Talking Simpsons - Talk to the Audience?!? - March 2021

Episode Date: April 7, 2021

What a big month of podcasts we just had, and not to mention a ton of Simpsons news to reflect on. The show got renewed, there was the 700th episode, and controversy about continuity. We'll discuss all that plus some fun teases about some of our future podcasts, we discuss what we played/watched during the month, AND we respond to some of our favorite Patreon comments! So listen now! Support this podcast and get dozens of bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! Check out our new shirts on TeePublic! And please follow the new official Twitter, @TalkSimpsonsPod!

I heartily endorse this event or product. one of your hosts, Bob Mackie. And like The Simpsons, I've also had 700 episodes. Who's here with me today? It's Henry Gilbert, and I love Showbiz Pizza and references to it. And in case you're new to this, this is our community podcast where we talk about what's happening in The Simpsons world and in our world. And then we respond to your questions and comments from the recent round of episodes of Talking Simpsons and What a Cartoon. If you're on the Patreon feed, this is the last episode of the month. And if you're on the free feed in the Talking Simpsons feed, this is the last episode of the month. And if you're on the free feed in the Talking Simpsons feed, this is the first episode of the month. So welcome to another month. Lots of news this month. Yeah, it was a well, it was an eventful march in many ways as we we hit a lot of fun anniversaries. Yes. And yes, we were having man, we've been

podcasting it up this month, too and and so many cool things are coming your way but yes as we always do we start with simpsons news which i guess we should start with the one thing that happened right after we put out the last community podcast as always happens when we were worried that the simpsons wouldn't be renewed because it was happening so so late i think the last renewal was in early february right yeah yeah this this one they waited until the very start of march but the simpsons despite what i thought in my uh previous like guessing at the they were gonna let it stop being a televised show not the case the simpsons will be produced so quite a number uh they it's smart you know the way the cycles work they really should do two at once if they if they

just go season to season that's a lot to negotiate they have to work so far ahead better to just have two so you're not interrupted in the middle of it and they also renewed family guy for two seasons and bob's burgers for two seasons so family guy is getting 19 and 20 bob's burgers is getting 12 and 13 and then it made me realize this new story is just like so much of fox's programming is animated there's uh the simpsons family guy bob's burgers bless the hearts duncanville the great north and something coming up called housebroken which i don't know what that is and then there's like a new dan harman series also coming oh yeah the dan harman series yeah housebroken is about the pets

of rich people i believe it is it's like a dog it's pets and stuff but yeah you're right everything is uh that the young show of bob'sers is now going to be a dozen seasons. That makes me feel a little old, I have to say. Or that Family Guy. Family Guy will be in its 20th season, which to me is like, that's too many Simpsons seasons. It's insane, too. If it wasn't canceled, it would be in its 20s now. Oh, yeah.

It'd be like 24th season at this point for sure it would well actually yeah it would be 22 because i uh it debuted in season 10 of simpsons so it would be 10 below simpsons and but it it got canceled for a few years there 757 episodes so they're gonna pass that much and i mean uh the simpsons if you're like let The Simpsons end, know that had this not been renewed, it wouldn't stop anyway. It would just turn into a different thing. And there'd still be a season and a half left of shows to watch. Yes, yeah. You'd still be, who knows what the last episode would have been, but now it's going to keep going for a whole other two years.

I can't imagine what the actors voices will sound like two years from now i have to say they'll all be ai deep fakes uh that honestly get started on that tech now because uh as you and me both watched a lot of the recent episodes this month lots of people are sounding old now it's not just harry shearer yeah it doesn't help that we are doing season 2 and season 12 so we can see like here's them 20 years ago here's them 10 years ago sorry 20 years ago and 30 years ago yes yeah i don't like thinking of season 2 being over 30 years old now but it's the truth it stinks and stinks other uh simpsons news there's been lots of timeline fuckery lately when the simpsons were in the 699th episode do pizza bots dream of electric guitars

homer is now a hip-hop loving millennial whose childhood is ruined by jj abrams yes and uh yeah it's uh it's matt selman doing it and he uh he played with the timelines before in that 90s show which is uh over a decade old now yeah which i i guess after watching both 699 and 700 i hate that 90s show less i don't yeah i don't like it but i think we'll be okay i think it'll be not as offensive once we get to it in our podcast thing oh sure sure but but this one wrecks it even more because wrecks it by that continuity but that 90s show set up that homer invented grunge and basically in his college age while this one makes it that homer was 18 in like 1996 really i'd say yeah actually they still given homer's age and what year it is he's still too old in this episode

yeah yeah he he is our age like i turned 30 we both turned 39 this year we are going to be homer's age homer yes is now born in 81 82 yeah homer to be in his late 30s he has to have been a child when the simpsons premiered and soon enough thanks to the ravages of time homer will be younger than the show itself is like bart would be 40 now in in the show's timeline as well but yeah i the the episode itself not so bad i well i will say i dislike the seventh hundredth episode so much that i've i ended up liking the one before it more but what i like is i thought the whole episode was a full flashback but the first five minutes are set in the 90s and then it's it's all current day i wish they were meaner to jj abrams because they were like oh he tells the perfect stories there's there were a

couple jokes where homer said this is the same thing that happened when i was a kid except worse and then the jj abrams said it's kind of my thing and then the lens flare stuff which i think uh we just stopped doing that yeah i i think we're past that and of course that homer has to turn into an internet hater like i i mean i'm kind of very much done with shows that are like time to talk to our haters the substance of the first they've been doing it for so long homer had to turn into comic book guy and then it turns into just like refuting of this ruined my childhood things which then selman actually had to deal with on twitter about that episode i saw him uh tweeting about the idea because the simpsons is just has a moving timeline it never made sense because we see the first episode where bart is born it's 1980 and

then when lisa is born it's 84 and then when maggie is born it's 93 yep so it was never like a consistent timeline but now that decades have passed it's just so strange when maggie is born it's 93 yep so it was never like a consistent timeline but now that decades have passed it's just so strange to think about homer growing up in the 90s instead of the 70s yeah when they they were so specific in season two of having homer be a graduate of the class of 1974 that was their choice and to pin it down uh it was a big swing. And so I guess they always are like, eh, it's just going to have to slide. Otherwise, I mean, honestly, it could be more funny if they just kept pretending like,

yeah, when we graduated in 1974, when you were born in 1980. That is my idea, actually. I was on the same page as you, Henry. I wish that would have been what they did. It's just like, well, yes, Bart is always born in 1980. Lisa is always 84. They always graduated in 1974. Bart is always born in 1980. Lisa is always 84. They always graduated in 1974.

They were always born in the mid to late 50s, even though it makes no sense. Because no matter what you do, it's not going to make sense. But I think that choice would make less people mad. Yeah, it would. But then, I mean, I think they could still even do the current day references if they wanted to. You don't just shove it in our face and like yeah homer was a teen in 1974 and he's also 38 in the year 2025 and he has the newest smartphone who cares like i mean i did there was another bit in a selman directed one that i was like uh our show run one

where homer goes on a whole speech about boba fett being lame and i was like this homer's too old to care about boba fett he should have no childhood interest in boba fett or complaining that boba fett being lame and i was like this homer's too old to care about boba fett he should have no childhood interest in boba fett or complaining that boba fett is overrated but i mean we saw him in line for empire strikes back when he was dating marge yeah yeah but he just he didn't think that much about it he's like yeah it's the movie you see it's the big movie but at least the episode you know i like jokes about showbiz pizza and Chuck E. Cheese. Those are fun. And we get to see that Gil went to prison for cocaine distribution. That was cute as well. But when is Homer's interest in, you know, 90s hip hop and like, say, De La Soul or the Humpty Dance?

When does that ever come back into the show? Well, Bart and Lisa said he could never rap again after he tried out his Mr. Plow rap. Oh, that's true yeah he he was doing that mr plow rap before this episode was set like that's but i have to say i like that episode more than the one that came after it yeah episode 700 which is the one i watched i didn't watch 699 but i did watch 700 manger things and it is a christmas episode which you said was their third one this year they had uh the christmas summer christmas one of the hall of the hallmark movie yeah that films and which i did like that episode it was i thought it was a good episode and they had another one had

a scene at christmas but this is their christmas episode which i don't want to after covet it's like yeah you probably had a christmas episode of march because it wasn't ready at christmas i i'd bet that and uh i will say i think i've had enough simpsons christmas episodes for a while we can just cool it because uh it was nice when it was more of a rare occurrence and whenever they did one it would be special but now it feels like you they're not really trying hard enough to justify this christmas episode and for this one it was like well homer has to do something really bad and what he does i don't even think is that bad and uh it just makes for an unremarkable episode and there's also some weird timeline stuff where it takes place in 2015 uh there's so much timeline stuff happening this season where it's

just like episodes shouldn't have been back to back bart and lisa are really little kids they've got like ipads uh homer helps uh mod give birth to todd that's that's the one thing i liked about the 700th episode is that mod gets to be a major character in it and yeah and maggie roswell sounds like a good voice still she still sounds like herself so i like that too i saw somebody else point out homer being that close to todd and the flanders family only makes his unintentional but cause of death of maude 10 times worse yeah like this is the woman he kills through his mistake and also by parking he parked in the ambulance zone and prevented any resuscitation he doesn't seem to care that much about the woman he murdered who uh he gave helped give birth to their son yeah i mean there were some fun jokes in here but i feel like uh do we need to celebrate

700 i mean come on yeah i think it was them also making it the christmas episode because the first episode's christmas yeah it's fitting and all that yeah but and also it made like todd younger than lisa which i always view todd is equal in age to lisa not six and she's eight they were never very clear about that because in we just did the episode or recorded it at least the dead putting society and todd and bart are supposed to be the same age right yeah but then but then rod is like older than bart but sometimes he's not i don't know it's they were never very clear with the flanders is yeah and i and i hate that todd's middle name is homer now and he's like todd homer flanders and again it's like well why are you so awful to this child i i know a big bit

that they liked about this uh the 700 episode was that Mo brings up that there's a room above their garage. And it's the show's way of saying, like, there's still places to explore. We never talked about that space above their garage, did we? Not to go on too long about this, but I really wish, I think a missed opportunity is that they could have went back to old Ned. We could have seen Ned as more of the Ned that we saw in dead putting society the one with the rumpus room because when uh he told homer about his man cave the joke is it's a son of man cave it's a very like christian room i was like oh i wish they would have brought homer to his real man cave from the early 90s and maybe this is where ned becomes more christian or maybe this is when he's

reconsidering having all this like splendor in his basement. Who knows? But I was hoping they go down to that basement again, which we rarely see. Instead, Ned is at his like weeniest ever. Yeah. And the only thing that makes him look different is his like mustache isn't fully grown out.

Yeah. And also like everybody just, I mean, they also like they take an Uber in the episode too. And also when they go to the party, it's just like, God, Burns sounds so bad. Yeah. And Julie just is. And Bart now sounds too old.

Everybody just sounds so old. It brings me down more every time I watch it. Just the voice acting, really. They shouldn't age. It's a real problem. That's the rule. But also, their voices are irreplaceable like i don't want to hear whoever they shove in there disney will recast them at

some point it just will happen and it's like but i don't want that either can't but i'm also one of those people who complains like the muppets don't sound like muppets anymore i and it makes me sad and there's no way around that so matt grating has been doing a lot of press for the 700th episode and i will say that it must be very frustrating for him because every interview i read with him for the past 20 years has featured all of the same questions and i get frustrated when i'm out in public which is rarely happens anymore but if like a random person finds out what i do and they ask me questions it will always be the same questions and i have to just be polite and be like well here are all the answers and i feel like he has been doing this for 20 years at least it's always like wow you're so you're still

going how much longer do you think it'll be and what'll happen in the feud it's all of the same what would your last episode be yeah yeah he's he has to hear the same and now the one new question he's been asked for the last five years is like what about apu like that which he in the usa today interview he seems agreeable with the criticism but still a little defensive he stills like i'm proud of apu and he definitely has a fix he wants he thinks he's got like this is the idea that'll fix apu but they're just disney i think is just fully like you don't do shit with. Like, I don't care what you think the fix is. Because they tried to do their fix before, and it was roundly rejected. I didn't like that at all. But, yeah.

When in that same interview, too, Groening was, it wasn't my idea to start doing the recasting. But he's totally cool with it. And he's like, oh, yeah, more opportunities for people. That's good. So, I like that. Like, at least that's one landmine he didn't step on. Yeah, I just, I wish he wouldn't be, I don't know.

He went on to say like, well, the reason we hired these people is because they could do so many voices. And that was the intent from the beginning. And that's what cartoons are all about. So I think he's kind of still like sticking to his guns a bit on the defensiveness. Well, I mean, yeah, for Groening,

I've said it before, i think you know he came from such like a lefty area of portland like he was to the like he was the guy in the writer's room saying like don't do ableist jokes don't do that racist joke don't do these things and he did work hard for what white hollywood considered racist or not back then he i think he did work hard on that and i i i can see why as now an old billionaire that he doesn't like being told that stuff he did in the past was imperfect you know like i i get his defensiveness about it but he's just gonna have to let it go because it's just time has passed you by buddy like uh you can't do apu anymore it's just it doesn't people can't have fun with it it just it and it just becomes if he tries to insist upon apu at a certain level you're starting to become the conservative guys i know graining doesn't want

to be of just like we don't care about the pc police we're doing apu like i know graining doesn't want to be that kind i'm really glad he's not on twitter because you could easily turn into one of those people or be like radicalized he's he's the good you know the smart for billionaires is to stay off of twitter you'll only be worse like uh well also in positive things he hinted at he did say they're working on more disney plus exclusive things like longest daycare so if longest daycare the positive of it is that it let them break rules that they that they are very strict on on the tv show i hope that they start letting more people get to have the david silverman-ness of like oh i can just draw a crazy thing and it's not it doesn't break a fucking rule and also he he's saying they're waiting on a renewal for a fifth

set of episodes for disenchantment on netflix but says like yeah the ball's in their court you know and i guess the next set of episodes won't be for another like 12 to 18 months i guess they just debuted that was january when those came out man yeah and kovac kid is certainly only been slowing it down so i i would bet i bet it's gonna be a while there was an interview with al Al Jean that I liked more. Again, it is the same questions you get a lot. But also, I think Al Jean realizes that like, oh yeah, the show was bigger than us and Disney will continue it without us. Because I feel like at a certain point, Al Jean could have said to Fox, like, we're going

to end the show now. This is going to be the last season. And Fox would have been like, well, we're still going to merchandise the shit out of it and still put in syndication. But sure, I think at a certain point, it maybe could have been their decision to end it but now i think he realizes like no disney will do this with or without us oh yeah i i'm seeing a lot more acceptance in those articles especially from gene and i think a little from selma too where they just go like it's not ours to stop anymore that we can stop what we do but that doesn't mean simpsons won't have new stuff

forever and ever and ever like with it definitely felt felt like at fox that if somebody stopped doing a series of things that it would take fox years to start it back up they do a new predator and then it takes six years to make another predator it didn't turn into the predator factory disney is that factory and it doesn't let when they cancel a spider-man cartoon series like ultimate spider-man they're already working on the next spider-man series marvel spider-man they don't let the spider-man pipeline stop and i would think that if al jean whenever he's like gracie we're stopping no more simpsons that disney just picks it back up like cool we've got people we'll do it but but the sad thing i found is like

disney's not going to hand it to like what is merit what is deserving there's probably many people who could make a great simpsons show but the people who disney hands those projects to now they're big names they're not just going to be i call again to the muppets or star wars for star wars at first even though dave filoni was doing a great job overseeing the mythology of star wars post lucas they're like well the famous guy's jj abrams we're hiring that guy and same with muppets muppets they still could have hired frank oz or just worked more with the muppet people but then jason siegel showed up and he's like, I'd like to make a Muppets movie. And he said, yeah, this famous guy, we'll give it to him. Yeah. I think the Muppets are a great comparison

just because they are a brand. They're an assortment of characters, but also the creator has been gone for 30 years. Macaraning is still with us, but there will be a point where he is gone. And there'll be a point when like Dan and Julie and Nancy are gone too. So it's like, well, we can't, these characters are too beloved to like go away forever somebody needs to step in and fill these shoes and you got to be careful too because if you don't we talked about it on your flintstones one once it hit its 30s of as a franchise it did fall apart and they didn't have plans for it and it got shucked to the back i'm sure many people would want simpsons to like can't it just end and we just like appreciate what was there that doesn't happen like that what country

do you think this is yeah but gene you're right in that interview gene definitely seemed to be in the acceptance phase of of the dabbed uh rules uh but no more denial he's like yeah this will go this will outlive me i i also like them asking like do you think it'll get to a thousand and he says that'd be 12 more years and i i just can't imagine 12 more years of this he's pointed out he's been on the show half his life now more than half his life because he started when he was uh 29 or 30 and now he's 61 or he will be 61 boy oh boy yeah and yeah i mean for al gene is he thinking like 73, am I going to still be showrunning the show? Though the question could be,

maybe somebody else could showrun it instead. Nah, that sounds impossible. Who else would know where all the fax machines are? Who does what, you know? Just make Carolyn Omine the showrunner. How about that? Just another internal person who's been there for like 15 years how about that i mean al jean's very funny uh but i think it's more than fair

to say after 22 years of running the show maybe he could be like uh lauren michaels like show diplomat figure just like i'm the figurehead of the show i'll have creative input but i can also do all the interviews and be like just the uh the guy in the shadows yeah be if jim brooks were to ever retire he could just take that jim brooks role of like well jim brooks is still here day to day and he gives his opinions and he can still go like no no don't do that but he's not the driving creative force on the show who approves every script or that's what i liked in the 699 one that at least felt like selman is trying to do something counter to Gene. Like I think he's,

I wonder how Selman and Gene get along these days because so much of the Selman episodes feel like counter-programming to the over-treatliness of Gene episodes. No, the James L. Brooks comparison is better because James L. Brooks was a sitcom veteran. Now Algenus had much more experience than James L. Brooks did in 1990. He was only in his late 40s uh Algenus is in his 60s now yeah yeah man yeah it yeah there you've

got the you've got the pattern right there Gene just take just step back just a little bit please we can ask him that if we ever interview him will you step down sir yeah that'd be uh last question can you quit yeah why don't you take a lesser? Yeah. Why don't you quit? Take a lesser role. Don't you want to retire? You know, retirement, you can spend a lot of time with your kids or your grandkids, maybe. And by the way, other news that we've covered because this happened a long time ago. But yes, Embiggened got added to dictionary.com and many people contacted us about this. But we went through this in 2018 when it was

recognized yeah miriam webster already did it and we've uh we in big and cromulent both got added but this is just another dictionary yeah it's just another dictionary well these the dictionaries know they go viral if they yeah add in a made-up word from a memeable show but we've been through this like oh is every three years in big it'll be made an official word from a memeable show but we've been through this like oh is every three years embiggen will be made an official word by another thing and we have to go like wow look at that embiggen's an official word now like i and i love those words and cromulent great words i see them in print all the time well on my pages but now they're just words they always were words yeah yeah so i don't i not to be like i'm so over this but we did this in

2018 and i don't if in 2023 this happens again i i feel like i'll be even grouchier about it i will become the joker uh another thing i keep i keep seeing a lot of is this uh npr piece about the simpsons their middle class existence does not make any sense but i think i keep reading stories like this or takes like this yes so i included this one because npr they some reporter npr saw that atlantic piece that we talked about a couple months ago they interviewed the creator the writer of that piece and then spoke to al jean about it and that's what i i really liked that's why i wanted to spotlight it because it's al jean's input is on it. Yeah, Al Jean responds to it. And it's a 10 minutes NPR. And it's interesting, like Al Jean, in ways that I was kind of surprised for, you know,

a very rich Hollywood writer that he's saying like, well, yeah, the generation after this can't live in a middle class like this. There's no, he admits that it is inaccurate but he did he mentions how they did i didn't recall the more recent episode but he said like we did an episode where the simpsons lose their house because they can't afford their mortgage payments and then at the end flanders buys it back for them but it was an episode about how the simpsons can't afford to live the way they do and aljean said that it too many people got sad about that episode like that was a bummer of an episode so he's like that we don't want them to be accurate it's it's just too sad for people

yeah and the money aspect really dropped out of the show in like the fourth season right yeah yeah they they stopped counting how much uh they'd go into debt i mean caring about the actual like fiduciary insolvency of the simpsons that's not a dave merkin thing like other than the one where homer owes money to selma and patty other than that i dave merkin was not into the reality of that but yeah if you want to hear aljean talk about like how you know he grew up middle class with a dad who owned a hardware store and it reflected his childhood but now he's like oh yeah the generation after this and every after they don't make as much money they're they can't buy homes it's pretty fucked up that's why lg

should not have made fun of bernie sanders on his show i know come on man come on man yeah in other news our best buddy bill oakley former co-runner co-showrunner of talking simpsons launches own line of vinyl figures wait a showrunner of talking simpsons launches own line of vinyl figures wait a showrunner of the simpsons yes this show is not secretly the showrunner has there been a hostile takeover bill oakley running the podcast i'd like to see that happen but yes he has his own line of vinyl figures called psych gags and the first one launch it's called the sneaker sniffer and the theme of this line of vinyl products is uh the least popular advertising characters of 1962 i love that i love it that is such a bill oakley thing of like a weird drawing of a thing that

tries to sell stuff and in this case like this green dinosaur kind of monster who's just smelling a sneaker uh they unfortunately it came i think it had gone live when we did the talk to the audience but we had missed it and so we couldn't properly promote it but i think you can still buy it i think or at the very least pay attention to the next time he sells one of those because in bill oakley's plans this is only the beginning of those characters the twitter account is just site gag so you can follow that for future updates oh yes yeah and i do he he also did some great new food reviews as part of promoting it including eating the uh he says that the fish sandwich at was it popeyes no arby's he said arby's had a fish sandwich that actually is good that's me i i really like a good fish sandwich

and there's no arby's to be found around here uh yeah we can't bring the meats nowhere yeah the twitter account is psych gags inc like incorporated so you can follow them there for more updates uh there's a list of characters that could potentially be figures uh they're not going to make them all if it's popular enough they might but it's a it's a peak of what could come i love the future i love the promise of a checklist that uh that it's like when you're a kid collecting marvel comic cards and it's a it's a peak of what could come i love the future i love the promise of a checklist that uh that it's like when you're a kid collecting marvel comic cards and it's got the checklist card or uh that was in the simpsons trading card set too once you get the checklist the first time you're like oh man do i have all these now every other time you get the checklist the worst card no fun

at all but uh but yes i always love a checklist in other news, our final bit of news is that Chief Wiggum finally got to go meet Bob Seger and go to a Bob Seger concert. Because the joke is in My Sister, My Sitter, he has tickets to Bob Seger, but they're actually tickets to Bob Saget. Yeah, it's like, have fun at Bob Saget. It's Bob Seger. Ah, crap. A better payoff would have been in the... So this is the episode that aired recently, right? Last night.

Yeah, it was last night's episode. As of this recording. Yeah, the last one of March. Bob Saget should have been at the concert. That would have been good. Yeah. Complete the cycle. Yeah.

That episode also digs into the background of Sarah Wiggum. So even in season 32, they can identify a character that never got to say or do anything what about her like fancy well that's a I think Tress does her voice but they decided that's not her voice anymore yeah it's now Megan Mullally uh and also she gets to well she also gets to be like sexy mom kind of style as Megan Mullally as well yes yeah but yeah. But, you know, I'm fine with Sarah Wigum. We got to have the jokes like, thanks, Sarah. Those jokes still exist.

And now it's time for news about us, our favorite kind of news. And lots and lots of podcasting has been happening because we are wrapping up our recordings of Talking of the Hill Season 2 Part 1, which is now live on the patreon so please head on over to patreon.com slash talking simpsons sign up at the five dollar level to get all 11 episodes of that as it goes live through the end of may into early

june yeah and i hope you guys liked us priming the pump for it with that wes archer interview we had a lot of fun with that so so many questions we already had about King of the Hill. And now after doing it, we both came up with like a dozen more questions we would have liked to ask him. And so hopefully, you know, a year from now when he's promoting a King of the Hill reboot that could happen any day now,

that he'll come back and chat with us. He was very nice. And of course, Talking Futurama has been a monthly podcast since the beginning of the year. So every friday at the end of the month there's going to be sorry every week of the end of the month will be four podcasts a week come on you can't that's a deal buddy you want to be at that five dollar level yeah this last week you had within an eight day span you had the upa what a cartoon you had the UPA What a Cartoon. You had the Talking Simpsons, Dance and Homer. You had King of the Hill.

You had Futurama. Then you had the DuckTales. That is 12 hours of podcasts, I believe. No, I think 18 hours of podcasts in an eight-day period. We've been recording a lot of podcasts. I think this week I'm recording a podcast personally. Most of them with you. Hey, and I wouldn't want to be with anybody else oh thank you buddy and uh let's talk about our april schedule which is now live on the patreon you can check it out there in full detail

we'll talk about what's happening in april for what a cartoon so the first what a cartoon of the month is going to be our traditional our now traditional what a cartoon april fool special in which we cover a live action cartoon and that one will be the classic uh cult 90s series get a life the episode girlfriend 2000 and this is so directly related to the simpsons isn't that right henry oh my gosh when we i hadn't re-watched that whole series in so long and i broke out my dvds and while it uh dave merkin maybe takes too much credit for it sometimes he is such a huge part of that series and if you watch that and then instantly go to season five of simpsons it's just a train continuing like they're the same they're cut from the exact same cloth like

if you watch get a life now you'll be like oh he redid that joke on the simpsons he redid that joke on the simpsons or reworking that joke on the simpsons or reworking of it but yeah it was a ton of fun to go back to get a life not just because they were great shows for 1990 and so ahead of its time but also there is dirt to get into behind it too so there's there's fun dirt to talk about as well what a great series next after that a very different show we'll be covering the death note anime series the first episode rebirth yeah that's a premium patron pick and uh it's nice to get back to some anime it's it's been it feels like a little while since we did an anime so and it's such a great series i'd never

given it enough time before bob is the big big fan of it but I love everything I've seen of it so far, and I love the creators of it. It's a huge crossover hit of the aughts, which recently, by the enemy four years ago, got a Netflix movie. Yeah, which, you know, Willem Dafoe does kind of look like Shinigami. I'll give him that. That's a very cruel thing to say. I mean it in the nicest way. But yeah, Death Note's kind of on everything. So you can't not watch Death Note somewhere.

Plus all the comics are on the Shonen Jump app for like two, that's how I'm just flying through it. What a steal. And the week after that, a cartoon nobody remembers, but we had a lot of fun with another patron pick, the Savage Dragon, the episode She-Dragon. And yes, that is on peacock believe it or not yes yeah it was one of those lost shows and then all of a sudden when nbc universal launches

peacock they're like what do we what can we just shove on here in the kids section because it's kind of anemic oh this usa network show that aired for two years and not a single person remembers and it's based on a hyper violent still running image comic so yeah you can watch the whole thing on peacock but the best thing i'd say definitely watch the season two opening of the show because that's just like straight up anime and our final week of the month we'll be covering shrek so if you are a five dollar patron or on the free feed you will hear the extended free preview of that podcast but if you're on the ten dollar feed at patreon.com slash talking simpsons you will get the entire podcast we have not recorded yet but it probably will be around

four hours at least I don't think so yeah the the history itself we have recorded that's about an hour and a half so uh it's going to be a long podcast we had a lot of fun with it already oh man I I can't wait to just talk about donkey and all the others like and and yeah we're doing big green guys back to back and that's right and the history is uh you know we've talked around or about jeffrey katzenberg here and there but this is our deep dive into the true auteur of shrek the quibi master himself jeffrey katzenberg so i think you guys are going the true auteur of Shrek, the Quibi Master himself, Jeffrey Katzenberg. So I think you guys are going to have a lot of fun with us celebrating the 20th anniversary of Shrek at the end of this month. And as for our What a Cartoon movies for May, we have a new poll coming up very soon.

We'll tell you all about what's going to be on that right now. So the theme for May's What a Cartoon movie is going to be live action animation hybrids and those movies will be looney tunes back in action rocky and bullwinkle cool world and casper and one of those i think uh maybe two of those are pretty good sure yeah not to weigh the scales yeah but uh but any of them will be fun to talk about you know we've if if we hadn't already done space jam this would be time for uh coming to slam and jam in space jam town because previously he's coming yeah previously our longest podcast was space jam ah yes yeah but i i don't think anything will ever be the end of evangelion no no if yeah if it did we really need to go to

the the funny farm if we break five hours yeah space jam 2 is coming and these uh films will help you prime the pump for space jamming so yeah looney tunes back in action the sort of space jam sequel that was a big old flop the uh hideous looking rocky and bullwinkle film uh then the very horny cool world which actually we talked a little bit about that in a one that in may we're uh doing a podcast about and of course the christina richie devon saw starring casper the friendly ghost the dead little boy dead little boy who everyone loves and in more news for us we now have a new uh template for the cover art for talking simpsons our other podcasts all have pretty standardized templates talking simpsons did not we just would artfully and very carefully after much judgment put the logo somewhere on the image

but now we have a template for the cover art looks great so thank you to nina matsumoto a fantastic artist for putting it together for us yes it's a great i i mean it's a classic look at the old tv and now you're like watching us there's a scene from the episode in the center of the tv nina did a great design as always thank you so much and uh and yes you know you're seeing the first one on the episode art for this one this week and you'll see them all from uh here and out so thanks again to nina matsumoto for that great design let's talk about our personal lives we're playing and watching well as for me the countdown to see my wife continues we're starting month four of that so uh hopefully i'll get to see my wife in case you don't know she lives in canada i live in america this thing called covet happened the border's been closed for over a year i got to see her in december that's when we got married and now uh

the countdown continues hopefully i'll get to see her again by the uh late spring early summer recording a lot of podcasts in advance so i can have like a month off to do that and quarantine both ways yeah we're we're deep into june recordings now and we're only gonna i would figure especially once we're done with king of the hill i think we'll be done with july at the end of april it's very possible so as for what i'm watching uh together with nina i'm watching slayers next which i talked about last month we're nearing the end of that lots of fun i have not seen that in 20 years also with nina i've been watching the promised neverland season two which just wrapped up uh last week

it is bad oh that's too bad and not to spoil anything going into it i was like wow so i read the manga and then i watched season one and i was like, wow, this is such a great direct adaptation that adds a little bit of flavor to it, but not too much. I'm just going to wait for them to directly adapt the rest of the manga. They did not do that. That's crazy. Season one of The Promised Neverland is like 12 episodes. They adapt five volumes.

Season two is 11 episodes. They adapt 15 volumes. So big things happen but the context of why those things are happening how they were set up it just is not given to you the last episode is like a slideshow of things they wish they could show you it is fuck i don't know the politics or the decisions that went into making the second season just the rest of the manga was it just a mix of budget and covet and they're like well we're not getting renewed for another one let's just dump everything in here it could have been so good if they just directly adapted the rest of the manga but now i have not read the rest of the

manga this is encouraging me to read it so in a way this is the best advertisement for the manga ever hey you know then it pays off i guess in that way that's what a bummer that's sad all these whenever a season two of an anime doesn't come together it's it's what a bummer that's sad all these whenever a season two of an anime doesn't come together it's it's such a bummer like they it seems like they a lot of them have trouble keeping a staff together even just doing season two at the same studio for these shows and i have a feeling season two of promise neverland was supposed to be 12 episodes but guess what buddy one of them was a clip show clip show and not even with a framing device it was like well here's a bunch of clips i hate that and also it used to be you get 13 and then it yeah

well then it turned into like well the 13th is for only for the ova and then it's like now we just don't we just make 12 only 12 so as for uh movies i believe this or not henry i watched my first jackie chan movie ever I've been keeping this from you I cannot believe that I was reading ahead in the notes here I was like what you've never I mean I don't want to be that guy but I'm like how could you have never seen I had to revoke my dude card

but now I got it back and yes I saw police story for the first time did you oh I just bought the criterion version of that I want to open it up i i love police story it's it's maybe his best movie it's uh i mean it's when jackie chan figured out what his thing is you know like he had he had been forced into this thing of am i gonna be bruce lee and then he's like oh i'll be bruce lee in america and then he has all these shit films in america

he's like fine i'm gonna just make my own fucking movie in Hong Kong I'm gonna blow up half of Hong Kong to make this movie I'm gonna break my pelvis I'm gonna do all this crazy shit I I really liked it I will watch more Jackie Chan movies I also watched my first Marilyn Monroe movie uh I saw gentlemen prefer blondes based on Nina's recommendation and I really liked it that's good and i've only seen uh i've seen seven year itch and uh some like it hot but not gentlemen prefer blondes i should that's the famous one of the madonna video yes diamonds are a girl's best friend right right and that's the best song in that movie and i also saw another movie that i wanted to see is uh the original version of the departed eternal infernal, yeah, terrible name.

I don't love that name, but I love that movie. I like it more than The Departed. I have not seen The Departed, so now I can watch that. Oh man, Bob, you're pushing me all over the place here. It's so funny you're seeing these two very important Hong Kong films, basically like 17 years apart that i think they are i have you

okay have have you seen any of the john wu hong kong films like the killer or hard-boiled no i don't think i have oh man well you should watch this next on my list yeah that chow yin fat is if you've if you've seen an andy lao film and a jackie chan film chow yin fat should be the next guy you go to so i would suggest either hard-iled or The Killer. Both of those are classics. And I've been listening to the podcast Blank Check a lot since I just subscribed to it, and I've been going through the Burton series. So this made me want to rewatch Pee-wee's Big Adventure because I had not seen it since I saw it at the Castro Theater in maybe 2012, I think. Wow.

I saw it in a double feature with Beetlejuiceice last time i saw either of those movies and nina uh has never seen peewee's big adventure she knows nothing about the character so we watched it and i put in my notes that i watched it on my old dvd i was like okay i have my dvd that i bought in summer of 2000 it'd be fun if we watched it on this because it still works i tried it but then i was like this is 480p i'm an animal. So I downloaded a Blu-ray rip from the internet. We watched that. Hey, you own the disc, so it's fine. Yeah. How'd she like her first viewing of it?

She liked it. I was afraid she wouldn't because she hates Goofy. And I was like, oh no, is this character going to be too wacky for her? But no, it's interesting. And I recommend listening to the Blank Check podcast about it because Griffin Newman is right. This character should not work. Yes.

Yeah. But the movie does. And there are funny scenes, but there's no way to explain why they're funny. Like the tequila scene. It's just like, well, why? What's he doing? Why do they like it? Why is this funny?

It just is. When you take B.B. Herman by himself, he's an annoying jerk. Well, Donnie, when they try to claim claim it obviously they're the one who stole it so they don't deserve a reward i just love how intense he is and the joke that nina made in her head but didn't tell me until we were done is like the scene in the movie in the beginning when he is just manic in his house playing with trains and making a cereal she was like that's you after a few more months of quarantine and i said you know i'm glad you didn't tell me that while we were watching the movie uh we need you got to build a breakfast machine it's time for that but you can't even

get mr t cereal anymore no no what i love about that is he makes the entire breakfast the balanced breakfast you see in every cartoon commercial from that era he eats a few pieces of mr t cereal off of it with with a giant fork and that's his breakfast. And he just leaves it all to waste there. I also love he feeds Mr. T the box his own cereal. No, there's a million scenes. That's funny that me listening to Blank Check is why I rewatched Beetlejuice for the first time in a million years. And see it in 4K, pretty nice.

I will say there are some parts that if you're being a movie pedant about things you're like boy they kind of skip over that it is steam through this i in my mind there was there was more spackle between characters of like instead characters just leave like oh this guy moved in and also this guy knows magic and then this character just leaves they never come back there's there's a lack of explanation it's a little messy but uh god i saw that movie like 40 times as a kid and i love it so much yeah it gets funnier every time you see it good reference uh so i'm popping these mics here today sorry what i'm playing uh so yes i'm also working way ahead on retronauts i have jive up to june finished on retronauts by the way i'm doing so much on retronauts uh i'm still

playing my forever games like final fantasy 14 and uh yaksa like a dragon i i started playing yaksa like a dragon on release day i still have not finished it so i'm playing taking my time with that so i beat dragon quest 11 two years ago in january of 2019 and i just picked it up to play the epilogue and i am enjoying it that's good i'm glad there's there's a real hard turn in that epilogue of like the game i always love in a dragon quest game when characters fully just break the reality and they're like hey this you can't come back from this wink wink they basically say you better save yeah you better save you better save and you better save like five files for it in case because uh because we don't want to hear you complaining if

you didn't okay it's a bold move. I do like it. I'm interested to see how it plays out. And also Monster Hunter Rise just came out and I am really looking forward to playing more of that. I love Monster Hunter, but with this game, I was like, okay, I played three, I played four, I played Generations, I played World, I played Generations Ultimate. That's five versions of the same 100 hour experience will

this work on me again and it did it works every time i'm gonna play another 100 hours of monster turner these essentially the same game again no i i liked your point you said on twitter about how i i haven't played it yet but uh world was really my first one i gave the time to but you made this great point that like world was trying to be more international more new user friendly but rise is like this is a japanese developed game like let's let's share our culture with this and also be more colorful and not be scared of pushing away the call of duty crowd is just like wait the color yellow no red no thank you that red's too bright it's colorful it's more silly and i think their stance was like what you're gonna play it on something else you can't that's too bright. It's colorful. It's more silly. And I think their stance was like, what, you're going to play it on something else?

You can't. That's true. Yeah. I mean, everybody owns a Switch now. So that's... And that also, I guess, staying on Switch lets them not have to deal with a new gen engine and all that. They can stick with their old engine and just update it. Or really, not their old, old engine.

Because Monster Hunter World wouldn't play on a Switch. There's no way it is it is they're using the re engine actually so they're using the same engine that world runs off of and all the capcom games run off of it looks it looks really good for a switch game next to like things like uh mario odyssey it is one of the best looking switch games i've ever played oh that's all right man well i i might play it i don't know i i also don't okay don't play it because you will play nothing else all right then that's good then sure and i will i will i will point out that we have a discord for patrons of five dollars or higher there is a games channel and uh i did set up a steam group for our discord so if you're in the discord look at the pinned tweet in the games channel

and that way you can join the Steam group and it's already filling up. So check it out. Yeah, I've been really enjoying getting into the Discord more and more these past couple months. We have a great community that shares fun things, whether it's like their immediate thoughts on the episode

or when we can like tease stuff to them, like, ooh, a cool thing's coming or just the memes and shit post channel that is just a bunch of like silly jokes and people sharing funny pictures they saw online uh it's it's a lot of fun i i really like that and because you have to pay to get in nobody's a jerk yeah yeah i like that a lot too what have i been playing and watching in this last month so finished wandavision these are the marvel shows i'm uh society pressures you all these are all things you're prescribed like take one wandavision uh chase it with uh justice league yeah call me in the morning uh so yes wandavision the ending's okay i can see why people who thought it was like

oh this is a really deep message about, you know, overcoming trauma and all that. Well, it has to end with a giant laser fight in the sky. So that's how it all was going to end. And I know some people were definitely disappointed in that. What is tragedy if not for love persevering? Or whatever it is. What is grief if not love persisting?

I bet every screenwriter just said fuck um well i'll tell you what made me say fuck that after watching wandavision and already being annoyed like boy there's a lot of military propaganda in these things i then watch falcon winter soldier which is fully about that and it starts with uh basically an extra a almost a war crime you'd say a falcon breaking international treaties and exploding terrorists over the the border of libya does it tell you how to enlist at the end um close to it but honestly i i don't want to spoil too much but well so here's what is keeping me going with falcon what i like the actors who play falcon

and winter soldier they're they're good actors actors. Anthony Mackie's really good. And ever so slightly, definitely very far for the MCU, they sort of talk about being black in America, just a little bit. But the way I'm watching it, I'm just like, they especially, they introduce a character that in Marvel Comics was introduced to actually address real historical racism that the army did in World War II. They introduced this idea into the show, but they tease it.

And I am just really curious, how far are they going to go with this character? Because how much do they want to blame the military and say the military was kind of racist or fucked over this guy like i hope they don't eventually pull like oh they meant well yeah they stumbled into this i have a feeling it's going to be some stumbling well they they also they did a thing with cops being like hey let's see your band let's see your id and then they find out he's a superhero like oh we're sorry sir but they framed it more of like these aren't racist cops they're just dumb cops or what anyway so i also dutifully watched the snyder cut uh but hey it paid off because every podcast or video channel i watch did a thing you

know what i listened to all those podcasts anyways and i still had fun uh but bob you didn't get to see wonder woman decapitate somebody come on give me the stone uh give me no they want boxes all right it's the box i just kept seeing that clip we're going kal-el no yes oh yeah up and at them gal gadot is uh not a good actress just no straight up uh but yeah, it's a Snyder Cut. The baby's got their bottle. Good for them. They got their boxes. They got their box. They wind it up and they got their toys. So I'm sure they'll all be

very satisfied. The Snyder Cut is better than Whedon's version but that movie's shit. I listened to the Chapo Trap House version and I kind of agree with them. I'm very suggestible. Let's just say that when it comes to their opinions. They change my mind on a lot of stuff, but it's just like, yeah, they're both crap, but

at least Snyder has an identity and it might not be one you like, but it's not the very, very boring other version. I really like Felix's point of that uh these films wouldn't exist if zack snyder felt like he could be by that would be but but yeah i mean the phil and the guy hates superman like he doesn't or his vision yeah yeah he's not my vision of super and by the way i like no zack snyder movie no absolutely it's not even like a like a personal thing or like a philosophical thing or his politics just i don't like his movies yeah at all i when i started at the website job i had in 2008 i pushed some people away from me because i was very clear of like i said 300 is a fascist film

and they're like what it's cool it moves in slow motion like there's a reason that the snyder cuts four hours long half of it is in slow motion and and it ends with uh the last 20 minutes are some of the worst things they did the rest of the movie's not so bad compared to the last 20 minutes but uh also speaking of dutifully watching things i watched the oscar-nominated mank which uh yeah i mean i i'm kind of over gary old man don't like seeing him and stuff sounds like he's a jerk and secondly uh orson wells is a genius in any movie that's like actually it's about how orson wells kind of takes too much credit for it it's like no i don't think so don't agree with that and also a movie i watched which uh is it basically a vh1 special yes but it's not a true documentary but

on Netflix a documentary called the last blockbuster I really enjoyed it because uh also because it's seriously Netflix dancing on the grave of blockbuster but it's a really interesting history of blockbuster video a tribute to people who remember what it was I especially as a former blockbuster employee it made me feel old because I was like, I'm old enough now to feel nostalgic about working there, not just my negative feelings about how shitty it was as a place to work at. I had one big complaint about it.

It's that they should have really hit harder on how like Blockbuster is not a thing to be celebrated. It killed so many mom and pop businesses and it's why the video store market was destroyed i think we just missed the ritual of going to the video store for sure and it wasn't just like i can watch any movie that was ever filmed ever on my computer whenever i want it's like no you you drive to a place you walk through different shelves you pick out one or two movies you'll watch and that happens like once a week uh and part of like hanging out with a friend or going on a date was walking by all the tapes and like hey seen this

movie it's pretty good yeah i don't like that movie oh yeah well have you seen this no i haven't like just that conversation it also convinced me that the reason all these podcasts started up is because the video store guys like me no longer have the bully pulpit to speak from at a video store instead instead we have to put it onto a microphone well this pays better so you're better off yeah it does i i also felt in the in the last blockbuster they talk about how there is one blockbuster left in america bend oregon and they show pre-pandemic all of these people going up to bend oregon who don't want to rent anything they're just like uh hey i want to i used to work at a blockbuster and i did this and like the woman who runs it is she reminds me of so many blockbuster managers i knew it's uh

but anyway yeah that's pretty good uh i also also signed up for Paramount Plus because I want to spend $120 a month on streaming services. But my favorite thing on Paramount Plus is it has some Comedy Central shows I didn't give a chance, like Detroiters. I'd not watched Detroiters before. I love Tim Robinson's I Think You Should Leave, and this was the thing he did before it. Right, right.

It fucking rules. Everybody should have watched it nobody did and and also if you liked our talk about superman the animated series the hd remaster of it's on hbo max now seems like they'll never put it out on disc but you can at least watch it on hbo max and also another of my favorites that i was like man when will this ever be on streaming urusei atsura the movies all six of them are now on crunchyroll and verve like you can finally the blu-rays haven't come out yet because i think they're still remastering them but finally i can watch the movies other than two two's a great movie but there's other great love movies too and now you can finally watch them in the u.s it's sort of like how castle of cagliostro was the only lupin movie you could watch for 30 years exactly yeah it's i

understand why i get it it's the best one yeah they're the best ones and they're more about visionary directors who you know were figuring their stuff out working on elisa's property but the property itself is also great like i i just love that series and hopefully it could mean that if the movies are here maybe the tv shows will finally come back as well as for games not a ton i was slowly chipping away at dark souls still working out ring fit five days a week and played a little more mario 35 before they take it. I got first place for my second time ever. There will be no call from the governor. Mario will be executed. And I beat Bowser's

Fury. What a fun game. That is a great seven hours. Totally, even if you are done with 3D World, you've got to play Bowser's Fury if you're a Mario fanboy. If people are on the Patreon, they can still buy Mario 3D All-Ststars and that fireball game

yes there's still time there's still time get download them it's still the fiscal year of 2020 um and also as as far as other podcasts i listen to want to give a promotion to the sloppy boys i want to say i really enjoy the sloppy boys podcast that's great yeah the uh three of the guys from me and bob's one of our favorite sketch comedy groups the birthday boys they started a band called the sloppy boys which is a funny band and now they do two podcasts a week uh where they review it's kind of like dough boys but for alcohol so you know if you're trying to stay sober maybe it's not the best podcast for you but i really love it those three guys they're just

guys who have been friends for like probably close to 20 years and they're just dudes hanging out it's a it's a really good time so check out the sloppy boys so now we're moving on to questions and comments for talking simpsons the first episode was insane clown poppy and eve of the stars says manta ray slander you guys said a manta ray killed Steve Irwin, but it was a stingray. Manta rays are pretty much harmless to humans. I think this blunder should cause someone to perhaps get fired. And Nina Matsumoto agreed, whoever that is.

And she says, and manta rays are huge. Stingrays are the ones that can be teeny enough to pet at the aquarium. I will also not stand for slander of manta rays, the gentle giants of the sea. I'm sorry. I misremembered. I should have realized, like, yeah, a stingray stung him with its stinger.

It didn't manta him. Yeah, and manta rays are gigantic, not a kind of thing you can pet. So when I was petting something, I was petting a stingray, not a manta ray. I love manta rays. They're so cute. I love their floppy. I think of them as the Batman of the love they they're floppy I think of them as the batman of the sea because they're floppy head pieces and maybe it's because I had the manta ray ninja

turtle toy whatever his name was man was it man ray I feel man ray was from uh spongebob yeah but but yes thank you thank you for the correction and we got another correction on the same one uh which I uh I have a response to this or two uh so evelyn schlick says not a juggalo personally but i will not have any icp slander they had a very firm stance on covet and how they would never want to do a big gathering if even one person was harmed outside of that they are super lefty and anti-fascist and their clown makeup is one of the things that has like 100 block facial recognition software also violent jay's daughter is a furry and he's super supportive of her and even has his own fursona with cloud makeup i used

to poke fun at icp and juggalos but they're incredibly accepting and care a lot about their fans so i will say in our defense i don't think we said anything negative about icp i i think the most negative i said was i didn't want to assume they weren't doing the gathering because of covid which i do feel bad about because they were very adamant that they wouldn't do the gathering because of covid but i my mistake was not assuming the best instead assuming the worst about icp which i also saw there was some chat on Twitter. Nina shared a quote I'd never seen before of, I think it was Violent J saying, yeah, if your kids ever ask you about why my old lyrics sucked

and had a bunch of hateful shit in it, say that I was a dumbass as a kid and I'm sorry about it. Oh, I like that. So Henry is now down with the clown. Well, hey, I don't,'t whoop whoop i think is what you say right but yes we all are followers of the great malenko no no but i can see them eye to eye on pro wrestling okay that's the but i do that's where the venn diagram overlaps uh that's as close as i can get to juggalo town but yes in my defense most of the worst people i knew in high

school in the late 90s were icp fans so it's hard for me to get over my own personal grudges against the juggalo nation but yeah they were very different types when i was in high school as well very much so and hey if the icp with their open-mindedness are pulling people away from more hateful places that they could fall to i see that as a positive for sure so our next comments are from three-eyed fish and i refuse to say anything more about that title because it goes on too long and again thank you to uh brianna joy gray and virgil texas we love having them on the show and please listen to bad faith yeah and everybody was very welcoming to first time guest

brie and i think i i do hope is she's ready to come back either for either for a Bojack Horseman podcast if we were ever do that with her or the very least Simpson Safari because Virgil made a very good point that it probably would be good for us to have somebody who's lived in Africa on an episode all about Africa he could be onto something and you know what I feel connected to Noam Chomsky now because they interviewed gnome chomsky and then they came on our show so we're up there with him in terms of importance uh one podcast connection away from gnome chomsky so game breaker 64 says wes archer did a fantastic job on this cartoon he was pretty hands-on with the layouts animating some scenes of burns himself he did the scene of santa's little helper licking burns all over while he struggles feebly there are some great poses if you freeze frame it and game breaker 64

were you working with wes inside info yeah he could be at least one of those guys who has like the the layouts and stuff but it archer is uh you know it's something i guess it changes from director to director but when you're a director on it you might just oversee and make sure everything's fine. Or you might also just go in like, no, no, no, let me redraw that here. That's the best thing. I just saw somebody share some old drawings from old money in season two. Oh, yeah. And saying like, look at these cool drawings of Abe.

That's just David Silverman saying, yeah, here's the key pose for that. Here's the key pose for that. Again, check out our West Archer interview. Something I didn't know is that he took half a year off in seasons three and four so that's why he only directed two episodes in those seasons that's why yeah you wouldn't think that from watching it you think he's just there the whole time but it it sounded like he had uh he had some rough times working uh dealing with that workload who i can't blame him at all uh john harrison also on the three-Eyed Fish episode says,

States had laws about bars being closed on Election Day, not because they wanted sober judgment. They were just trying to combat the problem of candidates and parties buying votes with drinks. One of the theories about the death of Edgar Allan Poe is that he got alcohol poisoning on Election Day from all the free drinks he got from voting. I got to lay down too much voting i i do you know i do remember that from the scorsese movie gangs of new york

where it's election day and they're embarrassing movie very embarrassing there's good parts too good production design yeah and hey daniel day lewis is amazing in it but but when it's election day for the new sheriff uh like they just they give a guy a shave and like no you got to vote again here we cut your hair you look like a different guy go vote and and they're also buying uh votes in the bar so yeah i i another person said it was about they wanted sober judgment but i like that one for the edgar allen poe history you know what i think we got the exact same correction on this six years ago, which proves that we learned nothing. Yeah, we learned.

We retain nothing because we're pushing so much knowledge into our heads. Every day. We're just like Homer saying, and then it pushes a bunch of old stuff out. Remember when I learned how to make whiskey and I forgot how to drive? You were drunk. Boy, was I. Lisa the Tree Hugger is up next.

And Drew Mackey says, so there was a small controversy with this episode in season 11 of RuPaul's Drag Race where contestant Brooklyn Heights stole this joke about being a level five vegan and not eating anything that casts a shadow. And she did it as an improv challenge. She stole the joke

and she actually didn't even get the level number right. She said level four and not level five. And that's not enough to say you made it your own thing. Like Scott Pilgrim sort of did. Oh, yeah. I forgot that. Anyway, no one on the show clocked it and not that many viewers noticed. And that was when I realized I was part of the relatively small overlap of Simpsons fans who also watch Drag Race.

Man, that would have pissed me off. I do. I hate hearing somebody. You have to look. One of the greatest things a person can do is say a simpsons line in real life and just use it as as a saying but you kind of have to cop to it and you definitely in improv can't just that's just joke thieving of just like yeah i just said a joke from a show that i know it could have been an accident who knows because

sometimes i'll make a joke on twitter and then like i'll look at it two hours later and think like oh that is pretty similar to a simpsons joke or like the phrasing of a simpsons joke but i can't help it yes yeah it's true it's uh it all you we could give brooklyn heights the uh the benefit of the doubt there i suppose i i don't know much about drag racey i my husband watched it more and we have gotten into watching the video content of two drag race superstars Trixie Mattel and Katya uh because they're they're fun and I like their jokes about basically they watch Netflix movies and TV shows so I don't have to just like make fun of it but and I mean somebody's got to do it and Katya is like uh she's a Bernie bro so I like that about

her too but also on that episode pete kyuha says genius at work moment here early in the episodes it was established that the tree was a sequoia tree but after lisa is revealed to still be alive jesse calls it a redwood are we to believe that this is some sort of magic tree or something i apologize for not catching that they said it was two different types of trees matt selman asleep at the switch once again uh yeah i guess you know they're most people don't know the difference between the sequoia and a redwood i i don't know if i've ever seen a giant sequoia i've driven through the redwoods of uh here though not as much as you think i would since we live here but that's one of those things as zoidberg says you live here but you don't go until p until people are visiting there's i think

they just forgot the parody they were doing like oh right where it's not a redwood that's the real thing yeah it's true yeah yeah who cares so up next we have comments for what a cartoon and the first one is for whisper of the heart and nina matsoto says, It's not ramen they're having. It's nabayaki udon. The name literally means pot cooked udon. It's udon cooked in a specific kind of lidded pot. So it's not a ramen bowl either. Normally only made in the colder seasons. To a Japanese audience, that pot and those specific toppings are a dead giveaway.

Google it and you'll see. I'm being pedantic about this because you guys were wondering why the ramen was so thick. And I'll respond to Nina as it's on trial again. In the dub, he says he does jumbo noodles because i think they understood americans would probably know what ramen is but udon would just be some funky word they wouldn't even process so they oh ramen with big noodles kids yeah i we were steered wrong by the dub it's the dub's fault yeah 2005 dub didn't trust me to know what Udon was. Also, thoughts on the film from Nina. The more I think about it, this is Nina saying,

the more I think about it, the more I wish this film was about the privileges that come with class. Seiji is able to skip high school to go to study with a master in Italy for years, while Shizuku has to struggle on her own without any guidance and has all these distractions from being in a cramped home she has to help maintain. It shows how not everyone is able to have the same opportunities even if they have the talent and drive not everyone can afford to simply follow their dreams i don't think this is something miyazaki thinks about and therefore isn't a theme in the story from his age and culture he grew up with i'm sure he believes in meritocracy well i i do think the film is interested a little in that stuff they definitely make a point of showing shizuku's

home compared to her friend's home because her friend is clearly has a lot more money so they are interested in that but when it comes to seiji they are kind of hands off with yeah they do just let seiji say as a statement like well my dad doesn't like this but i'm gonna fly off to italy for a few months i'll just skip school like it he doesn't have to worry about high school exams or any of that stuff i it's it's weird to be have this such a materialist reading on shizuku's family and her friends which i feel you know was really he was really pushing for that with with kondo but then when it comes to seiji maybe he was like well if i want you to like this guy I can't engage with this too much perhaps that but I think they present the issue with class but they don't really say anything

about it it's just just like a just a matter of the reality of their world yeah I and that Seiji well too his grandfather is a Miyazaki type guy so it's possible he's like by not engaging with it Miyazaki doesn't have to think about his own class differences when he's possible he's like by not engaging with it miyazaki doesn't have to think about his own class differences when he probably thinks he's like oh i'm very knowledgeable about class and all these advantages but when it's time to talk about his own kids yeah his generation like well how's your class helping them in by being higher class he's like well let's not engage with that here's a fun cat sequence yeah that's nice and nina had a bunch of other great uh corrections like about calorie mate or other specifics we missed that i really appreciated her help with with that episode in general of

catching things and so brian biggs also said about that episode when i visit another country nothing fascinates me more than seeing how people go about their everyday lives. In that sense, the intro to this film is really something special. I also love the use of real-world locations, like where Sugimura professes his love to Shizuku. I went to Japan in December 2019, and it was one of the last amazing experiences I had before the world turned upside down. This whole film brought back warm fuzzies of that trip we need more strict materialist marxism in animation i agree yeah i the detail is what's so special about it you know but that detail is hard you can see why so few people do it i

i did like it in your name but even your name doesn't engage with it to that same degree it's true yeah and yeah i guess it did give me tourist vibes too of just like i miss being a tourist there on a vacation you know and i know this is just rubbing it more into you but i'm taking my my honeymoon there and maybe 2022 it's like fine have your olympics nobody cares get that out of the way and then let me come into your country in 2022 i am so sad i can't see evangelion 3.0 plus 1.0 in theaters though look at the blu-ray in eight years i'm i'm really hopeful that because g kids was able to license the tv show to put on blu-ray and and the first movies but not rebuild i'm hoping that it could

be two years just two years let me see it in 2023 by time, they'll have rebooted it again. I hope, I kind of hope Anno is done with it. I just let this end. If he doesn't end it, if he tries to start it up again, he will die before it's over. Then we just get no ending. So let this just be the end. I totally agree. Up next is Freakazoid, the episode Dexter's Date,

and Boyd Adkins IV says, I'm so glad you guys did this episode. When you talk about Tales of the Tape I had recorded this on VHS and watched it so much I'd memorize it beat for beat heck anytime I see guarding Tess anywhere I bust out laughing just because of a one-off joke in the episode and this is Bob speaking guarding Tess came up on an episode of blank check and because of Freakazoid I knew what it was that uh yeah you never hear about guarding tests otherwise like i've never it's funny to hear him say anytime i see guarding

tests anywhere i was like when do you ever see guarding tests no it is such a forgotten it's a favorite of the lobe uh well uh well also on that episode jacob reed says as long as we're speaking of the spielberg connection for way Knight, let's not forget that both he and David Warner were primary characters in the short-lived Fox Kids program, Toonsylvania. Warner portrayed Dr. Frankenstein and Knight was his Igor. So not only did they work together, but Steven Spielberg was one of the executive producers

of that show. Additionally, the show was in part created, written, and produced by Bill Kopp and had a bevy of talent. That being said, I saw it an eternity ago and don't recall if it holds up. Future what, a cartoon maybe? Perhaps. Is it streaming anywhere? You know, I don't think it is.

I should look that up. I think Toonsylvania is another of those lost shows. In my Shrek research research i learned about how when dreamworks started they said we're gonna do everything like we're we're doing not just movies and animated movies we're doing music we're doing tv shows we're doing kids cartoons and toonsylvania was like this half half attempted redoing spielberg's tv animation but the time had passed and and also i remember when we talked with cop when i did research on him it's like he did the first season of toonsylvania and then he was

not around for the second season so i think it was a troubled production they were replaced by paul rugg oh damn the actors were 10 geez that sounds like some cost cutting there i think they're like hey what are we doing paying for wayne knight on this stuff let's get paul rugg in here i but i had forgotten that david warner and wayne knight were the voice on that i you know i think i would have liked it but by the time it started airing i had stopped being a regular viewer on uh on kids wb of those shows so up next we have eek the cat episode great balls of fur and dave dollar rumple says it's a shame that eek never really got a chance for a second life sorry when i see eek with an exclamation point in the middle of a sentence i have to do it like that uh dave goes on to say most of the mid-90s fox kids cartoons that were

part of the saban to disney sale in 2001 like x-men and the tick solidified their legacies as part of the jetix block in the mid-2000s, but Eek never fit in with the rest of them. Yes, I do recall Jetix as something that would just be on in the background when I was in college. It's like, oh, what are cartoons now? Jetix? That was a weird time. That got replaced with XD, which is just an emoji, which is like old, but I have seen a few Eeks

when I was looking up them on YouTube. They've got the Jet x bug on them but i i just it's so strange to me that disney's like this is just lost like it's not on anything i wonder if bill kopp could even like off the record tell us why or if he has if he has no idea either but it's just so sad because like there there were a million ripoffs of red and stimpy but eek the cat does feel special like i don't know it it's better quality than a lot of them and there's a lot of it too they made a lot of it much of it also on our eek the cat one john barnes says minor joke glossed over in the discussion among the names

of melvis's love interest in the movies was lu al cinder which i tried to spell there like a compa like a composition of louise alice cindy like one might go oh well betty lou or ellie may but the joke is of course about lou al cinder which was the previous name of kareem abdul-jabbar before he converted to islam that is a deep cut that is for all the kids in 1992 yeah you had to uh that is a gen x-ass joke of like you got into nba of the 70s like oh this guy's a great basketball player what's his name and are you to know like we got to hear about not to use the old names of people who have changed their names but we did hear about cassius clay because that was such a thing of somebody was like an old racist they'd say they'd still call him Cassius Clay not Muhammad Ali or Cat Stevens perhaps Stephen Yusuf Islam yeah but with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar I never heard nobody call him Lou

I only knew him as same here yeah because he was I don't know about sports I will be yelled at in the comments but wasn't he always Kareem in the NBA? Maybe. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Again, I was born in 82. I miss the heyday. I know him as an actor and as a writer. I know him.

And he controlled Jay Sherman. Yes. Yeah, that's right. As his puppeteer. But yeah, it's like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar seems like a pretty great guy. But I did not know Lew Alcindor was. That's a very obvious reference now that you bring it up yes so up next we have batman beyond blackout and henry was telling me

before the show that uh the art director for the show james tucker liked our episode yeah he's uh he responded to me on twitter with some minor corrections about like well more people than just darwin cook worked on the intro and the he said that it wasn't a budget reason that the character designs got simpler. It was that it gave overseas less to mess up. So that's why they did it. Not so much budget. Though he did say the budget did not grow for season two. But otherwise, those are the only corrections he had.

So I have to assume everything else I said was definitely correct. But he really liked the episode. So thank you,ames tucker that is the what a cartoon difference and tanner meth fen says this was a great episode and i can't wait for the one on return of the joker i might have to re-watch batman beyond again especially because i remember that egg baby episode being better than it should have been but i need to be sure oh yeah also this understandably didn't make it into your episode but as a huge batman fan i was so happy to ace the bat hound to get his due yes yeah it i did forget to mention that in the show a key character but not in every episode is batman has a dog old bruce wayne has a dog and his name is ace and it was a reference to in the 50s, Batman was given a dog sidekick called Ace the Bat Hound.

I should have known it was a legacy dog. Of course. Yeah, he's not half as famous as Crypto. And I mean Crypto the super dog, not the planet destroying money thing. Hey, I've got a JPEG of Batman that requires 30 trees to verify. And yeah, James Tucker directed that Egg Baby episode, and there was such a funny interview with him saying he thought the script,

the idea of the episode sucked, and he wanted to do his best to try to make it into something. So yeah, if you're on HBO Max, watch the Egg Baby one. It's a quality episode. Also on that episode, Devin Hoffarth says,

the Zeta project is interesting to me because I do remember it and I did watch it. It's funny because they introduced Zeta in the first season of Batman Beyond and he has much more inhuman appearance with a head that's just a round boomerang-like thing. But when they make his actual show,

they give him much more human-looking head with eyes and a mouth. Zeta and his female companion even make a return in season two of Beyond in a crossover episode that got marketed a bunch final bit of zeta project trivia is that the initial design of zeta the robot with a boomerang head also makes an appearance in a justice league episode the same one that introduces their version of power girl there it's just a killer robot that fights supergirl i'm probably the only world weirdo who thought that but when i saw that robot i went is that zeta even though i'm 100 positively just you used a prior robot design to save on budget great podcast as always yeah i did i did for i should have given

beta project more time i don't think that's on hbo max it's static shock is which also had a crossover episode with uh batman beyond that's right but should give this data project a little more attention it just it looked cheaper and that bugged me it did yeah i'm i'm sure the writing uh made up for it like like most of uh those productions and our final cartoons for what a cartoon this month uh are gerald mcboingboing and rudy toot-toot the upa duo that changed the world and joe hodgson says listening to this podcast just made me remember that the nickelodeon puppet show wienerville which filled time with cartoons like mr magoo and gerald mcboingboing i mostly forgot the show ever existed but that was definitely the source for much of my upa viewing as a kid

and joe hodgson is right and i did watch a lot of Wienerville. And that is when I realized Alvin and the Chipmunks had cartoons before the 80s. Oh, my God. Yes. Yeah. That's where I first saw those six Chipmunks as well. What deal did Wienerville have with that specific company for that one? Thank you, Joe Hodgson, for unlocking this memory in my brain here. I did like the Mark Wiener puppets where it was just his head on a tiny body.

It always worked for me. Let's see. Did you like bony or the uh sailor guy more i like the mayor him his drag performance as dotty the mayor dotty the mayor yeah it's whatever happened to mark weiner i'm sure he's in vegas somewhere yeah but uh also like uh so mr magoo great uh old album the chipmunks fine i hated the bat-Fan cartoons. Oh, God, yeah. Those sucked. I always hated those, too. And they were racist, too.

Oh, sure, yes. Because he had a Chinese psychic or some Asian psychic. Not Chinese psychic, Asian psychic. And it was the drawing you would expect and the voice you would expect. Which seemed fine in the 60s to most people. But it also was fine enough to air on tv in the 90s that's unbelievable they could get that on there but probably i bet i bet he was just saying like you see how cheap it was to get these come on oh his sidekick is called karate a man named

karate oh boy oh boy uh and our final comment uh from gerald mcboying boying and rudy toot toot is from thad kamarorowski which you guys should just read he had a very long very good comment I edited this down to some of the finer points I said first off I think you overstate how UPA showed that it could be done cheaper given that UPA cartoons were notoriously over budget even though that's the irony it ultimately did lead to cheap limited animation what they were showing was that animation could be done differently and in the style of modern artists and that was what made the biggest impact with better directors and designers at other studios i'm also pretty sure

most modern creators were influenced by the imitators especially early tv not upa itself the first fox and crow cartoon the The Fox and the Grapes, was directed by Frank Tashlin and is in a league ahead of all of the other Screen Gems cartoons. It was also cited by Chuck Jones as an influence on his Roadrunner series, so I urge you to give it another chance.

And speaking of Chuck Jones, UPA truly is from his seed. He was the most innovative of the 40s director shorts, not just with his posing and approach to movement but design take a look at all his cartoons from the dover boys period to see proto upa starting to sprout lastly we covered upa ourselves on cartoon logic last year that's his podcast with bob jakes and they discussed the dreary but still great christopher crumpet in detail listeners interested in more chat and not a ton of overlap with bob and henry's great podcast check it out and then he links to it

that is true i listened to that episode when it was new uh maybe like over six months ago i don't recall all of it but i do know that uh bob jakes really he does not like upa but he appreciates the artistry he just finds the cartoons boring yeah i can see i can see the artsy fartsyness of like that's why if you're guys who prefer merry melodies and seeing you know tech savory characters bash each other in the head uh the art artfulness of a christopher crumpet even is like yeah wouldn't it be funny if they hit each other in the head i i thought also shared with me uh privately a quote i had not heard from bill melendez where he was asked in some interview why did uba shut down

and he was like did you see the stuff they made come on that's why it shut down it was unsustainable but yeah that that makes sense but yeah i think if you guys want to learn more from the uh cartoon historian side of guys who are super experts on that era of animation definitely check out that and bob's cartoon logic podcast out there and that is it for this episode of talk to the audience again we are so uh we're over indulging on podcasts for the next couple of months because every week there will be three new podcasts a week in the last week of the month there'll be four new podcasts so yes new talking to the hill you just started listening to it we're almost done recording it it's why hey you're the best is yet to come we've had so much fun talking about this season so many

great episodes oh my gosh and just so much stuff coming on the horizon like shrek yeah shrek get a life she dragon yes yeah god too many too many to list and and may's even better and boy we have some big guests coming your way next week it's gonna be the stars are coming out to shine on talking simpsons because we got some of our biggest guests ever coming up over the next like two or three months yes we recorded so many of these in advance we're we're super proud of them we hope you guys enjoy them too you might might have had teases of who some of these people might be when the stuff we talked about in this episode follow all the clues.

Put the pieces together yourself. But yes, thanks for listening. We'll see you next month on another episode of Talk to the Audience. We'll see you then. Wow. Infotainment.