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

Episode Date: December 8, 2021

It's the end of the month once again, which means it's time for another community podcast! This time around, we roll into the holiday season and discuss that new Disney+ short, the show's Fargo-inspired two-parter, Smithers' boyfriend, debunked 9/11 theories, the oral history of The Simpsons: Road Rage, and more. Plus, we go over our revised 2022 schedule and briefly review Netflix's Cowboy Bebop! And, as always, we respond to your questions and comments from our most recent round of episodes. So slather yourself in anti-bully salad dressing and get ready to listen to another great podcast! Support this podcast and get over 100 bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! And please follow the new official Twitter, @TalkSimpsonsPod!

I heartily endorse this event or product. Ahoy, ahoy everybody and welcome to Talk to the Audience where this is always death. I am one of your hosts, Bob Mackie, patiently awaiting annual gift man who is here with me today as always. It's Henry Gilbert, fan of fargo and the mockery of it oh wow okay uh oh yes the tv show fargo yes yes which uh we watched the parody of i've never seen it but i enjoyed the parody but more on that later but yes welcome to another episode of talk to the audience this is our community podcast and in this podcast we talk about what's happening in the simpsons world and in our world and we answer your questions and

comments from the most recent round of episodes and we are officially in the Simpsons world and in our world. And we answer your questions and comments from the most recent round of episodes. And we are officially in the holiday season once again. And I feel like it's slightly better than the last holiday season. And I'm also going to Canada again. Well, yes, both of, yeah. Oh, actually, I guess you did get to finally go last Christmas season. But this time I won't have to stay

in a small apartment for two weeks before being set free. And you just have to be locked up for two whole weeks yeah no it's uh and i get to actually see my mom and stepdad for christmas time too yeah i guess we're both also you know feeling that this is cyber monday we're recording this and hope you're all out there cybering on this great monday and uh yeah we're feeling good after a whole weekend of uh turkey or turkey substitutes turkey like things my field roast celebration loaf that's a great name i love it celebration

it's it's so inoffensive yes what are you celebrating i don't know figure it out you know not not colonialism i'll tell you that absolutely not but uh before we talk about what's happening in our world let's talk about simpsons news so november 12th was disney plus day a day perhaps greater than christmas or thanksgiving uh which led to the another short which you know i've i've had a habit of loving these shorts but it was the plusiversary short uh featuring lots of uh fun references and disney characters and brands were paid tribute to as was outlined in their contract yes and uh you know what this is not for me uh it's pretty inoffensive but it does feel still slightly wrong I didn't like Lisa singing a song about how great the streaming service Disney plus

is with some little sarcastic jabs but ultimately it's their master saying you can make fun of us this much yeah why it well in disney's part they get to they get some street cred or they believe they do of like hey we let them make fun of us slightly we let them make fun of how uh we'll have your credit card information forever and you'll forget to cancel and also don't you just make your kids like tv is just your babysitter and you show them these things forever but if you even draw mickey mouse on the screen we are imprisoning aljean yeah in magneto jail it was also weird uh yeah it was a weird world where they weren't the simpsons parodies like these characters have appeared been drawn into Simpsons before unofficially. Yeah. But this Goofy was like, well, that's pretty much official Goofy.

But then like the Snow White and Cinderella were more Simpsony. Yeah. They were like Disney versions, but maybe 25% Simpsonized, maybe 15% Simpsonized. It felt like there was some kind of edict, like don't make them too Simpsony. Yeah. They need to be identifiable characters to support their individual IP. And maybe Silverman

helped navigate what is Disney? Where the ratio of Disney to Simpsons design fit in there? So I also didn't like it. I will compliment some stuff though. The one joke i laughed at was

there's a dwarf who's mad and mo's like ah don't be such a don't be so grumpy he's like i'm happy that's how bad this is uh slight slight smirk for me yeah because well i also like the joke because most people unless they're a disney fanatic couldn't pick happy and grumpy out in a line or at least you could pick grumpy out but not happy yeah a lot of people are wearing those grumpy shirts you know like that's me on the shirt you know that was uh that's like taz you know all the taz and tweety content i feel like grumpy's in the but there and i also liked at least trivia wise mac reigning socks has said before on commentaries how much he loved 101 dalmatians as a kid and seeing the dalmatians watch tv and so they have

a scene of dalmatians watching tv in there which i was like well i think it's at least something that's like important to them or whatever what disappointed me me though was this interview with Al Jean that you linked me to Henry from CBR.com and you know what I feel like these shorts feel like they're being forced to do them which I'm sure could be true it could be part of the contract you have to make this many shorts we can dictate what kind of content they are

you can push back a little but ultimately we're your bosses and that's exactly what he's saying but in like a cheerful happy way where he's saying oh yes we dutifully followed all of their rules and i don't that's not what the simpsons is to me you know maybe that's what it is now and i just can't get used to the changes but it's just like yeah they said we couldn't let this character drink so we didn't goofy uh he didn't say this in the interview goof is holding a beer he's never drinking that beer interesting yes which like the disney characters got to drink and stuff but like you see that

brawn bones dude when we did the yes uh headless horseman cartoon like he drinks like a barrel of beer and they really pull the bonkers like i said earlier where it's like mickey cannot deign to appear in this short he will not even uh maybe a shadow but then you ultimately have to reveal that it's bart you know i i also didn't like that Sideshow Mel says to Bart, like, I can't believe you're getting away with this. Like, yeah, that's yeah, that's you're patting yourself on the back. Like, if people actually think that, let them say that. Don't have a character say that. Like, I didn't particularly love that.

And yeah, I was thinking like 20 years ago in commentaries they would have said you know uh oh doesn't it feel like uh if you work at disney you have a gun against your head to enjoy these things but but hey i i've heard two schools of thought of the bright side of this kind of thing one of them is that if this keeps aljean busy and selman gets to run more episodes of simpsons then the overall output of simpsons episodes is better uh and second remember how bad that donald trump uh west side story thing was that's what their shorts used to be so i'd i'd rather see them sucking off disney than trying to do like snl cold open gags with donald trump you know you know i suddenly just remembered uh recently remember

last election i know we all want to forget about it but it was during that election that mac raining was like i'll start a youtube account and i'll make my own trump short and that's all he ever put on that it was dan caslanetta singing a song about i'm the big orge goblin blah blah whatever all the boomer jokes you expect but even he was doing that on his own but with like rough draft animated yeah that uh man that stuff sucked and i get like yeah we all hated trump he did suck but you know your jokes aren't that special about him you don't have a special joke that's why a lot of my favorite comedians had to find like they had to push themselves really hard to find something different to say about like our our pals on chopper were like yeah yes our big dumb

president filled his diapers full of shit like what else can you say or that uh that james austin johnson guy sorry if i got his name incorrect but he did an amazing trump impression where he just rambles on about like sonic the hedgehog and clifford the Big Red Dog yes yeah and well also in that interview Gene was like oh well you know we can't do anything for Hawkeye or Boba Fett that's too soon but you know She-Hulk and Kenobi are coming up next year like I every one of the times Gene does interviews promoting these things he will say he'll call the next shot you know and the only uh the only other thing i'll add is that i wish we went to disneyland the day after disney plus day and i kind of wish i'd been there for because there were still signs up of like happy disney plus day disneyland i was like if i'm going all

the way to disneyland i want to see how like truly awful this can be could have gotten this like a bart protesting doll or something. But, you know, I have to say on Disney Plus Day, they announced at least a couple shows I'm actually looking forward to. Not just as homework assignments of like, well, I have to watch the She-Hulk show. Home Alone for the holidays? No, no. The Spider-Man and X-Men cartoons. Oh, right.

Like X-Men 97, which is a weird thing to name it. Yeah. Yeah. It's incredibly inside. I'm shocked they're doing it, but it seems to actually involve as many of the original cast and writers and artists as you would, I guess, to a surprising degree. But no way. I mean, we'll see.

Marvel's cartoon output, even when the writing is good the animation is never as good as a warner thing like they never spend the budget on animation they should i hope they do well i mean that's fine because the x-men cartoon never looked that good and uh and spider-man freshman year which yes of course i'm excited about a new spider-man cartoon bob i know but it's also that uh cool dude who i follow on twitter and friendly with on twitter and i'd always said i'd want to have him on a podcast but like in person and that we'll never go to burbank again seemingly but uh but jeff trammell who was head writer on craig of the creek uh he's the head writer on the spider-man cartoon so that when i first heard i

was like okay more spider-man i saw oh jeff trammell and on top of that they hired one of their character designers is a spider-man artist i love paulo rivera who i would have been like oh shit that that guy's who should draw spider-man for a new cartoon so look here's some good stuff it's i know it's disney owns everything and it sucks i'm looking at some of this i missed some some of these announcements like Hocus Pocus 2. I did see the teaser for the Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers movie. It feels like someone found a Roger Rabbit 2 spec script and just changed some proper nouns around because they're coming into our world. Is that what's happening? I do believe so.

We need to see the shot of the boring human driving the car with them like on the dashboard to complete the uh the cycle i you know i'm gonna start the rumor that that's what sent john mulaney into his drug binge was having to work on the chippendale thing like i don't know it could be hey i love the john mulaney and andy sandberg are very funny guys i'm i'm more interested in it than uh that darkwing one i get what seth rogan's working on like i'm at least more into it i will say uh hooray for the proud family movie that's something that deserves to exist it's the real it's the actual bruce w smith running it again and i've i've seen lots of uh african-american animators i follow on Twitter that are so excited to be working on that show, too. So, yeah, there's good stuff.

Yeah, it was always a great-looking show. It was also funny to see Rob. I follow Rob Delaney on Twitter, who mostly is, you know, he's an American living in England, who's a funny guy who also tweets a lot about, you know, democratic socialism. But then this last couple of days, he's like, you know, I'm in this new Home Alone thing. And it was hard doing the stunts. And shout out to the stunt guys. I was like, oh, wow.

I watched a video review of that new Home Alone, and it looks pretty dire. Although they get the funny kid from Jojo Rabbit to be the main character. But let's just stop doing this. It was built around the appeal and charisma of Macaulay Culkin. Or at least make him an adult and make a movie about that. Although Buzz returns in this movie. They got Buzz back, everybody. What is he, like 50 now?

I guess he's our age. Yeah, he'd be, I mean, he'd be, he's probably like 45. Yeah, well, good. Oh, wow, now that I know Buzz is in this. He's a cop in the movie. Oh, that's perfect yeah it's uh you know what you're selling me no please don't if you tell me you watch that in 8-bit christmas i'm ending the podcast network i did not watch 8-bit christmas i promise okay uh let's move on

talk about it was a big month for interesting simpsons episodes i've watched the most new simpsons this month and i have like in maybe five or six years yeah and there was another two-parter called a serious flanders i wasn't sure if i'd like it i think some of these two-parters are pretty gimmicky but even if i didn't ever see the source material they're parroting i thought it was good but i also thought this doesn't need to be a simpsons episode i think you guys want to make a different show yeah no i mean it's just 1000 a different tv show like they just made uh they wanted to do you know a more mature show that also is a dense parody of the fargo tv show like every there's one-to-one characters all over the place across all three seasons the flashbacks everything like and i i i've heard the fourth

season's really bad and i didn't watch that or at least ends poorly. Uh, but seasons one through three of the Fargo TV show are really, really, really good. And I say this as a person who thinks Fargo is like perfect film. I could watch the film Fargo a million times, but TV show Fargo is really good too. And this has a lot of good parodies in it. But yeah,

like you said, this doesn't need to star the simpsons characters or but the way they get away with it is just like everybody dies like yeah the show starts with rich texans brutal murder like just horrific his face gets ripped off mr burns gets shot i mean i i still liked it but you know what make all the episodes like this make the characters just playing different roles like a treehouse of horror it'd be fine i you know i really like the conceit at the start of that this is on simp flicks yeah so it's like oh well you can just do how about like five episodes a season or just simp flicks and it's just technically the same cast of characters but just uh extended treehouse stuff

in there i like the the Prestige TV parody. I also like how there's a fun fast-forwarding gag. Yes, yeah. Kind of making fun of how long all these episodes have to be. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And there's more than one villain in Fargo Seasons who is just like, yeah, I'm a weird guy with an interesting quirk, and I do have a long monologue about this

about a parable i just love and brian cox is the is absolutely the type of guy they pass to be in that and just and hearing him scream like you should let me finish my parable all the casting was great and speaking of prestige tv uh we have to talk about cowboy bebop yeah because it premiered uh did it premiere this month it did okay it's been a busy month and uh so i didn't watch it uh but i did watch an amazing video review of it it's about an hour long by the mother's basement youtube channel i'm gonna watch this i am so glad he put in the work because i know i can save a lot of time by just never looking at it yeah yeah so i've seen some folks say like uh gene pack who uh writer the games guy for washington post

uh i saw him tweet about it like look yeah there's bad dialogue in this and it's nowhere near as good as the anime it's fine it's a good that's that's his stance i only watched the first episode and yeah i mean yeah it's it's ups and downs there's some parts where i'm like oh yeah this is like a good little sci-fi show and then a character most oftentimes faye valentine but any of them yeah will say a line of dialogue that makes you just like want to turn off your tv i almost said a self-harm thing but just you feel awful. You just roll your eyes of like, boy, you should just have a picture of the writer of the episode in the corner going like, aren't I clever? That's so funny. What bothered me about it, having watched the video review of it, was I think the streaming model is making a lot of fiction worse, televised fiction, because you have to have all these little ties and, you know,

narrative things strung throughout. When Cowboy Bebop was episodic, that was the point. I think the weakest episodes are the ones that have to go back to tell the story. I think the best ones are just like, here's a fun adventure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The one-offs aren't allowed in Netflix.

No, that's in even the first episode where I can feel the algorithm bubbling up of like this episode is not improved by seeing vicious at the end like this is just the rule set a teaser for the rest of the season arc has to be here and you have to yeah it's like no no people people aren't going to just let the next episode play unless they see julia and vicious at the end of the episode. Vicious is an embarrassing one note character in the anime. And he's only good to have cool fights to be like just a brooding nineties character with a Katana.

That's all he is. He doesn't need entire scenes with lots of dialogue. And I mean, they're trying with the budget they got, which is like not a nothing budget, but the special effects never look good enough. The fights never look good enough. It's not edited tight enough.

And it's, it's also that like humans have limitations, even actors like John Cho who get in really good shape, uh, and can do a lot of cool stuff. Even them. It's like, well,

you can't move as perfectly as like Spike Spine, uh, Spike Spiegel. Yeah. Also, uh, Spike Spiegel. Sorry uh spike spiegel sorry also john cho is like 50 yeah he's 20 years older than the character i think he was just cast because he

is the most notable male asian actor in the world right now uh yeah which hey at least you know cast like 20 years ago they were just like keanu reeves he can be he's every asian character and stuff but they could have cast another unknown like Mustafa Shakir as Jet. He does an amazing job. Yeah, he's great. He's almost doing an impression of the dub actor for the series. You get the feeling he's a big fan. Finding unknowns like this guy, I think that's a great boon for the series.

But I don't know if John Cho works. He just looks very tired. Spike is puffy and tired and 50 in this series, and I don't like it. And he broke his leg on the show too yeah because he's 50 years old i know i i think they're putting a lot of like pressure on him to be the only famous guy in it but you're right yeah the the actor who plays jet is really good which makes it even more frustrating when they put like some shit in his mouth of a terrible line he has to say and say john show where he says like you know what i got when i went to new tijuana herpes a churro stabbed i was trying to buy a churro like no jet and spike saying like

uh hey we should follow the rules like i don't want to hear spike say that kind of dialogue i don't like him saying like um check please um did you really just do that there's some uh it's full of like whedonisms is what i've heard yeah oh yes yeah no uh gita jackson she wrote a perfect article about it uh for vice or motherboard look up gita jackson on twitter her her article on that is great but yeah bebop sucks that was our but but it's if you're looking for something to pass the time you can do worse i say read a book come on people you have better things to do that's a lot to ask yes uh but yeah that's our bebop review corner moving on more simpsons news uh smithers gets a boyfriend very briefly yeah in the episode portrait of a lackey on fire written by rob lezebnik and his

son johnny and there's a great interview with them on gayest episode ever yes yeah that was really cool our our pals drew and glenn getting to interview them ahead head of the episode coming out and yet johnny johnny lezebnik uh he had a funny tweet of saying like yes i know i've i i used uh i had some favoritism here i've been sleeping with hans mole man for years now but i bet, hey, at least he recognizes it. I have to say, so Drew asked us if we had any questions for Rob. I could come up with nothing because we've covered one of his episodes. He leaves the show, does not write another one until 2009.

So Homer vs. Dignity is his last one credited until 2009. So this is like an eight-year gulf because I think he left to make Grounded for Life or something like that. Which was an all right show yeah good show but yeah i uh the episode itself you know i felt i felt gay responsibility to watch it of like this is uh uh you know the first smithers centric episode i think with an actual gay person involved in writing it and i i like uh i i liked it mostly i think the casting oh my god well honestly when Christine Baranski appeared I was like yay like it actually did work on me just like Smithers because I love

Christine Baranski I thought it was good I like Smithers episodes I don't like when Smithers realizes Mr. Burns is awful I think maybe that should have been the point of the show to take him away from Mr. Burns or have him have that realization but he kind of realized like oh my boss is awful and also like an insane old

man yeah and I kind of like the Smithers who will do anything for Burns yeah I Monty Burns yeah he's less of a sycophant but I guess if you want to care about him as a person who gets a boyfriend then he has to get more normal

he can't just be a man who only lives for Burns and only sees burns and everything. And also he found, like, Victor Garber, great casting too, like an openly gay actor who is like a silver fox as well. But I also like that they sort of have a commentary on, I guess, pollution or industrial capitalism of just barts them just seeing how much it's destroying the environment this fast fashion yeah that's the first time i've heard the term fast fashion before i guess neither of us are fashionistas we never heard of the

fashion line the simpsons did a thing with until they did it but balenciaga yeah i'm wearing my new 500 t-shirt i got it on sale but i i like that he said like well yeah johnny target and wally walmart or however he said it like they they want shit fast and cheap so you got to destroy the planet for it and i like part's line of saying uh what the gays are supposed to be better than us like that was a good line but yeah it was it was a fine little episode that also uh gave smithers a dog at the end, which, you know, cute little bow tie dog. Let's see if it sticks around.

Yeah, and boy, did Harry. He sounded, Harry Shearer sounded good as Smithers still. He sounded mostly like Smithers. His Burns is like. I'm Mr. Burns. It's so wheezy. It sounds like Hans Molband. Well, I mean, Harry Shearer is going to be 80 soon.

Like we said, he's approaching Mr. Burns first age of 82 I believe yes yeah he's not a fiery 47 year old anymore like he wasn't the best but he's just so man I hate hearing Burns so tired I just ask myself like boy these are they even give him some good Burns lines

but I'm just like well yeah he can't say these well and we're like oh boy well he's even more evil than me at least I have warm and I'm just like, well, yeah, he can't say these. Well, we're like, oh, boy. Well, he's even more evil than me. At least I have warm and glow people. I did like his the running jokes about him not knowing what a jigsaw puzzle is. That was good. Yes.

And sorting the pieces by weight. Some good Burns jokes. But I mean, everyone's aging. We can't stop it. But yeah, that was a fun episode. I did like the Fargo two parter first. But I like seeing Smithers after 33 years finally get an episode about him and a boyfriend yeah yeah with with a gay person involved in writing it as well so we have some breaking news here about censorship in the simpsons so uh the episode goo goo guy pan which was written by dana gould about how

he legally adopted a daughter from china it was taken off of disney plus in hong kong because of a joke about tiananmen square and uh yeah uh it just uh they might be a little touchy about that yeah yeah it's uh you know i i was reading hollywood reporters right up on it too there's you know in online conversation i i i am not i am not pro the censorship of pro-democracy people in hong kong as well but i often get i pause when i see oh who are the people who mainly talk about this in the american press to yes give it coverage it's like well oh it's like racist assholes who don't actually give a shit about anyone in hong kong it's to be mad about, to be racist toward the mainland Chinese government and hate the Chinese,

which I don't like that. I mean, but yeah, also, if you're mad at the censorship, I think you should be also pretty mad that Disney's like, well, yeah, well, oh, cut that episode. Sure thing. Hey, I mean,

there's a ticking clock before they find Nazi supermen are our superiors from Itchy and Scratchy Land, and that's going to get the boots in all territories. I also think, you know, I don't know the Hong Kong versus China mainland stuff all that well, so I don't feel too comfortable commenting on it. But for sure, the mainland Chinese government does not like comments about Tiananmen Square or talking about it. So I can see why they would not like that joke and ask Disney to not have it in there. But also hearing about that episode just reminds me of our live show with Dana Gould,

where he had the very funny thing about how he was watching that episode with his daughter or another episode with her daughter. And they're like, no, that's you. I made up that character and named it after you. And she's like, yeah, whatever. Yeah. He said she doesn't care. She wants to watch Bob's Burgers.

Yep. Yeah. But yeah. So, I mean, we're seeing things centered on streaming a lot, not just in other territories. I was just reading recently that HBO Max, the Harley Quinn movie, they censor out her two middle fingers. Instead, they make her have like two two

other rude gestures they change the scene yeah yeah i hadn't heard that that's i i had heard that they'd also accidentally or seemingly accidentally uploaded a like cut for tv version of birds of prey to the hbo max and had to like take it down but no i i yeah the networks uh netflix censors uh stuff a lot everybody also what was it that the that hassan comedian his show he had like one about the saudi arabian government that they had to like take down where did that go yeah yeah but i wouldn't expect this to uh slow down at any point. No. So, yeah, I guess pirate everything. Except for our podcast.

No, don't do that. No one will censor us. So there are some new Simpsons shoes coming out because these things can't stop becoming by Adidas. They're inspired by Snowball 2 and they're ghastly because it looks like you have skinned Snowball 2 and you're wearing Snowball 2 on your feet, which I guess fits the character design because Snowball 2 is a hideous character on purpose. Yeah, it looks like Mr. Burns decided to make shoes out of her instead of the gophers. Now, yeah, these are a pair of shoes I will not buy of Simpsons shoes. They look like slippers you'd wear around the house because I had Homer slippers once that was just like you sticking your foot in homer's mouth yeah those were hard i i told the parents once like you know what don't get me i don't want to put my my feet in homer's mouth you don't want to look down and see two homers just chewing on your feet there's something i had my walking around sandals i'm

like i don't want to put on shoes are the donut ones that vans made. Like, those are nice. They just are. They're the pink, sprinkly donut cover. But, yeah, the snowball ones are just horrifying. Like, I would not buy those. Though, I guess, if I wanted to make a statement on stage with a live show, I'd be like, here's some ridiculous shoes, but I have another pair of shoes I'm saving for. No, I have not worn any of my Simpsons shoes yet. So, I'm waiting for our next live show, which we'll talk about soon i guess right yeah yeah and so we have more news stories uh aljean finally commented on the simpsons predicting 9-11 and of course it's the thing

that i'm sure bill oakley has answered a billion times on twitter in that uh the from homer versus new york that episode from season nine uh run by Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein. Bart, of course, is showing off the New York for $9 pamphlet. And the 9 is next to the Twin Towers, which was like an 11. And people have been saying for years, like, oh my God, they predicted it. And I know from my countless conspiracy theory podcasts, this is known as baking. So you take the littlest crumbs of evidence you have and you fit them into whatever narrative you want and people have been doing this forever and just because a nine is next

to a thing that looks like an 11 they assume like oh they knew or like how eerie is that when I think when we did that episode we talked about it we were like there was probably a discussion in the room what is the funniest amount of money that will send you to new york and somebody decided on nine dollars nine is less than ten more than eight nine is a funny thing yeah i i like yes that it's one of those coincidences i've never i haven't heard that term baking before that's clever i yeah i i just thought it was funny gene now has to comment on stuff like well i didn't even write that episode i wasn't there for it and there's like then there's like the obligatory like yes we're still on tv yes it's still going on it's just like please stop don't don't bring this up with him no i i had to like uh as i was combing through the last month of simpsons news i had to ignore like five different ones or like al jean says how he'd

end the series it's how he said he'd end the series every time he's been asked this for at least a decade now that they'd be that it would end with them going to the christmas pageant that starts the first episode and it would go in a loop he said this in so many interviews that i was like no this is not news anymore i feel bad for aljean in this case because he has to be asked this every time and has to give the same answer through gritted teeth like yes we're still on tv yes isn't it funny how uh bart is now what homer's age is supposed to be and all that other stuff like he's got to go through all the rigmarole that we've all heard a million times because some new

writer wants to hear it directly from aljean himself yeah i probably you know if somebody knows aljean tell him we wouldn't ask those questions no no mike reese uh complimented us yeah we didn't have the same eight simpsons questions everybody asks people and we didn't have a barking dog in the background yeah yeah but yeah aljean gave a lot of interviews but that was the most interesting one to me of him just going like oh yeah i know this predict 9-11 thing same with when i'm coming through the news stories whatever if a thing a major thing happens in the last month there's at least one article like no the simpsons didn't predict it it's a fake image and the most

recent one was about you know that tragedy at astroworld thing they're like do the simpsons pretty good that it's like this is a lazy image somebody like photoshopped together of simpsons in front of it like of course they didn't it's so obviously fake and like they did just i remember when uh the january 6th uh insurrection happened or whatever, and there was a drawing of Willie as the QAnon shaman, and people were like, does Simpsons predict this? It's clearly like things are in different resolutions in the picture. Yes, I hate that. But I mean, that's just part of the system. Probably the person who posted that didn't believe it either, but they're like, the algorithm tells them that Simpsons predicted it articles always always get clicks so let's just gin up one from an image that's obviously fake you know

it's sad sad sad sad and in other simpsons news there is a great oral history on simpsons road rage by input magazine and i read this and i was thinking about it uh on the walk up here and you know i think a misnomer about the show is that Matt Groening just cashes checks. When you read articles like this, you can see Matt Groening was like sitting in on meetings for Simpsons games even 20 years ago. And he had a great amount of input on this one. I don't like it being remembered as a good game because I don't think it is. I replayed it for a blog post I wrote like in 2009 when I was replaying all of these games. Obviously, it was much better than the games that came before it which is why I think it gets the not the nod to

being a good game but you know hit and run is better but this is a step in the right direction and Matt Sullivan wrote it with I believe Tim Long yeah yeah yeah it at least road rage set up the future of better Simpsons games which then uh that future got flushed away for tapped out but yeah but yeah i mean compare road rage to you know wrestling skateboarding or bowling of simpsons games at the time contemporaries like this was better yeah they make note of how bad the wrestling game was in the article like the developers like that was like a steaming loaf of shit on your desk uh you know i i'm tempted to set up my simpsons arcade machine just to play bowling and see like how bad was this because i actually never played even emulated i never

touched the bowling game i i've only seen videos you know what the bowling game is fine it's like any bowling game with a track ball and when when you're bowling you're just doing this moving your hand forward for as long as you want to and then it's over and then you give yourself like blood blisters by getting it caught in the trackball. I should have figured like, yeah, Konami could make an average ass bowling game with a trackball. But yeah, it's a, but Input Magazine, I had not heard of them before, but that was a good, a good oral history from them. And finally, best of luck to Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein, because this week, the week

of this recording, they're pitching the Gus and Wally series. I think that they were developing at least as early as last summer they were talking about it. And that's why, I mean, they would have come on anyways, I assume, but we got them on our podcast, interviewed them, and we talked about that as well.

I feel sick to my stomach thinking that it was 17 months ago when we interviewed them first about this. The pandemic has been going on for this long. Yeah, but it was interesting timing that we did that entire deep, deep, deep, as deep as it goes, dive into Mission Hill, and then right after we're able to interview them and be like, you guys want to make more of it?

And then I felt bad that we did the episode about lost episodes where they're like, we kind of want to make those. I was like, well, now we've blown your jokes because we've talked about all of them. Hey, they're all online. Yeah, it's true yeah but uh but yeah seeing bill and josh talk about that i wonder if you know what you think that they were waiting i've been wondering this whole time what's not been said is that josh was a showrunner on a netflix show and i have a feeling some deal at netflix would tell you you can't do you can't pitch stuff uh if you are under contract here in netflix something tells me that uh production on disenchantment ended a while ago

that uh i get that kind of feeling in the air as well yes yeah they haven't said it which hey you know what if they if they ended it at 40 episodes like here we told the whole story and maybe if we come back we'll come back but that'll be at a later date i hear we told the whole story and maybe if we come back we'll come back but that'll be at a later date fine yeah they told a good little story yeah but but i am so rooting for bill and josh to to get this i really hope their gus and wally series sells they've they've talked to about how like you know uh one difference between now and then is they're definitely gonna have actually hire some gay writers and performers and actually you know i as as one gay person i thought they did a very

good job as two straight guys telling a gay love story we got some wally but they recognize that like times are different now let's hire and also i love seeing bill said again in reply to this of like what do you know he said before like this will always be in the late 90s to early 2000s and we will not deal with 9-11. It will keep. Yeah. Mission Hill will always be set in this time frame if we come back. We don't we want to avoid that. Yeah.

But I love that. I mean, we talked about on the series is the perfect window of time. Oh, yes. Yeah. And people want to be nostalgic for that more than ever now so yeah bill bill and josh i'm putting out all the vibes towards your project i i hope uh you know hbo well jesus who owns it castle rock and that's or well it'd be on like h i guess if warner owns it i don't know well seinfeld is like on netflix because like castle rock owned it and i guess that was a sort

of sony i don't know but whoever it should be on hbo max that's where it should live but yeah but Well, Seinfeld is like on Netflix because Castle Rock owned it, and I guess that was the sort of Sony. I don't know. But whoever, it should be on HBO Max. That's where it should live. Give it at least four episodes or something. Just a limited order. If you don't want to commit to 10, you can tell four good stories and then see what happens. Yeah, yeah.

So moving on to our news. So let's talk about the What a Cartoon December schedule. If you are over the age of 60, you you're gonna like what we have for you uh just coming off of rudolph the red-nosed reindeer of course we're starting off the month with frosty the snowman the 1969 classic starring jackie vernon and uh charles wait no jimmy duranty why did i say charles yeah and mr billy de wolf yes uh so yeah we had a lot of fun we recorded all. So, yeah, we had a lot of fun. We recorded all these, by the way, and we had a lot of fun with them. Oh, yeah. We enjoyed that corncob pipe and his button nose.

Didn't like the coal, but, you know, you got to take the good with the bad. So, moving on. After the first week, Frosty the Snowman, we have How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the 1966 classic with, you know, great art and designs by Chuck Jones and Maurice Noble and, of course, Boris Karloff as the voice of the Grinch and Thurl Ravenscroft as the narrator and the uncredited singer. I'm sorry, he's just the singer, not the narrator. Yeah, yeah. And June Foray, also uncredited.

She's uncredited in both Frosty. No, actually, she's credited in Frosty. They cut her out of it. These are facts you'll learn when you listen to it. Spoilers. cut her out of it these are facts you'll learn yeah listen to spoilers but we've but we've covered now two of uh two i guess mr magoo is the last of the 60s classics uh that we have not covered now on a lot of cartoons i think that's due for next year yeah yeah we ought to save something for 2022 yeah so uh and also for five dollar and up patrons of course we have our monthly talking futurama installment which is for the episode The Roots of All Evil, the classic episode starring Qbert and

Dwight, the characters we all love from the show. I've got my Dwight shirt on right now. It's everybody's favorite episode. Yes. You all love it. And look, and again, I have to say, we are doing DVD order. If you're looking at this on Hulu, this episode doesn't air until two years after the last one we did. Yes.

But this is DVD order we're doing. Thanks a lot, Bumper Robinson. You'll hear more about that on the podcast. And our What a Cartoon movie for December is Millennium Actress. We're celebrating its 20th anniversary. It's a classic Satoshi Kon movie. And of course, if you're on the $5 or free feed, you'll get to hear the history of that movie. But if you're on the $10 feed, you'll get to hear the entire podcast, probably around three to four hours long.

We have to cover a thousand years of Japanese history. So, yes, it might take a while. No, I'm so excited to do it, to finally do our first Satoshi Kon piece as part of what a cartoon podcast. He's like the greatest director of our, well guess i won't say our generation he's like 10 years older than us but man it's great and uh that is my favorite one of his movies his millennium actress and i'm sure we'll cover all of his movies because there's only four yep yeah it'll go pretty fast sadly yes uh you're just making me even more sad i'm sorry we can be very comprehensive though so for our january what a cartoon movie poll we're doing least essential disney sequels so a lot of direct-to-video stuff and you'll have a chance to vote between the hunchback of

notre dame 2 the secret of the bell the lion king 2 simba's pride bell's magical world and the little mermaid 2 return to the sea so a different era of disney we're going to be covering that for the first time i mean we have covered some of the disney tune stuff like the duck tales movie and return of jafar this is more of the like late 90s to early aughts era that i it's uncharted for me it's a pretty much for me too uh the only one of these have i watched in full and uh i'll let the listeners guess. Yeah, but yeah, I'm looking forward to us dealing with The Curse of the Return of Jafar, which is that it showed that direct-to-video sequels make a shitload of money, and so Disney did them for like 15 years straight.

Yes, and I'm sure they made a lot. Yeah, and these are all on Disney+, or also uh or or also you know you can steal them too yeah it's fine uh but yeah that is it for our scheduling so let's talk about the future 2022 it's where we'll all be living alarmingly it's coming up 2022 i can't stand it like this year like jesus christ man yeah but we are going to be changing our schedule a bit to account for how the world is slowly opening up more. We're going to have more time to do things that aren't podcasting, like perhaps see our wives or husbands more. And because of that, we're going to be making some adjustments

because at the end of 2019, we were like, wow, we're working so hard. We need to make some changes to make, you know, our schedules more reasonable and keep up the quality of the podcast. And we did that. And then a month later, the pandemic happened and all we could do was work. But now that things are slowly getting back to normal, we're having more time to do other things.

We are going to be making some changes. And the biggest change we're making for 2022 is that there will now be one episode of What a Cartoon per month. But things will be very, very good if you are a patron because we are now making Talking of the Hill a monthly series. So we experimented last year with Talking Futurama, making that a monthly series, and it just made sense.

And everybody liked it. Nobody complained. It was easier on our editors. And we're going to be doing the same thing with Talking of the Hill because we noticed that people stick around longer if we have recurring Patreon series. And honestly, from my perspective, doing a big burst of episodes over the course of a few months, it doesn't make any sense anymore for where we are now. We started by doing that with Talking Critic because we only had Talking Simpsons.

Now we have so much more on our plate and it just makes sense to do things on a monthly schedule to have just things throughout the year you can look forward to and then not just a burst over two months that you can you know miss if you're not a patron yeah with talking critic it was also you know a more than half a year long yeah it made sense to do that and that was before we launched what a cartoon and yeah when we started doing talkingurama last year's monthly, that was also us saying, well, it's probably just going to win our miniseries poll anyway, so let's just do, instead of doing 12 episodes over three months, let's stretch it out over the year. And that really worked for us recording-wise, too, and people still got the same number of episodes as if we'd done a miniseries just stretched out and same and now i i expected that king of the hill would likely have won of a miniseries poll uh if we did it in

january or or in december so i think it's just like let's just have king of the hill king of the hill we love doing it you guys like hearing it it makes so much sense to do those as monthly episodes alongside all the simpsons episodes they're fun for us they're big crowd pleasers we love doing them as for what a cartoon we love doing it too we really do we are not going to stop but we can only really devote resources to one episode per month aside from the movie because uh from our angle it takes around i would say three to five times longer to make a what a cartoon episode than an episode of talking simpsons or talking futurama or talking in to the Hill or blah blah Batman because you have to start at square one.

Like, where did this come from? Who made it? What's their history? When did this air? What was happening then? What did they make after this? All of this history that goes into it. It is a lot, a lot of work that we love doing and it's very self-indulgent. But because it's so self-indulgent, we really can't justify doing it as often as we used to be doing it but it will not stop we can guarantee that but we have to be more realistic about how much time we have and what uh needs more resources on our yeah i mean uh yes i am a research machine i love doing research i love reading like oh wow learning like it feels cool to learn new information but uh also a you you do have to just like measure your amount of time and productivity versus and like boy this is what a cartoon takes so much time to do it right and i wouldn't want to do it wrong like i would i like

doing it the way we do it but you know i think i look back on it i think it's crazy we did four of them in a month at one time and the movie as well. I don't know how, maybe that's why my wife told me she was worried about me at the end of 2019. Yes. You seem very tired. Yeah.

We, we were pushing ourselves way too much and it's, you know, it's unfortunate too that, you know, I, I love what a cartoon, lots of listeners love it.

It is not the most popular thing we do, which is an unfortunate idea, But part of being a podcaster, too, is just recognizing you only have so much free time. It's nice to do things that are creatively rewarding, but also it's important to do things that your listeners are telling you they want and and you and responding to that appropriately which i think uh switching to a monthly king of the hill futurama and then one what a cartoon and one what a cartoon movie yeah uh and what a cartoon will still be on the free feed also yeah like yeah so we're not that's not going behind the paywall and and the what a cartoon movie preview will post the same as usual too. So yeah. Yeah.

And what a cartoon movie. That's also a ton of work, but it's also very rewarding and a ton of patrons sign up just for that. So that's going to continue as well. So I can talk about what a monthly schedule will look like. So this is for if you're a patron and if you're not a patron, we can talk about that after the patron schedule. So if you're a patron, the first Monday of every month will be a What a Cartoon episode. The second Monday of every month will be a Talking Futurama.

The last Friday of every month will be Talking of the Hill. And the last Monday of every month will be What a Cartoon movie. So that is going to be the schedule every month from here out for the foreseeable future. And of course, if you're on the free feed,

you will get a new What a Cartoon on the second Monday of the month. And you will get the extended preview of What a cartoon movie on the first monday of the month so uh even if you're not a patron that is still six podcasts per month we're going to be sending out to you but if you are a patron you'll get you know uh talking futurama talking to the hill uh any other bonuses we throw up there and also if, if you're a $10 patron, you'll get to hear the entire What a Cartoon movie. Yeah, I think it's quite a lot. And Talking Simpsons will also be staying probably longer than two hours every week as well.

The hour ratio of content you get is pretty high, I'd say. So, yeah, you know, again, I do feel a little bad uh pulling back on what a cartoon because i know we have a lot of a lot of fans out there that podcast and yeah it's just it's really it's just you'll get one you just know that the one you get each month we worked really hard on yes and and it'll make it special too yeah that'll give us even more time to work on it because i think like when we cut back last year they got better yeah because i could i spent like three days on the brack show learning everything about it i love that episode i put out this year oh yeah no i mean and uh like i just did with uh with grinch and frosty like i put in a ton ton of extra reading and taking out

but oh man that i you'll hear it on the millennium actress podcast but i i put away half the books i'd taken out for that just i show bob like look at this giant stack of books i had it was about six books yes yes but uh yeah i think uh i will be happy with it i think you'll be happy with it and patrons will get uh two exclusive episodes every month for the entire year and then we don't know what we're going to do for the fall miniseries yet but it will be a complete miniseries and we'll talk more about that as 2022 continues so the fall miniseries will still exist but the uh the first two miniseries will be spread out throughout the year yes yeah and uh and if you're a king of the hill fan talking of the hills back starting on in january and it starts with snow job which you know is a january set episode. So perfect timing. So up next, in case you missed it, we are going to be at Sketch Fest 2022.

We couldn't go in 2021. I forget why. I think I was just being lazy that year. Of course, we're going to be going back to San Francisco to the Piano Fight Mainstage. It's where we performed in 2020. And it's happening on January 12, 2022 from 8 p.m. to 9.30 p.m. of course at a specific time and admission is $22.

You can get tickets at the Sketch Fest website, of course, and we'll be giving you more information about that show as we get closer to the date. Yes, yeah. Me and Bob got some plans.

We got some hopes, but until it's all finalized, we don't want to give it away yet. Probably, I would definitely think we'll be telling you about it on the next community podcast we do at the very least but yeah i look forward to that it's you know it's a wednesday night january 12th but i uh i i but just i'm just excited to get back out there again and finally be in front of people and i really liked performing on that main stage last time that was our first time doing it in january of 2020 yes it's going to be a great comeback i think i might uh be used

to performing i hope i didn't like forget about that over the past two years yeah that's true i do miss i i miss the stage i don't miss the you know intense uh feelings of stage fright right before and then as soon as i'm on stage i feel very normal me too yeah but yeah so check it out uh go to our patreon it's a public post with more information about it just what i said earlier the date the time the place and the admission cost so please check it out get tickets as soon as you can we don't know how fast they'll sell out and our audience has grown a lot in two years so i'm looking forward to a big crowd yeah yeah and and of course too you should know in case you don't live in the san francisco area and like

oh how safe are they going to be at this live show like the sketch fest san francisco in general for live shows has very strong for america anyway strong guidelines on covid and sketch fest is no different like we need vaccine proof we need vaccination proof ourselves to perform we also you know that's the venue as well puts it on people so i i would think our listeners here that if you can be vaccinated i assume you are if you're a listener of ours and if not you have like two months yeah yeah you know figure it out and uh yeah henry and i of course are double vaccinated i just got my booster uh a week like sorry like four or five days ago so yeah yeah i got i got boosted about a month ago and then uh i'm feeling good yeah do your worst omicron no don't say that oh sorry i mean uh we like you stay away uh so yeah that's

what's going on with us again uh new what a cartoon schedule and new patreon schedule for the next year for the foreseeable future and of course our live show for 2022 let's talk about we've been playing and watching of course not for the podcast although uh these things might pop up here and there so it's been a very busy month for me because i'm going away for three weeks to go to canada and we're doing a ton of podcasting behind the scenes we have podcasts recorded through march yep for some series so we have been so busy with podcasting no yeah very very productive i i'll warn people next week for the beatles episode we recorded that very far in advance so you will not hear us talk about recent beatles talk you know well peter jack Jackson couldn't have released that a month earlier. I know.

Anyhow, I have not been playing or watching much. Mostly podcasting, but I've been playing since August, The Great Ace Attorney Collection. I'm still playing it. I'm on the final case of the second and last game in the collection, and I'm like 85 hours in. It's a very long experience. I was not anticipating it to be that long,

but I'm enjoying it, but I also am looking forward to it for it to be that long but i'm enjoying it but i also am looking forward to it uh for it to end so i can move on i'm playing a short game next these games yeah you know high budget japanese games usually are so long i think even more so than in america i feel like in america for triple a games a lot of the developers go like if we can give 15 to 20 hours of a good time like in the guardians video game then we feel like we accomplished something but you know with with this ace attorney game with say dragon quest 11 or the most yakuza games it's like wait only 60 hours no no people will feel ripped off 100 at least but yeah it's uh i felt kind of bad when

i got back from canada in august like oh i was doing a ton of reading and i really dropped off then i realized i've been playing a game where i do nothing but read for 85 hours i think i've done enough reading since then that's right yeah it is it is a novel isn't it basically there are some choices but uh 80 like no sorry 90 of what you're doing is reading text on the screen uh not a lot of voice acting either. So other thing I've been playing is Batman Arkham Origins. Doing the Batman miniseries got me in the mood to play one of the two Batman Arkham games I haven't touched yet. And it's fun.

It's just like it's an admirable approach to doing the Rocksteady game. It's just a fun content bag you can jump into and just chip away at it and do things you want to do. It's been a while since i played a game like this i don't know when i'm gonna finish it but it's just kind of fun to be in the world and just unlock the riddler crap and you know do all the stuff you do in an arkham game you know those open world type games when if i take time off from playing them and then go back to them i'm like oh yeah i remember what i liked about these games but when it's every goddamn game like you do get kind of sick i think like i play one every five to seven years i'm fine uh and it's good that like uh this came out in 2013 but it still looks great and it's like oh yeah there's another one of these if i ever want

to play another one uh arkham knight i have not even touched that in and it's snowy and christmasy yes yeah it's it's a good it's a good and if people skipped it because it wasn't rock steady i i've been saying this since it came out in 2013 you shouldn't it's good it's uh and it's all it's it's a good it's a good and if people skipped it because it wasn't rock steady i i've been saying this since it came out in 2013 you shouldn't it's good it's uh and it's all it's all like 10 bucks now or something yeah they're just giving it away and uh so in terms of watching i've not watched a lot either uh one thing i'm watching i can't talk about because i'm going to be podcasting about it and i don't want anyone to spoil me because it's not over yet but uh we finished watching squid game it's great

uh i liked it a lot it's a great uh iteration of the death game genre i'm not doing too many new things but it's very competent and i'm looking forward to the next season of it i'm glad everyone else out there likes it as well yeah yeah and uh movies i watched over the past month i saw the 2018 halloween i gotta say really overrated i thought it was kind of lame and i don't like how they're trying to turn uh michael myers into like jason vorhees right yeah it's not great hey for it to happen in real time isn't he like in his mid-60s and he's still being this scary like yeah this is an old man and i like how this is the fourth reboot and they're like no this is the one that matters yeah it's it's uh it's almost up there with terminator movies with reboots but at

least terminators have the excuse of like well it is about time travel so multiple timelines blah blah and it sounds like the newer one halloween kills is much much worse so i'm glad i didn't see that i watched the half in the bag about it the youtube show yeah i also saw uh but i'm a cheerleader the natasha leone movie from like year 2000. That's a gay-ass movie. It is. It feels incredibly dated, but I can see why it was important for the time. And I thought it was somewhat enjoyable. Yeah, look. Transport yourself to being a 17-year-old homosexual in 2000.

There aren't gay things. Gay characters are few and far between on any TV show, and they have to be just like sad and guilty all the time yeah here's just uh you know a fun trashy uh campy uh silly comedy you know it felt like it was just it was trying to be a john waters movie but it wasn't pushing things far enough well yes and i'm straight so i don't know how far my opinion goes on this but what i didn't like about it was the movie was like there are many kinds of lesbians out there and of course there's no talk about like you know the spectrum because we weren't really there yet so it's like there are so many kinds

of lesbians there's one kind of gay guy he's effeminate and obsessed with sex and that's all there is you know I've noticed this in that era of 2000 core gay films you pick your audience if you are for homosexual cis men there's one type of lesbian in it like yeah token lesbian i can see that and if you are making your thing for

cis lesbian women then there's one type of gay guy in it and it's that type of gay a very camp gay guy there's uh it reminded me too of did you see that another actor from mean girls came out like that really basically every guy uh who isn't tim meadows in the movie what is the actor is gay i didn't know this okay yeah it was uh the the guy who asked out the goth girl at the end of the thing at the dance but but anyway yeah the the uh that is a very specific thing back then. I think, too, they don't talk about spectrum or the spectrum of sexuality because back then, I think for a lot of gay media, or at least in America, they were combating the adage of, but it's a phase. So people say, oh, you're just going through a phase. You're not really gay. You're not really this or that. And that led to a lot of biphobia in the gay community as well.

But yeah, to acknowledge the spectrum was seen by some as giving up ground to straight people who said like, oh, see, you are attracted to women or you are attracted to the opposite sex sometime. Then that must mean you're not really gay or whatever.

I can also see it being the year 2000 and they them being like the filmmakers saying you know we want a lot of people to see this so let's just do uh gay or not gay is the binary that's like as much as we can get through to some people yes yeah so i and now you know times have changed and i think there's a more there is some more nuanced uh conversations about sexuality in American media than there were back then. But Natasha Lyonne is great in that movie. She's great. A great performance from young Natasha Lyonne.

I love her. And weirdly enough, Nina and I watch Star Trek Generations because we have a good marriage. And that involves watching movies so you can listen to the podcast about the movie together. Because we hate movies for their Nexus series in December. They're doing Star Trek Generations, and I've never seen it. Wow. And it's a perfectly cromulent Star Trek movie. Oh, sure.

And it's just fun to see. It's a real suck job for Captain Kirk, is what I'll say. Well, if they're going to get him to come back, you've got to suck him off. It's his final suck off. It's his great goodbye. But then again, they bury him under a bunch of rocks.

It's a really undignified death. Yeah, that that makes me think i've always thought that that's their way of saying like here's what we really think of william shatner like now that he's not on screen let's stuck his body under rocks i i saw that movie in theaters and it did feel like an event like if you would live through the entirety of star trek the next generation and the all of the if you were on the internet you either argued about mike or joel or you are argued about picard versus uh shatner and so the ultimate team-up movie like that was something you'd been looking for i could see it being fan service too it was just funny to see how much more dignity actors had 30 years ago where shatner was like well i'm 61 time to retire with the role of

Kirk and we've got like Harrison Ford stumbling around and falling downstairs as Indiana Jones at 80 we won't let you quit you have to die that's the only way you get to you get to be free and then when you're dead we'll put your ghost in a movie like that's what we'll do

how dare you die and like interrupt the brand you gotta dance around as a blue ghost you've really inconvenienced this brand yeah you know they tried to warn us when there was the the guy dancing on the ceiling with the uh with the vacuum cleaner uh fred astaire dance on the vacuum cleaner everybody's like this will be every celebrity you'll never be allowed to die we're like haha for real if you if they bring john candy back i'm going to do something that will get me banned from twitter if i talk about it so let's not let's not talk about that more but yeah that's it for me and also you're gonna be

talking about this too henry i'm playing pikmin bloom because i already walk like four to five miles a day it's fun to walk and also see meters fill up from that so that's that's it for me oh yeah it's uh pikmin bloom i guess i'll start my what i've been playing part with that yeah the the app look i don't like that it says like can we look at your pictures please i'm like fuck off no but we want to mine all your data we're fun little creatures but i like it as a person who played pokemon go a bit for a few months when it was new this is the chiller pokemon go like no just walk around and if you find something you'll we'll tell you later and you can just send them to yeah you don't need

to take your phone out or leave it out you can sometimes be like oh i want to walk by that that flower that's blooming or whatever but it's really like a very passive game and that's why i like it yeah and i love seeing my steps cover the uh map as well and also i went to disneyland this month and getting to walk around there and see my plants plant there like i got i got a postcard from hondo onaka like whoa uh the the uh the animatronic that's at the uh millennium falcon thing i'm looking forward to going to vancouver and getting all of those sweet canadian postcards yeah because i needed to play it too yeah and nina sent me a fun vancouver postcard and i sent her one uh one from berkeley that was we we actually were doing what the commercials tell us to i yes as long as i mentioned disneyland yeah we had a nice little trip to disneyland we were just like you know we basically was to get a

free trip later on on southwest and so i was going to disney for a day and we had a nice little time i said i gotta ride splash mountain one more time before they retheme it i think it's good they're retheming it i'm not one of those people like i gotta ride it before the snowflakes ruin it that's not what i'm saying but it it was a ride for me growing up that i was always scared of and this time i was like no way I'm Mr. Brave front row on Splash Mountain I got so fucking drenched by that

and it wasn't the big drop it was the second the middle drop there's you know you think you're safe it catches you off guard it was literally like here are two bathtubs full of water just on me Darren my husband very smartly

brought extra clothes with us it's like here let's just go to the bathroom and here's a new shirt for you i'm like yay okay you know i went in 2018 with a friend of the show maddie cop she does some of the art for our podcast and i had not been there for a long time so i did everything including splash mountain in 2019 when i went with nina for the first time and she had not been in a while i was kind of like we don't need to do splash mountain and she was fine with that uh no it's uh i regretted doing it i'll never write i don't think i'll ever write splash mountain again it's just there's i don't remember getting that wet the last time i wrote it there are some things i don't want to ever do again like autopia why they let me into one of those cars, I don't understand.

It felt like torture. And also the Finding Nemo ride, which used to be 20,000 Links Under the Sea. I felt like a panic attack coming on in that little ship. And that was before COVID. Yes. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah. But as for video games, I am now actually 30 hours into Shin Megami Tensei V.

Are you out of the tutorial yet? Yes, I just finished what I would call the second dungeon. Some might call it the third dungeon. There's some spongy readings on what you call a dungeon. But yes, SMT is known for its very gradual pace. I think they actually addressed it pretty well in SMT V, where at the very start of the game, they say like,

here, oh, you walk around the train station in Shinagawa for like 10 minutes. It's like, oh, now you're in the other world. Better start fighting it. It's like you're straight into dungeon fight and you're not having to do two hours of conversation before you do the fight. That's refreshing. refreshing yeah if you love shimogami or just demon fusion or also there's some smt fans who wouldn't like me saying this but if you just like

persona but never played the shimogami games this is a game for persona fans like you will like this well i have to play 140 hours of persona 5 royal uh first you do you do have to bob like i i sound like bob odenkirk at the end of that like there's a lot of tv and you do have to watch it that birthday boy's classic uh also i i played the triple a game loaf that is guardians of the galaxy the video game totally good it's good it's a seven or eight out of ten uh i i i complained that the characters never shut up i will say that at the end of the game they use it in an interesting way the fact that they're so fucking annoying it it at least pays off in some form i don't feel it was worth it though to drive me fucking crazy with all the characters and and it makes them thematic choices that I'm already tired of seeing

in all these other AAA games, and they put it in this game, too. But I mostly liked it. I think, and I've seen it for, like, $25 for Black Friday deals. Like, that's perfectly good price for that game. Yeah, yeah. That's like every AAA game that came out in the fall. It's a bounty of $25 or or 35 games right now for the holidays and uh and i got in the mail bob saw it my big box of simpsons arcade i saw it arcade machine i will probably not build

it until i live in a different place until until me and darren move to another place that has more room for it i'm not going to build it it's just going to be in my closet in my walk-in closet accumulating value yes yeah well again i watch it still be available a year from now but in my imagination i was like oh this will sell out in a year and i'm going to regret i didn't buy it so i i got it but i i technically own the simpsons arcade machine before we move on to talk about what you've been watching henry i gotta say you have the most hetero viewing schedule yeah compared to me i have like but i'm a cheerleader in star trek and you have the like literally the most hetero assortment of viewings i've ever seen in my life it's true i really i really had me and my husband really heteroed out this month no i i know this sounds like i did the bro-iest bro dudes rock month it was it was dudes rock month

in november in this apartment uh but yeah we had a real content thanksgiving we were thankful for content this thanksgiving so i we're almost done with sopranos we only have season 6a and 6b to finish it's the best show i love it uh we already talked about cowboy bebop also in december comes out the new spider-man and matrix so we're like let's just watch all of matrix and spider-man movies again so we did that we watched uh far from home and matrix revolutions this month and far from home i like slightly more on the second watching but i still don't like a spider-man that loves a billionaire this much it just feels wrong to get used to it and and matrix

revolutions is ridiculous but i like it more every time i watch it and i also watched the final bond movie of daniel craig no time to die so i watched it uh with my my mom and stepdad because i'd watched the last two bonds with her so i was like let's just watch the third one let's finish finish it off and it's a good movie it's good it's good that that shift an octave tells me it's very good yeah no it's it's fine if you if you like the other daniel craig bond films it's a fine little bond film i i also watched the uh the the entirety of the second half of he-man revelations uh or I should say Masters of the Universe Revelations. And they really, that's why He-Man's not in the title because he's not much in the show as some people complained.

But once you adjust your expectations to like He-Man's not the main character of this Masters of the Universe show tila is then i think it's a good show with good animation and if you give a crap about he-man mythology it's really good i i like the last five episodes they do something in the last episode that 1000 seems like a response to the first season uh getting negative reviews from hardcore he-Man fans of just them saying like, them doubling down and saying like, this show is not about He-Man. Okay, chill out. They were still mad over Thundercats.

Yes, yeah. Which that technically exists. Like Thundercats Roar, you can watch it. I've heard it's very good. Yeah, yeah. We watched Goodfellas because Darren's never seen Goodfellas before. And I was like, I'm ready for more. Let's dudes rock some more with Goodfellas. You's never seen Goodfellas before. And I was like, I'm ready for more.

Let's dudes rock some more with Goodfellas. You know, Nina has not seen that. I'm thinking that could be a fun Christmas watch. It's a good, I think it's a really great movie. It's incredibly watchable. Like so very watchable. It's like two and a half hours long, but it flies by. And when you know it's like the first one of those and how every movie after was like, yeah, constant monologue.

Saying like, and of course you have to know that at this time this was that and meet this guy then and here's a song yeah oh god the sauce darren just had the laugh of like wait no we they just started a song like even that was 10 seconds ago they're starting another song but yes that's how good fellas does it but uh and i watched the south park uh post-covid special do they make regular episodes anymore they just make like four specials a year now so that's the secret i think uh what's not talked about is that hbo max signed a five-year-long 500 million dollar deal for all the south park episodes and that when new South Park episodes would air on Comedy Central HBO Max would get those too but I believe if you call it a movie Paramount Plus they get

the South Park specials and air South Park movies okay I was confused because I have Paramount Plus I'm going to get rid of it soon because I hate it. And I was like, wait, South Park is on this? Yes. I thought HBO Max had South Park. Yeah, well, it still does. Does HBO Max, wait, sorry, HBO Max has that special too? No. Oh, Jesus Christ. What a mess.

So the only South Park stuff you can watch on Paramount Plus is this special and South Park the movie because they seemingly kept the movie rights with Viacom. But HBO Max got the TV rights. So that's why they have to call post-COVID a movie so that it can be on Paramount Plus. And there will be 13 more movies. So the other movie is on HBO Max, though. The other COVID special. That's a special.

Pandemic special. Right, right, right. Mini movie. Yes. That is technically not a movie. So that's on pandemic special right right right the mini movie yes yeah that that is technically not a movie so that's on hbo max but all future new south park content i would expect to be on paramount plus and when i watched it it reminded me of how i felt the last time i watched a brand new south park thing which was probably like two three years ago which is they write really at

times really funny character-based stuff and seeing kyle cartman stan all of them interact together oh that's funny good character-based stuff and then they'll make a comment on real life that uh is eight times out of ten they make i disagree with they will make a good joke about like oh yeah you're selfish if you don't get a covet vaccine like yeah that's okay good and uh then they'll do a joke about how you can't tell any funny jokes anymore as a stand-up comedian because everybody is too woke and you have to just be complimentary i'm like god that sucks this should be like dave chapelle and go to a high school auditorium and yell at everybody yeah i know i think they know that's lame but it also pisses them off like yeah so it's just and fortunately there wasn't uh no there actually was one trans joke in it which was also bad uh but it was a joke about how you can't

tell trans jokes which is too bad guys i know it's uh which is yeah the worst stuff in it is about jimmy balmer the special child who's the comedian he has grown up to be basically jimmy fallon and any when he does jokes on tv uh he just says like the joke in the movie is or what do you call a trans woman who goes to an abortion clinic her valid pronouns but that's the joke he's forced to tell because everything's too woke now you can't i i i feel like there's actually if i were to punch up this joke i think there's there's actual comedy to be made about how like stephen colbert and jimmy fallon and all these guys who host their late night shows they basically just have to go like they have to cry and be like i'm sad too this is

bad but i am here and i feel for you this horrible thing happened in the news but i see and hear you and i know your val i'm like which is completely useless to me i don't care i i used to care if steven colbert was sad for me i just wanted to be funny again but it's not going to happen in my lifetime like that's a joke you can do but if the to me if the joke is just like oh yeah it's hard to be funny and everybody's so woke it's like that sucks i think that sucks don't like it but but the plot is actually good and interesting i don't know if you can if you push past that it's fine i'm not gonna do it and last thing i watched the most boomery cis hetero man thing i could do i watched uh two of the three

episodes so five hours of Get Back. Oh, who's your favorite Beatle? It's George Harrison. I'll say it next week on the podcast we recorded with our guest on the Ringo episode a while ago. George Harrison remains my favorite Beatle. He comes off the best in this. He's tired of being bossed around by everybody and treated like a session musician, and he fucks off. But look, if you don't care about

the Beatles, you're definitely not going to like watching this movie where you get to hear them practice songs and you basically have to hear the same song dozens of times as they try to figure it out. If you care about the Beatles, you're like, oh my god, they're figuring out the song. Get back. I'm watching them discover the

chord progression or this new lyric is added to across the universe you know it's not for me but i'm just happy beatles fans finally get something yes it's so rare uh well it's also like this isn't this is some new footage but this is all footage shot for a movie that was already made into a documentary the let it be documentary yeah so this is but this is just that peter jackson who is a beatles freak himself he got access to all that footage too he's like oh i found more interesting stuff and i'm going to tell my own story and a story that's longer than a two-hour film is and he makes an eight-hour movie

basically interesting to get to find new beatles content yes yeah well this late and this late in their lives one it does show the footage of things that I'd only read the stories about because it was like footage they didn't want to show in the 70s, but now that half the people in it are dead, they're like, yeah, let's just show it. But you hear these stories of like, oh, and George quit that day and he walked out. But when you see the moment, it's just George is just silent

and he's been silently stewing the entire time. And then he puts down his guitar. He's like, you know, I'm just, I'm going to go. You know, you can put out an ad in the magazine and you can find somebody new for this. I'm out of here. And he just leaves. But it's also just fun to, it's fun background. I'm not watching it that closely, I'll say.

And me and my husband are enjoying talking to each other. You know, Beatles accents. And it talking to each other you know Beatles accents and it's it's really nice you know it's I think that's a really good thing a lot of liver puddling dialogue being slung around here yeah I look it did I like Beatles music it reminds me of what I liked about Beatles songs but I say go out and buy the great album one that's all you need they'll get you through life. But if you don't want to watch a bunch of guys just practice music a lot, I can see why the original documentarian was like,

let's just boil this down to the juicy bits of where people fight and quit the band and argue with each other. We don't need to show them like, well, here's this 10th time they played get back and they're like oh nope still hasn't got the song yeah that sounds like torture to me just because when all of my teenage friends got intolerable it's when i would go over to hang out or like play games they're like no you're gonna listen to me drum or no you're gonna listen to me play guitar it's like can i just turn on the n64 uh well then yes this is going to drive it's like the secret white man desire to bore your friends uh no i've i've seen some funny stuff on twitter of people making fun of other people

like and then he picked up a guitar and i oh my god he's making magic and people they quote tweet that of like paul mccartney's just like practicing blues riffs like he's just like and then he figured one out like and and it's if you like the creative process i think it's interesting there too but yeah if you're coming in with the gravitas of like we are watching gods form the mountains like this and it's like no it's it's guys who are good at writing rock songs figuring out how to write new rock songs that's that's what's most interesting to me about it but so there i yes i watched too much stuff over the thanksgiving break quite honestly so we've got questions and comments coming up next

and our first questions and comments are for talking simpsons the first episode was bart's dog gets in f and andrew bouvier says always love to hear connor on the podcast but one minor correction regarding the photo the falling soldier that it was used for one of the patches of the bouvier family quilt it was from the spanish civil war not the spanish american war as henry thought and on top of that there is controversy surrounding it that not only does it not portray the subject in battle the photographer claimed it did but also that it was 100 faked staged things like the supposed subject had been killed somewhere else and the geography of the photo and others in its series not matching the claimed battle location, etc. So, Andrew Bouvier telling us this is a fraudulent photo.

Man, I didn't know this. This is a truth. I mean, this is about a Bouvier family quilt from a Bouvier, so he should know. Yes. Man, everything's a lie from back then. I don't know what to believe. It's a photographer. It's like a photograph.

Let's just call it movie magic. Also, who can keep track of Spanish Civil War versus Spanish American War? They're just so, you know, all these Spanish wars. Well, we started the Spanish American War, I'm pretty sure. Or at least we drummed up support for it in newspapers. That's the one that's from Citizen Kane. Yeah. I connected it to a movie.

Now I remember which one it was. But but yeah that uh controversy behind that famous photo also on that episode sabrina says i knew there was going to be haircut shaming here i have longish hair and you live in an area with a high cost of living hundred dollars one hundred dollars is not unreasonable it's standard at a quality salon here in new jersey it's definitely worth it if it makes you look good and feel good speaking of looking good henry you are doing an awesome job with your weight loss i saw a picture of you on twitter a few weeks ago and i couldn't believe it you look great and i am so proud of you oh thank you sabrina that's

very nice i didn't set it up so henry could read that one by the way it just happened that's nice no and hey look forward to that live show. You can see me in person. And you can see both of our $100 haircuts. Yes. Oh, man, I'll be sporting a new one in at least a month.

I'm going to get a haircut a month out from it. I'm not going to have very long hair again in a live show. Yes. By the way, yeah, it is worth it.

In fact, I'm going to see my stylist soon because I'm about to go to Canada. And, you know, for me, I get a haircut every six months. So it's really, the I'm about to go to Canada. And, you know, for me, I get a haircut every six months. So it's really the $100 is negligible. But, hey, you know, if you can only afford, you know, a $20 haircut, I'm not shaming you about that either.

It's okay, you know, but if you can afford a $100 haircut, you do see the worth in the haircut. Yes, and I support these frontline workers who are cutting my hair and absorbing all of my germs. So Nina Matsumoto says, correction, I didn't say Cesar Milan. The dog whisperer uses choke chains. By the way, this is Bob speaking. I misrepresented Nina's opinions on this matter or her thoughts on this matter.

To go on, Nina says, I said he follows outdated theories like alpha dog and pack leader stuff because they're based on one bad study and have been debunked decades ago. And he also uses old school methods like rolling the dogs on their backs which you should not do unless you want the dog to fear you i don't think he uses choke chains though upon googling i see he designated something called a quote-unquote illusion collar which i don't know anything about and i didn't know rolling a dog on his back makes him scared

of you that's uh that seems mean i guess the dog should just roll on its back makes him scare to you. That seems mean, I guess. The dog should just roll on its back for you. If you force it on its back, it's not good. I see. But if a dog just drops on its back like, hey, it's tummy time, give me some scritches. There's consent involved there. You know, an update on those morning walk things, which I've talked about last time. People are like, hey, pet the cat.

Pet that cat. I did pet the cat. I've petted a few cats. And also on my morning walk today, I had one of those things, you know that joke where Bart sees Sam's little helper, he'd tear up his homework. He's like, you ate my homework?

I didn't know dogs did that. I saw a dog with its, a person stop at a fire hydrant and pee on the fire hydrant. I couldn't believe it right out of the cartoons yeah it was crazy so up next we have simpson safari and guy incognito says attorney here contest rules on an old box of cookies could certainly still be legally binding on the company depending on the terms of the contest such as the inclusion of a defined end date another great

opportunity for courtroom gags lost in a phil hartman less world so i guess like homer has to go into arbitration with the the cookie factory people like they can't have like a trial scene because there's no lawyer yeah it's sad man this in another world that would have where you know um his wife him and his wife just divorce like we'd we would have that scene with uh lionel hutz talking over the the vis-a-vis of getting his uh his africa trip and they can't afford blue-haired lawyer that's true yeah no that's yeah that's why you know they can get gill as their lawyer but it we all love gill but it all it doesn't feel as funny when gill's their lawyer uh tom buck says about this episode the grocery strike talk brought back a lot of memories. It happened in November 2003 in Southern California

and lasted for five months. I was 17 then and got hired at our local Ralph's as a scab, except I didn't know anything about the politics. I just knew they were paying $12 an hour to bag groceries and minimum wage was $6.75. That's how they, this is me coming in here. That's how they break you, man. It's sad.

But he continues. The weird part was that this particular Ralph's location opened literally days before the strike started. So most of the workers who were striking had never actually worked in the building. When the strike ended, the managers wanted to hire me for real but told me not to let anyone know i worked during the strike and to pretend i was new again i was 17 i just wanted a job i wouldn't cross the picket line now but this meant i had to act like i didn't know where everything was in the store where oddly enough i'd spend more time working than the proper union employees yeah this is sort of like our experiences where we were brainwashed or at least they tried to brainwash us into hating unions from the second

we started our jobs yes yeah no tom i i don't judge you for you know you you were an innocent scab at 17 you don't understand these things especially you know in our youths 20 years ago like union labor was just like oh that's what the gangsters are in charge of right or it's all just a scam to steal money or it's only if you're working in like a steel mill or something yeah yeah of course and and man would i my first job not long i was working in 2003 in florida for i think seven dollars an hour at best i bet it was more like six i was making like 525 for i don't know the first uh three or four years of my working career in the early aughts i do remember my first job in too late 2001 was 475 like the the minimum wage of florida we want to pay you less but they won't let us uh speaking

of unions i keep getting these emails i don't know if it's been resolved or whatever but like people at kaiser which is the health insurance company they're going on strike and I feel like these letters are trying to make me sympathize with the company but it's secretly well not secretly I'm saying on there I hope they bleed you dry Kaiser oh yeah you do nothing for me you are nothing to me you are one of the worst things I hate having to use you Kaiser Permanente you're awful but you know what every other option uh is also bad yes so just like just choose who to throw your money at that will never see any use man all this that you know we could have taught libby watson has many great opinions on this our guest from a couple episodes later but man yeah like oh this marketplace you have so many places

to choose from they're just all awful yeah i yeah i've gotten those emails too and i also think like you will never make me feel bad for you guys or never starbucks is doing a similar thing right now of like trying to intimidate people from unionizing it's uh i hope none of it works and i hope everybody gets unionized too and to keep this on topic uh mike scully has been raising a stink rightfully about uh getting animation writers unionized yeah because they really get screwed yeah uh yeah i just read a variety piece where he's sourced in it i think we have more industry listeners on this than most podcasts but if you're outside of it uh that if you are an animation writer for a kid's cartoon you're part of iotsy you're not part of wga and your minimums are much

lower like a third or a fourth as much for a normal script and in this a variety article folks should look up i was reading people say like oh yeah i am living paycheck to paycheck even though i look very successful on my imdb while meanwhile my friends who just happen to go to live action instead of animation they're buying houses now because they're getting paid real money and they're getting wga things like scully has been so good on twitter of saying like these people should be wga or iotsy needs to raise their rates like one of those two things yeah make sure you follow him on twitter i mean he's funny period but he also keeps me up to date on this union stuff going on

in the world of writing see that's you know all these other harvard guys who wrote for simpsons there and they're not working class Joes like Scully. If these people want more money, they should be as smart as me. That's what they say. Exactly. So let's move on to old money. Andrew Bouvier is back, and he says, my grandpa, a.k.a. Pop, my dad's father, also smelled like pipe tobacco. He smoked velvet brand in a maroon pouch out of a corncob pipe in his

right hand, which was a hook. So like Abe, he was a World War II vet, a B-17 pilot who was shot down over Germany and was a prisoner of war for the last year of the war. But that's not how he lost his hand. He was the fire chief of our small town and was supervising the July 4th fireworks in the

70s and went to douse a dud firework with water and sand but it was not a dud and blew up his right hand before he was able to douse it took his hand and approximately for 20 years until he passed he had a hook that he could open and close that was controlled by a cable that ran up to his shoulder wow man i you know if he's smoking that pipe all the time the pipe should just be a detachment on the end of hook i think so yeah just like screw your pipe in uh what bouvier that's such a funny story that like you you start with world war ii vet and you're like but that's not how he lost his hand he was it was fire where america and the bicentennial blew his head up i had a uh a world war ii hp pa but he

died like a year before i was born very rude yeah but he did not uh fight in the war oh okay so uh you know good on him you know my my uh papa daddy he he uh he was like coast guard he still i felt that was at his military rank papa daddy well that was my nickname like pops or i know it was but but yeah his uh then he would spend his you know retirement years hanging out at the vfw and i just you know later in life thinking like one of those other guys in the vfw who were like actually in you know germany or japan think of this guy who's just like yeah i patrolled the waters and then slept in my bed at night it doesn't matter because they're all getting stinking drunk yeah yeah that's true i man when he described the maroon pouch i was like

oh i think i feel like uh my papa daddy smoked out of the same brand wow a corncob pipe yeah hey it makes me think of our upcoming uh what a cartoon uh joe hodgson says on that same episode this is the start of what was quite the snooze fest for all of us bart maniacs back in 1991 i think this episode is genuinely mediocre while lisa's substitute is quite good but definitely was not a favorite of mine back when i was seven years old in 1991 it's a pretty long wait until three men in a comic book i just see it as evidence that the show really wanted to appeal to both adults and kids and then would eventually stray more towards their true audience though without ever truly alienating the adult viewers of the day and yeah it seems like they lost track of this being

the bart show you know yeah i think it was insecurity and also kind of wanting to impress james l brooks yes yeah like he'll like this script. He likes emotional stuff. Well, and Brooks is just, I mean, I definitely get the feel like Brooks was so hands-on in season two compared to one or three that he's just like, no, heart, heart, heart. Where's the heart? He just demands it in all of these.

But we see it used more effectively in the future. Yeah, yeah. At least his substitute is about as good as the heart gets in there. And as we will say on that future podcast, that later we learn from John VD that he was kind of annoyed he had to plumb the depths of his emotion. And when he was asked to do a similar one in season four,

he's like, fuck that. I'm going to make fun of the very concept of this. And we love it, but James O. Brooks has a vendetta against the VD estate. But then he hires dave murkin who does 10 times his crazier episodes of vd yeah he tells dave murkin don't do this that's all that dave murkin does is uh screw with your expectations so uh now we're on the trilogy of error and thank you again to nina matsumoto for being a guest on that one i'm only calling

her out because she's my wife and uh ron sterling says i think i can solve your muselix conundrum muselix is based off a swiss slash german breakfast dish called musely which basically translates to mush a cold oatmeal dish prepared with many of the same fixings and soaked overnight in cold milk i'm guessing salmon was served the latter and assumed the kellogg's branded product was the same thing so matt salmon did not do his cereal research yeah i man that mush sounds gross like soaked overnight in cold milk it's like cold oatmeal yeah uh you know it's you know it's so annoying about oatmeal it's too warm and nice it needs to be freezing cold with cold milk in a sludge it feels like it was designed for a time when the oats were too hard to chew with your

teeth so you had to like wear them down overnight yes yeah i mean and also you had to be like well we can't just light the fire in the morning to heat this up it's got to be cold uh but but that makes so much more sense thank you ron uh keifer fulsome also says about that episode i may have to put a call to other patrons on here who may have experienced the same thing but i'm curious back in the early 2000s i had this phase where i'd have closed captioning on for everything and would read along for the heck of it but something i distinctly remember is there were times where the captions did not match up with what was on screen this episode is one of those times i can remember where in the scene where lisa finds her bike missing the episode in the episode she says oh no somebody took my bike

but whenever this episode came on and in the closed captions it would say who would take a girl's bike looking at this scene the lip movements are look a bit off so i wonder if the closed captioning had an early script or such if anyone else had their closed captioning on in this era i'm curious what their experience was i definitely did i don't know what was wrong with me but for about maybe like five or seven years i just always had close captioning on on my tv just because it was neat but then learning things like this oh you can find out when they change lines that was really cool too or also when the close captioner got something wrong yeah like uh this is i can remember a million of these but one of them i remember uh is end of an Animaniacs episode.

Something bad happens and the characters say Iris out already. Iris out means close the black, the black hole on them. But then the captioner says, I want out already. So you can see Frankie act makes a few of those mistakes too, because it takes from the close captioning on, on the broadcast version of the DVD.

So there's some mistakes in there as well. Yeah. I, you know, I wish I'd done it more. I saw Nina reply to this and noted that, or maybe it was in the Discord, of saying like, oh yeah, somebody noted this on one of the old Simpsons boards too.

I wish I'd have done the closed captioning thing more. I can only remember doing it once and catching something, which I mentioned in the one in this little wiggy where Bart is hanging out with Wiggum, Ralph, and he's looking over his dad's rap sheet, and he said, like, oh, Homer's been in jail five times. Mom's only been in twice. But in the closed caption it said, dad's been in jail dad's been in jail five times oh he killed a swan at the zoo yeah i was like boy i'm shocked they uh they that it made it that far

to the closed captioning now yes if i could go back in time or if i could find my old vhs's to put them on and turn closed captioning on my tv maybe i'd see uh some other a lot of other deeper cuts in there you can see how late they were changing things based on stuff like that yeah so uh yeah let's move on to what a cartoon comments let's talk about uh batman beyond return of the joker that was our april october what a cartoon movie i don't know what i'm thinking about it's not april well we're about well at the time we're recording this we're even like thinking about our december or january one so it's it's like four different months all at the same time it's yeah so devin hoffarth says it's funny how bob and henry are

talking about how the joker is trying to kill terry's girlfriend to make him more brooding and dark well that's exactly what happened to spider-man in the 70s won't bore you with too much but the green goblin basically orchestrated and killed peter's girlfriend grun stacy sort of and this started a much darker and grittier era of Spider-Man who was more dark and brooding. Fans didn't like this, but don't worry. Marvel corrected all of this in a totally simple and coherent way that wasn't stupidly drawn out or convoluted. I only bring this up because it makes you wonder if Deany was basically writing Joker as the Green Goblin for this movie. In fact, Norman Osborn brainwashing and putting himself into the body of a friend of Peter's through super science actually does sound like something he would do as well.

Just something to think about. Now, Henry, I'm sure you're going to explain this, but did Paul Dini ever write Spider-Man things? Well, he definitely wrote for the Ultimate Spider-Man cartoon show. He never wrote, to my knowledge, any Spider-Man comic books or previous animated series but yeah about uh eight to ten years after return of the joker he was writing spider-man on ultimate spider-man and i'm sure he's a spider-man fan but and as we said in both batman beyond a podcast we did this takes so much from spider-man he is yes yes and and yeah green goblin kills gwen stacy it's one of like the biggest moments in spider-man's history and and it did turn him into a darker more brooding guy which is honestly like

i like peter parker as a guy who feels guilt a lot about a lot of stuff but if he's always just going like i'm sad like i don't want to depress spidey laughs through the pain that's spider-man to me but yeah i i definitely think dini was writing him in the Green Goblin mode here for sure. Which, I mean, the Green Goblin also, he's the smiling, laughing, clownish or impish chaotic villain of Spider-Man. He totally was designed in a Joker style for Spider-Man. So to bring Gwen Stacy back, was there some kind of pack with a devil or something oh boy you have 30 seconds gwen stacy technically has never come back but she has come back as a clone and that clone then went and moved away so no gwen stacy

sort of never did that clone is now two towns over yes yeah and they actually just double extra undid a bunch of deaths and stuff but uh but you know what i'm reading the new spider-man stories uh the nick spencer run sucked i'll just i'm gonna be straight up with you listeners who read the comics that sucked but the new run that just started that's written included by like uh a twitter pal of mine who also wrote for craig of the creek cody ziegler he's writing on Amazing Spider-Man. I'm really enjoying what they're doing right now. Cool.

Yeah. Also on Return of the Joker, Joshua Marchant said, I have to imagine the use of hair ribbon in the movie was an intentional meta joke about the production staff being frustrated being asked to produce new animation to replace the iconic Robin kills the Joker scene. Much like Return of the Joker, the Termite Terrace animators had to replace the iconic robin kills the joker scene much like a return of the joker the termite terrace animators had to replace the already completed bug shoots the dog ending with

new animation which was almost never done in the golden age because of the time it cost intensive nature of ink and paint animation then he goes on to explain his uh dog suicide ending was considered the more family friendly one that real people pleaser that dog suicide of course we're talking about hair ribbon the classic Bugs Bunny shorts where they include a clip of it in the show or sorry in the movie and yeah I can see that being a reference to their own uh troubles they're having out of all Bugs Bunny cartoons they could pick they pick the one that is about uh Warner executives telling them to reanimate something. That ending is just so great of just this distraught dog saying, like, I don't want to live anymore.

And Bugs just pulls out a gun, just blam, right in the face. I looked up the original animation, and it is shocking in a fun way. You never see Bugs just shoot anyone point blank in the head, really. Only Bob Clampett had the guts. To see Bugs Bunny, Bugs Bunny can cause like oops or hi, didn't mean to, but this is Bugs, the gun in his hand, his finger on the trigger,

he chooses to kill this guy. Though yeah, it's funny, the family friendly ending is Bugs and we're like, well here's a gun, you really don't want to live? Yeah. So somehow Bugs pushing a man to suicide is less bad it was uh it was 1941 or whatever right yeah i forgot bugs had suicide in it yeah bugs was an accessory to the suicide yes yeah he didn't the the dog didn't have the gun bugs handed it to him like the little

stinker he is influencing suicide what a fun trait of bugs bunny that's not in space jam 2 by the way you know it would have made it funnier if he should have handed uh what's algae rhythm yes well if you're real said you lost no actually bugs kills himself oh right yeah oh my god that's the end of bugs bunny that ending sucks so hard uh maybe one day we'll cover it i still have not watched the movie because when the movie came out, eight people I liked did podcasts about it. So I listened to all of them. I bet in 2023, our podcast will be just as funny though.

I think so. We got to wait a little bit though. Let's move on to Garfield's Thanksgiving. And Joe Hodgson says, I too had a run in with the happy fishermen. Now this is Bob jumping in here in case you don't remember that. That was the cartoon of the fisherman underneath the water the fish is giving him fellatio and it's like the text is i'd rather be fishing or fish love me or whatever right it's just a disgusting graphic image that is cavalierly put on t-shirts and hats and mugs okay so uh joe

goes on to say someone gifted a coffee mug to my dad with that cartoon on it of the bottomless fisherman getting some special attention from a fish. I'd seen it as a kid and I had no idea what was going on. The way the illustration was done, the fisherman's genitals kind of look like a hook coming out of the fish's mouth. So I just thought this dude was catching fish and attaching them to his crotch for some reason. It confused me as a kid,

but a pantsless fisherman was funny on its own to me as a kid. At some point, I figured it out many years later. It was a holy shit moment for me. I would assume my parents still have that mug, but after four years of marriage, they've had a lot of coffee mugs. That thing is probably buried in a cabinet somewhere. So, yeah, we were, again, very cavalier about this image of bestiality. Yeah, I never, man, I probably as a kid a kid too would have just been like oh that's a butt it's funny to see a cartoon butt drawing i would never consider i like uh speaking of

ghostbusters like if he uh i guess we were saying that off mic but speaking of ghostbusters like dan akroyd's uh belt loosening like as a child didn't make any sense to me now that's the scene that should be fully restored yes yeah the the cabin scene or whatever yeah yeah them being at the the like 10 whole minutes of setup for a book and then that way it actually happens instead of being a dream and this needs to actually have happened to or just cut it out entirely actually cut it yeah uh also on the guard field nina matsumoto says i've only lived with one cat in my life but he went absolutely nuts for baked goods all baked goods everything from plain bread to cookies had to be shut away in a drawer or else the bag would be torn apart in minutes I know friends cats who are also this way I could

absolutely believe that pancake cat more officially known as bellini cat is happy about those bellinis so i i i guess my cats i i could totally see cats enjoying like a big milky buttery pancake or whatever or bellini yeah my cats never cared much for for baked goods they yeah i think like it feels universal that all animals like bread like my parrot i mean he doesn't get that off because it's not good for him but i'll just give him like a little a little munch off a piece of bread if i'm having it and he goes crazy wow yeah african gay parrots don't eat bread in the wild i guess yeah i i thanks to nina for informing me on that i guess my cats were weird or i never tried to feed him bread or whatever but they seriously they were i ate many a sandwich in front of a cat and they were not that maybe they didn't like the peanut butter or jelly on

there what about a meatball sub yeah i figured one of those cats would like that it was going to town on those and finally we have our questions and comments for the brack show the episode president dad and christmas ape says on one of these space ghosts coast to coast dvd commentary someone i can't remember if it was andy merrill or someone else told a story about how his mother sent the entire crew a stern letter saying that they should be wasting their time on the brack show because it has swear words in it this is even funnier looking back because like you said in this episode the brack show is probably the least profane of all the adult swim originals oh that's so funny that's yeah i

i think i remember i have hazy memories that too i think it was probably andy merrill like someone related to him especially hearing the religious upbringing thing you mentioned it also like i watched a lot of the brack show for this and it just feels wrong when somebody says like ass or damn or bitch or whatever yeah like i don't think brack ever swears no which is good no that would be selling him out too i think that's the joke in the new year's party where they're talking about being canceled brack is bleeped but he does say like shit or something and i think that was their way of saying like you know what screw it like brack can swear now like okay uh no that to know that some sweetie pie was sending him like you

know that's too many swears in Space Ghost. But you know, in Space Ghost, they got away. They shoved in swears where they could. You remember the classic episode, King Dead? Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes. Okay, yeah. Where it starts with Space Ghost saying,

King Dead, you guys. And then it's a circular episode where it ends with Space Ghost saying, like, if you don't open the door, you're fucked. And so if you were to put him together yeah i hope andy merrill's name isn't on that he's going to hell uh they also got away with that i am so fucking re remember that yes yes yes anyway that was an aqua teen though yes yeah okay but so final comment here from joe hodgson on brack show i know for me i didn't get into the brack show but it had little to do with the show and more to do with it being the lead-off show for adult swim i wasn't ready to turn off my playstation when it came on so i wasn't

tuning in i didn't catch it much until it was bumped into later time slots even though i was a day one viewer of cartoon planet and and very much enjoyed Brack, I definitely preferred the more manic nature of Aqua Teen. But Brack had a place on my TV and I'm sad he's gone. Yeah, we didn't know how good we had it with Brack. That's funny, too, to think it's like, as he describes it, it's 10 p.m. on a Sunday night and he's just like, I want to play Chrono Cross just a little longer. Then I'll turn it on. Second filter three please yeah but no i i'm glad to see that his time has gone on people have they've gotten more

warm to brack and they they appreciate the brack show for for the for the reasons that we didn't like it back then of not being as mean or swear filled as the other shows yeah really and now it stands out after how cruel everything else is yes but yeah that's what another episode of talk to the audience remember december is going to be a fun holiday month we got some classic boomer christmas specials we've got a change of pace millennium actress has nothing to do with christmas and we also have batman the batman animated series is wrapping up in december as well so yeah a ton of great episodes coming at you and two of them are holiday themed yes yeah and don't forget to vote on the poll for the January movie as well.

And I guess, yeah, I hope everybody had a happy holidays or Thanksgiving if you celebrate it. I hope you all had a good one. And now onward to the march to the end of the year. Yes, and unbelievably, it's going to be 2022. I don't believe it. Perhaps the first year that matters since 2019. Hey, it. Perhaps the first year that matters since 2019. Hey, it'll be the first year that matters since 2019 because we'll have a live show in it.

Yes, yes, and look forward to that as well. But yes, we will see you again next month for another episode of Talk to the Aliens. Have a happy holiday, everyone. Wow. Infotainment.