yeah it's just uh you know there's just if you go through 90s television like we do you you go oh yeah oj everyone's making oj jokes not so much uh the simpsons i do recall some like more inspired ones uh if you're watching late night with conan o'brien of course he's going to be talking about oj but because it's a weird talk show with a strange format,

there is one episode where Andy isn't there, and they do an OJ story with Andy where they keep cutting to a Bronco as they're talking to Andy as he's fleeing for some reason. So they were having a little more fun with it. That Bronco chase alone changed television

for the worse, in a much worse way. Yes. But yes, OJpson uh goodbye folks uh see you in hell uh moving on we have some news which uh feels like a lot of speculation but the the godfather of uh fast free ad supported streaming television is really speculating that disney is going to jump on that bandwagon rather soon. I mainly wanted to include this one just because I was like, I wanted to complain how ads are in everything now that used to not have ads.

It just feels like how everything's becoming old. And people said this, streaming has now just become old cable and you just own a channel. But I'm watching things on prime video where i pay to not see ads and then they take ad breaks and show me ads even but little ads and it uh to know that it's coming to disney plus as well would uh that would be a bummer now i i read this as it not coming to disney plus i read this as disney plus starting one of these fast channels for different programs where if you look at Pluto TV, the Criterion channel has one of these now. It's just a constant stream of content that you tune into that's free and you will get ads while you watch it.

So there's no way to pay for this. Like Pluto TV, there's no way to pay to get ads off of Pluto. You just turn on the Three's Company channel and there's a 24-hour stream of Three's Company all day with ads every seven minutes. I mean, a fast FAST channel that was just The Simpsons would probably make Disney a lot of money. I would bet it would get them a lot of ad views yeah and i mean uh this article talks this indyway article talks about how this gets rid of whatever it's called like analysis paralysis when you when you can't make a decision as to what to watch and yes often uh we will turn on pluto and put up with ads just to have a constant stream of like a bad old drama to make fun of it'd be great just to have the 24 hour simpsons channel even though there's ads you could just walk by your TV like oh I'll sit down for five minutes and look at this and then go about my business yeah no I I do I miss I definitely miss what's on this channel and channel flipping like

that that is dead to me and now it is just uh it's like did we watch all of this thing do you want to start this thing I don't know yeah yeah actually uh whenever i'm in a hotel that's when i revert back to my cable watching ways and uh because you know we we couldn't really make many choices in milwaukee i think we watched like three episodes of martin every night like oh just let's leave on martin that's how nice that's nice and i forgot martin played a ton of different characters on that show he got kind of tired of being, yeah, you know, I just remembered Shanaynay, but he must have played like many others. There's like a little kid. There's a homeless guy.

There's a cop. There's his mom. There's Shanaynay. And I swear to God, there's one other character. Wow, man. Clearly, I did not watch enough Martin. I need to watch more of it. It was on right after The Simpsons.

What were you doing? Well, you know, we became a Seinfeld house around that time. Hey, that was 9 p.m., sir. 8 o'clock Simpsons, 8.30 Martin. 9, you go to NBC. Well, I guess, yeah. Then at 8.30, we were probably watching, if it wasn't Friends, then The Single Guy or something. I regret watching the hammocked show

in between that instead of Martin. I regret it now. You missed out. Maybe. I don't know. Martin wasn't very good when we were watching it, but it was just a fun time capsule. Martin's got to be more fun than The Single Guy

or Boston Common. Yes. I will give it that. I will give it that. So this came up last month, but The Guardian published a great little profile on the indie zine roots of The Simpsons and Matt Groening's career. It covers a lot of stuff like his relationship with Gary Panter, a great indie artist who developed the look of Pee-Wee's Playhouse. If you just Google Gary Panter, Pee-Wee's Playhouse, you'll see a lot of his amazing original art that was also part of the merchandising of Pee-Wee of that era. Yeah, I really like that article. When I first saw it pop up in my feed, I probably glazed over like, yeah, yeah, it's Matt Groening telling the story of how he got contacted by Gracie and pitched the thing and all that but to hear from the people who knew him when it it connects with to how you know we talked about how Mimi Pond uh the reason she wrote the first

aired Simpsons is because she was an indie comic pal of Matt Groening and I think so much more of Matt Groening makes sense when you remind yourself that he is an indie comic artist from Portland who then made one of the most mainstream things of all time without meaning to. Yeah. And the the article really talks about how The Simpsons was this amazing culmination of this indie comic vibe mixed with Harvard people mixed with traditional sitcom writers. It just this this very weird stew that made such a unique show. Yeah, and I think, too, it was fun to read it as because we just passed the 37th anniversary of the first airing of the first Simpsons short, which also led to it. I was just seeing it right before this. exchange, but a differing of opinion because Homer's Odyssey's original script was published on Twitter by the Daily Simpsons account. And in that it's Juliet is Marge's name in it. And, and, and then Jay Kogan replies and says, well, we didn't know what her name was yet. And then

David Silverman replies to that with, I beg to differ. We knew it was Marge. We never called her Marge in the shorts, but we knew she was Marge the whole time. And then Jay was like, well, yes, I heard that later, but when we wrote that script, she hadn't been giving a name yet,

so we made her Juliet. Okay, that answers a big question because I remember on some early commentary on season one, Jay said, we didn't know Marge's name. We called her Juliet in this script. I mean, that shows you those TV writers weren't talking to the animators too much back then. And I think David Silverman's reply was a little bit of that coming out. Sure, sure.

I'm sure they're nice to each other. Oh, yes. And they're good friends So Cracked did a new oral history on Mission Hill For the 25th anniversary of the show It's a lot of info that if you host A Mission Hill podcast like we did You know it all

But some fun new things came out Including a picture of the dog that inspired Stogie The dog Stolie so I was happy to see that Yeah It has to be the only time vicky lewis has been interviewed to talk about this show in in forever same with poseidon and uh and yeah it got a lot it got several of the voice actors it was only missing laura mcmullen for the major folks in it when vicky lewis answers the phone does she have to say number one i am not

kathy griffin if you're calling for kathy griffin that's a different person it's so i feel for her there was somebody somebody at nbc was like no every sitcom must have a a wacky redhead it has to be both but no it's not yes if you if you've listened to all of our mission hill podcast then i don't think there's anything in there you don't know, except maybe like two or three little nuggets. But I like that Cracked did a fun article, oral history interviewing all the right people. And again, reminder, Bill and Josh on tour. Check their tour dates, folks. They're showing classic Mission Hill.

They're a lot of fun. You know, on a side note, though, what's going on with Cracked? Because I'm surprised to see them still publishing things they went through the same thing every website went through uh and i know they just laid all the best people off and the site was kind of a wasteland for a while but remember the the like the power date like the when they rained the internets cracked and we were writing features because cracked was writing these features and we were trying to get the same success for our websites absolutely we were doing and my website i worked at too we were doing listicles uh trying to get like what cracked it and crack published their traffic they did the view count they'd get was right at the top just

to like kind of shove it in your face like yeah you know i was looking at it every time going like man my articles won't get a tenth of this and uh but yeah i think they pivoted a video and then fucked it all up but seems like somebody still gets to work there and probably paid shittily to write a great uh oral history of mission hill well i'm glad there was a nice space to park that feature yes uh now on the lighter of news, a man self-immolated outside of the Trump trial this month. And for reasons we'll try to explain, his manifesto did include Simpsons references. Now, we're going to tell this to our listeners. If you're thinking of self-immolating outside of the Trump trial, don't. People care about you.

Don't do that. Yes, please. And then podcasters will make fun of you yeah yeah especially in i mean we've there have been a lot of online manifestos published by people after they do uh insane things but i this the guy is a better writer than i expected now here's the thing uh i i being into true crime, I know what manifestos usually are. They're usually very, very long, bad grammar, very disorganized, lots of just obscure, petty things thrown in there for good measure. I mean, it's your last thing you're putting out there. So you're trying to get it all in.

This guy, nine pages. He's in. He's out. Bullet points. I kind of half agree with him on some things. But I do want to include some, but not all. I'm sorry if you think this is in poor taste. I think it's worth commenting on because it's just so bizarre. And also, The Onion predicted this. My wife, Nina, reminded me that in 2004, they published the headline, Suicide Letter Full of Simpsons References.

I had forgotten all about that i that didn't oh god that's a great article but yes i mean this guy uh he's correct about like you know a cabal of billionaires uh engineering society for their gains that's all true he's got the details wrong but uh let me let me explain what he's saying here and i'll put some fun music under this to make it a little a little more light uh so he says quotes uh harvard university is one of the largest organized crime fronts in history which is how they turn out billionaires it's a major hub of the sprawling criminal network as it turns out dozens of the writers of the simpsons went to harvard so i asked myself the question if the simpsons served the interest of organized crime, how would it do so?

Well, it offers a dysfunctional family suffering from moral decay, a community incapable of solving its problems, a worker drone who slaves away for an evil billionaire, and cathartic laughs for our poor collective circumstances, unquote. So this is kind of like the QAnon style thinking of, oh, they're rubbing our noses in it. They're putting all of these messages in to mock us. And they're just being out in the open with what they're doing because we can't stop them. So his idea is because The Simpsons portrays a dysfunctional society,

it's these billionaires saying, ha ha, look at the dysfunctional society we made and you're helpless to fix it just like these characters are. Man, the Harvard connection, that is crazy. It's so crazy he brings up the Harvard thing like we do. We have the Harvard test for every Simpsons writer when we talk about them. And yeah, Harvard is one of the most evil institutions known to man.

It also produces great Simpsons writers. And I'll go on with one more quote from this guy. You can read his manifesto online. It's very easy to access. He talks about specific episodes. There are some notable specifics as it relates to this research too. In Marge vs. the Monorail, the townsfolk

are too oafish and divided to invest in the town's fit needs, fix Main Street, and fall for the charms of a dazzling showman with a bogus monorail Ponzi scheme. When we know that the show is closely linked to an organization that invests billions of dollars in Ponzi factories, this becomes quite damning. So yes, folks, they're just rubbing our noses in it.

They're just out there saying what their crimes are via this cartoon. And I guess the only one man was brave enough to say so so my understanding was this guy was in support of trump burning himself i mean i don't want to try to figure out why a crazy person did something crazy but you know i couldn't figure that part out and honestly i didn't i didn't actually read the entire thing i just zeroed in on the simpsons thing but maybe the trump thing was just like i will get attention if I do it in front of this kind of event. It worked out.

Yeah. No, that Waltz at the Harvard thing. I mean, I think back to when we asked, you know, Will Miniker from Chapo Trap House when we had him on, he did an entire, one of my favorite live shows they ever did and released was the, it was there trying to figure out the most evil person who went to harvard and they're exploring the history of harvard creating evil people and you know having having lots of people who uh entered the cia going to harvard as well but um but he i believe it was will put out the idea of like if you go to harvard and then see how like

horrible the world is and if you continue on the path at Harvard, you're part of that system. When you get sick of that, you then become an irony-poisoned Simpsons writer, perhaps. And so you're one of the good ones, Harvard students, if you start working on the Simpsons instead of trying to destabilize Chile or wherever. Yeah, I mean, it is a slow news month but uh i felt this was worth commenting on this guy was 37 so he is kind of in our demographic so i i think as time marches on we're going to see references to the simpsons in some very strange

places because we all have this knowledge previously it was like well only young people know about so intimately all of these details about the show. But now we're all middle-aged, and middle-aged people are out there doing the weirdest things right now. So I feel like this is not the end for seeing Simpsons predicted it has now gotten to the point that it's in a man's self-immolation letter and again if he this guy should have been a listener to us and then he would have known that these Simpsons predicted things are easily explainable and not not a vast conspiracy my initial so actually Drew Mackey shared this with us my initial joke was man it always hurts to lose That was very, very funny. I legit LOL'd IRL. But yeah, again, very strange. And I just felt the need to say something about it. Because I feel like if we didn't say anything, I feel people would come to us and ask us, like, why didn't you say anything about this? Or did you see this?

Well, we have. We definitely have seen it. It was front page Simpsons news, for sure. How we use electricity can be smarter, cleaner, and greener. At Electric Ireland we can help guide you there. You see, our new Net Zero Hub

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electricireland.ie. Now we've covered many a death. Let's talk about two men who aren't dead, us, and what we're doing in the month of May. So let's talk about our schedule for What a Cartoon. May's What a cartoon episode will be about the series fosters home for imaginary friends and the episode uh bus the two of us yes

it's an early odds cartoon network hits and one of the creators went on to spawn a a much bigger show my little pony friendship is magic lauren faust but this show uh one of the earlier flash shows for cartoon network as well or tweened or whatever you want to say it's yeah it's uh and i feel like about as good as a mid-aughts flash cartoon can look because you know craig craig mccracken the co-creator of it is the powerpuff girls guy and actually cared about making it look as good as he possibly could. But it is a favorite of a lot of slightly younger people than us. It's another of the mid-aughts cartoons we're going to be covering, just like Phineas and Ferb we did. Also a top-level patron at Pick.

I've been interested to re-explore it. I think I'd only watched before, maybe, I definitely watched the premiere episode and a little more but I was a little negative on the flashiness of it at the time but maybe I think I'll warm up to it now for whatever reason I actually saw the premiere when I was in my early 20s and for whatever reason my friends and I would watch this if I was hanging out with them and it was on so I've seen maybe like 20 episodes so I'm not completely ignorant to this show and yeah I'm curious to go back and see what it looks like I know the look of the show was designed to move well with the way it was animated so i feel like maybe that won't be too distracting this time around and for our five dollar and up

patrons at patreon.com talking simpsons we have our normal miniseries episodes first up with talking futurama we are covering actually one of the Hulu episodes related to items you viewed, a very, very funny Amazon satire that is, I think, the best episode of the first 10 new ones. Oh, yeah. It was our favorite of the, your and me's favorite of the Hulu-rama episodes, and it was so, so fun to cover it, to flash forward in this little in-between time between the Fox era and the post-Fox era that we're in right now in our Futurama chat. We'll talk about the future of Talking

Futurama in just one minute here, so hold on to your horses here. Also coming in May for patrons, we have the Talking of the Hill episode about the episode Hank's Cowboy Movie. A season three episode, I always kind of forget about this, and for patrons we have the talking of the hill episode about the episode hank's cowboy movie uh a season three episode i always kind of forget about this and the baseball one towards the end of the season are ones that i i know i've seen a bunch but i'm not like very uh knowledgeable

about the details so i'm curious to see if this is another solid gold season three episode i feel like this one is going to lead both of us to to google around about uh different dallas cowboy players i think but no i remember actually every time i see the name hanks cowboy movie for a second i think it's the one about where they the truck one where he watches the movie that makes him think about his truck dying i think this is the one where they're making a video to sell the dallas cowboys on arland for a future home of a training camp yes for the team so i'm sure it's very funny it's season three king of the hill and our what a cartoon movie for may if you're on the free feed or the five dollar feed you'll get

to hear the free preview a little truncated version of the history if you're on the ten dollar feed you'll get to hear the entire thing. We are covering the first Futurama movie, Bender's Big Score. The first and I think the strongest movie, maybe not the funniest movie of the four, but one that's definitely worth covering as we bridge the gap between the Fox series and the Comedy Central series. It's a big Futurama month for patrons. And yeah, the movie the the first comeback movie i i think it's the yeah yeah it's definitely the best of the the four and hearing uh some of the behind the scenes stuff just on the commentary i think it's clear that it's like it's because uh it it functions the best as a movie from the strange editorial edict they had or management edict they had.

It should have been one movie. It should have been a real movie, but I think it's definitely still worth covering. And yeah, so here we're going to cover a Talking Futurama news. This is the future of Talking Futurama. So starting in June, we're going to be covering the Comedy Central episodes from the very beginning starting with Rebirth and working our way forward so yes May will be one Hulu episode and the movie and then June

starting in June until I don't know four or five years from now we'll be covering all the Comedy Central ones in order and yeah I'm very excited because I have only seen like about a dozen of those and it's going to be all talking about what was going on in the early 2010s I was around we can talk about those references finally yeah it was a lot a lot of things I when I was looking through

the list of episodes too that I missed I think maybe partially I was grumpy that it was not adult swim that comedy central got the rights uh from them but yeah i i like that we are jumping after bender's big score we're getting straight to the comedy central years yes and i'm sure people want to know will you cover the other movies my answer is absolutely not uh i'll talk more about this when we talk about what we've been watching this month i watched all the movies uh recently uh mostly on an elliptical machine where i couldn't leave and even then some of the movies were trying my patience uh yeah i definitely want to cover the first one just to cover like the weird uh period in time in which something could return on dvd and then return to television that's going to be fascinating and the production details of like how these movies came to being are fascinating but i did

not want to spend a whole year covering the four movies we i think we lose people and i frankly i wouldn't blame you so yeah this is the one to cover out of all four even though i think the second one is funnier it would yeah, it would be summer of 2025 when we finished Wild Green Yonder. Like, that would be when we'd be done with it. Yeah, and you don't want that. So, yeah, big month in May. We're going to be covering Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends,

Talking Futurama. We're going to be covering a Hulu episode, Talking of the Hill. And then for $10 patrons, we're going to be covering a hulu episode talking to the hill and then uh for ten dollar patrons we're going to be covering benders big score can't wait to dig into just how that came into being and just to try to take apart the very fun time travel plot which i i really appreciate upon a second viewing oh and also some really cool guests coming up on talking simpsons as well new and returning that's right yes so stay tuned may is gonna be great also may is my birthday may 7th please say happy birthday or check out my steam wish list or hey just be just become a patron that's also fine um so that's a gift to me too so i yeah it's the gift

that keeps on giving so now we're going to talk about what we've been playing and watching that's not related to the show and yes like henry i've been playing all 9 000 hours of final fantasy 7 rebirth the game that somehow is that long i don't know why they set out to make a game that long that's only a portion of a remake but i've gotten to the open world part i've gotten into the cycle of the game and you know you're going through a series of maps and they all have these certain activities. You do different variations on them. You can go to the story stuff, but the most fun of the game is exploring.

It does feel like a mix of Final Fantasy and Elden Ring and Breath of the Wild. Just giant Final Fantasy stuff, but with giant maps, lots of things to find, lots of unique activities. And it's a lot of fun. I usually don't like

these uh open world activity play sets but this one is so expertly designed to make you feel good by doing things and uh and of course i'm there to see how they translate all of the weird original stuff into 4k and uh hear all the great remixes of music It's just so much work has been put into this game. It's astounding. I think there are so many unique assets in this game. I don't know how they made this and didn't sell it for $100. Just if you go into a hotel, every room has different decorations on the wall.

Every bed has different sheets on it. It's the attention to detail that we were promised in the past. And I don't want every game to be like this but it's fascinating when one is i mean in the open world every rock is in every place it needs to be also it's mini games the game like there's 80 mini games i i feel like i'm not over uh that's not even hyperbole there is so much to do that isn't even just the main combat and exploration which also rules like and yeah bob i i can't i can't believe how dense it is i finally beat it but it is such a dense game and i could easily play another 15 hours if i wanted to do everything i'm gonna try to do everything let's see how uh my patience will last but yeah i'm

just i love it's such a chill game to just go jump into the map jump on a chocobo try to find everything you can find and uh yeah really loving it it's been a real final fantasy month for me because i'm also playing through final fantasy 6 pixel remaster i'm almost at the very end of the game and i started playing it because uh when i went to midwest gaming classic that convention in early april uh we did a panel on ff6 and also a separate podcast about the different characters so i wanted to prep myself but then i ended up getting really into it i will say if you've been sleeping on the pixel remasters they are in such a really good state now that they're worth buying they've been patched so much after like constant fan fan feedback that it is the ideal way to play these games.

And I'm very impressed by what they've done with FF6. All the music remixes are great. You can hear the original stuff if you want. They fixed bugs in the original game. They made so many quality of life changes. I have not played this game since the Game Boy Advance release in 2007. And it is one of my favorite games. So it's been so fun to experience it again uh much much later in life and that's uh i i gotta do five first before i do six but i need to i need to

start these up too but i i just finished a 94 hour game oh yeah i feel like i want something smaller i want to ask you what's next we'll cover that when we talk about your stuff henry because i think you should try playing like a five hour game i've got a couple it's so refreshing it's so refreshing. And of course, Helldivers 2, I play that every weekend. I'm very happy with what's going on in that game. In terms of watching stuff, now I feel like a real horse's patoot because I never gave this show a chance.

In fact, when it was announced, I scoffed. I scoffed at the idea. But for whatever reason, maybe because I was heading to the Midwest, my gym watch changed from one piece to fargo season one and i watched through all of it and i really really enjoyed it and i i thought uh billy bob thornton was one of the most convincing and terrifying monsters ever depicted in a in a crime series i was really happy with uh everything i saw and i'm

going to jump into the other seasons i know four isn't that great from what i've heard i'll give it a chance but i'm really hooked on on their their kind of uh storytelling it does feel like someone translated a novel that had not been written to the screen i i think the uh they it's written by very good coen brother fanboys like they really get the feel and they also they have the cheat code of using some actors who were in coen brothers films like billy bob uh thornton in in particular but you know i i haven't watched season well actually i watched season one when it was new i re-watched it with my husband and that's when i watched two and three i think uh in the last five years and yes also four four bored us also and we actually did not finish four but i'm i heard good things about five i

heard good things about five i think dave foley's in five the actors that show up are really surprising sometimes they're distracting like when key and peel are fbi agents and i'm like they're gonna do something funny though though uh man i forgot uh the martin freeman is so good in it too that season one like he is such a great loser like uh almost as good as the greatest loser in movie history william h macy yeah for in the movie far i mean i love coen brothers i love stories about wormy little guys who get involved in crime and are way in way over their heads uh so i'm i was naturally drawn to this and i i think it really fundamentally understands just how terrifying it is when someone doesn't play by the rules of society like uh

thornton's character i think his name is lauren malvo where it also taps into the the fear you have as an adult like what if another adult bullies me yes what will happen i can't even imagine but this happens to you if you're a victim of crime you realize like oh there really aren't rules we just all are operating peacefully with each other pretending like well yeah i can't just take something that's not mine but with this lauren malva guy he's like yeah you're a sucker if you think there's rules to anything i just do whatever i want constantly and because of my audacity i just get away with it yeah it man that's it i think season one is still my favorite though two and three are both great three is almost as good as one it's so close and and it's also fun that it is like what it said it was a 2012 show and set in 2007 i think

i think 2014 because i i think i recall seeing the date i was like oh this this was 10 years ago when i was scoffing yeah my scoffing happened but i'm glad i'm glad you're giving it a shot i look forward to hearing what you think of the uh the the other seasons too and uh i watched the new fallout series i'm a big fallout fan uh and last year i replayed fallout new vegas and all watched the new Fallout series. I'm a big Fallout fan, and last year I replayed Fallout New Vegas and all of the DLC. I spent about 100-plus hours with that game, so I was ready for this, and I was not disappointed at all.

I think it's a solid B-plus of a series. Not perfect. There's some things that I don't like, but they have nothing to do with how they violated canon in the games. I think people complaining about that are misguided and need to appreciate the fact that we have a high budget Fallout series that perfectly captures the tone and the look of the games. I don't want to spoil anything, but yeah, I watched about one a night and just was really satisfied with how the story went.

Of course, there's a cliffhanger. It's streaming television. Thankfully, it was renewed for a second season. But there's a satisfying enough conclusion at the end of the first season that I was happy. And I was happy to see Ella Purnell in another role because I enjoyed her and her gigantic eyeballs in Yellow Jackets. She is so great. I mean, she has perfect wide eyes to be a recent vault lever. Like, yeah, I have two episodes left in the season I've been enjoying it too, but I'm a big Walton Goggins fan.

That's what brought me there first. As for Fallout, I like Fallout, the original pre-Bethesda games, but I had a stupid thing. Like, you scoffed at Fargo. I scoffed at the Bethesda ones because I detest Bethesda open world things. I do not like their Skyrim and all that stuff, the bugginess. It bugs me in so many ways, but that's a whole other thing. I've always been meaning to give New Vegas a try,

hearing people like you, who I trust, Bob, tell me how good New Vegas is. But maybe having seen this show, I'll finally boot it up on my 360 I mean you've you you were playing Baldur's Gate 3 you should understand the appeal of a slightly janky western RPG where the sheer amount of things you can do often lead to some jank because they can't account for everything it's it's the it's the trying to make it into a shooter thing that I really disliked the most, I think. Hey, that's why there's VATS. That's why you have VATS.

But no, honestly, what it made me want to do is start up on my Steam Deck the original Fallout again and play that for the first time in forever. You see, I'm the weird guy who I don't like the original games because I tried playing them much later, and I love the first-person games. Man, well, I think... And also, I didn't notice... I had forgotten that Radiation King was the name of the TVs in the show, and so they're just... This is not a spoiler.

TVs are in the show. But when it had the Radiation King logo on it, I was like, that's crazy that you... In 97 97 they reference it in the first game a simpsons reference of the radiation king tv and now it's just in an amazon tv show of a microsoft video game mega franchise as like divorced from being a simpsons reference yeah i was seeing some people complain uh about oh the show is too jokey and i think back to the tone of the games and i thinking yeah, this is a jokey,

like, tongue-in-cheek series. It's like so kitschy, like, mid-century modern look set against the apocalypse. They were there trying to be funny from the beginning. There are baked-in Simpsons references, like you said, Henry. Yeah, honestly, at first I was worried it wouldn't be funny enough.

When I was watching the first episode, I was like okay where i hope this uh stays funny and it really does also just an incredible cast and not not just walden goggins like yeah i will say try try the newer fallouts and by newer i mean 15 plus years ago and further and don't play them like a shooter because they just they look that way to sell them to a modern audience. And by modern, I mean 2008. But you go into VATS, you target people, you make it into a turn-based game, and that's how you should play it. Okay, well, I'll start with New Vegas. I am still an achievement junkie, though I know playing the 360 version on a Series X is a stupid way to play it when I should be playing it on my steam deck but but i want those xbox achievements uh listeners talk some sense into him you can't do this to yourself the the the pc oh god okay so the pc version has been modded into a fantastic

thing that runs very well the bugs are fixed i i really recommend that all right maybe you know i again i have a steam deck which lets me uh pretend i'm not i'm playing a console in a way which you get i know look i'm stupid you're in microsoft's pocket i i i'm a console guy who still cannot like it feels weird to sit at a pc and not do work or read things i i to play a game on it, I just have this mental block of like, well, no, games are consoles. Somebody talk some sense into Grandpa Henry. In my day, we word processed

on the PC. Look, I have a mental block. I'm a weirdo. I'm telling you, my PC is next to my television. When I want to play PC games, I pick up the DualShock I have paired with my PC and turn it on. And we are in the future, my friend. So yeah, Fallout, very good.

Definitely recommend it. This little Amazon studio, give them a chance. They're doing some good stuff. Hey, at least this is something worthwhile they're doing with their money. Not like making that Russo Brothers streaming show they had to film three times and cost $300 million or whatever. This show probably cost like $100 million also, but it looks like it. It actually does look like money was spent. So, yeah, I watched all the Futurama movies.

You can go on to Letterboxd. I'm Bob Servo on Letterboxd. I read my reviews there. They really run out of steam after the second one i'll tell you that folks the first one we're going to cover it in may uh this month at the end of the month and you know strong story as with many like uh plot like plot mechanic focus futuramas and story focus futuramas that often comes at the expense of jokes but the story is so strong and the time

travel stuff is so strong you can forgive it movie two a lot of really funny jokes i was laughing out loud then we get to movies three and four and it just feels like they are so out of gas and had to make these things so quickly and you can definitely tell where the first two movies have like a one writer attached them for the most part and then when we get to the second and sorry the third and fourth movies there's a lot of writers on different segments and it just feels like they're trying to get them out the door um yeah i i and i i bought all of these originally on dvd as they were coming out so uh i i was i was happy to download the the pirated versions because i don't know how you watch them as movies otherwise

outside of having the DVDs that are out of print now. But I can recall the sense of having paid that $20 that was a lot of money to me in the late aughts and being given a disappointing Futurama movie. I was very happy that by the time the third one came out, I worked at a video store again and I just could borrow it the day before basically we got it before street date and then i could watch the uh bender's game one

and uh and not have to spend oh you bastard uh yeah okay well i i i we'll talk more about the movies but god there's just this so long lord of the rings parody where every obvious joke is made and it just takes forever folks they get rough and the fourth one it should be like a big a big culmination of everything in Futurama it should feel like oh this is the new ending but I think it really feels like

the movie remembers it's a finale in the last five minutes and just crams a bunch of characters onto the screen and that's that's kind of it and we'll talk more about it on the uh the benders big score podcast but yeah i did i did the work and i revisited all the movies and i will say don't do it i i really liked your point in your letterbox that the beast with a billion backs is for the crazy sci-fi idea of polyamory yes yes uh yeah actually that's something i took away from that episode uh or sorry that movie is that uh the crazy sci-fi concept is polyamory but also

uh a gender neutral creature with unique pronouns oh yes yeah how insane yeah what a crazy idea uh and actually people are respectful of the creature's pronouns for the most part but that was a crazy out there idea for the mainstream in uh 2008 let's say before we knew the horrors of pronoun comedy we had no idea uh so yeah i watched that i also watched uh believe it or not my wife and i for the first time watched the 40 year old virgin um and a very interesting time capsule i had never seen a judd apatow comedy i don't want to see anymore this was pleasant because of all of the performers but it's so interesting to look at this character and a he's played by steve carell just naturally funny steve carell very a very handsome man i'll say very in shape for this movie. He's also a guy who's got his own place that's very neat and clean.

He's got good hygiene. He's got some fun hobbies. And the movie dares to say, well, he's an unfuckable goblin. Look at what a weird asshole he is. And I'm just like, boy, this is the perspective of nerds in the early aughts, where this guy's got a mystery science theater poster, and he plays with some guy named Iron Man. Pretty weird.

Yeah, man, I have not seen that since the extended DVD release when I watched that. And I got to say, I know your letterboxd thoughts and this was why oh I had a chance to watch one of two movies and I chose not to watch stepbrothers for the same problem you had with for uh 40 year old virgin I was like these things are just so make an editing choice that's what I want it's just like no they they liked all of the improv let's have this scene last twice as long as it should, because all the improvs. Yeah. And because of that, the characterizations are so sloppy that you can't really get invested in anyone like, oh, is this nerd?

Is this Steve Carell guy like a sweet, naive nerd? Or is he a guy that does like big Steve Carell act outs? You know, he's both, I guess. Yeah, it's like they couldn't. Also, it's more like a series of sketches they just kind of like stapled together into a movie. Yeah. And it's, yeah, my favorite of those types is Superbad, I think, because that at least I think is a fuller script that then they improvised around. 40-Year-Old Virgin just feels like, and then the wacky ending of say of a musical ending it's like uh you know i i'm curious if you'll see the uh what was the the the basically sequel to this knocked up no i'm not

gonna see that but bob a baby's life begins at conception so that's the point it's the anti-choice comedy we all love that that and juno oh god yeah they both are the same yeah i uh but yes 40 year old virgin i have happy memories about it but i also feel like i would have no patience for it now because i'm so tired of judd apatow uh improv it should be 88 minutes it's two hours long and i can't believe there's an extended edition but of course there is there's probably like the two two virgin for theaters edition with red text on the dvd character holding their hand up hands over their boobs shot of somebody like steve carell's head photoshop on someone else's body that's like doing a wacky pose i don't know um so yeah other movies not a lot of movies this uh month i've been busy traveling and watching like streaming shows and stuff but i finally saw clifford nina sat me down a very important moment in a husband

and wife's life is when they sit down to watch clifford and i thought it was uh it was it was worth seeing i think the one thing missing in clifford is good character actors that aren't martin short and uh charles gro. It's lacking a funny supporting cast, but it is worth it just to see the incredible practical effects that went into making this dinosaur world ride, which our friends on Podcast The Ride have talked a lot about,

and I finally got to see it in action. It includes full animatronics, some portions of what looks like a functioning ride. It's very impressive. Mary Steenburst is really good in it, too. But she just is not given a lot to do. She's just kind of like a gentle mom whose head is always turned the other way

when Clifford is bad. No, I mean, it's just about Grodin and Short. They're the stars of it. I watched it during lockdown recently i i'd seen it before i actually uh i remember first knowing it as a comedy central thing that played all of the time so it was it was actually years before i watched it in full as like a video rental but uh i i still love it i mean especially the we act like a person, please. Like, no, like that. And just the fate.

That is one of the funniest scenes ever. Yeah, they're both great in it. I just think they need more funny people around them instead of just a lot of people going, well, I never. Well, Richard Kind's in like one scene. He's like, I needed to take my son Clifford. He's really bad. They need a Richard Kind type guy in more scenes. Yeah, I agree. More Kind. they need they need a richard kind type guy in more scenes yeah i agree more more kind uh yeah

and i also saw uh the first venom for the first time i like the second venom more i i do i did enjoy the first venom but it takes like a goddamn hour to get to venom and then he's not even in it that much um but yeah i i do enjoy those movies i like how they are schlocky. They do feel more like a 90s superhero movie. And they're just fun. They're just fun. Well, and the star actually gives a crap. Yeah, that too. He likes being in this movie and being a silly, wacky monster man.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, no real complicated thoughts. Just, yeah, I saw Let There Be Carnage without having seen this one and i did enjoy that i enjoyed this one too and i don't see a lot of these movies and uh nina's a big venom fan so she's like well we've watched clifford honey it's time to watch venom wow man now you're you're going to through all the that's such a fun uh back-to-back thing well venom of course has the the wonderful m&m uh song over the credits too which makes it so perfectly unintentionally dated yes we were talking about that because i i brought it up that uh we just we just covered the ninja turtles movie and how they have their like plot summary rap at the end

and nina brought up oh that's also in venom i guess i wasn't paying attention it's gotta just pull up the video on youtube it's uh it's a fun it's a fun video too because i uh as i recall and m&m gets venomized slightly in it too okay well don't let that happen to you uh and other stuff i spent a week in milwaukee like i normally do uh for midwest gaming classic it was only a weekend i like to hang out more uh afterwards to drink a lot of beer eat a lot of cheese curds and see the sights of milwaukee uh get some get some some Midwest energy back in me before I head back to Canada I had a lot of fun the panel was great

I basically had to do someone else's panel that I was not prepared to host so it was kind of like a panel we were all improv-ing kind of flying by the seat of our pants but we filled a whole room people really enjoyed it we recorded a fun episode after that so thank you for coming out to midwest gaming classic i got a lot

of uh nice compliments and a lot of people saying hi to me and i always love that it looked like a lot of fun it would look like a really good time and you had to see some folks who you uh you know your your retronauts pals uh came out in person that you got to see yeah yeah uh diamond and nadia were both there i got to be on a panel with uh gary and cole a talking simpsons guest they do their watch out for fireballs podcast but yeah um i i love going back to the midwest uh just once a year but i need to get my fill of cheese curds and then i can abstain for the rest of the year until i go back but yeah thanks to anyone who said hi and thanks to anyone who came to the panel. I will say

that before us in the room were Phil Moore from Nick Arcade and one of the American Gladiators. I believe it was Tower. And they were rude and they went over on their time, so our panel was short. But we got a bigger attendance than Phil Moore

in an American Gladiator. So take that, former host of Nick Arcade. Man, geez. I expected better panel manners from the host of Nick Arcade. I frankly blame Tower. But I wouldn't say that to his face. I'm sure even in

his 60s, he's probably very large and terrifying. But yeah, that's it for me. A fun and busy month. uh well we've covered a lot of the things i i did too so but yes i beat final fantasy 7 rebirth 94 hours and i loved basically every second of it the con i did the only extra thing i'd add to it other than it just to being like as pretty as a game maybe can look of its type. It's also just, its combat is so good. I could never play Kingdom Hearts again

because this is what Kingdom Hearts should be. And if whatever the next Kingdom Hearts game doesn't just steal this combat, then they fucked up. Yeah, it's like an improved version of the last FF7 remake game where it's real time but also you can slow things down and give individual commands and then there's a whole layer of systems on top of that it is very overwhelming at first but i got into the groove of it after about 10 hours and i i love the battle system too uh it's way of doing atb while still being a an action game like so good but um uh and then

since that was such a gigantic game yes i uh and this was 94 hours of that after playing 90 hours of like a dragon infinite wealth which also i didn't do everything in that either uh you know i played a little of dave the diver uh because that's on the playstation network thingy freebie thing my husband he's a subscriber too and i played a little bit of that i was like oh okay this i i i get the the gameplay loop of that dave the diver it's it's pretty funny i'm looking at uh how long to beat.com have you been to this website? How Long To Beat? I have, yes. I'm getting 24 hours for Day of the Diver. Boy, I could probably beat Super Mario RPG faster than that. That's a 10 or 12 hour game.

I would jump right to that. And as for movies, I watched a couple new ones I wanted to call out was Godzilla X- or Cross Kong the new empire it is a ton of stupid fun I I really enjoyed it they did they did pro wrestling moves on screen and it's a colorful bunch of monsters punching each other I liked it so uh so it's Godzilla Godzilla Kong and it's about an empire there's another movie about an empire in theaters. What's going on here? It was so crazy. It's at the same time as the Ghostbusters Frozen Empire.

Yes, it's a new empire and a frozen empire released almost back to back, though. Yeah, Godzilla. I didn't see the Ghostbusters one. Godzilla Kong. It continues the Monsterverse and the humans are the worst they've been in the whole series uh and I'm a guy who likes a good human story in a Godzilla movie though also despite his name being first I've seen the stats people say it's like eight minutes of Godzilla in this movie it's a King Kong movie Godzilla appears in that's what it is well he should be listed first

but if you see if you can see it in IMAX it rules it is the spectacle is incredible in IMAX so uh check check it out even if you're going to fake IMAX in in your local theater like which just means the biggest screen they have but isn't really IMAX um I watched a couple films I hadn't seen no no country for old men and forever my husband had never seen it we gave that a watch it's it's really it's a really great movie i'm just so tired of like everybody ripped off anton sugar's character and put him in stuff that it's just like it it's like seeing the joker in dark night and you're like oh yeah this is why everybody loved him but you see him everywhere so you get kind of sick of it but it's such a great yeah yeah just uh i have to go back to it so many parodies were spawned from that character including a crummy one on the sims yes but played by the actor right no no they couldn't get him i think they didn't uh it's like if it's one of those

things where like they i think they thought they'd get javier bardem but they couldn't but um and then also speaking old things uh my husband had never seen before Drunken Master 2. Great movie. One of my all-time favorites martial arts movies. It also has a very interesting behind-the-scenes story about how Jackie Chan fired the director in the middle of the movie. His director and co-star just vanishes in the middle of the movie and he becomes a different movie for the last third. but it's also, if you get the Warner Blu-ray edition, it does come with a warning at the front for the last five seconds of that movie, and boy, does it need it

for the face Jackie Chan does at the end of the movie. Oh, I don't know about this. What's going on? Slight spoilers. After the final battle in Drunken Master where he drinks to power up Popeye style, he drinks enough alcohol to leave him mentally incapacitated. And Jackie Chan in his character pretends to, let's say, have some level of mental disability. I didn't know there was a universal face to signify that though he he makes

a face that you're like oh my god i can't believe this was like this got cut out of the american version but for completists it's in this warner release okay wow wow yeah but just know that going in you can stop watching at the last five seconds or so and just pretend you don't see Jackie Chan one more time in it. Then I watched The Nice Guys. Never saw that before. That was really good. Really, really good movie. Yeah, it sets up a potential Nice Guys verse that apparently didn't pan out.

Shane Black, writer and director? Yeah. Yeah. It's a great 70s pastiche. It'd be a good double feature with the holdovers. Also, because they're both Christmassy movies. Well, the Nice Guys has some Christmassy. Well, Shane Black loves Christmas.

We know this. And also, it's a peak of throwbacks. Still keeping up with X-Men 97. Wow, that episode five, huh? Yes, I do enjoy the show. My issue is, huh? That's what I'm left saying a lot of the time because I'm not given context for things that are happening

and so it does kind of lose me at times our friend of the show Andrew Jupin posted the I have no idea what's going on Homer image meme in response to recent X-Men 97 episodes and yeah I feel like like i i need i like

slow down just a little bit i'm not up to speed with what's going on and then i have to ask nina am i supposed to know this or are they hiding something they'll reveal later so yeah uh i just feel like maybe it's a little too much for the fans i don't know oh it definitely is i you know i gotta catch up on the we hate movie stuff about it i wonder what sadak has to say because he is the x-man uh super expert in their group but yeah for me as a regular as a person who has read a lot of these x-men comics even i had to be reminded like all right life death that was a multi-part storyline in the comics with forge and storm in it and now it's turned into like you know one

and a half episodes of the show and I did think the the X-Men arcade game stuff was uh kind of neat but uh at this point in my life I just want to say please stop referencing things I've had enough pixel art you've seen enough yeah I don't need it anymore uh but you know what i like now seeing new things it's uh yeah no i we've we've gotten we've gotten so much of those throwback things that was maybe a little but hey i'll give them credit that they pulled it pulled more from the genesis x-men game than it did well no and actually but at least pulled from the genesis x-men game in addition to the konami arcade game we're still waiting for wolverine to do anything in the show uh they

should just follow him around as he does his shopping like ah i need some celery all he all he does is look at his shoes and wish to kiss gene gray that's mainly what he does yeah but it's it's been a fun show um and i watched the final season of kirby enthusiasm which was all right but it's it's been a fun show um and i watched the final season of kirby enthusiasm which was all right but it was really just built around one joke about referencing the final season of seinfeld that's that's mainly what it's built around but it's but me what you really watch it for is to see rich people complain about rich people things it's it's basically like you know how seinfeld was complaining about things normal people experience this is about but what about when you tip a waiter at this five-star

restaurant he might or what do you do with a valet and when you toss him your keys it's all rich that's something i had to get over when i first started watching the show where you know when seinfeld will complain about something on his show i would think well you know he has limited means he lives in new york but he's a working comedian. With Larry David, I just would think, well, you've got all that Seinfeld money. Who cares about these awkward situations you get into? It's, you know, at least he's being honest of like, hey, these are the things that still bother me as a basically a billionaire. Like these are the things like how he complains that you can't take enough people on a private jet because they calculate the uh gas usage that

was in a previous season and i was like boy this is a like this is almost it's ballsy in how much it's about being rich i'm gonna say i honestly see some kind of seinfeld thing happening now that he's no longer doing this show maybe it's wishful thinking but i think it really has to happen at this point they he larry david is in his mid-70s now which is multiple jokes in the show yeah i mean they did that the last season of the show i watched was the seinfeld reunion season which was very funny maybe that was like okay this is the one time we'll do it we'll do one scene of that's still the peak to me too yes yeah they they. The clock's ticking on that cast, too. You know, they're all still alive, but you can't – don't gamble on that.

They're all looking great. I mean, Seinfeld grew new hair. He's getting younger, actually. And the only other thing I did is I traveled to Sacramento. There was a rainy time in Sacramento and a live podcast that my husband and I were going to see, unfortunately, had to be canceled by the performers. But I did get to go to attend my mom doing a trivia night at her local bar area. And my mom is so in her element doing trivia. It reminds me like, man, my mom, she could have been a great podcast host as well.

It's not too late. If she was a little younger. It's not too late. You're right. I need to build her, turn her room, the extra room they have in their place, into a podcast room. I should do that for her. But it was a lot of fun seeing my mom. But yes, and some old friends in Sacramento.

So that's what I did this last month. So now we're going to get into questions and comments on podcast episodes. We're going to start with Talking Simpsons, the episode I Love Lisa. And Kat Hegberg says, If it's any reassurance to Mike, who probably isn't reading the Patreon comments, but still, I initially wasn't allowed to watch Home Alone. And when I was finally at age seven or so, my mom made me promise to never copy anything Kevin did. To this day, I've never hit my parents in the face with paint cans or stuck tacks in the doorbell button but in retrospect i wish i'd use that promise to my

advantage to get out of doing other things he did in the movie like going to the church or drinking milk uh yeah i there was never any concern for me as to whether i would imitate these acts or not in fact uh i think it was like 1991 whenever it was on VHS, it was one of those, let's run out the clock before Christmas break. The entire school watched Home Alone on TV, basically. Yeah, I'm shocked to hear more of this stuff about parents not wanting their kids to watch it back then. I didn't know that was such an issue of his imitatable acts, even though it totally makes sense. But maybe it's just because we just covered the ninja turtles i figured parents should have been much more concerned about

like imitating the kids imitating kung fu moves they see the ninja turtles do as opposed to uh shooting people with bb guns or lighting heads on fire and uh he was just practicing home defense which would become very popular in passing decades it's such an american uh story yes of uh it's it's castle doctor in the movie uh joe hodgson also said about that episode this is not my favorite episode of the simpsons but it might be my most watched it's just so sweet and relatable and my god the quotes from this one i I use homers. Yeah, they'll do that. Anytime my kids complain about something obvious, it's just an iconic episode that you have to go back to and watch Ralph's other appearances to even think of him in another way. Upon seeing this one the first time, everything I knew about Ralph going into it disappeared

and was replaced by his appearance here. And Lisa's rival, I bet my Wookiee is another favorite quote yeah even though Ralph is a bit different than how they'll later figure him out uh it doesn't feel off to me in this episode no it's a good bridging one if they if they went straight to from previous Ralph appearances to Ralph saying like he was going to the bathroom, like the very dumb special Ralph stuff, then it would seem like too big a jump. This is like Ralph is an awkward kid who is a little thick, but he can at least be a good actor and can eventually get it.

Future Ralph won't be that. Yeah, we're escalating to the Ralph we know and love, and in this one he can't use regular scissors. He's not allowed to. Yeah. So we're transitioning to that period of Ralph. He's a paste eater, but he doesn't yet imagine snaggleboats. Yeah, or leprechauns that tell him to burn things.

Up next is three gays of the condo, and Dan Vincent says, well, here's my little summation of the first part of the condo uh and dan vincent says well here here's my little summation of the first part of the uh his his comment apparently a fan q a with weird i revealed that he indeed wrote lyrics about king of the hill in the song over the credits so bob mackie is here to say um a wiki editor didn't make them up as i so callously accused these were real lyrics but the the story was buried in one of these old uh weird Q&As from August 7th, 2003.

So jumping into Dan's comment, he says, Four months after this episode, Al answered a letter asking about his experience being on The Simpsons. I've quoted part of his response here. Quote, Originally, I was only intended to be in the body of the show, but the recording session went so well, the writers thought it would be a great idea for me to sing an extended version of the parody over the closing credits and of course i did too so they came up with some additional lyrics and i went back to the fox lot several weeks later to record that as well then shortly before the show aired i had to go back one more time to re-record the end

of the song i think the original ending went something like oh yeah we got time to fill why don't you go pee before king of the hill the problem was by the time the episode was scheduled to air the simpsons was being followed by oliver bean not king of the hill so they had me change it to be the more generic oh yeah weird al had fun on the show even if it was just a brief cameo being on the simpsons was definitely a high point in my life big thanks to all the writers producers and artists who helped make it happen so well that's interesting because that four months later timeline of that answer shows that he remembers it better than he does when he appears on the commentary in like you know 2011 or whatever because that commentary they're all in agreement that it was like the lyric was about oliver bean

but no i i believe this now more that it was, no, the lyric was about King of the Hill and Oliver Bean forced them to get rid of that lyric and make it the one that aired. The fact that they didn't name check Oliver Bean makes me think that they didn't think it was long for this world. And hey, they were right. Two seasons. But since we had all that Bean talk in that episode, that's why listeners, I hope you enjoyed in that episode that i dropped in an original oliver bean ad in the ad i did and it brought back a lot of oliver bean memories i watched a lot of oliver bean all 13 episodes or whatever i've i've found on youtube fun things same with uh another one i had fun with was when in the episode where we talked about how head of state had just premiered i found an ad for for like Bernie Mac hosts Chris Rock to talk about their new film, Head of State on Fox.

But also on that episode, though, Harry Thornton says. The story with Poodle Hat is that the lead single was a parody of Eminem's Lose Yourself about TV shows. But while the parody was approved, a planned big-budget music video was scrapped. Why? Because Eminem thought the video would hurt his reputation slash image somehow and hurt its success so badly that it's his least successful album in years.

Yes, many people chimed in to let us know that Poodle Hat was kind of lackluster because they couldn't make the big music video to promote the album, so it just kind of flew under the radar for most people. And then we have White Nerdy, huge music video with the next album, and that's what really pushes Weird Al

back to the mainstream again. That's Eminem. You know, he gives, like, it's that backhanded take it and then, or give it and take it back thing. That made it so he couldn't you know make the perfect uh music video to get some money for it or extra sales like and then eminem goes on to do a venom song like that's that's far more shameful than than weird al parody and eminem's

early stuff is just what if weird al was a homophobic not racist sorry homophobic more homophobic more homophobic uh i honestly weird al uh i don't think he was that homophobic in in his early stuff you know oh no no i think he was especially by 1980s standards no way it was again it's so funny on the commentary he's even saying like oh this is like I think he called the ending a little homophobic. Yeah. And I want to point out that in this episode about gay culture with gay guest stars and gay podcast guest stars, all the comments are about Weird Al, which proves really who our audience is. Yes, that's true, man. This tells me we should do a what a cartoon on the Weird Al TV show. I'd love to. I did dip in and out of that a little bit as a high schooler, and I was like, why couldn't they make this when I was a child?

I know, man. I would have watched it even more than I watched the Ernest TV show that did come when we were kids. I watched all of that. Yeah. How did it last only a season? I don't know. Maybe in the future we'll talk about it.

Moving on to Dufflis, Mike Mariano says, If you enjoyed watching Moses-like date Lisa Simpson on Herman's head, Moving on to Dufflis, Mike Mariano says, In the film, struggling screenwriter Jeremy Piven comes home to find his father, played by Alex Rocco, has set him up on a blind date with a woman played by yardley smith but piven's true love is sheryl and fenn so he leaves rocco and smith to have a good time together hanging off of each other and laughing while drunk on the couch that is as much of that pairing as i would want to see and i agree with you mike i don't want to see yardley and alex rocco paired together especially now he'd be rather pungent uh i mean even now just trying to imagine them kissing each other feels wrong definitely very wrong i know that's i i feel for yardley smith in that she when she's cast in a movie in 1997 they're like well obviously she wouldn't get to date our main character jeremy piven she's the joke blind date that would kiss his dad.

That was a Jeremy Piven movie where before Seinfeld, he didn't grow his hair back yet. Right. So it's that level of Piv hair. Once he got big on Entourage, that's when Piven finally was able to grow his hair back through Shearswold. You never saw those early episodes of Ellen titled These Friends of of mine i wasn't there it's it's pretty great we don't have to care about jeremy pivin anymore what's what's going on with him anyways well he got me too as

well oh okay yeah i i have not been updating my jeremy pivin fan sites well again it's like he's one of those guys when you say oh he got me too you're like oh yeah of course he did like yeah but you can't but you got to google it to find out exactly what happened honestly i didn't i didn't care to know but uh also on that kevin nash though i'm betting not the wrestler but kevin was oh then i then i'm extra honored uh says my parents used to take us on brewery tours we went to cores in boulder colorado the rules were loose back in the 70s because they served beer to me at 12 and my sister at six they must have been too busy helping to create the heritage foundation and making sure potential

workers pass lie detectors cores wants you to drink their beer near freezing so you can't taste it it is bad beer that's that's funny i i like the idea of children being served beer it did remind me of my upbringing where i wasn't drinking as a child but i would i would ask for little sips like oh what is that what does that taste like and i would never like it but i thought like oh an adult drink and i think every christmas i would be allowed to have a glass of wine and get like a sense of what being a tiny bit buzzed was wow i i just remember a little sip i was allowed once or twice a beer and then hating it and this was like shitty bud so of course or michelob i think michelob was my prefer my parents preferred

one until they got under rolling rock i think that was my mom. My mom and dad were not fancy beer customers. Everybody's parents that are our age drinks awful beer. And drinks bad coffee, too. And horrible coffee, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I didn't like beer until I realized there was more than Miller Lite. And it's like, oh, there are nine million kinds of beer, and they all have amazing flavors and different ABVs, depending on what you're in the mood for,

and it's great. But not so much if you're a boomer and you've been sucking on the same Miller Lite for 40 years. It just tastes normal. That's how your day is. A nice glass of cold to calm me down. Now we're moving on to what a cartoon movie, Chicken Little. Thanks to everybody for coming out for chicken little it was fascinating i i hate this movie so much and i hate that i know

so much about it but we had a good time talking about it and alex irish says uh mark dindle did work on multiple projects in between chicken little and garfield including the seemingly aborted funko pop movie yes yes really, for Warner Brothers, and the DreamWorks movie Me and My Shadow. This may be the most tragic cancellation of the 2010s because it was this amazing combination of CG and 2D animation where the real world characters were CG and the shadow characters and their world were traditional 2D. It got cancelled in the mid-2010s along with a number of other big DreamWorks swings like an Australian Outback musical with Hugh Jackman and the Bill Murray starring B.O.O. Bureau of Otherworldly Operations due to management changes everyone loves so much and the 2015 shutdown of PDI and

Comcast's purchase of the studio probably had something to do with it. There are many clips and animation tests from the unfinished film online if you want to see what we missed out on. I personally think it's sad that Mark Dindle is forced to work in the IP mines, but at least he and his crew might be having fun with Garfield based on its hidden Easter eggs and visual fidelity to the comic strip. I

do not have high hopes for that Garfield movie. I'm not going to pay to watch it. I will swear that now on this very podcast. I am holding you to pay to watch it I will swear that now on this very podcast I'm holding you to this right now it's coming out the same day as Furiosa so I'll be watching that in the theaters but yeah

I feel bad for for Dindal as well especially because I remember seeing that test footage from Me and My Shadow that it leaked eventually on social media it looked amazing like it feels like it could have been a truly great movie especially on you know dreamworks yeah i completely forgot about that me and my shadow thing i was just going by imdb unfortunately

imdb does not include things you worked on that are not made so he was definitely working consistently between this movie and garfield just nothing got off the ground isn't that horrible that Garfield's the one that gets to be a completed movie and released in theaters it has to be better than the one we watched for our we hate movies episode it can't be worse than that right I I I want to believe it can't yes I feel like just by what gets made in movies today for kids movies it can't be as bad as the lowest of the low mid-aughts like of kids movies where everything has to have a dance party that movie ended the garfield movie ended with a dance party just like chicken little was the style of the time uh also on chicken little ryan o'reilly says disney tried so insanely hard to push this

film so much so that not only was there a massive chicken little blow-up that towered over california adventure but around the time of its video release they amended the promo wall that was used on the 50th anniversary which featured the fab five and chicken little yes a moment, they equated this Zach Braff abomination with Mickey Mouse. Yes, really. I guess the Fab Five are Mickey, Goofy, Donald, Daisy, and Minnie? Are they the Fab Five?

I think so, yeah. Unless, I think sometimes, well, yeah, it'd be, oh, no, well, man, it's either Daisy or Pluto. I think Daisy and Pluto are interchangeable because it'd be Mickey, Goofy, Donald, Minnie, and then either Daisy or Pluto. But I think it's Daisy.

But regardless, Chicken Little on a much, much lower tier. I mean, also thinking like California Adventure is a fun theme park now, but in the mid-aughts, it was pure disappointment. Simpsons talked about it. Having a giant blow up Chicken Little there feels so perfect for that era. Yeah. Welcome to mediocrity. Chicken Little will be your guide. So up next, we have what a cartoon all about the kids in the hall. Thank you for indulging us on a very self-indulgent episode that we had so much fun with. I think is that one over three hours long

oh yes it is yeah I think it's right at the three hours and eight minutes I'm looking at it now but yeah thank you for I won't say putting up with that but letting us introduce you to kids in the hall if you don't know about them hopefully you sought them out and watch more episodes but ever see a

sandwich take a bite out of you says I was raised by a single mom after she left my drug dealing father and we moved to a small town on vancouver island we couldn't afford cable and the only channel we got through our rabbit ears was cbc i wasn't allowed much screen time when i was small but on friday nights she and i would always sit down and watch kids in the hall and laugh like a couple of idiots our favorite sketch to this day is still the one where the car didn't start because we would experience similar problems and it wound up being a baby under the hood or something there are some treasured memories of me watching comedy with my mom which then evolved

because we moved about three blocks up the road where our rabbit ears got global utv at the time and she and i would watch the simpsons on thursday nights that's very sweet um i have a lot of memories of watching my uh the lots of things with my mom and hearing her howl with laughter at very silly things, including The Simpsons, lots of SNL reruns. I think a kid, she would like duck in and out of the room during some kids in the home and find some stuff funny. But when we're doing these podcasts,

I can always remember what made my mom laugh. Yes, yeah. No, I think I've, yeah, we always bring up like, oh, my mom explained this joke to me or my mom loved this one. It's always touching to hear when people can remember the good times they had with parents watching comedy and how it informed them.

Most of the things we did with our parents just was watching TV. Yeah, I know. That was that meme that people were dunking on of somebody saying like, no kid ever. It was saying a parent bragging about how they take their kids camping and on trips because they say, no kid ever says, no adult says, I remember watching TV or whatever. And it's like, no, that's most of what I have remembering with my parents. Yeah, actually, I saw a similar ad that irked me because I'm a stupid nerd.

And it was an ad about like, I don't know, going outside or something. And the text was basically because they won't remember the day you bought them that video game. And I say, I protest, sir,

for the first, I don't know, 15 years of my life. If you gave me a list of video games, I can tell you where I was, who got it for me, the circumstances of me playing it. Those are,

those are very fond memories. And that's why I do retronauts as well because i am that sick the same with like going to movies watching tv shows yeah i uh but uh and i i guess i appreciate that canada spent tax dollars on such a weird thing to show to people who only had access to the cbc like like uh this commenter did back then also speaking of canadians nina matsumoto says on that episode i was very impressed by the emperor of japan sketch because it taught me that 99 bottles of beer on the wall 99 bottles of beer does follow a haiku structure it's a bit bit of a stretch, but the syllables all fit. They did their research.

That totally was lost on me, even though the delivery in the sketch was haiku style, too. It really is. It fits all the syllables. There's accurate Japanese writing in the sketch and accurate haiku structure, so way to do your research. I'm guessing Mark McKinney probably wrote it. Yeah, he was the most global of the boys as well, or the kids. Why am I saying the boys?

The birthday kids? I also was thinking about the clever writing of haikus into English stuff, English localized things, because in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, it hit me that there is a character who speaks in haiku occasionally, and only I like meeting him for the second time. I was like, oh, wait, that's the haiku meter. It's a really cute thing in the game. Moving on to Talking Futurama,ty lang's babe watch sketch i want to note that this was a story he told multiple times in his stand-up act and multiple times across his various

appearances on the gilbert godfrey's podcast which is where i heard it apparently after hours in the makeup chair it was him looking at himself in the mirror in the pig get up that really sent him over the edge and by the way this is bob jumping in to say that we mentioned Dave Herman on Mad TV. We also mentioned Artie Lang being in a sketch called Babe Watch, which was a mashup of Babe and Baywatch in which Artie Lang played Babe in a very strange pig outfit. Yes. Yeah. And it's mainly all the characters mocking him for being a fat, ugly person they all hate and kill. And going back to the comment by all the trophies. So Artie called up his Coke dealer in the city and abandoned the set to go get some drugs. According to Artie, this was early enough in his career that his dealer didn't know what he did for a living. So Artie shows up in his pig costume and the dealer goes, man, what kind of shit are you into?

But anyways, Lang gets the drugs, goes to his trailer, and has to destroy four hours worth of pig nose makeup because he couldn't start a line through the prosthetic. I'm glad he's doing better and just posting Godfather quotes on social media. Nowadays, this is Bob speaking. Brian Benelli also added in the comment thread, the David Herman already land connection is actually pretty deep. Already has frequently credited David for saving his life after his first suicide attempt.

So I did not know that. Me neither. Man, I feel to supplement our talking Futurama, I guess I'm going to have to re-watch, just pull up all of Mad TV. I'm sure easy to find. Dave Herman, voice actor, hero. That's great.

Again, we've said it before, but all these stories of Artie Lang, they again remind me, and he still is alive. I'm happy for him. Also on that episode, Saya Clark says, I have so many great memories as a kid watching this episode over and over again. I remember downloading it with LimeWire after a neighborhood friend showed it to me for the first time. This episode started my love of musical theater i would go on to join theater in high school and lead in a couple of productions and to this day i still obsess over musical theater the little shop

movie podcast was a dream come true this episode is one of a kind a masterpiece that's very sweet yeah yeah i i could see how this could get people into musical theater by introducing it to them for me it was little shop of horrors i'd never seen a musical before and the idea was just so crazy and interesting to me as a kid and that limewire bit too was fun because that was how until the final dvd set came out it was kaza for me but i remember downloading multiple futuramas the experience of not yet really having a reliable wikipedia and knowing the names of every episode and so going like wait did i see this one and i always get tricked by space pilot 3000 because i wouldn't think it was the

first episode i thought it was an episode about like oh they must have bought a new spaceship or whatever i recall i bought all the dvd, but they came out in the UK first. So I torrented them all first. Wow. And I watched them all and I listened to all the commentaries digitally before I actually got the DVDs in America. But then when I got them, I thought, well, I bought these and I have very little money, so I should watch them all again and listen to the commentaries again. And I did on DVD. And that's why you got a podcast now. that's why we've covered all 72 episodes uh

of the fox run yep uh moving on to talking of the hill love hurts and sodas art and chris dobson says bob is correct that the real problem with the art appears to be a hipa violation for the failure to de-identify protected health information this This would likely get the art pulled. Also, while I agree that the Texas beef disparagement law appears to have a chilling effect, it would probably have been found unconstitutional if challenged and brought before a competent Supreme Court. It's a civil law that makes it easier for beef companies to sue for libel. It doesn't create a criminal statute that you could be arrested over. What I'm saying is, I don't think the events depicted in this cartoon could really happen and

yes this is bob saying i i made a joke that uh the artists would not have been arrested they would have had the art taken down a cease and desist and i was reading other comments in that hippa came around in like 1996 and maybe some places would have put it into effect by 1999 but uh unlikely wow i thought you know that that i was surprised to learn because hipaa feels like a forever thing to me not a thing that like happened in my lifetime and i i yes the the guy being arrested is uh is the cartoon going too far though i could imagine uh in in the real world an overzealous Dallas sheriff arresting somebody that they had no constitutional grounds

to do so. Sure, and they're playing things up to make a big joke. So the fact that he is arrested I think is just part of the gag where it's pretty exaggerated. And our final comment of the month is from Steven who says,

regarding the Gout thing, not true that it's always due to choices some people actually have a near inability to eliminate uric acid despite being otherwise healthy young and having a balanced diet typically it requires those individuals going on a vegetarian diet to mitigate interesting so i can't blame victims. It's a dark day for the Talking Simpsons Network. But I'm surprised I didn't consider that enough, too, in that episode. I definitely feel better in my life having eat better to not get gout flare-ups. And it's still been a while since I've gotten any. Still none since the last one.

I haven't been eating any undercooked liver since the last time. No pate for you? Not yet, no. No crepe lox? The one I'd be most in danger of eating is going to, the last time I ate any organ meat, it wasn't on this Japan trip, the last Japan trip, I went to an izakaya and ordered the skewers and then one of them is chicken organs. And that was the last time I ate organ meat i honestly don't love organ meat in general anyway before a doctor would have told me not to eat it yeah i was never a big fan sorry organ fans i never liked organ meat when i ate meat um yeah not a huge fan also i'm more of a

white meat over dark meat guy anyway so organ meat is like that's the darker of dark meat that has been another episode of talk to the audience thank you for listening we've got a very fun big packed month in may uh very futurama focused as we cover the hulu uh rama series and the first film and i do want to point out that we surprised launch a blab about batman episode last month and there should be another one this year that will sneak up and club you on the back of the head it was just like the the cape crusader himself you'll never know when it's going to appear but it's always a treat when you see him yes you'll never see it coming but yeah we're really excited about what's going on here i believe at some point we're going to kick off a new series for what a cartoon movie during the summer that we still have

to decide upon but right we are looking forward to uh some fun months as things get warmer and nicer and there's a reason to go outside, but still have your earbuds in. Don't encounter the outside world. Listen to us. Just giggle to yourself while walking around a beautiful sunny park. Yeah, no eye contact with anyone. Just stare at the ground. Listen to your podcasting friends.

Yeah, a great bunch of Talking Simpsons coming too with some really cool guests, including one we'd been wanting to get on the show for for years. We finally were able to get them. You guys can enjoy a lot of that this month. Thanks so much for listening, folks. We'll see you next week for a brand new episode of Talking Simpsons and next month for another episode of Talk to the Audience. And we will see you then. wow infotainment