Talking Simpsons - Talking Simpsons - Bart The Genius (Revisited) With Eric Szyszka

Episode Date: January 14, 2020

Just in time for the 30th Anniversary, Talking Simpsons returns to the first season of the show to do a much deeper dive than we did the first time! And joining us is returning favorite Eric Szyszka from the We Hate Movies podcast! We just into the debut episode, Bart The Genius, a strange but fun ep full of weiners, green skin, lying on tests, operas, and so much more! Listen now or be damned if you don't! Support this podcast and get dozens of bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! And please follow the new official Twitter, @TalkSimpsonsPod!

attention podcast listener we've got an exciting new podcast coming just for patrons of patreon.com slash talking simpsons talking futurama season two part one has begun exclusively for our five dollar and up patrons on the talking simpsons network that's the first 10 episodes of futurama coming to you once a week so just sign up for $5 a month at patreon.com slash TalkingSimpsons and you'll get Talking Futurama Season 2 and all of our limited miniseries, including the entirety of Talking Futurama Season 1. That's 13 episodes.

That is patreon.com slash TalkingSimpsons. Now please enjoy the rest of this podcast. I heartily endorse this event or product ahoy everybody and welcome to talking simons, where all the dimlets live on Easy Street. I'm your host, the acceptable ethnic variant of Wiener, Bob Mackey, and this is our chronological exploration of The Simpsons. Who is here with me today? Hey, it's Henry Gilbert, reading Radioactive Man Comics while green, but I am wearing clothes. Thank God. And who is on the line? This is Eric Siska, and see, Bob, you stole it from under me, because I was going to say that's S-Z-Y-S-Z-K-A,

an acceptable ethnic variant, but I guess I'm a quid... God damn it, what was that Scrabble term? Quidgy bow. There we go. I'll be a quidgy bow today. Siska is easier to spell, and today's episode is Bart the Genius. Hey, looking good, Bart. Bart, what happened? I had a little accident in chemistry today.

Well, I bet it's nothing a little turpentine won't take off. So yes, you voted for it, you wanted to hear it, so we're re-exploring season one, and our first guest is Eric Siska of the amazing podcast We Hate Movies. Welcome back. Thanks for having me. When this is posting, it is basically the 30th anniversary of the premiere of the first real episode of The Simpsons. If you count the Christmas special as not to the debut and just as a special, this is the first episode of The Simpsons to debut. But technically the second production episode.

Yes. Yes. We'll get in all that. I haven't seen this episode in so long and I was surprised how like fully formed it is. And it's like a solid show from the start. I usually rewatch like three through six or so so it was nice to dip back into one yeah this is one of the uh the stronger ones from the first season although there are still some weird elements we'll talk about throughout this podcast yes but although we should do our history segment though

right oh yeah that's right today's episode aired on january 14th 1990 And as always, Henry will tell us what happened on this day in real life history. Oh, boy, Bobby. Grant Gustin TV's Flash is born on this very day. George Foreman defeats future Simpsons guest star Jerry Cooney in two rounds. And why is the world in love again why are we marching hand in hand why are the ocean levels rising up it's a brand new album for 1990 they might be giants brand new album flood well that's all that matters yes yeah uh if you're between 30 and 40 and white possibly older you know what we're talking about yeah now the uh i'd say between 30 and 50 come on yeah i think 30 year olds would be 60 now who heard they might be giants then so yeah it actually is 30 to 60 jeez but uh yes no they might be giants album of flood was the first one of the first cds i ever bought because two of the songs from it is stample and particle man were on tiny tunes

So I had to get the CD of it and yeah It it was early nerd rock for me and entry into and I still love it like I as I was doing the research Last night. I was like, I'll just put on the whole album. Let's just listen to it It's a solid album up there with like Weez's Blue album. Solid start to finish. So good. A TMBG fan, Eric? Yeah, I mean, I remember I used to go through their stuff in high school. I haven't really

listened to it in a while. Now I want to gear up some flood. It really takes you back in time when you listen to it, I think. I think they've also aged better than Weezer because at a certain point they're like, we're just going to make kids music. But Weezer's like a 55-year-old Rivers Cuomo is making songs about malls. And they put out that weird cover album.

Oh, yes. Yeah. No one wants that. They're not even good covers. It's like basically them doing the rock band video game version of songs. It's like, what if Rivers Cuomo picked up a plastic guitar and sang this? It's like Rivers Cuomo was like, oh, no, we were supposed to be a wedding band. That's basically where our level was. Well, as someone who went to a Weezer concert last year,

I can tell you the under 20 kids who were there really liked hearing the cover. Really? They loved hearing Africa. And I was there. I was like, you know what? I'd rather hear Africa than anything after the Green album honestly so yeah i in my you know what not no weezer talk i'm gonna cut it off right there but uh but yes jerry cooney defeated by uh george foreman two rounds a a nice punchy kind of guy he's knocked out by auto in uh springfield with a dollar sign. A single punch, yeah. And this was part of George Foreman's return to boxing.

His last run as a heavyweight champ after he'd retired to be a preacher for a time. Interesting fact about him, as a head in a jar, he envies the dead. And this is pre-grill, I assume. Yes, yeah. The grill is years away from foreman at this point and uh and yeah that the tv show flash cw's the flash of the arrow verse it's that great gustin he's a good

actor that's the flash show is fine was mark hamill in that yes well mark hamill was in the original flash show which actually was airing around this time. Oh. He also returned as his Trickster character in the Flash CW show. I thought he played Cockknocker. Cockknocker and Trickster look very similar, though the voice he does for Trickster is the Joker voice pretty much. Yeah, that's true. It's funny, when he played the Trickster in his return role in CW's The Flash, it was like fresh off of his nine-second appearance in The Force Awakens.

He was just in a $4 billion movie and now is just in a stupid Halloween costume giggling. He started to cash in after that. He also did some show on history or something called Nightfall or something he was in. Oh, yeah. I mean, he does. Mark Hamill has been enjoying his time back in the limelight, I think. I like how in, no spoilers, but in Rise of the Skywalker, he plays the same role that Obi-Wan Kenobi does in Return of the Jedi just to show up and retcon things. But he stands.

He stands the entire time. Yes, I might be a lying ghost, but from a certain point of view, I'm not. You guys see Rise of Skywalker just so people can complain about it for it rightly to you listeners. Yeah, you gotta see it for content. If you're creating content out there,

go see it. I mean, like Eric's podcast, We Hate Movies, your Rise of Skywalker podcast was great. Oh, thank you. Yeah, we were late on the game with it, but I think it's good because we got all these tidbits that are coming out about the production hell. Oh, God.

We were able to weave in. Yeah, you guys had a big month for Star Wars. You had, I believe, Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi and the Mandalorian miniseries and also your recent on-screen about Rise of the Skywalker. Yeah, it's, you know, it turns out like, I think I'm done talking about Star Wars for a while. We put it because our Empire episode and our Jedi episode are both three hours each. And then the Mandalorian half hours usually ended up being closer to an hour. So, and then Rise of Skywalker was like 72 minutes or so.

So I'm beat. I think most of the world is done with star wars right now so you're fine it's been funny the last month seeing many of my favorite you know media commentators who i look to for star wars information so many of them are are like you guys going going i'm tired of star wars i don't want to engage with it at all anymore i'm just done uh but yeah your return of the jedi one uh and you're you talk for over three hours about empire and uh yeah the return of the jedi i i'm gonna pimp bob into this you watched it for the first time i can't believe that it's true yeah i mean uh i've gone over my star wars history but i'm a space balls guy like space balls was the first star wars movie that i saw basically i do like space balls i think there was a generation of people born in the early 80s where they were too young for any star wars so

they took space balls at space value at face value and was like this is a fun adventure with jokes and then later i found out star wars was real and it wasn't until the movie uh theater re-releases of those movies that i saw empire and then i worked my way back and saw the first one and i never got around to jedi i think just because of the stigma and then i took it as a point of pride a very annoying point of pride like i've never seen the third movie everybody check me out uh so i finally got around to seeing it and now i can bob you are so cool i know i've never seen a lot of movies avatar titanic never seen them blade runner i think is on there i've never seen blade runner although i do want to i'm sorry i play a lot of video games all right you've played all the video games blade runner

got ripped off exactly i played snatcher i got the gist of it right you played the blade runner video games the tit Titanic video games. They should make a Titanic video game. It's about time. Yeah, I think so. But I did want to go over the writer for this episode. So our previous take on this first season, the episodes were very short. And we didn't start doing these writers' corners until around season six or seven. So I want to talk about, we're going to be going through the initial main cast of writers for the first season.

And this episode is written by john vd let's go over his bio really quick would it surprise you that he went to a little school called harvard i think of credited writers on this episode on this season there's two people who didn't go to harvard i think yeah is that what this gifted school is based on i wonder i thought a lot about harvard seeing the gifted kids and i think on the commentary says school is based on? I wonder. I thought a lot about Harvard seeing the gifted kids in this. I think on the commentary it says it's based on one of the gifted schools he went to as a kid. Like all the things he remembers. But yes, he was born the same year as Al Jean, 1960.

And he was president of the Harvard Lampoon with Mike Reese. So I think, I mean, they were just giving an old buddy a favor because he had just gotten off a miserable year at Saturday Night Live. He hated it. That was his first TV writing job, and he needed work. And this was a very low stakes show that was probably going to fail. Everyone thought it was going to fail. Yeah, yeah. They're just like, oh, this is a nice six months of writing this thing in a weird way.

And then it definitely won't be renewed for a second season. Who would ever do that? Now it's gonna outlive all of them they uh absolutely oh i think so yeah uh yeah i mean it outlived it outlived sam simon it outlived uh many people who worked on one of the actors on this show yes uh so yes john vd wrote uh 25 episodes of the simpsons and is behind classics like lisa substitute radio bart a mr plow and cape fear and he wrote all of the Simpsons and is behind classics like Lisa Substitute, Radio Bart, Mr. Plow, and Cape Fear. And he wrote all of the early clip shows, only one of them under his actual name.

Yeah. I mean, at gunpoint, he wrote them. It's funny on the commentaries. He's just like, this contractual obligation was completed with this third clip show. So he left in the mass exodus of writers in season four, but would come back to write the season seven premiere for Bill and Josh. They picked him because they knew he could make an amazing episode. And he also came back in Al Jean's early second tenure to write a few episodes in the early 2000s. So he's got about like five or six between 2002 and 2004 or something like that. He's I mean, he's one of the best, you know, we, you can talk about the Harvardness of it. Mike Reese gets defensive in his book about it because he, uh, he talks about how like, oh, you think it's just Harvard guys hiring Harvard guys, but you know, Sam Simon hired all of us and he never went

to Harvard. So the cronyism begins then when those guys took over and started hiring more Harvard guys. But I mean, VD too, he was one of the three guys uh on army man with meyer and swartzwell you're right about that yeah i mean he wasn't i think it is it goes like meyer's swartzwelder and then vd unlike who wrote the most on army man but he was an army man writer too so it's uh it's not just that he's a lampoon old friend of the friends there. So basically everybody left the show in season four because The Simpsons was not a union show. No one was making royalties.

And this was the era of huge development deals for network TV. And they're all being obscenely overworked, too. That, too. That's a huge part of it. Harvard kids aren't used to that. No, no. Just getting that bell curve they give them. They adjust their grades.

Because they're all sons of oil barons, is my understanding of the scenario. It's very hard to work with all those silver spoons in your mouth. It's distracting. So he left The Simpsons to become a creative consultant on The Critic, where he wrote a few episodes of that. And then he worked on the Sam Simon co-created ABC sitcom Phenom as the co-executive producer.

I watched all of Phenom. I cannot tell you a single episode what happened in any of them. Well, I mean, Simon, at least, though, he was watching out for his buddy. He's one of his best writers, too. It makes sense. And that was a Gracie Films ABC sitcom. The second one, the second one the first one was called sibs and nobody knows about that so you watched all of that i did not see all of

sibs i watched all of phenom i think because it was on like after home improvement what was it called again phenom it was about like a tennis like a like a little tennis pro oh yeah it was like a young girl who was a tennis pro who then wants to live a normal life, I think it was. So you watched that instead of Return of the Jedi? Yes. I think I've seen more minutes of Phenom than Star Wars. But yeah, it starred, this is so stupid, it starred the little girl Chrissy from Growing Pains and also Judith Light from Who's the Boss? So two former sitcom stars. Talking too much about Phenom.

Let's talk about what other stuff John VD did. So he also worked on things like King of the Hill, The Larry Sanders Show, and the third Gracie sitcom for ABC, What About Joan? What About Joan? I don't know that one at all. The thing about Joan is they didn't air the episodes that they made for it. So that was the Joan Cusack sitcom. Ten episodes remain unaired of that. It was right before September 11th.

And the last thing about John Vitti, before this goes on too long, is that he wrote the amazing Alvin and the Chipmunks, I believe, 2007 movie, which he swears his script is much better than the final movie, but he also wrote the Squeakquel and the Angry Birds movie. So, there

you have it. He's getting paid. Have you We Hated movies, any of those films? No, not yet. Man, not even. I was sure the Chipmunks had been done. No, I don't know. Sometimes we're like, oh, we'll save stuff. Everyone else is jumping on it.

We'll save it. 10 years later, we'll come around the corner with it. But I've never seen it. But part of me suspects it might be even too bad to even talk about it is fun to hear the writers uh roast him on some commentaries about that movie he's like i swear the script was good the script i turned in was funny uh i mean his angry birds film sounds better by comparison and i think just uh i think he also oh in the ice age movies i think he was like a big consultant but yeah he

wrote my favorite critic which was the siskel and ebert one that was a john beattie episode uh well and also the uh my favorite critics duke philip disease episode oh that's duke's oil yeah duke's oil or sherman's oil uh something like whatever anyway that episode uh is really great and it also has a make you up a word in Scrabble joke as well in it. That is true. Yeah. You know, Eric, too, I wanted to ask, like, where were you 30 years ago when this episode aired? I was a young boy in the Catskill Mountains living in a very, I guess, unusual life, for instance.

Now, this is kind of like your Return of the Jedi thing, Bob, is I've played scrabble not till this day i've still never played scrabble wow you're you don't have a family of nerds that makes you play scrabble no i lived i lived on a mountain so you weren't watching this show then in the in the first episode i was actually funny enough um once the simpsons really debuted and started really getting going it might have been a year or two after this episode, I was in a Boy Scouts type organization. I think it was the Boy Scouts. I don't have to say type of organization. But I dropped out because the troop meet was the same time as The Simpsons. And I was like, no, I got to pick.

I think that was by design. They did not want you watching that show. It was to protect you. Yeah. This whole episode opens with a Scrabble set piece, but I remember distinctly the Christmas of 1991, there was a miscommunication in the family, and I somehow got two of the same Scrabble sets.

What? By like an uncle and my parents. Just like, we have two Scrabble boards. Which one do I want to use today? Pick them off the shelf. Yeah, my family, mom's side, loves Scrabble boards. Which one do I want to use today? Pick them off the shelf. Yeah, my family mom's side loves Scrabble. It actually, we don't play it anymore at family get-togethers of her side of the family because the last couple times were like, some people had a little too many fun drinks and people,

especially with the advent of the internet. That's when the slurs come out. Well, no, but it is like when people go, that's not a word. Yes, it is. I'm looking online. That's not the rules that's when the slurs come out well no but it is like when people go that's not a word yes it is i'm looking online that's not the rules you where's the dictionary blah blah blah like it's uh it gets very tense i think scrabble was just invented to make people argue and destroy families i think when i look back at this episode it's i think a obviously we'll probably say this 800 times in this season yes and i will not apologize for repeating myself from five years ago it's going to happen i didn't listen those episodes again before this so please bear with me if those are somehow fresh in your mind

which they shouldn't be uh but this was not the first episode there was some enchanted evening which is the airing final episode and fully redone but the planned first episode that would be the first regular episode of simpsons people would see was some enchanted evening this was going to be the second one but i think they really luck was on their side 800 times in a row on the simpsons that made it the phenomenon it was a phenom but uh but but this being the first regular episode was so smart because Simpsons Mania was really Bart Mania. And this is a Bart episode where Bart says his catchphrases, does cool things, is the main character. Like, I think by starting with this one, this is what got kids into the show making The Simpsons They Hit It would be.

And the next episode is about Homer killing himself. Yes. It's a real rollercoaster ride this season. That one still starts with some Bart, though. That is true, yeah. It's a Bart first act. Do we want to talk about the very strange first version of this opening

where the dissipation of the clouds at first just takes way too long and makes me anxious? There's a fade into the intro. There's not like a hard smash into the intro, just like a gentle fade. The clouds take about five seconds to part. And all of the weird season one stuff is in this intro. Sorry, Eric.

No, no, no. It's just, it is a longer intro. Like, I had totally forgotten this. Like, there's people waiting for a bus at some point, one of which looks like an old Bart Simpson. Yeah, I wrote in my notes, Bart is stealing from himself in the future. It's a looper scenario.

And Krusty's on the screen. I mean, they hadn't established the Springfield cast yet, so there's just rando dudes. Instead of Smithers and Burns behind Homer at the Power Planets, a guy. It's just some guy with a beard line. And I mean, most of the characters in the background in the intro, they break all the rules of the show, too. Yeah. I mean, they lost a lot from this intro. One of the things that I actually like is the shot of Lisa riding her bike going over the bump. That's such a great shot. Yeah. All the books sort of go up in the air and then fall back down in that little belted loop she has. Very cool. Yeah. That's such a cool shot that they'd they'd kept it i and on the commentary

graining so it's so i'm so glad that me and you are coming back to this too after we did the shorts like me and you did a lengthy patreon only exploration of the shorts because you can see how shorts decisions followed into this first season and on the commentary graining talks about how this intro is way longer than even intros were in 1990 for most shows. For the same reason he wanted some shorts to happen during blackouts. Because he's like, I just want to make things easier on the animators. Let's just have something long so there's less animation. But as the show would go on, they'd have to keep cutting.

Well, they kind of go between really loving having a long intro because episodes would sometimes come in short but other times episodes run really long and they have to just cut straight to the credits of the creator and develop by and i think this is the first couch gag and possibly the only one where the couch gag extends past the shot of the couch where bart falls down in front of the tv in front of the develop by credits i kind of wish they kept that i think it should be a like using him falling as the transition between created by and developed by i think that's a really cool idea or have just something happen that's an extension of the couch gag you saw but that's just even more work and also the chalkboard gag of like i will not waste chalk that's a good i i think that's a

good first chalkboard gag yeah definitely well something else to consider that opening two of the clouds it reminds me of a thing that was in mike reese's book that like blew my mind the joke that nobody ever got was that it says the simpsons but it says the simps as in simpletons and then ons comes in after that so so subtle that even after him telling me that i'm like i still don't see it i'm sorry it's like a magic eye poster for me i mean season one is littered with two subtle things that when you read the script or hear the writers or artists talk about it you're like oh that was the joke oh that harvard nuance there is one thing in here i noticed for the first time that just blew my mind i was like you guys tried way too hard on this 30 years later 60 viewings

later was the first time i was like oh that's a joke i had no idea we'll get to it i hope it's we'll galaxy brain everybody out there too um i also uh want to compliment those 2001 dvds for something I didn't use the last time we did this either. Me and you both read the script, like the table read script from May 1989 of this episode is on the DVD. And there are a few, but not as many as you think, changes in there too. Just a few. I'll point them out when we get there. But I also think, you know, we talk about how Some Enchanted Evening was such a difficult thing that the story behind the scenes was that if the next episode came in that poorly, they might just cancel the whole idea of launching it in 1990 or restart over. Like, it would have caused even bigger production issues. But

Bart the Genius came in good enough that they that they went with it and this is john vd's first written half hour of television and david silverman's first directed half hour of television so uh yeah it's amazing it's insane this worked and it's also matt graining's first tv show he's ever run it's klaski chupo's first ever half hour show they've done and james l brooks and sam simon's first cartoon series like the fact that it worked at all is insanity like the the odds are against it uh and i do think you watch if you watch the shorts and then go to this one silverman was definitely there's parts of this that just feel like oh this is an extended short this scene is a short this scene is a short and silverman's

kind of stitching them together in layout you know but i do think it mostly works i do think i all the smart kid stuff in here it is like graining feeling like bart in a writer's room full of harvard guys i could see that yeah i mean we've heard it from other people who've experienced that writer's room that the you know the brains around you can be so intimidating when you're like a college dropout or whatever right they'll steal steal your lunch by talking about the weight on weight of it on jupiter uh we we heard a previous guest kate raft who she was a i believe writer's assistant was her position on simpsons yeah yeah she told this funny thing that

feels like one of the kids from the show where she said she heard one of the writers, she didn't say who, but she heard one of the writers say, it's an intera bang, not a bang intera when you put question mark

then exclamation point. You don't do it the other way. That feels like such a brainy nerd kid thing to say. I don't know a single word you just said. I'm being know a single word you just said. I'm being one of the gifty kids now. Well, in Tarabang is where you see question mark exclamation point at the end of a sentence.

What? I just did it. See? Oh. Wow. Bob was even smarter than me. Yes. I have a master's degree, by the way.

That's where it all comes in handy. We're banging on this podcast. The Simpsons will be right back. The 60s had the Cleavers. The 70s had the Bradys. And the 80s had the Huxtables. Now, introducing a television family you can finally believe in. Who are those people?

The Simpsons. Don't shove Maggie. She's just a little baby. Don't hit your little sister. She's a girl. Keep your hands off him, Homer! They may look a little funny. You kissed me. Well, nothing wrong with a father kissing his son, I think. But they're as real as it gets.

The Simpsons premieres Sunday, January 14th. How we use electricity can be smarter, cleaner and greener. At Electric Ireland, we can help guide you there. You see, our new Net Zero hub has all you need to know about smart meter plans, EV tariffs, solar panels, and much more. Making your usage clearer, your trips greener, your home cozier, and your world brighter. Find our Net Zero Hub at electricireland.ie. Hey everybody, it's mediocre geniusocre Genius Henry Gilbert at the break and thanks so much to our guest Eric Siska

for coming on this week's podcast for Martha Genius as we're starting up our revisiting of season one. We really appreciate him joining us for the 30th anniversary and please check out We Hate Movies and all the other cool stuff he does. Now the Talking Simpsons podcast is only able to do cool things like revisiting the first season for the 30th anniversary thanks to the support of subscribers at patreon.com slash talking simpsons folks who subscribe to the talking simpsons network get to hear every episode of our podcast a week at a time and at free and the same goes for

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But yeah, I guess let's get to the opening here. I love on the commentary, Grady even says, this is a slow-paced episode. Ooh, yes. There's a lot of air in some of these scenes. Yeah, not as many jokes per second as I'm used to. I think once the writers see what episodes come back with from their scripts, they're like, oh, we need to shove in more stuff. Yeah.

I guess I should say they're working on all these before they know what the show will look or sound like they're writing all these scripts at once and then like after they start coming back they know what the show can do that's very fair on one future commentary jay cogan will say that they didn't when they were writing it they they weren't aware the wife's name was marge they're like they wrote julie in it instead mr burns is like mr meanie yes yeah i uh well also like when you see the original script that's on the dvd you can see that like there's few producer credits at the start like you actually get to writer almost instantly in the credits in the opening and that i think is because they didn't have a ton of on-staff producers to heavily rewrite a script after the table read which has been the practice since like season two onward so there you know this is a purer episode of the show from

script to screen but uh i think it you know it does suffer from not being as tightly written but here why don't we give a listen to the first lines on The Simpsons? Oh, wait. Here's a good one. Do. Id. Triple word score. Hey, no abbreviation. Not I-D, Dad. Id. It's a word. As in, this game is stupid. Hey, shut up, boy. Yeah, Bart. You're supposed to be developing verbal abilities for your big aptitude test tomorrow. We could look this id thing up in the dictionary.

We got one? I think it's under the short leg of the couch. Ed, along with the ego and the super ego, one of three components of the psyche. Get out of here. That's a long scene. It really is. One thing I don't think they really figured out that much was Lisa. I think they knew she was precocious, but I think

Bart being recognized as a genius and not her would have been a huge angle of this story if they had figured her out by now there's some slight touches on it in later scenes and there's like one extra line in the original script that makes it more clear but it also is like there i think the writers knew it was there but they were just too subtle in the touching on it they're like yeah she's when she says aptitude there that's showing that lisa is smart but they are completely overlooking here because they she's written as the overlooked middle child that's all they really had for lisa in season one uh there was one like visual gag right because homer's scrabble uh words was like it was an actual word yeah

oxidize yeah yeah that was fun That was fun. I did something. I like that they're all stupid in just doing two-letter words. Yeah. Elisa's is the smart, is still a two-letter word, but smart. And you can see that

John VD is trying really hard to justify all of these choices where they're playing Scrabble because Bart has his IQ test tomorrow. That is the reason why in two years, they could just be like, oh, they're just playing Scrabble. Here's a fun set piece. That is the reason why in two years they could just be like, oh, they're just playing Scrabble. Here's a fun set piece.

But he has to really set it up like, okay, why are they playing Scrabble? And what does that lead into? So yeah, he's working very hard as a first-time TV writer. Because no normal person would be playing Scrabble. There's got to be some ulterior motive. It's a training exercise. I played a thousand games when I took the GRE.

Well, the first joke of the episode is like maggie writing e equals mc squared with her blocks which sets up from the beginning that maggie is supposed to be the secretly the smartest simpson as well and there are a lot of still just uh you know uh weird background jokes happening just in one of the shots you still see a lot of the shorts gags where the gag is like look how many doorways there are in the background and then there's a painting of doorways next to the impossible doorways it's just very weird so many weird background jokes and there's also like a a photograph of homer like screaming in the background like there's so many just pictures of the family all over the place yeah now i want a photo of my father screaming framed on the wall and also the coloring is just like it's gradient like it's really i wonder if

you remember in the deleted original version of some enchanted evening there's no backgrounds i'm wondering if they made the choice of like, oh, we'll color in the backgrounds digitally later. It'll be easier to do no backgrounds. But like the gradient is just so distracting. I believe in the next season they moved on to like cell backgrounds with solid colors. But this one is just like very it's a little messier. And also like Marge's dress is almost her skin color. And the banana Homer grabs is all the wrong color too and i feel bad for like they uh you know they kind of dump on their uh korean not too harshly but they dump on the korean

uh overseas animators a little bit for not getting things right but like they're handed this show they've never done before and then on top of that are like draw scrabble letters it's all english letters that are not your alphabet just and then they all fly into the air just do that i i feel for them me too yeah uh but yes as a seven-year-old all the crappy words they were doing i didn't get the joke or could knew what oxidize was so i would have just been the kid doing like the or him or do as marge does there's also not much to marge in this episode too she's she's very much your shorts version of like oh dear where's bart but yes bart though has his own fun word my turn quijibo k w y j i b o 22 points plus triple word My turn. Quidgy bow. K-W-Y-J-I-B-O. 22 points, plus triple word score,

plus 50 points for using all my letters. Game's over. I'm out of here. Wait a minute, you little cheater. You're not going anywhere until you tell me what a quidgy bow is. Quidgy bow. Uh, a big, dumb, balding, North American ape with no chin. And a short temper. I'll show you a big, dumb, balding North American ape with no chin.

And a short temper. I'll show you a big, dumb, balding ape. Uh-oh, Quigibow on the loose. It's a very short ending to an Allman thing, too. It does feel like a short, yeah. And also Marge's exclamation, and a short temper. Yeah, Marge is in on the joke. Yeah.

It's a very, it's that old thing. You know what the made-up word was in critic quizabuck quizabuck quidgy bow and quizabuck not too dissimilar these made-up words dutastrophe was better yeah what a duke licious saying but i do want to say that quidgy bow did not really stick around as a meme of its time it was not a line that was referenced i think they thought maybe they had something there it's a fun joke and i think uh slightly memorable but it did stick around in pop culture because the guy who created the melissa computer virus in the late 90s his online handle was quijibo do you remember when viruses were notable enough to be named and have

new stories about them yeah those were the days really honestly now mcafee or mcafee he eliminated all the viruses before he went insane yeah he's uh hey don't say that about him bobber he'll come to you from his sex island thank you what a bastard that guy is because i want to know all these weird hacker names because it makes me think of that classic film hackers and now i i could be imagining the adventures of quijobo being locked on the roof of a school, thinking there's a pool up there or whatnot. Well, this guy was no Angelina Jolie. I saw a picture. He's a typical dumpy nerd.

Was he actually a dumb ape from North America? He had sort of the body and posture of one, maybe. But he got like 20 months in prison. I think he was one of the first people to serve time for making a virus. And also, for some reason, if you... So here's a quote from a news story that I got about the Melissa virus. If the user launched this document

that had the virus, if they launched a document, your computer became infected. Although, if you launch a document when the day equaled the minute value, like, let's say 20 minutes past uh whatever hour on the 29th you would get bart's message on the screen where 22 points plus your reward score blah blah blah like yeah for whatever reason like if you open the document at a certain time you

would get bart's message from the episode that's that's the fun cyberpunk prankster i want in this world like that yeah these guys never they never look like angelina jolie or even keanu reeves in the matrix with his online name or um chris hemsworth in that film black hat nobody saw that i actually liked black cat when i saw it but i i gotta go back and revisit it i just know it is a thing nobody watched the uh oh yeah homer yeah they they remark on the commentary the apparent they think no one in korea had seen a banana before because the color is just all wrong on it but it's more like a plantain yeah though though i think it's a challenge for these first time the first time

you're animating this show like here's these yellow characters do you make the banana the same color as their skin what do you do with it i mean if you look at the kitchen curtains you'll see like half the time they're painted as corn half the time they're painted as carrots nobody colors their skin what do you do with it i mean if you look at the kitchen curtains you'll see like half the time they're painted as corn half the time they're painted as carrots nobody knows what's going on uh also they they note several times including when homer says do it's a trumpet mouth like these long like anteater kind of mouth when they say do that left the mouth charts uh pretty soon into season two i think that's it's one of those many things that like season one uh al jean said this about season one of the critic after reflecting

on the simpsons like season one of an animated show is all practice it's only learning things to do better in season two and i mean graining all i note in this are notes all i note in this are things i've heard graining say of like, oh, I hate that. Oh, this is wrong. Oh, I hate this. Such as the look of every child at Springfield Elementary. Oh, God. They all break.

They're just these freakish monsters. Like all escape from life and hell. The comic. They have the life and hell dot eyes. A lot of them do. And also the Bart and Lisa hair of the hair that's same skin tone to a lot of them do and also the the bard and lisa hair of the hair hair that same skin tone to a lot of a lot of broken rules and they're also playing marbles which yeah yeah which is like uh you know antiquated on purpose but for the first time in my life i actually looked up to

see what this jump rope chant was all about oh because it's like when they're you know doing the establishing shot of the school we see you know kids playing jump rope doing a jump rope chant and uh I misheard it every time but this time, so I went to Frankie Act, which did not exist when we first did these episodes. Yeah, yeah. So the jump rope chant is, we come from Springfield and we sell swampland.

And that is a phrase meaning you're a bullshitter. Like, if you believe that, I got a bridge to sell you, buddy. That's what it means. It's like sort of establishing the town is full of con men and bullshitters. This is like a Harvard expression. to sell you buddy that's what it means it's like sort of establishing the town is full of like con men and you know bullshitters this is like a harvard expression man i never i yeah that's great i thought it was we come from springfield in the south swampland meaning springfield is built on a shitty swamp who cares but it's like no the kids know the town is full of swindlers

and con men so there you go uh and then we see uh bart doing his classic bart crimes of spray painting he does skinner's face and then as a cross dissolved to had this aired in the correct order the first appearance of principal skinner and he is uh very flatly played as a boring disciplinarian though with a little a little goofy weirdness to him from harry sheer's performance i think mostly and it's weird to see bart actually fear him yeah yeah now all these jokes they talk about on the commentary that their original plan with skinner is that he was going to be constantly trying to get bart expelled from school like that was his dream to do that and we see that in the uh the france episode later yes yeah yeah he does the exchange

program thing i think the last vestige of that was when he got him expelled in whacking day i think that's the the last time skinner was trying to get bart out of his school like a ferris bueller mr rooney type of relationship yeah he's skinner is just so clearly played as an 80s film principal. Complete with a toupee, which they never made a joke about. I'm so glad they never did. Yeah, his hairline is so clearly drawn to be a toupee. Just the line between his top of his hair and the rest of his hair. He's so supposed to just like...

Yeah, it's like a hat. You can just pull it right off. Yeah, and I don't want to belabor every change that happens between season one and later seasons but his colors are so fun and weird wild so instead of having the aqua jacket lavender shirt and pink tie he's got the he's got like a prince purple suit jacket he's got like the the new kevin smith jacket he's wearing and a pink shirt it's so garish and his hair is like a lighter brown, too. Skinner is wild. And we also get in this next clip, not only Skinner,

but the first appearance of the greatest teacher's pet that ever lived, Martin and Prince. You there! No chewing gum on school grounds. In the trash can with it. Principal Skinner, one of my fellow children is vandalizing school property.

Oh, where? Over there, sir. See? Look out, Bart. Here comes Skinner. Yikes. Hmm. Whoever did this is in very deep trouble. And a sloppy speller, too.

The preferred spelling of wiener is w-i-e-n-e-r, although e-i is an acceptable ethnic variant. Good point. Boys, let's see your hands. Good. Okay. Simpson. You might say you caught him red-handed. Simpson, you and I are going to have a little talk. Same time, same place? place yes in my office after school what a scene yeah the one thing i see uh memed all the time is the very weird shot of skinner looking down at the kids from that upward angle and i always see the text pathetic yeah that's that's right that's where that's from yeah that's such a perfect meme there's there's so many great drawings from these original seasons that like

they got stamped out for the greater good of the show get becoming more you know fluid and and set but i there's just so many wild pictures and that's one of them just how imposing and square and just like odd he looks from that angle and we do see i believe for the first time richard and lewis the uh very personality free pals of bart's i do love the martin line of one of my fellow children yes that's good and then right after this he's got some line about like i was merely trying to fend off the desecration of the school building. I love that he's just a proud teacher's pet who doesn't even know that it's wrong. The Bart Gets an F episode in season two is such a sequel to this, right down to Martin finally realizing like, oh, everyone hates me.

He really isn't doing this to be hated. He thinks he's a good popular kid. It's weird to see oblivion. It's weird to see a version of Martin. That's not just a vehicle for gay jokes. Yes. Yeah. I mean, that would be the new joke starting in like maybe season three.

I think when they ran out of things to do with him. I think his loot is the first time they explicitly effeminate. Let's say that voice is the late russie taylor yeah just recently passed away uh she's uh i mean most iconic for mini mouse and also the nephews on pretty much every duck thing you've seen uh though i think you know this is her most i think martin prince is her most iconic non-Disney character in her career. I would say so, yeah. And I think she was another of those lucky people in the right place at the right time. We talked about this in the Simpsons Roasting Podcast, but they cast a lot of cartoon voices of the 80s to do a lot of roles.

And some folks, like Christopher Collins, didn't make the cut. They didn't work out. There was just a friction but russie taylor like she fit in like her and pamela hayden like these these lifers of 80s cartoons they were able to make the transition into the show and i think she's really really good as martin prince like she makes this very lightly written character into something more memorable just from his like especially i love the delivery like is an acceptable ethnic variant like that's such a funny line and yeah also the you know skinner's statement of like same time or bart saying same time same place i feel like that must be a specific from somebody's some writer's childhood because don de linger says

the same thing as a homer and barney in the way we was episode well i think a lot of skinner is taken from life and hell like the autobiographical uh episodes of that and he looks very much like the teacher that's always yelling at bongo or macaraning stand-in in those comics so i think macaraning is drawing a lot of his own childhood from this. There's also only one shot in this episode, I think, where Milhouse has his correct hair color. Yeah. When he's telling Bart, like, Bart, put it away. Skinner's coming. That bit.

Also, another thing I didn't know until reading that script is that Richard and Lewis are identified as two of his other friends and are explicitly stated that Lewis isis is african-american and that richard is asian he really says in there that richard is to be read as asian i guess i can kind of see that in a way maybe but i don't think that's what they carried forth i never in animation read richard as an asian child and he also appeared very rarely in it i mean you know maybe now even though obviously richard lewis seems like the the reference with his two friends do you think it could be a richard sakai reference if he is supposed to be an asian student that is a very good point i've never even heard that before but that's amazing yeah it was shocking to see in the in the book because like the wiki doesn't even

identify him as as asian or not yeah they don't give him the simpsons asian skin color but i'm looking at the character now and he does have like uh narrower eyes so i can see how from design he could have been intended to be asian well it's not until season two that they go to a japanese restaurant or i think meet a oh well no there there are i guess we'll have to note how asian women are drawn in the um million girls song that's coming up oh yeah that's right let's see how they they figure out how simpsons work in the world of it uh how asians work in the world of simpsons but anyway yeah bart also there's so many great drawings of bart from like different angles that they they never did in the shorts yeah i think they learned after this year

front-facing characters are not the most appealing to look at and also they get a little too close to the faces sometimes yeah it's a lot to figure out they later use that as like a gag where like moe's trying to kiss uh what was it helen hunt's character oh yeah a thousand years from now on the show yeah i mean i mean moe is one of the most disgusting looking front facing as would as would be a constant joke in the show uh and but yes in the next scene we also meet miss krabappel for the first time also voiced by the late marshall wallace uh or voiced by the late marshall wallace just another another uh no longer voice actor. Plus, we get to hear the first time Bart says his classic catchphrase.

Bart, I hope you won't bear some sort of simple-minded grudge against me. I was merely trying to fend off the desecration of the school building. Eat my shorts. No, I don't want you to worry, class. These tests will have no effect on your grades. They merely determine your future social status and financial success. If any. Mrs. Krabappel, isn't Bart supposed to face the window so he won't be tempted to look at his neighbor's paper?

You're right, Martin. Bart! Remember to visualize the complex problems. And relax. The test will start... Now! Oh, Marsha Wall is so great. I didn't realize she passed away so long ago.

So 2013. Late 2013. But at least they retired her character. Yeah. I wish they had killed off Krabappel. Like, in-universe, she's dead. Killing another one of Ned's wives. Oh, so sad.

I have not seen the show in a while. They killed off Krabappel? Yes, yeah. After Marsha Walliles passed away. Krabappel in the show married Ned. Yeah. That happened. A big viral thing for the show was Nedna.

Nedna. Did you vote on who Edna would marry or something? I mean, people could vote. I didn't vote. What was the other choice? I think it was to stick with Skinner or get back with Skinner. Oh, yeah. I think it was.

Which I wouldn't. You know what? I should have voted for that. That shows you the dangers of not voting. That's my OTP with Skinner or get back with Skinner. Oh, yeah. Which I wouldn't. You know what? I should have voted for that. That shows you the dangers of not voting. That's my OTP, Skinner and Edna. It's an important year. Go out and vote. But vote for Skinner.

I mean, anyway. Yeah, no, Edna and him were together. And so there is an episode where they play what must have been the last recorded thing they had of marcia wallace which is edna and ned dancing somewhere and then they reveal that that scene was just a dream by ned and he's wearing a black armband and he's like oh i miss her and that's very maudlin and they would do episodes after that of like bart gets a new teacher like a revolving door of teachers to replace krabappel and it's just you know i guess he has to have a new teacher like a revolving door of teachers to replace krabappel and it's just you know i guess he has to have a new teacher because so many stories originate at the elementary school

so you need bart to have a teacher but uh it's just a bummer just a bummer i can do like a little mini bio on her i don't think we really did one originally so uh before this if you want to know where she came from she was a regular player on the murph griffin show something that was you know people that were alive in the 70s know about but i have never seen outside of like seinfeld doing a whole episode about the sets uh and also most famously on the bob newhart show as bob sarcastic receptionist and after that she made a ton of appearances on game shows and was a ton of guest characters on things like Columbo and Murder, She Wrote and all that fun stuff. And she won an Emmy in 92 for Bart the Lover for her performance in the episode Bart the Lover.

A great episode. She's so great at that. She really earned it. Yeah, I watched many a rerun of the Bob Newhart show on Nick at Night to see Marsha Wallace on it. Oh, yeah. And also she was the maid in That's My Bush. Ooh, yes. Well, she did a good job in that show.

Yeah, she did a good job in that. It was good. It was cool to see her like, oh, that's what Ender Krabappel looks like. I mean, I guess that's less shameful than Teen Angel, her regular appearances in that show. I forgot about that. Yeah, Gina Reese put her in that. Miss Krabappel is such a one-off character. I don't think they had plans for her about that. Yeah, Gina Reese put her in that. Miss Crabapple is such a one-off character. I don't think they had plans for her beyond that.

And such a broad joke that her name is Crabapple, but no one ever mispronounces it. Everybody knows it's pronounced Crabapple. I was calling her Crandall. That's one of the best jokes. Yeah. Yeah, I was calling her Crandall. That's one of the best jokes. Yeah, I feel like, I don't know if she was intended to be a returning character because of the Marshall Walls connection. Is she in any other season one episodes? Actually, she's in the next episode. Oh, okay.

Overseeing the class field trip at Homer's Odyssey. Because of her counterpart. So it's killing me and I have to talk about this now. Because this is my galaxy brain thing. Because I'll stop talking about this with our season one exploration eventually but a lot of season one characters have really painful names uh a few of them now are just like part of our lives now so we don't think too hard about them like kerbopple like i see kerbopple a thousand times i never think of crabapple maybe one out of every thousand times like oh yeah crabapple i get

it skinner named after bf skinner who cares but there's people like mr largo largo is a musical term uh there's also you know jay lauren prior he pries into your life things like that like working too hard to make these character names funny quote unquote so later we're going to meet miss milan and that is another mispronounced fruit name miss melon melon meaning head. What's in your head? Your brain. So Miss Milan is the good version of Krabappel. So they're both teachers. They're two different sides of the same fruit pun coin.

And that is disgusting. They work too hard. 30 years later, I understand that is the joke. It's not a good joke either. It's not a great joke, but it's a little too smart for it so good i yes until i read it in the script i never got that until this very day that it's melon like like no one mispronounces melon so mel milan krabappel two teachers both voiced by

marshall wallace i think last time we got the milan joke but uh before that i was like it's so weird she voices both of these teachers it's very distracting yeah that's why it feels like such a one-off casting too of just like well marsha wallace plays both sides of teachers anyway we'll never use her again they're like we don't have we don't have plans for her we don't have plans that she's going to be like the sexy divorcee in town none of these things are in mind for these characters. I do love the talk about great drawings. When she says now, it's such a wild, goofy drawing of her mouth open there. Also speaking of great moments in the show, that is Bart saying his catchphrase, eat my shorts there for the first time uh which you know on the commentary

they are very defensive about the catchphrases because john vini like makes it clear that they wanted bart saying things like eat my shorts to be read as bart watches too much television and repeats what he sees on tv it was not a planned catchphrase that would be put on t-shirts for forever yeah the next year i had like an eat my shorts a poster in my room i mean the second the brand operators and all the folks selling things heard eat my shorts or don't have a cowman they only read it as not a deep commentary on catchphrases but as the catchphrases we will put on t-shirts and every other thing which i mean it said it on my sheets i had my simpson sheets had bart saying all those words all the best insults of the 60s also there is speaking of subtle jokes in there when martin tells a krabappel

that bart needs to turn his desk another kid like, like, there's a girl in the class who slaps her forehead of the expression of, oh my God, this kid. Oh, I didn't see that. No, wow. It is played so lightly, you completely miss it. Usually there'd be a loud sound effect in this season. Yeah, you know what?

The sound effects are not half as overactive as they were in a month prior with simpsons roasting on open fire there's not a licensed song playing in the background of every scene i i think maybe after that aired they realized they're like oh rework that sound mix gotta turn all this stuff down that's one of the things they can do afterwards yeah there's a ton of front-facing bart here as he's taking his iq test which uh this all feels like graining getting back at the schooling he had as a kid of just all all the ways that they placed order on kids or all these expectations and pressure they gave and he said one of the best parts about being

a creator is revenge and that's very true yes i i love the revenge it's the greatest it is uh my greatest creative outlet, I think. And yeah, I mean, he's getting revenge on his teachers who told him, stop drawing, cartoon boy. Pay attention. You'll never amount to anything. All the things he probably had to hear growing up as a boomer child in America's 60s. And then Bart has a very long uh visualization sequence yeah and i guess uh from the beginning they thought we're not going to do dream sequences but this is sort of a test saying like what can we do with this medium and this was so successful within the staff of the show they did more but

this is all david silverman i believe he was drawing from a project he did in college where he was doing the set design for a play called the adding machine it's about an accountant going crazy so as the play progresses he works more and more numbers into the set design so that's what's happening in this little set piece is that as this dream gets crazier and more chaotic you see more numbers in the background but a lot of weird characters i love all the bystanders are so you know non-characteristic they're just like uh ziggy people i think i related to this a lot i i could never do a word problem or any math really whatsoever this level of math is about where i was good at i really i was i was gifted in the opposite sense these uh no i mean The word problems, they

could be tough for me, but once it came down to just blank times blank or blank divided by blank, once I could break it down to that, I could figure it out. Anything beyond algebra, I couldn't do that. I love remembering all the teachers saying, you won't have a calculator on you all the time when you're an adult. Guess what?

I have all the world's information in my pocket. I mean, they taught us nothing, us nothing right nothing really i don't want to dissuade your younger listeners that you you might have but nothing you learn you nothing you learn in elementary school or high school really is you know as long as you put your pants on you know i don't know wash every so often you're good unless you're gonna get into harvard and run the world then exactly i guess that's the thing because everyone it's everyone who controls all of entertainment i guess i mean it predates the show or we're just uh good at math when they were kids so if you want

to be a comedian one day get good at math when you're six years old or i mean also if you want to be like a politician who decides who bombs what like you also have to do it's a quote i think about from our friends of the show at chapwood trap house the people that are running the world were just good at high school yeah which is a terrifying yes horrifying uh so i guess it matters for the like 0.0001% of students that the system is made to elevate. But other than that, it doesn't matter so much. This reminds me of the career aptitude normalizing test from season three, Separate Vocations,

where one test will determine your future career. Yeah. A lawyer bird. I think that episode basically just reworks this idea. It's a funnier version of that joke yeah but the but bart's dream sequence all in black and white like wild drawings where i think they they get away this we talk about the the you know major art decisions they make in this one in the dream sequence they get to be even looser with the rules at the time like bart has like a looney tunes head

head getting giant scream a moment there or that oh that you i saw you tweet out the image of martin like the dream the conductor the coal shovel turning his head around just this crazy animation of martin's face appearing on an adult yeah yeah that's terrifying and the ticket taker is doing like a peter lorry impression oh yeah that's dan castellaneta doing peter lorry yeah it's an early example of dan doing his thing of like oh uh there's a random character in the script what if i just did a random impersonation as that person's voice it was reminding me of the the movie m where where uh peter lorry is a child murderer just like just the idea of peter lorry luring a child it's maybe it's a dark joke i don't

know you took this to a darker place at least yeah who knows what my mind works it's not about math it's about dark things it's uh that's a great film oh god what a great yeah but uh yeah there's so many great drawings of this that there's also when bart falls out of the dream sequence like that also feels like an olman short ending of like he bart is told to do something he has a wild imagination and then goes ah and then falls down the fall down would be the end of the short like everyone reacting to him uh you know falling down and waking up or whatever yeah yeah but uh in this in this case martin just says that he i finished my test already he didn't interrupt me like i also like his mouth chart on that he has the big teeth like the little half circle teeth oh yeah i love those stupid teeth man martin has

this coming yeah he, he really does. I think they cut some stuff later in the script that I'll get to. But yes, Martin then gets to go outside and read. And they make faces at each other, which that is also some real David Silverman-y faces there. Especially Bart. My favorite is bart's like biting his upper lip with his bottom i mean there was like a short about face making right like a face bad face contest or scary face contest or whatever yeah i think he actually pulled some out of the

out of the shorts there entirely yeah and kerboppel sees him look out the window and says what's out there are those naughty dogs back again it's nothing but it's i don't it's just a funny line to me for no reason does it show that bart made up those dogs before and said oh uh there's some scary dogs outside like no i think the joke is there were dogs having sex out the window and the kids are very distracted oh wow your mind isn't filthy enough henry yeah that's definitely where it was it's not like a snagglepuss was going to the bathroom outside bart then is able in the distraction to grab martin's paper erase his name write bart's name at the top and then change over his bart's paper to martin's and bart randomly fills in uh the answers which this is the last time we see Martin in the episode,

but in the original script. Oh, we see him at the opera. Okay, you're right, you're right. I was wondering, like, this seems like a good B storyline of Martin going to, like, special education or something. Exactly. Does that happen? Well, the end of this act,

the joke in it originally is just them saying, like, and sometimes it's completely random how genius is born, whatever. It then goes in the script that Skinner and Pryor say, anyway, we have another meeting. And they go into the next room. Oh. And Martin and his parents are there. And they say, well, your child is going to need to take some remedial classes. And he'll never live a normal life well this this thing about like bart and martin changing roles was explored in what bark gets an f yeah that's uh

they've it's really it's a sequel episode to this one yeah sure yeah so uh but this they totally drop martin here martin should be punished for uh well he shouldn't be punished, I guess, but it's just desserts from all of his getting Bart in trouble that Bart damns him to a life of mistreatment. Well, Martin is going to grow up to be Ben Shapiro, so he deserves to be punished. I kind of wish they kept that little scene

in there. Yeah, it's unfortunate. Lose the opera! You needed to hear five songs from Carmen. They're all great jokes. But yes, Bart turns in his paper and has now been called after school. You know, when you talk about things being set up, it's right there, too. Skinner telling Bart to meet with me after school sets up why Marge and Homer are coming there when they receive the test results, too.

So it all hangs together in ways that are not necessary. Well, as future viewers of The Simpsons, you realize they're not necessary. Marge and Homer arrive with an odd walk cycle. All the panning shots of walking just don't line up well. They didn't really figure it out. I do love Homer's very stupid expression on his his laugh it's taken right from the shorts like the sort of bug-eyed uh wall-eyed laugh at the portrait of skinner yeah i'm sorry the graffito tag it's not a portrait yet

the uh yeah i think it's from the one where they go to the zoo and he's teasing the the monkeys yeah let's say dirt is thrown at his face i'll call it dirt yeah monkey dirt uh but yes the this also this scene of them arriving and talking about parenting in this next clip uh these are roles like homer and marge would not keep as father and mother of of bart but this shows marge as the soft touch and homer as the too harsh one he's a good boy now and he's getting better and sometimes even the best sheep stray from the flock and need to be hugged extra hard. That's exactly

the kind of crapola that's lousing him up. Hey, look at this. I am a wiener. He sure is. Mr. and Mrs. Simpson are here. Send them in. Hello again, Principal Skinner. What have you done this time, boy?

I caught your son defacing school property this morning. We estimate the damage at $75, and frankly, we think it's terribly unfair that other taxpayers should foot the bill. Yeah, it's a crummy system, but what are you going to do? Oh, no. He can't mean that. My wife thinks you want me to pay for it.

That was the idea. Oh. That's my, I think that's my favorite line of the episode, actually. The crummy system? Yeah, just like, I think it's terrible. The taxpayer should pay for that. Yeah, it's a crummy system. What are you going to do?

He's not reading between the lines. He's like, no, I agree with you. It is bad. But you got to pay for it. It's your 75 bucks. Like, yeah. And then Homer still doesn't get it. And he's like, my wife has a stupid idea that I'm supposed to pay for it.

And he pays with a check. I wonder what he'd pay with PayPal now. Venmo. He'd Venmo Skinner. Venmo Skinner. Bitcoin. I mean, Bitcoin, right? Yeah.

He's going to be into Bitcoin. Yeah, I think so. He'd fall into that, I think. But yeah, Marge's expression of like, sometimes the sheep stray from the flock and they need to be hugged extra tight. Marge does sound like a parrot in this episode. But it's funny to hear Homer's like, it's a kind of crapola. Crapola. You need to bring back crapola.

It's a great expression. Let's repopularize that again. Yeah, I think he's very much the walter mathau in this episode for sure still like the 60s dad yeah for the first couple seasons yeah and uh and you know skinner we see that bart's permanent record way more jokes about it than to i think though they it comes back every now and then i really loved how it came back in the Skinner and Edna romance episode because they just make it Milhouse's giant permanent record. Yeah, this is definitely Skinner is about to get Bart expelled. Like this is his long preamble to expelling Bart from the school.

And he's so ready to get rid of him. But unfortunately, he is interrupted by the iconic character of Dr. J. Lauren Pryor. Would make like one more appearance. I mean, as far as we know, there could be more. Lisa Sacks. He's also in Bart Gets an F. He's the one telling him to get held back. I forgot about that.

I think only two other speaking lines. But he has more lines in this episode than Edna. Like he is seemingly a very important character to the show. He has the voice of Mr. Burns. He's just Mr. Burns. Why don't we hear from Dr. J here? Well, at any rate, it is my reluctant decision. Mr. Skinner, Dr. Pryor

is here to see you. He says it's urgent. Send him in. Mr. and Mrs. Simpson, this is our district psychiatrist, Dr. J. Lauren Pryor. What do we need a psychiatrist for? We know our kid is nuts. Oh, on the contrary. I have some very exciting news for all of us. This aptitude test we administered this morning has revealed that the young Bart here is what we call a gifted child. A what?

Your son is a genius, Mr. Simpson. Bart? That's long-haired. Impossible. No, no, we're quite certain. The child is not supposed to know his own IQ, of course, but you can see it's beyond the range of any doubt 912 no you have it upside down it's 216 oh that's still amazingly high so i want to say the for the first time i sort of realized why he was using that voice it's because another actor was voicing burns at this time yeah so he's like well here's

a voice that can pull out of my pocket but then when he voiced burns he's like well actually this should be the burns voice so he was sort of when he was recast as burns he didn't know where to go except for to sort of turn this voice up a little bit more yeah no chris uh christopher collins had recorded burns for the next episode so he just he did his light ronald reagan i guess you'd say uh especially when he says well yeah yeah he did say well a lot but uh also lost in this time is the uh skinner's secretary never to return yeah the unseen secretary yeah nancy does a lot of incidental voices in season one that she would not she pretty much just sticks to kids uh after this but I like her as the voice of a receptionist on the other end. But yeah, J.

Lauren Pryor, they seem to think he'd be showing up a lot to explain the things that were wrong with Bart. But Skinner and Krabappel can just do that. And they're more fun. Exactly. Like, why add another school administrator? The best one, though, for him is Chalmers. Because as Skinner becomes less an authoritarian more of like a weak coward uh chalmers is the perfect counterpart to him just

to scare him at every turn yeah the power dynamic switching there yeah it's great uh but here skinner is supposed to be the tough one and he's he's listening to prior i also i love right after that that skinner skinner is doing the obvious thing of just saying, like, we'll make him take the test again. He's definitely not a genius. And the only reason he doesn't is because it's like, oh, he's going to leave the school? Then forget it. It's even better.

So that's another good plot justification of why Bart isn't found out sooner. And it just becomes an emperor's clothes scenario, which I do think that's like really smart writing that everything that Bart does that should prove him to not be a genius, everyone talks themselves into thinking like, well, a genius, but he's clearly so smart. They are eccentric. Yeah, they're also eccentric.

I mean, in this next bit here, prior explaining in this, this is a very long clip, but explaining how all the ways Bart acts could somehow define a genius is very funny. Tell me, Bart, are you ever bored in school? Oh, you bet. Never feel a little frustrated? All the time, sir. Do you ever dream of leaving your class to pursue your own intellectual development on an independent basis? It's like reading my mind, man.

You see, when a child with Bart's intellect is forced to slow down to the pace of a normal person, he's probably going to lash out in ways like these. I think we should retest him. No, no. I think we should move him to another school. Better yet. Bert, we'd like you to try a kind of school that doesn't rely on grades and rules and bells and buzzers. A school without walls, where you do as much or as little of the assignments as you feel you need to. Does that sound good, Bart?

Sign me up, Doc. Excellent. We're all set, then. Here's all the information you need. Show up around nine-ish. Mr. and Mrs. Simpson, congratulations once again. I think we're all in the mood to celebrate. This is all too much. I mean, my son a genius? How does it happen? Well, genius-level intelligence

is usually the result of heredity and environment. Although in some cases, it's a total mystery. You know, we compare that to roasting. There's almost no music and just like, there's birds chirping, but it's so much for quiet. And they cut back like that music sting at the end is rare.

Yeah, I think on the commentary they're talking about, they showed this episode to Barry Diller, who was the president of Fox. Look, he looked a lot like Mr. Burns, by the way. And he watched the episode. He's like, you're going to score this, right? You're going to put music on this. They're like, yeah, we're going to score this, right? You're going to put music on this. They're like, yeah, we're going to score it. So it was a very quiet show. Maybe the Christmas episode

was them just overcompensating, like, loud, loud, lots of music. Go, go, go. License five songs. Put them in the background. The drawings of Bart as he's being tested with calipers are so funny looking, too. But also, J. Lauren Pryor, he would be very popular in some online subsets now with his talk about how genius only comes from hereditary.

Certain skull shapes. Yeah, you have to measure skull shapes. Oh, my Lord. Yeah. And geez. So then we do we then go immediately to the charter school or whatever this is? Yeah. I mean, Bart gets sent to it after the next scene but

this charter school it uh you know it's like demoxenel it always it still exists and lisa could always go here yeah for free like there's no talk about tuition or anything but bart's you know yeah i'm gonna retcon it to say that Bart's getting expelled means they'll never accept another Simpson again into the school. I guess maybe anyone from Springfield Elementary, because why doesn't Martin end up here later on? Yeah, as he deserves to. I think what happened was that explosion later destroyed the structural integrity of the school and just collapsed the next day. Miss Milan is dead. She died.

Everybody else was green forever afterwards. But yeah, the Pryor, he says, excellent and well. Excellent. They, you know, new pitch for a Simpsons episode. Pryor returns as he finds out he's an illegitimate son of Mr. Burns. Oh, my Lord. Yeah. Pitching that phrase.

Any Simpsons writers listening to this you can use that just go go ahead i think i think lg would love hearing an episode about the return of j lauren prior uh but yes lisa in the next scene they're they're at breakfast it's one of the rare moments in it where lisa goes like i know you're not smart like you're a dimwit yeah there's like a little l Lisa story barely emerging, but she gets about like three lines to comment on Bart. I do think they knew what they were doing. They just touched it too subtly.

They should have done it a little harder. And I think also the show, they didn't know the time they had, the space they had, but the show is a little underwritten. Like, I think the school sketch goes on a little too long. Actually, it goes on way too long. It could have been like half the length. I do love a line here at this breakfast

table scene where Homer is looking at the sugary cereal and says, oh, maybe one of the chemicals in it is what's making him smart. And he thinks Bart's brain will explode. I love that. And Homer is very Fred Flintstone in this sequence, too.

It reminds me of the deleted stuff from Some Enchanted Evening. Like, Homer has, like, neck fat spilling over his shirt. I thought you meant in the delivery, too, because he's very Jackie Gleason. Also that, yeah. Well, here we actually have the clip here. How about a tie, son? Everybody knows boy geniuses wear ties. You're flagging my creativity, Dad.

Sorry, boy. Bart, this is a big day for you. Why don't you eat something a little more nutritious? Nonsense, Marge. Frosty Krusty Flakes are what got him where he is today. It could be one of these chemicals here that makes him so smart. Lisa, maybe you should try

some of this. Homer! I'm just saying why not have two geniuses in the family? Sort of a spare in case Bart's brain blows up. I don't care what that stupid test says, Bart. You're a dimwit. Maybe so, but from now on, this dimwit is on easy street. I love his hand motion on easy street.

Really nice little flourish there. Going back to the Gleason thing, I just want to point out that I think no one references Gleason when they talk about Homer's old voice. It's always Matthau, but it's like a mix of the two. It's like, everybody knows.

Blah, blah, blah, blah. And then he goes back to Matthau. Yeah. They're also, Jackie Gleeson and Homer are both prone to extreme violence. That's true. Violent mood swings. Except Jackie Gleeson threatened his wife and Homer threatened his son.

Well, because he didn't have any kids to, you know that Ralph Cramden would have beat his children if they existed. He had a kid named barney just strangled i thought he was firing blanks uh yo we don't talk about that ralphie oh god yeah yeah the uh those chemical also the crusty on the box this is before they drew crusty in telltale head so they're going off of Shorts Krusty, which is a green-shirted

version of him. That's who's on the Frosty Chocolate Flakes box. There's also weird Krustys on his lunch box and the little cup he has. I mean, that is not Krusty. That's a space alien on that mug. That's like someone played Pictionary with their mom and they were like,

draw Krusty. Okay. Oh, God. Yeah, the alien on that that's like someone played pictionary with their mom and they were like draw crusty okay oh god uh yeah the oh also speaking of marge there was one other bit in the script i noted that the joke is prior looking at homer and thinking like well you definitely couldn't be the father it makes no sense to me that you'd be the father of a genius originally it's marge and homer it's a two-shot of him reacting to them and marge looking kind of empty-eyed too uh i think they made the right choice of it just being like no homer is the obvious idiot they also make uh later in this episode they make marge a bad parent too where she doesn't know like what the word nurture is it's like we should have been doing what's that called again yeah just uh they yeah it seems like

she's also kind of stupid in this episode. Like the start with the Scrabble game with the he and that. And the whole hereditary thing. It couldn't possibly be coming from our line of blood, even though Lisa is smart and they insinuate Maggie is too. It's funny to see in these early... It's a generation, maybe. In these early episodes that marge and homer

have almost equivalent iq for just a few episodes it's like they figure out like okay homer is stupid but marge is just naive and innocent they do play with the homer and bart relationship in a good way for the next two acts of just showing that like homer finally believes and supports in bart uh because of this which he should just do all the time but it's actually it's kind of touching it's it's it's nice to see them like this i like that bart doesn't even know what to do with like a kiss to the forehead of like what what is this what's going on here there's this weird stuff baked into the first season where uh there's this like philosophy of like what does it mean to be a simpson and like

no simpson has ever done this or like you're a simpson boy and that means this like this weird philosophy about what their family means in the context of like society which does not apply in the future i don't think there's a lot more about the simpson lineage throughout this whole show yeah and same with like it's also strange posing homer's speech there it's so yeah you're right it reminds me in roasting where he talks about simpson where he says like you may outsmart someone his posing is like it's at the end of a vaudeville act like look to the audience arms outstretched you may outsmart someone uh and yes then bart gets shoved into class after having a clip-on tie attached to him. Oh, yeah.

I got to point out, I put the clip on my Twitter of the animated GIF. There's just like this very long scene of them walking across the screen with the loudest shoes ever. Oh, yes. Bart got extra loud dress shoes. And they look so, I mean, it's like Rocky and Bullwinkle level walk animation. Like a cell is sliding across the screen. Like Poochie left for his home planet. And I guess

everyone wears ties, and now Bart doesn't want to feel left out. Man, being in an elementary school wearing a tie, is that what the Harvard people did? Maybe. I mean, everyone knew a bow tie kid, right? It's the little

Apple Polisher affectation. Just like, I'm a good boy. Yeah. And we've seen where that ends with Tucker Carlson. Yeah. We see. He can't make Tucker Carlson bow tie jokes anymore because he left that behind. The racism made his head so fat.

Did you see how fat and red his head is? Yeah. He's challenging Sean Hannity for fat-headedness. Well, you know, he took over Bill O'Reilly's time slot. That's a big head to fill. They made the right choice by picking Tucker Carlson there because he is a sexless guy. You know, when they had their races before with Bill O'Reilly, he was too sexually active. Pure sexual energy pouring out of the TV screen.

Well, you know, I think there might be something about Tucker that we're not seeing that will come out one day, like he stabs his own genitalia or something. There's got to be something weird about that. Masturbating with a crucifix. Yeah, exactly. Every Friday, he adopts a cat, and no one ever hears from that cat again. Exactly. But yes, Bart gets shoved into the classroom. And I do love the crazy, drawing of homer smiling in the window

and that's when we meet miss melon who never appears again i i believe she got leukemia no the school crushed her okay it's a it's a very like uh storybook sort of character voice like hi bart i'm this lady and this is your school it's it's supposed to be very genteel and welcoming but it's just it's a little too sleepy there's a lot of air in this sketch here yeah the school sketch well and would you believe in the script there's like three more scenes of smart kids school stuff it was a backdoor pilot for smart kids school like what if we spun off this school i mean i feel bad for the animators that they had to design two full classrooms of children for this plot oh god you're right that's that's a lot but the

writers at the time they still were like well the magic elves just do it if i write if i write there's five characters or 500 same amount of effort for me so who cares uh and while she's showing him around uh bart finds the one thing that interests him. You must be Bart Simpson. I'm Ms. Milan, your learning coordinator. Let me say right at the start that we have one rule here. Make your own rules. If you feel sleepy, take a nap. If you get bored, feel free to take out a book and start reading. What should I read, ma'am? Why, anything you want, Bart. Oh.

A comic book? How did this get mixed in here? We used it last week as a prop in a film we made about illiteracy. You hear every page of those books in that. Yeah, every page expertly, Mike. I gotta say, these brainiacs are not open-minded to the idea of graphic novels being viable young adult literature well you know it's a different time in 1990 they didn't know was it mouse out it was yes that didn't want to pull a turbine yeah it's true

well i mean but this is cartoon boy matt graining getting his punches back at them. And yes, that's the first appearance of Radioactive Man, the just like Krusty, a joke about a character that is Bart's hero that is like Homer, but Bart doesn't recognize it. A very off Radioactive Man. All wrong. Every color is wrong on Radioactive Man. I mean, I think he really wouldn't be a thing

until season two, but it's one of those things like Happy Little Elves where they used a few times and they shrugged. Like man had his day in the sun in three men in a comic book and then in the radioactive man episode but after that it was sort of like well we did our jokes with this guy radioactive man gets used more in the comics i think he is a i think matt graining really likes him so he sticks around more than the happy little elves once they made two jokes about the smurfs they're like we we don't need any more jokes about that yeah i do like that bark knows to grab the comic first like and that he steals it like he will be reading it later and you can see what they haven't figured

out like there's no uh real quote-unquote sign gag except for maybe there are two books by homer which i guess could be a shrugging at a joke, but there's no joke where there's such a, like a, just a slate, like a blank slate to write any joke you want in that whole list of books. He slowly goes over. Yeah. Very slowly.

And the other kids Bart meets, uh, one of them, Ethan has, he has dot eyes. He breaks the rule on the dot eyes right there. Like he, is this a smart thing?

Like he's so smart smart his eyes are gone or something i think the dot eyes are normally denote like a weirder kid like that macrae would draw and then uh then a smart kid but uh also it's funny they have a joke about palindromes because that was right there in the mensa episode from season 10 we just did a few podcasts ago that uh being able to do a palindrome is an easy way to express smartness rise to vote sir oh i'm saeed bart in the script actually in the original script they have a line where milan says he did have to drop the h from o but it still works like that that feels like they were being too too pedantic yes yeah but speaking pedantry, it's time for a debate in class.

Now let's all welcome the newest member of our collective experience, Bart Simpson. And now we can continue our debate from yesterday. When we left off, Calvin and Tanya were arguing that free will is an illusion. If you ask me, humankind has freedom, but a freedom fraught with paradoxes. Freud shows how childhood shapes our subconscious mind, but this helps us to think for ourselves. Very good, Ian. Does anyone else have an example of a paradox? Without law and order, man has no freedom. If you want peace, you must prepare for war.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Well, it seems the smartest child in the class is also the quietest. Bart, what other paradoxes affect our lives? Well, you're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't. Well, I guess that would be a paradox, too. Thank you, Bart. I was having a small panic attack waiting for Bart's line to start. I'm like, where is it? I was worried you guys might think I cut off the clip there.

Well, every episode. Yeah, and that line would be sampled in deep, deep trouble. That's where I only think of it hearing it over and over again. Yeah. Also, paradox, another example, is a town in upstate new york uh there's a town called paradox yeah it's in the anderandex wow i did i know all these upstate new york's things it's uh that's where they have steamed hams right that's more of a utica thing oh geez they lied to me utica is far from paradox i don't know know, maybe an hour, eight minute drive?

No, more than that, maybe. Anything more north of New York, it may as well just be Saskatchewan to me. I don't know. That one kid's voice, I'm glad they don't do voices like that. I was thinking about having a voice like this talking for the entire episode. Oh my gosh. Yeah, I guess because it's like a kid voice. Yeah, it's just like a very generic, annoying kid voice. You hear it a bit in this first season, but maybe Matt Groening was like, no, no more.

If you think about how much Matt Groening hates Database, I could see him killing off that voice type as well. Database is so good, though. He's got the nervous, before he talks. Database should be in this class. He should be. Yeah, we're the super friends. nervous before he talks like they should be in this class he should be like yeah where are the super friends this is where all this after they close the school this is where the super friends you had to go they went back to elementary springfield elementary uh also the gag about

dissecting the control hamster that's that's funny too i like the heartlessness of it honestly that shapiro girl like she's gonna grow up to be a very hawkish congresswoman i think that is true, yeah. For a piece, you must prepare for war. This just sent from the internet ticker. I want to correct the record. Okay, so it's a two-hour and 24-minute drive from Utica to Paradox. Oh, wow.

New York's a big state. It is. Please reduce it by half. I would like that. Western New York, it could go to your home state of ohio oh thank god yes i think you know america could get up to 100 states if we were more judicious and how we cut them up i think definitely could use some more senators right oh yeah uh those clowns in congress what a bunch of clowns uh yeah uh also in the script the script, there is a line about how there's computers at their desks.

In here, it's just a visual that you're like, wow, what a fancy school. Kids have computers at desks. They actually say like, oh, you'll even have a computer at your desk, which in 1990 or 89 when this was written, the idea of children having computers at school, insane. We had computer class where once a week you used a computer from 1978. It's like, here's your Apple II and no way to say

new computer that you will ever use in your life outside of this school. You had to get rustproofing on those Colecos. Let's talk about the lunchboxes,

which I noticed for the first time. I think this is the first time I viewed this on a 4K TV so I could read everything. So one of the kids has a Brideshead revisited lunchbox. I think that's a reference to the 1981 miniseries starring Jeremy Irons based on the old novel. It's a very smart lunchbox, at the very least.

And the other kid's lunchbox is by Anthony Karpov, who looks nothing like the guy on that lunchbox. But he was the Russian chess grandmaster before Kasparov. It's by Anthony Karpov, who looks nothing like the guy on that lunchbox. Oh, boo. But he was the Russian chess grandmaster before Kasparov. Ah, okay, right. He does not look like Albert Einstein. He's more like a kind of, well, he was like a very skinny-looking weirdo with no facial hair. Well, they didn't have the internet to search for those things back then. So they're just like, it's a smart guy.

He looks like that. Make him Einstein-y. And they were ahead of the curve showing that nerds can be bullies, too. so uh they're just like that's a it's a smart guy he looks like that like make him einsteiny and they uh you know they were ahead of the curve showing that nerds can be bullies too you know oh they're the worst uh they should have been bullied more of these kids but uh yes that's where bart gets handed a mug where they put eyedropper into and that i i think you're right it's supposed to be crusty but it's like it's a space alien. It's a very insect-like Krusty. And I think it's like, so Bart has the Krusty lunchbox. The joke is that they have much more mature lunchboxes and Bart has the clown lunchbox.

So that's just an extension of that joke. I do like them calling him a mediocre genius. Also, the very cartoony giant sandwich Bart has. I love that design. Then the scene just ends with another just like, fade just like energy diffusing fades it's uh it's an odd editing choice in these early days uh so bart's home with uh this comic book he stole from school and uh homer does us a shorts reference to frosty chocolate milkshakes i love it it's uh my mom loved saying frosty chocolate milkshakes. I love it. My mom loved saying frosty chocolate milkshakes.

If we were going to do a family trip to Dairy Queen, we'd hear about frosty chocolate milkshakes, even though we'd get blizzards, not a frosty milkshake. But yes, the family is going to go to get some culture tonight. So, how was it?

Oh, oh. What? That was it? Os, os. What? That's backwards for so-so. Wow. What are you reading there? Comic books? I guess you don't want to overheat the old noggin, eh? Tell you what.

To celebrate your first day of genius school, what do you say we go out for a round of frosty chocolate milkshakes? All righty. Bart, I feel so bad for going so many years without... What's that word where you encourage something to grow? Nurturing.

Nurturing? You're a brilliant brain. So I got tickets to the opera tonight. Hurry up. Get dressed. It starts at 8. Oh, Mom, not tonight. Come on, Bart. Your mother's only trying to help, so go ahead and enjoy the show. Homer, That's a good line. Yeah, I did love Homer's odd Bart reversing a two-letter word. Wow. And that's another example of Marge being kind of dumbed down in this episode.

Yeah, like Lisa's got to tell her a very simple word. And Marge, I mean, I want to assume marge was nurturing bard even earlier in this episode she was doing her best i read that as marge overcompensating with guilt that she's like i should have done more i feel guilty like it it feels like mom guilt to me yeah also it's a very i think the exchange there is the closest we get to lisa is obviously a genius and nobody pays attention where the joke is she's asking for a word bart and homer have no clue what the word is at least it goes nurturing thank you lisa you're brilliant brain anyway bart you're a genius yeah i can see that so i think they were at least playing at it there but it's again it's like they needed to surface that stuff a bit more yeah i think lisa's little smile about nurturing it was

saying nurturing too is another funny drawing and also yeah homer's i'm not a genius why should i suffer another another great line homer gets all the best lines in this episode yeah and this uh so up next is the giant opera section which is like to me it's like four or five minutes I'm sure it's like two, but it does feel like maybe four Tracy Allman shorts. Like they go to the opera. Here are four little jokes. They make noises in different ways. It's just them doing a Mr. Science to Do 3000 through it, doing like the crassest jokes possible, like fart noises and whatnot. The only thing I liked was just the very flat, non-clever, when is this over by homer at the end i also do like the

who's the lard butt uh the best jokes in it are like homer uh homer flatly saying something like he's like yeah shut up boy yeah it's not a joke and like all throughout this commentary uh david silverman the director is cringing at this he's like this is the worst stuff that we did and yeah like the animation of homer mock snoring is just so bizarre you're not sure what he's doing with his mouth it's just it's a lot to ask an animation team like he fake snores what does that look like figure it out there's a lot of nuance they don't know how to express and the uh they haven't learned yet you know and that and then silverman included i he's he's defensive too of saying like yes i know the lip sync's off in c-nex this was the best we could get it yeah and they stole this russian opera uh version of carmen and the director for the first time i saw

was boris chupovsky yeah so klasky chupo i love that like as silverman as we talk about silverman guys you really i say it every time but you to listen on the Patreon to our interview with David Silverman. Oh, yeah. I didn't give a bio for him on this episode because listen to that interview. That's his bio, like where he came from before the show. conductor it is that like gabor was technically the series director of simpsons though uh there there's arguments to be made that he wasn't uh as engaged as a series director as he should have been and that david silverman just ended up taking on a lot of those responsibilities uh but yeah this carmen thing i think they he mentions that it's copyright free because it was like Soviet, I think. Again, remember, it's still the USSR when this episode aired. That's how old it is.

The joke was they don't respect our copyright, so we don't respect theirs. And I do think it's very impressive. Homer can make armpit fart noises through his suit jacket. Powerful. Very, very interesting. He's a sweaty man. It was shocking too the only like there's somebody there's a few twister mouths in this where bart like reacts to something and makes weird faces but

i was shocked martin's dad got a twister mouth yeah i forgot that they were even in this uh scene and that's the model of martin's dad we'd see for years and years to come yeah they kept this model for his parents his mom is just like a nothing character i'm sure they would have redesigned her if they knew she'd be up here again but uh yeah uh martin's voice not having that you got greedy son not having that voice yeah instead it's uh that could have been any character say i i think i wonder if it was not even written to be martin's parents and instead they're like oh it'd be funny if it was martin's parents yeah and it's harry sure going who are those people which that's a perfect thing for a commercial you show that in a commercial like who are these people the simpsons

tonight at eight the uh yeah the i'd like to that lisa is joining in at the laughing and it's only marge who's embarrassed and she's honestly i can see it from marge's perspective she probably spent like a hundred dollars on these those are balcony seats yeah these are really fancy seats marge is always the one that cares about decorum in some way like we have to go to church for appearances type of thing i know that hasn't happened yet in this series but it's kind of the groundwork of being i mean she's always embarrassed by her oaf of a husband. Embarrassed by the whole family here. They just leave her to get hamburgers, though, don't they? Let's get a hamburger.

Well, I assume she stood up after they stood up to leave, too. Just sighed. There is what Bart says, like, well, you know, it's not over until a fat lady sings. And there's a fat lady singing, and Homer says, that fat enough for you? And then it's the burger. The design of the singing fat lady, too. then then it's the burger that the design of the singing fat lady too like she's a very rugrats looking cat like she's it's an extreme cartoony design you never see and those those singing soldiers are crazy like it's it's fun to watch but not part of this world in any way uh i still haven't seen carmen i've seen i've seen clips of

it i think it's one of those things. I'll tell you what. The scant bits I know of the plot of Carmen are from a Benny Hill sketch about Carmen. That's how I know anything about it. At the end, Carmen gets killed by her bullfighter. It's like a murder-suicide by her bullfighter. After being chased by a man in a gorilla suit and a bobby. And a wig flew off the old man on the way there. But yeah, the whole sequence, it's very long.

But if it had been an Omen short, it would have been one of their better ones, I think. I do also like the introduction of them with their silhouettes. It really shows off how cool their silhouettes are. Who's the large button? He's a bullfighter. No way a bull's going to miss a target that big, man. Who are those people? P.U., when is this over?

It ain't over till the fat lady sings. Is that one fat enough for you, son? Let's go get a burger. Then we get to see Bart feeling very unwelcome at both of the schools he attends. So Y equals R cubed over 3. And if you determine the rate of change in this curve correctly, I think you will be pleasantly surprised. Oh! Well, don't you get it, Bart? Derivative dy equals 3r squared dr over 3, or r squared dr,

or r dr r, har de har har. Get it? Oh, yeah. Hi, guys. Great to see you. Get lost, Poindexter. Yeah, beat it, professor. Why don't you go build a rocket ship, Brainiac?

Classic. Another best writing there. Go build a rocket ship, Brainiac? When that dog barking came in, I was like, what the fuck? I totally forgot that dog bark there. But I do love the drawing on Milan's RDRR. It's a funny, weird drawing. An early reference to Red Dead Redemption.

No, not really. I think this is an actual Harvard joke. I totally think, yes. It feels more like a David Cohen joke, but he would not join the show for a long time. I was thinking of Futurama the whole time. I mean, while these guys also majored in math, too, it's like Mike Reese. He talks about how he tried to correct a David Cohen math joke that he saw on the show. And then David Cohen was like, ah, no, but that's actually part of the joke that the math seems incorrect.

So that's... Was that the math magician joke? No, it was one of the background gags in Homer Q. Oh, okay, okay. The joke was that it was an imperfectly expressed theorem, I think it was. Well, Al Jean is the one who was like the math genius on the staff. Yes, yeah. I didn't know that for the longest time until, because Al Jean, you know, he's not bragging about this. Though I never stopped bragging about this, though. I never stopped bragging

about this. Mike Reese mentioned it in an interview. Jean went to Harvard at 16. He finished like that is insane. That's crazy. Yeah. That's why he's run the Simpsons for 20 years. So his father gave them an international airport. Well, I will say he is one of those you know one in a million harvard guys who come from relatively humble means i mean his dad owned a hardware store in like detroit and detroit so it's not like he was like a very poor kid but he's he was not a he wasn't from a fancy family i will say that that's reassuring reassuring to hear. But yeah, I think as Mike Reese says, he could have been president if he wanted to be, but he liked jokes. So he sees it as wasted potential, I think. No one who enjoys jokes becomes president.

He would have been left out of the room instantly. But the kids all being mad at Bart, him feeling unwelcome, no matter where he goes. Like, it's a fun, sad moment for Bart. But yeah, the insults from his old peers don't really make much sense. This bit could just be cut. Yeah. Yeah. And the next scene is like relatively joke free with just a sweet scene between Bart

and Homer to sort of one of the through lines is like this new thread in Bart's life is to is getting him and Homer closer together because like Bart has a new goal homer's proud of him and this is just like more evidence of that but uh no jokes no is this where they play catch yes yeah yeah well right before that they're supposed to go to a film festival to see a snooty movie directed by some swedish sweet ball i love that like homer and bart playing catch was also a thing that was like a running joke for a few not a joke but like a running scene for like two or three episodes he did that a lot when homer is um the other time he's horribly depressed in the life in the fast lane episode they're playing catch where bart like bashes him in the head with

the pace that's what i was expecting here, but I forgot. It's like, no, they just have a nice game of catch and they're supportive of each other. And remember the short where Homer is telling Bart to catch the football. Go on, boy. Get it and I'll get us frosty chocolate milkshakes. Pretty easy to write.

Well, come on, you two. Don't forget about the film festival. The what? Oh, sorry, Bart. Your mother bought us tickets to a snooty movie directed by some Swedish meatball. Oh, no. Well, I guess we don't have to do that. Um, look, Dad, I got something to tell you.

Can I wait, son? It's getting kind of dark. All right, Homer, come on, baby, right across the plate. Let me feel the wind. Whoa! Strike two! Two and two! Can you still see the ball, Bart? Don't worry, homeboy, you're not that fast. Oh, you don't think so, eh?

Well, here comes some real heat. Whoa, yeah! Strike three three you're out of there so what was it you wanted to tell me son oh nothing pop i'd like what they're saying with the relationship with bart and homer here is that if homer is told by some trusted party that he should understand bart more there's some reason to not be mad at him. Then he actually gets closer to his son and understands him. And it also, but it's all just to set up the tragedy that the finale is that he completely lets go of any of the lessons he learned.

Like that's, that's what we're all leading to. But yes. Also, I think about how much money March spent on those film festival tickets just wasted. At least Lisa, I hope I enjoyed it. I how much money Marge spent on those film festival tickets. Just wasted. At least Lisa, I hope, enjoyed it.

I hope her and Marge win. I think she splurged more on the opera, but still. Unneeded expense in this poor family. Especially since that first episode, the Christmas one, they're so hard up for money. Now they just go to the opera, film festival tickets. And how fancy a place Springfield is to have a film festival going on. With a Swedish film in competition. I think Marge's hair dryer is emptier than normal.

It's the least light on her head, though, these days. So we go back to the school. Bart is told, you know what happens when you mix acids and bases, which apparently is a giant green explosion that dyes everyone's bodies green everyone learned that with their first baking soda vinegar volcano right so come on simple science i also like that milan says like if you don't get a partner i'll assign one like it's obvious no one wants to be his partner the explosion is you know that's another like crazy shorts kind of punchline as well.

Yeah, cutting to the outside of the building for it was a very smart idea. I do like that. And then cutting back for just like the shot of the chaos immediately falling afterwards is great. And they mentioned on the commentary that the gerbils escaping is how they're hamsters. They're different animals. Respect them. The hamsters escaping is how they got away with doing a joke that they were going to dissect them because they have to be clear, like, no, the hamsters get away. They are not dead.

Well, that one hamster's got the staph virus, so it's not long for this world. Right. And the other one's the control hamster. Maybe it spread that virus all throughout Springfield. Bart caused a number of deaths, I think. So it's a wild choice that for the last two minutes, three minutes of this episode, Bart is green. He's just green for the rest of the episode. Yeah, yeah. I think for as visually interesting as the show was when it first came on, and still is, but back then in 1990, seeing yellow characters was shocking. To have

a green character in your third act, they're really pushing the line, but I like it. Yeah, and this is when Bart meets again with Dr. J. Lauren Pryor, who again, I think has more lines in this than Skinner or Krabappel. Or Homer. Now, Bart, we want to emphasize that nobody's angry about this.

We're just concerned. When a young man with a 216 IQ can't make a simple experiment work, well, it doesn't take a Bart Simpson to figure out that something's wrong. Tell me, is the class moving too slowly for you? Lord, no. Well, then what can we do to make you happy? I want to go back to my old

class. Oh, but Bart, don't you remember the boredom? The ennui? The intellectual malaise? Yeah, well, you know, kind of. But I was thinking I could go undercover. Undercover? Bart, I'm intrigued. Go on.

Well, I could pretend I'm a regular dumb kid. You know, to study them and all the stuff they do with each other. You know, see what makes them tick. I see. Like Jane Goodall and the chimps. Yeah. Uh-huh. This is most impressive, Bart.

You write up your proposal while I talk to Principal Skinner. Proposal? You know, outline your project, what you hope to achieve, what you require to do it. Gotcha, man. So did you know that Jane Goodall was on the show recently? Really? Yeah, in season 31, which was this past November. Gorillas on the mast she played

herself which is funny because like 20 years before that there was a very unflattering parody of her oh yeah uh in simpson safari diamonds that's right so yeah she did make it on the show but um yep that's so i figured it had to have happened at some point. It hadn't happened 19 years ago when they recorded this commentary for this episode. Holy crap. I really want to go back in time in those commentaries and warn them about 9-11. They don't know what's coming. They're like just a peaceful world where we record Simpsons commentaries and hang out with our friends. What a great future.

You get the Simpsons writers trying to advert 9-11 right how do they book they book seats on the flight and they're gonna take them out before oh that'd be an amazing script yeah only these bases and take out the plane before it hits well now before a commenter says this this was was an episode of Family Guy. They did that. Oh, okay. They go back in time, and Brian warns himself about 9-11, and he gets on the plane, the one that goes to New York, and stops it. So that is an episode of Family Guy. I believe these DVDs for this first season, which I and you watched for this recording, right before 9-11 or right after. I forget when it was. It is September 2001, I think, is the release month of these DVDs.

Yeah. Which is, yeah, these episodes were only 11 years old when they were recording these commentaries. Like, that's crazy to think. Talk about a terror bang. Ohember 25th 2001 so you had two weeks of mourning and then the world starts anew with simpson season one on dvd amazing two two whole weeks after uh bart has some really fun acting in this sequence here like i love his reaction shot i'm like lord no like that's that's great there's also you know a lesson they learned in the background design in this season they have so many just pictures of faces that can be read as like is this a window with

a person looking in like they can't be read as photographs help that frozen person please yeah i noticed that like maggie's outside bart's room in a photo yeah yeah and it's just like is maggie looking in through the wall i think also it was just them trying to like remember maggie's in the family remember grandpa's in the family like just to remind the viewer but uh not necessary speaking of not necessary i do really like nancy's reading during this letter writing scene but i think it's a new writer new to television new to animation uh he's asking animators have a character write a letter for a minute make that interesting and i love the reading i love how it turns from a lie into a confession

but i really feel like and i think i said this originally when we did the podcast five years ago i think it should have just been a smash cut to you spelled confession wrong. Yeah. Yeah. It's that's funnier. I like the, the, one of the most daring artistic choices is to just play it on one shot, like one uninterrupted shot of Bart writing. Uh, and,

uh, but yeah, I think it's, it, it plays really long to get to the obvious conclusion, you know, but, but you got to consider too too in compared to what other

sitcoms were in the 1990s everything moved that slow you know like it's true it's true they were writing at the speed of the cosby show or you know facts of life that's that's how long these scenes would play out on those shows so they were just kind of following they were just following the system there they they short shout out on the commentary uh david silverman does the animator dan haskett who drew a lot of bart i think did the whole sequence of bart writing the letter now dan haskett that's they got a real ringer on the animation team there i think they were very lucky he was free he was fresh off of working on the little mermaid and beauty and the beast crazy he was the character animator for bell and ariel or a character animator for bell and ariel yeah it's uh they were very lucky has to draw some of the

best looking stuff in in season one where you're like oh that's a randomly great animated scene here yeah now was this the guy that like snuck in all the boners in that movie? Is that like an urban legend? Or is that a... That might be true. Well, okay. If we're talking... Oh, boy.

No, I think you're talking about... I don't know Disney movies, so... So we're not talking about VHS covers. We're talking about the priests in that movie. Well, the priests sneeze. Yes. Yeah. They look like genitals perhaps

yes but also on the cover of the vhs box of the little mermaid the castle has some phallic uh ziggurats i guess you call it whatever like but but they all all of them on castles look like penises yeah i mean if go out go outside look around you just penises of vaginas everywhere you look i mean everything is either a penis or a vagina if you think hard enough about it. Yeah, that tree looks like a penis. And that Little Mermaid poster was drawn by Simpsons artist, future Simpsons artist Bill Morrison,

which, listen to that interview with us as well on the Patreon. BS, why don't we hear, it is long, but I think we should hear the full confession. My proposal by Bart Simpson I want to pretend I am a regular dumb kid. Period.

By this I hope oh no for this I will, um, require, oh, man, my confession by Bart Simpson. I am a regular dumb kid, period. I cheated on my intelligence test, period. Ah, finished already. Principal Skinner will be very interested to see.

Yeah. You know, you misspelled confession. That's when all the glamour slips away and Pryor realizes the mistakes they made. Yeah, and it's interesting to think that, like, beforeancy was doing like my little pony and care bears and all that shit and this is a real acting performance yeah yeah she's she uh delivers when when asked to with with bart i i like that about it uh in that sequence though, it plays so long. Speaking of jokes too subtle, you didn't even notice it. Just now, Skinner doesn't want Bart back at the school, so the joke is that Pryor is calling him to tell him Bart's actually coming back to Springfield Elementary.

And so you're supposed to be laughing at the thought of Skinner getting the bad news off screen. But again, see, it's very light. It's very light. Bart is obviously expelled from the school he goes home and is this bright green and uh marge is just is she knitting in that sequence i i i think yeah i don't recall marge is very like in the background in this episode yes yeah murmuring at other characters and uh and homer lets bart know that like i'm sure einstein made himself a million colors before he invented the light bulb uh i like that joke yeah and uh and also that he's homer is very excited to put he's he's not plus to the idea of putting turpentine on bart bathing in turpentine just normal it's cut with a little bit of water i

think we see a hose yeah yes yeah so this is the last interesting bit from the script that is different in the script it is clearly written uh this is a table draft that's on the dvd it is clearly written that bart is in his underwear when being bathed not naked but i think that they wanted the fun of drawing a butt on television and being like you can't draw you can't show uh a non-cartoon butt but we can show a cartoon butt on fox television so they they wanted to get away with it and i think the important context for this final scene that we might forget about is so the first episode that aired was the christmas special for as dark as it was there was a heartwarming uplifting ending and this episode ends with where you think a sitcom ending would go where it's like they have a heart to heart they hug the music swells but in this case

the father immediately decides to beat his son to death and will stop at nothing until his son is murdered at his own hands so that is the subversion that we all forget about where it's just like things like um even roseanne for as much as it tried to subvert sitcom tropes was very heartwarming with its endings this one was just like no homer will try to kill bart and that's where we leave the episode i think in other simpsons episodes they'd even have a joke of like oh i can't stay mad at you or whatever like yeah a regular simpsons would do that that it would end with i mean this i think to the animating of homer in this sequence it's silverman had already drawn angry homer in this kind of way in the shorts but this is really figuring out like this is the fun

homer yeah dan making loud screaming noises as they animate crazy poses coming very close saying doe yeah you're not in his first dough yet, correct? It was in roasting, but chronologically we're not at his in-production chronology. But yeah, that last shot of Homer clawing at the door, banging on the door, smashing his face into the door, it's all David Silverman, the director of this episode.

It's like nowadays, you just know The Simpsons and you know that this this this history of violence homer has is just part of the character but you know when this came out it must have been kind of jarring and surprising it probably gave them that the interest you know like okay now this is different i mean this is the edge people are talking about it in in being censoring bart shirts at school like he he's a kid putting up graffito tags and also uh being uh his father's going to beat him like yeah and they're showing his butts like it's relatable you know yeah i love that line in uh behind the laughter i think it's like and that horrific act of child abuse became a beloved uh you know running joke on our show or something like that

i miss quoting it there's also i i meant to say before i play the last clip yeah i like to the little return to the joke of his graffiti art being now called great art because he drew it and it even puts his iq underneath his name with there's like a frame around it yeah yeah that's great banksy or something he's way ahead that's where banksy got his idea from el barto that's where and i think in uh in roasting on an open fire we hear a homer strangling bart we don't see it yes we were supposed to see it like david suffren posted a an image of like the final shot was homer strangling bart while they're singing christmas carols but this is the first time we see an attempted strangling and it breaks graining rules so graining has certain rules about the strangling where to make it more quote

unquote acceptable and not horrific homer has to be impulsive but i think this breaks the rule that it is impulsive but homer is like hunting parts yeah he's stalking him throughout the house trying to kill him he even tries to trick bart into coming back out so he can strangle him. Yeah. He's got some plans in this final clip here. I cheated on the intelligence test. I'm sorry. But I just want to say that the past few weeks have been great. Me and you have done stuff together. You've helped me out with things, and we're closer than we've ever been. I love you, Dad. And I think if something can bring us that close, it can't possibly be bad.

Why, you little... What's going on up there? I think Bart's stupid again, Mom. You can't stay in there forever! I can try! March your butt right out here! Now! No way, man! Son, if you don't come out, I can try. March your butt right out here. Now. No way, man. Butt.

Son, if you don't come out, I can hug you and kiss you and make you feel better. You think I'm dumb enough to fall for that? I'm insulted. Wild noises. wild noise yeah and we talked about this on uh roasting but uh part of the show baked into it was like this is a very antiquated family a family outside of time in 1989 a very 60s family and that you heard the loud cowboy show playing in the living room with lisa and marge watching like wagon train or some old like 40s movie i like too as bart's giving that speech you you just cut to homer with just a blank expression on his face which makes his explosion of anger even funnier yeah yeah yeah and though that music

too this is you know season one no al clossett music so it's uh it's just very standard music there's nothing real special to like the do do special to the little kind of sound as Bart is making his confession to Homer. In the original script, too, the punchline last line of the episode is Bart saying, I'm not that dumb because the whole episode's about his intelligence. So you end on a laugh of Bart saying, I'm not that dumb. But I think it's way funnier that he's like, you think I'd fall for that? I'm insulted. And then you really end with just Homer pounding on a door going, rah, rah.

Just exploding. He thinks about what was said to him for a second. Then he explodes with rage. Again, I put that on my Twitter last night. This is such good animation. Such a funny ending, yeah, of a weird, weird episode. But these are the types of episodes they have to do to learn how to make something other than the shorts. These episodes, like this one especially, is such the link between the shorts and Simpsons as we know it and love it. And this,

and there's still, you know, flavors of what we love, we love about classic Simpsons. Plus you, there's animation. I think you can really appreciate in this. Yeah. And they were smart enough to know that Bart would be the breakout character early on before even hearing anything about what people thought about the show. And it was a great episode to start the series proper with, a Bart-focused episode. I think Homer would take over by like season two and a half, but Bart was who we all wanted to be. And this was a great way to start the series. Again, a lot of stuff about this is dated, but it is very strong for being where it is. There will be weaker episodes in season one, I think. Eric, how about you? What did you think about Bart the Genius? Yeah, I thought it was pretty good.

I was surprised, like I said at the top of the show, that I generally rewatch episodes from like three to six or maybe even as far as 10. But that's kind of like where I've just been. And sometimes I'll catch a season one episode on syndication on TV, but it's not often. So I really don't go back very often and just seeing this is still kind of fully formed.

I'm sure there's bad ones coming for you guys, but I was just surprised and it's not as much jokes as I want. It's more airy. Like we were talking about the sitcom model. It's kind of molded after and they're not there yet. All these characters aren't, you know, inner secret is either. Well, now what's this word? Idiosyncrasies.

Thank you. I'm not a genius. Eric, it's enough. It's also a touching episode that, you know, like the confession at the end with Homer felt very real. And then they, you know, do the, the, the comedy gag of,

of violence afterwards, afterwards, which also works. Um, overall I, I enjoyed it. Yeah. I think,

uh, I hope we surprised more people because I said this before, but I feel like even in the heady DVD, uh, buying days of your, uh, a lot of people did not buy season one. And I think with Disney+,

a lot of people are watching it for the first time in maybe 20 years. So hopefully we're surprising people. For some reason, I was just one of those people that was just like, oh yeah, season one's not good. They didn't find out what the show was yet. And I watched episode one and two in preparation for this. And both of them exceeded expectations,

to be honest with you. That's great to hear. Did you dig out your DVDs or did you watch uh did you do disney plus i'm curious i have the dvds and i did get season one on dvd and i basically didn't touch it very much but i did it on uh disney plus just because i had that hooked up for mando and all that well i hope the uh the cropping wasn't too bad on it i i don't even know how the cropping was because i watched it only on my dvds did you even see those hamsters escape you know i might not have honestly i don't really remember that part i think the cropping is pretty bad um i was like

well you know i could dig out the dvds right now or i or i could be a lazy piece of shit and i opted to be a lazy piece of shit but i do think the obviously the uh original aspect ratio is the way to go hopefully across our fingers disney plus will get it in the next six months i hope so too yes so eric thanks again for being on our show once again uh please talk all about having me oh for sure and please talk about uh we hate movies everything you do in your patreon you have so much content so many podcasts so many miniseries, and I love them all. Yeah, it's a lot. You can find out more information just by going to whmpodcast.com or searching We Hate Movies on iTunes.

We like to put clips and stuff out of the shows we have on Patreon. We did the Mandalorian half hour, like we said at the top. We also have a Star trek podcast where we recap an episode of the original series and the next generation on patreon uh there's just so much stuff so just you know search for us and you'll find it and follow me on twitter this is like my new thing in 2020 i feel like our web presence could be a little bit better um so it's eric siska e-r-i-c-s-z-y-s-z-k-a and then you know i'll tweet about shit and you'll find it you can't spell siska without ska very true it's good advice that's how i remember but man but thank you so much for coming back eric no thanks for having me it's always it's always a blast and

you guys have such a great show so i really thank you so thanks so much to eric siska for helping out with this episode we appreciate him and his time and if you want to check out his show we really recommend it it's called we hate movies a fantastic movie podcast now almost like a decade old so there's so many episodes for you to pour over and they've got a great patreon as well but as for our patreon if you want to support our show and get every episode one week ahead of time and ad free. Please go to patreon.com slash TalkingSimpsons. And if you sign up at the $5 level, you'll get just that, but also access to all of the podcasts behind the $5 paywall. 100 plus bonus podcasts you've never heard if you're not on Patreon. There are far too many to go over right now, but I can tell you as of this recording, we just wrapped up talking futurama season two part one that's 10 new episodes of talking futurama for patrons only and there are way

more mini series going on there and more to come in the future at the five dollar level but henry can tell all of you out there what is going on at the ten dollar level extra long podcast every month that are decided on by patrons yes if you go to the ten dollar level you get all that five dollar stuff bob just talked about plus our monthly what a cartoon movie podcast where me and bob talk for up to and over four hours about a different animated feature film once a month you get access to the entire back catalog like last month's the iron giant where for the 20th anniversary we talk about the brad bird film and it had a surprising impact on the production of the simpsons the creation of that film so you'll learn a whole lot there and in january we're going to be doing the animatrix the anime

matrix anthology film you'll want to hear all of those plus the dozen that we have done before it so please sign up at the ten dollar level at patreon.com slash talking simpsons so i've been one of your hosts on this podcast bob mackie you can find me on twitter as bob servo my other podcast is retronauts find it every week at retronauts.com or look for retronauts in your podcast machine it's a classic gaming podcast if you enjoy video games i think you'll be able to find at least one episode you enjoy. Henry, how about you? You can follow me on Twitter at H-E-N-E-R-E-Y-G. Anytime new stuff happens on the Patreon or on the free feeds,

I tweet about it and you'll learn if you follow me there. Plus, you should follow the official Talking Simpsons Twitter where there's tons of information on our upcoming live shows and other cool things. Follow that at TalkSimpsonsPod on Twitter. That's H-E-N-E-R-E-Y-G and TalkSimpsonsPod. Follow us there. Thanks so much for joining us, folks. Next week, we're going to continue our season one re-exploration with the episode Homer's Odyssey, and we will see you then. Bart, there are students in this class with a chance to do well.

Will you stop bothering them? He's not bothering me, Mrs. Krabappel. I'm finished. May I go outside and read under a tree? Certainly, Martin.