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

Episode Date: June 2, 2021

Summer's about to begin, so grab a Long Island Ice Tea and listen along for our monthly community podcast! We chat about all the Simpsons news from May (from Star Wars to Swartzwelder), we preview some of our fun upcoming podcasts, we chat about all our fun adventures in the last month, AND we respond to some of our favorite Patreon comments. So don't be like Swartzwelder and be silent for decades, listen along 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. who is here with me today as always bb8's best friend henry gilbert and in case you don't know this is our monthly community podcast in this podcast we talk about what's happening in the simpsons world and in our world and then we respond to your questions and comments on the last month's worth of episodes and welcome to the summer yeah summertime is here it's yellow guy summer at talking simpsons network uh and uh you you know, hopefully you're like a lot of people in America now and you maybe can even enjoy some stuff in the summer if you're fully vaccinated. As of today, I am now fully vaccinated.

Huzzah! Yes, and I walked here without a mask, although indoors and everywhere else I'll put a mask on, but it was just so nice to smell the goddamn air again. The CDC told you you could do it, Bob, so you're safe. I have my permission slip you know what people said they got emotional upon getting the vaccine i didn't i just i'm so dead inside i'm just like fine that hurt a little bit whatever but when i smelled the nice sea air

walking around berkeley i did get a little teared up i was like i i've been robbed of my senses for the past 15 months you've been breathing your own uh breath back yes this whole time yeah no i went out you know when i got my second shot i i felt good i listened to like some of my favorite like happy songs to like celebrate like whoo like uh of course the the fry favorite i'm walking on sunshine wow uh yeah i i felt pretty good about i've been i've been vaxxed for uh fully vaxxed for the entirety of May, and I actually did do something to celebrate it, too. But, well, I'll just leave that as a tease for the listener for later in this episode. But I hope if you're able to get the vaccine that you have been able to, and I hope you don't have, say, a shitty boss who would never give you a day off or two to go get a shot.

Or a shitty country that won never give you a day off or two to go get a shot or a shitty country that won't let you get a shot yep yeah i hope uh hope that's possible for you you know what are those tokyo olympics happening they still seem to be saying they will word of word on the street is that just now they're starting to vaccinate people 65 years and older uh you gotta get on the ball come on japan no and i i and I don't think the issue in Japan is a lack. I don't know. I don't know enough about this, but I had heard it wasn't similar to, you know, there's some other countries where they just don't have a lot of the vaccine. But I don't think that's entirely the issue with Japan's rollout.

I'm not really sure. But yeah, I mean if they want the olympics they need it now they need everyone vaccinated right now they can't push back the olympics anymore because i want to eventually go back to that country yeah no well and i think today at the time of this recording on may 25th that they like america gave the directive of like don't go to japan right now like don't don't travel there which i i can't i couldn't anyway and a friend of the show who does some of the art for the show maddie cop she is still waiting to go to japan for her job so we're we're rooting for you maddie i know you'll get to be there someday uh anyway this this month of simpsons it was well there were a couple big ones yeah but not uh not a huge number of news stories like lots of other months there was one

of the most amazing news stories of all time in terms of simpsons history in that the legendary john swartzwalder gave his first ever interview with the new yorker via email and he is just as funny as you would think he is it was really great like i when that popped up in my feed in the morning and then i retweeted it and got honestly a lot of engagement. Cause I was one of the first people to tweet it out. Uh, but like, like I got retweeted by Simpsons writers because they, they were in shock. Like I saw Bill Oakley was like, I cannot believe this happened.

Like people who have met John Swartz Welder in person, even they were like, no way. I can't believe it. It was also funny timing because we had just had a bunch of Swartzwelder in person, even they were like, no way. I can't believe it. It was also funny timing because we had just had a bunch of Swartzwelder talk on the episode that posted the week after with Tim Kalpakis because he'd also, you know, in his time working at Gracie, had gotten to see John Swartzwelder in person. He's like, the myth, the legend right there. I did enjoy his comments about Gr grimy in that he says he was

asking for it and he got it he got it he has no sympathy for frank grimes oh man it was i loved him saying to like oh you know there's some really hardcore fans of simpson sometimes they're outside my window even and i really i think too because the interview was via email he could be as funny in writing as he always is and he really is so he's confirmed real and also his twitter account is actually real too i couldn't believe that i was sure that had to be as real as the dave chapelle and bill murray ones i mean even though carolyn omine had told us too that that really was him i still couldn't believe it and but seeing it imprint into the new yorker i couldn't i couldn't i couldn't

accept it still uh but yeah so now if you want to follow the official john sforzwelder account it's really just him promoting his books and and i hope he never gets an avatar i want him to reject having an avatar i i do love uh yeah he's on twitter and of course still writing books so now i'm inspired to read more of those books yeah me too and i i have to say you know massive respect from uh you know one uh journalist to another to mike sacks the the uh the interviewer and the writer of the piece he said afterwards it took him uh like 10 years of follow-ups in the emails and stuff like he'd i think he had said that he had started with getting swartz welder's contact info for some comment in an article and for the longest time was pushing him like please let me interview you everybody wants to know all these things i bet swartz

welder has an aol address i we've gotten other simpsons writers with aol addresses so i bet he they locked down that email like in 1996 and they've had it ever since. And Mike Sachs did the hardcore fan thing of, hey, I heard this story about you. Is this true? I heard this story about you. Is this true? We got those answers. And I like too that he seems both normal, more normal than you'd think, but also still kind of weird.

Yeah, he's a fun kook. And I love John Schwarzwalder. So please check that out at The New Yorker. And, you know, it's the best of times and it's the worst of times in simpsons news because on may 4th have you heard this pun before may the fourth be with you well it's star wars day yes and that used to mean something to some people but now this uh entails that a short was made to promote star wars and it's part of the maggie shorts collection yep and it was called The Force Awakens From Its Nap, directed by the great David Silverman. I will say this was not made for me, but I'm trying to be nice about this, but it upset

me. And you were in the room when we were watching this. Yeah, we watched it together and I was like, yeah, boy, there's that. I mean, okay. I guess, you know, it was, it was cute and all and i you know i i i really appreciate what silverman tries to do with 2d simpsons animation that it really can't do anymore i like that a lot but yeah i mean this kind of corporate synergy thing is uh depressing in a way yes yes and i mean uh it does i guess it feels like an ad for star wars which it is it is it is an ad for Star Wars, which it is. It is. It is an ad for Star Wars. And I was upset throughout.

And then once we got to the end and the Gracie film logo is there and Mickey Mouse is in the audience of the Gracie films logo, I said, fuck you. Yes. I said, fuck this. This sucks. Now, I read Al Jean gave a behind the scenes on it and they said that it all came together in just a period of a few months. Like it was January. Disney okayed the idea. They actually said they wanted to have a Grogu appearance in it.

They were told, no, you can't do that. They're too protective of him, but they could have BB-8 appear. It's the goddamn Simpsons. Yeah, the BB-8 appearance feels like an ad for BB-8, honestly. Like, oh, it's fun. They'll team up with Maggie. Well, it's a purely the bb-8 appearance feels like an ad for bb-8 honestly like oh it's fun and they'll team up with maggie but well it's a purely on model bb-8 it's not a simpsonized bb-8 that yeah how bb-8 would appear in anything else this feels so anti-simpsons to me that's what upset me about it in that it just feels like something they were obligated to do or that they

happily agreed to do because they couldn't back out of it you know the real bring down on it for me was when we watched it over the credits they had those very funny drawings of the rest of the family doing things and the look i like seeing you know homer drinking with the max rebo band yeah that made me chuckle now i mean are those easy pops for a star wars hardcore yes absolutely they are but those made me laugh more than just like diaper jokes like yeah I'm just tired of diaper jokes it was it's all the jokes were what if this was that

and I don't even know if this is in the episode or the short but like oh what if R2D2 was a was a diaper genie that's pretty funny write it down it's going in it just felt like a bunch of easy jokes and I watched it then Nina was asking me it's like oh is it just a Simpsons in Star Wars land I said no that would have been better instead it's Maggie at a Star Wars themed daycare that happens to also be real Star Wars and I feel like this is not the showcase for this kind of satire or parody but

in 2019 one of the most hated movies of all time came out and that was Rise of the Skywalker no jokes about that in your Simpspson star wars thing not one little tiny joke not even comic book guy showing up to make a little riff on it nope no it's it's your fault for not liking it bob it upsets me because i feel like no no no we have to forget star wars is still good star wars is now all the tv shows you like and maybe there'll be movies again but that movie never happened and maybe it did happen and hey maybe you liked it you can't remember but here's maggie dancing around uh maggie remembers why star wars i mean it ends with a a joke list but uh but a positive list of like why star wars always rules or whatever and it's like there's always two sons and there's you know it's it's

just it was it was too fluffy definitely it it lacked the bite you'd expect from even simpsons jokes about something loving that they love the parody that was too late they did in like 2004 2005 which was galactic wars which was just a joke about episode one that had way more bite to it like you're you're this is this we have gone beyond the era of simpsons saying fox sucks they they are totally in disney's pocket pocket. It upsets me because I want them to make jokes at the expense of their owners and it feels like they're not allowed to do that anymore. No. When you told me they

weren't allowed to use Grogu, I was like, you guys are the fucking Simpsons. Well, you know, they gotta play ball with their... Well, I mean, I guess, you know, when you mentioned Nina's asking, like, oh, did they just go to Galaxy's Edge? You know, this... Roseanne had to go to galaxy's edge you know this rosanne had to go to disneyland yeah like all these things but then they made jokes about it being like a

secret prison sure sure that's uh i uh well bob unfortunately you better get used to this because uh aljean hints that this is only the beginning they got a lot more plans what else can they promote for their parent company well aljean said you know i'm not saying but i am a pretty big fan of marvel comics and aljean is it i would say aljean wasn't pretending to be a giant star wars fan boy because i think he was too old by the time star wars came out he was like in his early 20s so i think he thought he was too cool for it but he like aljean is not faking when he loves Spider-Man in old Marvel comics

he really does it's just it's the low hanging fruit and I have sympathy for them because they probably can't say no to this and they probably have to play ball in a very friendly way but it before I watch this my thought was like oh what is there was it is there pacifier a lightsaber of course it is yes of course it was

I think David silverman is trying his best with a mandate and he's you know i i respect him so much he's an animation legend but yeah it's uh i mean though too hey think of it this way wouldn't i might prefer this to seeing things like the squad singing a song to Donald Trump. Yes. You know? Yes. If one or the other has to exist. Or, yeah, any political shorts, just don't do that anymore.

Yeah. You know, Trump's gone, so they don't even have to feel the... For guys like Al Jean, they can just say like, oh, everything's fine now. Nothing, their politics is over again. I don't have to think about politics or make political comments. Let's not even mention who the president is yeah it's fine but yes i'm sorry for being so negative up front but

it did feel like the show i liked is now just the puppet for disney yeah i mean well maybe the marvel one will have a more bite to it but let me guess the infinity donuts oh no they'd have to pay a voice actor for that yeah no no one's gonna talk in these bob yes uh i would guess that baby gerald will be a thanos type guy who snaps away the pacifiers and he collects pacifiers that are the colors that are there you know what because of this it inspired me to actually watch clips of the family guy star wars parody and i thought this is a million times funnier because they found like this is a platform for discussions about things that happen in star wars that are kind of weird yeah there's actual like good i it's weird to compliment family guy but there actually are good jokes in there i uh unironically

i think after watching this i pulled up the clip of stewie being explained the small hole in the flaw they're like so i mean do you want to fix it he's like well we can fix it real soon if if price is no option if price is no barrier okay we'll get an estimate i mean thumb wars had more cutting jokes than this short no i i do i think george lucas was cooler with being made fun of than disney i also think that like i think is a lot we all made jokes about him he was a weird guy and the emperor of his own universe for sure but george luke is at a better sense of humor than corporate suits who just say never joke about us yeah never it would have been a better short if it started with like sideshow bob has returned somehow or whatever just yes the dead speak yes so bob is that movie sucks yeah we're not allowed to talk about it anymore

now i uh god all that shitty shit like oh general snoke was actually a bunch of snokes and he was he's alive somehow uh you better read a book and figure out why i enjoyed the first two movies i'm not even a big star wars guy but because of that third movie i just never want to see them again ever i'm good i'm good yeah i i really did like force awakens and the last jedi there i absolutely understand critiques of both of those movies sure there's lots to critique but when i saw rise skywalker like it reminded me of seeing one of the prequels of just halfway through i just start laughing at it because my brain takes it as illegitimate yeah well this isn't real come on uh but uh and then uh the season 32 ended this uh this month as well the finale just came out i watched all three of the episodes uh i'll talk about it later but i was on a flight this week and so i i had an excuse to watch all the new episodes

uh the first one was a flash forward one where lisa decides to not go to college and it's the best of the three because it actually is about marge and lisa stuff and marge uh future marge is mad that 18 year old lisa is not living the dreams that Marge wanted to live through her. And Marge actually gets like a really good speech in it. And then it turns into a sequel to Bart to the Future. It's really weird. Really? Okay. Okay. If you don't want to be spoiled, then skip ahead a little bit.

But Lisa decides not to go to college, which then, of course, invalidates Lisa's wedding. But it shows that even though she didn't go to a college, she becomes a community activist in teaching kids. And that takes her on a travel to the White House eventually 20 years later. And so Lisa becomes president, designed the same as her president. Look in Bart to the future. Except in this future, Bart is not a loser. He is the head of a marijuana distribution company. Seems about right.

And him and Lisa even get high in the White House, man. It shows how much things have changed from the final joke of that episode being like legalize it. So that was an okay episode. Then there's an episode where Stephen Fry is the guest star, and he plays an English spy who has been hunting Abe Simpson for 50 years. It is a very tortured parody of the third man, and it's not that great. I think really it counts on Stephen Fry being good at doing multiple different UK accents that it's like what okay now oh steven

could you do one from northern england how about southern england oh how about scottish you know i love the third man great movie i've read the book uh the time for parodies of that has ended that was the 90s the last time i've seen i've seen i've seen them picking the brain parody but i've seen so many other parodies of it. Nobody gets it. Like, we're the losers who get it and can recognize it. But they also get very in your, it's weird. They watch, they insert live action pictures from the third man into the movie or into the episode.

Like, Abe is watching on TV the ending of the third man, and it's just the film. I don't like that. They did that with the Kill a Mockingbird episode, Like Abe is watching on TV the ending of The Third Man and it's just the film. I don't like that. They did that with the Kill a Mockingbird episode, Dadicus Finch. It's just like, no, there should not be live action footage in The Simpsons. It's kind of a sequel in that way. Yeah. A chill run up my spine, sorry.

Also, I will say Maurice LaMarche comes back and does a fine appearance as Orson Welles. He's always funny as Orson Welles. But it was the weakest of the three. And then the season finale from Sunday sees Moe in a John Wick parody. Now, that sounds fun. Yeah. Moe is part of this collective of bartenders. And then he gets excommunicated from it and hunted down just like happens to John Wick and uh it's

it's a fun little episode it's it's uh it's all right the funniest bit to me is how uh they got Ian McShane as a guest to play the character basically that he plays in John Wick and I love Ian McShane in anything but uh it was a fine little episode it also was interesting because this season has been marked by the recasting uh it had major parts for bumblebee man hibbert and carl so i was like wow this is almost like you're showing off all of the recastings you did they they bark goes to a bumblebee man show and it's just fully in spanish It is not the joke high school Spanish that Americans recognize. It is just people speak Spanish to another

for like two minutes straight in the show. It's a very different choice than we're used to in the series. So, you know, if I could rank them, I'd say the Lisa Future one that also had Warner Herzog in it as a returning voice. Then the Mo john wick one

then at the bottom the uh the abe spy one also because that is just like a bad ending it just it's a real uh classic like how do we end this sort of no resolution like they just shrug their shoulders so there was a recent gas scare i believe it it's over now because just to put it briefly, not doing any real research, there's a big pipeline you see. And that pipeline was attacked by ransomware. So they interrupted service on the pipeline because otherwise they couldn't figure out how to bill people. And because of that, gas prices spiked briefly for like one week, two weeks, something like that. We are spoiled babies in the Bay Area in that we don't have cars. So we don't buy gas but a lot of things surfaced uh a lot of videos surfaced viral videos

about people you know putting gas in improper containers like plastic bags and there was a people posting this uh the screen grab from a simpsons episode from a 2010 episode of homer homer pouring gas from the nozzle into his trunk to store up gas which you know it tied into all of these stories of like you know i think it was some governmental body tweeted please don't put gas in plastic bags but it is uh you know if you're going to store gasoline there are very proper ways to do it i mean especially the gas hoarding thing it really ties into like a lot of post-apocalyptic fear stuff yeah like i guess if you watch enough walking dead you realize the main thing you're thinking all the time is like how do we get gas like how do you siphon gas how do you collect it how do you get gas out of another car into this

one yeah but and i was seeing like a lot of the videos and things that were going around were actually old clips of people doing that during previous gas scares i know it was like it was a fake viral moment of a gas scare pretty lame if you ask me but the but snopes was on top of it making sure to say simpsons did not predict it the joke in that scene isn't about hoarding gas or a gas scare and also homer would have the worst reaction to any sort of crisis so i mean it's not like they predicted it oh yeah it's like homer is indicative of the worst idiot and we have plenty of idiots around uh as you know his his main plan in a crisis just like exactly just sit on the roof with a with a chair uh also uh related to

animation news uh related to what a cartoon our sister podcast is that venture brothers is getting a finale movie along with metalocalypse and also aquatine hunger force as well yeah it was so you know we talked about it in our venture brothers what a cartoon a few months back but the show was canceled very sadly they were all planning on another season on an eighth season and then it got canceled and so it was announced this month that adult swim is going to make movies that will first be actually released direct-to-video and then put on hbo max okay so no no theatrical plans for these i don't believe oh man because well i mean that's a different level of budget. That's true. Well, one of the biggest thrills for me was seeing the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie in a theater.

Oh, sure. Thinking, I can't believe I'm doing this. I can't believe the same cheap Flash animation is in front of me, but like 30 times bigger. I'm happy to know that at least getting a physical release first because at least for Adventure Brothers, and I think too for Aqua Teen and Metalocalypse they get a lot of special features like the uh Publican Hammer very into doing special features for physical releases so I'm hoping they'll be the same in their finale movie yeah I'm not sure about uh Venture Brothers guys but it did sound like Brendan Small got screwed oh yeah he really

hired on Metalocalypse number one albums with that show and they just kind of dumped it yeah i the venture brothers guys got off a little better than him i think but uh but it looks like adult swim is at least doing a little good by them of they were probably i would think in all cases they were offered like look we're not we're not gonna spend you know this much for a whole nother season but we'll spend you know let's say a third of that on one 90 minute thing and then you guys can you know wrap up your storylines give it a well also you know it helps for streaming having a real ending is what you need for binging and so uh it actually makes venture brothers a worse target uh for binge opportunities if it doesn't

have an end that's true that's true like what's the point yeah exactly if it ends on a cliffhanger the person who watched a all uh 60 something episodes in a weekend they're like what this is where it ends i hate this app i don't subscribe speaking of apps and streaming services now henry i know you know a lot about this it's kind of new info to me so uh at&t is getting out of the content game which makes people think they were in it yeah but they were because they own everything they do though now they're going to own one less thing so for the longest time for the last five six years you know there already was the Warner Media Monopoly, like Warner AOL, all that, this giant conglomerate.

Well, AT&T, the phone company, you know, they were like, we need to diversify and apparently the government's not going to stop us so we can actually own a media company while also selling those things on our phone service, which, you know, should be illegal and not even allowed. But AT&T could do it so they're gonna buy Warner it took them forever to officially buy Warner it even got

like slowed down by a year or two by Trump uh which it's one of those things where it's like well he should have just prevented it entirely but he's not gonna really stop big business but it was framed as like he's mad at cnn so he's making it hard for the yeah which you know but seriously it should be illegal like it's a broken clock thing fuck donald trump but it should be illegal but so at&t eventually did get to become the full owner of warner and you know we've heard on the record and off the record stories from lots of folks we know that at&t being the owner of cartoon network and adult swim and a lot of other things caused uh countless projects to be fucked like to either be told you have to end now because you don't fit

what at&t's vision is or we'd love to renew you because AT&T does like what you're doing but they're the merger's not done yet so we can't do it or you know this pilot has three million views on YouTube but it's not really what AT&T wants like all these things if you're mad that a show got canceled AT&T probably did it if you're upset of how like a pilot you saw on Cartoon Network or Adult Swim didn't happen or all of these things it it just sounds very frustrating from what i've seen again on and off the record and then all of a sudden this month at&t announces out of nowhere that only a year into launching hbo max they're like hey we're spinning off hbo and all of that tv and movie

stuff discovery will have it. The Discovery Channel will now merge with that giant thing that is HBO. Team Discovery Channel. Yes. Now Team Discovery Channel will be the owner of HBO, and that'll be the HBO Max people, which it does give them more content. It gives them the reality bullshit

that uh discovery has but all of a sudden after hbo max and all of these things got messed with because of at&t's involvement did you like anything that started dc superhero or not like something that happened well at&t was ultimately the reason some of that happened like and now at&t is like nah we don't want to do it anymore I hate all these cowards getting into the content game because they're just they can't do anything and this reminds me of like the world of video games we're an Amazon just like we're Amazon we have all the money in the world let's make video games whoops it turns out we can't yes Google does the same thing we're Google we have everyone's info and all the money

in the world let's make video games we can't do that now Netflix is like we're gonna make video games you're never gonna make a fucking video game get out of here every time every time they want some yeah we've from our old jobs in the gaming world we know this really well like all these these executives they see if you're at amazon or at&t and you see like you're making x percentage off of some movie that showed on your platform or whatever, that's not good enough for you. You're like, well, especially because the, the name of the game in all business is exponential growth. And so, uh, you, you need to make more money in the way it always goes, because there's only one way to think in those meetings is, exponential growth is if we spend into debt on content

creation somehow we'll make a hundred percent of the pie off of this and we'll make way more money than if we license something to netflix and it's nuts it never works out like the game one is just another example because unlike where you say i have a phone pay me to use it yeah that's not the same as saying i had a movie yeah i'm sure you'll want to watch it like the as much as they try to remove art from all of this art matters in some way like artistic skill matters at some level that's why i'm glad that at least for now patreon is not like we're going to make our own content yes turn and tune into the patreon streaming network no i mean also that yeah i saw this shared by friend of the show adam johnson from media watchdog fair but it was a list of like the

the consolidation of billionaire companies over the podcast space too and you know i mean uh i'm not worried about it because for the same reason they can't really figure this shit out yeah and the money we make is really good money for me and you all like any executive a mid-level executive wouldn't like touch this money for uh like uh if he wouldn't like stop to pick it up off the ground this won't even pay for his alimony yes yeah this our money is not money that matters to rich people and it's it's just really you can just see same with podcasts that these these executives see oh conan o'brien just invented podcasts so or like oh look how much joe rogan is making from spotify just like well that's that's him that's that's nobody else yeah that's and also that spotify paying and thinking like well everybody if this is how

big joe rogan is now we can make him even bigger instead of what they should think is joe rogan is as big as he's gonna get and he got therean is now, we can make him even bigger instead of what they should think is Joe Rogan is as big as he's going to get. And he got there without you and you will actually make him one of the big reasons Joe Rogan is so big is he is, of course, like a counter reactionary, giving him more prestige or saying like, and now he's on a big website that limits his growth. I mean, I'm not a fan of him at all, but there's a lot of episodes of his show that they don't have on spotify yes yes there are because of who was on them no i know and that's because joe rogan's like a a stupid meathead he's pink shrek yeah he's pink shrek and he just goes like wow really wow like that that's just his entire yeah this is off topic but i i just love how it looks like he records all of his podcasts in a rotisserie oven. It's so weird.

Bob, that is peak physical conditioning. That's true. He could kick all of our asses. You're doing hot yoga and recording a podcast at the same time. And also you're stoned to the gills every second of the day. It makes for good podcasting. And in final news we have this month, Bruceuce tim is getting the batman the animated series gang back together but jj abrams is the foul caboose on this train yes yeah it's uh so uh it's a new series called batman the caped crusader bruce tim is an executive producer on it but so are

jj abrams and matt reeves which uh you know i saw this was rumored for months now i think we when whenever we last did a beat dcau show i think batman beyond i mentioned you know kevin smith had said i'm hearing rumors they're gonna do a reboot season of it and now it's it's been kind of turned into this which is it sounds like in the style of the show but also its own thing and then uh so jj abrams like he's he's a producer of the next superman movie too uh i think that he fucked up star wars so bad that he was able to they're like get out of here you can't do star wars anymore and he just walked across the street and says, oh, hey, can I run your DC movies? Your DC movies are fucked up.

They're like, yeah, do it. If he was a woman, he'd be in prison in Hollywood. But because he's JJ, he can just hop from place to place. And Matt Reeves is the director of the new Batman movie that's coming out. So I get why they'd have some input, but it's part of my like annoyance with Hollywood these days in general that animation doesn't need a famous name attached to it but they always have to have it I can't stand it my I have issues with this because I don't like the spiritual

successors to the animated series beyond is fine beyond was just an extension of that but things that are similar but not enough my thing has always been just make more of that that was perfect because i mean people think about what do you like about batman the animated series the voice acting the character designs the music the writing one thing i think people don't think about is every episode is a little film noir yeah that is what makes it special it was never a 90s thing it was always drawing back to the past this is what that should be and if they miss a 90s thing. It was always drawing back to the past. This is what that should be. And if they miss that aspect, I think that's what everyone misses when they're trying to call back to that series.

They forget the film noir aspect. Yeah, and the episodic, just tight little story. But that, Bob, doesn't sound like you could fit a long arcing mystery box plot into it, could you? All right, the streaming thing has ruined every storytelling device. Well, and JJ loves a mystery box. He should not be allowed to work no he really shouldn't uh but he's he's still very very rich uh and well and i was thinking back to you know freaking 30 years ago bruce tim and eric radomski who were like in their late 20s they went to gene mccurdy all they were were like you know mid-level guys on tiny tunes and they brought her a pitch of like hey i'm sure you want to do a new batman cartoon because the hit movie well look at these cool designs and then gene mccurdy was a brave enough executive just

say like this looks fucking good go for it guys and she gives these two guys now they did put alan burden in charge who did have experience running a show, but that was it. The majority of the people who worked on that show were under 30, and now Bruce Timm, who's in his mid-60s, even he has to have a babysitter

of the real movie guys like J.J. and Reeves. And that old series, it was not executive produced by Tim Burton. The only Batman connection of the era was Shirley Walker,ley walker right because she worked with danny elfman yeah they and they were very lucky to get her but yeah you're you're totally right like tim burton didn't want like i think most of them i don't want to say about burton but because he actually is from animation but most film directors wouldn't give time a day to the cartoon boys they'd be like yeah that's the kids thing on tv who cares like and in that kind of wild west like bruce tim and all of

the the and paul dini and radomski and all those great guys they were able to get away with a lot of shit and every time since then it has to be harder for them and then here we get this and it's this you know it's that monkey's paw kind of thing where wow bruce tim well though i mean also like bruce tim has been making dc stuff for the last 20 years you know all these direct-to-video things but this prestige batman thing uh i just i don't feel like jj is needed if they're gonna if they're gonna put him with somebody how about an animator in their 30s as a co-executive producer how about that yeah like a young visionary i think at least you know coming this month is that a uh the new he-man show that

like kevin smith is involved in that's how i first heard like oh kevin smith he-man show and when kevin smith has been very upfront in the interviews for the last month of like well yeah i mean i i'm a producer on it but it's really this guy and this guy this guy's the showrunner these are the animators like he's very respectful to the animators and i don't get that same kind of energy from jj it's uh actually that he man almost looks like more of a dcau spiritual successor than this because most of the cast are actors from the old batman and superman cartoons including Mark Hamill. I am looking. I will certainly watch it, but it gives me pause for sure.

I'll give it a chance. So let's talk about news about us. Hopefully we'll be in a better news for this news because it's all good stuff. Yes. And so number one thing, we were on We Hate Movies this month talking about the Simpsons movie.

A fantastic episode. All those guys are great. And of course, we must remind you, we will be covering the movie on our own when we get to that in the Simpsons movie. A fantastic episode. All those guys are great. And of course, we must remind you, we will be covering the movie on our own when we get to that in the Simpsons timeline. But we got a lot of new listeners because of that episode. So welcome aboard if you're a new listener.

We got a lot of new patrons. So it was nothing but good for us. And we thank everybody at We Hate Movies for having us on the show. It was an honor to be on it. Oh man, was it? I had so much fun too. It was so great goofing around with the guys and

and talking about the movie like somewhat in depth but yeah i uh and also you know if you're one of our new listeners who came over from this uh you know we've got some new ones coming up with uh eric siska and jupin and sadak uh but we also have a big back catalog i think they've been on like all total like 12 or 13 episodes of our podcast so definitely everybody should uh if you're you're a new listener go back through the archives and check out all the ones where uh the cool dudes from we hate movies were our guests on it and please check out their shows we love them and what they do and now they're all recording in person again uh it's so great yeah just like me and bob yeah so now we are

talking about what's happening with us and uh we are working way way ahead and we are nearly done with the august uh crop of talking simpsons and the same for what a cartoon on our new schedule so we are just slamming through the summer because uh obviously if you're listening to the show you know that i am separated from my wife because of the goddamn border. And one of these days I'm going to visit her for a month before I eventually move out there in like 2022. Who knows? But because of that, we are planning to buy me some time off whenever I can do that. So hopefully on June 20th, they will open the border for husbands.

Vaccinated husbands can go. Why can't the vaccinated just enter? I don't understand that. Come on, on trudeau what the fuck yeah but put down the shoe polish and start governing again now i uh yeah actually next week we're about to record a couple october podcasts even we're going slightly out of order for uh for some guest picks but and we got some really cool guests coming your way boy do it and for retronauts on my end i am almost done with summer as well so i am working very far ahead so i can just just drop everything for a month but uh yes it's happening with me as for us uh let's talk

about the what a cartoon june schedule so we have a lot of great episodes coming up i think these are all uh patron picks because we're going through the rest of our patron picks because we closed that tier down and we're going through all the rest of their picks for uh up and through the fall i think are going to be all patron picks yeah and it's uh it's a lot of really fun picks uh though uh the first one is very historically important but this pick also does come with a content warning if you don't want to hear about that is true subjects it is uh donald duck's defuse face yes usually seen out of context certain screenshots of donald duck dressed a You don't want to hear about some stretchy subjects. It is Donald Duck's Diffuser's Face. Yes, usually seen out of context.

Certain screenshots of Donald Duck dressed a certain way or wearing certain symbols. We're going to explain to you why he's doing that and all the trivia and information behind this very now offensive but also historically important piece of propaganda. Yes, yeah. And then we go deep into the history of Donald Duck and Walt Disney, learn from propaganda, and a lot of touchy subjects, but it's worth talking about, and we appreciate our patron for picking that one. Up next, I can't decide if this is more offensive, Capital Critters, the episode Head and Mouth. Yes, Capital Critters, the 1992 also ran primetime animated cartoon. And yes, most commonly known as one of the tombstones in the Simpsons Treehouse before opening. We're going to talk about what this was, why it failed, and boy, it's a miserable show.

It's an amazing flop. Yes. It really is. If you enjoyed our Cool World episode, we are just as miserable on this one. And we're joined by the premium patron who picked it, Professor G who was a lot of fun to chat with too so yes uh let's remember the very weird race parable episode as well and that that's uh in both those cases defure's face and hat and mouse both are just available on youtube you can just find them right out there creators have disowned them uh and then on the third week of june we have the sailor moon r episode mirror mirror on the wall because previously we did

sailor moon in the early 2019 we didn't talk about the classic deke dub we talked about it but we didn't discuss it in detail this time we are focusing on the classic 1995 version of this that aired in america before it was redubbed in the early 2010s yes so you're gonna hear a lot of ontario accents in this uh one but i i forgot how wild sailor moon's accent is i can't even place it uh yeah it's uh we need a real canada history buff to explain specifically what province it is but yeah sailor moon are uh that one you're gonna have have to do a little digging to find the Deke version. If you want to watch the Japanese language version, that is on Hulu and other places under the title Steal a Kiss from Mamoru and Project Snow White. So, but yes, that was another great $50 patron pick as well. And finally, the end of the month will be our What a Cartoon Movie episode because you voted for it.

And yes, it is 1997's hercules as part of our it's kicking off our summer of the disney renaissance of the 90s and hercules is the first entry in that three-month series unbelievably it defeated beauty and the beast lion king and the little mermaid it really does put the glad and gladiator it shows that we're slightly older than the other millennials listening to this uh but yeah we uh we just recorded the first half of that one today actually and uh as a very interesting history and of course you can find hercules on disney plus like everything it's good to watch a movie that i kind of want to see instead of cool world again we must mention that again because it's coming up uh maybe you already heard it by now. If you're on the free feed, yeah. But if you're hearing this on Patreon, you're just a few days away from all the fun we had on Cool World. We'll be in a much better mood during Hercules.

And so what's coming up next month for What a Cartoon Movie? Well, this is going to be a binary yes-no vote for you out there, you Five the Larned Up patrons, in that we are going to ask you, should we do The Hback of notre dame for the 25th anniversary yes or no because it came out in 1996 making this movie 25 years old so yes an interesting and pretty risque movie for uh walt disney in the 90s and quite good i love it i love it it's uh it's more grown up than some of their other stuff but it's it's better than pocahontas. And even those, like, hey, who doesn't love hearing Duckman, the gargoyle, as well? There's a song about being tormented by horniness and also, you know, a farting gargoyle played by Jason Alexander, not Jason Gallagher.

That is one of my favorite villain songs, Hellfire. I love that. Yeah, but I guess it'll be up to you patrons it's a 50 50 choice here yes or no do you want us to cover the 25th anniversary of the hunchback of a notre dame in july and that poll will be up very soon if you're listening to this on the patreon so now is the time of the show where we talk about we've been playing and watching outside of podcasts and i don't have a lot to talk about but uh so henry can now respect me as a gamer because after 30 hours i have finally finished the epilogue of

dragon quest 11 a game that took me 120 hours to finish so once that's all over you're given a lot more content i could have played it for 20 more hours i chose not to but i'm officially a pro gamer i can look down upon all those who have not done this because it is a gigantic waste of time. But one that I enjoyed, though I probably wouldn't have done it unless of the COVID pandemic. It is like 30 hours of back padding from the game to you

for being brave enough to play more of it. Like it's, I love Dragon Quest XI. I think I used to say five would be the one I'd tell people to be their first Dragon Quest. Now, no way, it's XI. I think I used to say 5 would be the one I'd tell people to be their first Dragon Quest. Now, no way. It's XI. If you're a normal gamer today, Dragon Quest XI is the perfect starter game to get into the series with. And you would not know there's another 30 hours waiting for you unless you reload your save after you finish the game.

They don't tell you at all. That really is for the hardcores. If you're a hardcore, you know that the ending is never the ending in Dragon Quest. So come back for the real ending. And yeah, being able to just, I won't spoil it either, but just being able to visit every place over again and seeing an entirely new scenario and character detail that calls back to what was in the story, but recontualizes things and in so many interesting ways and then the it's also just this incredible tribute to just the history of dragon quest which is extra cool because of the time we record this tomorrow they might be announcing dragon quest 12 or something else but it's the 35th anniversary news live stream i hope it's a 12 announcement

prove me wrong children that game came out fucking 5 11 came out five years ago in japan so that's how old four years ago four years ago uh so also in terms of gaming i replayed all of the telltale tales of monkey island series because i recorded in a podcast about that with my lovely wife nina and not a lot of other gaming going on because i am busy working ahead on podcasts to get ready for a canadian trip but i can talk about some movies i've been watching. So every week I have a little movie night, remote movie night with my wife. So we kicked off the month with Enchanted, a movie that I never saw in my life. Oh, that's cute.

You know, I don't think I've seen that either. Really? Yeah. That's on Disney+, isn't it? It is not. Oh, wow. I had to get it on Amazon because I think it makes fun of Disney too much. Though not enough in my estimation.

I think they wanted to go a little further but couldn't. That's funny. You know, that's that post-Shrek thing where they're like, we got to make fun of ourselves a little to be taken seriously. Enchanted was a big hit. What I didn't know about it, directed by the director of a Goofy movie. Oh, right. Because he started doing live action right after that.

That's right. Wow. Kevin Lima, yeah. Man, now I really got to check that out. The following week was my birthday week and I was like, I want to watch a weird movie that's uh now i really gotta check that out uh the the following week was my birthday week and i was like i want to watch a weird movie that i haven't seen in a while that nina has never saw so i watch whatever happened to baby jane it rules i still love it it kicks ass please watch it don't even look about what it's about it's an old movie with some great

performances dark horror it's amazing i love it it's really funny you watch that within a week of us recording the episode worst episode ever where yes the comic book guy says now i know what happened to baby g that's what made me think of watching the movie again and uh really the breakout star of that movie is victor buono uh an amazing little performance in a very small role i love that movie uh so it was nina's turn to watch a movie next and we watched the movie Save the 2004 send up of Christianity and Christian schooling and I thought it was okay I thought it was enjoyable I would have really loved it as a teen like an edgy teen oh yeah and I think it felt a lot edgier in the George W Bush evangelical Christian era when it came out in 2004 I can

tell you that for sure because I did see that movie in 2004 and my my first visit to berkeley i saw it in that theater right over there yeah i moved to berkeley in 2006 but then i visited in 2004 and one of the things i was like wow saved is showing i couldn't see that at the amc near me and in florida yeah i mean in in George W. Bush's reelection year, seeing this thing that says like, hey, hardcore Christianity is bad. Let's make fun of it like that. I enjoyed that. But also it's still at the end of the day, I was like, hey, you don't have to be too mean to gay people or to Christians. And I went to Catholic school and this is not a movie about Catholic school. It's more of like a Protestant thing. But I was like, they're not nearly mean enough to this girl.

Yeah, this is not about Catholic school. I went to Catholic school and my experience was if this was a Christian school, this should be a lot darker and crueler. It should be like a Todd Sollins movie. Yeah, I think Mandy Moore's character would have been even crueler than she was in the film, I think. And I remember thinking that Susan Sarandon's daughter who's in it was really good. And I was surprised she hasn't done more stuff since then. We looked her up. She's one of those lifestyle people now.

What the fuck? She was a good actor in that movie. I liked her. My theory is you're Susan Sarandon's daughter. If you're not going to act anymore, just don't work. I guess so, yeah. I'm not going to stop you from making money, but I sick of the lifestyle people it's it's not good okay so my my lock of the month bob mackie's lock of the month is the robert zemeckis movie death becomes her because

i'm listening to the blank check podcast there's a lot of episodes i haven't heard i'm going through the zemeckis series and i skipped death becomes her because i remember liking it as a kid but i haven't seen it since then. I rewatched it. So good. So funny. A little messier than the Back to the Future movies because super nerd Bob Gale is not writing it. Sure. But this shows where Robert Zemeckis could have gone if he wasn't constantly chasing Oscar gold. Because the next movie he makes is Forrest Gump.

He learns all the wrong lessons. This is such a fun, high concept, dark comedy that's super cynical. It's about how everyone in L.A. sucks and is an evil demon. yeah it is so good you probably forgot it exists it's on hbo max it is a tight like hour 40 it's hilarious bruce willis when was the last time you saw bruce would give willis give a shit about anything i know he's so he's so like he's he's also a nerd in it yeah it's bruce willis playing a rick moranis character oh and and meryl streep and goldie hawn are so great it's like these two gargoyles who hate each other like they're both when you have two people who uh like oh both female leads in this are awful

people like trying to screw over the other at all times i well now you know we're old i should give that another watch too because as a kid I was like what's this fear of aging I don't understand this like now it hits differently and I understand the themes a lot more but I was surprised by how good it was it's a movie that nobody talks about and again it's cool to see oh Bruce Willis used to care now he's so bored by acting and he's playing the super like macho hero well into his 60s here is an atypical role for him now he's so bored by acting and he's playing the super like macho hero well into his 60s here's an atypical role for him where he's asked to do things he doesn't normally do and it's great well you know also speaking of the wrong lessons learned in it like he uh zemeckis

was like oh anti-aging video effects and special effects to change how a person looks it's also zemeckis continuing down the dark road of special effects that will lead a person looks it's also as a mecca is continuing down the dark road of special effects that will lead him in the wrong direction and uh but boy if he could would have kept making weird dark movies like this and used cars and roger rabbit instead of schmaltzy crap like forrest gump and uh marwen yeah geez i just wish things had turned out different than him but this is just like the end of that part of his career just so fun to watch but that's it for me in terms of entertainment outside of podcasting uh well so i had uh quite a full month of content i enjoyed uh i'll first say i really enjoy that hulu modok show now is it made highly demographically aimed directly at me yes it 100

is it is about a late 30s guy, nerd. Well, definitely his work reminds me of when we worked in a giant corporation as well. Plus, it is full of very deep references to comic books and to 90s rock songs as well. It's really weird. It goes in some uh funny places plus it's full of great uh comedy actors that you know if you're a comedy nerd who listens to too many podcasts like it stars pat noswalt who i know i was just complaining like jj abrams just shows up and takes his job pat noswalt is a famous name attached to this project but he knows marvel

comics like he he's the real deal so he's perfect now what's the story behind this i thought this was canceled ah or it was written and not made so it was the one that lived out of them so yeah it uh one of the last things jeff lobe did as leading marvel television was to okay six shows with hulu that would basically be Marvel's Adult Swim shows. And the production started on them. And then in January, 2020, Marvel television production arm got killed. Kevin Feige's like, everything's on Disney Plus now. And they ended every planned show, which included a Howard the Duck show. But that all got killed in january 2020 except for modok and i really think it was that they were too far along with it plus that it was them working with pat and oswald and

seth green it's a robot chicken company production and i think marvel eventually decided like and let's stay friends with them the rest of the people working on these shows we don't care if we flush away their thing but let's keep a deal going for the okay yeah i know like a lot of scripted shows are just thrown away they wrote an entire season just put in the dumpster but somehow modok got to stick around it and it gets to stay on hulu it's also far too dirty for disney plus it's not for the nice people of disney plus so uh but that i really like it it's it it makes me laugh if you know who the villain the mandrill is you will have good laughs at jokes in this uh so i i give it a thumbs

up i mean also yes it's just an adult swim show if you sure if i told you pat noswalt stars as modok in a show from the robot chicken people you can probably guess the tone and joke style but there's some surprising jokes in there that are go deeper than you'd expect it's it's a real venture brothers kind of feel too um and i watched the first couple episodes of that invincible show and i do like it i want to watch the whole thing just so i can get the memes because the lead characters get memed well sorry the dad of the lead characters get memed a bit uh but i i think i've tapered off a little bit just because it's very close to the comics and i read those comics like 20 years ago when they were new so it has less impact for me but uh it's it's it's also interesting that it's like it's a 44 minute show it's every episode's uh

in the hour format wow animated too yeah yeah and sometimes the animation looks really great and then every once in a while i'm like oh that's real flashy that looks bad but then a really cool scene will happen it's it's real ups and downs the animation in invincible but but every if you read the invincible comics and love them over the last 20 years this i mean because robert kirkman is an executive producer on it it stays very true to those comics and i watched the new netflix movie from sony animation mitchell versus the machine the mitchells versus the machines uh and it's pretty all right it's pretty all right you know what i like the animation quality and style and the clips i've

seen i haven't seen the real movie the the finished movie and i know i will soon uh because i was looking at like storyboard artists uh were posting their storyboards and i love how these 3d characters look like drawn characters and i like how much sony is going for this yes and that like uh i feel like pixar needs to catch up oh yeah yeah even though they're winning oscars i look at soul i'm like soul looks like a quality movie of course i haven't seen it but just visually this looks so much more expressive Oh, yeah, yeah. Even though they're winning Oscars, I look at Soul, I'm like, Soul looks like a quality movie. Of course, I haven't seen it. But just visually, this looks so much more expressive. It pops a lot more for sure, yeah.

And Sony is not afraid of having characters that have dots for pupils. I feel like for whatever reason, CGI people are obsessed with insanely realistic eyeballs and the skulls, even in like coco which i found weird yeah this one's like no if your eyeball is just a if your pupil is just a dot it could be so much more expressive than just like this beautifully crafted iris and everything around the eyeball oh yeah there's there's so in the film there's a lot of energy like that in there and it's and also they worked with a lot of people who i followed on twitter who are like a you know a storyboard artist on gravity falls or on Steven Universe. Once the movie came out, they're like, I can finally talk about how I designed this character four years ago for this movie. It's full of people I really enjoy in it. And it's a Lord and Miller under that umbrella.

So it's that kind of tone of comedy. It's full of that kind of group of actors, voice actors. Maya Rudolph to Annie McBride and Abby Jacobson are voices in it. Eric Andre is a voice in it, too. It's a disenchantment reunion in there. I don't know who said this. Maybe somebody on our Discord. But they were saying this is a better Simpsons movie than the Simpsons movie.

Yeah, I can see that. Yeah, it actually, it's them fighting a bunch of killer robots. It's man. Wow. It actually very much is a Simpsons movie. Yeah. I also will compliment it. I don't want to spoil it too much, but if you're a gay person on Twitter who likes cartoons,

you probably heard that it is a queer, it has queer elements to it. And I'm always wanting more so i'm gonna sound like i can't be satisfied with queer representation and things but uh it it's not gay enough that's what i thought there's a character in it who's gay and i'm like or and walks around with a rainbow butt in the whole movie but they like kind of wink to it too much and they leave it to a post-credits thing and but oppositely it is gayer than any disney animated film ever has been and so it's like i don't know the bar is so low i let's just celebrate as a baby step forward but yeah it's like how every year for the past five years disney has had their first gay character exactly yes and i'm so sick at the very least the uh the gay character in this unlike

pixar's first gay character also isn't a fucking cop which is very uh appreciated uh and then last thing i watched on tv if you're a wrestling fan gotta watch that new season of dark side of the ring where can one watch that uh well if you got hulu the previous seasons are on there or just go to the vice website you can you can watch that's the part of wrestling i want to hear about oh yeah this you will learn so much i think uh you know a really interesting one to watch that just came out was the one about the biggest pro wrestling event that ever happened the largest crowd there ever was because it was for a peace conference thing in North Korea in 1990. And so it had over 100,000 people in attendance.

And it was Antonio Inoki and Ric Flair. And it was a big deal with a lot of weird stuff going on. Wow, that sounds great. Yeah. Look it up on the Vice website. Also, I finally picked back up my my berserk collection this month after you know the tragic passing of its creator and it made me go like oh i really should be reading this series some more when you when you read it it's just like when i read jojo's bizarre adventure that

it clicked like because it's been around for about as long as jojo yeah in both cases once you read it you're like this influenced every video game i've played for the last 30 years like every everybody read i was like oh dark souls now it absolutely makes sense the the style design the buster sword on on cloud it all makes sense but yeah i was very sad to see the passing i believe it's like kintaro mira yeah the guy's name yeah he was doing berserk for uh 32 years taking lots of hiatuses of course and uh far too young in his early, late 50s. And I mean, the cause of death is very similar to the Yoshifumi Kondo one. That really sounds related to it's an aortic dislocation, I believe it is. Caused by high blood pressure?

Yeah, high blood pressure. It is a sign of overwork. And if you look at the art in berserk, oh my God, he had to work himself into the grave to make panels look that amazing. Just these amazing splash pages with entire armies clashing on a battlefield. Yeah, it's insane. Just give it away in like a panel, one panel on a page. And also, on a suggestion of our friend of the show toby jones i learned that you could

buy a collections of the full storyboards of every episode of evangelion and so i uh perhaps spent over 200 dollars well this number keeps going up henry let's say 200 let's put it at that uh on the all five books of it and it's just it really is something to see like oh this is how they boarded it wow what's on the page what isn't there is really neat to see. There is no part of Evangelion that has not been marketed and sold. Oh, yes. Yeah. Well, Gainax, it was fighting bankruptcy every turn of the way, partially because they were

lying to the tax man about how much money they paid. You know what? They don't do this for American shows, but I would pay for books of storyboards of The Simpsons. Like, here's the season four storyboards good lord yes i want that i would pay i'd pay a hundred bucks for one of those easy man uh but uh yeah i mean honestly simpsons has never even got a true art book like that i i feel like the animators would love to do that like you've seen how much those spread around twitter when those get shared yeah yeah uh and also big thing i did this month my husband and i are both fully vaccinated so we did our first trip we did a one-day trip to universal studios hollywood uh where you know the mask rules

are still in place things have been changed up but it was just like an easy hour flight down from where we live and And we rode everything. We got to ride the brand new version of the Jurassic World ride. I always want to call it Jurassic Park, but. I think that was still, was that even an operation when we were there? No, I think I was sick. Yes, it was. That's why I didn't ride it.

We could have ridden the final Jurassic Park month of Jurassic Park. But yeah, I mean, Bob, why didn't you want to get soaking wet on a day you weren't feeling well i'm looking forward to flight travel where masks are accepted because i got sick on like every la trip i think people will be getting the flu less if they accept uh masks on planes i've seen the numbers the flu numbers were just posted for i think america it's a it's a four-figure number instead of being in the tens of millions of people who got the flu. Mask use really cut down on other illnesses as well. I don't think people will learn that lesson, though.

But yeah, I rode. It was also fun to ride the new. I've lost some weight, so I was actually able to ride the Harry Potter ride. Did you go on the 22nd roller coaster? No, that one I've ridden enough. Once is enough on that one i've written enough once is enough on that one but and the simpsons ride still there still operating it was really fun i was just thinking of all the like the things disney wouldn't let them do there's so many jokes

in that pre-show line there's a joke about uh abe saying like back in my day we can hate all kinds of people especially and then they pull the mic away from them i was like no they wouldn't let that joke happen at disneyland or there's there's a joke in the line of cletus giving you tips on how to sneak food into the amusement park i'm like well disney would never approve of that it was fun watching those and saying like well how risque can they get and then go pretty far uh yeah universal was a little edgier was uh but man that that ride hurts my back it really though you know bob if you go now you can private ride with the simpsons because they don't they're like okay what's your group you're the only people who get to

me and my husband got to just do a couple seat on every ride so stretch out yeah even even on the jurassic park right jurassic world right ride we have the whole row to ourselves every group gets a row to themselves and then there's an empty row in front of them i i don't know how long it's gonna last that way uh before they'll jam everybody together but it was a good time um and then yeah with video games i finally finished dark souls but before moving on to bloodborne i I'm playing 13 Sentinels. That's a lot of fun. Won't spoil anything.

It's just really good. Resident Evil Village, I played the first couple hours of that until, you know, the giantess sexily took my blood. I was like, I feel like I've now experienced this game. Oh, it goes much further than that. And then Mass Effect Legendary Collection, been playing that with my husband. I never gave, I liked the Mass Effect game fine, but I never really gave him much time. My husband was a giant fan of him, so he's taking me through what he loves about Mass Effect so much.

And then today, Shin Megami Tensei 3 HD is coming in the mail. Be prepared to have the first boss kill you and then to stop playing. Yeah tensei 3 hd is coming in the mail be prepared to have the first boss kill you and then uh to stop playing yeah that was my experience uh maybe they made it easier no actually i did i did fight the first boss which was like the matador right and then i was like god this game's too hard man i hope they change the be less often it just a little i know smt is supposed to be you know punishing but give me a break it's 20 years old now smt4 came out i don't know 10 years later the 3ds one and it's like well you spend the first three hours in this room grinding yep yeah and you're gonna like it damn it so yes

that's all the news for us and talking simpsons network let's talk about your questions and comments on the most recent round of episodes. So first we have Bart versus Thanksgiving. And Joe Hodgson says, I love this episode and it's one of my favorite holiday theme episodes of The Simpsons. A lot of it is due to just that slow pace in the beginning,

which just so expertly captures that buildup to a holiday gathering like Thanksgiving at home. Every time I watch it though, I'm amused at the use of bitchin' by Bart as it felt like the show was almost trying to make that a new catchphrase for him. He said it first in Treehouse of Horror and then repeats it here and will also turn to it in bart the daredevil it's just a season two thing as i don't believe bart has ever said it again which may partly be

due to it not being a real popular slang term beyond a narrow window i don't think the writers are trying to sell t-shirts or anything but just maybe playing with the character knowing marketing probably wanted more catchphrases for bart during this era and this was a way to poke fun at that while also doubling as a way to get a kid on tv to curse and yeah i think that bitchin is like the same clip every time i think so i think they recorded it for one for thanksgiving and then they're like oh well you need to goose two other scenes in episodes that we're doing the audio editing for near it oh well that bitchin was pretty funny i agree with joe i had the same thought in that they're like oh you want to catch face for bart well here's something you could actually never put on a t-shirt because they would not sell this to kids

uh anytime i think of bart swearing i think to what john vd told us about how they cut back on the bart swearing not out of like censors but because their friends were telling him hey thanks for teaching my kids a swear word. Like now he says it all the time. And then Fox was actually cutting back on the amount of swearing they could do because in Homer Defined, there was Bart saying, bad influence my butt. And then Byrne saying, kiss my sorry ass goodbye.

In certain airings, those are flipped where Bart says, bad influence my ass and Byrne says, kiss my sorry butt goodbye because they could get an ass in a butt. Yeah, you get one ass. So you got to be choosy. And it seems like on one day they felt that one ass was better than the other. Also on that episode, task a bar architect says on the subject of things kids just inherently

believe when I was young, my mom bought back a bunch of fresh fruit including grapes which i love to stop me eating them all she made up the total lie that if you eat more than a dozen or so grapes at any one day you get severe stomach cramps i continue to believe this well into my teenage years when i was relaying the story to a colleague he confessed that his parents had informed him that the large plastic sheets that farmers wrap up hay bales in were cow eggs and he never had a question of that he never had caused a question that until college yeah we we were reminiscing about how a parent tells you a lie as a kid and until you say it out loud in your early adult years to other grown-ups you go like wait wait a minute my parents were lying to me everyone mocks you the tooth fairy's not real i had a version of that in

that uh growing up uh you know you always got like the cookie dough out of the bowl or whatever and then finding out like that was dangerous yes yeah it's like nah not really no i mean you know hey don't eat raw eggs all the time, especially in America. A little raw egg here and there won't kill you. Just get the quality eggs. This is not a guarantee. So up next we have The Great Money Caper and Boyd Adkins IV says, This episode made me laugh as it has so many lines I repeat every day.

For instance, if she doesn't like it, I'll just die, remains my reply. Anytime I get my significant other, any other surprise. And what the hell are you talking about? Is often my go-to when the dog barks for no reason also am i the only person that conflates the beginning of this episode with season 13's the blunder years i think it's the restaurant that throws me off yeah what's the blunder years restaurant opening that's also where they're at a magic castle style place but it's the mentalist who unlocks homer's screaming memory that then starts the episode okay yeah i was just thinking of that too because you know those videos are on a loop in the crusty land um well those scenes are on a loop in the crusty land uh food area for the simpsons ride and i was just seeing

those ones i was like yeah i always get these two confused with the long island iced tea guy and the guy that makes homer remember things it was like seven or eight months later and yeah they go to the pimento grove and a uh a hypnotist a hypnotist called mesmerino ah okay brings homer back to being 12 uh by the way it felt so great to be back in that crusty the crusty secret vault area with all the cool original drawings on the wall like god i see in that picture of of david silverman's like smoking crusty is one of my favorite drawings of his and he gets to sign his freaking name too also on that episode dennis canin wisher says thanks for the billy the big mouth bass flashback i worked at toys r us when that was a thing and our genius managers put it right by the entrance so it turned

on every time a customer came into the store as a cashier i wasn't allowed to walk very far from my register so i was forced to listen to it my entire shift every work day for months that reminds me of working in a grocery store we had like an animatronic uh polar bear that like would say hi to kids who go like hi i'm Bear. And they would have an entire speech, and then eventually the tape would run down and get very slow and demonic. I recommend the Big City Greens episode, Berry Cuda, in which Cricket,

the little kid in the family, gets one of those. He's so enchanted by it, but the family goes insane because it won't stop. And it makes me think, like, oh, for kids of this era, the Billy the big mouse bath is just like the pet rock for us like wow this weird thing from the past neat uh man i can't you know i i need to i have other friends who have kids now and i really need to curse them with noise making gifts like hey your kids are gonna love this i'm torturing you with this gift lots

of singing greeting cards would help. When I worked at the AMC movie theater and the Blockbuster, there wasn't a thing to buy that would make noise all the time, but it was just there is an endless cycle of the VHS that was advertising things. Like, I could just mark the time at the AMC theater. If I heard a song, I knew like, oh, 40 minutes have passed. Okay. I just need to hear that song three more times.

Counting the hours down of your life. Yep. What a great way to spend my 20s. So up next, we have Bart the Daredevil. And Thad Komorowski says, this is indeed a hook episode of the series. Maybe the most so, the one that caught a lot of us as youngins and kept us hooked it's a powerful visually directed episode that skewers pathos for that horrific hilarious ending seeing this is definitely one of my earliest simpsons memories and besides homer's fall auto's commentary at the gorge stuck with me i mean that dead body observation what the absolute

fuck auto you know he didn't dive into that enough, but hearing that Otto casually thinks like, put a dead body down there and no one will ever find it. That's him kind of bragging like, you know, not that I would, but I bet that's true. Those metal heads are always thinking about death, right? That's true. And Thad, yeah, I saw Thad had a lot of great comments this month. He mentioned in general like this is getting him to reexamine. We all look down on season two but like season two has some of these amazing visual moments like the animators were really figuring

stuff out at this point and even if an episode maybe doesn't have as many great jokes or gets a little too schmaltzy or whatever the animation never falters in season two yeah also joe hodgson said about that same episode i did like the question that arose during the conversation about what was everyone's first encounter with the word ass in pop culture i definitely heard it in movies before seeing it on tv we came we saw we kicked its ass from ghostbusters but the simpsons could very well have been the first time I heard it as set on television I'm fairly sure it was the first time I heard it in something I felt was explicitly made for me which is how I felt about basically every cartoon when I was a kid I can remember a similar

thrill in hearing it on The Simpsons when Buzz says it in Home Alone which I would have heard not long after seeing this episode for the first time. I can also remember some of my aunts suggesting my mom will not let my sister and I watch Home Alone because of that specific scene, which is amusing to me because that same aunt had a neighbor who broke her arm imitating Kevin's ride down the stairs in his toboggan. Only she used the laundry basket. Kevin truly was the original jack he was i mean i never tried any kevin mccallister stunts i didn't have a giant house yes yeah to ride around him you you didn't have dozens of micro machines bob no trip up your parents i didn't have a spider either but definitely if you watched home alone as a little kid you thought this is how i i have

to plan for when the robbers come into my house the robbers are coming it was the Castle Doctrine movie of the 90s that we didn't know we needed up next we have comments for what a cartoon first up is Shrek and you know what I'm now kinder to Shrek I feel like Cool World will haunt me for the rest of my life it's already been

a hard quarantine I have not seen my wife in almost five months but seeing Cool World after all that time has passed just makes me realize boy life is short yeah and it's too short for cool world but now i think like uh shrek i was upset because shrek was like well this is a placeholder for a joke but write a joke and then i watched the movie without even placeholders for jokes well cool world doesn't have jokes no it has like two jokes we'll get to cool world next month but i'm just wanting to let you know i think shrek is much better now that i've seen cool world so uh bear witness says i know i enjoyed this movie the first time i saw

it but i basically ruined it for myself almost instantly after it came out it was last week of the school year and i had acquired a vcd bootleg of the new in theaters hit movie shrek unfortunately shrek's runtime was slightly shorter than the extra long block scheduled periods that made up my school day and we had nothing to do in any of my classes so every period someone would make it known that i had the bootleg and we had nothing to do in any of my classes. So every period, someone would make it known that I had the bootleg and we would inevitably end up watching the damn thing from start to finish. I watched Shrek eight times over the course of two days before the bootleg ended up tragically, quote unquote, lost.

I went from liking it to being utterly sick of everything about it literally overnight. And it took me years to willingly sit down with it again. I still think it's a little bit better than you guys do. But I'm here to say that the short-lived boost in popularity i got from being the shrek haver was not worth the pain of living through total shrek immersion uh man that it didn't last for long i don't i i don't know how the kids can share that these days but that feeling of like i have a bootleg of a popular movie with your friends like you're the source of the bootleg that is a rush of thrill

some of the time i remember coming home at some point in the summer of 1999 that was the summer of the phantom menace obviously and going down to the basement to where the computer was my stepdad was watching a bootleg of the phantom menace on the computer with like subtitles from some other language i forget what it was i was like how did my stepdad get this but i guess it was some guy at work but i was like wow he's pretty savvy that makes sense yeah it'd be the the probably the it guy at his office it's like hey i got a copy like yeah and he worked at a steel factory there was no office there was no it guy i'm sorry your dad was a working man yeah my dad was an office drone i'm sure there was an it guy but uh also we have another fun story of

overexposure to shrek and that's from elijah elliott saying just wanted to share my shrek horror story i went to a sleepover and my friend can't sleep in silence so he excitedly popped in his new shrek dvd for us to watch as we drifted into dreamland but once the film ended it goes back to the menu where donkey is jumping up and down yelling pick me pick me so because i'm a nice friend and i knew if i turned off the dvd it would wake him up i suffered through that menu on repeat all night long that menu has haunted burned in my brain i hope others have similar moments of that awful, awful menu. It just reminds me of the pain of DVD menus in general. The DVD menus that are awful.

And also the early 2000s were my earliest drinking years. You know, drinking way too much, not knowing how much I could drink. You know, drinking with friends, like crashing at a house, watching a movie. The movie's over. And then for the rest of the night, the DVD menu is just on. Everyone is drunk or passed out. You wake up hungover and that menu is the worst thing you could ever

hear in your life oh god yes the wake up of like the Roxbury theme going or whatever and you have like cotton mouth and your head is pounding and you just want to throw the TV through a window what am I doing with my life here I pulled up the Shrek DVD menu here.

Oh, me! Me, me, me! So that cycles for about a minute of just him going, me, me, pick me! I love, like, DVD menus are so fun, and a lot of them are on youtube like you just displayed i love slash hate the ones that are like solve this puzzle to watch the movie like no shut up every time i have to pull up the season two simpsons dvds to hear the commentary it's like

i get it guys i get i this is all very clever but yeah i mean that that shrek dvd at the time seeing an original animation of the characters made just for a DVD menu, that felt special. It did. Yeah. And now it feels special again because nobody spends that kind of money on a DVD menu. And now we have a comment for X-Men Evolution Operation Rebirth, the episode about Wolverine. And I get to read the Nina comment. Nina Matsumoto, my wife, says, actually, I feel

nothing about Mero. I've never seen her in anything other than the one of the games. When Bob said there was a character in this show, which I've never seen, that grows bones, I asked, oh, is that Mero? I just know of her. And remember, fans didn't like her because she's a Wolverine ripoff, apparently. I'm not thinking of X-23 because people actually liked her. And then Nina has a few other points in that, A, Bear midriffs are back in style right now. And also Nightcrawler's voice actor graduated from the same high school as me. Therefore, I have to defend his honor. He's more famous for doing the English dub for Light in Death Note.

And Henry may know him as Clark in Gundam Wing. Yes. No, he is a really good voice actor. I know we clowned on his German accent in X-Men Evolution. But yeah, I can confirm for her that Mero got some crap for being a Wolverine ripoff for sure in the comic fandom in the mid-90s because there were 8 million Wolverine clones because Wolverine was the biggest star in the 90s. And so when Wolverine gets his bone bone claws then they make up a new character

they're like but what if it is a pink woman who can just grow bone claws everywhere and she's covered in bones but yeah she's she really speaks to the extreme 90s but i think then thanks to this show having the character spike that everybody hated it made people like marrow more uh for being like a real character from the comics instead of like a rip-off guy like spike uh chris dobson also said about the episode i was a bit too old for this show but i thought it was pretty cool how they picked the characters that were done relatively dirty in the 92 cartoon nightcrawler and kitty pride mostly and made a version of they all live in the mansion but also have a normal life somewhat interesting the idea of the brotherhood of evil mutants being the reggie to their archie

worked out surprisingly well and it was the first time we saw a lot of relatively obscure characters on screen i'm sure a lot of it is age like milk to chase trends of the late 90s and early aughts but i'd be curious to see how it holds up today i give it another chance you know there's there's some flashes of great animation and also yeah uh like nina mentioned x23 is hotter than ever now everybody loves her i was surprised by how good that show looks yeah it uh i mean god most most marvel things wish they look that good like you watch well take a look at that guardian show that was on disney uh x-men evolution looks way better uh up next we have bullwinkle rue britannia in john charles home says i must admit the show's

one major shortcoming is that it's full of time killers with credits bumpers and intros probably taking up half the time but honestly watching it on dvd helps a lot where you could very conveniently skip these bits in marathon watching the show was on netflix for some time where i did try watching it only to find that not being able to easily skip around without chapter made it a total slog after this one i think i might buckle down and buy a complete dvd box set since the recent reprint of it seems to go for way way less than the original box i did for some time you you have that henry don't you yeah i bought that 20 box 20 dollars oh all seven seasons for 20 bucks it's a fire sale on dvds it has been for the past like five years

physical media is about to entirely go away so you know you can if it's a buyer's market right now if you unless it's fully out of print that it's not but there's a big back catalog of them out there for companies are now like wait a minute we sold things to people they could just watch them whenever they wanted forever we were stupid we. We were fools. We need to, we got to sell these for like a ticket to watch it once. Also on the Rocky and Bullwinkle, Mr. Neal says, this was a genuinely great episode

with your trademark exhaustive research and insightful commentary. Speaking of Rocky and Bullwinkle's bad audio quality, I can remember it being even worse. When it aired in the 90s on Nickelodeon, I distinctly remember hearing audio ghosting specifically when the audio was supposed to be silent you could hear the voice tracks from other episodes way low in the mix and henry here i remember that too it was really weird and

distracting he continues this is a remnant of reused magnetic tape where unless you specifically did a few passes with the erase right head a tiny bit of magnetic charge would be left on the tape leaving the original recordings very subtly present not surprising j ward studios wouldn't have the time or resources to do it the right way so had to settle for good enough i always hoped that the old muted remnants would have consisted of outtakes that could have somehow been savage, though that would have been a Herculean task. Realistically, it was probably just other episodes before they got struck to film. Nowadays, for the DVD, they mix the remnant audio out and even re-recorded segments with sound-alikes voicing the narrator. Though, I'm still more upset that they used new music for the bridging segments.

They did a literal hack job on the rebrand of the series eliminating animation to insert new text did they really think kids would be confused if they saw the title rocky and his friends instead of rocky and bullwinkle and also he corrected a misunderstanding i heard of a joke in the episode he says i'm sure you look this up but it's potomain lettuce gag as petomain is a very old-fashioned way of saying food poisoning so that's why it's a joke it's instead of romaine lettuce it's potomain lettuce meaning it causes food poisoning it's from the actually this was in the famous song hello mut Mudda Heddle Hello Fodda. Right. Like you remember, Leonard Skinner, he got ptomaine poisoning last night after dinner. So that's where that came from.

Well, no one says it anymore. That's what ptomaine poisoning is. I like that song as a kid. I didn't know what Ulysses was either. Alan Sherman. This is, again, why somebody needs to do a Talking Simpsons for Rocky and Bullwinkle that explains every joke that you had to be alive in 1960 to understand. Lots of asbestos jokes.

Up next, we have SpongeBob, Chocolate with Nuts, and I believe Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy 5. And Jared Brackett says, I always loved when this show would get really weird and surreal and kind of dark. They were never afraid to take it hard in that direction, which is something I always appreciated about the show even as a kid stuff like sb-129 or dying for pie with that in mind rock bottom and graveyard ship are probably my two favorite personal episodes rock bottom is solid gold from front to back and graveyard ship is some of my favorite expressions in the entire series plus that ending shot from nosferatu is so creepy and comes out of nowhere i really respect the nerve of them to know they were going to confuse every kid out there with that ending and go with it yes i think the show still has a lot of the edge that Rocko's Modern Life had.

That's Bob speaking, by the way. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it had that. It kind of lost over time. But yeah, those are both a lot of people. Because I said I thought Chocolate was the greatest SpongeBob ever. Lots of people chimed in with their own. And that Rock Bottom One has another of my all-time favorite gags of uh it's just a you know a classic looney tune style series of jokes on one idea but the bit of

spongebob realizing that if he reaches for the candy bar that it makes the bus drive away when he slowly he can hear it move revving up as he moves his hand towards it and when he touches his finger on top of it he can make the horn beep like that's such a great joke tune j723 says the first three seasons of spongebob are golden but season four is good too there are some bad episodes but for the most part it keeps the spirit of the first three seasons some good episodes from that season aren't of a Krabby Patty selling out Lost mattress have you seen this now and wishing you well for season five? There are more bad episodes and the good episodes aren't as great as the first three seasons or even the best ones in four

But there are good episodes to be had spongebob 6 is where I feel that the show became bad Henry said there's some close-up shots in uh spongebob aren't disgusting as they are in ren and stimpy well they do get that disgusting in season six the show itself just gets really disgusting too when vincent waller became showrunner after the second spongebob movie the show started to get much interesting because vincent waller's a big ren and stimpy guy yeah maybe they still they're like yeah too gross well we've we went too close to ren and stimpy i saw there be another comment say that like multiple episodes just feel like a rejected ren and stimpy pitch that they pulled out of the the closet so up next we have a recent

episode the owl house the intruder and wongavu t dim says as a current sva student myself i can tell you firsthand that my peers respect dana's, ethic, and the show a whole bunch. My teacher even screened that senior year student film of hers in my first year. It's real inspiring seeing passionate storytellers like Dana thriving in the animation world like this. It makes me excited to see what my generation that's inspired by works like Owl House and Adventure Time end up making in the future. You know, if we ever get to make anything original in the future. Yeah, it seems unlikely. Calls back to your comments, Henry.

It's like, is Seth Rogen attached? Well, then throw your dreams away. And of course it has to be exploiting an IP. I mean, that was something attractive about Mitchell and the Machines versus the Machines, that it actually was a new concept, not based on anything.

We are like a day away from the announcement of like the wonka prequel oh right which uh felix biederman from chapo trap house predicted in a joke tweet from three years ago yeah specifically even timothy chalamet like oh yeah it'll be him yeah now i but i do i mean i am inspired thinking of like you know five years from now all the people who grew up on adventure time steven universe like they what do they get to make with you know also with the people who created those shows still getting to work in the industry with those new younger people and and go from being you know the mentor to the men the mentors mentees the mentees to the manatees yeah the well the the kohai to the senpai there you go that makes

sense to everybody yeah uh but yeah no uh then marcy furrer uh says the sentiment that people are okay with not liking harry potter anymore because of rowling's transphobia unfortunately isn't as prevalent as you two made it out to be some combination of bigotry and shitty taste of media is keeping that franchise and her career float on a lighter note it looks like dana has returned to twitter she's been retweeting a lot of fan art in anticipation of season two and yes it's one of those things where two months pass in between the recording and when i said that dana had quit twitter she has since come back to twitter and they announced season two though she also said it wasn't just the pressure of uh the folks out there on twitter that made her go away it was that she was not happy with decisions disney was making and wanted to get

away from twitter because i guess you know if she's feeling she's losing control of her series the last thing she wants to see on twitter probably is people saying why don't you do this on owl house do this here like and also i don't know i don't think we're naive enough to think that people just have rejected jk rowling resoundingly because i think a lot of people either don't care or transphobic themselves and also the brand is too strong to die because you were just a universal there was no nobody picketing they weren't closing down rides because of the creator's awful opinions i couldn't believe i still was seeing adults in the Harry Potter robes still I was like and I wasn't judging them really before I was like yeah I like I liked Harry Potter too I wouldn't I wouldn't walk around in those robes but then again I did I go straight to the big pink donut and then buy a Bortz license plate yes I did do this according to JK Rowling you can just shit in that robe it'll go away just goes away yeah no i mean yes i was sad i was kind of sad of like why do people still love it that much like what

haven't they seen she sucks but i guess you know i am very on twitter and most people i follow on twitter do say like well if i ever liked harry potter i'm done with that now but uh yes my trip to universal really did show me people still love harry potter yes yeah done with that now but uh yes my trip to universal really did show me people still love harry potter yes yeah so yeah that is it for this episode a few things up front or a few things up front at the back i'm sorry we're now in the talking substance caboose join me in the caboose for drinks uh we are reaching the end of talking to the hill so the last episode of that will go up the first week of june but also talking futurama reminder is now a monthly series so look forward to an episode of that very soon if you're on the patreon if you're on the free feed it's already happened you're missing it buddy and anything else you need to cover henry

uh well and don't forget that uh after june the uh the what a cartoon schedule will change and it'll just be two new episodes of that each month and then futurama will will in July be in the Sunday slots that the second episode of What a Cartoon would have and don't forget to vote in the Hunchback of Notre Dame the yes no poll here's a hint the correct answer is yes yes yeah you have selected no

but thank you so much for joining us folks we'll see you next month for another episode of Talk to the Audience and we'll see you then bye so much for joining us folks we'll see you next month for another episode of talk to the audience and we'll see you then wow infotainment