Talking Simpsons - Talking Simpsons - A Streetcar Named Marge With Jake Rockatansky

Episode Date: July 26, 2023

This week's episode we get theatrical with Jake Rockatansky of the hilarious investigative podcast QAnon Anonymous! Marge wants to find a new hobby while Homer becomes a much more passive-aggressive partner than usual, all as the town engages in a musical version of a Tennesee Williams classic. We dig deep into the way it was created, the ways it offended New Orleans, Maggie battling Randianism, surprising deleted scenes, and so much more. You can always depend on the kindness of this podcast! Support this podcast and get over 150 bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! And please follow the official Twitter, @TalkSimpsonsPod!

This podcast is brought to you by patreon.com slash talking Simpsons head there to check out exclusive podcasts like talking Futurama talking of the hill the what a cartoon movie podcast and tons more I hardly endorse this event or product Our product. Ahoy, hoy, everybody, and welcome to Talking Simpsons, a white-hot grease fire of pure entertainment. I'm your host, the banality biter, Bob Mackie, and this is our chronological exploration of The Simpsons. Who is here with me today, as always? It's Henry Gilbert, and I'm saying I am a leech! And who is our special guest on the line?

I am Jake Rokitansky, with no Simpsons quote loaded up, unfortunately, yet. And this week's episode is a streetcar named Marge. I'm your host, Troy McClure, and now, here come the ladies! This week's episode originally aired on October 1st, 1992, and as always, Henry will tell us what happened on this mythical day in real world history. Oh my god! Oh boy, Bobby! Cartoon Network debuts with Rhapsody Rabbit as its very first tune,

Sinead O'Connor rips up a photo of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live, and the Mighty Ducks debuts in theaters. I was here for every one of these moments. Wow, yes. I mean, I definitely remember the Mighty Ducks premiering. You know, I didn't see, I used to see every kid's movie. Every time we talk about a kid's movie, I saw it in theaters, but I did not see the Mighty Ducks in theaters. That was a VHS a year later for me.

I think that was a running out the semester grade school TV on a cart special for me. Oh, yes. Yeah, it's funny. This is September now, so we're in 1992 when we're talking about this. But obviously, I never played any hockey in my life. Oh, yeah. You're from Florida. No, no, no, no.

I was not athletic in the least bit. And I barely played hockey video games either. I played Mutant League hockey, yeah. Now that I did, I did play some hockey video games, but mostly for the skull bashing

and the little pool of blood that would, you know, collaculate next to your character on the ice in like NHL 96 or whatever. Yeah, that's why I only played Mutant League hockey. It was just fighting and violence and very little hockey. Yes. I love the Mutant League series, both hockey and football. And that was my favorite singing in Swingers when Vince Vaughn is describing like,

no, see, in this game you see the blood. See, I'm beating up his favorite guy. So I was in Catholic school, by the way. We were all watching SNL too young. I was maybe 10 when, I think I was 10 when this aired. And it was scandalous on the playground talking about,

can you believe what she did to our Pope? Yes, yeah. Time has really on her side on this one. Everybody, as I recall as a kid, it was just, why did she do that to the Pope? And I never even saw, I wasn't staying up late. I watched Saturday Night Live on reruns. So the news of this really only hit me,

I think like a year or two later when the reruns happened on Comedy Central because they'd always have like Jan Hooks as Sanae o'connor tearing up other things and crying and the joke was like this lady cries too much what an emotional nutcase and it's like no she was protesting systemic child abuse in the catholic church which is obscenely real like a very real thing yeah i believe that was my impression of her. I think that was the popular culture sort of like archetype of her, which she was framed as like a crazy lady with a shaved head who was like crying a lot.

She had too many emotions, felt too much, cared too much. Yeah, the commentary was, we should have never trusted this bald woman. What were we thinking? We gave her too much power, this bald woman what were we thinking we gave her too much power this bald late well i think too part of the story became or the narrative definitely fit with lauren michaels does not like when anybody breaks the rules on saturday night live and you get you get punished in that way for it like because if she didn't get punished then other people would be like well when i'm on saturday night live i'm gonna do this or whatever like you know adrian brody has not been invited on snl sins for that uh and nor should he

but they only because that was not funny at all what was his political cause when he played the rest of man i can't remember that a white man can wear rasta dreads and speak with a rasta accent yeah that's that was his for reasons only known to him i I think. He thought it was going to be hilarious. Everybody was going to love him as Rasta Man introducing Sean Paul. The Rasta Man character. Man, I haven't seen Adrian Brody since, honestly, now that I'm trying to think about it. That might have been it.

He was in the Darjeeling Limited. Was there anything after that? Oh, yeah, that's right. I saw that. Oh, he had like a small part of Grand Budapest Hotel. he might just be one of those guys who's only in wes anderson movies i think so relegated to wes anderson uh character roles for the rest of his life i mean i mean that's not a horrible fate i guess if you're very rich in between those things yeah and also an oscar but yeah sure and cartoon network i was

there for the debut of cartoon network but i was 10 so i didn't understand how ip worked and i assume like oh every cartoon will be on this but then i quickly realized no this is just a rerun warehouse of things i got tired of when i was five yeah the network would change in about five years but it was uh it was just really boomer focused, right? Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, I remember my vague recollection of the Cartoon Network was exactly that, that this sounded like something that would be perfect for me, but the cartoons that they showed were not the cartoons that I was interested in, which was primarily the Ghostbusters cartoon, the Ninja Turtles cartoon. There were a couple fringe cartoons I was interested in, which was primarily the Ghostbusters cartoon, the Ninja Turtles cartoon.

There were a couple like fringe cartoons I was really into. Do you guys remember Cops? Which was the, it was like C, O, it was like C period O period P period S. And it was like these police officers who had like bionicle equipment. That was really big in the early 90s, I believe.

I had the toy of the cowboy from that. I was just going to ask you. I was just going to say, Henry, did you have any of the cops toys? Because I assumed you did. Only the cowboy. They have to understand, Jake. Henry had a lot of action figures. Oh, me too.

Me too. Let's talk figures. What were your, like, because, let's see. I mean, I had mostly Ghost ghostbusters a lot of turtles and then i had matt i was really into mask i was really into starcom uh those weren't neither of those were my no i well this is funny because well listeners in the future in a few weeks we haven't recorded yet there will be a ninja turtles episode we're doing of one of our side podcasts but every time i watch like a ninja turtles doc and they show all the toys or he man doc and they show all the toys that's when it hit me like i did my mom did buy me a lot of toys because i well i

i guess i had this full set this entire wave i had that set of toys. I had all the Turtles plus Splinter, Shredder, and Foot Soldiers and going onwards. So yeah, TMNT, Turtles, and then when the X-Men and Spider-Man sets came out, I had a ton of those. But I didn't get Cartoon Network until two years later. And it was a big, big day when our cable system in 94 got it. I watched it all day long. I didn't care that it was Hanna-Barbera Drek. Like, I wanted to watch Penelope, the perils of Penelope Pitstop. The Gary Coleman show?

The Gary Coleman show, all that. And then over time, the guys who would go on to create Space Ghost, they started programming the channel with, yeah, this shit sucks right isn't that funny let's watch this crappy stuff but well cartoon network did start with a bang though with the rhapsody rabbit which is the the big uh musical one of it yeah but i remember when space ghost came out and i tried watching it and even as a as a young you know as a young kid, I knew that there was something edgy and kind of snarky about it, but I did not get it. I think I was a little bit too young because I knew that there was something funny there. Because there was sort of a cultural conversation around space ghosts but i was like i don't know either i didn't get the humor

or i was still in my like busters phase or maybe i don't know maybe i was starting high school at that time and cartoons had been told to me i mean other than the simpsons obviously which i watched basically all through high school i have a really interesting sort of like frame of reference of space ghost of being aware of it, knowing that it was cool, but not being able to get into it for whatever reason. You heard him up front. Joining us this time is our special guest,

Jake Rakitansky from QAnon Anonymous. Welcome to the show, Jake. This is your first time on Talking Simpsons. Yes, I am honored to be here. Oh, thank you. Oh, an honor. As somebody whose clock was set to when The Simpsons came on TV Oh, thank you. Oh, an honor. at six so I knew from 5 30 to 6 30 I was I was gonna be in in Simpsons land and then something came on I'm trying to remember what came on after the Simpsons that was such a turnoff I believe it

was like Frasier or something that like you knew like you knew your night was over when it was like the freight it was like the Frasier intro you're like all right no more Simpsons all right I guess I have to like I don't know do my homework or potentially like try to convince my parents to let me play a video game for two hours before bed for me i think as soon as i heard the mash theme i thought well i should just go to bed and i you know on my local programming syndication i think it was most of the time i think it was like simpsons into it was simpsons into fresh prince into seinfeld i think that was damn that is a good lineup i i think i might have had two simpsons back to back i don't know how they did that but it happened in my area oh yeah no it was programmed

with it as an hour in my block too i you know there's some early early commercials for the syndication that are so fascinating to see now that we know how marketing works because they were such made to play at like four o'clock during kids cartoons and they were all like your best friend Bart showing up now two times a day it was so them marketing it to children when it is if somebody wanted to say if a culture warrior wanted to say, Simpsons is marketing filth to children, I'd be like, well, this commercial is true. Yeah, they did do that. Well, Jake, I'm glad you were so forthcoming with your Simpsons biography because having listened to your podcast a lot, I assume you're around the same age as Henry and I. And given how eager you were to do this podcast, I assume you have the same biography and you do.

Yes, yes. Yeah, I graduated high school i think in 2001 i'm i'm basically about to turn 40 so i don't know if you guys are in the same i i'm in we're both we're both 40 i graduated in 01 bob oh class of 2000 baby nice nice okay okay a true millennial in in the real sense of the word i i did have one year of adult life before 9-11 so i my like second week of of community college was 9-11 like that was me too i remember it so vivid let's hey let's let's talk about 9-11 let's talk about where we were on 9-11 well that's a regular topic for our listeners to hear us unfortunately hey uh there's at least nine years of fun after this episode there's before 9-11 so jake i mean it must be nice to be on a podcast to talk about

like a fun good thing instead of like you know january 6 or anti-vaxxers who drink their own urine. You have no idea. You know, when we started the QAnon Anonymous podcast, we had no idea that QAnon would become what it became. I mean, essentially, I was, you know, Julian Field and I, who's the other co-host and producer of the show, we had had another podcast that we were doing for years that was like about video games that nobody listened to. But we did it for years and we had a website and we were like writing an article. I mean, it was we were really

putting a lot of work into it and nobody listened to it. And we kind of knew that and knew that we were putting our effort into something that just wasn't it just wasn't hitting for whatever reason and I think there was a little bit of fatigue and we were kind of looking for something else to do well what else to talk about and we had settled on kind of this like dystopian sort of future that we were heading into there was you know this was the people were starting to talk about AI people were starting to talk about robots, video games, and second lives. And there was something, you know, that we were trying to figure out something in that space of this sort of like coming, this coming hellscape that we were all sure, you know, was just around the corner based on the sort of temperature of how everybody was feeling and what people were into. And then I discovered QAnon on a

conspiracy subreddit and was fascinated by it. I've never been into like the 4chan or any kind of chans. I'm basically like an internet normie for the most part. And so, you know, when it leaked out onto these kind of like mainstream boards and it was kind of leading back to the drops and there were these predictions and I saw people getting really riled up over it. I was like, I don't know. I was like, this thing is like really fascinating. And I was coming at it kind of like from the perspective of what if it's real? You know, what if this is real? What if somebody really is? What if there really is some high-level government insider that's leaking all of this, you know, leaking all of these potential arrests that are coming? I was like, that would really, oh, that would really, like, shake things up.

And that's where it started. And we just started watching it and watching it transform and evolve and devolve. Yeah, it's been. Seems like it will never stop. Yeah. Just like The Simpsons, right? Just like The Simpsons. Yeah, it's been... Seems like it'll never stop. Yeah, just like The Simpsons, right? Just like The Simpsons. We heard similar things from Travis. I mean, you guys love doing your podcasts, of course,

but it's a nice break to not talk about the subject matter you normally talk about. And I think part of the fun in quotes, to not sound cruel, is listening to you guys sort of lose your minds during episodes as you're trying to confront the things you're reading, the things you're hearing. Yeah,'s really weird it's really weird guys i i like don't know how to i don't know how to describe it i you know i have a theater degree i was working in the entertainment industry for you know you know all even while you know for the first couple years where we were

doing the the podcast and so for it to go the direction not only the conspiracy theory to grow but to also discover like really depressing shit like that we've always kind of been doing QAnon as Americans in one way shape or form and this is just a you know a sign of the times kind of like version of the thing that we've been doing for hundreds of years you know I think that's probably the most depressing thing about doing the show is realizing that americans and and people in general are kind of default conspiracy theorists anyway and you know the people behind q anon found a way to really tap into that we've seen so many classic episodes where on the simpsons where they they're making fun of a conspiracy theory then and we're like wait that's still a conspiracy theory now that like the the the hue people will say is the new thing like there's a

joke in i think it's season 11 or so of of ned saying he's not giving his kids flu shots because he's he's worried about what's in there i was like wow that's that weird and that is like this the uber religious character on the show, all tracks. Well, and also the Simpsons have worked them. The Simpsons itself has become fodder for tons to reference stuff that looks like a prediction all the time. I mean, all the time you see like, oh, well, in this Simpsons episode, oh, and James L. Brooks, well, he was married to so-and-so and she spoke at this government function. And so that's all tied in and The Simpsons is trying to do disclosure in a way. Yeah.

It's one of those shows that is so smart and has, I think, such a sort of accurate look into how human beings behave and what motivates us, and it's just one of those things where, after however many hundreds of episodes, like there's going to be stuff that sort of looks like a prophecy. Well, thankfully in this episode,

there's nothing too relevant to current politics. Although Ned does make some allusions to performing A Streetcar Named Desire in drag, which a conservative Christian today would not be down with. They'd be out protesting the A Streetcar Named Desire drag story hour. Right, yeah, exactly. I mean mean a man playing blanche dubois is an extreme drag performance like blanche

is a drag character in some ways but no i think that i i love that joke because this is getting ahead but i i love that joke because ned going to a hyper christian all all male school then made him have to do a very gay act of dress or queer act of dressing as a woman to play Blanche DuBois that's extra funny like he I mean did he kiss the Mitch of the play when he was doing that play

like what did he I know I want to see more of Lionel Hutz's Mitch we were robbed of that we really were but this episode that was such a funny line. That was a lol for me when I rewatched. We have so much behind the scenes on this one, too. Yes. Jake, you're going to get a taste of what our podcast says immediately as we have a

30-minute preamble. Well, what I found really interesting watching this episode back is how simple it is. It's a really kind of cut-and-dry morality play, sort of, which is, you know, through the viewfinder of watching the play, Homer realizes that maybe he's like one of the characters who's portrayed negatively in the show and that maybe he should change. And that's kind of, you know, the most basic point of theater and film is that, you know, we see ourselves in these characters and it causes us to question or, you know, analyze, you know, our own behavior and do we want to change it or not? We get a sort of objective perspective of, you know, maybe some, you know, some traits or, yeah, you know, sort of behaviors that, you know, maybe we go, oh, oh, that's kind of, yeah, I identify that with that. And that kind of makes me feel bad. Maybe, maybe I should think about that. When I throw a radio out the window, I'm just like Stanley Kowalski. Yeah. This,

this was the first time me and Bob both have watched the streetcar named desire the 51 film too in preparation for this which and i held off because of this episode i thought there's no way i can take this seriously and once you're about 10 minutes in you forget about the simpsons oh yeah i mean for good reason it's remembered as one of like the best films of its era based on one of the best plays and is like amazing actors four amazing actors at the core of it of course you know famously it made marlon brando a superstar like he just incredible as as stanley and as is vivian lee is blanche they they both are just amazing in it every scene i'm like oh this is the best actor in the movie the next scene no wait it's it's it's this guy it's carl malden

but though also though i felt like now that i've finally fully seen the film, one, I think they got away with some way dirtier stuff in this episode than I originally thought, knowing that full context. And two, that it came up with the idea of like, oh, Homer's like Stanley. Let's write an episode about how Marge associates Homer with Stanley. Homer, they have to make homer extra bad in this episode and even then he is not even 10 of what stanley is in the movie yeah he feels like he's not cartoonishly cruel homer he's realistically cruel homer he's cruel in a way a normal uh mean

husband would be yeah yeah and talk about seeing yourself in things like it's, I did see, do see a lot of what my, my parents then relationship was like my dad, my dad did not like when my mom had outside things that she wanted to do. Like a, uh, she, she had community band instead of a play, but principles the same. And he, uh, he was like ignoring her in the ways Homer does here too, or just straight up to saying, I don't care. There was no there was no redemption arc, though, in this story, though, of course, unlike in the real in real life, people can get divorced, which that's a good thing. Yeah, yeah. But but anyway, we we also know a ton of behind the scenes on this to start with.

Like, yeah, that there's two different creation stories on this one. Conflicting creation myths for a street car named Marge. So, uh, Jeff Martin, the writer of the episode, he says on the commentary and he said in other places too, that he pitched a story where Homer would be cast in 1776,

that musical. And he he learned something about himself and then at when he pitched that at the story retreat james l brooks responded oh you know what no it'd be better if marge got cast in streetcar and was playing blanche then the pitch then also became afterwards that oh well we can't just do a copywritten play in this so we're gonna have to like parody it as a musical make up a musical for it yeah it sounded like the script yeah it sounded like the script had been written uh and then they found out yeah that you can't actually use excerpts from the play but you can write songs based on characters from the play but i think they were allowed to use two lines from the play and they're they're very easy to identify if you've seen the movie right and so jeff martin that means he had to

like write a few a few songs uh that he wasn't originally planning to write but he he does he does some great songwriting with uh the rest of the team on this uh the other people help with the writing and stuff and of course the orchestration he jeff martin wrote the demos and the music for them but alf clausen did the orchestration on it well there's a second version of the creation of this episode though that comes from uh writer nell scoville's memoir if you don't know mel scoville she has uh two simpsons writing credits only one in the classic era she was the second woman to write a freelance script on the show the blowfish episode from season two oh wow and it's a great memoir if you just want to learn about like what making tv was in the 90s especially as one of the few women in writers rooms i think it's called just the

funny parts yes yeah it's it's really great and so in it though she mentions that when she pitches the blowfish episode basically as we know it where homer has 24 hours to live and he's got a checklist of things he wants to do before he dies sam simon hears that pitch and then he says oh you know what instead of that what if after homer thinks he has 24 hours to live and then when he finds out he survives it then he gets a part in streetcar and plays stanley and then after doing it he learns like wow i'm so happy i i didn't die and i lived to do this and and scoville says that she could not hide on her face that she did not like that pitch and that sam simon's like okay then i'll take your pitch and my pitch to james l brooks and see which one he likes and scoville says that sam simon

called her again about a week later and said well I guess you're the genius because Brooks likes your pitch more so we're gonna do that blowfish episode and then Scoville says but the joke's on me because then a year later Sam Simon does that streetcar episode he's like I always like that idea that I pitched against her idea I said and and now that I pitched against her idea. And now that we've gotten her idea out of the way, we can do mine. I mean, that's like, that's television. Like I've been in some like pretty high profile writers rooms and it's not fun.

It's a lot of people trying to figure out the best time to pitch the right joke when the showrunner is in the proper headspace to receive it. And a lot of it is people just like wanting their own ideas. And I mean, especially if you're established, you've been a writer for a really long time, there's a sort of sense of superiority. I mean, you get that grace. I mean, you get to, you know, you get to pitch more or your idea gets to sort of bubble to the top and the new writers or the income, you know, the incoming writers, they're like, you know, they're like peons. Well, if you're like a woman in 1991 and a freelancer brought in for just that script, not a full-time writer, I honestly, I guess we got to thank Brooks for saving that script not a full-time writer yeah i honestly i guess we got to thank brooks for like uh saving that script because if it was just sam simon making the call as the ep they would have just been like well then this blowfish episode goes down the toilet and homer

plays stanley who let a woman in here and that would have been such a waste because this episode is much better to make it a marge episode than homer in a play like it's so i mean this also kind of works as a sequel to when marge became a painter it's like marge discovers a secret talent kind of thing right gets her out of the house and yeah so they wrote the script uh full of quotes they then were told they have to change it to songs they were then told the like you know this might not even work as parody and that the lawyer for the show instead of doing what a lot of lawyers in entertainment do of saying better not risk it don't do it he says no this is established parody law and i will take this to the supreme court if we have to like he he stuck up

for it which is great they call it his name anatole klebanow which is a real armin tamzarian of a name that really is yeah also it's interesting that this is in season production order number 18 even though it is the last of season three production to air and it's the second to air in broadcast season four and i wonder if it's a mix of fox deliberately not wanting to program a Marge episode as like a season finale or a season premiere or versus this had so difficult a production full of complicated stuff that they're like we need the whole summer to finish this damn thing yeah I think on the animation side it was they needed more time for the third act and also on the writing side I think they were very proud of this one and they wanted to start the season with it i think it was the right call also if you guys have the dvds i hadn't watched this in forever there is an animatic

uh commentary with rich moore and david silverman on it they pulled out the it's basically half the episode the second half of the episode as the black and white animatic and just rich moore david silverman from the animation standpoint are talking over it there's some very deep details in it but there's also some a couple cut jokes that that i i have uh gonna bring up but also that they were very clear of like they asked too much this was too much to do they have a giant musical number oh and also they start the episode with a musical number two and it's full orchestration full harmonies I mean that was like one one of the things that really struck me when I watched the when I when I just watched it uh you know in prep to come on the show is the music is very it's very true to that like community theater adaptation

it is it feels very authentic and it's one of the you know and we can get into it later, obviously, but I think one of the deeper themes that's going on is the life of an actor and the life of auditioning and rehearsal and that lifestyle and what it looks like. And I thought that they really nailed that, but then I'm also thinking you've got people dancing on stage, so you have a lot of characters moving in unison at once. That has to be very difficult to animate and like a three minute film parody as well in this on top of that yeah yeah that's basically dialogue free but one last interesting behind the scenes thing i learned from this was that we talked a little a few episodes ago a little about how simpsons submitted emmys and how they were in fact bothered they did not win the Emmy in season three this was one of the two episodes they submitted for primetime Emmy awards in season four but an

interesting thing I learned they were pushed to submit it for outstanding comedy series instead of animated program that's why they're not nominated for animated program for the next two years oh so they were part of that category yes and we say this all the time is uh too crazy for boy's town too much of a boy for crazy town wait can i guess what one uh oh well let's see the comedy program one i didn't look that up okay because i was gonna say probably rosanne or well see that's the thing they were up against all these live action shows and in that world unfortunately the simpsons were not judged as equals to those like it was they they did it twice and it was like i think there was a hesitance to actually put a cartoon in the comedy outstanding comedy section and so after two years of that

they then got the emmys to re-change the animated program and then the Simpsons came back to the animated section where they've won many times since then okay uh Murphy Brown oh of course that's why they do the joke about has not been season five none of the wit of Murphy Brown they were mad they lost to Murphy Brown and also a big thank you to former Twitter user, though he's on other places like Instagram, ThatGuy3002, because he did a nice guide to a bunch of changes and also released a lot of Jeff Martin's original demos for this episode. So I have a few fun little tidbits and facts from that as well. Okay, now, with all that preamble let's let's start the episode

proper no this is amazing i like i had no no concept of simpsons for me was part was such an innocent part of my life it was that it was the transition from junior high to high school and all through high school this was before we cared about things like politics. Well, at least me. You know, before I cared about things like politics. You know, I had good friends. I did theater in high school. I was, you know, I had a good community. You know, even working in entertainment, like, I've never really sat down and thought about the production behind The Simpsons.

Who writes the songs? How do they record it? Like, you know, how long is a certain segment going to take? Because, yeah, this show is kind of frozen in time, you know, in a place where I wasn't questioning that kind of stuff. I wasn't curious about it. And so to hear all of these interesting things that are going on behind the scenes is, like, really fascinating for me because it's just something I've, like, never really delved into before. It's humanizing to learn more about how they actually did it. I'm sure before the commentaries, I thought, okay, the credited writer, he wrote a script,

he dropped it off, and they made it. There was not a room. There was not somebody else pitching the idea. Just the mechanics of how all of this comedy came into being is just fascinating to us. If Homer said something funny, I bet Dan Castellana probably thought of that. Yeah. We learned so much from the comment. Those were, we've said a million times, it was our first podcast. If Homer said something funny, I bet Dan Castellana probably thought of that. Like, yeah. Yeah. We learned so much from the comment.

Those were, we've said a million times, it was our first podcast that we listened to. Podcast before podcast for us was Simpsons commentaries and listening to them all the time. And other movie and TV shows, but Simpsons number one. The Simpsons will be right back. Marge puts her new hobby at center stage. What about the dirt? You can put the lid off your own can of pudding. The Simpsons. An all-new episode Thursday on Fox.

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Hey everybody, it's Henry here and we hope you're enjoying this episode while playing some bowling video games in bed. And a big thank you this week to our guest, the amazing Jake Rokitansky from QAnon Anonymous. So fun having him here. He gave us tons of fun insights into it, and I hope everybody enjoyed him

because we're big fans of his podcast. It's super funny, and you learn a whole lot about the sick, sad world that we're all living in here. And so please, if you haven't yet, check out QAnon Anonymous and follow Jake Rokitansky on Twitter at RealRokitansky. And if you're a fan of this podcast QAnon Anonymous and follow Jake Rockatansky on Twitter at RealRockatansky. If you're a fan of this podcast, you should know Talking Simpsons is only possible because of support of listeners like you who subscribe at patreon.com slash TalkingSimpsons for five bucks a month.

They get a ton of exclusive bonus features in addition to every episode of Talking Simpsons a week ahead of time and ad-free. You could be hearing next week's episode right now. Each month, you get a brand new episode of Talking Futurama and Talk King of the Hill. Me and Bob covering an episode of King of the Hill and Futurama. Super in-depth, just like we do an episode of The Simpsons. And you get the entire back catalog. All the Futurama and King of the Hill episodes up to now.

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an animated feature film, crazy in depth, just like we do in Episode of the Simpsons, which means over six hours sometimes about tons of animated movies. Our most recent one, talking about the 2004 pixar classic the incredibles the month before that toy story 4 and our summer of pixar is only continuing for the next two months so you sign up now and you can hear this month us talking about

a bug's life and there is a huge back catalog almost five full years of monthly what a cartoon movies at your fingertips many of them very very long, over five hours, including our longest podcast ever, six and a half hours on Who Framed Roger Rabbit. And not a second of it is wasted on that jam-packed with history and cameos film. Please, for your own sake, check it all out for yourself one more time. Patreon.com slash talking simpsons i'd say yeah this episode begins first we have a quick chalkboard gag about bart calling himself dr death a reference to the then very much in the news uh dr kvorkian stories going around he yes he wouldn't be uh tried yet until 94 is his first actual like trial for assisted uh suicide or i think it's called end of life end of life assistance now because i'm just reading that uh renee aborigin because

he lives in california he was able to do that in his final days it's like everyone's doing it these days i i feel like people should be allowed to do that yeah yeah if it's not gonna get better and your doctor can't do nothing else like yeah yeah i mean i've always look i mean i've always been uh i've always thought that the the hunter s S. Thompson route was, you know, was noble. I was, like, obsessed with his, like, note about, like, you know, no more baseball game. There's no more good baseball games on TV. And then he had his ashes shot out of a cannon, which was, like, organized by Johnny Depp. I mean, hell yeah.

I mean, why not? shot out of a cannon which was like organized by johnny depp i mean hell yeah i mean uh with the man who played odo i think he spent a day with his family listening to the beatles music and watching like photo albums and stuff so a different different end for him but he still chose it he still chose it oh cavorkian is going to give you a uh less painful ending than what uh though i guess who not we we can't answer ask thompson how painful or not his ending was. One of my good friends has an orthodontist named Dr. Kevorkian. No relation, obviously. But he's like, when he found him, he's like, oh, yeah, I got to go to my ortho. He's like, he's going through like an adult braces period right now, which God bless him.

And he was like, yeah, I got to go to my orthodontist. Guess what his name is? Dr. Kevorkian. I was like, oh, man, that's all right. I've heard. Guess what his name is? Dr. Kevorkian. I was like, oh, man. I've heard it. I've heard it, guys. It's actually a pretty common name. Look, it's a pretty common name, especially in the medical field.

So, yeah, this episode, though, begins in beautiful Laughlin, Nevada, which is a great joke because it shows that they couldn't even get Reno for this event. They had to go to Laughlin. When this would enter the circulation in reruns, I would always think, oh, this is Lisa the Beauty Queen because is this where they get the idea? Oh, no, it's completely, yeah. So I feel like they had beauty pageants on their mind in this era. As far as it aired, these were like two episodes apart,

but in creation, these were written like seven months apart. So I can see why they probably thought well we're not hitting the beauty queen thing too hard are we and you also can see that lisa is really into the uh the pageant like she has a notepad right in front of her i was gonna say that was like really weird to see you know that lisa bart and homer kind of roped in together and collectively sort of enjoying this thing where where would think the sort of the standard, you know, sort of layout of where the characters lie is that Bart and Homer would be into it. And Lisa would think that it's, you know, disgusting or there would be one, you know, contestant who came up and said something smart and, of course, was like booed, you know, by know by you know everybody in the audience and Lisa goes I like her you know like the dynamic is actually a little bit different than I think what you're supposed to and it's a little bit jarring I found the beginning of this episode you know and I think

it's due to what you guys were talking about earlier I think Henry was saying it that Homer comes off really kind of cold and distant and extra mean in a way that you're not used to seeing him because one thing about the Simpsons you know that that I always found is that yeah of course Marge and Homer would would have their their their differences and you know misunderstandings but there was always a lot of love there and Homer was always trying you know he was conscious about you know wanting to be a good you about wanting to be a good partner. But this, they needed him to be, the writers needed him to be different

so that you could get the turn at the end of the episode. But I did find that kind of strange in the beginning that it felt like the family sort of versus Marge, which is not a typical dynamic. I remember being a precocious kid and watching a lot of news magazine shows because I thought, well, this will make me seem smart. And I remember they used clips from this episode

in a news story about passive aggression and what it was. Like, this is what passive aggression is. This is the way your husband can be mean to you without hitting you. So be on the lookout for these behaviors. Wow. Yeah. Dang, man. That's really crazy. This is classic abuse, like emotional abuse, basically. hitting you so be on the lookout for these behaviors yeah dang man yeah i mean yeah this is

this is classic like abuse like emotional abuse basically but via via neglect via passive aggression this is one of the meanest homer has to be i think they do make lisa obsessed with it because marge has to be remote and lisa though would definitely side with her the fact that lisa even sides with homer it's just because she's she has to be that obsessed with the tv show i think but yeah it to bring up another guy i'm sure you've mentioned a few times on q and i anonymous that asshole steven crowder like these the videos of him with his ex-wife or soon-to-be ex-wife are just like it reminded me of these scenes here of homer just being like just so mean in a

cruel marge was not being wifely enough i think it's about dignity and respect marge that's what he should be saying oh yeah i loved i love the scene i love the scene where she where she finally like snaps back at him and she's like oh for christ's sake you can open your own pudding and and homer's like and he pulls the top and the ring the ring snaps off around his finger and he's like oh no my pudding it's trapped inside forever you know like there's this great you know a little bit the the opening with this uh beauty pageant i think i i finally got a joke that's very subtle it's the singing of janice ian's at 17 when i thought like oh that's just a topical song for this this teen beauty pageant but no it's the it's the beauty pageant contestants taking the

song back they're saying yes love is made for us screw you it's not for you chick writing this song if you look at any of the lyrics after the love was meant for beauty queens it's all about being an outcast an ugly girl and feeling unhappy in your life like but they but then they take it back to me and they spent real money for that joke too it's a great great and they all have to sing it in sync in fantastic design costumes like for the animators this is a huge amount of work yeah i think yeah going to say, even the one that's standing out is the one contestant who has the racetrack hat or collar, and then there's two little race cars moving around the track that's around her neck while she's also moving. It's like, yeah, you don't even think about that, but for an animator like that has to be a nightmare yeah there are 11 states represented all with their own costumes i think my favorite is the vermont with the stack of pancakes on her head but with the frozen syrup

pitcher sort of just a freeze from a bit pouring onto the pancakes and the uh the i think it's like the north carolina woman has just basically like a giant cigarette. Like just she's impaled on essentially. Yeah. Just smiling with it sticking out of her. Yeah. And this is when Marge reveals that she mentions for the very first time and what her plans are tonight. And this is what also we get Bart at maybe his most cattiest ever. Edds, I won't be home tonight, so I'm leaving you some low-cal microwavable TV dinners.

Okay. I'm auditioning for a play. It's a musical version of A Streetcar Named Desire. Isn't that exciting? If you ask me, they're all winners. We'll be cutting our first 40 contestants right after this. Let's take a minute to meet our distinguished panel of judges Skin care consultant, Rowena

Syndicated columnist, William F. George Token black panelist, Dredrick Tatum And Mr. Boswell, the man behind those infamous worst dressed lists Mr. Boswell, can you give us a sneak peek at this year's list? Memo to Goldie Hawn. Cheerleading tryouts were 30 years ago. Let's grow up, shall we? He's such a

bitch. Bart having the reaction of a catty gay man there. I mean, season four is basically a lot of the jokes are, let's make, what if Bart was gay? Yes, what if Bart is really good at walking in high heels? Yeah.

Yeah. I sort of remember that arc, just watching it in real time as the episodes premiered. They pull back on that after season four, I think. Yeah. So there's a lot in here. A quick one from the changed script thing from That Guy 3002 is, you maybe could notice that, you never notice it watching it on TV tv but if you listen closely on a podcast you can definitely tell that phil hartman recorded the thing he said for drederick tatum at a different time like the room tone's totally

different the original line it was always drederick tatum but the original line in the script was troubled heavyweight champ and i you know knowing what the mike mike tyson was going through in 1992 i can see why they decided they did not want to even reference that as a joke i could see that and instead change it to token black panel it's a funnier joke yes and there's also some weird callbacks here i noted that in the intro the the pageant is brought to brought to you by uh meryl streep's versatility which was the the gift that Homer gave Marge with his gambling winnings in Lisa the Greek. And then skincare consultant Rowena in her second and last appearance. She was also one of the judges for the Reading Digest or the reader.

Is it Reading Digest? Reading. Yeah. Reading Digest. The essay contest. She was one of the judges. So her skin color is different this time around. She became black.

Is that part of her skincare consultancy? Oh, wow. I mean, I guess they did hit the nail on the head that the people judging talent are actually just like brand ambassadors. Absolutely. Yeah, that is who judges these beauty pageants. Also, yes, William F. george a great parody of both william f buckley and george will i think that's the two guys that are shoved together here that's interesting yeah of the conservative commentators and you know it's also seeing all this pageant

stuff i have to say i mean i get why miss america and all these are still around but it's like especially with how they relate to trump as like i was like i figured we'd be done with them i figured they would just stop you know yeah yeah was he involved with miss teen usa this early in his career okay yeah i mean he was like 50 when this episode aired i think so gotta be yeah i mean they they also knew that like oh we gotta have a lot of troy let's have some troy up front though they they They do not have Troy talking about how he's, he doesn't mention what you know him from before. There is a cut line from the script, too,

where McClure mentions that his show, Handle With Care, is recently canceled. Was that also from Lisa the Greek? Yeah, that was the show that was premiering after the Super Bowl. I wish they kept that in there. We then get a quick joke of Homerer ignoring marge by saying sounds interesting sounds like oh and also he is such a bitch it's it's a recurring thing with the previous guest on the show will

i love whenever he talks about how donald trump is being very catty on twitter about like some celebrity he would just reply like he is such a bitch like it's a great line for people being catty about celebrity well mr blackwell's dead he's got to take over he's got to fill those shoes trump is the mr blackwell of today yeah we have a quick joke about how nothing is there's no references to make about delaware even though now the president is from delaware people still do not really have jokes about Delaware even now I think it's just the name I think it's just the name of the state I think it's got the it's got you know the the suffix uh you know where in it you think about clothes you know it's Della I don't

know Delaware just sounds like a boring place so it was when they made that joke I was like oh yeah of course yeah you got to make fun of that coincidentally is where my wife went to school so i too am connected to delaware in a in a strange way i think it was probably written around the same time that wayne's world had that we're in delaware green screen joke oh yeah that's right and i mean secretly it is one of the most evil states in america right yeah with all the banking stuff that goes down there. Yeah, all the bank fraud. I don't know. I've never been. But even the folks I know who are from there, they kind of just roll it up into with Maryland.

It's like, well, it's like Delaware and Maryland. It's just kind of both. And then Washington, D.C. just gets shoved into it, too. Yeah, it's Delamere, you know? This is then when we hear from deborah joe smallwood the uh the the previous year's winner does she is voiced by a special well a special production assistant yes uh uncredited on this episode i believe but uh lana williams then the assistant to algin and mike reese the showrunners voiced this character she was also a pageant contestant before she became a writer,

writer's assistant. She was the runner up in 1985's America Junior Miss competition. And she was Minnesota's Junior Miss. You can watch a video of her at the pageant 1985 online. I'm sure she didn't know that would be available forever. Now, for those, I'm sure you guys know this, but when they say writer's assistant, in my experience, and maybe it was different back then, maybe the writer's assistants actually assisted with writing. But when I was working in television, the writer's assistants would essentially get lunch for the writers. They would take the orders. They would go out. They would make sure everybody had their right lunch.

I mean, I don't think, I mean, to me, if a writer's assistant was elevated to the level of doing a voiceover or playing a character, I mean, that must have been pretty special. Yeah, I believe I was reading some interviews with her and she said she mainly just did a lot of typing in the writer's room. So the only woman in the writer's room was writing down the jokes of men. Of course. Just to make sure they were preserved. Well, and now there's a different role for that. It's like script supervisor or something like that. There's so many tiers of assistants. It's insane. You'll have your lower level assistant that's getting the lunch, the

second level of assistant that's planning the meetings, and then maybe the third level assistant that's actually having some kind of creative input or keeping track of the script or doing stenography in the writer's room as they're sort of pitching jokes back and forth. I wonder if it was partially a thank you to her because I think they depended on her or they asked her some questions like, hey, what was it like being a beauty queen for jokes in this episode that she's also the voice of amber dimsey in the lisa beauty queen episode yeah and she would go on to write for sitcom she also write she wrote the movie drop dead gorgeous which is about beauty pageants and murder oh i yeah i've seen it i love that movie it's great it's uh maybe the last time i liked kirstie Alley in something, I think. I can't.

Do you like her where she is now? She's dead now. In a grave? Yes. Jesus Christ. Hey, I'm a fan of Look Who's Talking, Look Who's Talking 2, Look Who's Talking Now. Those were classic 90s films. She was great until Scientology really effed her up i think that was uh but also you know the the statement she had about her unfortunate things things she said at the un it makes me think of like

in a q and on anonymous related way of like that some people you wouldn't think are q then when they're given a chance to like yes public speaking they say some stuff like oh you that most recently and look i would assume most mixed martial arts fighters uh who are high level probably are extremely conservative but this this one woman i believe champion in the ufc one recently said like and we got to protect our kids everything's going on right now the kids are really they're being taken in they she was implying she did not fully say the Q stuff but or like there were trains stealing children or whatever but yeah it's saved it's saved the children it's it's the bogus you know human trafficking statistics that people throw around I I had the exact same interpretation of of that line as I I immediately went to

oh okay what like weird political thing did she say? And then I was like, oh, this was like this was also before like the time of canceling where where, you know, somebody said something really, you know, fucked up that you could get in front of a crowd and say like, I apologies for my, you know, distasteful remarks during this public event. Well, you know, this was fall of 92. I bet she mentioned the Clinton death list, right? Oh, yeah. That's right.

She was probably saying, like, guys, we need to listen to Jennifer Flowers. I'm talking about the murder center. Oh, yeah, sorry. The sexual assaults, that's a different list. Right. Oh, wait, yeah, the whitewater stuff. All that. Yes.

You're right. 100 bodies and counting, I'm sure. Here comes a very sad scene. Like this, Al Jean says this on the commentary. Homer is not redeemed in this episode. Like, he's so awful. Yeah. And this is, I think, the lowest.

And usually, I mean, they usually will try to turn his cruelty or apathy into a joke or make the dialogue funny. But in this case, it just realistically observed a passive aggression in a relationship. I mean, it's a buzzword, but this scene is gaslighting here. March, keep it down in there. Homerer my audition isn't half hey look it's last year's winner deborah joe smallwood tonight my reign as miss american girl comes to an end and i'd like to apologize one last time for my unfortunate remarks at the united nations maggie cut that racket at the United Nations. Maggie, cut that racket.

And where exactly are you going? I'm auditioning for a play. Well, this is the first I've heard about it. I told you several times. It's a musical version of a streetcar named... Excuse me, Marge. I think that if you told me, I would remember. I mean, I'm not an idiot well I thought I told you kids back me up he's right mom sorry match point over I'm sorry honey

that's okay we're none of us perfect oh I mean it is funny but it's just she's so broken by it it's just so sad I mean it's to make her more like blanche though it's also like i don't know marge marge is kind of stella and blanche put together for to project characters on yeah i guess if you want to be judgmental of blanche marge uh does not have the dark past and and uh you know she's not constantly lying to people either which for understandable reasons why blanche does it in it like she's broken by society but uh yeah no stella is more of like she's the one who puts up with abuse more and doesn't even fight back at all and is so fully broken by this man i mean some of the best acting in the movie

is just from when blanche and stella are alone and then they they hear Stanley come and they're just like, they are terrified. Yeah. I mean, at times that film was like a horror movie. For sure. Yeah, definitely. And to think that even during the production code era

that they were able to have such a realistic, scary version of what domestic abuse is. It's amazing they got that in a movie. And Ilya Kazanan he's a great filmmaker and rat he's great he's great both of those things but at the very least homer lets her go uh though i feel like if they want to make homer even more of an asshole he could have said well then i allow you to go but you needed my permission to do so and uh the musical is called

oh streetcar uh and on the commentary jeff martin says he pitched hello trolley Oh, but you needed my permission to do so. And the musical is called Oh, Streetcar. And on the commentary, Jeff Martin says he pitched Hello, Trolley, but nobody laughed. I think it's a funnier joke, but Oh, Streetcar is more indicative of what they're trying to do. So, yeah, I understand. It's so difficult to watch Lisa sort of gang up, you know, to see her on the cut because you're so used to the dynamic of Lisa, you know, being in Marge's corner and pushing back against toxic masculinity, you know, in all of its forms. And I understand that, you know, the writers needed Marge to feel isolated. I also think that there's something here, there's a little bit and maybe i'm just interpreting this personally

but there's there's a little bit of an undertone of the the perceived silliness of playing pretend as an adult you know i you know when i was younger and you know wanted to be an actor i mean there were very few people that said like hey good for you you know what like that's a great yeah go for it like that's what you're interested in go you know my my folks obviously were very supportive it always it was always couched with like you know and you gotta think of a backup you know just make sure you've got a plan b because this doesn't really you know that I I think that you know that this pursuit of of acting or or performing is often sort of like written off as a fantasy and And I felt that there was a little bit of

that in this episode. And just the sort of, I don't know, the perception of theater as this kind of unimportant endeavor. And I think you get a little bit of that with Lovitz as the, it's John Lovitz who's playing the director, right? Absolutely. yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. You know, with Lovitz and his kind of over-the-top sort of self-important director style, the ego, the narcissism, you know, what I found most interesting about this episode,

honestly, was the portrayal of life in the theater and life in, like, community theater specifically where you have all these different people from the community who may or may not, you know, are at various differing levels of talent,

and yet they're all coming together to sort of do, you know, a show for some, like, failed Broadway director who's, like, doing community theater now, and he's a real pain in the ass because, like, his own ego, you know, is bruised from not being maybe at the, you know, premiering on Broadway or whatever, so they have to kind of overcompensate with, you know is is bruised from not being maybe at the you know premiering on broadway or whatever so they have to kind of overcompensate with you know it's the the sort of uh waiting for guffman quirky quirky oh yeah quirky yeah it's uh that's christopher guest character yeah

no that's uh that's behind the scenes i mean i love seeing all the characters practicing and showing off their abilities. Wiggum is doing a traditional vocal exercise. Yes, I was just going to say, yeah. Me, Mo, me, Mo, Mo. Yeah, they're all doing the dumb warm-ups and all of this stuff that's kind of like, you do all of that stuff in theater school, like all the zip-zap-zops and the me-mo- and the la la la la la la la la la. And it is sort of presented in this episode as this kind of dumb fancifulness.

Jasper looking very limber. Also, when we first see the inside of the community theater, I did notice Mr. Dandy in the background, a rare appearance of Mr. Dandy. When Bill Dandy of the Candy Most Dandy store from season one, he is distractingly behind marge and ned during their conversation but you see a store in the opening every every every time right yeah that's right yeah at least until the hd version yes ned reveals that he had he'd actually played uh blanche before which is a funny bit too because he can be a tell marge well you know when i played blanche like it's a great funny

there was something in dead putting society that jeff martin also wrote in which ned didn't mind dressing in drag when he lost the bet right right he says it reminded him of his fraternity days yeah though now that takes on a whole nother aspect now that you know it's an all boys christian school but i also love he's like still Stella, Stella. I will say there was a kind of a triggering moment for me when the director is starting to cast or looking to cast Stanley. And he tells everybody, he's like, all right, all the guys, take off your shirts. Take off your shirts. This actually happened to me in one of the first auditions I ever went to. I got sent to this, it was like an MTV spring break thing. And they were auditioning

people to just be kind of like people on the beach, like dancing. And I remember going into this, I was like fresh out of college. And it like one of the first, you know, one of the first things I went off on and they called like about like, you know, 20 guys into some, into some like commercial audition room and they were like, all right, you're dancing. Everybody's dancing. You're having a good time. You're doing great. And then they were like, all right. And okay, great. That was great. Everybody, uh, guys, can everybody take off their shirts? And it was me like looking like I am now, you know, I'm like five, eight and three quarters, like kind of, you know, got a little bit of a belly. And like probably like 20, you know, 29, like very handsome, like buff beach dudes. And they all took off their shirts.

And I was like looking around. I was like, there's no way I'm going to get that. I was like, I don't I'm not going to be like this isn't there's no way. I was like, I'm not fucking taking off my fucking shirt for the, fuck this. And I left. I walked out of the room. Hey, yeah. That's good.

I mean, that is dehumanizing for sure. Like, you know, you hear about it more or the stories come out more of like women having to go through that thing. But it happens to men too. Like I'm saying it's not just women. Don't take too much. No. But I. Yeah, look, if you you're gonna audition for mtv spring break i mean i probably should have known or whoever was sending me on the audition probably should have you know should have thought about that a little bit but it also sort of yes speaks on this commentary of dehumanization kind of this

lack of boundary in in theater spaces that that sort of um you know it's it's kind of like you're expected to do these like uncomfortable things because that's the job you're you're exposing yourself you know you're supposed to be vulnerable and naked and like I don't always think that that's like such a good thing and I and I they definitely addressed it what I felt with was a kind of negative tone in the episode and so i again it sort of added to i thought there was really interesting commentary on this sort of like yeah this like actor lifestyle well and ned is completely wrong for the role of stanley like ned is the least but the joke is that he has the perfect body like that he yeah yeah which i mean in the movie in the movie version of lee stanley is like the

hottest uh man could be in 1951 like he's sure he is he is supposed to be raw sexual power that's kind of his character and so he's always like greased up or wet he's a greasy sweaty man and taking off his shirt constantly chewing on something. This is Marlon Brando, like, in general, right? I mean, this man is constantly on the dark side of, like, gorgeous. You know, he's constantly got, like, a withered ciggy and, like, you know, just kind of dirty and dark. And, like, I feel like that's his whole vibe. I mean, he is the guy that captures that. But, yes, and we get to see Llewellyn Sinclair if you look

at the storyboards on the DVD he does not look like John Lovett after the storyboard is when they decided we're just drawing John Lovett's into the show that's great I mean uh John Lovett had been on the show I think three times before this all playing big characters that sound like him this is the biggest performance to date and I think this is what got the critic on their minds. Yes. They would have been developing the critic around the same time. First is a live-action thing with him, but it's, I mean, look, I just need to play it.

This one line at the end here, I think, has been echoing in my brain ever since. Hello, I am Llewellyn Sinclair. I have directed three plays in my career and i've had three heart attacks that's how much i care i'm planning for a fourth maybe i should have taken a nice calligraphy class oh forget about it that mr takahashi's a lunatic quiet all right i am not an easy man to work for while directing directing Hats Off to Hanukkah, I reduced more than one cast member to tears.

Did I expect too much from fourth graders? The review, play enjoyed by all, speaks for itself. Oh, I missed that hmm at the end. That's Wiggum reflecting on it like okay the way that the simpsons has just given me new ways to express myself blank enjoyed by all is just how i described something that was just very middling including my own work enjoyed by all our show was enjoyed by all yeah and that he is holding up a children's school newspaper like yeah it's so great and he's not even that seasoned he has directed three other plays

presumably all for children yeah and he had a heart attack each time too i'm planning on a fourth no uh yes in the in the shirtless scene too you can really see the bullet wounds on Apu. You can see front and back. You see the exit wounds from his being shot as well. And just a few episodes earlier in Radio Bart, they reveal that Groundskeeper Willie has the perfect Olympian body. Now we see that Ned does, too, which they do stay consistent with, mostly in the show. And, of course, we know that by season 12 he is given a giant penis to go along with that perfect body yeah since the auto show auto's

got new ink he has a big daddy roth style tat on his chest who's that's the artist who did rat fink if you ever see a you know a crazy monster driving a silly car. Oh, I read cartoons. Yes. My old, an old boss that I worked for had a ton of the old like rat fink models like in his storage, like the vintage sort of like plastic models that you can make that were like, you know, about yay, yay big. You know, in your acting experience, Jake,

did you ever do any Tennessee Williams? And in my school, we did, in your acting experience, Jake, did you ever do any Tennessee Williams? In my school, we did, in high school, we did a class reading, not an actual performance, of The Glass Menagerie, which I can see why we never touched Streetcar because of all the sex in it. Yes. Glass Menagerie is more about somebody wanting to fall in love and being disappointed. Did you ever do much Williams? I don't know. I don't know if we

did i feel like it's something that yeah we might have done for a scene study i can't remember if i was in any tennessee williams place but also this was this was a time in college where my memory is not so great due to a handful of substances that I was probably doing at the time. You're getting blotto like Otto. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm from the Midwest, and I went to school in California, and so it was like a whole scene change. And, you know, we went went from like, you know, very, very brown, very dry cannabis to very green, very, you know, the stickiest of the icky. So a lot of, you know, a lot of my college career at this point has sort of faded.

And the stuff that I do remember is like we were doing like obscure, like Slaumir, like Mrocek plays and, you know, just stuff that was like not, you know, it was like an acting conservatory. So I think they tended to like stray from kind of your mainstay theater shows. So, yeah, to them, Williams was like the MCU or something. Yeah, yeah. Something like that. You know, I'll say that for high school kids with your knife as as as a gay southerner myself i have a certain affection for tennessee williams's work i think they're really good i mean especially that he got any kind of gay themes into any of his plays back in the 50s like very very gutsy on his part and yes every everybody's like drunk

and southern and miserable like it's uh i yeah probably because i saw it in high school that's why i love the glass menagerie the most but uh especially the the malkovich the john malkovich starring film adaptation of it is a really good one i definitely remember doing like glass menagerie in high school i think we were we did like scenes from there and my high school like theater teacher was kind of like Lovitz's character. Like and I wonder, you know, I sort of think that maybe that's that's a type. Right. Is is, you know, people who direct shows for children and the you know, what the overcompensation that they need to sort of make within themselves to, I don't know, feed their own egos. But I definitely had a Llewellyn of my own who was, you know, I mean, more or less, not really exaggerating, like kind of exactly like this.

Like I remember this one kid that for like the his, you know, their senior year, we had to do these directing projects where like we would do our own. We had to like either write our own or adapt a play or something and we would direct it and it was you know we had to cast actors I of course was like I'm gonna do an adaptation of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried because I was like obsessed with that book and already had Hollywood on my mind I cast the lead guy because he was like very handsome and like had a shaved head and looked like a soldier. And I was like, I can get him to act. I ended up having to tape his lines all over the set so that he could read them because he couldn't remember any of the lines. But this one kid did

this amazing musical that he wrote. And basically what it was is he was like kind of coming out and he wrote this beautiful like and funny and just like incredible like incredible musical that was sort of this like allegory for like his own identity and I remember at the end of it this woman got up and she was like I have never seen something so vile oh she's like this is like, this is a project. This is a project where you are supposed to honor the theater. And I'm not even exaggerating. That was her vibe. And I remember she would eviscerate people in front of the class.

She would make people do weird scenes and weird kind of sex scenes too where like oh it was theater is fucking weird anybody who does it is lucky to find somebody that's like really healthy and like mentally you know stable and theater sounds like a lot of being tortured by unhappy uh people and adults yeah yeah adults who who had their own failures you know, and now they're here, you know, teaching high school kids. Yeah, it's a rough industry. Speaking of failure, John Lovitz was having quite a moment around this time. I think if you weren't watching him on SNL, people definitely noticed him in A League of Their Own, which was the previous spring. It was like May of 92 or whatever.

So he was having a huge moment. He would later carry the critic. He'd be the lead of 92 or whatever. So he was having a huge moment. He would later, you know, carry the critic. He'd be the lead of High School High. There was like a five-year period in which John Lovitz could be your star of your TV or your movie. High School High was big. I was in theaters. I was in theaters. I had to explain the virgin joke to my friend who didn't understand it.

Because he gets in the bed with Tia Carrera. The lights go off. Classic Hollywood joke. He says, oh says oh my god you're a virgin and she goes my panties are still on it's a joke about hyman's people yes and my 14 year old friend didn't know but i did i don't know how it still confuses me today well you see henry talk about a 90s you know about a 90s icon that then, after, I think, Y2K really affected her career. She's a huge star in the Philippines now, I've found out. Yeah, she stars in many films.

Hell yeah, good for her. Then we have a bunch of auditions for the women. We have a quick bunch of songs. We have Hey, Look Me Over from the musical wildcat made famous by lucille ball won't you come home bill bailey a jazz standard first performed in 1902 and the morning after by maureen mccormick from the the poseidon adventure marge doesn't even get to sing what like a full word i just love he goes like she's like, ah! She goes like, ah! Yeah, she's like, ah! And then, yeah, he's like, next. This is the extra joke in the episode two. Marge is bad at singing.

She's not a good singer. And that's understandable, given what her speaking voice sounds like. Kavner, we've said it many times, but Kavner picked a voice that she did not think she'd be singing in or talking in for 20 minutes straight in shows. By the way, Henry, I think you said Maureen McCormick sung the morning after. That's- Maureen McGarman, yes. No, McGovern. McGovern. minutes straight in shows by the way henry i think you said maurie mccormick sung the morning after that's uh maurie mcgarmon yes no mcgovern mcgovern uh mccormick i was like the one of the brady kids actually sing that song i was saying it was marcia brady yeah there you go oh sorry marine

she's a triple threat but marge then has a heartbroken phone call to homer i mean the one line again it's funny but when she says you're right outside interests are stupid i was like oh oh it just breaks my heart that marge is giving up hey look me over next won't you come home bill baby there's got to be a next thank you for nothing you're all terrible What you ladies don't understand is that Blanche is a delicate flower being trampled by an uncouth lout. Forget it. Just strike the sets, clear the stage. This production is...

Homie, I didn't get the part. You were right. Outside interests are stupid. Wait a minute. I'll come home right away. All right, I'll pick up a bucket of fried chicken, extra skin, rolls, chocolate cream parfait. Stop bothering my blanch!

This is when Llewellyn notices the magic inside of Marge. That's when he screams, stop bothering my Blanche! And hangs up the phone. Hey, that was a pretty good Lovitz. Oh, thanks. Well, he's a gay. This is him playing extra gay. The commentary, by the way, on this one, man.

They're having a good time, but you don't learn a ton. it felt like lovitz's bit for a long time until it became inappropriate was suggesting that other men he knew were gay so when they bring up a good joke lovitz would go did you write that in bed together yes it's the the funniest parts of that well so hank is areas on it too and they are joking about how like oh you know speaking of hot bodies uh Hank Azaria you just did a nude scene and along came Pauly and you're looking great and and I agree he does look really great in that movie you only see his as Homer would say and ask there is no frontal nudity in it it's only you see his butt but still well Hank Azaria is a good looking guy just kind of regular like I remember when I first saw him you know after being a Simpsons fan for so long and just being like, he looks nothing like I expected him to look.

It took him a while to get used to not being a movie star and being a voice actor because he does. He looks good enough to star in TV shows. Yeah, totally. And now he does. He's now starred in tv shows like huff yeah and uh brock and meyer or whatever brock meyer there you go i mean uh not to go on too long about this but the commentary is distracting because john levitt's he's bringing up the stepford wives the terrible remake they got like hacked to pieces too too. Oh, yeah, I remember that. I think it was the movie that broke Frank Oz.

Frank Oz made it, and he's like, oh, this sucks. I'm too old for this shit. Who was in Stepford? Was it Nicole Kidman? It was her, yeah. Oh, my God, my memory. Sometimes, wow, I even surprise myself. I think they hacked the movie apart so much that there's a subplot about how the women are actually robots but it never pays off in it yeah right yeah but that was what that that was kind of what

they sold in the trailer i remember is that it's it's yeah it's a bunch of women who are like cyborgs ebert crapped all over it i remember his very negative review i never saw it i just remember his yeah i never saw it either not not i saw the trailer was in my consciousness obviously enough to remember who was the main character yeah not not interested at that time we come back from the break marge over dinner tells her family about it and for people who have never seen streetcar she lightly describes the plot of the heat though it's much darker than that when she says like stanley's not a boorish man who pushes who like just mental like her mental break comes from sexual assault like it is incredible like it is harrowing it is

horrifying even even in the lightened for 1950 1951 in theaters compared to the stage production of it it is it is awful it's yeah i mean she's teetering on the brink of insanity when she arrives in New Orleans. Yeah, and it's just a little flick off the edge by a horrible, horrible man who first slut shames her and then putting all these modern, I'm calling it gaslighting, slut shaming, all these things. But the guiltiest thing she is of is having sex with lots of men uh which she shouldn't have done that's wrong that's that's the greatest evil she did well yeah i mean it just the wrong era because now you know the um you know the call me daddy uh uh podcast podcast you know sold for like 60 million or something to

spotify it's you know having a lot of gentlemen callers. Blanche DuBois would have a podcast now. She would have a podcast, I think, with the Southern Drawl, smoking a ton of cigs. I would listen to that show. And mental illness is very important for a podcast. You need that. Yeah, I can attest to that. Yeah, I mean, just the play, like my own perspective as a man watching it in 2023 was like, oh, this is just how few options women had you either tie yourself down to an abusive man which is at least some kind of stability or yeah you

are just this free agent that is looked down upon and you can find no you can't even like get a job or anything so you just have to rely on men and three throwing yourself out that man after man in order to try to find some kind of stability. And as you get older, your options dry up even more. And even the guy who's the nice guy will tell you you're not clean enough to take home to mother. Which, like, that stuff with Mitch, that's harsh. And Lisa said she feels like Lucy Arnaz Luckenbell, which is the daughter of lucy and uh ricky who would she is married to lawrence luckenbell who uh most famously played cybok in star trek 5 the worst star trek by the man the man the man's name is uh desi desi yes not ricky sorry i called him his character name

and now these days lucy arnaz she's still alive as is luckenbell they're still together from what i've read and her her main job is just maintaining the legacy of her parents which in that case she really failed by that be in the Ricardos she let that be in the Ricardos movie happen with her permission it was sort of like a deep impact Armageddon situation and that there were two Lucy movies one was produced by Amy Poehler I think that's the that's the non-sorkin one yeah yeah like is it called like being Lucy or I think it's like more doc style i i don't know if it's a full documentary or not but yeah the sorkin one again i didn't watch it i've seen clips though and i was just sorkin should not get to direct his own movies anymore anyway but second second you don't get to just make up things in a biographical thing, fully make up, like J. Edgar Hoover calling the show to say that she is not a communist.

Like, that never happened. Well, Henry, I mean, that's why at the beginning of the thing, they have to put the based on a true story. I always thought that based on a true story meant oh well everything's got to be true but the fact that it's based uh then yeah i guess you could take a lot of creative liberties as long as some tenets of reality are still intact i.e like who she is the movie basically makes two years happen in a week on the show too but but of course with it as all sorkin things are it's really about how sorkin is a genius and how everybody should listen to him that's that's what it's really of

course well and and while we're on the topic so what if you guys had to pick uh would you what would you choose between uh deep impact and armageddon i think this is a this is a important question that people probably want to know you know as a much younger man i did see both in theaters and i thought armageddon makes uh deep impact like a child's toy but now that i'm grown and more mature i appreciate deep impact as the more cerebral movie i agree i only saw them in theaters back in the day i have not returned to them i think the i remember liking armageddon more because it was like bigger and badder and I felt that Deep Impact kind of felt like a an expensive tv movie basically yeah it does have that sort of quality to it but there's good there's a good Tsunami and in Deep Impact and Elijah Wood is

good it's yeah it is it's a little bit more emotional in like an anti-blockbuster way whereas Armageddon is emotional in a you you know, very much a blockbuster way. And yeah, I'm sort of the same as Bob, as I probably liked Armageddon more when it first came out because it was bigger and badder and, you know, Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck and Steve Buscemi, you know, these were actors that I knew and liked quite a bit. But in my older years, I find that Deep Impact is what I go back to watch if I'm trying to watch a meteor hits the Earth movie. Well, and they actually, you know, Deep Impact gives you the meteor hitting. Like in Armageddon, the meteor does not hit.

Though they then added an extra scene at the start of the movie that was like filmed late. So in the start of Armageddon of like a chunk hitting a New York and exploding everything, including a they they destroy a Godzilla toy. Is there like F you to Godzilla being its competition? But I probably I well, I think Deep Impact is remembered now, if for anything, because of the then revolutionary idea of like a black president portrayed with Morgan Freeman. Morgan Freeman, no less the perfect the he was the perfect person to cast in that role. He warmed up people for Barack Obama.

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like an hour ago and Tyler's going to take a new tour of prison how can he even fit in a tour with his jury like the grand jury testimonies he's going to have to be doing wait Wait, what's happening with him? What did he do?

It's not fun to talk about. Let's just say he did what a lot of rock stars did in the 70s. With underaged women. Oh no. Yeah. And it turns out there's no more loophole or whatever. There's no statute of limitations. Yeah, it was thanks to

there was new legislation that removed the statute of limitations yeah it was the thanks to there was new legislation that removed the statute of limitations on on the sexual assault and so i mean are we fucking surprised though based on all of the music videos where his like own daughter was like cast as this like very sexy like i even remember as a kid being like that's's fucking weird. I was like, don't get me wrong. Alicia Silverstone and Liv Tyler together in a music video was more than my teenage brain could process. But even then I was like, yeah, but it's his kid? That's kind of, I don't know. There's something weird.

I guess she's in Armageddon, Liv Tyler. Liv Tyler is Ben Affleck's love interest in Armageddon. And in Deep Impact, the love interest, which is still two young children falling in love and getting married. So problematic as well. But it is, what's the actor's name? Lili Sobieski. Yes, yes. Lili Sobieski.

Eliza Wood and Lili Sobieski. Yeah, Eliza Wood and a young lily sobieski yeah that's right who looks like she was like she should have played helen hunt in yes young helen hunt in movies back yes agreed agreed that's a good that's a good yeah that's a good call but back back to simpson sorry well speaking of sexy imagery homer homer wants to know if there's nudity on stage which that feels even weirder with a community production of like whether you want to see your neighbors nude in this movie yeah you want to see chief wiggum's sweaty naked body i mean

i'm sure he's hoping for helen lovejoy to do the nude scene yeah sure yeah i wish we got to see any of her playing stella by the way like yeah yeah it's it's not i mean knowing what we know about helen uh who she would become it's a very odd choice yeah yeah i wonder if that got cut i wonder if it was just like ended up being too much because the play in and of itself it feels like you guys sort of hinted on it in the beginning but it feels like the the team sort of realized immediately once they went into production that they bit off a lot more than they could chew. Absolutely, yes. There's a couple cut songs.

There's a big one in a few minutes, actually. Oh, hell yeah. But first, everybody's got their parts. Play an aging Southern beauty who's driven to insanity by her brutish brother-in-law, Stanley. Wow, my mother the actress. I feel like Lucy Arnaz Luckenbill. Are there any jive-talking robots in this play?

I don't think so. Bart, don't ask stupid questions. Is there any frontal nudity? No, Homer. My name is Helen Lovejoy, and I'll be playing Stella. I am Apu Nahasapima Petilon. I play Steve. My name is Atu. I'm playing Pablo.

Lionel Hutt's attorney at law. I'm filing a class action suit against the director on behalf of everyone who was cut from the play. I also play Mitch. I'm Marge Simpson. I'll be playing Blanche. I made some peanut butter brownies for everyone. Well, would anyone else like a bite of banality i would well a big moment for apu who's given a last name here because uh the writer of this episode

jeff martin he went to school with someone i believe their name was uh nahasa peem petalon or something like that or ma petalon yeah i think yeah nahasapi ma petalon yeah and he would mention that uh they'd be in gym class and the coach would be doing roll call i'd be like martin daniels there's my buddy for the person with a non-white name he didn't want to say yes so uh yeah just named after like the one i i assume indian american uh person he knew right yes right i because a lot darker actually yeah they they named him apu in the first place because of you know the the at the time the only indian film most americans knew and i include myself in this well you would have even heard about let alone maybe seen was the apu trilogy uh of films and so they named him Apu based on that.

And now they're like, well, he needs to... I mean, the joke is, I'm Apu, I play Steve. Like, just the statement of, I play Steve. Which, and all these characters are the ones in the show. Like, you can actually, you know, the movie and the play. Steve is unnamed within the context of the play, but it says his name in the credits.

He's the paper boy. Well, how do you like that? Yeah. Okay. I would have figured, I should have looked at those credits. I would have figured it was just paper boy. Yeah. Apu's paper boy song was one of my favorite numbers in the episode.

He really crushes. And then in the next scene we see that marge and ned are acting out like an incredibly dark scene like this this is them getting away with a sexual assault joke on television like this is that ned ned is told act out the end the major end scene of stanley attacking blanche and the joke is in uh being directed now throw her on the bed ugly doggly and he he instantly like ned has no notes about having to act this out he doesn't even care he's like yep no issues like let's do it yeah it's interrupted by maggie putting on his glasses in again a very dark moment in the in the original so this is when it's time to make fun of libertarians in

the show uh as marge is suggested to take maggie to a daycare that is run by well and sister who they just draw john lovitz as a woman yeah yeah it's just miss miss sinclair and i feel like uh this is the earliest ayn rand bashing that I remember on TV but I feel like in our current year 2023 people that are into her know that that's a signifier that you're not cool so they try to find some cool libertarian style influencer to name check

they're never giving you the Rand up front uh-huh yeah never going directly to the source the only people who do are because they're being paid directly by like the einran einran society or whatever group like that you're forced to put it on the name but yeah that she's i mean all this objectivist talk of like you know that a baby is a leech for drinking from a bottle like that's how strongly they believe in being against the welfare state that

like offering a baby a bottle or a pass fire is turning them into a leech yes and the babies yes they lead the revolution how do these babies eat they just starve like a baby actually does need to drink from a bottle this is a real muppet baby situation in which she just leaves and goes to her office while the babies kind of mill around in this one big room i mean for a strictly objectivist lady she would do that yeah there's there's also signs in the background too of like a is a as you know yeah which i only know that as a libertarian catchphrase because i am a completist when it comes to the works of steve ditko the co-creator of spider-man who was an insane objectivist, like extreme objectivist. And he did a character named Mr. A, which was the inspiration for Rorschach.

If you see Rorschach in Watchmen is making fun, is a parody of this guy. Ditko did it just straight up of like, no, this guy's right. Like there's the, you're either good or evil. You're either black or white. And if you're in the black category, you're evil, then you will be killed. Like, you need to be murdered by him. And he always said, A is A. And, like, there's no nuance to nothing.

You're either good or you're bad. Like, that's the Mr. A character. This is, like, one of, I think, the really interesting things about Simpsons and going back and watching old Simpsons episodes, you know, as you get older. You know, when this episode premiered and no doubt I watched it in real time because, you know, I think I watched most of the Simpsons of these early seasons at least. Once I got a little bit older, I didn't check in so often. But when I do, I always end up laughing. Even on the brand new episodes if I catch it on. But this is something that I would have seen

the Ayn Rand school and thought nothing of it. I probably would have gone like, oh, they're probably, I know they're probably commenting on something, but this is a reference that I don't understand. So I'm just gonna enjoy the joke of the babies leading a revolution to get their pacifiers back, because that's what I understand. Not not not, you know, the the sort of ideology that they're poking fun at. For sure. Yeah. I just as a kid love the idea of like, what happens if you take away Maggie's pacifier?

What happens? Yeah. Yeah. happens if you take away maggie's pacifier what happens yeah yeah was weird to see her without it in her mouth to see maggie's mouth open and to hear a sound that she makes that isn't the pacifier sucking i feel like it was pretty rare uh at this point in the series and from my own experience uh this was the hit of the episode for all the kids on the school bus the next morning this is all we talked about uh i'm sure we enjoyed the streetcar stuff but we really like this and i think that's why they tried to capitalize on it maybe like 20 years later with the with the couple of shorts they made well they made one short that is directly sort of like this but slightly different yeah the in 2012 that's it they parody it in the longest daycare yeah or not parody it's a sequel it Daycare. Yeah. Or not parody. It's a sequel.

It's Maggie, again, going through a long adventure at the Ayn Rand School, even with the same... There's no voices in it, but yes, that's in the Oscar-nominated shorts. Probably the best of the Simpsons shorts compared to the commercial. Yeah. Compared to the Disney stuff, yeah. You didn't like the Billie Eilish shorts? Lisa's finally friends with Billie Eilish. And hey, that's one of the better ones, honestly. Actually, you're totally right about that.

It's better than the Star Wars one, that's for sure, which actually is another Lisa and Maggie and Daycare thing. It is. God, they return to that well so often. I think James L. Brooks really loves it. When you do at that level, like James L. Brooks really likes it. So we have a quick scene of Marge just not being able to get it. She's trying to act out the bottle scene. Brooks really loves it when you do at that level like James Earl Brooks really likes it but so we have a quick scene of Marge just not being able to get it she's trying to act out the bottle scene

I mean this also feels like an abusive director of just like hey let's keep acting out the most harrowing scene of this over and over again like that feels like he's torturing Marge though I mean it is the emotional impact of it you need it to work and then i like that he goes off to get drunk on a very gay coated drink uh amaretto which just not a bottle of whiskey a bottle of amaretto a sweet italian liqueur i i like amaretto as a uh it was a mixer as part of a cocktail yeah that's great ice well i mean i'm not a big amaretto supporter so i assume that it's usually mixed with things not had not had out of the bottle. An Amaretto Sour is a good drink.

Yeah, I've had an Amaretto Sour before in my days where I enjoyed alcohol. And in my youth, this next scene was my favorite of the adults, which was a Game a real game boys on television a talking game boy yes yeah i didn't talk now it is labeled as bowling 2000 but it's a game yeah i thought that this was you know do you guys remember the the handheld games where it was a single game and you bought it and that was the game that came on it you had it was either bowling or i believe i had one called snakes revenge Revenge that was a Metal Gear theme. But, you know, it's like little sort of filled-in black figures, and they essentially light up at different times to look like there's animation. That's kind of what I thought that this bowling game was.

But it looks, the device itself looks like a game boy which is weird too I was thinking when I saw it because you don't see a ton of video games in the system there's obviously um uh what is is it Lee Trevello's uh golf there's the golfing game which is Lee Trevino golf Lee Trevino yeah Lee Trevino's uh putting simulator which is like one of my one of my favorite one of my favorite episodes but other than that there's not a ton of video games and to see Homer in bed with a game boy was very like there's some dissonance there when I saw that oh we'll get to it but later in bed Marge tells Homer you won't like the play there's nothing about bowling in it oh wait there is and

then when you watch the movie 90 seconds in you're in a bowling alley straight to the bowling alley yeah it's the stanley loves bowling yeah they on the commentary too they're like wow that game boy they drew it too big i was like no that's how big they were i mean i guess in a man's hands maybe they weren't exactly as big but yeah it was like a steam deck in your hands yeah and and uh i was accurate for the time too because my mom played the game boy a ton in bed like she would take i wouldn't have the game boy allowed in bed and i'd find out later that she would you know take it to bed and stay up all night playing dr mario that's a true awesome what a what a fun what a fun like a secret to learn about your parents like because you know as you get older you learn you

know stuff about your folks that you know you're like oh well that oh well that maybe that's not the best thing but to find out that they were secretly taking your game boy and playing it all night dr mario that's a cool little fun fact my mom also got very addicted to dr mario on the nes as well like she i would i remember waking up in the night one time and seeing her up all night playing the game like my dad was like flying flight simulators that was his thing we had like an old apple 2 or something and maybe i maybe we i think our first we either had an apple 2 but i know we for a fact we had a commodore 64 and my dad would fly like the original F-18 Hornet games late at night that was his and I he the computer happened to just be stationed in my room so sometimes I would

wake up and there would be the glow of the screen and like a hunched figure in front of it and like you know sort of like a you know an airplane horizon you know crudely crudely animated horizon my dad's favorite was virtual cop. That was the only game I ever saw play for the whole nineties. And he was virtually a cop, right? Yeah. My dad does have a police background before he got into, that makes you half cop. He was, uh, he was a cop when I was born, but by the time I was able to create memories,

he was no longer a cop. He was in the savings and loan game get that 23 and me henry but my dad has a crack shot at it like he got the justice shot which is when you shoot the gun out of their hands like i have almost every time i could and he was free handing it like when i played virtual cop i had to have the gun sight right up on my eye like i i gotta hand it to my dad he was a good shot he wasn't shooting them in the back well they'd be yeah they wouldn't let you in virtual cop back yeah in virtual cop yeah they were facing you they had a weapon they were about to fire for sure now

that way it was i'm just trying to remember virtual cop was kind of like a moving target range essentially right it was fixed perspective people would pop up from behind stuff you would shoot them and then you would kind of move on the camera would it was like a rail shooter right yeah yeah like that that and lethal enforcers lethal enforcers oh yeah i remember that big time shoot everyone with sunglasses on it it was made with the same engine video game engine as house of the dead House of the Dead really kind of supplanted Virtual Cop. I mean, it's more exciting to shoot zombies than sunglasses-wearing assumed drug dealers, I think.

There was an Aliens version of those games where they had two pulse rifles mounted to the arcade stand that I was obsessed with. They still make those games today. If you go into like a a round eight or like a Dave and Buster's like they have they have the mounted guns there was a Ghostbusters one at the last like I think they either Dave and Buster's or whatever sort of like adult drinking arcade you know that that's that they have nowadays they control like shit I

remember the old ones were so accurate you know you aimed it and like you know you it was it felt like the gun was shooting at least at the very least like in the general vicinity of where you were aiming but now it just feels like it's kind of on autoplay and the player is just pretending that maybe that like they're moving yeah they're moving the cursor you're like the kid who comes up to the arcade cabinet with no money in it and just plays with the controls yeah yeah exactly that's sort of what it felt like to me last time i tried one of those uh and here's a funny thing about this scene too only learn now from the script version when they go back to them in bed in act three they just cut this scene in half like this scene was originally oh straight through it's supposed to

end with the other half of the scene of them in bed playing the game and Homer saying he's supposed to go to it. But I think they smartly moved it to Act 3. It works better in Act 3, I think. Nice. The second half of the scene. Mrs. Simpson, if you set out to push the bile to the tip of my throat, mission accomplished.

I'm going to crawl in the bed with a bottle of Amaretto. Good day. Easy, easy. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Oh! Seven, ten. Split. Homer, can you run some lines with me?

Make Bart do it. It'll just take a sec. Cutter ball. Oh! You see, Marge, while you're off in your own little world, you forgot that other people have problems too. We have a quick cutback. Actually actually a lengthy cut back to maggie she is trying to find something to replace a pacifier including a bartadal she an accurate to the 1992 bartal

i noticed that and she tries her first attempt and this is a long scene of no dialogue you know we just did chicken run so i have all of these great escape references like it to gen xers great escape was like one of the greatest movies of all time they all love steve mcqueen the coolest dude and these guys are i think they're on the brink of boomerdom right they're on the edge yeah like they're all born in like 1960 or so they they graduated college in like the mid 80s. Yeah. So they're in like the edge case of Boomer to Gen X. But yeah, Maggie with her attempted escape doesn't work in this.

And Alf Clausen got the original music sheets for Elmer Bernstein's great escape soundtrack and recreated it with his orchestra. It's very well done. Yeah, I noticed that the music was decidedly more cinematic during that whole sequence. And that all of a sudden, yes, you have this very strange horror movie scene where Homer comes to pick up Maggie. And you have all of the babies with their pacifiers. Ms. Llewellyn is nowhere to be seen. And yeah, it's just the echoing of the...

Which I found very unsettling, like even now kind of watching it back. I mean, looking at it again, I can tell why me and my friends were so into this stuff, even though it was about babies, but we were watching Rugrats too. Of course. This is just classic Looney Tunes,

just all like visual gags. Yeah. You can see why they were like oh we can expand this to a whole like maggie series of shorts just these kind of looney tune adventures oh yeah speaking of rugrats this is the last klaski chupo animated episode to air that's right yeah they because they are moving on to rugrats and also klaski chupo did not have a good working relationship with simpsons as well. Interesting.

Rugrats I watched a bunch of when I was growing up. I believe there was a feeling internally from the Simpsons side that they were putting more focus on Rugrats than the Simpsons and weren't putting as much work into the Simpsons. Well, in this house, we do not acknowledge Dill. No, no. He does not exist. Dill Pickles, we don't like that guy. Just like in the Chicken Run as well well they have their version of the box in this case it's maggie and a little playpen and i like when she keeps throwing the ball it bounces off her head every time yeah so then we had to let amateur night and dixie commence as marge is failing more and more and this is a big cut from the script there is a song from this called i love stanley and it is marge and

helen doing a song where she's trying to convince stella to leave stanley and it has a lyric like this uh blanche saying he may be manly but there's little polish in that polish man is one of the lines i mean if anything the movie's a cautionary tale a tale about marrying a polish man but there's little polish in that Polish man is one of the lines in it. I mean, if anything, the movie's a cautionary tale about marrying a Polish man. You shouldn't do it. True. No, no. I'm sorry, Jake Rakitansky, are you in the Kowalski zone?

I mean, even my, you know, Rakitansky's obviously not my real last name, but my real last name is also Polish. So I see it's yeah. You know, Stanley is giving Polish people a bad name. Hey, they throw out the piece. Learn that one. So a lot. Yeah, I look.

I have never physically abused anyone, but I can get greasy. And I there was a time in my life where I was smoking a lot of cigarettes. So who knows? Who knows? You don't talk while eating that much, do you? And I assume Julian and Travis don't hose you down when you get fired up. No, no, no. No need yet.

Only positively charged slime. And so, yes, this, again, another very heartbreaking line of marge saying why she can't get in it makes me sad that like if marge is seeing what stanley is in as we know stanley from the real versions of it the fact that she cannot say why she doesn't hate she can't hate stanley i'm like marge come on here but it's so heartbreaking as she, couldn't she just take his abuse with gentle, good humor? Yeah. Oh, that line hits so hard. Yeah.

It's so. Oh, God. Because it seems to encompass more than just this episode. It kind of speaks to, in a lot of ways, Marge's sort of general disposition when it comes to dealing with Homer when he's at his most brutish, which obviously this episode, you know, they really go overboard on that to sell it because he doesn't really have an arc otherwise. It's really interesting, especially learning the history of how the episode was pitched because they have this whole sort of idea of what the plot is but there's not a ton of emotional art going on between Marge and Homer in a way that there usually really is there's a lot

of push and pull there's conversation there's a dynamic whereas this feels very one-sided in this episode and so yeah it's very very it's very weird and this is when Marge finally figures out her character. Dan Lee is thoughtless, violent, and loud. Marge, every second you spend with this man, he is crushing your fragile spirit. You can't let that happen. Woohoo! Come to papa. Marge, I'll be out in the car. All I want is one embrace.

Marge, move it or lose it. Twist this bottle in your face. Hallelujah, I've done it again. Dad, you're supposed to overpower her. I'm trying, I'm trying. And then right after this scene, Marge stabs him in the chest. Yes, which is alluded to later. Now, Jake, you should know this sugar glass, right? That's what they should be using?

Yes, I have had a sugar glass bottle broken over my head. This was during a student film at my college. And I will say it was painful and I wouldn't do it again. I mean, even the sugar glass, that sounds pretty rough. The hitting of it. Yeah, I remember because they were supposed to. The scene was like I was at a urinal and somebody that I had like, I, you know, wanted to start a fight. The shot was essentially me standing at a urinal and then a bottle coming into frame and being broken over my head.

But the stunt guy that the school had hired, because they, you know, they worked with like, you know, real stunt people, you know, for this kind of stuff. But the guy was like a complete Yahoo. He wore sunglasses inside the entire time, which should have been my first clue that maybe this wasn't the best person for the job. And when he hit me with the bottle, instead of hitting it over the top of my head, he hit it on my forehead like this. And I remember looking into the mirror afterwards, because then I're supposed to fall backwards and I remember looking in the mirror after it and seeing beads of blood start forming

on the like you know through the cracks in my forehead and being like oh dear like this is this is like less pretend than I was sort of hoping for oh man geez that just lets our listeners know always check the pupils of the man who's going to hit you with sugar glass absolutely if you can't look them in the eyes you know call in sick just do a couple of some field sobriety tests on yeah have them draw a clock i do love the staging of homer in the background smashing stuff as yes sinclair is just saying the subtext of, this man is crushing your spirit.

You have to get away from him. Which, again, when the show sort of believes that, then it makes it so much more heartbreaking that Marge stays with him at the end of the episode. Yes, how do you go on after this? I mean, essentially, this entire episode is red flags about Homer and him being an abusive spouse. And it never really gets resolved, really. Not really in a meaningful way. So then you have to carry on after.

It's very weird that you have an episode like this that is standalone and then you move on with the rest of the season. It's weird. Though I guess it is accurate to what Stella does in the stage version and pretty much the movie version yeah and we come back they're trying out accents uh lisa slash yardley smith is really good at southern accents she's great at it but i think she had one in maximum overdrive that's right yeah she says you're bleeding like a stuck pig meanwhile i believe this is bart is beginning to develop his Ruttiger character. Yes. And so then I think it's surprising they don't really play up.

Homer hates Ned. Shouldn't he be jealous that he's acting out all these scenes with Marge? But Homer's thoughts on Ned never enter into this episode. I think they want to emphasize that he's being inattentive more than anything yeah you're right if he just got jealous that yeah yeah and that's that's kind of where i thought it was going right because you you know you have the scene where homer is standing outside yelling which is mirroring you know stanley's character but they they never really go there it was also fine funny. I had seen the Stella scene many times out of context.

Seinfeld, Elaine does it while she's hopped up on pain pills, right? Right. And in this episode, I always figured it was like a climactic part of the movie when really it's like the end of act one of the, the play when, when he does it. Uh, here's Dan Castellaneta doing his best Marlon Brando impersonation.

Oh, see you later, kids. I've got to go rehearse with Ned. But Marge, what about dessert? For God's sake, you can pull the lid off your own can of pudding.

Fine. I will. Oh no, my pudding is trapped forever. So I can open my own can of pudding, can't I? Shows what you know, Marge. Marge! Hi, Marge! Keep yelling, you big ape.

Aren't you being a little hard on old homie? Forget about him. Let's rehearse the bottle scene. Let's not and say we did. That ended my vocabulary. Let's not and say we did. Too bad Lyle Lanley wasn't around to lend Homer his penknife. Yeah, this is the pudding can.

We are very lucky to grow up in the easy-to-peel-off pudding cups of our childhood. The cans were over. We just had to peel them off from our childhood snack bags. No sharp corners. Yeah, it was just a tinfoil covering. Very easy to get. One thing that I was thinking about watching this know I think it could have clicked a little bit better if and maybe worked it's sort of better just for Homer's character on a whole if the

the episode had started with like Homer reading some kind of like you know like men's sort of like self-help book of like how to be the boss in your relationship or something some kind of influence like outside influence that is causing Homer to act this way that then watching the play he can sort of snap out of and realize oh my god like I've turned into like a piece of shit I think like just a small moment that that sort of you know showed Homer sort of like adopting this kind of thing instead of just him being like this for today for the purposes of the episode i think would have really strengthened what they were trying to do with this whole thing it instead implies that homer is always this way yeah this is the status quo yeah when

instead he could have gotten bad advice from oh let's say lenny you know right yeah yeah exactly like a guy hey homer you know when i when i want my girlfriend to do you know something that i want i just treat her poorly he's like really that work you know, when I want my girlfriend to do, you know, something that I want, I just treat her poorly. He's like, really? That works? You know, like just any kind of conversation like that. That's where they're at. Say you don't remember it.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. He's become a gangster now. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Actually, when you talk about the casting of this, it's funny that like the major characters, like Ned is a major character but you would figure lenny carl moe or barney would have been one of the other guys in this instead of or groundskeeper

willie or skinner instead it's it's jasper auto lyle hutz and with that's good point you would think because yeah he's going down like like uh lovitz is going down the line trying to cast his stanley he gets to Barney who just takes a swig you know swig from a beer and belt belches and he goes that's my Stanley you know I mean imagine imagine a you know a Barney Stanley like what that dynamic would have looked like it does it does seem like there's kind of odd casting in terms of which Simpsons characters like would have been best to put in these in these circumstances and then yeah we see later that barney and mo are stagehands basically and you wonder about the possibilities also it's great reveal ned is holding up his script and then when f calls homer big ape that's

when ned puts down his script and that's the reveal of his wounds which is a great bloody bottle wound then we cut back to the game boy scene and this is when homer again i was like oh this is this is too real like this is how my dad treated my mom's things as with total disrespect like if you if this is your interest it is as homer calls it a kooky project in this uh little clip so what time does this play start why are? Are you going? Well, I gotta go, don't I? I'm sure you won't enjoy it. There's nothing about bowling in the play. Oh, wait, there is. Probably not much of it.

Why can't you be a little more supportive? Because I don't care, okay? I can't fake an interest in this, and I'm an expert at faking an interest in your kooky projects. What kooky projects? You know, the painting class, the first aid course, the whole Lamaze thing. Why didn't you tell me you felt this way? You know I would never do anything

to hurt your feelings. Good night. It's the most... To tell her like, oh yeah, every time you even thought I liked something you did, I was faking it every time.

I don't care about anything you did. Like, that might be the meanest thing Homer's ever said to her yeah i think so and hope but homer is correct about there not being much bowling in the play it's true he would be disappointed i wonder do you think fred flintstone did all that bowling because he's a stanley type as well i think all just all these world war ii buddies needed someplace to go you know it was it was a

bar that wasn't a bar yeah you're right yeah i love homer like even when it could be a good sign that the bowling's in it even then he's like probably not much of it like yeah so then we have a long sequence here of maggie uh in the script they actually cut in between these but i think they made the right choice once it finally got to air of like no we need to see this in full just have a minute two minute long scene of maggie uh freeing the the pacifiers and the reason we're not going to go into detail about this is the same reason it didn't really work at the table read it just it's not fun to hear stage directions yeah yeah maggie shot to the uh the suction cup dart yeah though as a kid i didn't know what flame retardant was so when trusty says

i'm flame retardant i misheard it for a while like i had arguments with friends like what's he saying there like but yeah closed captioning makes it clear that it was not a uh ableist joke let's say and are they are they parroting Mission Impossible? Like, had that come out yet, the first Mission Impossible, where he comes down from the rope and steals the data? No, this is before that. So really, Brian De Palma ripped it off. This is 92.

That's 96. Oh, my fucking God. Because it's Ethan Hunt crawling through the vents it's even on getting lowered from the ceiling on the you know on the wire it's you know him having to interact with something on a you know on a surface that is in a secure location i mean i thought for sure that this was directly referencing that also cut from the script is that they lock ms sinclair in her office which explains why she is missing from when homer arrives at this oh yeah and then like i think it was only upon this viewing that i noticed that when the play is starting she comes in to sit down

looking very harried yeah yeah that's the only real resolution of her character. But the pacifiers are free, triumphant music from The Great Escape plays, and a happy ending. And then this is one Rich Moore should have said, like, no, because, all right, a very long sequence parodying, an action sequence parodying The Great Escape. Done perfectly.

They're about to do a full musical, multiple songs and dance scenes yeah they are asked to imitate the ending of the birds which is where countless birds are on screen so it has to be countless babies all sucking pacifiers in use and like this would be difficult to do in a disney film on a theatrical budget like this was too much they should not have asked them to do this it's a lot of work a lot of a lot of animated babies on that screen knowing how hard it was to do it uh and the many levels of it i can't believe they did it but what they did was great and as a kid this confused the crap out of me i think it was not this one that did it but once they did the largest seed bell

thing of uh with mole man trapped in the uh phone booth his birds were smashing it oh yeah that's what that's what i learned enough times like okay they've parodied the birds this many times i need to rent the birds as a 12 year old and finally see all these references this is the ending of the birds which is the anticlimactic walk away through a bunch of birds and hitchcock's cameo and this is the same as the birds. Walking the dogs. Yeah. Now, I want to say all this musical stuff, because of the album Songs in the Key of Springfield, something I've listened to a million times, all of this is just etched into my brain.

It will never leave. From the very beginning, perhaps we are all mad. That speech, it's all preserved on that album that I heard a ton. So this will never escape me. All of these songs, I can sing them all. you know that that speech it's all preserved on that album that i heard a ton so i just i i can't like i this will never escape me all of these songs are just i can sing them all the songs to me sounded a little bit like they had a little bit of like a jesus christ superstar vibe to them there's there's a bit of that with some though i also think that uh martin is a big sondheim fan yeah that that makes sense brings up multiple Sondheim characters and that is what

leads to the most controversial thing that happened in this episode with the opening song yes because uh so New Orleans not a big fan of this episode and because they were premiering their new season with the Camp Krusty episode they also sent out this one because it was ready so a lot of people were getting it ahead of time and there was a lot of reporting going on about this episode before anyone had seen it so uh new orleans in particular was very offended and i think it was even pulled from a few of the affiliate stations right yeah in new orleans uh new orleans where they did it uh it aired i believe especially there was one reviewer local in the area who took the lyrics out of context and just printed them. And radio hosts would talk about it.

It was a real thing in the Louisiana area. And Fox affiliates grumbled with it. There was talk of not airing it. And within a week afterwards, Fox television jamie kellner wrote a full apology what was it was it just the fact that they said new orleans i know it was like uh just to make the overpass souvenir stores and uh you're thinking about you're forgetting about the pirates drunks and whores yes pirates drunks and i think they're okay with the tacky overprice souvenir stores because out of ingramora the mississippi yeah I so this is what Jamie Kellner's uh statement was it has come to our

attention that a comedic song about New Orleans in tonight's episode of the Simpsons has offended some city residents and officials viewers who watch the episode will realize the song is in fact a parody of the opening numbers of countless Broadway musicals which are designed to set the stage for the story that follows that is the only purpose of this song. We regret that this song, taken out of context, has caused offense. This was certainly not the intention of the Simpsons production staff or the Fox Broadcasting Company. So there you go.

And this is also in the animatic. You can see it. They missed. This joke would have been clearer if they'd kept it in. At the end of the song they cut to two cajun guys in the audience who are deeply offended by it and leave the leave the show oh that's a great little game that's a great bit yeah i mean that's yeah they should they should have kept that and uh yeah it was specifically what martin says he was influenced by was the sweeney todd opening song there's no place like london

which is about how shitty london is including lines like there's a hole in the world with like a great black pit and the vermin of the world inhabit it and the morals aren't worth what a pig can spit and it goes by the name of london so he was just much harsher, much harsher, much harsher, much harsher. I also love the reveal that they painted an entire Superdome just so it could turn. Yes. Oh, yeah. I thought that was the animation on that was I was like noticing that I was like, oh, I bet that's like tricky to animate a two dimensional basically set rotating around like that's yet another that's on top of the musical numbers on top of the thousand babies on top of the uh when marge you know in the play loses her mind and she's you know being hoisted around by mo and barney and there's lasers and smoke i mean in a weird way this episode is such an allegory for like modern day filmmaking where you have you ask you know you ask so much of your creative team you know you push them to the limit you've got all of these big budget sort of like

moments and yet the the sort of human kind of the human story that's sort of underneath it all is like very undercooked and obvious and there's really no nuance and they're they're telling you I mean the scene where the director is basically saying you know this man is a is a brute and and you've got Homer you know bashing the you know bashing the vending machine at the same time as he's I mean how obvious can you get so there's it's there's a really interesting sort of uh and I'm you know I'm sure it's not intentional but you look at it from sort of like present day and it is kind of this like perfect allegory for these sort of big budget blockbusters uh that you know that we keep getting over and over again i well i also like that is as far as bad bad intentionally bad writing of a musical to set the stage for streetcar you do not need to

let people know that this was before the superdome and where the saints of football play like that is not needed at all for stage setting yeah it wasn't until i saw the movie that i realized like who is wigum playing in the scene and then i i realized oh it's he's he's the doctor from the mental hospital he's the guy who's introducing you into this world that's so great like and i also like that otto is fired by from playing pablo at the very start at the very last second yeah he's like yeah he's like and i will be playing your part you're not working out i wait pablo in the in the movie and presumably the play he has no actual dialogue it's just sort of like poker based mutterings yeah he's just you know

hispanic guy muttering at the yeah i so uh one more bit about the the offense this caused is that the next episode they would have a chalkboard gag apologizing bart is writing i will not defame the city of new orleans and as well in 2005 in england in the uk a week after katrina happened this episode re-aired on channel four there and there were enough complaints about like the poor timing of it that channel four like released a written apology we're like we're sorry we aired that after katrina that's crazy so for years this episode has been causing mischief when when katrina happened uh the superdome had new

meaning it was where people were living yes yeah the now when i hear him say superdome i am thinking of the uh horrible things that had to happen all the people waiting in there for help yes yeah and of course i think about how there were wrestlemanias at the superdome yes listeners who know wrestling yes is at the Superdome. Yes, listeners who, vomiting, violent, wallians Cuter, impractical, negative, violent, wallians Crummy, lousy, ranting, and pranking, wallians What's the matter, honey? Are you lost? I'm looking for my sister, Stella. It's Mom!

Huh? My name is Blanche Dubois. I thought my life would be a Mardi Gras, a never-ending party. Ha! I'm a faded southern dame without a dime. And there constant cuts to homer oh wait uh one of my favorite little bits there's tons of little things to say but i like how when herman who has one arm he's doing the stage direction of everybody else of raising up one arm but he just has to stick his shoulder out yeah yeah yeah that was great it's clever uh so in community college when

i first saw citizen kane and i knew lots of scenes from simpsons were from citizen kane because they kind of just shouted in your face all the famous ones in that movie the first time i watched it joseph cotton was tearing at his program and then flipping it over that's when i was like i was doing the point at the screen meme i was like wait that was doing the point at the screen meme. I was like, wait, that was in Streetcar. That was a Citizen Kane reference? Same with my first year of college. It was amazing. If you listeners still haven't seen Citizen Kane,

just watch it to know all the Simpsons references. Yeah, especially when that, there is a man, you know that song? I was lighting up in my classroom. I know all these words they're all i'm gonna sing along with the monty burns lines instead uh and you can also spot sanjay is sitting seated next to homer here so yeah then we get uh marge has a quick little song i mean when i say they wrote songs basically he writes one line for most songs in it. Yeah. So, like, my wife and I were trying to figure out why the Apu song is funny.

And I think after watching the movie, I truly understand it. Now I realize that this Steve guy is the most minor character in the entire movie. He's in one scene. But in this musical version, Blanche, her song is basically like 15 seconds long, the song that establishes the main character of the play. But then Steve gets a minute-long soliloquy about the one scene he's in, in his own plight, his own inner struggle. Well, this bewitching floozy seduces humble newsy.

I mean, it's, yeah, it's so, and then it's staged like a bad theater of heat. Marge has to stay there still and he has to step away and be like, let's pause this and let's sing about everything I'm feeling. Yeah, totally. I'm collecting for the evening star. Come here. I want to kiss you just once softly and sweetly on your mouth. I am just a simple paper

boy. No romance do I seek. I just wanted forty cents for my deliveries last week. Will this bewitching floozy Seduce this humble loosy?

Oh, what's a paperboy to do? Apu's song too is funny because I do think they're showing that he breaks character with his woohoo because he enjoyed kissing Marge in that moment though yes of course in the scene in the film it's a very sad moment of also like you know blanche also is guilty of statutory rape as well in in the film and this is her kind of her kissing that guy is her uh trying that out again i think or just she's she's playing with fire in that moment yes but i really liked um i. I really liked how the final note of the song is Apu's mouth curled in a very soft like, and his lips stay in that exact formation so that he can just turn his head and then be in a kiss, essentially. It was a very funny visual gag and also potentially just the animators like saving themselves some time i think it's the first time we heard apu sing and he would be

doing a lot more of it oh yeah he's got a beautiful falsetto and you know what his big song in that episode who needs a quickie mark it ends with do right. Right. Yes, of course. They know that Hank and Terry can hit that note. We were mentioning this is mostly Sondheim. This Stella song, is this the Andrew Lloyd Webber song? I think so, yeah. Can't you hear me yell on that? Yeah. Yeah, definitely.

That's definitely Andrew uh andrew lloyd weber inspired and what a great parody of the scene in the in the play is it's the scene where you like you can see why stella reason why she stays with stanley that he just breaks down crying like he's broken like he's like oh i went too far don't leave me like it's it's a needy man crying and that then the way shearer plays it that he screams it and then he goes can't you hear me yell like to make it upbeat rocking in such a moment yeah such such a great bit uh and then we cut to barge's descent into madness which i love that bart loves her flying around can't you hear me yell uh you're putting me through hell uh Stella! She can fly.

I think it's supposed to symbolize her descent into madness. There's another great cut line here. So after Lisa says that it's meant to represent her descent into madness bart says well by your logic superman is insane oh i like it i wish they kept it and so then after all that it's time for a big closing number which completely misses the entire point yeah i mean we're going to explain this joke but i mean it's just funny the song is funny even if you don't really know the context but the context is basically blanche is being tricked into being committed she's she's being taken away by people from a mental institution and she's saying you know i've always depended on the kindness of

strangers she's she's had a habit of throwing herself at every man and this time she's throwing herself into a trap right like where she's going she'll never get out of it's her life is over essentially like this is may as well just be sending her to jail and after seeing the movie uh the funniest part of this is when all the men and all the men playing poker stand up to join in the song that that was my new favorite bit now i realize like oh that is the four guys from his uh from his poker games and they pop up out of like in the scene it's so sad because like mitch is there and who's you know they're all everybody's bad at this but mitch mitch is in the movie is just watching like i did this like i helped to destroy this woman but here in the play or in the musical version he just hops up and just starts moving his arms back and forth and joining the song and i love

how they they marry that uh iconic line from the movie with the very hallmark a stranger's just a friend you haven't met something that would be on like a sampler or something now here's a tip from blanche you won't regret it's so great sorry jake we've been talking a lot about this uh this song do you have any input on the the finale of this musical uh i was just like i mean i was just kind of blown away at like how complete and good the production value was i probably should have watched the actual film, Streetcar Named Desire, because it's been years since I've seen it, to fully encompass, I think, some of the humor and what they were playing with. But I was just like, you know, I just thought like, oh, there's like a full, I didn't remember that there was a full musical in the episode i just sort of remember

you know that the episode was like oh yeah marge get marge does a play and like homer's not supportive was like what my memory of the episode was so yeah it was crazy no i think you guys like perfectly broke down what's what in the parody of it. Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers. You can always depend on the kindness of strangers to fuck up your spirits and shoot you from dangers. Now here's a tip from what you won't regret. Are strangers just a friend you won't regret. All strangers, just a friend.

You haven't been. You haven't been. Streetcar. And in this revised ending, she leaves via the streetcar. And by the way, when you watch A Streetcar Named Desire, within seconds you see that streetcar named Desire. You can just turn the movie off a promise fulfilled yeah god that's man every that movie is so good i couldn't believe like how it was all that and more of what people said but yeah here's another bit that you it's clearly on screen but really i only noticed when reading

through the notes from the script uh revisions is that on stage when everybody takes their bows unremarked upon is a trio of acrobats and a man in a bear suit and you're like what happened in this this version of streetcar they just need to produce the entire musical as an episode i think yes yes go back to the well can you imagine like the animators when they're like oh yeah and you gotta add like a guy in a bear suit and three acrobats and they're like but they don't appear in the musical at all and like there's no reference to them it's just you just having me draw extra guys for a gag fully design them have them bow design those characters art boy it's just john lovett says it on the commentary the stupid thing that people who don't work in animation think that, oh, it's the same budget-wise no matter what they put on screen.

They can just do anything. It's like, no, no, they cannot. The director for this episode was not on the commentary. No, he probably had an embolism if he heard Lovett say that. Oscar winner, Rich Moore? Oscar winner? Oscar winner for Zootopia, yes. Whoa.

Oh, and Zootopia is really good he's the director as well of record ralph and uh and the sequel and probably when they were recording the commentary he was supervising director on futurama or that was just wrapping up i'm guessing or he was uh doing development stuff at disney maybe or working on drawn together all right what do you guys what do you guys what are your feelings about Futurama do you like it did you watch it fans we're fans yeah we do we have a whole sister podcast on the on the patreon patreon.com talking

Simpsons and we I am with some guarded optimism kind of looking forward to the new Hulu stuff me too me too it'll it'll be out pretty soon I think I believe it's gonna be this summer think i believe it's going to be this summer at the time of this recording the the word is summer yeah yeah i remember like at first watching futurama being like oh this is like it's not as good it's weird it's weird to see characters that are kind of drawn like the simpsons and i know it's from the Simpsons creator, but it's not the Simpsons. But over time, it really grew on me.

Futurama did. And occasionally when I like, you know, we'll throw on like a couple episodes because I feel like that's a catalog of content that I just really haven't been through in the same way that I have with the Simpsons. So it's worth exploring some more. It's yeah, especially the the first four seasons of it especially yeah yeah yeah Marge looks at Homer in the audience he seems ambivalent they said it was very hard for them to get the emotion exactly right in Homer there Marge thinks that he's like bored and sleepy when he's really like sad as yeah I picked up sad from his they did a good job I picked up kind of sad defeated

though contemplative contemplative whatever that word is though as the memes say does he know does he know uh but i also love the line you people out there you are the stars and then i was like cool he's like he doesn't mind that he was cut out to play at all. I was the star. So there's a tiny cut bit from the animatic as well. After the curtain falls, there's a quick bit backstage of people changing on their costumes, and Wiggum is telling people to get cast party in the evidence room. Of course, yeah. But instead, we cut back, and this is where I have one last clip here. It's slightly long, but this is the happy ending of the episode.

Hey, look at me. I'm Blanche Dubois. Mom. Way to go, Mom. Everybody was cheering for you. Almost everybody. Kids, wait in the car. I want to talk to your mother about this play thing.

Looking for a spot to fun with the Mrs. A. Governor? Shut up, boy. Marge, you were terrific. Oh, come on, Homer. By the end, you were so bored you could barely keep your selfish head up. I wasn't bored. I was sad. It really got to me how that lady here... Um...

You know which one I mean. You played her. Blanche. Yeah. How Blanche was sad. And how that guy Stanley should have been nice to her. Yeah? Go on. I mean, it made me feel bad. The poor thing ends up being hauled to the nut house when all she needed was for that big slob to show her some respect.

At least that's what I thought. I have a history of missing a point at stuff like this. No, Homer, you got it just right. Hey, you know, I'm a lot like that guy. Really? Yeah, like when I pick my teeth with a mail and stuff. Maybe just a little.

You know, there's no real way for Homer to dig himself out of this hole but i don't like the ending that much because i feel like he's given too much credit for kind of understanding things for slightly understanding how these play yeah and also there's no actual what's crazy is there's no line that has him go like maybe i should change or like i want to be better he just goes huh i'm kind of like that guy which is really bizarre and then march just takes it yeah also after watching the play to ever want to compare yourself to stanley you know but i mean homer's pretty dumb but yeah but but yeah like this feels like marge

accepting breadcrumbs which also may like a starving person who's just like well this these breadcrumbs are great like but that makes her more like stella than blanche to me really yeah yeah i think she's more of a she really is more of a stella figure it's a miscasting really blanche here yeah but yeah i mean it's uh they made homo realistically abusive and uh that can't be solved in 20 seconds at your ending and they try yeah it reads as marge just accepting like well this is the best I'm gonna get yeah well I guess he's a little bit more self-aware than he was you know 30 minutes ago two hours ago but you know what'd been interesting is if she had gotten cast as Stella and then slowly over the play as she watches the scenes between Stanley and Blanche play out that she starts to realize like maybe

there's there's some parallels in my own life that would be I think that would make for an interesting episode that that just by proxy of like observing the abusive relationship as opposed to pretending to be in it and channeling you know whatever rage she has that she slowly over time realizes and then you could you know cut back and forth between stuff happening with Homer at home. There's really only those two scenes of him not caring when she tells them that they're going to audition, and the two scenes with the Game Boy in bed. You know, I think that they could have laid in more in terms of juxtaposing, like, the abuse at home. But again, they've got 22 or 23 minutes, and it's also supposed to be a family show I mean this

is a really ambitious episode in both substance and sort of the the visual nature of it it's a really wild one I'm sort of glad that that I picked it because I I feel like it is a kind of atypical um in terms of the you know the more majority of like the simpsons catalog yeah and i'd say like maybe there's five minutes of dialogue free maggie side story yeah too which is weird which is odd yeah i my big last thought on this is after now seeing the film that they're most directly parodying i do think the most charitable reading i can say is that I feel like Marge realizes that everybody thinks Homer is like Stanley. But now after this experience, he's like, you know, you're not exactly like Stanley. You're not that bad.

But it's really hard when they make him so realistically abusive. You can't really come back from it with him not even with him sideways apologizing like even i mean to the stanleys of the world or just abusive men out there or abusive people in relationships often get away with not with the non-apology of just like i mean homer should just say you know i'm sorry uh your feelings were hurt or whatever like oh i'm sorry you took offense at that kind of thing but i would never i would never send you to the nut house you know just like i don't know some kind of acknowledgement that yeah it is weird it is it's a non-apology it is a non-committal to like yeah like why homer starts

off the episode like this like is it you know beauty pageant on TV, like, worth kind of ignoring your partner's, like, passion or even if it's just a hobby or whatever. Yeah, it just seems, it oddly seems out of character. And it seems like in some ways that the writers have to kind of insert that I'm just a big dummy who doesn't understand these things. Kind of is, like, provided as, like, forgiveness, these things kind of is like provided as like forgiveness, or not forgiveness, but it's provided as like an explanation. And even that in and of itself is gaslighting, is being like, well, I'm just a dumb idiot who doesn't understand how to treat women nice.

It's not my fault, you know? Yeah, I feel like if there was a woman in the room doing more than typing, there could have been some pushback against this ending, I feel. I agree, I agree. That's why diverse writing rooms are important, everybody. Yes. doing more than typing there could have been some pushback against this ending i feel yeah i agree yeah that's why diverse writing rooms are important everybody yes and uh yeah the commentary you can hear aljean pitching bringing back luellen sinclair though he would not return in a speaking a true speaking role not counting a cameo in a future episode in season 14. In 2018's Fears of a Clown,

he does return in a real part. Wow, that's crazy. Well, Jake, we've taken up two and a half hours of your time. Thank you so much for being on Talking Simpsons. Two and a half, well spent. I mean, I will go out and preach the gospel of a streetcar named Marge from this point on.

But please let us know more about QAnon Anonymous and please let us know where to find you online and anything else you might want to promote. Now's your chance. Oh, well, you can, yeah, you can find us on Twitter. We're QAnon Anonymous. We also have a Patreon. We do two episodes a week, basically, and one is free.

And if you like it and you want more of it, you can join us on Patreon for five bucks and get access to a bunch of premium episodes, which are usually they tend to be kind of weirder and darker or sometimes more fun and yeah i i enjoyed one of your most recent ones about that weird anti-vax guy who advocates drinking urine yes and you guys also did a a really uh i believe was on the patreon but deep dive into uh cat Turd as well. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The horrible, horrible Cat Turd. And if our listeners enjoy us talking about TV shows and movies, you guys do a lot of great movie episodes as well. Yes, those are like the fun ones, the fun premiums, where we'll take weird movies, pilled movies. We recently went on a field trip to go see um kevin sorbo's uh antichrist 2 uh which was uh which i basically had a panic attack in the theater um yeah i'm a little i'm kind of jealous that that we picked q anon to be the pot the topic of our podcast and not like a

show that i loved or like a you know like a movie that I was really a line of toys, something like kind of harmless. It's been very nice to sit with you both and talk about something that is fun, that reminds me of my childhood, that reminds me why I gravitated towards wanting to write for television and film. And I think a lot of us of this generation, you know, the Simpsons became a huge part of our humor, our sense of humor. I think there is the generation whose sense of humor sort of distilled down from the Simpsons. And then there's a generation whose humor distilled down from like the Judd Apatow stuff, like super bad and, uh, you know, stuff sort of beyond that point. And it's two very different styles of,

of humor. And, um, you know, I'm, I'm grateful. I'm grateful for the Simpsons for providing some of mine. No.

Well, thank you so much, Jake. Yeah. We'll definitely have you back for sure. Yeah. I would love to be. Yeah.

Any, anytime, anytime you guys want to talk about anything, anything, uh, TV or, or even if it's, if it's not The Simpsons, if you're on to Futurama or something else, I'd love to come back and kick it.

We'll talk about cops, not actual cops, but the cartoon. Yes, we can talk. Just for you, Jake. I had the toy with the big mechanical handcuff that he shot out of his hand. That was the action figure that I have. That's going to be a reality soon, I think. But thank you so much jake thanks for having me you guys thank you once again to jake rokatansky for being on the show please check out all of his stuff at q anon anonymous we love what they do but if you want to check out more of what we do and get these episodes

one week at a time and at free please go to patreon.com slash talking simpsons sign up for five bucks a month you get just that, but also access to everything behind our $5 paywall. That's access to over 150 bonus podcasts since we started this Patreon back in June of 2017. You can access all of them immediately the second you sign up. That includes podcasts about The Critic, Mission Hill, and Batman the Animated Series, as well as

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once a month only for patrons of that level or higher. What is that, Henry? Bob is talking about the What a Cartoon movie podcast, our monthly premium podcast where we talk about an anime feature film. It's crazy in depth, just like we do an episode of The Simpsonsons which means we often talk for over five hours sometimes even six about animated movies last month you got to hear us talk about toy story for us closing out the entire toy

story series of films and that's just the beginning of our summer of pixar because this month we will be covering the incredibles yes the superhero adventure by Brad Bird and we have a giant back catalog that covers everything from Akira to a goofy movie if you want to hear our longest one ever you need to hear our six and a half hours about who framed Roger Rabbit not to mention stuff like South Park Shrek there's so much great stuff there please check it all out for yourself and all the five dollar things bob mentioned at patreon.com slash talking simpsons and as for me i've been one of your hosts bob mackie you can find me on twitter as bob servo and my other podcast is retronauts it's a classic gaming podcast all about old video games you can find that wherever you find podcasts or go to patreon.com

slash retronauts and sign up there for two full link bonus episodes every month henry how about you you can follow me on twitter at h-e-n-e-r-e-y-g i'm always tweeting up a storm there and you should be following on twitter at talk simpsons pod because that is how you stay in the loop when there are new podcasts out on both the patreon or on the free feed and any other news that's going on in our lives that's at talk simpsons pod It's also at TalkSimpsonsPod on Instagram. We're often posting things there too. So please follow both of those. And if you want an easy to find list of all of our previously released free episodes of

Talking Simpsons and What a Cartoon, head on over to TalkingSimpsonsPodcast.com. Thank you so much for listening, folks. We'll see you again next time for the latest episode of our community podcast. Talk to the audience, and we'll see you then. You're a dame and I'm a fella Stanley, stop or I'll tell Stella Marge, Marge I'm asking for White Hot Rage And you're giving me a hissy fit

Marge, can I get some change for the candy machine? Oh, here Hey, there's some quarters in here