Talking Simpsons - Talking Simpsons - Bart The Lover With Cody Ziglar

Episode Date: December 28, 2022

This week's romantic pod is joined by the great Cody Ziglar (writer for the upcoming Futurama season, She-Hulk, and Spider-Man comics)! After we hear all about working with Matt Groening, we learn about the interior life of Bart's teacher, all while also getting a masterclass in swearing, hockey Allstars, the many uses of zinc, and more. So grab your swear jar and listen along! 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!

Riddle me this pod fans. What's 90 minutes long arrives every Friday and all about the caped crusader. Why it's blabbing about Batman, the animated series, the newest Patreon exclusive podcast, mini series on the talking Simpsons network. That's right. For the rest of 2022,

we'll be covering eight of our favorite episodes of Batman, the animated series with the same heavy duty research clips and trivia you've come to expect from us. And if you sign up at the $5 level today at patreon.com slash talking simpsons, you'll get to hear each episode as soon as it goes live. Remember, sign up at patreon.com slash talking simpsons to hear all eight episodes of Blabin' About Batman, the animated series, as well as the 100 plus other exclusive podcast episodes we've produced so far.

So become a patron and join us through the rest of 2022 for another great miniseries. Same bad day, same bad podcast feed. I heartily endorse this event or product. Ahoy hoy everybody and welcome to Talking Simpsons, brought to you this week by Globe Wax. I'm one of your hosts, the tool of the doghouse makers, Bob Mackie, and this is our chronological exploration of The Simpsons. Who is here with me today, as always? Henry Gilbert, in three simple words, I am gay.

And who do we have on the line, our special guest today? Cody Ziegler. And this week's episode is bart the lover a personal ad why not it might be fun kind of a lark come on come on answer the phone i need a man this week's episode originally aired on february 13th 1992 and as always henry will tell us what happened on this mythical day in real world history. Oh my God! Happy Valentine's Day Eve, Bobby.

Wayne's World tops the box office. Jeffrey Dahmer is sentenced to life in prison. And Amazing Spider-Man number 361 is published. Which may not sound like big news, but it was the first regular issue of amazing spider-man i purchased as a as a lad and i i mentioned that too because we have some a guest who has literally written for that same uh comic book how appropriate and uh jeffrey dahmer i've heard of him if only there was some sort of podcast or YouTube video or streaming series I could watch about this character. But he's mostly unknown to history, right?

Yes. We don't know much about him. Boy, those fan cams I saw of Jeffrey Dahmer. I hope those weren't made earnestly. I did not look too much into them. I hope those were joke fan cams. People are in love with serial killers. A lot of Ted Bundy fans out there.

Right. Who are my Bundy heads? Yeah, where the Bundy's at. And yeah, Wayne's World, top in the box office. I mean, I think I watched that twice in the movie theaters as a child. I had to wait for the VHS release. My parents loved it, though. And so did I.

Still very good. Yeah. I mean, but yeah. But yeah, Amazing Spider-Manman 361 that's the first appearance of carnage now i know some people will say amazing spider-man 342 is the first appearance of cletus casti fine but the carnage symbiote over him that's the first appearance there and yeah it was it was a big deal to me because i had friends in in elementary school who were getting into comic books and they showed how cool venom

and carnage fighting each other were in later issues too and that's the first time i began my love affair with actually reading comics as a kid before i just paged through them but this was the one that made me a fan and i pretty much was a regular i've been in a regular amazing spider-man reader up to now i there's there's periods where i have to go i go away and catch back up but uh yes and uh i just i wanted to use that uh i mean cody like uh when when did you first start reading comics too i'm curious it's funny um yeah my um my dad got me into it when i was super young because he took me to a comic book convention and i didn't know who the incredible hulk was so he's like i gotta fix this but he uh he he like my first comics that he bought me were literally spawn three and four

and he bought it for me because he obviously did not read them because they're very hyper violent comics that you know seven-year-old kids shouldn't be reading so like i sort of got in under the radar just because my dad picked something that had a cool cover so like my first entry was definitely like with the spawn comics and then i got into, like, the superhero stuff, like, much later. Like, during, like, the Ultimate run was how I got into, like, proper cape comics. Oh, that's cool. And now, I mean, you are writing. You've written 616 Peter Parker, which, you know, is a dream of mine.

And, of course, now you're currently the writer of Miles Morales' Spider-Man, his regular series. You've written the Spider-Punk series that just came out, or miniseries this year. That was great, too. Thank you. I've gotten all the Spidey people that I've wanted so far. I have all the main Spider-Men and my own little alternative universe Spider-Man, so I've been very, very, very lucky.

You know, I can see a clueless dad picking up Spawn and thinking, oh, homeless Spider-Man. This looks fun. He's perched like Spider-Man, so I've been very, very, very lucky. You know, I can see a clueless dad picking up Spawn and thinking, oh, homeless Spider-Man, this looks fun. He's perched like Spider-Man, sir, why not? I had never, yeah. What if Spider-Man had a cape? Oh, I'm sorry. No, I think I read Spawn too young, too, that it was full of just blood and guts.

I think the first one I read was just seeing Violator or the vision of hell. I was like, yeah, it probably was too much for a kid to see i brought it to my catholic school oh really how'd that how'd that go and i was like they don't know how but they don't even know what this is about they found out what i was reading i'm sorry sorry for interrupting you no no that's funny because i just made me think like you know he's there are whole pages where he just gets like holes blasted through his chest which as a kid you're like i mean i wasn't even reading i'm just looking at the pictures being like oh this is cool because it's violent and not having any context like what the

story was or like why this was happening to him or why i should actually care but it definitely activated something in like my little reptile brain as a kid yeah every issue came with the the spawn meter at the end that showed you how much power he had left i love that spawn meter spawn's running out of hp yeah he's gonna eat a piece of chicken or something and get his health back up. But joining us today, you've heard him up front, Cody Ziegler. Cody, frankly, has too many credits, but up front, Cody is a writer for She-Hulk, Craig of the Creek, and pertaining to our interests, the upcoming Hulu run of Futurama. Welcome to the show, Cody.

Thanks for having me. Any excuse to watch some of my favorite seasons of The Simpsons, I'll always take any opportunity to do it. Well some of my favorite seasons of the simpsons i'll always take any opportunity to do it well yeah so were you a simpsons fan growing up then oh absolutely yeah i mean watch it constantly like i i mean it was just on tv all the time but like i truly got into it when i had to be in like middle school because i would come home and upn would have like that two-hour block where they would show nothing but like back-to-back simpsons so like monday through friday I was just watching classic Simpsons like seasons three through I

guess eight whatever seasons they were showing but like I would come home and watch literally the Simpsons every single day and then I think Saturday was the only day that I wouldn't watch the Simpsons because I couldn't find a station that it was on but basically Sunday through Friday I was watching Simpsons at some point at the time. And I think you grew up similar to Bob and me, too, of being both a Simpsons fan, but also a fan of anime and Japanese comics and all that, too. Yeah, you co-host the podcast The Dark Weeb as well, so one of those rare interlocking Simpsons slash anime fans.

Yeah, I mean, you can't see my desk, but it's surrounded by like robots and like gundam figures and then also like random like thor figures it's like i truly am like everything core last didn't it somehow ended up to work out for me where i watching this stuff and being a huge nerd i've somehow been able to pay off and let me like pay my bills and stuff by doing it uh futurama scripts can buy a lot of gundam uh bottles also i guess growing up a simpsons fan like now you know i'm we're not asking you to tell us everything that uh all the secrets of futurama but it must be pretty cool to you know you're working on on futurama you i mean

that you must have met me now and worked with you know mac reigning and he'd like david cullen yeah yeah yeah like it's funny my my interview to get the job it was just david and matt and i was at some point i mean i think we spent maybe half the interview just talking about my favorite simpsons episodes like my favorite gags like i say this in like literally interview interview i've ever had when it comes to like a writing job but like my favorite joke of all time for any show anything is the side show bob stepping on rakes like that truly is like the the foundational basis like what i think comedy is like it goes on

for too long and it keeps happening and happening and happening and i think it was so funny i was like this is exactly what i want to do but as i was watching this like i'm sure you guys have talked about it plenty of times on on the show because you've covered so many episodes but truly like re-watching it like you forget just how many jokes are happening in any given scene for this show and like one thing about Futurama is like watching how that process works where like we truly just spend all day trying to make a page as funny as possible and like seeing that translate over to The Simpsons like uh I was I was watching um I was watching like a small clip from the um the episode where they they closed the school and like Homer's in bed with Marge and he has a little perpetual motion machine. And then you see Bart outside flying the kite at night.

And it's maybe a 50-second clip, but there's maybe a dozen jokes that happened within that 40-second clip. It's just wild to watch that and being a part of that has been very, very surreal, but also very cool. Yeah, we do a Futurama podcast as well. And we are always astounded by just how joke-dense the show is to the point where you can actually miss jokes yeah yeah we've we've done uh many times on on the Futurama especially like Zap Brannigan will sometimes have lines that are like one one sentence is three jokes and it takes a close watch to be like well we caught those two jokes but actually yeah but actually there's a third joke in there. I mean, Cohen especially seems like a master of that, the joke density.

So, wow, that's amazing to have your job interview is just talking to Matt Groening and David X. Cohen about what you loved on The Simpsons. That is amazing. Our listeners probably want to know, a big question out there is, what if Bender became a podcaster and he had two friends that look a lot like Henry and myself? Maybe, you know, they sound like us too? That's just an idea our listeners have

and it's not our idea, but we're just throwing that out there. That's an interesting idea. Maybe I could pitch it in the room and see what they think, see if it gets any traction. I think it's got a lot of legs. I think it could turn into a long-term thing for the show hey we met mac reigning and he was very pleasant to us very pleasant yeah he's a sweetie

so that was our in yeah good job well this episode is a is a real classic one like it has a ton of heart to it glad we could get get you for this one uh cody like yeah this also is written by i think the guy like we always appreciated john vedia's writer but the more we talk about his episodes i'm like man i think he might be like top three of his era of simpsons writers like his episodes are always so good yeah and especially when you hear like how he had stuff assigned to him that wasn't even his pitch and the way he can execute it so well like like it's just, yeah. Yeah. I mean,

it was a really, um, I was surprised at how emotional the actual episode was. Like I, uh, I, you know, again,

I, I haven't, you know, I haven't watched this episode maybe three or four years. So I haven't, I haven't seen it since I've been an actual professional television writer, but like watching it, like there's so many layers to it.

Like you have this really fun, silly B plot with like Homer cursing and all that stuff that has a nice resolution. But even the idea of catfishing, it could be a little icky, but it sort of works. I don't know. I was surprised at how emotionally rich this episode was and how now that I'm 35, I can process it. But as a seven-year-old kid, I was like, oh, this is funny because Homer stepped on a nail. That's why this is funny to me. It's funny to hear, uh, on the commentary to the, like this, Mike Reese says that he

pitchy ideas. Like, you know, he'd gone through a lot of personal ads in his life, uh, as, as had, uh, other writers in the show in the more innocent pre-internet days. Like it's all about pre-internet, uh, online dating really. Yeah. I think he met his wife through a dating service. They're still married to this day, which is why we later see parodies of video dating, because Mike Reese was doing a lot of that.

I mean, there was no Tinder. You had to have videos sent to you. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's fun. He met his wife. Mike Reese and his wife, they travel the world, see amazing stuff all the time. Have a fun podcast about it. And also, Cody, I was going to ask, too, I hear John Vidi on the commentary mentions, see amazing stuff all the time i have a fun podcast about it but one and also cody i was

gonna ask too the i hear john vd on the commentary mentions like pitching a uh in a krabappel script really he sold it quick because he said like if you find an underserved character in the show and pitch it it's like if you you have a better chance of selling it like it is does that sound like good good advice still for a active writer yeah that is very funny uh yeah because like this is something we've been going over in in the Futurama room is that you know the show at this point has had like a hundred and something plus episodes so like there are parts where you're like yeah we should do as like a Zoidberg episode or like or they will you start pairing up people that don't traditionally get paired up because like you haven't seen that and it seems like it'd be a fun rich story but that is definitely that is definitely truth in

that you're like you're like sometimes you're doing the math you're like all right what characters haven't haven't had like a real stories together what's the angle could be and like if it's a new pairing it's so much easier to get a story in as opposed to like you know another fry and bender story uh also if you've got the dvd dvd, there's the secret hidden Al Jean commentary track that has a couple of fun things to say. But it is it is a solo commentary track. So it's not the fun, boisterous energy of the commentary tracks. Hey, yeah, Cody, actually, did you ever listen to the Simpsons commentaries? We've heard from other writers that it really inspired them.

Yeah, I did. It's been a very long time. But when I basically when I was maybe at the end of high school or early college, I like had sort of a part part time job that paid me enough money where I could actually buy things. So, like, I remember buying the season five DVD case of The Simpsons and watching, I think, all the episodes in like maybe a day, a day and a half. And that was the first time that I saw that they had commentary because they had commentary for every single episode and uh i remember watching those and like oh it's funny it was like just getting insight because i didn't know what what writing was like i know that you could be a tv writer i didn't put the dots i thought oh some guy drew this and then it was just a show but like seeing how their process worked and and like all the inside jokes they thought were funny was really really illuminating i think it's honestly probably why I ended up doing what I'm doing now.

They're fun time capsules now back to an era in which commentaries were so important and the DVD market was so important that if a person missed a commentary, they would come back and record their own, which has happened a few times on the Simpsons DVDs. Like Mike Reese, his basement flooded, so he comes back to record two commentaries on his own. Basement flooding is not funny. It's very serious very serious yeah but i mean he's his simpsons millions can pay for i mean yeah for mike reese one one day in the rewrite room on ice h2 pays for that several basements well and of course i we have to give a credit to our pals drew and glenn you son of a bitch oh i'm sorry this was okay bob please you you'd cover this uh no we both did the same history but uh they actually didn't mention this on their episode uh correct i do i re-listened to it and then uh i i talked to drew about it drew

mackie from gayest episode ever and drew was like i feel bad that uh you got to that before me and i was like no no don't worry this information just makes me stupider this is not something you should have in your brain uh but they covered a gomer pile usmc episode called love letters to the sarge last year on gayest episode ever and as i'm listening to this episode i'm thinking this is so much like bart the lover because in this gomer pile episode now i'll forgive you if you haven't seen it uh in this episode uh gomer is sort of the anti-bart so bar uh gomer notices that sergeant carter uh you know his boss in the army was very mad at him all the time he's one of the only guys who's not getting love letters from his sweetest gals at home and so uh gomer wants to cheer up the sarge so he basically makes a pseudonym called

miss x and starts writing love letters to Sergeant Carter. And he, much like Bart, has to go out and ask advice from people to find out how to write love letters. And just like in Bart the Lover, he has to let Sarge down easy when Sarge finally wants to meet this Miss X. And it's not mentioned in the commentary, but I think the smoking gun in this episode is, there's a Gomer Pyle reference in this episode. So I feel like they a little a little smoking gun to let us know like yes we kind of borrowed from that because they weren't about borrowing from other sitcom plots they admit as much like yes this um the the super bowl episode is basically a mary tyler moore episode that they're cribbing from but hey their boss worked on it yeah it's funny on the commentary they don't mention it

but yeah i never it didn't hit me until our, our pals Glenn and Drew did the, that episode of it, which is also, it's on gay. It's not a gay episode so much, but it lets them talk about how like it is. It is Gomer Pyle writing love letters to another man.

And of course, Jim neighbors, uh, a gay man as well. Yes. But, uh, oh,

and also this episode, one Marsha Wallace and Emmy, uh, that we, we've talked about this before, but that was for the 92 voice acting Emmy was when they kind of reformatted it. And as part of the reformat for I think it's the only time they did it. They're like Simpsons wins, but it goes to all five of the regular voices and then two guest voices, Marshall Wallace and Jackie Mason. So I don't I uh, I don't believe

that's how they format the voice acting Emmys these days. That is funny. Cause I was taking note of like how good her performance was as Ms. Krabappel. And maybe because I haven't watched a Ms. Krabappel episode and she's, she's passed, but like, I was taken aback by like how good she was. And I was like, wow, I want to go back and watch mother or other Krabappel focused episodes now. Cause, um, I was really, really impressed. There was so much heart in that story, in that through line. It was a really, really good performance. Yeah, I think they got really, well, not lucky, but they cast her well.

But Mrs. Krabappel, up to this point, she was just Bart's annoyed teacher. Her character, for at least the first two seasons her character was just she prefers martin to bart and is just like oh like she praises martin all the time and hates part yeah uh and and then early in this season they found the new dynamic for her to be horny or i guess i guess really in lisa's substitute in late season two they they made her yeah, on the prowl. Yes, yeah. And they also threw out the idea of like, you know what, even though we called her Mrs. Krabappel, she is divorced.

And single on the move. But this found a new level to her of a sad loneliness that I think they found so much to do with and yeah uh as and a bittersweet thing about this episode too is that in early november of 2013 when marshall wallace passed away uh at at 70 they wanted to re-air this episode uh in like the eight o'clock slot that night uh but apparently it was their plan up until like they were last second issues clearing it. They called it technical issues. I'm not sure exactly, but it's really too bad. It turns out Zink was a big sponsor.

Yeah. But it would have been a great credit to her. You're speaking a little bit to like finding out some of the three dimensionality of Edna Carbopo. But like that opening montage where it's her getting off work it's raining she like buys the the lonely or lonely super whatever it was called and then there's a bit when she gets uh she stops by the gas station and the guy's like ex-husband sugar in the gas tank ex-husband districts again like I I say that line very often to myself just walking around my apartment apropos of nothing bingo bango i say that so much yeah

but yes the episode begins basically with a sketch of uh uh well it's one of the greatest performances ever but i i i have to play the whole clip because dan is the funniest ever in this one and and harry's great too hey what gives you said you wanted to live in a world without zinc jimmy Ray too. There are no telephones. Dear God, what have I done? Think again, Jimmy. You see, the firing pin in your gun was made of... Yep, zinc. Come back, zinc. Come back. Come back, zinc.

Come back, zinc. Zinc! Zinc! What? Oh, it was all a dream. Thank goodness I still live in a world of telephones, car batteries, handguns, and many things made of zinc. Gross, he's picking his nose. Oh, man, just Dan's Zink, Zink, what? Like, it's just what

I love that so much and in case you weren't aware this is very much of a style of industrial short that we saw a lot more of when Mystery Science Theater and Riff Trax were dredging them up I mean this is so much like a case of spring fever it's not funny and also Paper and I is a good one

except there's no like physical manifestation of Zink taunting the boy. Yeah. That's usually like a character in the shorts. Like, oh, do you want to know? You're taking this thing for granted. Well, I'm going to show you what the world is going to be like without this. And then it's like a little cheaply animated cartoon bouncing around.

No springs. Yes. Coily. Yeah. They replaced the silly cartoon character with just a a reed richards type i guess i would call him just like uh but yeah the script science man you know it's it's just so funny that like i mean it's great great dark joke that jimmy would kill himself over over dozing in the world but but then also i i extra laugh now when he wakes up the next when he wakes

up and he's one of the things he's thankful for is that he's like it's great how it just keeps firing as he talks too it is a very jerk joke for 8 p.m so much so this this was a real interesting find i found i saw this on a simpsons fan archive and i was like no this has to be made up i went into the san francisco chronicle archives to confirm this was a real article wow uh so two days after this aired uh in the san francisco newspaper they quoted the executive director of the national committee on youth suicide prevention who was upset at this joke in in the episode uh matt graining i i had he was asked for comment and he had a funny defense for it uh i'll just read what he says he's like graining says he wakes up thinking thank god i live in a world of zinc if anything it possibly cheers up suicidal

teens by giving them something to laugh at there you go i agree i agree yeah one reason to hang on is that zinc exists i think laughing at that and laughing at uh at dan castellan is saying zinc over and over again i'm sure he's pulled many people away from dark places yeah i i always love when the simpsons can start with just like you start with basically a sketch like this is like an snl sketch yeah it's classic simpsons too i love that martin of course martin's the one running the projector too that's also great uh it it fits he's the nerd who would do it this is also such i think i'm thinking about it writing wise like the episode starts like any regular one where you're through bart's perspective

like uh school is boring bell rings bart leaves and you're used to like the camera will stay with bart in whatever bart's adventure but it lingers with edna and you're you're used to like the camera will stay with Bart in whatever Bart's adventure, but it lingers with Edna and you're, you're left with like, well, what happened? You've never asked yourself this. What happens to this character when the school day's over?

And man, it's so, it's so sad how, how, how empty she is like begging for them to stay and she'll do their homework. I, you know, I,

I'm very curious as I wish i could go back and watch it um when it was first airing and see like what the general consensus was because i i'm sure it had to be very rare for like an animated show that's on prime time to like that's basically doing jokes 24 7 then take this pause and sit through this like pretty pretty grounded and and honestly kind of sad beat for like you know a couple pages for like you see her like i said you know she goes to the grocery store buys like one thing of food for herself she you see that she has a very spiteful ex-husband she goes home and she's so lonely that she decides to like look up personal ads like that's what you think the comedy is but like for us for a good chunk

they're like there's not like a lot of laughs happening it's very it's very grounded as you sit with her with her in this like sort of real moment and i i love her playing just to let you know she doesn't give a crap about being a teacher like she plays a lot of every day and it's like and if i win i'll finally stop yeah yeah yeah yeah yes and back to that sugar in the gas tank thing i have some very boring information about this because it's actually an urban legend started in the 50s and for my research it really doesn't do anything because because uh cars have fuel filters that do exactly that so it was more possible to mess up a car by dumping things in the gas tank when the uh the fuel pump was a mechanical thing but now it's electronic and cars are much more advanced so i mean if you dump enough of anything in a

car's gas tank it probably will mess it. But the sugar thing was an urban legend. Sounds like if you want revenge, then slashing tires is the faster way to go. Yeah, I think so. Yes, we're recommending this to all of our listeners. I remember seeing like an Andy Griffith show episode back in the day. Boy, we're getting all the hits in, aren't we? And it was about like a used car salesman swindler in town. And how they did things is they would basically put sugar in

the gas tank and take the people out for a test drive and in the fiction of the show the sugar in the gas tank made the car run better temporarily so the sugar in the gas tank thing has had several meanings throughout history it's a cure-all it can do whatever you want to do i love the design on end of sad lonely apartment i even like it's like a tiny old apartment complex too like it shows hey what are you saying henry uh hey only losers have kitchenettes no no no no no i also uh you know edna's cat not long for this world we won't see it again uh the cat is not there when she's dating skinner yeah design wise i mean the animation team carlos paeza as director of it this is great i he's he's our new white whale that we've like

we are on the search for him he moved back to cuba after leaving the simpsons and has never like appeared on a commentary or any interviews we've found but i yeah i want to know all about him but the design of crustyy on the Springfield Magazine cover eating chili is such a fun, it's just a great drawing. I love that drawing. I would throw up if I saw a picture of a clown eating chili. You're right.

A clown eating chili on a cover of a magazine doesn't make you want to buy it. Also, I just always loved how, what that said about the town of Springfield. One, there's so much news happening that they need to have their own dedicated magazine but also crusty the only person that sells anything in this town and he has to sell chili like i always said i always like wanted to connect the dots like how does this even campaign happen in the first place like i thought it was

so funny as a kid and also like she just speeds past it springfield magazine scored like the only interview with jd saliger yeah yeah yeah she doesn't care i love the realism of edna when she decides she's gonna do it uh because she says at first like you know it might be fun and then just the desperation instantly fits in like i need a man like just like they have her say i need a man and this is one of those like coincidences later i don't think intentional foreshadowing on the part of the show but the next shot is skinner the guy she'll almost marry uh and date for a while it's also great on the aljean commentary when they recorded it they hadn't yet broken up skinner and edna yet but he is hinting at it on the commentary he goes like well now he's Skinner and her together but we'll see how that goes in the upcoming season so do you guys remember

what season they think that Skinner and Edna got together was it was it like within this early these early seasons or is it later down the line okay it's it's season eight it's season eight like grade school confidential I'm pretty sure that's eight yep yeah because i remember that too just because uh bill oakley was doing fewer commentaries on season eight than seven but he he was on that one because that episode is very uh personal to him and and uh his wife rachel palito so yeah uh but yeah it was it would be five more years before they get together we think of them as like a constant couple yeah but it would be five more seasons before okay that's interesting it may but it makes so much sense i think that's why bart pitches it later in the episode i'm just like why don't you just date him you're both we saw how torn up edna was over skinner's possible death

and birth the murderer that's true yeah also another just random line like oh my eyeball like what a great what a a great dumb kid. This is what causes Todd to swear so much later. Okay. The Simpsons will be right back. Bart plays Cupid to his teacher. Dear Edna. Truly, yours is a butt that won't quit.

On the Simpsons Valentine's Eve special Thursday. When you really care about someone, you shout it from the mountaintops. So on behalf of Desjardins Insurance, I'm standing 20,000 feet above sea level to tell our clients that we really care about you. Home and auto insurance personalized to your needs. Weird, I don't remember saying that part. Visit Desjardins.com slash care and get insurance that's really big on care. Did I mention that we care welcome to the break gordy how appreciators and a big thank you to our guests this week cody ziegler it was great to have him on and to talk about his insights into this episode

as well as all the cool stuff he's working on like the new season of futurama his recent work on she hulk and of course definitely check out cody ziegler's great comic books he's working on like the new season of Futurama his recent work on She-Hulk and of course definitely check out Cody Ziegler's great comic books he's been writing too at Marvel including his new run on Miles Morales Spider-Man his Spider-Punk limited series and his work on Amazing Spider-Man's Beyond Amazing run oh and also don't forget his super cool podcast The Dark Weeb thank you so much cody for coming on the show we'd love to have you back and you know this podcast is only successful thanks to the support of listeners like you who go to patreon.com slash talking simpsons me and

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Beavis and Butthead do the universe to Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse and everything in between. Please check it all out for yourself at patreon.com slash talking simpsons okay so yo-yo champions uh i i will say i never got a school assembly like this growing up but we did at my elementary school the closest we had other than like a okay the closest was it was basically a new kids on the block style group i think they got started in the area that were like hey we're gonna sing they basically did a mini concert for us and then sold us their ep after that's sleazy yes yeah uh

for for me uh i was mainly thinking of uh you know what's the educational value of this thinking back at this as an adult and one of the assemblies was uh here's an old man with a whip and he's going to do whip tricks to the point where it's like let's get your principal on the stage and the principal like would hold a piece of paper out and he would like whip it out of her hand or whatever that's cool wow that's just like this it was like an old man with an eye patch oh sorry Cody

I'm sorry I didn't mean to interrupt you but I just had to know did either of you guys have a guy like a really muscular guy come and rip phone books in half because we had that happen we had a guy that came it was sort of based around like self-improvement and self-power but he just came and he just like ripped a phone book in half and like that was the entire presentation and like the kids were like we don't know what we're supposed to do with this information it wasn't

really that entertaining because he was like spent a long time struggling to do it but like I don't know if that was like the only school that happened but i'm so curious to know if other people had this experience i never had that they were mostly like anti-drug things self-esteem things or you show up and you realize this is the newest fundraiser here's what you're selling i went to private school my parents were paying tuition and they still were like here's a box of candy get out there you might you might win a bike but you know what the kids who won bikes their parents own businesses and they basically made all of their employees buy the candy bars and they won all the prizes so the rich get richer was an early lesson this episode is a real lesson in capitalism too for us as kids because they

are talking about they're writing from their own childhoods of being advertised yo-yos to them with school assemblies from the Duncan Yo-Yo Champions. If you want to know the style of how this was sold back then, look up on YouTube the 1970 commercial. It's so much visual that I didn't pull up clips from it, but look up on YouTube the 1970 commercial. Duncan presents how to run a yo-yo contest featuring Barney Akers. The Barney Akers? The acres the barney acres he's no ted carpenter yes uh they they also mentioned that like uh they had friends who were yo-yo champions apparently the the the late owner of golden apple comics in los angeles uh was was one of those yo-yo champions oh bill leibowitz who started the store fine yeah i it is in his

2004 obituary that they mentioned it and how he was he was a yo-yo champion at eight and he kind of parlayed that money into to the comic shop and and he'd even do yo-yo exhibitions at the melrose branch of golden apple comics in the 90s it's funny when this episode came out this was like i remember being shocked at how accurate it was because there truly was just kids everywhere um walking the like doing this trip with the called the walking the dog and like the little cat's cradle thing but like that that honestly like that whole bit after they come and everyone's in the yo-yos at the school was this my school for a solid year it was just everywhere you look people was like yo-yos and i i certainly as a kid probably

had a couple yo-yos but i could never make it work i never i just didn't i didn't have the skills for yo-yo i can make it go down and up that's basically it yeah and i don't know what uh yo-yo penetration is like now but i i've never seen anyone share like a yo-yo tiktok or whatever so i feel like there's a space there for yo-yo oh man there should be a yo-yo tiktok account you're right yeah if not free idea out there like but it also so it's hard to use a yo-yo it seems hard to animate yo-yos effectively and there's lots of really cool uh yo-yo animation in this episode oh man yeah i love honestly the twirl king champions all four of them they are like a superhero team like they all everybody has a

specialty and like they're designed perfectly to be like a diverse group of people like mr amazing and this and the uh sparkle is the is the smurfette of the group did you have a favorite of the uh of the yo-yos you know always as a kid and i still feel it it's zero gravity it's just like it's such a cool cool trick i. I mean, Mr. Amazing with his A Bunch at Once, that's pretty cool too, but yeah.

I like the Cobra. It's a bit of cultural appropriation, but he doesn't choke on the yo-yo, which is impressive. The swallowing of it is pretty impressive, yeah.

Yeah, I also was a big fan of Zero Gravity. I thought it was so cool. I mean, it hit everything that like seven-year-old Cody wanted to watch at that point in time

in his life. I mean, they're basically the X-Men. Yeah. It's also like this is an episode about women and it shows how few female role models are presented to Lisa that she immediately just falls in love with Sparkle and wants to be her. Yeah. It's like, oh, the one girl. I love. Yes.

This now is an adult i really love this scene because it is so much about it's about the kid perspective and the adult perspective like you have the kids instantly fall in love they're like oh this glamour works on them perfectly yeah and then you have the adults going like what like are just like being very cynical about it and even the pitch man i just love how the presenter starts with like not much competition for a video game or is it admitting like why would you yeah video games why would you play with you and i i really love the layout of it's like three stages of reactions as it moves up you they it's the older somebody gets you have bart say like they must be rich

move upwards the slightly older boys say like they must get all kinds of girls then all the way to the back and it's the adults uh just being incredibly cynical like why are we even doing this and this is the greatest i love she's like this will be one of their few pleasant memories when they live a crappy life later like and also the use of the age of aquarius song from hair i think yes yes yes i was just saying things perfect pitch perfect use of a song for for a needle drop for this scene well i don't know if they if they corrected this on disney plus but i was watching my old dvds and that strobing effect is uh is out of sight it's it's a strong strobe it's a health hazard. Ooh, I didn't even notice it

because I watched it on the, I didn't watch it on my DVDs today. I watched it on Disney+, but I didn't, it wasn't seen as prominent. So maybe they may have fixed it. I'm not sure. Well, we're talking to a Disney Plus star right now.

Well, naturally, the Disney Corporation would protect us. Yes, that's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Our lord masters of the Disney Corporation always have our best interests at heart. I didn't throw this in all the other compliments. I was throwing at Cody at the start. But seriously, your She-Hulk episode, the whole season was great.

Your She-Hulk episode. Thank you. I loved it so much like it was. I read another of my first comics I read growing up was She-Hulk number three because spider-man was in it but i loved she then afterwards and yeah that your episode so had the feel of the she all comics i i read growing up like it's funny uh it's funny it's in the it has a weird side villain and also like she hulk she hulk has sex like she's she i'm trying to say it in the most nice, like, her and Matt Burdock get together. Spoilers if you haven't seen it yet.

Sorry, but I feel like everybody talked about it. Yeah, no, thank you. It was very fun. I mean, I am such a bizarrely huge fan of, I have, I'm showing them, you can't see it, but, like, I have Frogman toy and I've had it forever. And, like, I'm such a bizarrely huge fan of like those like C and D list villains and stuff. No, I love, when I saw Frog, thank you for that. Cause when I saw Frogman,

even in like the promotional materials, I was like, holy crap. Okay, that is the exact right C lister, D lister really to appear in She-Hulk. I was so glad to see Frogman get the MCU, but yes. And I've been quiet because I'm the bigger She-Hulk fan, and I want to let Henry have a platform for all this. Yeah, I can see Bob seething.

People at home can't see it, but he's surrounded by She-Hulk merch. It's a little unsettling, to be honest. She's my wife. I like She-Hulk as a friend. That's all. She's my best friend. So, yes, after an uh yo-yo uh presentation the kids are going after like i also just love bart say bart millhouse say the exact thing that

they're supposed to say like how much do those yo-yos cost i don't care yeah they have been sold it perfectly and i know it the shot of them all in the back of the van is a great dark joke but i think that's the old sparkle is one of the most like wonderfully like cruel lines the show and i i noticed this time like a little touch in the drawing of the people in the back of the van is like they're all morose except for sparkle because i think she realized she reached one child yeah yeah you know hearing that from lisa but like yeah that sparkle she, see, there's always other sparkles. Like just the idea of like, well, that was the old sparkle.

I'm just the new one who got hired and they haven't made a new photo for me yet. Oh, God damn. It's so good. Every kid's got yo-yos now the next day. And the kid, it's, well, actually, you know what? I got to play that. This was the old sparkle line. It's so funny to me.

What do you say we get your principal up here? No. Careful now. Oh, that one grazed my ear. Don't move. You could really get hurt. Oh. How much do those yodels cost?

I don't care. Bye. Bye. Bye. Wow. Thanks, Sparkle. Wait, this isn't you. That, thanks, Sparkle. Wait, this isn't you? That's the old Sparkle.

All right, get your worthless butts in the van. We got three more schools to do. Come on, let's go, go, go! Worthless butts. I don't think yo-yos sound like that, but for some reason it sounds like what a yo-yo should sound like. Yeah, Travis Power, unsung hero the simpsons like his his sound design is so great i uh cody i don't know if you've experienced this working on on futurama but i've always heard mac greening

is very invested in getting sound effects like that just right too like he's he's yeah he um he he's like he has like he can hyper focus on specific things it's like he's, yeah, he, um, he, he, he's like, he has like, he can hyper focus on specific things. It was like, he was talking, um, the other day actually about how, like when there was an episode when like they had the Simpsons cry, like Simpsons cry for the first time. And he was like, I, he is a real stickler because usually they would just do blue for tears. And he's like, no, it has to be clear, like clear.

What is what makes sense? So like they are, there are all these like small things that no one thinks of that he really latches on to and like tears and sound effects are definitely uh in the top two of those things yeah i think we just covered a futurama it's the one where bender becomes a chef and at one point he claps his hands twice and on the commentary matt's like wait why does it sound like two fleshy hands clapping he's a robot he is very good at identifying like yeah that's wrong those are the exact type of things that he will he'll question yeah and so every kid at school's got a yo-yo uh i like nelson just bashing a kid's head in when questioned on his bad yo-yo abilities uh and then bart is amazingly good at yo-yo like he's better than

the twirl king champions, really. I mean, we did cover it last time we talked about this show, but this scene is now retroactively cursed. Yeah, so as Bart is showing off all of his tricks, Homer thinks he's going to get rich, and yes, Marge challenges him to name one person who's gotten rich off of a yo-yo. The joke back then was, these are three people who are very famous

for things that be getting rich from things that are not yo-yos but now you hear every name but arnold palmer it just makes you sad yeah yeah when when homer says i think it's the only time until relatively recently that homer says the name donald trump in the show and of course the and the reference to bill cosby is because they're running against him like bill cosby is their their friendly rival on another network at the time but uh yeah it's it's lines that uh every every day that goes by it feels much different than yeah than intended unfortunately so meanwhile it cuts to school edna is very annoyed all the kids are starting to ask if yo-yos have anything to do with anything

is the answer yo-yos uh and i love you know both bart with his yo reply and also the pick in his nose thing it's something i feel like i don't know if they do anymore it's so much on the show but i miss when bart was a kid who taught kids how to be a bad boy yeah like to teach it like to teach kid pranks i don't know if he does that so much anymore this yo-yo snapping of edna when she's like nothing to be said about yo-yos no projects no dioramas i remember a teacher of ours snapping in a similar way with less like uh they were prodded a lot less because it was a music teacher and, uh,

they're like, okay, we're going to be talking about bebop today. And you know, you know, the musical genre bebop and a kid, this is 1991 by the way. And a kid is like,

are we going to be talking about rock steady too? And he's like, that's it. Oh, you know, when a teacher slams the door, a kid might get hit. Yeah. Oh, that didn't happen, but it was like, you are writing an essay slams the door, a kid might get hit. Yeah, oh, damn.

That didn't happen, but it was like, you are writing an essay for the rest of the class. I'm not talking to any of you. Wow, wow, man. He had heard just enough about turtles. Yeah. That's so, wow. He knew enough about turtles at Rocksteady was Bebop's companion. Holy cow, man.

Just slam. Like, you know, he had learned enough at that point that's so fun yeah i feel yeah this episode in general makes me feel bad for teachers yes we didn't get hit in catholic school they realized we were in enough danger oh god as bart uh after he pranks the teacher he's he's innocently wanting to show off one new trick to millhouse uh this is where it's called plucking the pickle. At no point until the commentaries did I ever think it was meant to be them getting a masturbation euphemism in the show. But it's quite obvious now.

They mentioned they had to go through multiple. I think he originally wanted it to be spanking the monkey. I think that's it, yeah. But apparently, Cody, in your experience, how have you gone up against getting things past standards and practices or not? It's funny because we do have similar things now. I mean, we have a lot of leeway because we're streaming at this point. But, you know, he's like, we like to keep it the same that we have always done. But, like, there are, like, sometimes we'll just take fully take 15, 20 minutes and just everyone will pitch alternate alts for like whatever the dumb thing is that we're trying to do.

And it is one of those moments where I do have to take a I have to stop myself from taking a step back, being like, oh, this is a room full of adults. And we're pitching like poop, a variant jokes or like the proper like it was very fun to do those things or like or like a thing that we really enjoy doing, but also hate doing are sign gags whenever like you know any classic like the church will have like a sign gag or like those are always very very fun but also torturous because we each have to come up with like 10 alts to that will hopefully get on there and be funny it sounds like it is a tradition in writer's room that sign gags will keep people there late yeah it's a long time well yeah actually is it uh is it an in-person writer's room for uh no we're all we're all zoom luckily we're all zoom and also like half the writers are like another country it's it's it is really all times of day so it's sometimes for us we're on the east

coast we're great because you know we're used to it but uh there are moments when we will see that it's like you know two o'clock our time but it's pitch black on some of our other writers' Zooms because it's fully 6.30 there. It's three hours ahead, four hours ahead sometimes. So, yeah, I didn't realize it got that remote with it. Wow, man. So this is when Bart loses his yo-yo in our next clip. Hey, Bart, got any new tricks for us today?

Just one. A little something I call plucking the pickle. I build up a little steam and... I didn't do it. Don't worry about your wee fish, Loss. They're going to a better place. Bart, that's one month's detention. Mrs. Krabappel, we're all upset by the untimely deaths of Stinky and Wrinkles.

But life goes on. So if I could just have my yo-yo back... Bart, if I were you and you were me, would you give back the yo-yo? Here you go. Just kidding. Here you go. Just kidding. Well, would you?

Absolutely. I love the here you go, just kidding. That would come back in the Lisa's Beauty Queen. Krusty would do it. Though he would be punished by God by being struck by lightning. And I love the Willie joke, but it is such a cheat because he's not even out of the room when you hear the toilet flush. It's physically impossible, but the is such a cheat because he's not even out of the room when you hear the toilet flush. Right, yes. It's physically impossible, but the timing, it works so well.

Yeah, you're not really paying attention. I mean, also the great line of Bart saying, I didn't do it when the yo-yo runs literally to his finger. Yeah. Now, Stinky and Wrinkles, that's funny names, but Super Dude, funnier name for a dead class pet uh from from who shot mr burns part one but i like that the play dude cover says up dyke on the martini which means it to me means it's a very old issue of play dude when they were john up day yeah some kid brought their dad's 1976 issue in you know in that in that pre-internet time, if you found a 1972 issue of Playboy, it was prized. Yeah, that was gold on a schoolyard. They slam the door on that, Bart loses it, and he's got a month of detention.

We cut to Edna on one of her dates, and it shows you that, like, you know, obviously the internet and dating apps have exacerbated these things. But this shows you that even back then when it was via mail, people will send you a photo that's like many years younger than they are now. Or catfishing you. I think Jasper looked like a real cool dude back in his heyday. Yeah, with his zoot suits. See, because of this line line just because there's a little snow on the roof i forget how the rest of that goes i could never learn the saying of it i've

heard the real saying many times i could never learn it yeah this this yeah this does make jasper about 90 years old though yes yeah in in 1992 i mean yeah like the the real saying is i have to google it every time. It's just because there's snow on the roof doesn't mean there's not a fire inside. Okay. But see, the Jasper line is just so good. Like, I forget how the rest of that goes. Like, that just rewrote my brain.

But so then we cut to Bart. He's a very skilled plumber already. And skills he's going to use very well at the Maison Derriere. When he works, he's going to use very well at the the maison derriere when he works he's plumbing there and that malibu stacy had the designing of a disgusting it's yeah it's great just covered in grime yeah uh but bart gets his chance when uh edna is able to go drink early at the office and runs off uh grades every paper with a b that's a great joke and this is when bart discovers the personal ad for himself with object save me and he he knows what he's gonna do he bart writes a really good first letter for a trick uh i mean uh he even starts with like basically saying i don't

normally do this type of thing he picks woodrowrow Wilson as a name when the incredibly pinched mean face of Woodrow Wilson is the one that inspires him. It's on the wall next to him. This is where I learned about Woodrow Wilson. Yeah, same here. Bart is catfishing her, you know, just for his yo-yos. She should realize when he has such a great specific in there about yo-yos, that should set alarm bells off.

But, you know, loneliness can blind us all. Yeah, I hate yo-yos. And she imagines a man named Woodrow having that accent, too, for some reason. Like, that's the voice she hears in her head. But, yeah, there are a lot of red flags that say this is not be true. But, you know, as you said, like, you know, she's a lonely lady and she's hoping for her best. But I remember re-watching this today, I was like, I really do appreciate when, you know she's a lonely lonely lady and she's hoping for her best uh but i i remember i re-watching this today i was like i really do appreciate when um you know bart's usually a

pretty dumb kid intellectually and like written word wise but i do like that he was able to channel some sort of genius for this very specific task and only because it was going to be a prank but otherwise he cannot do anything uh education to educational wise to save his life yeah i think i think that's a big thing for even to like the beginning with graining uh in the shorts with bart is that like bart bart does terrible in school like i mean bart the genius is about how he can't focus in school and school boards him bores him but if you have him yeah have to work on something he's interested in he actually can focus very well like yeah so we come back from the commercial break and this is where out of nowhere the b plot comes in but it's a great one they're very inconsistent with the weather in this episode uh because at times

it's too cold for the dog at times homer is like sleeping on a hammock outside uh but this also made me think that uh they did one christmas uh in season one. And then for three years in a row, they do Valentine's shows. That's right. Yeah. So it's Principal Charming. It's this. And then it's I Love Lisa. David Merkin does not care about love.

So we're not getting one for season five. I guess another Simpsons clip show is kind of a Valentine's Day episode, but it's the worst one you could possibly get. I guess that shows you really how much he hates love. Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, I feel it's animated too well i feel too horrible for for sam's little helper here like he's just this especially a

greyhound is so cold like it is not made to be outside it's it's just they truly have yeah they're just like nothing but but muscle and and skin like they have nothing they're so lean is it's so that was a very funny bit uh and i this is what maybe one of my favorite b stories because it involves so many moving parts as it goes along like anytime you have a classic flanders homer story like that was always a fun bit but like when it's like the end is being his two his two kids like that i love those kids so much like they're such a funny perfect dorkork neighbor kids. I love Homer saying, but what are you going to do? Which is like, well, you let your dog in.

That's what you do. I like he grabs a fistful of marshmallows. Yeah, nice little bit of acting there. And yes, also that Homer, in a real jerk way, thinks that I will say I experienced this with my own father. He usually thought if any of us wanted to spend money, it was on something stupid or that we got tricked or whatever and that i often would think of homer's like a tool of the dog house makers but all those dog houses in the pocket uh i love i love to when homer says he's gonna build it marge kind of looks away like i don't know like she she knows how this is gonna. Maybe we should let the dog in.

Marge, dogs love the outdoors. I think he needs a dog house. Yeah, but what are you going to do? I bet we could buy a nice dog house for $50. Marge, you're a tool of the dog house makers. I am not. Yes, you are. You've been brainwashed by all those doghouse commercials on TV.

I know. I'll build them a doghouse. Oh, I don't know. Don't worry. I just drew up a little blueprint. Now, let me walk you through it. This is a door. He goes through that.

This is a roof. And this happy character, here is is the sun he shines down on the house see and i i love homer's childlike drawing of the dog house especially with him explaining to marge what the sun is like that's the sun he shines down keeps things warm that feels like an ad-lib by dan castellana i don't know if it is though but he's selling it in a very casual way dan is i mean dan is always great but he's really great in this episode bart says i guess he's got globe wax later but he's already working that floor waxer as he tells marge when he comes in uh and this is when bart is excited he's got his letter i was so close it's so uh cody we are always on the watch out for a twister mouth whenever bart's

head moves in two directions at once when he says i'm on the 29th president he almost does it like his head does do the quick it feels like it was a current on the on the words united states it feels like he it was an aborted twister mouth he was gonna go for it was like no my jaw hurts too much today and yes edna sends nudes she she sends well a sexy photo not literally a nude photo but yeah she's again it shows you all this stuff pre-internet it was still happening and also again it's got to be pretty provocative for like 92 you know yeah this is an eight o'clock there's so like and and it's also like it shows that edna is a attractive woman too like she's she's a hot lady, though.

Bart is going to get arrested for revenge porn if he photocopies that. We didn't have that term back then. Yeah. Yeah. This actually reminds me, and I think I'm in the clear now, of a letter based prank a friend and I played on another friend. And to be fair, this other friend was very annoying. So he was no he was no victim. And the year was 1996 and we were 14.

So not we could not be tried as adults, obviously. And, you know, we were all excited about the N64, and this rotten friend actually got a reservation in, and it was very hard to do. So what my friend and I decided to do was, like, let's mail him a letter, supposedly from Toys R Us, saying, we regret to inform you that your uh your reservation has been canceled remember to play it loud this fall or whatever and uh yes it worked but at a certain point we were like uh well

he brought the letter to school and was like oh can you believe this and he was so like he got too sad over it and i believe we did say uh we had to like gently let him know like we just played a prank on you go get your n64 it's fine oh but he was a very credulous friend uh at least that's that's so uh well it's nice you told him the truth yes yeah that's i mean i would have been heartbroken if i got a call from uh if if i thought toys r us was telling me that yeah he should have looked at all of the signs though you know if you're a trusting kid i i i was also the prank e on things like that a couple of times as a kid. I was too trusting.

So we then come to the swearing and we got to do in season three, not out of like censors telling them to do it, but because their friends, uh, who they respected were parents and said like, you taught my kid the word bastard. And they keep saying it like, so, so the, this must be also pulled from that too. Just like that. Oh yeah. This we've taught kids swears all the time and we're feeling a little guilty about it. Yeah.

It feels like the turning point in the show where they, they cut down on the swearing, the casual swearing. And also the turning point in the show where they really figure out, oh, the Flanders are very Christian. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And I think me as a kid, I mean, it's true. Homer taught me the term to hell with this. And I think I still say it to this day.

The little kid hearing it all said he's like he brings it to dinner the next night and i would say a meme is born in this moment at least in the simpson shit posting community yes in our next clip fella came into the store today has for change for a dollar well sir i gave him three quarters by mistake took me the whole afternoon to track him down todd would you like some mixed vegetables? Hell no. What did you say? I said I don't want any damn vegetables.

All right, that's it, young man. No Bible stories for you tonight. Weren't you a little hard on him? Well, you knew I had a temper when you married me. Ned Flanders is on the phone. Oh, if this is about that stupid quarter again. Hello, Ned. Sorry to bother you, Reverend Lovejoy,

but I'm kind of in a tizzy. Our son Todd just told us he didn't want to eat his damn vegetables. Well, you know kids and vegetables. What was it, asparagus? No, no, Reverend. The point is, he said a bad word. Oh, oh, right, yeah.

Well, kids usually pick these things up from someplace, find out who's doing it, and direct them to the Bible. Where in the Bible? Uh, page 900. Damn Flanders. Page 900. Great acting from it, great line reading. If you're not religious, you might not know that uh

you don't refer people to pages of the bible yeah they're like this book this verse these chapters i love their their lovely christian dinner of like a big ham and mixed vegetables and that like i i don't know i don't think for my parents they wouldn't have said they would have said a vegetable like have your peas have your broccoli or whatever the term mixed vegetables sounds like she's like reading the bag like she's like going by the advertisements i feel that was just like a can of mixed vegetables that were just dumped into a strainer and then heated up with butter on them or something that that frozen bag of it's it's carrots it's peas and broccoli like and you just dump it in a bag picked about five years ago oh and corn of course yes and

brought to your table yeah i've been sitting in an icebox for two years but man that look i mean that look on todd's face when he says damn vegetables with squint yes yeah and i also like how much they underline well yeah flanders is a norm but how poorly his business is doing because a man came in just to get change he didn't buy anything leftorium's not back into bad business again you know homer saved it that one time but i guess it's not doing good like this is the start of a real runner too not just the the hyper christianness but also that todd is easily influenced like she he's the one who thought if he should stab somebody like the mouse did or he's also the one who said my freaking ears yeah he's not he's not the one who thought if he should stab somebody like the mouse did. Or he's also the one who said, my freaking ears.

Yeah, he's not the kid who Bart played mini golf with. Wait, did he play? Was it Rod? No, it was against him. Okay, yeah, I thought so. And yeah, he's a very different, incredibly impressionable child here too. When you really care about someone, you shout it from the mountaintops. So on behalf of Desjardins Insurance, I'm standing 20,000 feet above sea level to tell our clients that we really care about you.

Home and auto insurance personalized to your needs. Weird, I don't remember saying that part. Visit Desjardins.com slash care and get insurance that's really big on care did i mention that we care i mean also too as a kid i i would say i was guilty i was a todd as well like i i was i was a good boy in school but i did get in trouble once because before this episode aired of the simpsons uh we like i think a couple years before i had seen the word slut said on married with children and i repeated it in school and got in a lot of trouble for that and so the kids kids learn dirty words all the day how do parents do indeed to the darndest things

how do teachers deal with it now like literally everything is online there's no i i that's a good i'm also wondering if teachers these days are even unless you just play something say something horrendous like do they even care if a student curses because i'm sure all the teachers grew up in that environment too where they were cursing because i mean what would they because our generation now where i've been logged on for like you know 20 years like i i wonder if it's even like that big of a deal at this point unless you say something really really right well and also you don't know, if I was a teacher today, I would also worry of like, wait, are one of them secretly filming me

to try to like clown on me online? Yeah. Is this all just like a stunt? What's going on here? My family was a real swearing family, but I can only push it so far in front of them. Like I couldn't call my sister a bitch or anything like that. But I could say the F word pretty loosely around them.

Yeah, pretty cavalier. But then I'd be around other people's families, and it would slip out, and I would just feel really bad because clearly that was not the rules there. Like a friend's mom yelled at me for saying geez. Oh, geez? Oh, really? Geez. She's like, you should say gosh.

It's like, isn't gosh short for God, too? Man, that's shocking. The closest I had to that was I got in trouble when, not trouble, but a teacher admonished me for writing X-mas instead of Christ-mas. She was right, Henry. That bothers me, too. Come on, it's fun. X-mas. And that's how it is in the future in Futurama.

So, yeah, they didn't know that there was all the precursor to you being a super Futurama fan as well. So, yeah, I also love that Ned has talked Lovejoy's ear off just about one quarter. Like, he felt so much guilt about it. It's a little hard to read, but that Ned talked to him so long that his ice cream melted and his dessert was ruined. That's also a great guy. So, Bart asksisa for some help uh lisa instantly knows that she's got something on him as as the sister and is just like taunts him until bart goes away this another one of those things of like oh this is an extra joke i never got when lisa is naming the

girls bart could have a crush on he says is it terry no is it sherry no like he's more emphatic over one twin than the other like it shows bart has twin favoritism there though i guess we've noticed a lot when we were looking for it like there's a lot of stuff between the one twin likes bart more than the other twin and bart likes one twin more than the other but i i forget how often they change it with sherry and or terry then we get our our wink towards the inspiration for this episode, which as a kid, I only knew Gomer Pyle from this joke. And then the later, two years later in season five, the joke of Homer remembering Gomer Pyle.

I knew nothing about Gomer Pyle. You know, it's a fine show. I watched a ton of it as a kid because he's such a wholesome and nice character. He was like a very, it's like what if a Pollyanna style character was in the army and somehow did not get drafted to fight in vietnam it's funny i had the same the same sort of thought like my i only for so long i knew so many so many of the references just from the simpsons but not knowing what they were based off so like gomer powell to me was just this funny voice that they did on the simpsons like i didn't know that he was like had like a whole other like shit going on but like i just knew him mostly growing up as this funny voice from The Simpsons

that they would do every now and then. It's crazy to think that Gomer Pyle as a character was so popular on the Andy Griffith show that he graduated into his own show that lasted for years and years and was hugely successful. He never came back to Mayberry. You know, everybody fell in love with goober anyway so they but yes uh this this is uh a dual clip here not only do we get to hear gomer pile but we also get to hear homer in love golly sergeant carter i can't fix your jeep but maybe this will make it up to you

is this all he watches? Well, he used to watch Davy and Goliath, but he thought the idea of a talking dog was blasphemous. Hey, Mom, did you save the love letters Dad sent you? Of course I saved them. Yes. Well, actually, there's only one. It's more of a love postcard from some brewery he visited.

Maybe it's a beer talking, Mark, but you got a butt that won't quit. They got these big chewy pretzels here. Oh, you guys want some beer? Five dollars? Get out of here. Damn. Excited dad I've never seen. One of my absolute favorite jokes.

I love everything about that. Five dollars. Get out of here. What is $5 that pissed off Homer so much? Maybe it was to pull the touch the world's largest pull tab. That was $5 he had to spend. My wife and I, we love going to breweries. It's one of our favorite excursions.

And I usually do get a big chewy pretzel. And I do think of this line in my head when I order it. And now they're closer to like $6 or $7, but at a certain point they were $5. But, you know, we're living through inflation, so this joke doesn't apply anymore. You know what? I think But Then Won't Quit is a great compliment still. No, it is. It's a useful one.

Try it on your apps, folks. See how far it gets you. The Dan goes into just all this garbled stuff yeah and that the the animators take that to be just like just scrawling on a and then homer's love note was just a post card he sent for capital city that yes yeah yeah i remember having so many questions like he couldn't have been gone long that long he probably got home around the same time the actual postcard got home i'm sure homer doesn't remember sending that card either like this this actually reminds like one of the worst field trips we took was we went

to camp for about five days in uh in my school like during the fall in ohio so it was very cold and i i just seen camp things from uh you know television and movies so i was like what do you do at camp oh you write your letter to your family i'm gonna do that and i was sitting down and doing it and some like adult came up and said you're gonna get home before that letter does stop it i was just doing a tv told me no longer fear death yes exactly but taking us to summer camp in the the dead of fall i you know i guess it's an empty summer camp probably pretty cheap at least yeah it's cheap we we cut to bart trying to get more information out of edna posing as a friendly bartender even spit cleans the mug for her yeah which which i like that they say i go what like

this is an all-male writer staff imagining what a woman wants but i i that she's like you know at the very least she would want help with fixing her car because her ex-husband keeps messing up her car and leaving her with huge bills so i can see why she'd want help with that but i also uh you know you can only imagine what edna does after she vanishes beneath the bubbles for me to get my spark plugs a woman in a bathtub did signify something yeah it was shorthand i know isn't it crazy to think back then it was like the joke in comedy was women could only do self-pleasure in a bathtub like that was just the the joke like oh mom's running the bath again or whatever kind

of there's there's much more versatility to to female self-pleasure jokes these days i think cut back to rod and todd they are singing a very obscure religious song uh i i did a little research on it it's history but i don't know if you did the the no i just know that sheaves are just basically like the the collections of thing you're bringing in from harvest yes it is a a bundle of grain stalks a a sheaf is one of one bundle and sheaves are are a bunch and yeah it's uh it was written it's an american protestant gospel written in 1874 okay that's why uh catholic church here so we didn't get that crap out of here see that and it's apparently taken from psalm 126 6 which is a song about tearful sowing and joyful reaping which uh you know technically it's about you know sheaves of grain but really i think it could mean you know

something with religion it's like that uh me reaping me sowing tweet this is when this is when ned learns what's really going on he confronts homer about it homer says if this is about your camcorder, I lost it. This is continuity here. Because it was in the Blowfish episode, Homer borrowed the camcorder to film his message from beyond the grave to Maggie. And clearly he never returned it to Ned. And Ned doesn't even care. He just waves off like, oh, it's okay. Yeah, the reading of, I lost it.

It's just, yeah, that thing cost probably $800 in 1992. And Ned turns the other cheek instantly about it. Apparently it was a Sam Simon pitch. Groening at first didn't like it, but he did like how Harry Shearer performs it. But Ned saying a bunch of things that are swears that aren't swears when he says them. Cody, do you like that bit? I like any time you see Flandersanders get angry but it's still the most pleasant thing you could ever possibly think of and like he's so bad at being bad um except for that way

like the one episode where like he actually has like a big explosion and like he loses his temper but like it's so fun like watching him get flustered and try to play and be bad because he's just such a good person that he can't do it i i love how he says half cocked and asses of ourselves like that's that's fun and all but i think my favorite is that they snuck in hard on and that he can't do it. I love how he says, half-cocked and asses of ourselves. That's fun and all, but I think my favorite is that they snuck in hard on. He's like, I don't want to be hard on you. Also, I love that Homer impossibly nailed his upper arm to it.

He just rips his jacket apart. He just tears it apart. I always wondered what he was doing, how he even got to that. It's impossible. He couldn't have like that but this is something too i love that like we talked about this in uh when flanders failed that when homer would say something under his breath he was a little too clever he would be too clever this one he's not too clever admiral butthead is just him being like a dumb jerk saying something under his breath i I like he got stupider.

And we're about a year out from a show with the word butthead being in the title. All right. Yeah. We then get a quick joke about colorization, which even confuses like Mike Reese on the commentary. He forgot it's a joke about colorization. It's something we don't have to worry about anymore. It was a real brief thing.

I mean, I guess, well, actually, I suppose the colorization of today is ai aided upscaling which i still certainly see a lot of that yeah i it i'm okay with it i've seen it used in a couple places okay but it's the ones where they make especially with cartoons where i've seen it used to make it like 60 frames per second assist yeah it drives me crazy every single time it's so it's so unsettling to watch particularly when they do like miyazaki movies up like to like 60 frames per second it's so unsettling and so bizarre to watch to watch it like you're just like why it was perfect as is it was literally made this way this way for a reason like you're you're messing with perfection you can hate motion i i mean i hate motion smoothing enough on my parents tv every time you visit for the holidays but this is like someone intentionally doing it like look it's

yeah it's kiki's delivery service 60 frames per second doesn't look great like yeah they know also the colorization thing was such a big deal that they uh john vini wrote an episode of the critic also all about it yes uh philips vision yeah yeah it was philips vision just to make it more clear that duke phillips is ted turner philips vision vision yeah yeah it was philip's vision just to make it more clear that duke philips is ted turner philip's vision though rewrote endings of movies uh yeah to tap your ones i also in in the line there's something about the it reminds honestly it feels more like a futurama type line saying three-eighths of your beauty like that's just such a funny fraction yeah any any sort of math yeah truly bart uses that in his next letter this

is when edna is ready to do it but she wants to see a photo she has to know for sure because she's learned from from jasper uh this is when bart turns to uh one of his school books and they have a fun behind the scenes story about this too uh which is they wanted johnny unitas johnny unitas said he wouldn't do it because he wanted to be paid. It is his likeness being used on the show. I can see why he didn't want to be paid. So, which makes me wonder if since they did use him in the season six episode, Hold Me the Clown, how much they paid him for that. I mean, he really just says probably. That's basically his one line.

So then Al Jean takes some credit for picking Gordie Howe because he played on the Detroit Red Wings in the NHL hockey. When Al Jean was a kid, that's when G howe because he played on the detroit red wings in the nhl hockey when al gene was a kid that's when gordy howe played on the team and so of course he grew up loving it and gordy howe agreed to it and uh yes then a talking simpsons history bit is yeah i looked this up but please continue well no we we recorded the when we covered this episode the first time long ago when we started this podcast we recorded it before he died and the episode published a week after he died and it was the first of many times where listeners are like oh why it turned into a thing of the talking simpsons curse where we even tried to make a jingle out of it and now and then we retired the jingle out of respect it was

happening just too many times so here's the thing i mean this is why i'm furious about it to this very day and it's not funny this is why we don't play the clip anymore please stop bringing it up i'm yelling at all of our nice listeners to give us money and listen to our show uh he died on june 10th 2016 our episode went live on july 6th that's almost a month it wasn't just a week that much time passed and he was like 90 years old so i'm saying please he was an old hockey player retroactively i demand justice i love uh yeah so it's it started a cycle of the simpsons predicts talking simpsons predicts the death and i'm now we're kind of past that now i think a little bit we've we've egged it on less it did hey look you can still buy our fun t-shirt though of that stalks you at every turn yes but yes i i also love bart strap on your skates gordy you're going in it's a it's a fun

direct reference to a real sports star that you wouldn't think of like i don't know it's like it's not like gordy howe isn't a name but it's just it's just good and random yeah it's it's it hits the sweet spot of being oddly hyper specific it'll only it's a joke that only works for a very small number of people, but the people love that joke. So then comes in a thing I've only seen in sitcoms. I've never heard of a swear jar in real life, but it's used in sitcoms all the time. But this exchange between Homer and Marge is very funny.

Hey, Marge, do you want to hear something funny? Flanders stinks, I swear too much. Marge, you you want to hear something funny? Flanders stinks, I swear, too much. Marge, you're not laughing. Well, you know, maybe he's right. Well, what a surprise. Marge sticks up for Flanders. Can we have one conversation where you don't bring up your hero, Ned Flanders? Actually, Homer, you brought up Ned Flanders.

Look, we're past that, Marge. Maybe I do curse a little, but that's the way God made me. And I'm too old to stop now. No, you're not. When my father got out of the Navy, he used to curse a blue streak. It almost cost him his job as a baby photographer. So my mom put a swear jar in the kitchen. Every time he said a bad word, he put in a quarter.

What do you think? Well, Marge, self-improvement has always been a passion of mine bring on the swear jar do i have to pay if i hit my hand with a hammer yes homer what if i catch on fire no what if i see something really weird in the sky yes homer what about when we snuggle that's okay yeah she's into it folks i like marge wants him to talk dirty i like that yeah the now that baby photographer background doesn't jibe with the later reveal that her father was a flight attendant uh you could have more than one job uh i i told myself is that marge just buried that memory very deep that's uh that she doesn't want to this also is such a great heightening of the

marge slightly defending ned and homer going crazy about it i especially love her like well actually homer you brought it up it's like marge we're past that like we're past i also will say i've i've been accused recently of of getting uh doing more swearing than i had been doing in a while and it was because this year we covered some south park and so i was watching more South Park than I had in a while. That is why I started casually swearing a lot of my teens. I watched South Park in my teens. And I think you just saw Clerks 3. I also just saw Clerks 3.

I noticed that after that. You start a lot of times with like fucking... I think I've tamped it back down. You have Henry. I know, yes. That 50 year old Kevin Smith. He makes me know how impressionable his his watch on him yes it's 40 year old viewers they're too impressive also i i love homer's line of like self-improvement has been always been a passion but but yeah like like swear jars i only ever heard of them on sitcoms like the only other show i even think of when

related to swear jars is mr show did a great Swear Jars sketch. Swear's for Cares. Just about how they swear so much on that show. That probably also gave me a lot of casual swearing. Oh yeah. Bob Odenkirk screaming God damn it all the time. God damn it! Boy, I just saw Monkeybone. He's

in the third act of that movie and he's screaming and he does say God damn it. Of course. Oh, of course. I'm not recommending you see does say, God damn it. Of course. Oh, of course. I'm not recommending you see Monkeybone, by the way. Oh, okay. Not an endorsement of Monkeybone. Just watch the Bob Odenkirk and Chris Kattan parts for about 15 minutes. It's fine.

Dave Foley's all right in it, isn't he? He's fine. Yeah. Then we cut to Bart getting his final letter. I like that as he's reading it from Edna she says and then to my place for some home cooking it takes bart a couple seconds to get what it means uh and bart is up in his treehouse in a t-shirt and shorts the weather has uh gotten a lot balmier yeah that's true yeah it's a heated treehouse he has a you can't see but he has a kerosene heater right out of the frame that you

can't see that's dangerous but cozy hey you know that does sound like the type of thing homer with his bad craftsmanship would have built for bart yeah exactly 100 there's there's a cute bit of uh edna reading his reply and then saying like oh i feel like you're watching me moves down the picture and bart is staring at her that's uh that's a good gag so bart has made his decision as far as pranks go i mean he could have humiliated her a lot more he just wants to stand her up and make her feel bad which and waste her evening but uh in but you do feel so bad for it and like when you see her dress-up montage and also what a great bit of animation bart like kind of becomes a silhouette and it like cross fades to her dress-up montage. It's really well done.

And I love all her cute outfits. They're all really well made. It's not like a silly dress-up scene montage. It's just like, no, we're going to see that she cares about her appearance and she's actually quite fetching. Yeah. So Bart leaves her at the Gilded Truffle, goes to see Ernest Needs a Kidney. They're getting in there earnest bashing rather late because uh we had just been scared stupid oh yeah in october of 1991 and that's when disney

cut baits that's true yeah they they ended their partnership earnest earnest popularity was pulling back we we didn't appreciate jim varney enough when he was with us absolutely the better gag of this they will make it even better gag in Cape Fear of Ernest goes someplace cheap. Yeah. But yes, Bart comes out laughing, sees Edna's still there, sobbing as they close the place. I also love this line here. It's a quick clip. I can't help but feel partly responsible. Partly responsible.

I do want to ask Cody about this because they mentioned in the commentary, like it's always so hard to find an act break line. And they spent a long time on this one uh how does that work for uh futurama are there going to be act breaks or is that a secret um i don't think it's a secret there's there are act breaks but it is very true like we do spend considerable amount of like effort in having like a good out like a good joke out or like a good lined out because it truly is like it's one of those things where like as you're writing it like you just put something in and then you're like wait actually

we need to have this moment set with someone for set with people for like a little bit if they're gonna like they have commercials or whatever they're doing because it really does like tie the stuff together like i actually funny enough you asked that because i had that exact same thought when i was watching this is that like it really is like a if you like put yourself back then what's like actually on tv like it's a pretty powerful moment because then you have to sit through the commercials and like, you're, you're really like leaving on, on such a bummer down or a down feeling for this episode. But yeah, it's something that we definitely do put considerable amount of time and effort

into because it is a surprisingly important thing to have when you're, when you're watching shows that have like different act breaks and stuff. Yeah. It's interesting too. Cause like you write for your credits are diverse enough like craig of the creek is just a straight 11 minutes and rick and morty has a break just in the middle and then she hulk doesn't have commercial breaks yeah so you yeah it really varies this is the first time i've ever had where that had like act breaks like you're like like this where you have to have i guess one two

three you have to have three of those you have to have i guess one two three you have to have three of those you have to have like three big butt moments per episode and it was definitely um definitely an interesting learning curve because like you said like you know she hulk had none of them craig of the creek didn't have any of them and rick and morty's like right when in the middle like it's such easy it's so it's easier to like end on a big emotional beat and then come back then resolve it instantly as opposed to doing that three times per episode uh so when we come back we then get a homer swearing montage which uh i have the clip because i want to i just always love to imagine the dirty word homer swore for real and and they tell a great story on the commentary too about children being witness to dan castellaneta swearing up a

storm as homer yeah i guess contest winners got got to tour the making of The Simpsons, essentially. And this was the episode that they were witnessing being made. And they heard Dan Castellaneta actually say all the words. You know, it still feels weird to me if I see one of The Simpsons actors in something and they say a word they can't say on The Simpsons. Yeah. They can say that? Yeah.

You've been watching Brockmire again, haven't you? Yeah, Brockmire goes there, man. But yeah, to hear, I remember on the Inside the Actor's Studio they all did, they bleeped it, but just the idea of Dan as Krusty says fuck and they bleeped it like, wow, Krusty saying fuck, i could never imagine yeah we did lose

our mind i remember the the um that one bit in the episode where homer asked the kids to step outside and he just yells fuck at the top of his lungs like i i remember i had the exact that that always reminds me of of that i had the exact same feeling like i want love it would be so unsettling to hear homer actually say like a curse word like word. I don't know if my brain can still process it even at 35. But yeah, the swearing montage, just great. And here's our next clip. Homer, that was a 20. Yeah!

Oh, you son of a... Homer, you know, I owe you one, buddy. No sooner had I shaved off the old cookie duster than a lady cast me in a commercial. I'll tell you, the way these checks keep coming in, it's almost criminal. You dirty best! What do you think, Lisa? How's the dog supposed to get in? Well, he just goes...

Oh! Oh! goes oh the mangled hand dropping the change you should have been allowed to swear at that point barge gave him permission for fire swearing i feel like the bees should count too or hornets yeah you know homer it's hard to pick my favorite the the drawings of homer begging the trying to will the the pin to fall over is so good but i also really love just how he goes like well he just oh like that's the way his head goes back for like which he must have said like ah fuck like which to say that in front of lisa makes it even dirtier i always like the my my head cannon for how the bee came on the bee nest fell on him.

It was a prank that we didn't see Bart did. He was trying to shoot something with a slingshot and he missed. And he hit a beehive and it landed on Homer. And that's how it got there. But I just love how it just seemed like an act of God. Just from on high, this bee nest lands on Homer's chest while he's trying to relax outside. I mean, in the Simpsons world, God is real and bless his head and curses homer so yeah also i guess don't sleep under an active penis yeah you should check for that yeah i i also clean shaven ned looks so strange but i love that he's

like when you really care about someone you shout it from the mountaintops so on behalf of insurance i'm standing 20 000 feet above sea level to tell our clients that we really care about you. Home and auto insurance personalized to your needs. Weird, I don't remember saying that part. Visit Desjardins.com slash care and get insurance that's really big on care. Did I mention that we care? Instantly got cast in commercial as making constant commercial checks coming in nonstop.

So after all that, we cut to Bart with his globe wax. He's waxing the globe, specifically with wax made for globes. And I love Bart. I just, I gotta play the whole thing because Marsha Wallace is acting here. like this is what wins the Emmy. Like this exchange here with Bart. Like this could just be easy like, oh, you're sad teacher or whatever.

But she brings so much humanity to this exchange here that's really just about how every man in the school is horrible. And she can't date any of them. Oh, Woodrow, how could you stand me up? Mrs. K, whoever this guy is, you don't need him. There are plenty of good men around. Name one. What's wrong with Principal Skinner? Seymour? Let's just say his mommy won't let him out

to play. What about Coach Fortner? Look, look, look, look, look, look, look, look. Wow. What about Groundskeeper Willie? I'm not even gonna tell you what that guy's into. Bart, you are the closest thing to a man in my life. And that's so depressing, I think I'm going to cry.

Bart finally feels guilt there. It's a great little scene. Her performance is good. And I also like how Bart realizes about two recommendations in that he can get secrets so he's like what about this person and his diagnosis is correct uh the mother issues are a problem with when she dates when she dates we we never saw coach fortner i assume that he was uh fired i assume he yeah or accident and of course we know what willie is into illegally filming people as all scottish people do which is a scottish tradition you can see why edna doesn't want to fuck with that you know she's like yeah you know what who knows when he's filming me but

the but i i just love his mommy won't let him out to play i think of that line a lot about people someone's problems that their mommy won't let them out to play i think of that line a lot about people someone's problems that their their mommy won't let them out to play we get the resolution to the swear jar which homer the swear jar works homer has successfully reprogrammed himself to not swear her in this very painful Oh, fudge. That's broken. Fiddly-dee-dee. That will require a tetanus shot. I'm not going to swear, but I am going to kick this doghouse down! Gah! Gah! Gah!

Dad, this is not a commentary on your skills, but we bought you a new doghouse. Where'd you get the money? Well, there was more than enough in the swear jar. And if you look inside the dog house there's a little surprise maggie oh cute no behind her beer how did you know that's a great gag about homers at the end of a commercial like beer how did you know like how did you guess that's what i wanted but there's a similar gag in home alone but the nail doesn't go through the foot yes and

actually there's a similar i wouldn't call it a gag it's a horror movie but the movie a quiet place yes where you're not supposed to make noise somebody steps on a nail that's on the stairs oh wow and uh that movie's a little silly but i did i mean i don't think you're supposed to laugh at that part but i did laugh at it that's uh you know hey drunk krasinski starred in comedy uh yeah the the sound i i wanted to hear it there too of just like the quietness of a of a piercing his foot all the way like oh my god it's so like homer does need if it goes through his foot and the shoe like he needs to go to the hospital right now i could have nerve damage yeah he's like bleeding to death yeah no i mean you know on the alan partridge show uh that british series he also

pierces his foot in a similar way but he it is more realistic he almost bleeds to death later in the episode from it so but yeah i also love that lisa has to couch and like this is not a commentary on your skills but we bought a new dog house and then homer ended up paying for it himself with all the swearing which is pretty great too i love that that just puts the the pin on it it's over that story yeah nice full circle nice full circle b story it's very neat clean. The next scene is just Marge blowing on Maggie's tummy. Like, it's just a realistic, like, parent and baby thing. It's just so cute.

Yeah, there's no heightening of it. It's not a gag. It's just, like, establishing the scene of family tranquility. It's so cute. It's so cute. I like Marge acting like a regular mom. I love those little moments. So this is when uh bart comes clean and i will say

in another show they would have done a dirtier joke of part revealing to them that his secret girlfriend is his teacher i feel like there'd have been there they they'd have gone into dirtier territory with that uh margin lisa then share a murmur this is they were murmuring a lot together at this point they actually do it twice in this episode then we cut to homer reacting to the photo of edna which that's a funny joke too when marge takes it away homer just has like a grin on his face like he's he's still thinking about it and he you know he wishes he had gone to parents night but then in season four he still doesn't go to parents night he lets marge talk to edna and well while homer takes all the compliments on Lisa.

I also love that Homer says he has to come clean. And Marge says, no, that'll humiliate her. He's like, I only said it because I thought that's what you wanted to hear. Homer can't win. He's like, I tried to do the right parenting thing, but forget it. So apparently it was a pitch of Jim Brooks that the whole family would write the love letter together. This definitely feels like VD dealing with that kind of pitch the way he wanted to. It just turns into a writer's room.

Like it is just all the characters are writers pitching stuff. Right, Cody? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It really takes a village. It takes a village to un-catfish your son's teacher. And also, like how I assume it works in a writer's room, you want to shield people's feelings.

If they throw out, I am gay, and your response is, let's all think of something. Yeah, we'll all think of something. Although, I am gay, that could work. You have to massage it a little. You could just say, well, I realize I'm not into women. We can get there. Yeah, we can get there.

It's just going to take a bit of work to it. Yeah, you know, I'm not into women and et cetera. Yeah. Yeah. We can get there. It's going to take a bit of a bit of a bit of work to it. Yeah. You know what? Marge needs to, she seemingly is the head running the room. She needs to learn of like, Hey, don't just shut it down. Let's try to work on it. You know, not just negatives here. Yeah.

I love that. That Marge says for the last time, I'm not putting it in there. Like Homer is the guy pitching the joke who won't get the hint of like we're not using that joke stop it yeah i also uh lisa has the helpful inoculation pitch bart just goes to something gross of having a thing bit off his face they they heighten this joke even better with i'm not gay but i'll learn that's that's what does that come in i forgot about oh that's towards ralph it's the one towards ralph it's what bar is what homer says lisa should tell ralph when rejecting him that's his only idea that's his go-to pitch for breaking up i think another one was like i'm married to the sea or something like that yes yeah i'm married to the sea i don't want to kill you but i will

yeah well you know back then you know uh there was a lot less there's a lot less sexual fluidity that it's just like hey if you just say i'm gay it's the conversation you know, there was a lot less sexual fluidity. It's just like, hey, if you just say I'm gay, it's a conversation. But yeah, so the family finally figures out the letter together. Okay, okay. I cannot see you for the next five years, for I will be farming the ocean floor. I must finish this letter quickly, for I have only four minutes to live. Three simple words. I am gay.

Homer, for the last time, I am not putting that in. And any time I hear the wind blow, it will whisper the name. Oh, that's very good, Lisa. P.S. I am gay. How shall we end it? How about with a love that will echo through the ages? Oh, that's sweet. Oh, Homer, you old honey dripper.

Hey, you little hee hee. Homer musses his hair and not strangling him when saying, why you little. Well, Cody, I was going to ask you this as a writer too. So by writing the letter together and finalizing it, you as the viewer know what the letters contents are going to be, but then Edna needs to read it and you don't want it to just be repeated dialogue too. So they, they kind of have to like play it both ways with.

Yeah, they, um, it is funny how in its own silly way, it is kind of close, like an actual writer's room where like you're taking the best bits and sort of smashing them all together but it's funny that you yeah you called marge the head writer because she's the one that's dictating what does get and get does not get to get in but it is it is it always enjoyed these moments when like you see the family working together even though it's a very crazy scenario that they're in but like i do enjoy when you do especially when it's under the guise of getting barred out of a very very stupid thing that he got them all into it's it's it is a sweet ending i and it definitely feels like the kind of like sweetness that that james l brooks specializes in so so well and led to so many like great endings but it's it it comes in that weird zone of season three where they still have they can

still get like the the genuine heart of of the james o'brooke style but the cynicism and the meat and the joke are coming in more as as time goes on but so yes they they drop off the letter i love the shot of of edna eating out of a can with a dumpster behind her in the window like it's such a sad sad lonely shot uh but this is when we get a bittersweet ending for edna wait wait dearest edna i must leave you why i cannot say where you cannot know how i will get there i haven't decided yet but one thing I can tell you, any time I hear the wind blow,

it will whisper the name Edna. Bart, it's such a nice day today. Let's have detention outside. It's a date. Aw, it's sweet that she ends up on a date a date with bart too that bart bar gets to feel good edna doesn't feel so humiliated presumably she died without ever learning the truth about woodrow so so that's nice too but also homer's line is written down on the paper it's not said in in edna's internal monologue of reading it but

the homer's closer is on the page so okay i i like that it's not that they forgot it they just were like ah you know what we don't need to have you hear it again just you can read it on the page but and then they flash gordy house stats on the screen with some nice like uh arena music yeah yeah it sounds like the zamboni getting started i like that yeah it's and apparently mike reese said a bunch of his friends were like what was that like just everybody was confused by it being such a weird now we're so steeped in like random comedy yeah in sitcoms on tv like that this that this shocked everybody is is shows you how different things were 30 years ago yeah i i think that uh they were maybe a little insecure about how sweet the ending was

so they just threw in a non-sequitur joke at the end to kind of surprise people yeah too yeah i i could definitely see that because it is so earnest and sweet but i think you definitely give all right we we we got to have one more thing to go out and let's take this random random stats for this for this guy that's been mentioned maybe like once in passing in the actual script it's you know it's a credit to his skills though i and uh the last thing i'll say on the the episode itself is that it's crazy hearing on the commentary david silverman who's who's there in in the place of baeza who's not there to speak for the artist side i like that silverman defends baeza like mike reese makes a little offhand comment of like you know baeza great animator but uh sometimes

his things came in a little late and then silvermanman goes like, I think this one was on time. I think it was. He called Carlos like a renaissance painter. Yes. Working so hard on every scene. I mean, it shows there. But also Silverman says on the commentary at the very end, like, wow, that was 10 years ago. And it's like, this DVD set is 20 years old now.

Yeah. But, man, it's such a touching episode it doesn't does it have as many of like the crazy cutaways or like weird violence or anything like i mean most of the wacky stuff is with homer but you get enough of that and plus you do get the fun of the the yo-yo champions that you get some some weirdness in there but this has so much great heart to it and the zinc zinc oh my god yeah how could we forget as i get older i like these episodes a lot uh the episodes that are about like lonely women i think there's a trilogy there might be another one i'm thinking of principal charming this and selma's choice yeah yeah and it's all about like

a perspective that is still still feels pretty rare to see on tv but especially rare at the time but um yes uh having been an only adult at one point in my life uh yes it it is like that sometimes yeah i wasn't even thinking of this in she-hulk jennifer walters goes through similar dating woes as as edna as well actually a lot of these yeah yeah yeah there's a whole episode that's just about basically what edna went through like only she actually went on a bunch of dates but they were all uh they were all uh gray up top with no fires in their belly but yeah cody any any final thoughts yourself um i'm really glad that you picked this episode because season three is like probably the season that i have watched

the least amount over the years like for me it was always like that transitional period where like every episode i think for my money is still great but like i feel like season four or five and on which one they really found like that sort of golden age stride so like i forget how many like great um moments are in this season but also specifically it's when you start to flesh out and get these these like really big character pieces that you know you know there's like this is like the first Edna episode, like big Edna centered episode. And like, you forget that like these characters weren't all just like fully developed when they first,

when the show just started. So I really, really highly recommend this episode, this season in general, actually there's a whole, there's some really fantastic episodes. Like when this, when Simpsons really started stepping into like the golden age run,

like this, this whole season is a great, great, great launch. Thanks again to Cody for being on the show, Cody. Like this whole season is a great, great, great launch. Thanks again to Cody for being on the show, Cody. Thanks for being a great first time guest. Please let us know anything you want to plug and where we can find you online.

Yeah, check out Miles Morales' Spider-Man number one. That's out now at a time of this recording. I'm going to be doing that run for at least the next 12 issues. So I'm really excited about that. If you want to check me out, you guys have already mentioned the Dark Weed wee podcast it's not too similar for this only instead of covering one show indepthly we yell about a bunch of nerd stuff indepthly and um yay for zig on instagram that's where i'm at awesome yeah no we are i i mean i'm i'm so

loving your stuff uh everywhere i can't wait to see uh your your episodes of futurama or like that new season. I'm sure we'll probably cover one of the new episodes when they go live. Let me know. I'll come back. If you guys ever want to have me back, I would love to.

I mean, any chance, any excuse to talk about The Simpsons or Futurama, I'm always happy to. Oh, hell yeah. We would love to. Thank you so much, Cody. Of course, yeah. Thanks again to Cody for being on the show.

Please check out everything he's involved with, but as for us, if you check out more of what we do and get these episodes one week ahead of time and at free please go to patreon.com slash talking simpsons sign up for five bucks a month you can get just that and also access to everything behind the five dollar paywall that includes over 100 miniseries episodes we've recorded so far since the beginning of our patreon over five years ago you also get monthly access to episodes of talking futurama and talking to the hill on our most recent min mini series was season two of love about batman the animated series it's just wrapping

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