Talking Simpsons - Talking Mission Hill - Pilot (or The Douchebag Aspect) With Matthew Jay

Episode Date: April 29, 2020

This week we're beginning our new Patreon-exclusive podcast miniseries, Talking Mission Hill! And we're sharing the first episode with all of you, featuring our Mission Hill expert/pal Matthew Jay (The Deep End, Cartoons 101) as a guest! We celebrate how Simpsons' executive producers Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein created the ultimate late '90s slacker cartoon, how the first episode sets everything up, and how The WB bungled the entire thing from the debut broadcast. Learn all about it in this episode, then sign up for $5 on Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons to hear us discuss every other episode of the series for the next few months! Support this podcast and get dozens of bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! And please follow the new official Twitter, @TalkSimpsonsPod!

One, two, three, four. Ahoy, ahoy, everybody, and welcome to Talking Simpsons, where there are dark forces at work. I'm your host, Dilbert tie owner Bob Mackie, and this is our chronological exploration of The Simpsons. Who is here with me today? Henry Gilbert, and I'm still coughing up spare change. And who is on the line? I'm Matthew J. Everybody ska! And today's episode is the Mission Hill episode pilot or the douchebag aspect. Ah, so this is Mission Hill.

Don't get excited. It doesn't have anything you would like. Well, it looks very colorful. So yes, we're taking a massive swerve as we've done in the past we're introducing our newest mini series in the talking simpsons feed because we have hit mission hill in the talking simpsons timeline yes we were probably going to get to it right before we resume season 11 but right before that i know we're not exactly done with season one yet but we're about to launch a brand new thing on the Patreon, so it is the perfect time to go back, well, for one week, to 1999.

That's right, and so if you want to listen to the rest of these, they will be on patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons, and if you sign up for $5, episode two will be there on Friday, and then every Friday after that, we'll be going through the entire series in order. And that will only be on patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. Yeah, it's just like our previous ones for the so far first 23 episodes of Futurama, the first season of King of the Hill, the entire series of The Critic. We did all of those in the Talking Simpsons style as exclusive miniseries. And this is our first one for 2020.

Yeah, and our fifth miniseries and this is our first one for 2020 yeah and our fifth miniseries so far as patreon as chosen by our voters you know it was close uh in the poll between this and king of the hill season two part one but i guess our dirtbag listeners couldn't couldn't say no to mission hill and joining us on this podcast is the ultimate mission hill fan matthew j hello matthew welcome oh wow thank you That's high praise. Very few things are so specifically targeted at my brain than the show about layabout Gen X dirtbags that's drawn like 90s alt comics and has tons of ska music in it and deep references to like RPGs and video games and shit. Like this is exactly the show made to pump

endorphins into my body and i'm very excited to come here and talk about it thank you for asking me so this episode aired on september 24th 1999 and as always henry will tell us what happened on this mythical day in real world history we interrupt this trivial program to bring you important world news oh boy bobby jean-claude Van Damme is arrested for suspicion of drunk driving. Nine Inch Nails long awaited double album The Fragile is finally released. And Family Feud is back, baby, as Louis Anderson hosts a new series. Oh, delightful. I had a friend absolutely ruin Nine Inch Nails for me.

Oh, really? Yeah. One of those friends, like when you're a teenager, you have these friends. You come over, and they just make you listen to songs. Oh, of course. All of their favorite music, and you're just sitting there bored, like, can I play Mario Kart or something? He's like, no. The perfect drug is awesome.

I was doing that to people with Mission Hill episodes as a teenager. Well, at least that's audio and visual together like i feel like you should be at least doing drugs together if you're listening there weren't any drugs like uh that's unlike all the drugs jean-claude van damme enjoyed yes i think back to the oral history of the street fighter movie i remember reading where they just straight up say like oh yeah and i saw jean-claude van damme just do it rails like on the flight and man we've had a lot of family feuds in our lifetime haven't we yes uh did we start i mean i think i grew up in the post dawson era i think dawson probably he was i bet he was still doing some

of his last seasons when we were alive but that roy combs guy was that his name the late roy combs yeah we we he was our guy first. And then after his passing, I think they gave Family Feud a little break for a while. And then Louis Anderson was the big return. Then after him, I think it was Al Borland. And then... He has a name. Sorry. Richard Karn.

Richard Karn. Put some respect on his goddamn name henry and uh then i think it was the guy for elaine's boss from john hurley from uh seinfeld mr peterman oh that's right yeah and then it became steve harvey and he's just owned it for like the last 10 years i think i love those videos i think vick burger makes them or somebody does where it's just uh him just looking miserable at the camera i mean i know it's kind of like a bit but but he hates these like regular Americans he's forced to interact with. You could tell. I mean, he probably sets aside two weeks a year to film 17 a day. They definitely do. And then once it's over, he's like, I'm free again for another year.

I mean, so this is a family feud, right? Yes. The feud. I was thinking of Hollywood Squares, nevermind. But I bet like in the old days, like on Hollywood Squares, they did film 10 in a Day, and at lunch, everyone got tanked. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But yes, that was what was happening as the new season of television was beginning all across America in September 1999. The era of the Dreamcast. Oh, God, yeah yeah the dreamcast was like uh two weeks old when this episode aired we were playing final fantasy 8 getting ready for mission

hill to launch yeah wow this was 15 days after the all-important 9999 the biggest day in entertainment history according to egm uh i was freshly turned 17 the age of one of the characters in this and so uh or he's maybe 16 i forget but i i was kevin's age so when i first saw this i was the perfect age to see it same here yeah and you grew into it matt but you were the right age when it started airing in uh in its second life, I would assume. Yeah, I would say so. I did watch it on the WB. Oh, wow.

It comes out in a very weird time where between the ages of like 9 and 16, I watched anything that aired on TV, particularly anything animated, especially anything animated for adults like that's that's what my other podcast the deep end is basically about is about i have all this built up knowledge about dilbert and and duckman and and things like that that like no generation 10 minutes younger than me will ever care about like in the universe but my friend steve yorker and i have to talk about it for 90 minutes every week but uh i watched it on the wb i probably didn't remotely appreciate it as much as uh i would yes on adult swim that's when i really like and that's when i rediscovered it and i started showing it to my friends that's when i found out about the music rights issues and how they were airing them where the dvd was weird and i would like i i always have

on my hard drive just in case a uh a copy of it that's the dvd rip with the tv audio put back onto it so i can listen to the toasters while i watch it uh since it aired it's been kind of a part of my life because that's also the time of the wb where like i believe it's not that long after baby blues airs as well i was i was a fan of that show it's a weird time in the wb where they bought all these shows when they had no idea what their audience was. They were like, first WB starts out and they're like, we're making a network for a black audience because that doesn't exist. And then they got all the weigh-ins in there and stuff. And then that didn't work. So they're like, OK, maybe the same sitcoms everyone else makes.

And they started making all those. And that didn't work. And then like One Tree Hill hits and they're like, OK, we figured it out. We're just for teens. Like we're for white teens now and in that time mission hill got bought and produced and gets just totally fucked because the network is like we have no room for you anymore get out of here platypus man was not there seinfeld well yeah like upn scooped him on the urban market as it were yeah mission hill was just left in a in a tough position i definitely watched this the first week and the second week i it did just kind of leave my brain after i mean

i liked it but i was like oh i guess it just went away like tv shows do and i love obviously mega huge simpsons fan when this aired but uh i wasn't as knowledgeable about the creators of stuff. So I probably did see some ad somewhere that said from producers on The Simpsons that drew me to this as well. But I did not know about Bill and Josh, our favorite Simpsons writers at the time. I think every animated show was promoted that way because it was true. Just like there was at least one producer

who worked on The Simpsons. Like they could legally say that about Baby Blues. Jeff Martin was a showrunner on it. So yeah. My shameful secret about this is so I saw I think the second episode when it aired. This was famously like not promoted very well. And I wasn't really watching a lot of late night TV, especially WB.

Although I did like their cartoons. So I think I saw part of the second episode like, oh, this looks neat, then disappeared, as we all know. And I totally missed it when they I saw part of the second episode Like oh this looks neat then disappeared as we all know And I totally missed it when they burned off You know some of the episodes in the summer And I was like oh I guess I just came in when I read about it online Oh that's sad I wish I would have seen more of that

Then it came on Adult Swim And I didn't like it And because I knew about The Simpsons and the inside I hadn't really heard the Bill and Josh commentaries yet. But I was like, oh, these guys did my favorite stuff. And they left to make this. And Mike Scully took over the worst man on earth.

Of course, this is what I thought 20 years ago. We love Mike Scully now. But I was resentful. Like, why did you leave? Why did you give the show to this awful man? And I didn't like it, even though I watched it all. And then I got the DVDs, even though I watched it all. And then I got the DVDs via Netflix in like 2007 or 2008.

And I was like, oh, I've lived a little more of my life. I'm a little more like Andy than I was like Kevin before. And I get it now. And I think this time I watch it, I'm definitely going to love it because I have lived all of the Andy life experiences. Like trying to make a bizarre, ridiculous job work in a big city. Yeah, yeah. I think we grew into living the life of Andy, I think, all three of us. And I think it did speak to me to a degree in that it was, I could easily identify with the nerdy character who is struggling to get into cooler social circles like i was trying to befriend the cooler kids on my block despite knowing i was a giant nerd like i

i uh was a bit similar to toby from this show back in high school and uh and i also i didn't realize this until doing the research but like freaks and Geeks premiered the next day. Wow. Wow. What a week. So that was the other show that I obsessed much more about in 1999 that was also speaking to me as like, you're a fucking loser and a dork. You want to be cool with the burnouts. Here's stories about that like those those both

of you spoke to me you know i think it probably helped that i was reading tv guide a bit then or other good reviewers who were just like this is the about freaks and geeks this is the best show on tv nobody watches and that did make me want to watch it more knowing it's like the broken toy but mission hill didn't even get that like you know yeah it's part of this long lineage of uh uh it's one of the shows that taught television a very bad lesson which is animated sitcoms are about either children or people who are married and have a house and have children and there there's no in-between. And for some reason, people keep trying the in-between of people who are in their late teens or in their 20s

or even like in their early 30s, and they all get canceled. There's just this huge, there's a mass grave in the late 90s through the 2000s of great shows that got to go one season, like Clone High, like this, like MTV's Downtown, that are for an audience that doesn't get these things made for them, but also pre-streaming, that audience didn't watch television. There were not a lot of early 20-somethings watching like 8 p.m. on the WB on a Tuesday,

so those shows always tank and got canceled, and then people would find them later. I want a renaissance of that now that we have streaming and people that age are watching a lot of television. But for some reason, like those shows never stick and they're exactly what I need. And when I was of that age, there was nothing like that being made for me. And I would have to go back to shows like this. And although now that age is millennials are we're in our 40s and don't have like, you know, a very good job market or housing market or anything. So we actually can't even live the dirtbag life that people live in these shows anymore, which I saw that.

I saw that apartment in this. I'm like, no way. Even with two roommates or I guess throughout on the Kevin paying rent pays rent, though. But parents pay the rent. Yeah. They send money. Gorgeous. Yeah.

This I mean, not to get too ahead of ourselves. pays rent though but parents pay the rent yeah they send money gorgeous yeah this being i mean not to get too ahead of ourselves this made me yearn for living in this kind of place in the 90s before i mean in the in the you know end of history you know the brilliant era where everything was at peace at least we thought so and just there was so much culture before it was all stamped out by corporations and big tech moving into cities and destroying them as we're experiencing here and i love it oh yeah i mean there's many forces at work not not to get ahead of ourselves in the mini series but there's an episode that kind of presages 9-11 in mission hill which is really eerie i've been thinking about a lot the last couple weeks yeah i think so that shot of like andy

like with his arms outstretched and like happy as the world in crisis thing is behind him that reminds me of like my what's going on with me now like my life is great but everything sucks and i can't be happy about it but you're right matt that this was kind of like a proto adult swim show like the graveyard of late 90s animated series done after the boom of king of the hill uh really helped adult swim with programming about three years later and bill had a great uh point on your interview matt i don't know if we brought up that interview yet should really listen to that on your cartoons 101 patreon a couple years ago you did a an interview with bill we've interviewed bill oakley a few times but we're so simpsons obsessed that by the

end of it we're like well there's five minutes left uh mission hill that's pretty fun but but you're i want to do specifically i almost only talk to him about mission hill that's pretty fun but but yeah i want to do specifically i almost only talk to him about mission hill because people for some reason don't talk to him about it that much even though he's incredibly vocal about it he tweets about it all the time he loves the show they apparently want to or are trying to bring it back something's happening something's happening yeah they're making merchandise still like they just started like two years ago making official merch for mission hill because you know it never got the chance to have that. But he really believes in the show.

I don't know if the show could exist today. Like it would be very different. I say on we did an episode about this show on our Adult Swim podcast, The Deep End, and I think it could exist today. The only thing I think is it can't not be incredibly political because yeah it's not an apolitical show but it's not the most political show but nowadays people of that age are the most probably politically minded young generation that's uh ever existed and uh i think you'd need to push a lot of that into it i think that's the only main difference that you need to make and have it be about how hard it is to live a life like that now yeah being a slacker is a very

privileged position in this world but back to your interview matt i thought it was really interesting he pointed out in your interview that there was an animated show explosion at that time but there was also an every show explosion like right before reality tv was the thing you made very cheaply made a lot of money off of executives thought there was lots of money in sitcoms make enough of those to get syndication deals and so on and animated shows are just part of that there were way more sitcoms make enough of those to get syndication deals and so on. And animated shows are just part of that. There were way more sitcoms made that you don't remember than the like 10 animated shows of this era. Yeah. It helped all these animated shows that they have to order 13 and they can't just be canceled in four episodes, like all the Dharma and Greg wannabes that were the contemporaries of Mission Hill. So 13 episodes have to exist in Mission Hill,

unlike a live action show where you can just strike the sets a few episodes in and just release everybody. But yeah, I guess to get into the history of this show and how it came together, which your interview is very helpful. Bill Oakley reveals several things I did not know before. Regular Talking Simpsons listeners, I don't think need much explanation about the lives and careers of Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein. Yeah, we have several interviews. I think we've interviewed Bill three times and Josh twice. Yes. More to come, I'm sure. Yes. We'll never leave them alone.

But the short version is that they were childhood friends who turned into comedy writing partners bill went to harvard josh went to stanford bill worked on the harvard lampoon josh is an honorary member of it i believe he went for like a summer uh and and wrote for the harvard lampoon and they had very like circuitous post-college careers of trying to get into comedy but eventually were able to sell uh based on a spec script a first freelance job for the simpsons and then fully staff writers on simpsons by the end of season four they were the first simpsons fanboys hired to the simpsons which makes them our favorites but they really are just like great sitcom writers. Like their scripts for the shows between seasons four and six are some of the best episodes the show ever had. And when they took over for season seven and eight, like they are amazing seasons. Like I think me and Bob are pretty much agree five and six are probably our favorite seasons, but seven and eight are right behind it.

They're very, very good. I like the mix of Merkin and Oakley and Weininstein together yeah their sensibilities like in this weird cocktail they they basically feel like in in seasons five and six that there's like six episodes that bill and josh just kind of ran themselves yeah and like many seasons within the merkin seasons but yeah can i talk about them as fanboys real quick. Sure. Because I know this is well-worn territory on Talking Simpsons. But yes, they were the first fanboys of the Simpsons hired to write for the Simpsons. And the they were the kind of the only ones to do that correctly, because they were fans of it as like a television show when as, as of course it was a cultural phenomenon, but it wasn't like what a third of our economy was based on yet. Like it is now, but they loved it. And what they brought to it as fan boys were,

we know what the audience wants out of these characters. So we know like what developments we want them to make. We know like what we, we know what would make us happy to see Homer and Marge and Bart and everyone accomplish. Now the entire writing staff, other than the 60 year old Harvard grads are that, and it's really bad because they aren't bringing that sensibility.

They're bringing like, Oh, I love Mr. Plow. Let's put Homer in his Mr. Plow jacket here. And let's also have Marge say like, weren't you Mr.

Plow? And he'd say, no, I wasn't because Homer also dumb. So like, I am still as i said on talking simpsons a couple weeks ago i am watching all of the simpsons because now because i can't leave my house but uh i'm in season 22 and uh the show is built out of that like it is only

homer you've been an astronaut no i wasn't i don't remember being an astronaut like that's all it is it's just reference upon reference and And they didn't do that. Like they're, they built more history out of it. Like they found, they found them as starting points instead of just referential stuff. Yeah. And now the show is just like this Ouroboros swallowing itself.

That's just like, Oh, we need to have a sequel to a camp crusty. That doesn't actually matter about camp. Like also retcons the end and yep it's just it's hard to get although yeah we found a little pocket in season 20 that was like a few really funny episodes in a row and then it just went away again i mean uh this is maybe two or three years ago there was also like a team homer sequel but homer's bowling

team was completely different than it was in team homer i'm like just watch the episode first yeah it's like if you if you want to do it then do it like that i mean when we've i i got the feeling from talking with bill and josh and in our interviews that it was important to them to know that like no the last time we saw this character they said this or i i think about how when crusty reveals that he is rory bellows and he swims through the water and his normal face makeup washes away and he has his real skin which is not makeup that is a pointless thing if you're not a mega fan like it actually probably confuses viewers if it's their first simpsons but it's incredibly important to like no they know that that's not makeup and it's important to show that and it's a plot element

too it's not just fan service yeah i feel like feel like, I mean, it should be said that Bill and Josh, they had long hours at the Simpsons. People were staying until like 2 or 3 in the morning. And that's not great for work-life balance, but I guess good comedy came out of it. In this case, it did. There's probably a lot of tortured comedy writers who didn't write anything funny. Yeah, if you're a 28-year-old childless, unmarried comedy writer, you probably have a lot more energy than a 60-year-old man with, like, an alimony and kids and a wife

and a family and a mansion. And kids probably soon, too. They take over season seven and eight. Bill has been up front in your interview, too, of just, like, they thought it was the end. And they figure Simpsons got, like, a year left. and many simpsons writers left for big fat development deals so they do the same deal after their two years and sign up with castle rock to create sitcoms that would hopefully get bought by a network uh now let's talk about lauren mcmullen a little bit here the

uh what an accomplished artist, too. I don't think I really appreciate it until we really start working on these podcasts. But Lauren McMullen, guess what? Also a Harvard grad. Oh, it makes sense. Well, the most talented people go there, right? Yes. Smartest and the most deserving people get to go there.

She's apparently from the class of 86. So I think even classmates with Oakley. And according to her LinkedIn, it's listed that she was even president of the Lampoon, which I had not heard before. She's almost like a co-creator of the show. And it's like, give her credit then. I wonder if that's just like the way deal packaging goes of like, well, they wrote the pilot, so they're the creator.

But in Matt's interview, he does call her a co-creator but sort of like bill morrison is a creator futurama yeah exactly yeah instead of just designer or whatever uh oh yeah having seen the other side of that uh it sucks uh it's very difficult to get the credit you deserve on a lot of things there's a there's also i mean nowadays it's even worse there's generally a very uh difficult and stressful arbitration process that sometimes you can write a very successful movie that is in theaters right now and not have your name anywhere on it uh that's not me it's someone i know but it sucks when that happens so lauren speaking of credit she doesn't have much credited work on IMDb after graduating in the late 80s from Harvard. But the sense I get from looking at her LinkedIn and from reading a couple interviews with her is that she was working primarily in commercials and bumper work in animation up until 1992.

She was working at a place called Olive Jar Animation Studios, which i believe is still around uh it was founded in 1984 and primarily did like commercials and bumpers idents that were like both animated and stop motion like if you remember say a million different mtv or nickelodeon idents from the 80s and 90s like do you remember the one on mtv where a guillotine cuts off a head and it's a severed head and the mtv logo they also did coke and miller light ads and a lot of other other ads so mcmullin was working in that world that's where she she put her artistic work into uh but she would leave commercials when former lampoon mates of hers but different ones aljean and mike reese were starting their own animated series the critic

and her episodes are gorgeous. They're the best. She's the best director on The Critic. It's crazy. Like when I look at her resume, like she worked in all this commercial stuff. So it's not like she's unexperienced in animation, but she is like a boarder on the pilot and then directs a little devil do you like her move from boarding to directing is a not typical in the world of animation. It's amazing how many just some of the best TV animation directors were on The Critic, like Chuck Sheets, Rich Moore, her, and other people. Just crazy how they got so many people together, like all the best rough draft associates.

Oh, yeah. Her Little Devil Do Ya, what a great episode. And she directed the Roger Ebertbert gene siskel episode as well so basically two of the best of the critic and so funny too like like she has such a talent for visual comedy that's so good and the visual the look of this show is so integral to what it is and she also really are we on her working on mission hill yet or do you want oh well no i can get there soon. Take your time.

I love her. I love her so much. Take as much time as you want. I love Laura McMullen. So she, though, credited herself as L.H. McMullen earlier in her career. To quote her reasoning for it, I went with a credit of L.H. McMullen and changed it later. At the time, I wanted to be taken at face value like e.l conigsberg which

was a noted children's author of like the 60s up till the 90s uh and not unlike jk rowling as well women in the arts uh can sometimes just want to go by a name that is gender neutral because if people assume you're a man then they don't come at you with a lot of judgments so i still know writers that do that that's like still a thing and it sucks now i i know a friend of mine who i just had to get used to calling them uh by their initials because that was their their work identification not that not that she's ashamed of being a woman or anything but it eventually just grew into her brand so she worked on the critic she also used some of her stop emotion skills to be the director of the hanukkah town sequence

i hope shlomo and after the critic got canceled she went right over to the nanny that's awesome uh i just listened to the gayest episode ever's podcast about the nanny and i was like i gotta listen you know what i really like the nanny let's watch the nanny again in these trying times oh and she's fucking cool she's like a socialist and stuff now rules now I love that about Fran Drescher and she's a 10 out of 10 smoke show she is hell yeah hell yeah but yes in 1995 the nanny did a holiday special called oi to the world oh why why? Not like the classic Ska song, Oi of Oh, I to the World. Laura McMullen wasn't just the credited director. She's also animation timer, background designer, character designer, color designer, and storyboard.

Was that done at Rough Draft, I'm guessing? It was at Rough Draft, yes. I thought so, yeah. If you watch it, you can tell it did not have the budget of a Simpsons episode or a critic episode, let's say. It even looks very like early digital animation for TV, but I think it's fine. For a 1995 Christmas special of a non-animated series, I think it's fine. The designs are cool. Yeah, well, and she could go off of the opening animation to the nanny show,

which was all about... Her boyfriend kicked her out in one of those crushing scenes. Oh, yes, that's right. She was out on her fanny fanny henry thank you that would be censored in the uk she was out on her uh bum uh but yes uh after that christmas special the next job she has on imdb we're directing two episodes of the second season production wise a king of the hill oh yeah three days of the condo which is the one where they uh have to cross the border illegally back into america that one's great and the second of the two-parter death of a propane salesman oh that's a great oh man i can't wait to do more talking the hill not to get too far ahead of ourselves i love doing talking mission

hill they're both hills i think andy is king of the mission hill they talk the same talk you are black You don't know that means, do you? They walk the same walk. Don't you love that new binder smell? Yes. My fondest high school memory. That and getting... Two brothers with nothing in common until now. Are we going to be roommates? From producers of The Simpsons.

Who wants to get it on? You are so lame. Mission Hill. Coming this fall to the WB Friday night. uh but so there she's working on king of the hill at the same time bill and josh are working at castle rock developing an animated series that their old friend lauren would be perfect for oakley even mentions her as a co-creator she comes on and really helps them develop the art style of it and just so much of the spirit of the show. And the brief version is Bill and Josh have explained it many times is when they worked

on the Simpsons, they realized there were no young adult characters other than like Otto and Jimbo maybe. And also, you know, taking inspiration from like the indie film boom that was going on at the time. Like they specifically referenced things like Welcome to the dollhouse and chasing amy plus the indie comics boom of peter bagg's hate and daniel klaus's eight ball way more peter i mean this i think they should have peter bagg should have gotten royalties for this cartoon just without i think that too it's very i've seen people even use that as like a slight against the show is like they just may look like peter bagg it's still

it's different enough but it is very heavily inspired look like peter bagg it's still it's different enough but it is very heavily inspired by his work yeah it's it's like the say i would say this in a non uh non-patronizing non-insulting way it's the tv safe version of peter bagg's work like if you put hate on tv and there is a short pilot online you can watch no wb if you were to watch a character that ugly and cruel and i love the hate comics but man you can't really do a hate series yeah and bill said i think on i think but man you can't really do a hate series yeah and bill said i think on i think he says in that interview i did with him that hate is his favorite comic book ever yeah he's like a comic guy yeah so i mean it's it's intentional i wish they'd cut

him a check but yeah i mean have you seen buddy bradley's nose on the commentary on the dvd there's a great bit where he says like we thought these were very popular comics to us. But then we find out they sold like maybe 10,000 copies and they were not that famous. But yes, also, Lauren took a lot of inspiration from her own like kind of bohemian artist's life and that her and her friends led. Like they talk about how the loft is based on an apartment she was living in as an adult with other artists, too. Also, they took a ton of inspiration from the cool communities all around America, from San Francisco's Mission District to Chicago's Wicker Park to Brooklyn's Williamsburg and Boston's own Mission Hill. Yeah, I think on Matt's interview, he said it's basically Wicker Park.

That's where they went in Chicago. They took pictures of it for it, but it's also influenced by other cities too. And it just, man, it made me so excited to like, someday I'll live in a cool city. And now, you know, I've lived in Berkeley for 15 years and I'm like the old townies in Mission Hill are just like, man, yeah, I live here. Yeah. I always thought I would move here to LA and live in like Silver Lake. And every time I'm there, I do think like would move here to LA and live in Silver Lake. And every time I'm there, I do think like, oh, I'm in Mission Hill right now.

And now I live in Burbank, which is the most, it's the place that Tim Burton takes all his inspiration from to be like, no, this is the normie boring place. And I'm like, I fucking love it here. This is the best part of LA. So yes, they are working on the show together, Castle Rock, going by the timeline

of Variety articles on this. It was was july 1997 where it was first announced that bill and josh made the deal with castle rock for this reportedly in the range of five million dollars so you know big payday for those guys and they as oakley put it they wrote the pilot script they shopped it around to networks and once they had a meeting with wb they just loved the pilot and ordered it directly to 13 episodes. Just boom, like that. Like, insane. I mean, at the time, in late 1997, the WB was still a startup network that hadn't really figured itself out yet. So in Variety, March 16th, 1998, it is officially announced with the working title of Brothers in the article.

I'd asked Oakley about this on Twitter a while ago, and he was like, yeah, that was just so temp that they were just told we have to have something in this article. So just call it Brothers. They never were going to call it Brothers. That was before the Wayans Brothers. But they did want to call it the Downters which it was for a time and then unfortunately the mtv downtown had to come out months before it came out and so they they changed it to the more straightforward mission hill so on july 27th 1998 variety also has an interview with wb exec jamie kellner talking up the uh the netlitz future and uh the

downtowners gets a brief mention jamie kellner if you're on like rec arts animation the news group or just reading message boards in the late 90s he was hated by all cartoon fans he killed a million cartoons i mean he doesn't like cartoons he doesn't well okay jamie kellner also killed wcw wrestling when he transitioned from being the wb exec to a different part of warner to be the head of tnt he instantly into in the start of 2001 he was like i don't want wrestling this is garbage like this is a bad demographic jamie kellner feels he knows one demographic and can sell to it well and that's young teens and so once buffy and dawson's creek and all those

started really hitting it shows that for weirdos was not particularly wanted by jamie kellner whether it be the downtowners or wcw nitro either of those jamie kellner not a fan of if you read that article like the downtowners gets a brief mention while it's entirely kilner talking about like man buffy and dawson doing so well we're moving the time slot for dawson up an hour it's going to be great it's like oh the the writing's on the wall like already uh they're still working staffing up in mid-1998 getting writers animators and voice actors uh many of the folks from behind the scenes on simpsons would come over like if you you see in the credits you'll see the sound guys for simpsons crystal desmond travis power has also worked on this and same with like pretty much the u.s production was all

handled out of film roman just like the simpsons and king of the hill were doing and overseas animation was handled by two studios a com a com didOM did this one, but also a Korean studio. I'd never heard it before and I cannot find any information on, but it's called New Millennium. Either they changed their name or they didn't do a bunch, but that's all I can find. Ironically, they closed in 2001. I actually don't know that. They were not ready. They were not ready for the New Millennium. And a fantastic voice cast. So good. Like starting with wally langham uh is andy french i still don't really know who he is but i love his voice as andy clearly not a veronica's closet viewer then oh no i was i'm sure i just another one of those fucking shows that when i was like

11 i was like well it's on television i better watch it i'm sure i watched like two seasons based on pure momentum like seinfeld likeeld, like push me into it. I was just tumbling through Veronica's closet at nine 30. He was one of the writer characters on Larry Sanders, which he was, he was very good at in there though. His, his characters usually are like in Veronica's closet and Larry Sanders,

his characters were noted for being thought of as gay. And he was constantly going, no, I'm not gay. Like, I think that's been a curse on Wally Langham's life And he was constantly going, no, I'm not gay. Like, I think that's been a curse on Wally Langham's life that he is ostensibly a, a,

an effeminate straight man or a, Hey, there are lots of us out there. He's been on a bunch of stuff. He also was on law and order or no CSI. I mean, for a while, but he,

he has such a distinctive voice that I really wish he'd do more voice acting. I can't think of another. I think he's been in some video games and stuff. But he's not really done that much. And he mostly just pops up on TV shows. And he was in Weird Science and stuff. But his voice is amazing. And I talk all the time because I talk about the same era of animation on most of my shows but there is a big shift happening right at this time where voice acting for cartoons was known as oh you do 40

silly voices uh and you can cast one person as 40 characters we start to see this shift right around here of like casting people for their voice and for them actually playing the character with with their natural voice which can give i'm not saying one's better than the other, but they can find a lot more avenues for like emotion and storytelling and things because it's naturally there within them. And some people survived that change. Some people have a harder time surviving it. But like, that's why Steven Universe sounds the way it does. OK, KO, Craig of the Creek, like modern cartoons have a full cast. It's not like, you know, The Simpsons, which has like seven people playing a hundred different characters. It's definitely cheaper to hire one Harry Shearer

than like seven people like that. Yeah. Or one Maurice LaMarche playing every single celebrity on The Critic. Yep. Well, you talk about voice actors who do a lot of voices. That's Scott Menville all over the voice of kevin well he does his one voice but he was born with that voice and um i'm a little conflicted about the voice because i think that was one of the reasons i didn't quite like the show it's a it's a bit much but i mean it is scott menville's voice he's playing it up a bit uh i i like it now but i think it might have been a wiser choice because Andy has a just a non cartoony speaking voice but everyone else in the world is a cartoon I think

it might have been a better idea to give that character a less cartoony voice because as of I mean in the final product Andy is like the only normal voiced character like everyone is just like a very played-up voice like Posey and Bob's not a fan of Full House. Oh, no. Bob Menville's got some range if you check out his recurring role on Full House. Who was he on Full House? He was Kimmy Gibbler's boyfriend

who was also a porn. And was very dumb. And he would usually just say, what did he say? I think he said, all right or awesome, something like that. Totally.

He had a catchphrase that was just a word that a dumb guy says. At this point, he already, though, was a pretty accomplished voice actor too. Like he had played Freddie Flintstone on Flintstone Kids. He was Red Herring on Pup Named Scooby-Doo. Yeah. And who could forget Ma-T?

He was Ma-T on Captain Planet. Yeah, you know, okay. They'd cast a different actor than that now, but he did a good job as uh the heart heartful kid as uh as would be revealed they muted on the commentary but uh in other interviews they revealed that andy dick almost was kevin french but i think scott was a better oh yeah it would have been just i mean the character would just be andy dick then yeah you can't have an andy dick voice character and not be andy dick and he was also the main uh the main character in the gamecube

game tales of symphonia which i played a thousand hours of yeah but i mean if you hear scott menville be robin of course yeah he was shaggy for a short amount of time like scott menville does his voice but only he has it so you can immediately recognize him in anything he does he's he's lived as robin for about 50 20 years now 20 years straight he's he's been the robin of animated voice acting and he's on the teen titan show and he is not an anti-vaxxer which is uh which is kind of a rare commodity on that show so i really okay it's not that rare but it's rarer than it needs to be uh you got brian posain is jim hot off of being on Mr. Show and Just Shoot Me. I just saw him do stand-up about 18 months ago.

Still very funny. I love him. He's turning into a regular Santa Claus, though. And we got Vicki Lewis as both Posey and Natalie. Just wrapping up news radio at the time this was getting cast. And an accomplished Broadway actor who now she's been on a million things since uh speaking of animation voice acting lifers you got tom kenney tress mcneil nick jameson filling out a lot of the other regular voice actors so if people didn't hear

my sam and max hit the road episode of retronauts i did a lot of research on nick jameson so he did the other celebrity impressions on the critic that maur LaMarche Didn't do Right He was also the voice Of Sam in the Sam & Max video game Did you know He only started voice acting In the 90s In the 70s and 80s

He had a music career He is the fourth Unofficial member Of Foghat What And he plays On the albums With Slow Ride

He is the bass player On Slow Ride What Yes When you hear Slow Ride That's him playing the bass The guy who ride what yes when you hear slow ride that's him playing the bass the guy who does the voice of mr sherman wow yeah he talked on the critic commentaries about not being a voice actor and then wanting to play all these roles and he's like i kind of had to

teach my voice how to do all those different voices and now he's like an accomplished great voice actor and he has like two solo albums one in the 70s one of the 80s they're all on youtube so he had quite a life before he started voice acting in the 90s yeah damn and he's great too he like he sometimes it's hard to tell if it's him or maurice doing some of the voices like they're both really good at stretching their voices in all those different ways and uh speaking of tom kenney as of course like any animation nerd i'm a diehard tom kenney fan i think he's brilliant uh recently my co-host steve because he works on rick and morty got to meet him and said the same thing that i've always planned to say to him if i ever meet him which is i'm gonna bring up mission hill

because i think this might be peak tom kenney i think this might be the best he's ever been and he's one of those guys as i said some people in the old school way of voice acting had trouble moving into the modern way of voice acting i won't name any names on this podcast on mine i do uh tom kenney has done it better than anyone like he him and maurice lamarche i think are the two the two that figured it out the best from that era and jim comics of course because he's just fucking he's a genius but like tom kenney can do the silly stuff but put so much character and emotion into it where like you're right some of his voices on here are so cartoony and yet like the last episode of mission hill which is one of

in my mind the greatest episodes of television ever like you love that character so so much and believe in everything that he says even though he sounds like the old man on spongebob god yeah just a great i think tom kenney is able to adapt well too because he has the improv comedy background you know he he wasn't just a you know radio voice guy or whatever like it's a stand-up sketch comedy improv he did it all yeah so the show is primed for a friday september 24th 1999 debut uh two days ahead of the season premiere of the simpsons for season 11 it's going to debut at 9 p.m with the lead-in of the jamie foxx show which uh feels a bit mismatched and wasn't getting all that advertised it would get a 1.8 rating which is a big for anything now yes yeah but

but even then by wb's low standards that was low like wb wasn't on as many channels so they shouldn't get nbc ratings but even compared to the jamie foxx show it was a dip and it was a real dip compared to what like buffy would get on a tuesday and that same night it got murdered by dateline and sabrina the teenage witch i was just gonna ask you what the competition was i was like was this like a Mad About You night? No, no. Well, Friday, if it wasn't TGIF, Friday is like murder show night on every other channel. The murder show.

For people that don't know, I believe a 1 is roughly a million, right? Basically, a 1 is a million, so 1.8 is basically almost 2 million people. It would only get lower from there we'll talk more about that later as for post mission hill lauren mcmullen's career continued like just up and up and up she'd go on to the simpsons and direct some of the strongest looking episodes from 01 to 04 like her episodes rule at least animation-wise, as I recall. And then she also contributed a lot to the Avatar The Last Airbender series, which I did not realize until now. And then after that, she followed her old critic co-worker,

Rich Moore, to Disney Animation Studios on the theatrical side. She worked as a story artist on both of the Wreck-It Ralph films and Zootopia, and was the first woman solely credited as a director on a Mickey Mouse short. And the Oscar nominated Get a Horse. And she's still at Disney today. I would bet she's working on something that has yet to be announced. Speaking of Avatar as well, I'm sure you'll get to this when you get to the episode he directed. But Michael Dante DiMartino worked on this show.

One of the co-creators of Avatar. Might how they met i would bet you're right i would bet you're right yeah uh i guess i was never really clear on what the broadcast schedule was for this show and it's nuts it's crazy i didn't know how fractured it was so it's like one episode airs and then like two or three weeks pass another episode airs and then like four or five are burned off in the summer and like half of the series was a new show on adult swim they had never aired yeah to think of how wasteful it was for three years that no episode like these episodes were just not seen and then there were like five uh produced in animatic that are online and i think one had full animation produced and

another one had an active animation produced. So not finished or anything, not scored or any of the processes they do after that. But animation was completed for these things. So sad and wasteful. All that for like, they put all this work into it and you get one Friday night. And then it's just like, well, failed on the first Friday night. The end. There's the axe.

Get out of here. No one will see this. after spending like probably 20 million dollars on it yeah oh god it's uh the i can see why uh this would drive uh anybody crazy having this happen here by Mission Hill, Tuesday on DVD. Got something for me? Sure. How's this? For the slacker in all of us. Loser! 13 hilarious episodes

and behind-the-scene extras. Mission Hill, the complete series, by a Tuesday on DVD. Now that we've presented the history of it, let's get into the first episode of mission hill again uh thank you bob for hooking me up with the versions that have the original licensed music i liked this when i first watch it and i did watch it on adult swim but it wasn't until i was loving the simpsons dvds so much and then the Mission Hill DVDs came out with their own commentaries I was like I have to own this and that's when I truly fell in love with with Mission Hill as a series clearly they didn't have the kind of support a Simpsons DVD box that

had but I think that the DVDs are definitely worth it and Bill and Josh put as much work as they could into it there's only like three commentaries probably because that's just all the space they have like if it had three discs instead of two they could have probably done a commentary every i'm guessing it's more like they had two hours at a studio somewhere yeah that they weren't paying for i bet you're right there but yes the uh the opening of the show so great like the the instrumental version of the cake's uh italian leather sofa it's great i'm in already yeah i love cake as a white man born exactly me too and uh it it sounds like a different version because the version on the album of course has lyrics but i think they might have uh used like an earlier version of it or a different version it is different than the

album version oh yeah this was slower too yeah yeah well this is a cool one of the many cool things bill and josh their twitters are fantastic for sharing secrets josh tweeted out like hey here is the downtowners poster we had of the characters that was used on the cassette of this special version of the cake song the cake recorded for oh nice cool this was a brand new studio recording cake did uh so they were definitely honored to be the uh the opening theme to this show too whatever their 99 album was uh really good as the one that had uh sheep go to hell yes goats go to heaven no no sorry sheep go to heaven goats go to hell that's right don't send sheep to hell they're pure they did what the god told them to do. They respected the words of Jesus.

Lots of great songs. No phone. Approachable karaoke, by the way. This show is made for lame-o, milquetoast white guys like us. Exactly. It's like a fantasy for us. Bob, I think you and I did a cake song at karaoke together once. Was this my wedding thing? I think it was.

I think so. I think at your wedding, we did that song together. of those songs and i was wondering what you guys think about this so bill oakley's interview with you helped me a lot matt because this show is a fantasy and idealized like life in the city again it's like a version of hate that's like the good like the happier version where things work out like i was i was grappling with this when i watched it again i'm like is andy too cool but then i understand the point of it it's like yes this is the fantasy of living in a city and then you see when you have a show like the critic the network's like this character's a loser everyone hates him he never

wins so i can see why they like let's have a successful character that's kind of a dirtbag but he does get laid in the first episode, or at least there's the chance there. He's not always getting turned down and losing in life. You know, he can talk to women. He doesn't completely hate himself. He's got game. He can screw over his boss, like, instantly. I mean, it's like, I was just grappling, like, is he too cool?

But I understand why they made him cool. Though over time, you scratch beneath the surface of Andy. He is a loser in a way i mean the dead-end job is a problem too and the aimlessness the unemployment episodes like that's those are the dark nights of the soul for andy french i can't wait to get to those because i was not unemployed until after i had watched those and they all made sense to me because i've been unemployed like three non-consecutive years of my working life just because we live in a hellscape in a terrible economy that's not good to creative people but I can't wait to get to those again yes as the uh as also Bill Oakley has revealed

in multiple interviews since like every eight episodes Andy was going to have a different job and they had a very long arc planned for his character so I i like the first shot we see of him is at ron's waterbed world like this is the low point of him you know you gotta have a day artists have day jobs man you don't just become a professional cartoonist yeah bill also says uh in that interview that each job he gets after every eight episodes would be a little closer to his dream and then he said at a certain point he would be mac reigning he might get a tv show and it would be very stressful and he'd hate it well you see he has characters for a tv show uh drawn already he's got ideas i animated series everybody and their brother has one of those these these guys came from the simpsons and i love that they come at it with like we need a

10-year plan for this like which uh is overambitious for what they were going to do. But yes, also it's a clever way for the pilot to introduce him. We just see a name tag that says, Hello, my name is Andy French. And in the voice actors, one I didn't touch on, though, was Jane Weedland of the Go-Go's. I looked at her resume on IMDb, like not a lot more voice acting after this,

even though she is just perfect as alternative dream girl Gwen in this show. She's more of a, like, a lucid pixie dream girl. Yes. Not quite, not really manic. No, no. She's really chill. Like, this is, you know, in the 2000s, we wanted manic pixie dream girls to fix our lives and be very proactive. In the 90s the dream

was just like a chill girl who's just like let's hang and like yeah you know maybe fuck slack around yeah let's all slack it up and slack down here's our first scene with old andy french hey ron is it okay if i take off a little early today i'm supposed to have dinner with my folks and they're way on the suburbs so i I... No way! Everybody gonna stay late to inventory tonight. Nobody leaves early. Are you kidding me? But that's your job. Yeah, but I gotta leave early.

I got a hard date with big, phony jugs. The kind I like. That jerk. He's always doing this to us. Clearly this calls for drastic action. Okay, everybody. Work's over. And nobody saw anything, right?

Right! I like this intro of Andy. You talk about the differences with, say, Jay Sherman and him. Yeah. This first scene of him, like, this is a cool thing a slacker does in a movie of just like, hey, man, I'm going to help all you guys so we can all get off early. I think the first thing we see of Jay Sherman is him being humiliated by everyone he works with. Yes, yeah.

It's hair in a can. That's the first shot of him. Here we're seeing like, yeah, Andy has a shitty job with a crappy boss who's like a vaguely ethnic angry man but he's not letting it get him down in fact he wins every now and then you know and and does it to help everybody else as a spartacus or popeye type somehow doesn't get fired yes yeah and just got all the background characters like all over this like talk about more great work they put into it like they got all the background characters all over this. Talk about more great work they put into it. They designed so many background characters. You watch that first season of

Simpsons, just vague people everywhere with seemingly no guidelines of what they'd look like in the first four episodes. In this episode, so many characters that are so specifically chosen. They're not just tossed off background characters. They did a lot of work designing the city and the people first, I think. And what I like about the show, we didn't talk about the color design. It's just amazing. Like you don't see these colors on TV. I don't think the color white exists in this world.

Like the pupils of the eyes are yellow. The teeth are yellow. Like it's a very interesting world, the color choices. And it's like one of the last cell animated shows too. I love just the texture of it as they leave the place andy even has a cute little conversation with his on again off again girlfriend of the series that was great you're the spartacus of us wage slaves thanks i always thought of myself more as popeye but spartacus is good too though it's not really fair to compare them because they lived in different times and would you like to go on a date with me uh yeah sure yeah i'd love to hey how about saturday

my roommates and i are having a party would you like to come as my date instead of as my co-worker so when you put the moves on me it won't be sexual harassment. Exactly. It's a date. Ooh. I do enjoy the Gen X rumination about pop culture. Yes, yeah. Andy is one of those cool guys who's like being too jokey and talky that he has to pause like, wait, oh, oh, a girl's asking me out. Okay, reset. Yes. I want to lean into my brand for a second and talk about how this show draws attractive women.

There's this recurring thing. I talk about this a lot on my other show, too, that when a cartoon show is designed generally for adults, it's allowed to be a little ugly or weird looking or at least very stylized. I feel like it's always the second step to be like, OK, now how do we make people want to fuck these characters? Like they draw, you know, Andy and Kevin and make them look like weirdos and they have like shaggy hair. And you said like their teeth are yellow and stuff. Some shows it looks like they put a sticker of a hot lady on it and it like doesn't fit. Some shows find the way to do it. And this show,

the way they do it is all the women are anchored with this circle. That is their hips. Yeah. Oh yeah. They have a circle that they draw everything out from. And it like, it's kind of this, like they look real circle that they draw everything out from and it like it's kind of this like they look real and kind of frumpy and like real women and that makes it like so much better and realer and feel great and that's why this character was like one of my

first cartoon crushes i was so in love with jane weedland's character on the show and i think part of it is that and also just the like short hair mascara look that they give a lot of the women on this show is just like really it's really great and really well observed and feels of the era but has aged really well she has a little baby fat on her gwen does i like that about her design she's not just like the va va va voom character or whatever yeah though definitely some uh a number of men's fantasies for sure yeah she's not like a sexy sexy redhead or an asian lady with like a purple stripe through her hair or whatever like you'd see at the time like every mtv show yeah i mean we're definitely thinking of undergrads here yeah i mean at least the the

asian the asian woman that uh andy sleeps with in this series she does not have the purple streak yes yeah just a regular lady uh i also there's there's so many great little animation gags here that i i only really caught in closer inspection like seeing andy when he's trying to be cool like yeah yeah like he kind of leans on a lamppost then he rethinks well you know no no no lean on lamppost that's not cool i like his little scarf it's a fun affectation oh yeah it reminds me of things that I would do. Like, oh, this button would be rather fetching. And it does feel like just wearing your regular work clothes

with one tiny little thing to make you just a little bit warmer puts it in like, you know what day of the year this takes place in a city like that. It's just such a well-observed. And it's a show where people do get to change, and it does feel like time moves. Some episodes, it's hot out. Some episodes, it's cold out.

Yeah, they also, people do kind of have their uniforms, but it's not weird if Jim wears a different shirt or a jacket on the show. Yeah. Again, I was 17 watching this in 99. The idea of getting into a subway and not getting into a car

like that was a alien to me could that be me one day and it's it's been it's been me for the last 15 years for me i was like talking to a girl and i was 17 yes in the broadcast version the song that plays behind this amazing little walk sequence for andy Burning Flies by Looper. It's a really nice song. It was also referring back to your interview, Matt. I love how Bill Oakley doesn't give a shit about music. Like on the Simpsons Lollapalooza episode, he's like, these picks were all your guys'. I like old 70s rock. I don't care. Like same with when you asked him about this indie music, he's like, I left that to Josh and other people like i don't care i think his favorite band is mountain who wrote mississippi queen that's right i think you're right but the soundtrack of this show is great it's so great

like it's it's not the top 40 kids teen music that you would just hear in every episode of dawson's creek but just like on dawson's Creek, when it got put on DVD, they didn't have the rights to any of these songs. I mean, I'm happy that at least on the DVD, they have the cake song. They still have the intro music anyway. The one thing that hurts it ultimately is that one episode, the final joke is the song, Everybody Hurts. And it's very odd on the it's i'm glad we have the original version for that episode of talking mission hill i've heard you guys talk a bunch about the way that that episode ends with the rem song and i i just watched that version of it with someone that i was introducing mission hill to and we and just to make it easy i watched the youtube clips or the youtube uploads of it and

i realized i don't think i've ever seen it without the real music and it's so jarring and annoying and bad and like it's not that's the only one that it really sticks out because other times you're like it just sounds like a tv show like the ska song in this episode sounds fine it's not the toasters but it's fine but like yeah that one that clip is like people will hunt down that episode and just look at it if you're not familiar with it because it's it shows you like how fucking hard it is to get old tv uh available like there's so much crap you have to go through because the way we watch tv shows now like didn't exist over a decade ago i think we've learned don't base a joke on a licensed song because i haven't watched the hulu version of it i'm interested in seeing

what they did but on daria there's an episode where there's like a extensive everybody hurts parody where they're just sort of panning across characters like the video and having like subtitles of what they're thinking. And I'm like, boy, I wonder what they did. I have watched Aria on Hulu and it's bad. It's really hard to watch. Just like The State. If you've ever watched The State on DVD or on Hulu, it's a lot of shows of this era, particularly MTV shows, because they were allowed to use whatever the music they wanted because that was part of mtv having the rights and same with wb i guess because this is also the era of like you'd get to the end of an episode of a show and the credits would get pushed to the side and that guy would come in and be like tonight's

episode of smallville has a new uh single by one or by third eye blind yeah like it's just a bummer because that's not how music rights work you don't just get to use them whatever you want forever well you know back in 1999 wb the broadcaster they're ready to pay x amount of dollars for tv broadcast licensing rights for a song but in 2005 is warner entertainment on dvd willing to pay that same amount or likely more to put it on a dvd for an unpopular show no probably not you know we get spoiled by like simpsons it was huge enough on dvd that they paid for every song they're like oh we're gonna have to re-license every song including like a chuck berry song which is impossible to get back then they're like we gotta we gotta find chuck berry and hand him money to get the rights to the beatle song yes yeah golden slumber is getting teased out but they

did it for simpsons because it's that big but mission hill and a million other shows like they they would not do that i have a conspiracy theory about that because as everyone knows in the michael jackson episode of the simpsons him talking was him but him singing was a sound alike. I think that also has weird rights issues tied into it and I think that's part of the reason they pulled that episode from everything. I think they're like this we don't actually care if he

did anything to anyone but this is a good excuse to stop paying whatever we have to pay extra for that because it has singing in it. Well yeah a year later he's all over the radio again like nothing happened after the documentary so that could definitely be it yeah but in happier news i love this shot of it this is the like the young person in a city fantasy like this is so cool just him walking they let you breathe it in and like the world the people the stores like it's such a pleasant shot before he's almost murdered by an air

conditioner oh god he the show really takes its time which i think also is a thing that i love about it and the background design that you mentioned uh a minute ago there's an upcoming one that i really want to talk about when they're talking to their parents but the background design in this one of him walking through it like he passes by his local bodega and takes the free weekly free weeklies are dead now they're just all like sex ads for the most part now if they're even i remember the like the local free weekly thing in my block that now it is just like gone like even the thing you'd put the papers into are gone i wrote for all six issues of our free weekly in my hometown

yeah and also he passes by like a good time gag i never read before the non-phallic eclairs. That was, uh, as a funny ad. Uh, and yeah, also the background characters, so many great ones, like that smoking couple that are holding it European style photo of him he's like oh you robbed me and this is my photo uh yes andy is almost crushed to death in his first episode but he's so excited at the prospect of this date with gwen he doesn't even care and uh he arrives in his building that's where we meet one half of the biracial alternative couple of natalie and carlos very that comes straight from bill and josh's like actual friends but that also felt very like oh i'm in the big city where like uh my friends they're two different races and they're married that's different watching it now i'm like oh i live in an old apartment now like andy and i have the same mailboxes that they do yes yeah you're so right

yes yeah actually this is not unlike your uh your apartment complex but my apartment is like a rat's nest compared to annie's nice loft well and now i've aged into being the gus of my apartment complex so uh but before we get to them i do want to say too i like that natalie and carlos are like they're young parents who just have this uncontrollable baby and that everybody just deal with like yeah yeah it's an uncontrollable baby what you're gonna do and then he's drawn to just have like dot eyes like he's the one of the most cartoony looking figures in the show too then we get to the first gay kiss in prime time american television

which nobody noticed because nobody watched this on snl they had jokes of two men kissing so it's not like never before in television did a two men kiss and i guess there was that kiss on roseanne but it was like non-consensual yeah gay woman kissing a straight woman yes yeah yeah these were two gay men in love kissing and i think they got away with it because neither wally or gus is uh conventionally attractive, I suppose. They're very different types. Yes, yeah. Here, I'll play the clip.

Sit still, please. Calm down. Hey, Natalie. You want some help with those? Oh, thanks, yeah. Carlos and I have just been exhausted lately. What with the baby schedule and all the noise in this building. I know.

I could barely get to sleep with the sound of Gus and Wally fighting. What are you looking at? We made up. Sorry about all the brouhaha last night. You've been in a relationship this long, you better have a few beefs. We'd have a few less beefs if someone would learn to pick up after himself i said i would use the hamper enough so yeah i guess wally is based on wally cox just an appearance and demeanor and gus is tor johnson and lawrence tyranny yes yeah together based in part on their experience of working with law Tierney in the March Be Not Proud episode of The Simpsons.

A very terrifying couple of hours. Now, Wally Cox, yes, he was not gay. He was married to women, though Marlon Brando said the two of them fucked. But Wally Cox was like, yeah, it's just a lie. No, no, no. And he's really drawing on the Paul Lindy kind of affectation, I think. Yeah, yeah. It's like if Paul Lind played underdog, that's kind of the voice that Tom Kenny's going for with Wally.

I could see that. Yeah. And also, of course, they're based on... Oh, yeah, he was underdog. I totally forgot about that. But yes, Wally and Gus are also based on viral audio recordings of the late 80s and early 90s the uh shut up little man tapes and they were called there's a documentary about that that's been on netflix for like 15 years yeah yeah actually i have a uh

if you want to hear a little bit of them here's a clip of it from the documentary about how these tapes came to be. So, yeah, I guess they were inspired by Mo being based on the tube bar tapes. We played a bit of those on, I think, Homer's Odyssey for this. They take the shut up little man tapes, which were recorded in late 80s San Francisco. It was Peter and Ray were the name of the two gentlemen. One passed away in 96, the other in, I believe, 2000. So long, long gone, these two gentlemen. But the real people, Peter and Ray, the effeminate one was gay, a very gay man.

The other one was a super homophobe who called him awful slurs in the Shut Up Little Man tapes. So this takes the idea of like, well, one of those two guys were actually a couple instead. So that's who Gus and Wally are. Though they don't look anything like the real life Shut Up Little Man guys. They're just the audio inspiration. I mean, it's so perfect how Gus is Tor Johnson that they, where they take it in the final episode. It's so great. But you know, yeah, as a young person watching this coming to terms with my sexuality i do think i really even then enjoyed seeing like this stable mature couple of wally and gus who you know this is played as a joke some in this episode but these are real people with real with a real long-term relationship who are uh they're in their 50s or 60 i guess actually if wally was a director in

the 50s and he'd be like 70 and 90s i'd suppose but i love gus's little hats like all the little stuff they put on his head so so funny there'll be a knife there later yeah oh god but yeah wally and gus i just i love them every scene they're in i love it is like an interesting tour of like here are all the different people you will meet. And it is really shocking for someone from the suburbs to like go into this world. Like I remember when I first moved out here, like a few years had passed and I was just talking about my life visiting home. My sister was like, where do you live? I was like, I live in a house. She's like, you rent your own house? I'm like, no, I live with roommates.

And she was like, do you know them? And I was like, no, they just had a Craigs craigslist ad and she was like how do you know they're not murderers i'm like well i'm still alive and then they're people are shocked by like things like you know getting on a bus or riding a train it's like all these things are very shocking if you live a sheltered life like i did growing up so like seeing all these different kinds of people is a good way to get into this world the city world yeah yeah it was a big wake up for me too of living alone and going from a very white sheltered suburb like Kevin does in this episode to living in this, you know, more much more diverse alternative lifestyle area, especially with, you know, you compare this to the lily white suburbs of Springfield. Yeah. Mission Hill, very, very different. Like where I grew up, I didn't meet an indian person or like an asian

person until i was in my 20s wow yeah super super super sheltered one of the stressors that this pandemic has removed from me is my family calling me to make sure i'm okay when they hear about anything that happens in california they'll be like they'll call me and be like i heard there was a fire and i'm like that was literally 600 miles away. I am fine. That's in Northern California. And now they call and I get to be like, oh yeah, I might die. You're finally right. Because like, even when I lived over the bridge in Philadelphia, they'd call me and be like, don't walk around with your headphones on because someone will mug you.

And I'm like, I'll be fine. Now I get to be like, oh yeah, you're actually scared for your life as well. So we're actually connecting. You're not annoying me anymore. I think Midwestern parents don't know how big California is because it's like they assume my apartment behind me is disneyland my backyard and then right to the right of me is a golden gate bridge yeah yeah and then the mexican border is just like a few feet away uh yeah uh so uh after we head upstairs we get to see andy grab his first beer it's the maestroestro, which I like the Mission Hill.

Instead of just Duff, there's multiple fake beers in this world. Gruberhoff. Yeah. Maestro is more of the red stripe. Well, it's a malt liquor, really. It's in a malt liquor bottle there. We get a good view of this two-story loft, and I hate every person who lives there. Maybe hate Gen xers yeah

you didn't know well i mean these characters are the ones gentrifying this neighborhood like these are the gentrifiers our lead character these three white people live in here yeah the only problem i have with this apartment other than the just the what's not a real place that i could ever live in but where's posy's room? You ever think about that? Yeah. Cause Kevin has his own room too. I'm more bothered by the fact that there's like an open window between, uh, Andy's room and the rest of the apartment.

Yeah. Like just the window shade. I don't like that. I love that. I've always wanted that. Uh, but yes, why don't we meet one of the roommates?

Hello? Down here. Oh, Hey, what's going on? Want to drive me out to my parents' house? They're moving tomorrow and I have to go pick up the dog. Right.

Your dog. Hey, does he still get drunk like when we were in high school? Are you kidding? Dad had to spray the liquor cabinet with dog repellent. I'll get the keys. Ow! What happened to the couch? We moved it over there last week, remember? Oh, yeah.

So the family's moving? Your little brother, too? Kevin? Oh, yes. He'll be a thousand miles away. Did you know he had a T-shirt made with his SAT scores on it? How did he do? I don't know. I don't care.

I didn't look. Much better than me. That song that was playing, that is the Couldn't You Wait acoustic version by the band Silkworm. But yeah, Jim. Love Jim. I mean, he's another of those TV stoners that can't smoke weed on television. But we all know. Although I think at one point he talks about eating a brownie he found on the subway.

There's also an amazing joke that I think about all the time where he says something and Andrew just says, What are you, high? And then there's just a close-up of him staring at him smiling for like 10 seconds. Oh, yeah. Like a really long cut. I think it's just the joke is that jim is constantly high and yet the most functional of any of the people there it's a pro marijuana show he's a great i mean he's a great guy too he's just like if i lived with one person who had a car and i didn't

have a car and i was like hey want to drive upstate they would be like uh no i have work in the morning like fuck you i like characters who are comfortable with themselves and jim very much is that yeah yeah and he's such a cool guy wearing his bowling like vintage bowling shirt oh i bought a lot of those in the early 2000s at goodwill i also like that he seemingly breaks his back in the but doesn't care and it's it's one of the first times where so much of like the old-timey like fleischer brothers style animation kind of bleeds in and i just i love that spirit of it like he has twinkling stars around him and and later you know a hot thing of coffee will have dotted lines coming

out of we're about to get into like a cloud fight yeah yeah an old-fashioned cloud fight you know i wonder if the show had continued on like we when we're watching season one of simpsons there's animation choices that made sense to them before they started broadcasting that then they changed their mind on and they wouldn't do in later seasons i wonder if they would have you know kept doing this embellished it more pulled back from it like i love the spirit of it here i'd hate to think they'd get rid of it but you know shows change and evolve over time i wonder if this kind of these kind of choices would stick around i have points to make about that clip real quick there's a great voice actory moment of the voice performance working with the animation in there that i don't think i've ever

noticed before when he asks andy about going upstate andy's drinking from me he has and andy starts talking before he takes the 40 out of his mouth and he goes the way that you do when you're taking a thing out of your mouth and having a conversation and i never noticed that before but he's talking into his beer for a second and then pulls it away from his mouth oh that's a nice choice really it's one of those things you don't get those two sides of it the animation and the performance working well that way together that has to be from someone who knows exactly how to make cartoons really well. That's a very subtle touch.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and as they drive up, you also, you hear about Kevin before you meet him, which is a good, you know,

process for introducing the character. And I believe on the commentary, Bill confirms that these are his SAT scores. He's a little Harvard boy. I mean, these uh these are two ivy leaguers that's why like uh you know they are kevin they're not andy they're they're kevin's who want to be andy and relax some like i have a feeling these characters like they hoped that kevin would go on the trip they made of overly logical, borderline libertarian asshole kids to relaxing some and realizing, oh, I'm a fucking loser. This sucks. A theory that I had about Andy and Kevin while watching this, I don't think they knew it when they were writing the show.

But I think this is very much a like Gen Xer versus millennial kind of show where andy is a gen xer his boomer parents had him when they didn't know what they were doing they fucked up he just had to figure stuff out on his own but with kevin they're like kevin's a kid we're gonna actually parent and they were helicopter parents to kevin which explains why they're so different that makes a lot of sense and kevin is the millennial and andy is a gen xer that's why kevin is being tasked with learning the piano and all these things yeah yeah their parents uh make a few appearances on the show the dad definitely feels like uh from a similar vein as all their great skinner stuff he's a boring man or maybe a little uh he's like chalmers and skinner rolled into one while the mom is just like a guilting jewish mom yeah i'm not sure what they were

doing with the mom i'm not quite a big fan of this character i mean it's it's trust doing her usual like guilty mom like she's she's really good at this uh kind of stock character it's like uh the show's a lot of nuance i wish there was more nuance to the mother uh i mean they get more sexually free as the show goes that is true yeah so i like that the the mom is also making tv dinners which i think is a nice touch like it feels it feels like they ask themselves oh they're moving so they haven't been going to the grocery store so they just make instant dinners for everybody it also seems like uh they won't let andy say no to this request so at the end the act break joke is when are the

movers coming again like the movers are about to show up that's right so they're getting andy at the last second to give kevin to him and the dog and uh yeah and great uh background design here for like a house that is moving where like all the cabinets are open and bare like they put a lot of thought into what what your house looks like when you're about to not live there anymore and we meet stogie the dog who uh named after a real dog who was named Stoli, which is a real vodka brand. And apparently WB wouldn't let them use that. So they changed it to Stogie, the nickname for types of cigars. Which it works, too. Both work as a dirtbag dog name.

I love that he's like, every look on Stogie's face is just a brain dead dog it's a fun drawing of that guy he's he's 10 times stupider than santa's little helper like and much more lethargic like he's he's just a more realistic version of where they go with uh with santa's little helper uh but yes why do we meet both Stogie and Kevin? You want to go back in the basement? Jeez, Mom, his brains are damaged enough as it is. Come here, boy. It's okay.

We're going to have so much fun in the city together. No more mean Mom and Dad. I'm going to take care of you all by myself. You know, it's funny that you mention that, because, well, would you be willing to... Did you tell him yet? Hi, Andy. So, guys, are we going to be your roommates? What? Kevin, honey, please go wait in the other room. Here's some fig, boss. Wait a minute. You want Kevin to come live with me? It'll just be till he graduates and goes off to college. You see, he wasn't thrilled about moving to Wyoming and... Were you ever planning on consulting me about this? You know, I have better things to do than take care of my stupid kid brother. A 1460 combined

SAT is not stupid. A dog who eats mothballs, that's stupid. A dog, I might add, who you're rolling out the freaking red carpet for. But your own brother who loves you, he gets a knife in the back from Andy French. Look, Kevin and I have never gotten along and... Honey, we're taking the piano. You don't need to practice anymore. That's a cute joke. Just showing you what a nerdo he is. God, I love how he enters the room before he's called in, too. Like, that's good comedy timing on him.

Yeah, and the first of two Scott Joplin references in this episode. That's right. What a fucking dork, man, he is. Also, if she hands him fig bars, those are clearly fig Newtons. Yeah. But that feels like another. Bugles is the only brand they're allowed to say in the show. Made me hungry for Bugles, but I can't find them anywhere.

Oh, man. They're probably all sold out on Amazon right now. Gotta make those bugle fingers. Eat them off that way. Kevin is such a well-observed, like, annoying smart kid. Like, he's smart in all the testable ways and has no emotional intelligence or life experience, but he's just this, like, little asshole.

Yeah, very judgmental. Yeah, which I can get why warner might have had a problem like this is an this is an unlikable character he is very much the you know while you were out partying i was studying the blade kind of character yeah uh but i mean it gives you a place to watch him grow and learn to like um respect women or uh see that drinking isn't bad in in and of itself yeah the mom is a little uh boilerplate i will say though i did like the animation choice like a knife in the back like she acts out a stabbing like a downward stabbing of a knife like that's cool i did like that i did like uh andy like cradling stogie's head and like flipping his ears up and down oh

yeah his giant head yeah i like when big dogs just have giant skulls and andy's saying the things he should in a in a heartfelt sitcom andy would be saying those things to kevin like i'm gonna raise you all on my own like we don't need mom and mean old mom and dad but yeah the the flopping dog ears like that's so great i like too that they got him in high school So he's like a seven-year-old dog. So he's not a young dog. And he's pretty fucked up from eating drugs, pretty much. And drinking liquor. Yeah.

And yeah, I guess Andy is young enough to still have his childhood pets alive after moving away. It's an interesting age gap for them of seven years. Like, I'm three years separate from my younger brother. So we were kind of babies together we're closer in age but like for andy like he went off to borchmore when kevin was 11 so he missed a lot of his uh his teen years good old borchmore the the parents are ready to be empty nesters like right now like they they want to be Riven. And I like the mom at least talks him up by telling him he's my big, cool baby cupcake. Do I even have a choice?

No, not really. Kevin, come in here, Andy. We'd love to have you come live with him. Son, we're very proud of you for being so mature. Ow! Crap! You did that on purpose, you little creep. Well, your big feet were in the way.

Mom, he said crap. Because you broke my damn feet and you're not even sorry. What the hell? Okay, you're losing your mind. I'm getting away from you. Come here! Ow, ow, ow, ow! Boys!

Boys! Hit yourself! Hit yourself! Stop drooling on me! Oh, they'll be fine. parents are very used to this uh god all the cartoony sound effects uh the one i had missed before until listening to it now is the sound of his foot like uh vibrating with pain sizzling with pain yeah love that uh the and again yeah a big cartoony cloudy fist fight it's so cool i hope uh you know had it continued i would hope they'd only keep this going these animation choices my sister is three years older than me and i remember like physical fights with her where uh she was bigger than me like an intimidating and like getting her mad and just like barricading

myself in my room and pushing against my door. She was trying to force her way in to beat me. Dang. Yeah. I think I was on the other side of the door with my little brother in those situations. I mean, brothers and sisters physically fight too,

but I guess it's less covered in media than brothers. I think so. Yeah. It reminds me of like, it's also, it's covered on South Park with Stan and She so yeah it reminds me of like it's also it's covered on south park with stan and shelly yeah like i was like that's accurate but i think it's harder to portray like sort of like uh while man woman violence it's not as comical like if kevin was his little sister or something or andy was uh kevin's big sister and they were physically like fist fighting on the ground to be like ugly and weird yeah yeah i could see that being uh how do you make that funny to watch as

opposed to like that's uh masculinity in america for you i guess it's like boys will be boys it's not a tragedy that they're kicking each other in the face here yeah so we go to commercial break come back they're driving into mission hill uh that was the opening clip i do think andy's saying like there's nothing you'd like here about mission hill that almost feels like they're telling people to not watch this show it's like oh you think you'd like mission hill well there's nothing you'd want to watch that's why i didn't watch it i was in the kevin demographic and also uh another moment that really reminded me of my childhood was Kevin talking about seeing Il Postino with his parents. Because I was taken to a number of Oscar-nominated foreign films with my mother as well.

Mother. We enjoyed so many things. Mother. But yes, that's how Kevin thinks he's very cultured, is he saw Il Postino. I like they have a little fight and then jim wants to pull over but it's just to pee not to turn the car around i it feels like they're getting close to home he can't just hold it like uh is he filled up jim is free he's comfortable with himself that's true yeah and when that when the need comes he's just gonna pee in an alley stop his car pee in an alley uh but so

speaking of free people the very free roommate posy is introduced in this next clip that wolf is attacking my plant shoo going back to the woods now shoo uh posy that's not a wolf that's my dog stogie and. And this is my brother, Kevin. They're both coming to live here. Oh, a female roommate. I've never lived with a girl before, but I assure you, I am a perfect gentleman. Yes, I can tell by your inner light that you're a good person. But Stogie, there are dark forces at work within him. Love that music sting zoom in like they zoom in on stogie and then back to posy's face just a very dumb look on his face too uh but yeah vicky lewis plays posy so funny

like she's it's a little bit of the stock hippie thing but she brings her own kind of spirit to yeah yeah i think that's a unique voice it's uh it's the character on the show i kind of like the least though because i feel like um it's a little too close to phoebe for my taste and they can't do too many interesting things with her because she's not really a comment on this type of character she just is this character yeah yeah i think her most intense story was when she started the produce uh yeah and yeah i think they would have found good things for her ways for her to grow in season two for sure yeah though i don't know i you know now i'm imagining a fifth season of mission

hill i could see posy just falling farther and farther back into the background because there's there's not or she'd have to change jobs or something there's yeah i see that but i like how just the noises she makes when stogie like is biting like yeah her little anxious noises are fun she calls him a wolf she thinks it's a wolf and uh the way kevin introduces himself to her too is very like he's never talked to an adult woman before that isn't his mother it seems like and uh but you can tell he likes girls but doesn't know how to speak to them i feel like her character is very it's now that i'm thinking about it is also very phoebe in the way that they give her complexity is she is this free yoga hippie but she is very drawn toward

like capitalism and possessions and things and she's constantly fighting about that there's an episode where she like goes inside of herself and meditates for the whole episode. And she wants a cool Miata and stuff. And then also, yeah, the one where she sells vegetables where she realizes like, oh, I can sell these for a huge markup and make a lot of money

and fuck over the bodega who was mean to me. And also one of my favorite screenshots of the show is her holding the sign that says, welcome to the real world, sucker. Love that. She wants to be a little says, welcome to the real world, sucker. Love that. She just like she like she wants to be a little mean, but she won't be too mean. But she definitely like enjoys fucking with them the way that they enjoy fucking with each other. And she I can you can tell that she wants to be a part of that, but also does stick to her guns and will be a hippie.

Yeah, that's true. The things that make her stand out the most from Phoebe. Now you've ruined her for me, Bob. I'm sorry. The things that make her stand out the most from Phoebe is when she is like actively mean in ways Phoebe would not be on Friends. And how much she seems to kind of like enjoy it. She has like kind of a wickedness to her that comes out that is covered by her touchy feely brawless uh whole act she has

yes then we head to the school if there's one character i could cut out of mission hill it's probably griffo oh that character yeah i didn't know he had a name uh i think he has to say his name out loud because he's like the witness in the arson thing it's tom kenney doing his voice in that transformers movie that's right yes yeah yeah like uh glip glop or whatever his name was it's probably less racist than what michael bay did yeah it's griffo and sea dog i think are the two bullies yeah yeah oh man i just look i get it and i get what the joke they're going for is that this is supposed to be like this is an inner city school like this is he's basically walking into the set of Dangerous Minds. There's like a pregnant student.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But there's not like, there's, I, like, the critic had jokes like this that were meaner. I don't think this is as judgmental about the lives of inner city kids it's but uh griffo with his you know dragging trousers and uh general look and also being played by a white man it it feels a lot more loaded and there's a ton more baggage with his character like i don't think bill and josh would do this now no way but hey it was 1999 everything was pretty bad then get a wayans in the room

they're just floating around that studio right yeah just have some crossover with the way maybe the wayans were on the outs with them they just canceled waynehead or something like we're not helping you guys uh but i do like that kevin in a very realistic to a high school dork trying to be funny, goes like, enjoy the skiing competition. His little stupid jokes are so perfect for this kind of character. Yes. Though his laughter is annoying, but that's part of the guy. It's highlighted in the title sequence so you know what you're in for. Yes.

It can push you away instantly. Then we meet Toby and George that's played by bill and josh themselves or jm weinstein and he's credited for sag purposes that's okay so i didn't realize this was them until i watched dvds again in 2007 after hearing their voices on the commentary so much i'm like oh my god it's josh and the other guy's bill yeah and they should do more voice acting they're really great voice actors they should have been regular voices in disenchantment as well it's a mistake they have just they have funny voices and i i know bill said for many years his daughter would tell him to repeat lines he said as george like so non-ethnic variation maybe not that one but i am not stinky yeah that that was his daughter's favorite one of him

but goddamn like josh is so i mean these also come from them being giant dorkos so yeah i just and josh does such a great voice like he's like he's he's can barely hold in his breath because he's Fatty McGee. That's who he is. And I can say this because I was the Toby of my group in high school, too. But yes, why don't we meet Toby and George? Oh, okay. Have a good time at the ski tournament.

Excuse me. Were you asking about room 410? Because I'm on my way to 410. Oh, thanks. I'm Kevin. This is my first day. I'm picking my way to 410. Oh, thanks. I'm Kevin. This is my first day. I'm picking up something with my obviometer, Captain. No duh.

I like that one. Kevin, this is George. George has a girlfriend in Singapore. Ah, Singapore. At my old school, I told people I had a girlfriend in Canada because it's so far away no one could ever check. Is your Singapore girlfriend the same thing?

It's a more believable ethnic variation. Stop bragging about your girlfriends! I like his distress. Yeah, stop. Toby knows they're fake, and he's still like, stop bragging about them! The fake Canadian girlfriend thing is sort of an old joke but it also reveals like how sheltered uh kevin is like he thinks canada is so far away yeah because he's all like he lives in like what kind of like upstate new york or whatever like can't be that

far away yeah yeah i well it's all over the place yeah this is but yeah it's it's not that far but i love george's like more believable ethnic variation. That's so funny. And some Canadian girlfriends are real, so don't judge everybody. I've met yours. I can confirm she's a real person. Some people just want to live in a better country. Yes.

I mean, also, too, George is an Asian character. So, I mean, maybe Bill shouldn't be playing him either by today's, you know, more informed standards. But not doing a voice. He's not doing a voice. His dad character is a voice. Who plays his dad? I think it's Nick Jameson as well. Okay.

Yeah. But we'll get to him. He's grandfathered in. Sure. Yes. With Khan. Yeah. Khan, Apu, all our favorites.

The little noise Josh makes, like, boop, boop, boop. Just, so, these were the guys. Like, this is who they were. And now, yeah, Dave Thomas is the teacher. Yeah, they're their old boss. They love Dave Thomas. He gave them their first writing gig. It was this, if you go back to our Homer vs. the 21st Amendment episode, we talk about it.

They worked on a reality show parody with Dave Thomas. It was reality shows of like 1990. Yeah. So like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and things like that. He'd go on to be Rex Banner. But that was just a one-off appearance. Now they can get him a regular gig on Mission Hill. And Dave Thomas is just a great actor.

He's just a funny guy he's still still with us knocking on wood there that old he's not young either that's true but we're approaching 70 known for his like impeccable bob hope impressions yeah god so good and sctv of course yes a lot of course the the icons of kids talking about's talking about Canada. Icons of Canada. Yes, Strange Brew. Yes. Those guys. Yes, he's playing the fed-up teacher type. And this is when Kevin introduces himself to his classmates

with a couple of red flags I recognize now in his introduction. Oh, yeah. All right, people, settle down. We have a new transfer student joining us today, Kevin. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself? Hello, everybody. My name is Kevin French. I moved here from Briarhurst, or as you probably know it, Exit 18.

I live with my brother Andy, who is a cartoonist here in Mission Hill. Some of my interests are miniature golf, Robert Heinlein novels, and collecting novelty neckties. I have an extra Dilbert tie if any of you would like to trade. Dilbert and Robert Heinlein, like that. This is a conservative genius. He's a fan of great thinkers, Henry. That's what I'm saying. And also like collecting neckties like that.

That's Tucker Carlson behavior, man. Oh, yeah. This show, I see this show as it's about hip people deprogramming a young Republican. That's what I see it as. Like, if Andy didn't intervene, he'd be Ben Shapiro at this point in history. Honestly, Ben Shapiro at 16, he was in Harvard at that point, like, in Kevin's age. That's the worst person in the world one of the worst uh yeah the and then nobody pays attention to his little speech and the the rest of the class hates him because they're giving a pop quiz on his his life uh but yeah you get to

see that he also does not fit in with the rest of the cool hip urban kids around him. And I love him rethinking his self-conscious laugh there. Then we head back home. We get to see Kevin enjoying his bugles. I think I've heard Bill complain that they never got any free bugles, despite putting them in the show so prominently. I just want to eat bugles now. Yes, Kevin even tattled, like, after having a fight with his brother, which goes so real like you are

so lame go away you lost this fight like that's a very sibling conversation but i like it kevin is such a crummy kid he tattles to his mom over the phone and and also the way he's just like you're having one beer you're losing your mind you're on you're uncontrollable that is such a shelter i love the young nerds uh stance on drinking it's so accurate because i was like that's like that kills brain cells and i want to keep all my brain cells that's for waste away yeah yeah i literally like got into huge arguments as a senior in high school because i the first time i smoked weed a bunch of my nerd friends got mad at me and i was like what do you we're 17 what the fuck is wrong with you idiots we got programmed by all the just say no stuff

yeah i didn't drink until the legal drinking age i'm not square i i didn't have any friends who were like big time drinkers but they would do it occasionally and they in a very kevin situation at 20 they told me like just get drunk like once. So you can say you got drunk while you were, it was illegal to do it. And you can have some story. And I didn't get high for the first time until I was like 27 to like, so, or 25, 25, it was and still not that many times i've been stoned uh but uh but yes also we get uh we get a the closest to wally and gusby coming there shut up little man characters in this sequence i don't

think you should drink if you can't drink responsibly what okay you've had too many drinks you're getting abusive will you get lost you douchebag You're the one who's acting douchebag. You are whack. You don't know what either of those words means, do you? You are so lame. Go away. You've lost this fight. No, I haven't. Mom and Dad would like to speak to you.

Honey, is everything all right? Um, well, no. No, not really. I don't think I can take much more of this. Kevin is driving me nuts. Oh, he just needs some time to adjust. Yes, I imagine your neighborhood is a bit different than what he's used to. New condoms.

What's wrong with our regular brand of condoms? Nothing, but these were on special, that's all. You cheap, gay, bastard. These things are going gonna fly right off Fly right off Where do they fly right off from? Yeah, oh man, that's another thing That people, sheltered people like I was

Couldn't imagine, like, strangers Are just like a wall across from you I hear my neighbors every night Not arguing, I just hear their TV and them talking It's just a fact of just being crammed together With people in the city uh i've been thinking about this bit for a while though like you know wally and gus seem to be in a pretty exclusive relationship and at their age i mean a protection is good but do they need it if they're if they're monogamous i i that that gives me a question but then again maybe they're more open than we know about. Could be, yeah.

Or one could be, you know, a positive. One could be HIV positive and doesn't want to share it with the other. Like, it's not just that they're being overly cautious. This condom tells a lot of stories. But I mean, the way Cuss says it's going to fly right off. I can't not conjure the image. Oh, yeah, it's perfect. It's across the room.

And you cheap gay bastard. What a great epitaph. And I was just destroying Kevin. Like, he's never had to think about gay people in his life. And now he's getting the most intimate details about their sex lives. And so the next day, Andy's at his last nerve they're heading off to hear ska i love ska where uh i see i being a kevin nerdo though i still had heard about ska because real big fish was advertised very heavily to me in 1999 but other than that i didn't know what ska was we're living in a post-basketball world at this point, I think, right?

Boy, you know, 99, yeah, it was Basketball 2000. That was like 98. They did it before the South Park movie. So yeah, the Real Big Fish version of Take On Me was on that soundtrack. Yeah, okay. And Beer, I believe. I think Beer is the song they perform in the film. That's right, yeah.

Guess I have myself a beer. Yeah, ska was mainstream at this point. Yeah, I believe. I think Beer is the song they perform in the film. That's right, yeah. Because I have myself a beer. Yeah, Ska was mainstream at this point. Yeah. I think. My deeper understanding of Kevin was that Ska was only played by white guys in their 20s. They invented it as a genre, Ska. I got into Ska oddly just for one year. It was 2005.

It was an odd year to get into Ska. Just one year, my ska year. That's about my ska intro year, too, I feel like. I feel like that's when I get real into it, and it never left. It's still there. You stayed true to ska, not like a sellout. I think the most ska-like band I listen to still now is probably the Aquabats. Speaking of sellouts, all right, you guys.

I also like the wayy mentions all the normie like gordon lightfoot the beatles like kevin doesn't know music but because he's fucking a child man like you're supposed to andy it's really his failure as an older brother for not teaching his younger brother better music and instead just going like you like lame music i'm not going to teach you that's that's what older brothers are for there's a lot more i'm reading into the show now that i'm watching it again and it's like the history is that yeah uh andy went to college when kevin was like 10 or 11 so for a long time andy was just this like cool older guy like living this cool life but like he was so out of kevin's life it's a it's a good place to start a, you know, story about characters that they get to learn about each other and grow

together. Uh, as, as Kevin learns to lie, to listen to Scott, I shouldn't be in here. I feel guilty. I'm in here under false pretenses.

Sit still and stop attracting attention. But what if they ask for my ID? I could get arrested. Then I'll never get into a good college. Oh, because I wanted to hear ska. Crap. Now the announcer's coming over. Be cool or you're going to get us all kicked out.

Good evening, gentlemen. I see some ID there, sir. Oh, how flattering you should ask. Ever since I shaved my beard, everyone has been... Sir, if you're not 21, I'm going to have to ask you to... Oh, God, it's happening! Please don't arrest me! I want to go to Yale or Amherst!

Don't call my mother! I didn't know! He made me do it! Andy should be dead from hitting a fire hydrant. Just have teeth knocked out. Maybe that's what loosens his tooth. Ah, yes. it's all a premonition here uh that's a great uh vertigo shot when uh when kevin's freaking out with the

background going further the background closing it we close in on him and the background gets further away uh and i also want to mention and you know we're all talking about what scott fans we are the logo for that band silly rabbit is fucking awesome and i feel i feel like a real band should have that yeah yeah that god well just the design sense in general like it comes through in everything like from from silly rabbit to the idea of like this realistic dive bar slash club called backwash like that's great i love it and now they're all like cast in blue light inside it's very dark and this reminded reminded me of a very Kevin-like experience where I was there legally.

I was seeing a show when I was 19, but going to a local bar for the first time to see a show by myself, it was terrifying. It was like a new world. Oh, God. Yeah. Crossing the threshold into adulthood.

And more Gen X referencing of pop culture ephemera from your childhood, like naming your ska band after a cereal commercial so informed yeah like recontextualizing things through irony yeah yeah and great cartooniness like on on andy's freak out of the steam coming out of his ears plus kevin's shaking wallet with all the coins flying out of it god i. I also feel like, as we know, in Bill Oakley's stuff, he likes to mock Yale.

So I think that's why Kevin says Yale instead of Harvard. He's like, that's how lame Kevin is. He'd want to get into Yale instead of Harvard. He says Porsche Manors. They head outside, and this is a big turning point in the episode. And Wally Langham does such a good job acting here and the posing. Like the animation is right there to meet it.

And Andy's big speech about what it's like to be an adult. Well, congratulations, you little dork. You've ruined my whole life in less than a week. I didn't shut up. I did you a big favor by letting you move in with me. You should be down on your knees kissing my ass Oops, I'm sorry I said ass

Please tattle on me Please give me a preachy speech Won't you show me the way, Reverend Goody McFreaking Gumdrops? Mom and Dad said Mom and Dad aren't here They're a thousand miles away Why don't you take advantage of that? Stop ruining my fun and have some for yourself, for God's sake. You're right. That's the first time you've ever said I was right about

anything. That's the first time you've ever been right about anything. But seriously, it's time I start taking advantage of all this freedom. Do things I could never do with mom and dad around. That's the spirit good now let's get home so i can start masturbating the music cue after masturbating is great it is good and i love that like the camera is like rotating around kevin as andy rants and like i was also walking around him it's really good yeah it's a very ambitious shot and it works yeah as it is the reality dawns upon kevin so i guess up to this point he never masturbated because he could never his parents would always be around i'm guessing that's hard for me to believe even for a pent-up nerd to think

that by 16 or 17 he hasn't uh manipulated himself that seems that seems unlikely i think now he just feels freer perhaps so yeah he's i mean now he can look at the internet whenever he wants doesn't have to worry about mom or dad walking in and it probably happened by accident once or twice oh yes yeah i mean as as the classic rick and morty line goes like uh you know i'm a kid you did the roulette opening the door in here yes so they come back for the break kevin is in full dirtbag mode he stayed up all night he's not even embarrassed to be seen in his underwear by posing oh man these incredible slouches they have are just they're straight out of hate the way these characters have terrible posture and i gotta say real heroes slouch because the world is resting on our shoulders i feel like i was very influenced by just the way they stand in their general

demeanor and i'm actually noticing uh hearing that clip of andy yelling at kevin isolated i'm like oh that's my passive aggressive mean voice like that's the way i yell at my girlfriend like that influenced by this oh did i did I say that? Yeah. She's also sitting next to me and laughed at that, so it's okay. It's all right. It's also the first of the blank McBlank jokes. Yeah, dirty old horny McWhack Whack. I was bummed that I couldn't use that as my line because it's not from this episode.

Matthew, stop talking about your girlfriend. I'm left out here in this girlfriend conversation uh the government won't let me see mine uh but uh yes even posy can see that uh kevin has lost his inner light and another great little animation bit of andy just stands there he's like hey could you give me coffee and she just keeps talking so then he just tilts it up himself to pour himself some coffee that's uh there's there's great little animation gags there i i love that and uh then we come back to ron's waterbed warehouse and andy and gwen are still having some flirty exchanges in bed together it's cute i wish it had like the uh the animation of a waterbed it feels like it just thrown a solid mattress here waterbeds are disgusting yes my sister had one yeah yes uh ending when they re-establish that they're going to get together at this party and the personal calls thing also

is a running gag or at least there's a second gag that follows this up in a funny way of ron really hating when andy gets a call at work. So Andy, though, is called into the principal's office and Kevin is in trouble. Mr. French, I've called you here because Kevin was caught sleeping during his fourth period AP chemistry class. When awakened, he flew into a rage and called the teacher a graphic expletive. A what? A foul term. This. This is what he called his teacher. Sir, I don't know how you did things in the suburbs,

but we don't use those words here in the inner city. I'm sorry. I've just, I've never seen it written so neatly. Oh, my. Perhaps I should just call your parents in Wyoming and discuss discipline with them. No, no, that won't be necessary. No, please, I'll punish him, I promise. I'm going to give you some serious discipline, young man.

See that you do. Kevin is suspended for the rest of today. That was a great laugh. Yeah. Yeah. I don't like his pants falling down joke. I'm not a big fan of that. But the rest of today that was a great laugh yeah yeah uh i don't like his pants falling down joke not the biggest fan of that but the rest of this is very fun i mean i also like that the you know african-american principal is telling him like it's maybe how you do it in the suburbs but we don't use that language at the inner city like it's uh it's fun and also douchebag written

out in cursive that's It's just a funny image. Did Kevin take Griffo's pants and hat? I don't know. I don't know what happened there. Then it cuts to them at the liquor store or at the grocery store. Discount food hobo. Yeah. This reminds me of entering the world of drinking and asking people,

well, what should I drink? What's this? What's that? Yeah, you know what? He'll do that. I miss those days now i just have i know the three drinks i like and i don't want to try new things if i though i'm not a regular drinker bob you're quite a uh beer uh snob i'd say i would go that far check me out on the untapped app you're you're up to try any type of beer. I am jealous of your gourmand-ness. Put it in my veins, especially now.

When I first lived alone, well, with a roommate in Berkeley, I went to the discount food outlet that's like right under the overpass, if you know where it is. It's closer to you than me. Oh, yeah, yeah. This looks more like a Whole Foods or something, the wine aisle they're in. Yeah, that's true. It's a very, well, you know, the wine aisle at Trader Joe's here is pretty big. It's true. You get the unhoused and people who are wine moms.

Like, they're all walking through there for their wine needs. They can steal a bottle as a treat. I'm bringing it back. That meme's coming back, folks. Thank you. But, yes, it's time to go shopping for alcohol. I'm glad you got suspended I could never carry all this booze home by myself

Hey, will you buy this for me? I want to have some beer at the party Now you're drinking? You're pretty serious about this new attitude, huh? Yes Excellent Because I was afraid you'd wuss out But drinking shows a real commitment to becoming a cooler person

So will you buy me this? Sure But that's olive oil that's maple syrup that's shampoo look if you want a good first beer try gruber hoff that's what i started with a nice cheap beer like don't waste money on this kid's first beer it'll all taste the same to him it's very observational the kind of like self-destructive drinking that happens in most people's 20s where just's just like it's just a normal thing You're drunk every day and then at least one of the weekend days will be ruined because you'll be too hung over to do anything

You don't you don't realize that's called binge drinking Yeah, your 30s or you never realize it in some people's cases and those are tragedies You know something I really got a sense of in this episode watching it now So in the early seasons of simpsons they actually do have some idea of like well i have x amount of money and we money's tight like they keep in context these realities for andy him saying like i could never carry all this booze on myself this is a joke about how he doesn't have a car and he has to walk home his bags and groceries that's true it it makes that clear with the character and he has to walk home his bags and groceries. That's true.

It makes that clear with the character. He has to borrow cars in other episodes. I'm glad they keep that clear. It's an important fact of him being an urbanite, as one would say. I haven't owned a car in 15 years. Don't miss it. It's also funny to see on network TV Andy approving of underage drinking. It's great.

It's pretty edgy that Kevin gets drunk in this episode episode yeah like first episode your main character gets drunk and and it's not exactly a very special episode about it either and the time cut of the moving that's so cool yeah that's a great uh the arm wipe yeah arm wipe yeah and also though as the party begins toby and george were exactly my friends except they'd be talking about anime instead of what they talk about in this next clip. Hey, guys, welcome to Party Central. You dudes want a beer? No, thanks. Drinking is for wastoids. We don't need liquor to have fun.

Not when we have the Babylon 5 collectible card game. Hey, great apartment. Thanks. There's a rumor that Sid Vicious once threw up in the bathtub. Betcha. Hello. Oh, hi. You must be Kevin. How do you like Mission Hill so far?

It's far out. I, uh. Oh, I, excuse me. I'll be right back. Hey, man, lay off the Gruberhoff. That's my private reserve. Who the hell are you? I'm the Grubermeister, and that's all you need to know. Now get out of here before I kick your ass. That's right.

Those are some of my cartoons, and those are some designs for an animated TV series I was thinking about. Oh, God. Not another animated series. I know. It's like everyone and their brother has one now. That's also true today. Oh, yeah.

It's ten times as true now. Every streaming platform has five animated series a day, it feels like. That shows you where Babylon 5 was at in 1999 it's like star trek is so such a lame reference we need the dorkier one like well then it's babylon 5 they were really tapped into nerd culture of this time because you know collectible card games uh this is right after the pokemon collectible card game exploded magic was around oh there's an episode matt mentioned earlier about an MMORPG, which was a new concept to TV viewers at the time.

Like, they were very ahead of things. Oh, in their Comic Con episode? Yeah. I was just going to mention, that is another hyper-specific nerd reference of the time, which is everything having a collectible card game. And I bought into a lot of them. Like, not just...

Because before this, it was trading cards. You would get cards based on every fucking tv there was probably like a chips uh trading card collection but they were just screenshots with some flavor text or maybe some stats about a character this is the time where like pokemon and magic were so big so every especially anime oh yeah got like this is the time this is the same year that the Dragon Ball Z trading card game, which I played for a long time launched. And like,

they all wanted to be magic or Pokemon, but you can't be exactly that. So they would change the rules a little bit and make it way harder and worse to play. So I, I learned the rules to a lot of terrible card games that I played once and never played again, but still bought all the cards for.

I, I feel lucky to have avoided the ccg uh craze like my friends didn't get into it we we played tabletop rpgs so it's not like we were cool but uh i didn't get into that but you're right yeah when i was your when i was your age but uh but but when i was nine trading cards were the thing. And I bought every Marvel trading card I could. Series one through four, I had them all in a binder. And I cherished every one of them. You're right.

Bill and Josh, very plugged into what actual teen nerds were into then. And this was as the internet was still young. They still had that information. And I forgot they set up the sid vicious thing like uh early here that's right the degradation of kevin like him uh getting to play drunk this early for a character got it had to be pretty fun for scott menville and like the first episode he gets to play him drunk i did like the uh the dotted line from andy's eyes to gwen's butt yes she's looking at his art you know it's it's a very mature for 1999 thing i

remember on news radio as well like the ross and rachel characters like had sex in the first season but this is like first episode they almost do it and i like they're both like yeah we're adults we are both interested in each other we both know what's up going to a bedroom to look at drawings let's drop the ruse though i like that it's when andy looks at her butt that what's up going to a bedroom to look at drawings let's drop the ruse though i like that it's when andy looks at her butt that he's like oh wait a minute i stink and so does my bed oh shit like though though gwen you know clearly she must like andy because she's like oh this stinky mattress oh well like let's i'm dtf all the same i believe bill oakley has said that all the all of andy's drawings in the show were drawn

by him oh okay wow i know no meat touching was him i know that one but i think i think all of them it almost is a little too clever the uh the everybody's got an animated series now kind of thing because for the for your first episode of your animated series especially when you're about to be canceled yeah there's actually no animated series. There'll be one more episode this year for you. But who are they to know? So Zanny and Gwen are starting to get down to business. We cut back to the guys dancing in their fun house party.

It's some real like Peanuts kind of dance. Yeah, we didn't talk too much about the opening, but I love Jim's like crazy dance in the opening. With his head hunched over and moving his arms all crazy crazy i'm miming it now it's awesome and his legs kicking up yeah i love that well though in the opening andy's like push and pull dance yeah and like the wavy arms too ah yeah yeah and though i think my favorite in this shot is is wally's like little head bob like that's i in general i like that gus and wally are not like their mean neighbors who hate the kids they're the cool old gay guys who get invited to the cool kids party like i i like how welcoming it is to them though gus isn't feeling very welcomed by

kevin in this one scene and i know you're gay okay like, I don't even have a problem with it. All right already. His history is full of great homos. Oscar Wilde was a homo. Alexander the Great was a homo. And you know who else is great? You, you big homo! That is a hurtful term. Please stop using it, or I will be forced to clobber you.

Pizza! it or I will be forced to clobber you. Bite me. Alright, everybody scoff! Hey! Who wants to get it on with the gruber meister sexual harassment real creep oh man i just like that that scene with him and uh gus is great because like kevin now his confidence because he's drunk and he's just like i'm in a city of talking to a gay guy this is awesome and we're cool with each other yeah i can call him a homo and it's like no you cannot call him a homo gus is gonna it's gonna clobber you i love he says

clobber like because he's also the thing he's yeah that's true just just in the ways that lawrence tierney is the thing he is the thing especially like i love the character of gus that for him being gay is just part of him. He's not sad about being gay. He's not fraught with it. Like, when he's, we'll see in a future flashback that, like, him falling in love with a man is kind of meaningless to him. Like, he's just like, yeah, I fell in love with a man. Whatever.

He's also comfortable with himself. Yeah. So, entirely too comfortable with himself, really. But yeah, I also like that Kevin's coming at him from the history nerd kind of way. Just like, actually, I know lots of gay people in history. Did you know this person was gay? Did you know this person? And yes, you've mentioned that ska song before, Matt. Do you know?

I don't know anything about the Toasters, but what's their deal? Oh, there's a very important fact about the toasters which is they did the theme song to kablam oh i know that song very well i do too yeah yeah that's a great song a lot of people think this song is the same song but it's not all songs are very nuanced and different they don't all sound the same i will say uh sleeper hit band uh the hippos are good look up the hippos. Oh, yeah, I agree. No, this is Don't Let the Bastards Grind You Down by the Toasters, which is an awesome song. I love this song.

Yes, which you won't be hearing on the DVD. But the joke works the same way. It's just like they just have a kind of library music ska riff. Either way, you get to see Kevin make a complete ass of himself trying to dance around. And I also like Stogie takes direction from Jim and bites him when being told to bite me. So in a way, he's a good dog. He listens. Kevin then thrusts his hips towards the ladies at the party, hoping he got slapped off camera right after that.

Man, then we get to sexy town with the andy and gwen in the bedroom like i like you know andy is just drawn as like uh you know a not terrible looking body but just the body of a man who in his 20s who doesn't exercise but doesn't eat too much scrawny and malnourished yeah and uh but you know just you know a weak man i just like her vision of him in his like underwear too she's like yeah all right we're doing this like and yeah like uh i like how in the scene uh she is the more like engaged person she's just like the more confident in bed person yeah she's really like dude come on we're let's get to it. And he keeps being distracted. She's like, you know, please. Like, I'm kind of on Gwen's side.

Like, give yourself 10 minutes to fuck. He's not going to die by then. And then once you're done, then you can walk away. Like, at least have a quickie. But they even get away with a little bit of boob on network TV there. Though no nipple, obviously. Yes, I guess, though, this scene being extra sexy makes it all the more important to get to see Andy's sacrifice. Like, he's given up a sure thing to help his brother, the brother he's been hating this entire episode.

That is Kevin. Well, he's probably a little drunk. Forget about it. I'd feel better if I could just check. Googer Geiger. Well, I do not feel better. You will in a second. I promise. I'm sorry.

He's my brother. I love his little face there. What's he saying? He's saying he's the Grubermeister. Do any of you have a problem with that? No, sir. Good. Now I think he's the Grubermeister. Do any of you have a problem with that? No, sir. Good.

Now I think it's time for you to leave. Get out of here, Bill Oakley. Bill Oakley doing his own voice, drawn as him. And Josh is there too, drawn as they were when they were 33 or however old they were at the time. I love that. I love his little beard and mustache that's his current twitter avatars is himself in his early 30s that's right yeah that was before that bill couldn't have imagined being the instagram star he is today the one thing i think about though in that scene is

like andy must have had like a boner he had to tuck away yeah walking out to save his brother uh i i'm sorry i bring it to bonertown i was just thinking logistically he's like to step out of bed he's he's gotta be at least like half there i also uh i'm jumping around the episode as we get toward the end of the episode i've been just jumping around looking at some of the shots and uh we were talking about the color design earlier and one thing i i didn't remember to mention is when they're going into that bar that Bob mentioned,

there's like this blue light on everyone. The shot of Kevin walking into the bar, the color, you see him walk from the outside light from the like checking the ID bouncer light into the bar light and it just looks, it looks great.

It's at exactly 12 minutes and 20 seconds in the episode just while you're listening to this if you're looking at it just look at that shot please it's very well observed and uh very detailed and that kind of color change in a pre-digital show is pretty impressive too that they they pulled it off uh very flawlessly and yeah when he saves his brother i actually do think he's right to chase off those guys because he's like the last stragglers at a party just watching a basically a child roll around drunk on the floor go write a tv show losers uh but yes uh it comes to the next morning kevin is hungover and he's like sorry for being so pathetic and he's like hey cheer up not everybody Sid Vicious. Like, it's a touching ending here.

I'm sorry for being so pathetic. Hey, cheer up. It's not everybody who can outdo Sid Vicious. Here you go. Is everything okay? Yeah, he just got a little carried away is all. It runs in the family. Every time somebody put down a cup, your dog ran up and drank it.

Well, I better get going. See you tomorrow. Well, I guess my experiment in being cool has failed. Miserably. So, you gonna call it quits? It's too hard being like you. I don't know if I can do it. Maybe you'd be happier just being the old Kevin? Well, it's certainly

the easy choice. Is the douchebag aspect going to be a problem? I can learn to live with it. Thanks. And, um, let's just try to forget about last night. Oh, God. At least Mom and Dad will never find out. Sunday, 3.30 a.m.

Yo, dudes! It's Kevin! Hey, could you send me my birth certificate? Because I want to change my name to the Grubbermeister! Wah-he-he-he! I love being drunk! I want to stay drunk forever. What a great line to go out on.

I want to stay drunk forever. You also get to see that Gwen, you you know he didn't totally blow it with her she gives him a little kiss and uh got him some coffee well she's there in the morning so who knows after what happened after they put kevin to bed hmm i wonder yeah i i get the sense that he babysat kevin all night just to make sure he didn't like choke on his own vomit but i took it as gwen just slept in his bed while he stayed up all night but uh later andy will totally blow with gwen but not yet though i i would bet if the series kept going she'd just keep appearing in the show i don't think she's just like his season one girlfriend i feel like

a much i feel like any lesser show would have her storm off uh and probably also make a gay joke about him i think at this point but like they let her just be like no i understand that circumstances are circumstances and he had a thing to deal with and it has nothing to do with me comparatively in the pilot for the critic the uh his girl his love interest for that episode does brutally dump him and because he stood up for his morals it's a similar situation but less respectful to women i would say in in the critic pilot a lot of bad uh girlfriends in that first season yeah some who didn't even get names yeah you need to you don't need to name a woman character oh no but who needs it man great first episode like a pilot that sets up every character amazingly

sets up the whole town like uh and creates the entire situation of kevin and andy living together like it does everything a classic you know iconic pilot does for a tv series like these are all pros working at the in their prime. It's fantastic. I can't wait to explore all of this on the Patreon. So check it out there at patreon.com slash TalkingSimpsons. Matthew, please let us know what you're doing now, how we can support you, and about your great podcast. Thank you.

And thank you again for having me. Of course, as we mentioned at the beginning of the episode, I love Mission Hill so, so dearly. I love the show so much, and I hope that this gets a lot of people who didn't get to experience it on the WB or Adult Swim to check it out. But, yeah, please, I make the deep end with my friend Steve Yurko, where we are going through every show ever at Adult Swim, including Mission Hill. We did a whole episode about that with our friends Gene and Casey who are two actual cool young people who live in a cool town. So Steve and I as the nerds as we've talked about in this episode got to ask them what that's like. How real is this?

We also have a Patreon. Patreon.com slash The Deep End where we do a weekly show about the Venture Brothers and a monthly show about other Adult Swim-ish shows like Clone High and Downtown and a lot of the shows that we actually mentioned on this episode golden boy uh archer also make

cartoons 101 as you mentioned that's where i interviewed bill oakley and other people like scott gerdner and evan dorkin who is an actual 90s indie comics legend uh like the ones we mentioned that inspired this show uh that's at patron.com says cartoons 101 i also go through series on there with a bunch of guests like uh the works of satoshi cone and avan gallion uh ralph bach she uh just did don bluth and now i'm doing non-disney renaissance 90s animated films i had alec robbins on to talk about a goofy movie to kick the series off uh he's mr boop if people are familiar with that uh he he goes real in-depth about where mr boop came from uh what it is he breaks kayfabe very in-depth interview about it for aboutop came from, what it is. He breaks kayfabe. Very in-depth

interview about it for about 20 minutes. So check that out. I really enjoyed that, Matthew. I was behind on so many podcasts now that I have nowhere to go and nothing to do. I've been listening to a lot of podcasts and I just caught up on almost all of yours. And I love the Goofy movie when you did with him. And thank you so much, Matt. Thank you, Matt. So thanks again to Matthew J for being on the show. Please check out his stuff. As for us, if you want to check out more of our stuff and Thank you, Matt. The rest of Talking Mission Hill will be on the Patreon behind the $5 paywall. If you're listening to this episode on the Talking Simpsons free feed, episode two of Talking Mission Hill is already there waiting for you. Sign up now, you'll get it immediately, and then you'll get an episode of Talking Mission Hill

every week after that until we run through all 13 of them. Plus, if you want to upgrade from $5 a month to $10, you'll get access to our premium once a month podcast, What a Cartoon Movie, where we talk about a different animated our premium once a month podcast what a cartoon movie where we talk about a different animated feature film once a month in april castle of cagliostro the first miyazaki directed film based on the lupin franchise it's a ton of fun and action-packed movie that has a interesting history to it and if you sign up you'll be able to hear that one and all the previous

ones lots of great stuff there over 60 hours of podcasting content just from the movies alone a great thing to do alongside all those limited series we talked about patreon.com slash talking simpsons is where to sign up so i've been one of your hosts bob mackie you can find me on twitter as bob servo i have another podcast by the way outside of this network and it's called retronauts that is a classic gaming podcast find it wherever you find podcasts or go to patreon.com slash retronauts to sign up for five bucks a month to get two exclusive episodes every month two full-length episodes that are only on the patreon at patreon.com slash retronauts every month henry how about you follow me on twitter at h-e-n-e-r-e-Y-G. Whenever new stuff happens in my life, I'm sure to tweet about it with fun images from

cartoons or also depressing thoughts on the news. Lots of different things. Plus, if you enjoy this podcast, you should be really following the official Twitter account of this podcast network, at TalkSimpsonsPod. That's at TalkSimpsonsPod. You'll stay informed on all the current events whenever new podcasts go live on the Patreon or the free feed.

Followed on Twitter at TalkSimpsonsPod. Thanks so much for listening, folks. We'll see you next week for Krusty Gets Busted and we will see you then. I think it's important to embrace as many ideas and cultures as one can. Mom, Dad, and I went to see Il Postino and... Shut up. You are so lame. Shut up. Maybe you should shut up. No, you. I'm not the one who's...

All right, you two. I'm going to pull this car over right now. What? Don't let me stop your arguing.