Talking Simpsons - Talking Simpsons - Bart's Dog Gets An "F" With Conor Lastowka

Episode Date: November 10, 2021

This week Conor Lastowka from Rifftrax and the 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back podcast returns for a podcast all about loveably dumb dogs! As Santa's Little Helper destroys everything he possibly can, he's in danger of being given away unless Bart can get through to him. All that, plus the uncomfortable timing for a guest appearance of Tracey Ullman all in this week's big cookie of a podcast! Support this podcast and get dozens of bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! Check out our new shirts on TeePublic! And please follow the new official Twitter, @TalkSimpsonsPod!

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Ahoy hoy everybody and welcome to Talking Simpsons, the podcast that taught a dog to drive. I'm your host, Satan's Little Helper, Bob Mackie, and this is our chronological exploration of The Simpsons, who is here with me today in the same room. Hey, it's Henry Gilbert. You go ahead and call your precious dog, Warden. And who do we have on the line? This is Connor LaStoca, who always forgets this is how you start this off and didn't think of anything funny to say. And this week's episode is Bart's dog gets an F. No, ladies and gentlemen,

when I got it, they didn't let me overrule. Today's episode aired on March 7th, 1991. And as always, Henry will tell us what happened on this mythical day in real world history. Oh my God. Oh boy, Bobby. The LA police horribly brutalized rodney king this week mario van piebel's classic film new jack city is released in theaters and baby talk the look

who's talking tgif series with george clooney in it debuts so what what a week. I mean, you know, the Rodney King thing, awful, horrible. Yeah, I mean, but it was pretty huge news, like for a lot of white America had not seen that kind of stuff on TV until it was filmed. We were watching Baby Talk. Yes, we were watching Baby Talk. And New Jack City, classic film with everybody just knows it now for the meme of Wesley Snipes pointing a gun and crying at you.

That's where that's from. Okay. Yes. But yes, let's really talk about baby talk. I want to get into this. A terribly terrible show. Who would have thought George Clooney would be the next Batman temporarily after things like Return of the Killer Tomatoes, I think he was in. Yes, yep. The Facts of Life uh he was pretty good in roseanne he was a bad boss in roseanne and then this yes

yeah he's one of those ones that was canceled as it was airing i've literally never heard of it oh well i looked it up it i do remember commercials for it but even i thought like oh this seems lame as hell but it so uh at first because it's not called look who's talking the tv show it's called baby talk you would think it's just a ripoff but it actually is the creators of look who's talking making a show but look who's talking too bombed so then they're like well crap we have this tv show and the movie sucked. So we'll just call it Baby Talk. And instead of Danny DeVito talking, it's Tony Danza talking over a baby. And yeah, George Clooney was like a love interest in it.

And the really interesting thing about it is, the most interesting to me is, they do a whole first season. After the first season, they're like, you know what doesn't work here? George Clooney. Get him out. He stinks. I need to correct you on the Look Who's Talking trilogy, Henry. Danny DeVito voiced a dog in the third movie.

It was always Bruce Willis, and then Roseanne was in the second movie. Right, right. And then it was Danny DeVito and somebody else, some woman. Let's say Meryl Streep. That's right. That third one shoved him into the place of bruce willis but yes i apologize it i mean the bruce willis to tony danza that is the movie to tv swap you make in 1991 for sure very much yeah i watched the trailer for look who's talking somewhat recently because when that came out when i was

probably in like second or third grade and to me that was like an adult movie and sophisticated because you know i wasn't allowed to see it and then you look back at that and it's like oh no that's just utter trash that was like designed to appeal just to you know uh people who who didn't realize that you know married with children was sort of like subversive type of thing yeah that was who that was for i was taken to these movies as a kid and all of them open with John Travolta ejaculating to a Beach Boys song. Yes. Right. Yeah.

I think that's what I heard on the playground. And so that was why it was like an adult thing that I would never be permitted anywhere near. I did not understand what sperm was or the sexual encounter that was causing it. I came for the talking. I went to the theater with my mom to see the talking babies because that but they didn't trick me for number two i only i only watched the first one but yeah then baby talk they they got a second season completely changed the cast except for the baby voices and then they decided like nah this still ain't working and just gave it up so that was the end of baby talk uh but but so anyway enough of uh that talk let's let's welcome

back our friend from riffraff's connor listoka welcome back connor thank you guys it's good to be here on on talking baby talk oh boy will it ever come to that yeah when we're in our 70s that'll be like our 70th april fools episode i think like i'd rather do baby bob first oh yeah remember baby bob nobody remembers baby bob that ties into your namesake more too and i think connor was last with us for possibly missionary impossible yeah yeah that would have been yeah when we recorded i think during the uh during the pandemic last year i think yeah before that i think i did the uh loch ness monster and 22 short films about springfield yeah and it's good to go back to the start this is the first time you're jumping back with us to uh 1991 and and were you watching

this uh when it was new oh yeah absolutely this was you know the simpsons i was fully in its thrall at that point in time i mean you, probably it came out around the same time as those Look Who's Talking movies. And so for whatever reason, that was the, you know, more adult thing that I was allowed to participate in. And so it was just, fortunately, my parents didn't say like, go ahead and watch this adult movie, you know, Look Who's Talking, because then I would have been like, well, this is the greatest thing in the world. But I was allowed to watch the Simpsons. And so that was whether I watched this one live, I cannot remember. But I would have been talking about this is the greatest thing in the world but i was allowed to watch the simpsons and so that was whether i watched this one live i cannot remember but i would have been talking about it on the playground the next day no matter what well this is a bart ass episode

made for little boys and and and intentionally so because it was partnered with a commercial that was for all the boys oh you know what else o'connor when welcoming me back i just want to say me and bob we uh watched together at our local theater that that live show of hobgoblins for rift tracks live oh nice it felt so wonderful to have like it's one of the many little things of like well this feels sort of normal again kind of moments and that was seeing seeing a rift tracks in theater was was that yeah it it felt good to do that too. It was a little weird because the theater obviously had a, the live theater we performed from

had a capacity restriction and we kept it below that, you know, even more to just let people sort of spread out and feel comfortable and stuff. So it's not a great setting to be, you know, telling jokes onto a stage that's an auditorium that's 25% capacity. But hopefully that didn't come across in the broadcast that you guys watched. No, absolutely not.

A lot less people laughing than usual. It's good that there wasn't, you know, audible, you know, crickets or anything in the audience. I think they were going to try to sweeten it in the truck, like, you know, either like raise the volume or put in some canned laughter because you've run the risk of someone in the audience having a weird laugh that gets, you know, over-volumified to everybody. You mean like my laughter. You just escort them out. Right, exactly.

I'm glad it turned out well. We've got another one next week, a week from today that we're recording it. And so I think that should probably have a few more people in the theater and just it will feel good again to do it. I had a that's chappy moment in the theater when you did the opening introduction to the guys coming out on stage i said that's connor because now i recognize your voice from you being on the podcast so much perfect perfect yes that's

that's what i that's what i hope for the show starts and that there's one person uh somewhere across the country nudging someone else in the ribs to uh let them know that someone they've never heard of is the guy that's talking at the moment well i can leave now i got what i came i came what i got for uh and also i could be completely wrong about this i i mentioned this to you connor before and and that night i mentioned it to you bob i swear there was that older couple in our theater bob and that i didn't know what they were there to see riff tracks and i swear the woman with the with the older man uh she like they talked like oh she's in hobgoblins like she was a stand-in in the film because like the old guy who he'd react to a joke with like oh no like that guy i love that old man because he was just

the most and i usually i don't like people who are saying things over the movie but he was just like oh oh my lord oh no but but when a when a blonde woman walked into club scum in a scene in the movie he said like oh that's you and maybe he was just joking with his wife of that that woman looks like you when you were young but i choose to believe they came to see this movie in theaters because in 35 years ago she they met in los angeles and she was a stand-in in that scene yeah there aren't a lot of people in hobgoblins as a general rule that you would you know turn to someone who you regard with affection and say that looks like you like that in general that's not a good rule so i i hope it was her i mean we've had that happen people who you know have either bit roles or larger roles

end up going to the theater and people see them outside and take pictures of them. And it's always sort of an awkward scenario because even if you're not trying to be cruel, which of course we aren't, it still is, you know, there's something that they did that they gave their best effort to

that you're being like, that looks like an alien trying to walk like a human. So I wouldn't encourage it and i wouldn't go if my movie was playing but maybe in 30 years it's just fun to see yourself on the big screen again that's probably it it's happy to just be remember i mean when do they they they made a might have never if you someone who is in hobgoblins when did you ever see it in a theater ever you know it's true you might have been like they actually this came out like This was available on a VHS at a Blockbuster ripoff. I never got paid.

Yeah. Well, the director was in our theater. So that was the experience we had, as you say, all these things. And then the guy is sort of sitting there and an interesting presence. I'll throw that to the director of Hobgoblins. And did you have a childhood dog or a current dog that this episode reminded you of, Connor? Yeah, well, no, we always had good dogs. And so it was, I didn't see a lot of them

in Santa's Little Helper, but yeah, I grew up with a dog that my parents got. I don't know if they knew I was on the way, but it's sort of like the testing grounds. So he was there the entire time I was born and probably died right around this time this episode came along. Toby. And then we had a Baxter.

And we had a Golly. And then we had a Dolly. They were all boxers. Oh, that's cute. The same sort of wiry build as Santa's little helper almost. But a lot more behaved. So yeah, I was a dog guy. And loved stories about dogs.

Would read where the red fern grows and cries. And so I buy into Bart's emotions in this episode. I'll say that. And now I'm a corgi guy. So I don't have a corgi, but those are my favorite dogs. They're great. When I've been out in San Francisco for Sketch Fest, I've met up with some of the celebrity

corgis that live there and stuff. You'll see a lot of corgis around the Bay Area. I think I walked by one this morning. Yeah. Nice. Nice. Yeah. corgis that live there and stuff so you'll see a lot of corgis around the bay area i think i walked by one this morning yeah nice nice yeah i i have been dog free my entire life uh mostly because growing up my sister was allergic to everything and it gave her all the attention your sister's your sister's gonna die oh no go play nintendo or something uh but yeah that's what happened and then uh as she got older uh she stopped being allergic to everything and then once i moved out all the animals came into the house but i was gone but never a dog there was never a dog present and that's uh yeah you know we had dogs until i was like four or five and uh one was gotten rid of because it bit me and uh and sadly the other one

passed away from like early cancer it was very it it was like very heartbreaking to me as a little kid. And then we didn't have pets until I was 14. And then it was cats, which were a lot less work, but we didn't have any, well, they're more work and less work. But, but I was used to like, our cats were jerks, but in the ways cats are jerks. So I was like, I guess this cat's poorly behaved, but what are you going to do? It's a cat. Like they're just going to knock shit over and you either keep your cat or and and deal with and just accept that that's your life now or you get rid of your cat and we of course kept our cats

because we did love them despite being uh assholes yeah the the nature of snowball too in this episode where it's sort of there at times and is uh you know a background player in the scene is very much the role of of cats in my life as well like they're there you like them but it's not like you're you're not going to center an episode around them yeah it's pretty rare for them to i think there isn't a true snowball centric episode until like the teens of the show when they kill a teen yeah well maybe something like that uh and uh and yes also i noted that this episode uh it aired out most of these episodes do air in their production order pretty close to it except for this one it kind of jumps the it got held until the deep deep trouble

music video was ready so it could be partnered with it as part of the second single spring promotion of the album simpson sing the blues so uh which was that because it was shorter so they could fit the video in well actually this episode was shortened uh for airing like there's uh there's about 90 seconds of this episode that every time I watch it are completely new to me over and over again. Because in my brain, I have locked in the experience of watching my tapes over and over again. And this is Henry's Tale of the Tape. It's back. But because we taped it off TV with the Deep, Deep Trouble, there's 90 seconds they cut out of this that are put back in the DVD version.

And I think were kept in the other future airings that didn't have deep deep trouble uh but they had to cut it to fit it in there they would do the same with the uh the black or white uh no black and i always get it wrong the michael jackson it don't matter if you're black or white yes yes are those uh deep deep trouble and do the bartman are those available on our nation's karaoke systems that's something I've got to put a note in my potential performance song. I do believe I've heard people sing Do the Bartman and things I've been at. It never struck me to look because I think I'd just be too afraid people would leave. But now I want to do it if I'm in a safe space.

I had the mic snatched out of my hand at a party in July by someone I didn't know who looked very angry because I was like, it's 1230 at night. Like, I'm going to do Rebecca back Friday and then leave. It didn't make it all the way through. It was, my wife had said, don't do it. People aren't going to know it and they're not going to appreciate it if they do know it. And I was like, I will take that into consideration as I put Friday into the queue.

What were they doing 10 years ago? Were they not on the internet? I don't know. I don't know. For someone who doesn't know you to do that you have to have crossed a line i think he was right to do it though uh but but deep deep trouble we already talked a ton about that in our simpsons sing the blues podcast uh but i mean the short version is like it they decided that it would be the second because it is the other bart centric song in it that isn't with

chuck berry uh they decided they'd they'd do that one and i mean it was smart uh pick two because it's like it's the bart rap bart raps uh written by dj jazzy jeff and it's the better of the two music videos i think it's the better bart rap on the album yeah yeah totally but uh and and the music video you know co-directed by david silverman and greg vanzo and it's the rough draft studio who were doing the amazing butterfinger commercials at the time like it's something like the sharpest bart has ever looked i i i really like the the look of the deep deep troll video even though like some of the raps are, I mean, corny even by 1990 commercial rap standards. But as an eight-year-old, I couldn't be more excited to see this episode all about Bart and then the new Bart song at the end of it, too.

Is that the only time Nintendo is actually mentioned in the era? It was growing up? All right, Nintendo for cash. Nintendo for cash. I don't think, you know, we should double check on Freaky Act, but I don't think they actually say Nintendo as a thing. Until Super Nintendo Chalmers. Yeah, yeah.

There we go. Super Nintendo was long dead at that point. And not to be too negative up front, but we talked about this when we covered this episode five years ago, but I still stand by the fact that this is a fact, by the way. Dog of Death is the better episode with santa's little helper of this era and it happens next year yes yeah so like i don't like a lot of the back half of season two some of the episodes are just so dreary i consider this and war of the

simpsons and brush with greatness and old money they're fine they were like the one of the best things on tv at the time but when i go back to them i'm just like these are so slow and dreary and this is one of them for me there's some good good jokes in here, but I'm waiting to get past the end of season two. Wait, actually, Blood Flewed is the one I can't wait to get to. And Lisa's Substitute. I watched this last night and I thought the same thing. For a Simpsons, it just didn't seem super wacky. It was a very straightforward episode. There wasn't a real crazy B-plot or anything like that. And so there wasn't a lot of really memorable moments, I think, because it was so straightforward. In my memory, I rewrite much of this episode with scenes from

Dog of Death, which just is like a sequel episode to this. We interviewed John Beatty, let's do it on the Patreon. But he's very critical of his work and he is on the commentary for this episode too. And I think it was him feeling like, oh, this is a very standard sitcom plot of like, oh, is the kid gonna lose his dog and will he go to obedience school? It doesn't shake things up enough. Dog of Death shakes things up way more than this one does.

And it has, this one really is just about like, it doesn't even have a fun first act thing. It's just like, at least it gets sick. It's just like the boy might lose his dog. The girl gets the mom. So no, like that, you'd have seen that on like Full House, you know, but it's- Baby talk.

On baby talk. But instead in this case, or in Dog of Death, it's like a long thing about the lottery and just a very fun series of just sketches about a town getting lotto fever, which I love. Right, exactly. That's where the inmates had sort of taken over at that point in time. Yeah. And while we're in the preamble, I have one debut in this episode I want to talk about,

and that is of Frank Welker. Connor, are you aware of who frank welker is is he the voice of optimus prime is he optimus prime memory no he's a megatron okay he's the the all uh peter cullen is the voice of optimus prime but i knew he was some sort of transformer yes frank welker voice acting since the 60s he's freddy and scooby-doo he's every animal you hear and everything which is why they hired him to be Santa's little helper and many other animal voices in the Simpsons I assumed he was with the show like

until now like I'm sure they bring him back right no he stopped making guest appearances in season 13 and I can tell you why oh whoa so I went to this interview with him on a dead website I had to go to internet archive to find like an archive version of it and in that website he answers the question why he's not

on the show anymore and I quote a few years back Dan Castellaneta did Santa's Little Helper in rehearsal and unfortunately for me did it a little too good the producers thought hmm Dan barks pretty good and we're already paying him and he seems to like doing the dog thing why do we need to pay Welker who comes in here

spends less than an hour eats all the donuts refuses to come to rehearsals. Let's just give the damn dog to Dan. Bingo. I'm out. I did do lots of shows that needed sound effects and weird sounds, but Santa is without this little helper. And then in a follow-up comment to this, the non-jokey reason is he asked for more money

and they said no. I knew it. Yes. I knew it, man. I was sure. Season 13, that belt is tightening and which is insane and i mean this is funny to mention this because i watched an old uh for research purposes i watched that uh classic conan roundtable interview with gene reese jay cogan and uh jeff martin and they

talk about a lot of things and one of them is just all these petty things that Fox said, like, well, that Mike Reese had to pay back 45 cents for cough drops that he sent an assistant to buy for him. And they talk about all this nickel and diming they had in, like, the classic years. And then even in season 13, they're like, hey, Dan can bark fine. Why are we paying the specialist to come in

here and do barking it and frank is great at what he does i i honestly think dan's uh portrayal is that stands a little helper is more funny oh sure because it's less realistic it makes me laugh more here when he's like bark bark yes chewy yeah that's one of my all-time favorite uh slh moments uh so i should have known it was money that's why he left man that's that's sad though it's those little things you know that did just i think it's death by a thousand cuts with simpsons where you're like oh why the quality why do i feel the quality dipped a little bit it's like well they it's all these little choices they make like do we need frank welker do we need this do we need that you know and it should be noted before we begin that he wasn't always doing the

voice it was when they had a episode focused on the dog or other animals they would bring him in man it still is the greatest fear of many a working person just so that one of your co-workers will they'll realize can do your job better for you for less money that's uh i i wake up in bed every night screaming about that possibility what an important part of worker solidarity is making sure you don't work good enough to make another friend of yours look bad. That's important. We all need to bring each other down. The Simpsons will be right back. Bart's dog is driving the Simpsons crazy.

Don't touch it! Don't touch it! Don't! And this Thursday... Oh, no, we'd never give him away. But we're moving to another country where dogs are forbidden. He'll have to pass obedience school or he's out of the family. You can't give my dog away.

Bart! I'm afraid I agree with your father. You do? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. do and all new simpsons thursday then catch the world premiere of my new video i'm in deep deep trouble so what else is new man welcome to the break everybody for a podcast where no one is named cory and a big thank you to our guest this week connor listoka we always love having him on he's a great writer for riff tracks check that out plus the podcast he does with riff tracks host michael jade nelson 372

pages we'll never get back a lot of fun check them both out and if you're a fan of talking simpsons you should be checking out all the cool stuff we do at patreon.com talking simpsons you should be checking out all the cool stuff we do at patreon.com slash talking simpsons because me and bob can only do this as our full-time job because of the support of folks at that website patreon.com slash talking simpsons if you sign up there today you not only get to know that me and bob are able to pay our bills but also you get every episode of talking simpsons a week ahead of time and ad-free. None of this you'll be hearing. Plus, you get access to over 100 exclusive to Patreon podcasts, including right now our new weekly miniseries, Blabbing About Batman, the animated series,

where me and Bob are covering 10 of our favorite episodes of the Batman animated series from the 90s. And there are some really, really great ones. Me and Bob have had a great time. And you get access to all our previous ones us covering King of the Hill, Mission Hill, The Critic and every month a new episode of Talking Futurama to boot of us covering Futurama. We're in season three pretty far now so please check all of that out at patreon.com slash talking Simpsons but if you want something even fancier than a cookie with

macadamia nuts you should check out the 10 premium level at patreon.com slash talking simpsons you see we have a sister podcast what a cartoon and once a month on that, we do What a Cartoon Movie, often talking for over four hours about an animated feature film, super in-depth, just like we do with The Simpsons. You can only hear the full thing if you sign up for a $10 level. Us covering films like this month, the Christmas classic and problematic to say the least, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Before that, we covered for october batman beyond return of the joker and a giant back catalog over three years and 200 hours of what a cartoon

movies at your disposal if you sign up for that 10 level now films as diverse as a goofy movie to akira to spider-man into the spider-verse to beavis and butthead do america and tons tons more check it all out when you go to patreon.com slash talking simpsons to peep all of those wonderful goodies well also the other big guest star in this episode uh is tracy olman you know in in our past in histories on the simpsons uh we haven't mentioned her a ton even though she is a very key but controversial figure in simpsons history uh And I feel like it's time to finally really talk about her since this is when she at last appeared in the Simpsons four years after it debuted on her show. All right, Tracy Ullman.

What's the deal with her? She was born in 1959 in England. She got her big break in the UK both as a comedic actress and music performer she actually had like a couple of number one or high ranking in the billboard songs uh in in the uk that no one's heard of here but they in like 83 and 84 big hits is that how like a ricky gervais was a pop star before he was uh like a comedic weirdo that's true yes i don't think his band charted but hers did uh and on top of that she started getting cast in stuff and she's in the truly

terrible uh paul mccartney film give my regards to broad street she's she's in that and and still friends with mccartney to this day i believe uh she appeared in a lot of hip British comedy in the early 80s that featured, you know, BBC import superstars like Rick Mayall and French and Saunders. If you're a hardcore fan who watched Ab Fab on the BBC, on Comedy Central in America, you've heard of these people. Rick Mayall, I believe, shows up in one or two Riff Trax movies that were also quite terrible. He was great, but he, you know, I don't begrudge Mayall for getting his paydays. No, not at all. No one played a better Drop Dead Fred than him.

Yeah. And promoting Nintendo video games to British kids like a champ he did. But so 1985 though, Tracy Ullman is out for the big money, which is in the United States. So she's pitching herself for shows in los angeles she actually films a pilot for a typical workplace sitcom where it's like oh isn't it funny a british woman adjusting to living in america

and cbs passes on that allman's like well crap uh she gets a new american agent that american agent sets her up with a meeting with James L. Brooks in 1986. Also, James L. Brooks, who had just started his Gracie Films company in 1986 with producer extraordinaire Polly Pratt, they see her stuff and they're like, you're a genius. We want to work with you, but sitcoms make no sense for you. Nobody's heard of you. You should just have a sketch show and on top of that james l brooks has a new deal with fox that fox wants to work very much with the director of terms of endearment and they've like we they will take any show he pitches

olman though is pregnant so they're like okay this will have to wait till start of 1987 but i know the great show for you it's a variety show we're going to bring variety back to prime time on this new channel fox gracie sets it up uh with polly pratt and others they get dan castellaneta julie cavner i forget that in the first season of oldman show there are also guest lectures by harry shearer so he's also in season one i didn't realize that it was brooks's idea that there should be brief cartoons not unlike on monty python that would separate these sketches and uh the very first one for the first two weeks was dr nguedatu a female psychiatrist comedy that looks like a new yorker cartoon seems fine and all but there no one remembers it well it was

the show was the nation's showcase for psychiatrist jokes as troy mcclure said uh and also key to the start of the show is that right before they begin filming olman and another executive producer on the show ken estin sign a contract that sounds pretty standard for the deal in like say happens on saturday night live or even brooks's previous shows like mary tyler moore which is i'll read it the quoted thing from the the later lawsuit five to ten percent of profits from products or programs based on spin-off characters end quote would be due to all men and another producer from the show.

Like they signed that deal at the start of the show. Pretty cut and dry. No room for possible interpretation or funding of millions of dollars away from the person. Yeah. And so meanwhile, somebody we also don't talk enough about, but was alerted to me by Drew Mackey, our pal, the late P polly pratt who is a filmmaker like legend honestly under talked about in the in the world of film uh she was the producing partner with james l brooks she is identified by many as the person who said to james l brooks hey this

life in hell comic is pretty funny check it out and brooks then was like i want life and hell cartoons to be the bumpers when matt grating doesn't want to lose the rights to life and hell cartoons to gracie films he makes up a bunch of a family that's kind of like his family and thus the legend begins uh but so the simpsons debut in the third episode of the almond show instantly they are the breakout of the show like people who worked on the show were like audiences were fine with allman's you know stand up or her singing musical performances all that stuff but they really loved the simpsons and the simpsons were way more popular and i'll say i think tracy allman is I think she's a very good performer. I remember liking watching Tracy Ullman show with my mom too,

but there's also a lot of her work that she should be happy that nobody watches because she liked to put on a lot of makeup and pretend to be other races. And yeah, not, she should just be like, you know what? Nobody should watch the old tracy allman show

but okay so simpsons spins out of allman show the last season of allman show doesn't have the simpsons coincidentally uh in may 1990 her show is canceled after the simpsonless season while meanwhile the simpsons is this gigantic breakout hit from january to may of 1990 uh all men uh in september of 1990 when the tracy ullman show wins an emmy after being canceled and she's really feeling herself she says in an interview i breastfed the little devils about the simpsons and actually uh in a 2016 interview with on the graham norton show he's like oh and uh you uh did you like create the simpsons and that's a larry king question i know it's uh yeah and and she repeats the i breastfed them kind of line and

talks about how julie and dan were cast on it and she does very funny impersonation of julie cavner i will i must admit uh graham was like wait you did those drawings of the simpsons breastfeeding that i saw no no i didn't mean it literally uh but but she says that the simpsons started on her show she does not agree with graham norton she created the simpsons i i will clarify that there uh but so but she did still say that the official story on the commentary for this episode and had been repeated elsewhere uh by graining was he wanted her to do a voice on the simpsons but she was too busy working on all the other aspects of the show wouldn't do it uh jay kogan who was writing on the simpsons at the time and started as a tracy

ellman writer so he would know and he's also into burning bridges uh he said in a 2013 interview something quite different uh which i'll play now it was dan and julie dan kessler and julie kevin there were on the tracy ellman show and as i understand it uh tracy ellman was too busy to do any of the parts so she hated it as well she hated it yes i'm Yes. She hated the cartoons? Oh, yes. She wanted it off the show. And then later on she sued for money because she said,

I breastfed these babies and these were from my show. She had nothing to do with it and actively tried to get it off the show. Well, the rest of us have no opinion on what you've just said Jay Kogan we can't anger Tracy Allman yeah I know most powerful woman in Hollywood I mean it sounds like she had the same relationship with the Simpsons that or early SNL people have with the Muppets like we hate this it doesn't belong on our show it takes time away from other people I'm sure that's what she thought like I need my

actors i can't have them going away to do voices on things and it takes a minute out of your show and i mean too no one's talking about the great work you feel you're doing people are laughing more at this cartoon that you have nothing to do with so i can understand her anger at it for sure yeah absolutely it's a tale as old as you know know, as Hollywood that to have someone just come up and, you know, snatch away the spotlight from you and that gets you irritated. And what Conan said at the end of that thing is something that I think every time you hear it in an interview, it's like, well, the rest of us have no opinion about that. And everyone laughs.

We all know exactly what that means. Yes. Well, these things get played back in courtroom sometimes. So Conan is jokingly, but also correct. Like saying like, no, seriously, we, I have no comment on that. But, uh, but so throughout 1990, I think Allman was still professionally friendly with Gracie. I can imagine the timeline of this is she would have recorded this in like summer or early fall of 1990 and not long after her show got canceled and maybe that freed her up to do

a guest voice on this episode after she records this would be the holiday season where simpsons merchandise uh according to articles from the time made 750 million dollars in merch sales just in 1990 it was like only behind the ninja turtles as the most bought merchandise of the holiday season and that included simpson sing the blues bringing in all this money so i don't know if you're tracy ullman who just had your show canceled and sees this show that is i mean quite honestly did spin out of your show making all of this money and you're not getting paid for it i wouldn't you six weeks after this episode on april 19th 1991 sue 20th century fox for at least two million dollars wouldn't you have done the same thing and also would entitle them to

future profits as well on the series it wouldn't it wouldn't just be give me two million dollars and then we're done it would be and also we get a piece of all that which i definitely see what kogan is saying that olman didn't make this didn't create it but it's like did lauren michaels create any like wayne's world did he create them no but he gets a shitload of money out of it like i i feel it's kind of a i think ultimately olman did get a raw deal out of this. She should have gotten some money from the Simpsons because it did start on her show. So they didn't give her the money that she sued them for? So she sues them,

and it should be noted that she was suing 20th Century Fox and very specifically was not suing Gracie Films or James L. Brooks, in part because she had a major role in I'll Do Anything James L. Brooks's next film which is an entire movie podcasted to itself about what a fiasco it was that it is an entire Prince album's worth of songs is in it that then got cut out of the movie it's insane but she's in the movie and so she's like well i don't want to sue james l brooks but her attempt to be nice i don't think made anybody happy because so she files that suit in 91 six weeks after this episode airs 18 months

later the suit is finally settled the jury rejects her claims and thinks she is not due any money for it and that only matt graining is the creator of the show and thus she does not deserve payment for it and also i think she was hurt that the the stories at the time as variety reported james l brooks showed up on video and i have to think that even though she wasn't suing james l brooks him having to get lawyered up make all this while he's trying to make a movie that is falling apart under him i don't think that made him happy and there's a reason james l brooks and allman did not work together again after this ultimately she got a 58 000 payment from the simpsons in that's like here are two free tickets but i'm tracy allman here are two

free yeah it's just like um that's like a half a day's worth of bart doll sales maybe in one state and it's like i know it's it and there's certainly the argument of why should tracy allman who didn't really do anything for the simpsons and seemingly actively didn't want them on her show at one point why should she get you know some big payday from the simpsons but because it was in her contract yeah one it was in her contract so apparently the jury disagrees but secondly it's like well who else is getting that money from it some executive who didn't do anything for the simpsons like but arguing that people should not get money that they didn't work to earn is uh something that's like ah it's my first day in hollywood and this is something i will argue about like but uh but hey a happy ending

for tracy ullman anyway though because after this she then went back to the uk uh her husband who was also a very powerful film producer uh got her a bunch of gigs on itv and then in the mid-90s hbo was like hey we want to be in the tracy allman business like they made multiple specials with her the tracy takes on show which again she should be happy is not on hbo max because um there'd be a lot of videos of her on twitter right now of her is some characters that i won't even say the character's names because those character names are racist also she did the voice on their little Lulu cartoon show as well. Right. Yeah.

So and according to one article from like 2008, she at one point was the richest woman in the history of UK comedy. Wow. She's doing fine. Don't feel bad for her, I guess. But if I was on that jury, I would have sided with her. I'm like, she's due some money for a spinoff from her show. I was trying to find out if there's any way to watch the Tracy Ullman show.

It's never been released on DVD in America, at least, at least in this territory. And then I found something called not the Tracy Ullman show, but Tracy Ullman's show, which is her newest show from the 2010s. I see. show from the 2010s i see so yeah and again like um these shorts uh from that era are not available legally anywhere and that's a huge shame and they should be even if they're not proud of their work they should be and it's an important part of the most uh one of the most important shows of all time you know it's like it's like disney saying you can't watch steamboat willie or whatever i would bet after you're really digging into the details and likely hurt feelings between Gracie and Ullman over this even though she didn't directly sue him

them and also certainly 20th Century Fox hurts feeling about it I have a feeling that if they were to put any Tracy Ullman content on DVD which would include the Simpsons shorts even if it was just the shorts they probably would have to cut a big check to Tracy Ullman to put it on there. And I would think that after that lawsuit, there are probably some hurt feel of people with hurt feelings that said, I don't want to give her apricot one. So they just cut her,

cut her out of it. That's my new theory on, on why those things aren't on there, because I would think legally those count as clips from tracy allman show and you'd have to pay her as part of it even though gracie like was the production company for it but but that's my guess but anyway yes that there is the full story about tracy allman as it relates to the simpsons and of course i'll do anything comes out in theaters gigantic huge bomb also it's why we didn't get a prince Simpsons. And of course, I'll Do Anything comes out in theaters. Gigantic, huge bomb.

Also, it's why we didn't get a Prince Simpsons episode or there was a Simpsons Sing the Blues sequel album that was supposed to have Bart singing with Prince that never came,

that song got canceled because Prince and Brooks had a falling out over the I'll Do Anything movie. But that's a story for another day. All right. I feel like i

talked about all that stuff too because this episode's boring parts like it's enough yes it turns out he doesn't the end uh so uh yeah this this episode begins with homer waking up getting his paper just like tony soprano at the start of the sopranos uh but i i really do love jim reardon and his team on this. There's some great bad or wrong drawings of Simpsons in this that I just love. Like Homer, I tweeted it out last night, but Homer's unhinged jaw, like yawn is crazy looking.

I love how he yawns in the opening here. Yeah, there was some other like perspectives of the dog that I don't feel like I'd ever seen before either. a lot of sort of fish eye views of the dog from like the nose point of view so there were some interesting choices yeah animation wise i think that reardon was doing a really good job in this one uh even if vd was uh playing it very safe with just like yeah it's a it's a story of a boy and his dog that tugs on all the usual heartstrings but i mean i say his little helper terribly misbehaved this entire episode starts with him it's a story of a boy and his dog that tugs on all the usual heartstrings but uh yeah santa's little helper terribly misbehaved this entire episode starts with him tearing the paper in half

cute little shot of homer just staring at slh through the through the newspaper hole that he had torn in it i i would think homer i i blame homer a little bit on this because i think the dog is tearing this stuff apart because homer hasn't fed him yet it's breakfast time like even when he eats obviously the dog shouldn't jump on the table and eat your breakfast but maybe homer should have laid out his food instead for him like you know dogs are they respond to routine very well yes you almost never see a dog where you're like that's a bad dog but the owner is so conscientious and responsible like what has happened here uh you know it sounds like we go to the marvin moreau school of dog training that it's your fault bad

owner yes but but it's true it's true uh and yes uh so we get also the first of the many cute dog point of view shots which reardon definitely said like it's easy to write in a script that for a first person perspective shot not so easy to animate on a tv budget but they did a very very good job with it and this was how as a little kid i learned many dog facts including the dog see in black and white that they are colorblind has that been confirmed have we asked the dog uh hey i i just trust people told me in enough i i haven't looked into the science of it but i believe it uh but yeah also the but apparently though it is a instead of sometimes when they had black and white in the show and they'd animate with a color palette in black and white this instead was

animated in color and then they did a video effect on it to make it black and white but yes after homer is uh wrestling with the dog lisa, isn't having a great morning in our first clip. Lisa, you don't look well. I'll make it, Mom. Just take my lunchbox to my hand. Oh, my, you're burning up. And your cheeks are so swollen. I think you have the mumps.

I'm calling Dr. Hibbert. Marge, the dog is hungry. Well, then feed him yes master it's just very observational stuff of uh passive aggressiveness between a mother and father but i really i love homer's sing-songy the dog is hungry and marge is like sing-songy back well then feed him you rarely see marge sassing back that much yeah i feel like it's just because she's stressed about lisa being sick that she is not being agreeable and just saying like no just do something for yourself for one summer i wonder when the last portrayal of the mumps in like you know popular fiction was because i feel like that

was something that was widely eradicated it's probably back in full force now but uh you don't you feel like that might have been its last hurrah in like 1990 i never knew anyone who had the mom same here i mean yeah i one of our funniest sounding diseases clearly something you don't want to get but i remember getting the mmr shots measles mumps rubella the dangerous trio i mean if you're thinking of funny ones to afflict the character with mumps uh in children causes your face to swell up so you know that's funny apparently apparently it also uh cause your um testicles to swell up as well not so funny there or maybe that's even funnier was that area on the grande's cousin now what happened to

yes exactly yeah no i mean now i'm thinking with you know today brain seems like lisa had a breakthrough case despite being vaccinated uh she better film a tiktok of her foot vibrating or something convincing people out there apparently it was like 97 gone in the early 90s and uh guess what yes in the last decade it has had somewhat of a resurgence uh since it's predicted yet another thing it's true you know there's been funnier lisa stays home from school sick ones too and uh the one with her playing uh the crash bandicoot uh clone dash dingo uh that was funnier than this but i i i like lisa saying like just tape the thing to my hand i can do it i can just make it she's that committed i like upon this rewatch i i i i like lisa saying like just tape the thing to my hand i could do it i can just be

good she's that committed i like upon this rewatch i i felt bad for lisa because her mom is like hey lisa you're sick let's learn a craft yes that's true it's like leave lisa alone let her watch tv or something i want to watch price is right and lay in bed all day just let me do that then a nice little cut from a sansel helper chewing on the food to him then being tied up outside. And it's a really great little gag that the circumference of where his chain is, is entirely just a circle that's torn up. Like it shows as far as he can get, he ripped apart everything. I had two friends. One had just a wild dog.

The other one had a mean dog the wild dog would just burst out of whatever door you opened and would just escape at every every turn it was always running away the mean dog was this husky and uh it was tied up in one part of the yard it was sort of like on one of those clothes lines where it could like walk back and forth the length of the yard you did not go in that part of the yard because it would bite you yeah ouch damn i got bit by a dog when i tried to mow the lawn of the guy who lived across the street and it like ran chased me i like leaped over the fence it bit me in the ass and tore my animaniacs t-shirt and uh when i when i went over to be like hey like your dog bit me he's like

yeah i thought i said not to like go back there until we got home. I was like, I am 14, sir. I was just trying to earn my $15. Please don't lecture me about the dog that bit me. Now I have to go to the Warner Brothers store. I think Paul F. Tompkins has this hilarious joke about a dog just screaming in their face like, oh, he's okay. It's okay. It's like, I don't think it is okay it's like i don't think it is okay no i don't

think so but the last words you hear are he's friendly that's yeah yes and yeah we also get to see a flashback to crusty gets busted with the talking crusty doll being torn apart i i also just love hearing i don't know something about hearing dan speak gibberish in the effect it sounded like like was that also in the crepes of wrath when homer falls on the stairs and the crusty doll keeps saying you're my best friend that you're right actually it's more a call back to crepes of wrath you're right yeah which vd co-wrote that one yeah everybody wrote that episode and that way none of them can take full uh responsibility for it but if i had my act together talking in the way that the dog hears everything would have been the thing i would have done for my intro go back and paste that to the i'm connor listock

then marge also really crosses the line calling her doctor at home you know what just go if it's that bad you just go to urgent care if you're gonna do it don't don't bother you gotta have boundaries with your doctor you know it's funny how the audience does not know how uh she got his number but uh he hears it yes yeah quite ingenious that that feels like a joke on vd's case of like i could have written something clever but i'm just gonna say i've sabered say like quite ingenious and we heard a chuckle in what was it uh it was uh old money and also uh when he has the mild arrhythmia yes like you'll bury us all and this one he won't stop laughing like he this is the most laugh heavy hibbert they found it they're like this is what he does he laughs at everything this is when they have fully decided this is a parody of the cosby show and so uh like yes the the shot of the hibbert family home

reveals the hibbert family which we've never seen before basically in the same kind of breakfast nook as seen with the huxtables in their very popular show at the time and they even have him wearing a very elaborate sweater as well as would have been worn by Cliff Huxtable. I prefer to just say that name. America's dead. And if you change to NBC while you're watching this, you probably see this kitchen because it was airing opposite the Cosby show. Yeah. I thought that the sun at the table was like a dead ringer for some of the bootleg Bart t-shirts that they made.

The ones where you'd be dunking. It looked like they used that model for those t-shirts. They never really figured out how many kids Hibbert has or what they look like. I mean, in the beginning it was like, well, he just has the Cosby kids. He just has the Huxtable kids, the three of them. But then like in the future, he just gets all an assortment of children, depending on the scene. We recorded the one where Homer saves his baby where it's like, oh,

I guess I had a baby. Okay. But, but yes, Hibbert gets a call at home from Marge. Hello, Dr. Hibbert? This is Marge Simpson. Not that I'm angry, but how did you get my home number? I see. Quite ingenious.

Doctor, I think Lisa has the mumps. Mrs. Simpson, much as I'd like to rely on your diagnosis, I think it might be professionally derelict of me to do so. Let me check my schedule. Two o'clock is fine. Thank you, Dr. Hibber. No way. She's faking. If Lisa stays home, I stay home. If Bart stays home, I'm going to school.

Fine. Then, wait a minute. If Lisa goes to school, then I go to school. But then Lisa stays home, so I stay home. So Lisa goes to school. Fine. Then, wait a minute. If Lisa goes to school, then I go to school. But then Lisa stays home, so I stay home. So Lisa goes to school. Lisa, don't confuse your brother like that. Have a nice day at school, Bart. Get my homework from Mrs. Hoover. Homework?

Lisa, you wasted chicken pox. Don't waste the mumps. This was the important lesson to eight-year-old me of just, like, you have to milk as much as you can out of any sick day. Like, that's the important, that was burned into my brain after this scene. You can't waste, like when I, and I got chicken pox not long after this episode. And so I learned not to waste them though.

I didn't have a good time having chicken pox. But I definitely, definitely you know ate the i ate all the junk i could and watched all the nickelodeon i could i had a uh former annoying co-worker who used to pronounce his schedule so hearing that last night was a real like sort of just you know flashback kind of moment i've only heard dr hibbert and jay sherman say it that way well he's fancy harvard boys now i well i also uh in the original airing hibbert's professionally derelict of me to do so line that whole thing was just cut it just goes straight from hibbert saying like oh i'm quite a genius let me check my schedule and it

uh hibbert took the most of the cuts uh in room for deep, deep trouble, which I think his lines are kind of boring. But I think they were taking also at the time they were being like a little too literal about the writing where it's like, well, Lisa has to go to the doctor first before she knows she has the mumps. And then she can come home and, you know, stay home from school. It's like they weren't thinking the way they would think in the future. It's just like not so literally. By season eight, they would just start at Hibbert's. You could just be right at Hibbert's. But yeah, this definitely feels like in season two,

we've seen it many times where you're just like, well, how do they get to Hibbert's? Obviously, they got to call him first and set up an appointment. They can't just show up there. Show every part of the process. Starts with a new day. And also on the commentary, Groening reveals the thing I had forgotten,

that Mrs. Hoover is named after his own first grade teacher. Who appreciated it, apparently. What's her name? Mrs. Hoover. Oh, sorry, Mrs. Hoover. I thought you meant Dr. Hibber's wife. Oh, that's Bernice. Oh, that's the debut of Bernice.

Yes, yeah. Who, as we will later find out, has a secret alcohol problem she she needs to deal with uh but uh but yeah this uh it also felt very life in hell seeing bart try to figure out a logic puzzle like this this exchange between two kids feels very uh grainy to me and there's a very subtle joke uh that's not really communicated very well in the animation but it's funny in that santa's little helper he digs a hole he puts a flower pot in the hole instead of burying the flower pot instead of burying the flower pot he digs the dirt out of the flower pot that's great i i do like that joke a

lot too that was cute yeah he's he dug all he could so he needs to re-dig a different thing and put it in there uh this is when he chases after bart and he breaks his never break dog collar from the 89 cent store must have been bought on the same trip homer did when he got that pork chop that uh for maggie in the christmas special i also like that auto is totally cool with sans little helper coming on the bus he's like just let him do it but they wouldn't revisit that for another like six uh 70 plus episodes in in the uh hundredth episode spectacular sans little helper just walks around loose after bart chews him away bart uh like an irresponsible little kid just goes like no just go home go home he's he's not putting the dog back in the house

there's no real joke to it but i just always chuckle every time i see sans little helper eat that bug the bug is so sad yeah it's big crunchy green bug well so i guess it's the perspective shot of his like giant nose into the frame and then crunching on the bug like i don't know it's just funny and then he bothers apu eats his beef jerky perhaps the inspiration for apu's later joke cans off my jerky turkey there was another line about how the cat spent all day eating bugs in another episode so there must have been some writer who who had to hang up with dogs and cats eating bugs because it's not something i really associate with either of them oh yeah i don't i mean if i see a cat or a dog eat a bug i'm like well i guess they would do that but it's not what i think of like if if

i was on family feud it would not be in my top five list of things bugs uh things dogs do right but uh yes then in some horrible bird violence sends a little helper chases after some ducks oh they get away safely that's true he doesn't kill a duck yeah but uh and then we get the first voice appearance of tracy ullman for her other character in this. one family on this block. No on earth. Inconsiderate enough to let a monster like that roam free. Are you losing your hearing or are you just stupid? I am going to explain this to you one more time

and then I'm going to hang up on you. It is not my dog. I tied my dog outside myself. I am looking at him right now. And that's Tracy Ullman playing Mrs. Winfield. Yes.

Previously seen in Homer's Odyssey, like, there's Simpson taking his motor for a walk. Was that it? Yes, that's the one, yeah. And she'd be ridden off in the fourth season. They'd move out of town, run out of the clock in Florida, as Homer puts it. Not to be confused with Mrs. Glick. Yes, yeah, very different, Miss Finfield and Glick. Yeah, the famous other neighbors of the Simpsons in the first couple seasons.

But this whole scene here, it does make me think if Ullman had wanted to, she could have been the Harry Shearer of this show for women. She can do a lot of just random voices it's basically what tress mcneil would grow to do on the simpsons uh to just be the utility female voice in the show allman could have been that if she i think she wanted to but i mean also it's like beneath her pay grade she she couldn't do blackface there was no point well she could do it we just couldn't see it yes she showed up to the recording do blackface. There was no point. Well, she could do it. We just couldn't see it. She showed up to the recording in blackface.

They just didn't talk about it. I love the term battle axe stuck out to me. That's one. We got to bring that back. I love his like your precious dog, Warden. Like, I mean, honestly, like the scene between Dan and Tracyacy like it's easy to forget that these two have great chemistry because they did a sketch show together for four years it feels like kind of a waste that tracy ellman the rest of her scenes are pretty much just her and bart and not that you

know nancy totally fine does great as part but it should have been a character that could bounce off dan or even share one scene with julie cabner and they might be being directed by sam simon who was a director on the tracy ellman show i bet i would bet they were yeah also like the only episode of tracy's takes on i ever watched or remember watching her hbo one was the one that julie cabner was in just because like oh hey look march yeah in that she played a uh closeted lesbian golfer who uh tracy is her secret girlfriend and it's her coming out story kind of thing. It was cute and all but it was also just you know

of course her and Tracy Ullman acted together in several films in the 90s directed by Woodsy Allen. Woodsy Allen right. I like his movie except for that nervous looking fella who's always in them. Again it's much like Tracy Takes On.

You can just leave those in the 90s. It's good. You know, if you saw him, you enjoyed him, whatever. But yeah, I also love Homer's speech. I think it taught me a bad lesson as a kid of like, oh, this is how you have a serious argument. Because I think when I've gotten in angry arguments with someone, I have talked like Homer, like, it's not my dog. So petulance won't win you many arguments no no but it feels good in the moment how did that how was that a learning opportunity he lost the argument i guess i just love the cadence of it it felt like this lets people know you're serious

in the case if you talk in this cadence in an argument uh answering a phone call from your neighbor these days like we just it would never happen yeah exactly yeah i assume any phone call just someone trying to steal my information yesterday that was claiming it was using the the phone system from prison gto i think or gtl something like that that was just like well this is if it was from the prison with someone in prison calling about my car's extended warranty that's probably what's coming next yeah yeah uh no i just i got a call 11 30 last night from such a thing which i couldn't believe i i i turned into my dad briefly in that moment like is there nothing sacred to call at this hour but uh so then homer has to admit defeat he goes and picks up his dog honestly

winfield was doing them a favor like she should have just called that dog warden and had slh put down she demanded her right to do so or just tell her husband like shoot that dog kill it kill it in the pool right now uh but never see mr winfield again that's true yeah he's uh she speaks of him but you never see him uh and so then homer as he's walking around he runs into his pal ned i don't know there's something about ned and his cool shoes well actually the way ned walks around that's me every morning now like for the last 18 months i have done a morning walk uh with heavy hands and anky weights as homer puts it and and i actually do walk around with a thing that tells me what my heart rate is and i do go like uh-oh my heart rate did lower i need to get moving we're

we're all in the fitbit mafia yes yeah who would have thought that that would have been something you know so many people would have as opposed to the you know the power walking yuppie caricature yeah it was supposed to be in the in 1990 i i lived so many years as homer but now at least for two hours each morning i become ned i could tell the listeners my heart rate is at 64 beats per second oh 74 wow i'm getting excited 75 i gotta calm down uh let's see uh i'm at 76 i see yes i'm 78 but i am standing so oh oh but When I saw that, I was like, that was one of those signifiers of the early 90s. If your neighbor in the movie was power walking, it was usually a sign that you were like the slob and that they were going to be sort of like uptight and like not tired of your antics quickly. But power walking is fun.

I like it, though. For me, unfortunately, I've only started doing it during the pandemic so anytime i see somebody's dog even though i would love to do what ned does to a dog here i'm like i probably shouldn't be in your personal space and touching a dog in uh in the covid world even like i walk by every now and then i walk by this really awesome cat who has a throne he basically perches on in front of the house to be petted. And I just have to tell myself, you can't do it. Don't do it. What are you afraid of?

What's going to happen? Is the cat going to cough on you? I don't know. I feel like more personal boundaries over people spacing in their pets that I don't want to be like, well, hey, I'm a stranger. I don't have a T- well hey i'm a stranger you i don't have a you know a t-shirt that says i am fully vaccinated is the cat is the cat uh being monitored uh you know you never know okay that's the thing as far as i know you can't spread covid to a cat by petting it but you should bring cat petting gloves just in case uh you know i just i

don't want to i i guess I'm being overly worried about it. A pet, a random cat that doesn't have a person nearby. I should just pet that. Yes. Pet that cat, Henry. We got to live our lives again. Yes. We'll wait.

Yeah. Get out there. All right. I'm going to do it. Stop kissing that cat. But, but really what this scene is about a very specific thing from 1990, 1991, isn't it? Yes, because this was in the news, a hot button issue. Thanks to the Sports Illustrated cover story, Your Sneakers or Your Life, which was, was that from 1990, Henry?

April of 1990, yeah, or May of 1990 because I read a 25 year retrospective on it uh in 2015 so yes yeah and definitely the people writing this episode or at least john vd had read this which is why the dark joke is that the shoes are called the assassins because they're a parody of air jordans which was the luxury item that certain people were being murdered for in inner cities and whatnot yes as as reported by sports illustrated and in a very like you know long piece deeply researched they they talked to michael jordan i think um uh with the in mind our friends of the podcast citations needed that is uh very much about uh media pr and uh bullshit as they put it it one thing you ask yourself now in reporting that they didn't ask themselves as much then like well the police say this happened you should maybe interview some

other people just in case but when i read the reporting now it's like i the quote said like atlanta police for instant estimate they have handled more than 50 such robberies in the last four months which you know might have been true and that that is the correct research at the time but it's also you know now especially actually since this came out this episode aired the week of the rodney king thing it's one of those things where i'm like well the police may say something but maybe they weren't telling the truth about why a robbery happened yeah there's lots of baggage with this article a lot of it is also wrapped up in the war on drugs where some parts of the article are like the drug money is paying for these shoes and what are we gonna do about it yeah it's it was the 1990s that was even you know the the democrats were talking

about these things you know like it wasn't it was a bipartisan issue to have this kind of like things that don't really uh that seem very tropey in uh today's society to say the very least about these stories of inner city youths and everything but that that's the the joke that is why they're called the assassins so it's a very very dark joke in the show this would have been right around the time of the reebok pump too which was the uh speaking of like power walking and stuff another um touchstone of the time was, you know i i had an upper middle class upbringing my i probably i'm not saying like my mom couldn't afford them but there was a limit of how much my mom would spend on shoes for me even if like technically they were

affordable for us but uh i so i could convince her to get me i believe it was the bk knights own version of the pump i think i had those yeah but and the la gear regulators version okay you know maybe that was it that la gear sounds right to me but but yeah but of course those don't look cool to your friends because we were all very as bart is later in this episode we were very brand conscious and we knew which was the the b-tier brand to the A-tier Reebok pumps instead. They did the research, though, because in 1990, when this was written, the Air Jordan, the fifth model of that shoe, the Air Jordan 5s were out, and they did cost in 1990 $125.

Wow, man, that's pretty good. I just looked that up. It claims that that's $262,021. Wow, man. I think shoes are still about uh i bought a 90 pair of shoes recently yeah i just bought running shoes that were less expensive than the assassins so yeah yeah uh but uh though also two three of my favorite pro wrestlers i have been following their you know travelogue videos and about six months ago they just turned into videos of them buying new air

jordans every town they go to and i i'm like well i guess i've learned much more about jordans than i used to know about those shoes and out of all the simpson shoes they've made they never made the assassins which i i think it's because they're a parody of shoes and it's it's hard the concept is hard to like explain to people it's like see what i'm wearing is a parody of air jordans that's why it's funny yeah instead of just wearing like your uh your albarto shoes or your mose bar shoes or your mr plow shoes which have a more understandable concept i think the the idea of wearing a parody of expensive shoes is weird and hard to sell like the car homer designed yeah yeah i you know i think i recall when

we interviewed last year the designers of the vans lines of shoes one of them said they wanted to do assassins but it just couldn't really be done that it's like they're nike style shoes and vans doesn't make nike style shoes you'd have to work with nike or maybe adidas to make something like that but custom vanity plate would have been pretty tricky too. Yeah. And also until I was like maybe in my mid thirties, I thought, well, yeah, shoes are $40. I will buy a pair of Chuck Taylors every two months.

It's part of my shoe subscription. But now, now that I'm older and my body is, uh, you know, let's say falling apart, uh, shoes are like at least a hundred dollars. Like I have to buy a hundred dollar pair of shoes or else I will be in pain no i had to break through that mentality too same with the mentality of um a haircut is twenty dollars that's what a haircut is it should never a haircut shouldn't be more than that or it's wrong i'm being robbed which no i've i i much prefer my hundred dollar haircut i've been getting uh but that but that is with a generous tip to the very friendly person cutting hair in the pandemic. Henry and I share a stylist.

That's true. That's what we're spending your money on. These fancy boys and their fancy Berkeley haircuts. Yeah, wow. This is quite a window into your opulent lifestyle. But yeah, so Homer learns all about the assassins from Ned. He also calls him Mr. Universe, which it would be late season three production-wise

that we would learn that Ned actually is Mr. Universe in body. Yes, when he would take off his shirt to be Stanley. All that power walking really does the trick. I'm not seeing those results yet. Yet from my power walking. We cut to hibbert checking on lisa i can these were also where the uh the biggest cuts were in the first airing when i watched it yeah i mean not to be too down on this episode this is such a useless scene yes there's nothing very funny uh i mean there are funnier scenes in the future of hibbert being patronizing and lisa being insulted but he's like have a woe we pop but that's just the joke that's it him listing arithmetic things he's like well you'll get back to your hypotenuses and your blah blah blah i was like

i can see why they're like hey we got to cut 90 seconds for the deep deep trouble well the him listing things that are in arithmetic is quite boring. So in my memory, the scene is just Lisa saying, oh, I don't want to miss school. He's like, oh, you'll be back to school soon. Have a lollipop. And it's just over. But yeah, then I do like that when Hibbert says it's the mom's side. I think I do like that Marge very naturally goes like, I knew it. I knew it.

Like that just feels like good mom acting there. We cut to Homer at his office. I missed it as a joke before, but that Homer takes an entire box of donuts with him to his workstation instead of eating it in the break room. And we don't see them for long enough. We see his current shoes, which don't look like the shoes that are normally on Homer's character model. Yeah.

He's got these beaten up white sneakers with Homer Simpson All-Star written on them. Yeah, I forgot how ugly his one-off shoes are for this. That was quite a quick shot. I wasn't sure if it was meant to be like that he had tried to make his own plate like Ned Flanders had, or like if that was just something

that has been we've seen before. Yeah, the joke is lost. Normally Homer has like the cloven hoof, a work boot on or whatever he wears. We love Homer's hooves normally. But yes, Homer gets a call from Lisa. Yo. Hi, Lisa. What's wrong?

The mom? Ooh, the kissing disease. My little girl is growing up. Yuck. Quit it, Dad. So what does my little girl want? What? Let me write this down. Copies of Teen Dream,

Teen Scream, and Teen Steam Magazine? Well, okay. You're the sickie. Goodbye, Lisa. lisa hey lenny i need to leave early cover for me will you hey sure thing homer and prime lenny a scene where lenny is named and does something you know john vd says he doesn't want to take all the credit for creating lenny and carl because he wrote them just as names on the script page but clearly here he's like you

know what i gotta have another scene where lenny specifically hangs out with over i like this half-lidded affable lenny yeah he's just like okay covering for you is sitting at your workstation and eating donuts that's a whole classical gas lenny that's what he's uh yeah sitting there half-lidded snapping that this is before lenny became the um the man of a thousand pains honestly mostly eye pain you know what that's why he's not half lidded anymore his lids were like torn off in one of his many eye injuries i agree with i think i heard them saying it's in a different episode yardley did not like that they gave lisa this interest in like cute boy magazines like she she was i and i

i think part of it was that she thinks lisa is too young and i kind of agree i don't think any i mean i don't know i i i have never uh bought magazines for an eight-year-old girl but it just feels eight-year-old girls are into that stuff sure but lisa i don't think lisa is but i think like uh these are all adult men writing this there's no woman nearby to let them know what's going on so like uh what do girls like stupid things the stupid things i see at news racks let's write about those i've seen where homer buys some dumb shit that girls like let's do that yeah but i mean it leads to a hilarious joke of homer rightly saying he's buying them for his daughter but the clerk thinking homer is into teen boy magazines and thinks he's a creep i i like that

bit i i like the callback or it feels like a callback homer previously on his last day on earth teaches bart the power of the term cover for me and here he is using it to his advantage with lenny i also don't like homer joking that lisa got the kissing disease as he misthinks of mumps as a mono i guess he believes it to be it's classic homer stupidity there i thought i would just nod up on my mumps uh terminology and slang i i think i like almost every disease can be transmitted by kissing sure probably ones that aren't just blood-borne uh you know if we called covid the kissing disease people would love it you know it'd have a lot more positive media then we get a bit of family history you know only recently did they even think up the name bouvier as marge's main name and and now they're creating an entire family quilt. Well, Lisa, here it is. The Bouvier family quilt.

Wow, neat. It smells historic. For five generations, women in our family have each added a square to it. Now it's your turn. Oh, but I don't know how to sew. Oh, yes, you do. You just don't know it the memory of a million drop stitches flows in your veins very impressive you try it ow you just need to develop you see now that's a sewing finger honey

it's rightfully disgusting yeah that always it did gross me out seeing marge burn her finger and not react to it that also just her i really love their very um good movement of like just one-handed turning on and opening a uh and then closing the uh the lighter it's uh just a smooth action it makes it makes it seem like marge smoked a ton at one point in her life i mean she grew up with patty and selma right ah she learned it lighting their cigarettes for them and probably her mom and dad cigarettes too and by the way a reference in this is the 1936 photograph the fallen soldieren Soldier by Robert Capa. That's a real dead guy, the referencing.

It's from the Spanish-American War, I guess. Yeah, I thought that the patches could have been a bigger opportunity for some more funny gags. But I guess if you said they only had established the Bouvier family line, there was no like, you know, what her ancestors might have looked like or where they might have been type of thing i i'm kind of glad that there's only like six patches because as a kid it really upset me that they they actually set up that this quilt is so very important and the heartbreak that marge will feel later is like it's too real i feel so I did think it was too harsh at the time to what they do to her. But now I agree with you, Bob. Marge is giving Lisa homework on her fucking sick day. Leave her alone.

Save the history lesson for when she's healthy, I guess. I guess she might just be feeling well, but it's still in the window of contagion. So she's just doing the responsible thing. But if Lisa's up for it, she might as well take advantage. Though Marge shouldn't trust on genetics to teach her how to sew. She should maybe just teach her sewing instead. Six generations? I mean, how far back is that dated?

I mean, that could be like the revolution. That is one stinky old quilt. Yeah. You know, that Buffalo one would definitely imply, at the very least, the westward expansion in America. Like I'd say. And I know people have been waiting for this, so I wrote down every teen magazine name. Oh, boy. Oh, man.

At least one of them is filthy. And by the way, mentioned on the covers in very small print, names like Corey, so their first reference to Corey, which will become a subplot later with the Corey hotline. We also have, not referenced again billy bill in timmy tim uh marky mark had his funky bunch later in 91 but i don't know if marky mark was known as marky mark when he was just the model he probably was and i can't remember but that's probably reference to marky mark but we have teen stars we have teen Stars. We have Teen Spleen. We have Teen Steam. We have Teen Cream. Oh, come now. It's Teen and then C-R and then it cuts off. I see.

Teen Dream. I think I said Teen Scream. We have Martin Sheen's Teen Scene. We also have Non-Threatening Boys and Teen Scheme. So there you have it. Non-Threatening Boys would return as well in the series uh yeah i think also it just felt incredibly dated to me now like homer walks up to a newsstand like it's you you would not see that now but uh yeah again the reaction of the guy like sure yeah it is yeah i

mean when i was a kid i took it much more innocently like haha he's buying books for girls but now as i'm done like oh, he thinks Homer's a pedophile. The actual pervert. Homer then is he's walking away. He's in the mall. This is when he spots the the assassins with the funny tagline. Join the conspiracy, which made me laugh. But yes, Homer.

Homer is convinces himself what to do. Sometimes you gotta spoil yourself. Spoil yourself. Spoil yourself. But I can't afford to... Simpson, I order you to buy those shoes. Okay, Blaynard, you're divorced. This one's mine.

Keep on truckin'? What does that mean? I didn't know then, and I don't know now. There's your stupid homework. Ooh, funny. Functions. Ooh, funnics. Functions, vocabulary, remedial reading. Oh, do your own homework, Bart. No!

Here's your magazine. How many of these guys are named Cory? Eight, thanks, Dad. Whoa, assassins! Yep. Read them and weep. Those are very elaborate sneakers. They better be for 125 big ones. No!

$125? Fart! Homer! No! I thought we agreed to consult each other before any major purchases. Well, you bought all those smoke alarms and we haven't had a single fire. That's great. I mean, Homer should have, you know, but Homer's an impulsive

guy, but especially for how little we know he makes. $125 actually, like, makes or breaks the family in some early episodes. That's like three days of income for Homer. Yes. And I have keep on trucking information. Truck in, by the way, not trucking. I messed up there. So they wanted to use the famous R. Crumb drawing.

It's not of Mr. Natural. It's of another guy with a long droopy nose. He's stepping towards the camera, keep on trucking. There's a couple guys behind him. If you've never seen that comic, but you watched all of The Simpsons, Homer walks like that when he's a safarian. Yeah. In his Rastafarian hat.

He's way past cool. So what it means is it was based on a line from the 1936 blind boy fuller song trucking my blues away the lyrics include the phrase keep on trucking he's talking about a woman who's going to take his blues away and uh that image from that 1968 comic was ripped off so much it was on mud flaps and t-shirts and stickers our crumb got no money because people were just stealing it so he was really bitter about it they tried to get permission to use it and they said or our crumb said no that's why they're just a yin yang uh symbol i understand why crumb would do that yeah i mean he's uh that guy's a very particular man as well but i can see why he turned that down a

blues reference in an art crumb cartoon that's got to be rare we have a uh a family tradition on my dad's side, which is the day after Christmas is St. Stephen's Day, not St. Swithin's Day, where you, I don't know whose tradition it is, but you have a wren and it's like the day of the wren in some culture. So you go around a neighbor's houses and sort of barge into their house and sing a song about the wren and you wear a silly hat. And it took until I was much older to realize that all the adults were, of course, getting hammered and going out to do that. But there's a great picture of my dad and his brother and one of their friends,

and they're probably in college. They all look ridiculous. One of them's holding a beer can and sort of swaying, and one of them's wearing the truck and T-shirt. So it's an endearing part of family lore. That's beautiful i you know my uh i actually this scene as a child for me caused the scene to happen in real life like i lisa asking marge about keep on trucking made me ask my mom no well really what does keep

on trucking mean and she also couldn't really explain it. She's like, well, it was a picture. And of course, this was before the internet. So I couldn't just pull it up. She couldn't just pull up a picture. And my uncle is a big R. Crumb fanatic. So I think she was very familiar with keep on trucking as a concept. Well, you're lucky they didn't set you up for something worse. That could have been an extremely awkward moment if it was a secret dirty joke.

Oh, I think that happened later. Yeah. And yeah, how many of these guys are named Corey? It's about how Corey Haim and Corey Feldman were both big teen stars of the 80s at the same time. Which if you're, you know, an adult man writing these jokes, you're just like, what, are 17 of them named Corey? These were the bieber jokes of their day right exactly exactly i also like there's a very quick little set of tv channel jokes apparently came in after the animatic which i could see them just going like boy it's kind of

boring can we get at least some like tv jokes in here so well we find out the babysitter bandit has escaped so she had been arrested at some point from the Some Enchanted Evening to now, but now she's gotten out again. You can count all of her appearances on one hand, and only one is a speaking appearance. Yes. And this is one of them. Part versus the Space Mutants. Oh, yeah. Oh, yes.

Yeah. Well, if we're counting video games, more than three. They needed a boss in a lot of the older games. Krusty is on joe franklin by the way and i was wondering who that was and i went to the wiki for the joe franklin entry on the simpsons wiki and all they have is bart saying joe franklin is one of the many reasons they should keep cable this is not on the wiki update your wiki joe franklin is drawn into the show it's the only show crusty will do i love that. I love that he says he'd only do the Joe Franklin show,

which like that's such a funny thing about Krusty that he would refuse to do like Carson or Letterman. He's like, no, Joe, yours is the only show I'll do. And who is he? I'm not familiar. Oh, he was a New York original who had like a famous interviewing people show. Like I believe it started on radio and then became like billy crystal in 1983 did parodies of how like silly and very boring and

ugly joe franklin is as a show so that's how old parodies yes yeah hey you know like guys who uh appeared in blackface joe franklin is one one of Billy Crystal's few non-blackface. There you go. I actually, I didn't even know he did Joe Franklin until I decided to watch the SNL episode that Hulk Hogan was on recently. And he's like, oh, he did a Joe Franklin bit. But right before that, Billy Crystal did Prince. So I was like, yep.

Yeah, that makes sense. Yep. And the other things that are on the tv are uh the duffier commercial i believe is from homer's odyssey yes and the troy mcclure thing is from the cable episode and that's dan castellaneta doing troy mcclure it's it's the same walking down the stairs animation but this time it's dan saying like i need as an actor i need my eyeballs to look their whitest uh but apparently that's the only time anybody other than hartman voiced troy mcclure i could see how back then they're just like uh troy mcclure it's not like we're

bringing them back like 800 more times just just have dan do it who cares uh and they play the barney's uh frank welker should have uh yeah harbinger of his doom and they play the barney's bullorama theme you don't see anything but you hear that in the background too yeah and uh and homer actually was responsible he put his shoes up in the where it'd be hard for a dog to reach he barely hid that cookie i think in my head i edit this together to make it more interesting in that uh san jose helper destroys the the shoes and then the blanket and then the cookie and in my head i'm like well he destroys everything at once right and there's a big reaction it's like no it's spread out, he destroys everything at once. Right. And there's a big reaction. It's like, no,

it's spread out. Yeah. He destroys the thing. Then some more stuff, a thing, then some more stuff. Yeah. Uh,

and I mean, the assassins really are like the worst thing to do. Well, for Homer's perspective, the quilt is the worst. I, I, yes.

Yeah. The, I do really love the animation of Homer's very slow walks, like, like all his noises too, as he walks towards it. And his scream. I love his no scream with the giant wiggly wormy tongue coming out of his mouth. Great, great animation.

And then SLH just meets that with a big woo, like just a howl. He's like, oh, we're howling here. Let's do it. It's funny that he doesn't know he's in trouble. He just happily looks over at Homer as he's destroying the shoe yeah it's like oh hey it's you uh he wouldn't be in those guilty dog videos that go viral well also that follows up into the next scene because after the break like homer is putting like a giant heavy chain on him and says a little helper still just licking his face just like happy he doesn't know he's in

trouble or anything and it's another really long act one it's like 11 minutes yes so tracy allman i guess she was there is uh mrs winfield but emily winthrop is uh not here yet they make you wait yes so at the start of this scene this is when march starts suggesting uh obedience school and this is when it starts the thing that probably should have been set up a little earlier but bart projects himself onto the dog when he says school yeah that's your answer for everything he does smartly tie up that bart seeing the rejection of his dog by his parents subconsciously or the you know the theme here is that bart thinks like oh you reject the dog this you're rejecting me as well you also don't think i'm good enough and I'm a bad, bad kid. And you'd sell me to a farm if you could too.

Like that's the emotional investment Bart has in it, which I like that. I do like that it makes this all. But when they call the episode Bart's dog gets an F, it also is them, this is just the plot of Bart gets an F now, of Bart being frustrated. And then in the end, he cries and it causes the thing to be fixed. And then, yeah, like Bart, he gets one more chance too.

Exactly, yes. It was pretty bold to be self-referential so early on. I guess they knew they had a lot more opportunities though. Now that I know VD is so self-critical i think i think he named it to be like yeah i know i'm ripping off the plot we already did this season but putting a dog in there then they have a series of obedient school jokes they're okay i do like the drawings of them like monroe beating the guy or the dog the dog wearing the straight jacket is a funny drawing to me i it was my joke up front but i

love we taught a dog to drive that's such a great that is a great line yes so yes we then cut to the school they choose run by emily winthrop which this is tracy's big character here basically a margaret thatcher parody. In her, how she looks, and I believe how she talks, a parody of Margaret Thatcher, I believe still prime minister when this was written. But also what is little known

about this character is that she is also based on the British dog training personality, Barbara Woodhouse. And she was made famous by her 1980 television series, Training Dogs the Woodhouse Way. She died in 1988 and never saw The Simpsons lampoon her.

Wow. Now, I wondered, like, how much of this documentary will I need to watch? Because there's a documentary on YouTube about her in two parts. No one's watching because nobody cares about her anymore. And let's just say her dog training methods are outdated. And so I looked up the clip and I was like, so I looked at the documentary. I just went to a random part and I'm like, OK, show me what you're making fun of with this woman. The clip I immediately went to was her demonstrating the choke chain.

And I was like, I know she meant well. She came from a different time, but I hope she's in hell. That's like her Gallagher water special bit. Exactly. And we do have a clip of this, by the way. You see, first of all, Mrs. Butters, this dog has got a cruel choke chain on, put on upside down. So I'm going to take it off because in all cases of nervous, hysterical, and dogs that are really making a nuisance of themselves,

we usually give them one good old jerk on a kind choke chain, show who is boss. So I'm taking this off. I'm putting my own on and making certain that it pulls upwards when she's on its left hand side as usual in all training. And if the next time she makes a noise of any sort, whether she does or she doesn't, I shall just give her a jerk which shows, now you go to sleep. Put your head down and go to sleep that's a good girl so there you have it uh spot on when i started the clip i was like oh she's taking the choke chain off thank god no she took it off and put it on the correct way the kind of choke chain

and i mean yes i'm sure this quote unquote works but i don't think choking your dog to shut it up is a lesson that it needs to learn and you know positive reinforcement with animals always works better and i was talking to my wife and she was telling me that um apparently the dog whisperer was a big fan of choke chains it was very controversial wow so first you choke the dog and then you whisper into its ear i thought he just whispered damn he's actually the dog choker man i feel like she must have told herself like you're hearing how she convinces herself for others when she says like oh you see this choke chain quite cruel this is the kind of choke chain it's just a little you know like

like just like uh it's almost a simpsons gag being like quite cruel try cruel take it off flip it 180 degrees and put it back on and of course you hold it on the left side and just let's know who's boss and it's like but when she said like here go to sleep now that's what it says like oh i'm sure it does say that yeah i'm sure your dog is thinking that like oh sleepy time i'm happy now this jerk around my neck that closed off my breathing like it's time to go to sleep i mean you know this lady was born in the 1910s and in the in the future in a negative way we are disconnected from where our food comes from like we never see how animals are slaughtered or or killed or like milked or

whatever she probably grew up on a farm and just saw chickens heads rolling by every day oh sure so i people had different relationships with animals in the past than they do today got another cat like yeah hide the corpse before the baby sees it i had an i did have an uncle like that uh who him and his family lived like up in the hills in california just like well you know hey if you see the cat in the morning pretty good if not well then you figure the coyotes got him and yeah you got it you're one cat lighter that's uh that's all there is to it but yeah that is uh barbara woodhouse died in 88 again i hope she's in hell yes i much much like Emily Winthrop. I think too, Winthrop definitely has that feel of the old,

I mean, she has a whole speech about like, the old ways, like that very much is that real life woman. When I saw that clip ahead of time and you showed me it, Bob, I was like, holy shit. I mean, this is obviously very much drawn to be Margaret Thatcher, but this started, it seems to me like john vd wrote about that lady in the script and then in the at the design point or maybe when

olman did it she's like well i got a thatcher parody that works pretty well for playing like evil old conservative lady you know uh but yes here let's hear from old Emily Winthrop. that with a little love and confession, any puppy will grow up to be a cuddly little bundle of joy. Stuffed and nonsense, taught by charlatans and learned by bloody twits. Let me tell you the two most important words you will ever hear in your life. Choke chain. You raise a dog the same way you would raise a child, with simple or authoritative commands. Lay down!

Followed by immediate correction. the child with simple or authoritative commands. Lay down! Followed by immediate correction. How can we tell if we're doing this maneuver effectively? The dog's eyes will cross and his tongue will protrude and change color ever so slightly. Is my dog dead, ma'am? You don't know how often

I've asked that. Toke Chain is a misnomer. Trust me, they are always breathing. They are always breathing. They always breathing always i won that whole line from martin that was cut from the original airing uh i didn't see it but i do love her just like laughter of like you don't know how often i've asked that like oh that's so funny you mentioned that and and also i mean the darkness of her line of saying you know uh the same way you would raise a child it's like holy jesus i like how casually bart asks her if she's dead you know that's just

a very funny line read yeah it's my dog dead man yeah also funny to see that barfly sam is there with his dog rarely seen outside of mose but he's he's one of the people there and uh jock is there although he's not in future scenes i think he dropped out yeah i think the animators definitely had a thing of like let's just draw jock in here and like nobody none of the writers want to keep bringing jock back but like we're drawing him in here a very uh early take on the martin voice too it seems like that hadn't uh that struck me as being a a rough draft Oh, well, actually, speaking of cheapness, this was one of those times like, you know what, Pamela Hayden can just do Martin.

We don't need to get Roosie Taylor in for a while. If Martin has one line, it's usually Pamela Hayden. See, Frank Welker wasn't looking at the writing on the wall. Yeah, he should have. But yes, the choke chain firmly established here. I couldn't believe it as a kid. I thought it was a joke. I didn't realize it as a kid i thought it was a joke i didn't realize it was just no it's a real thing also like i'd see i saw a million shows sitcoms about like sending the dog to obedience school like never it was like such

a sitcom cliche i never knew anybody who took their dog to a beating school i know it happens and all that but never i never knew anybody who did it but yes then another first for this episode though not named it is the debut of search for the sun jack i think the baby might be yours oh i'm sure it is doll face but i'd like to see you prove it you treat me like garbage that's because that's the way you love it, baby. Gee, is it always this good? Oh, I don't know. I just step in and out. I'm only watching today because Brandy is coming out of her coma and she knows the phony prince's body is hidden in the boathouse.

Oh, oh, oh, that dog! Bad dog. Don't worry, Snowball. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Mom, what will we do if Santa's little helper doesn't learn anything in obedience school? I don't know. Father McGrath, I thought you were dead. I was. Yeah, I posted that image of Father McGrath after I saw Rise of the Skywalker. That's all I put on Twitter.

I thought you were dead. I was. Oh, God. Somehow Father McGrath has returned. It's so, it's one of my all-time favorites is line deliveries. Like, I was. Like, not only that she says, I thought you were dead. I was. Like, it's so quick to it.

And the funny look on this guy's face of like that he seemingly did just dig himself out of the ground and just and he's so excited to say it he's like I was like I'm like it's just it's a great yeah it's a great drawing it's a great line reading it all works yeah I never watched soaps but except for one period like my sophomore year of college where you know we were just around a lot during the day and there was one on called passions oh yeah sort of it sort of leaned into some of things there's like a ventriloquist dummy that became a real boy oh yes some characters you would occasionally go to hell literally but you know played played still pretty straight so we got into that for a while but the glacial pace and the when i would watch them on my grandmother's

house like when we had to stay over there and stuff it would just be the the how different they were from real tv always made me so just like nervous because it was different you know it was like the the lighting was different the music in the background the pacing it was all just like i'm not supposed to be watching this you know in this scene and in the next time we'll see it when mrs glick is watching it in three men in a comic and a Comic Book, a key component to original search, the first jokes about Search for the Sun, were they were hypersexual. Like both scenes have like, you know, it feels like the joke is that in daytime TV,

they would get away with showing sexier scenes than you could even show in primetime. I believe on the commentary, Reardon says animators uh snuck in some nudity that they had to cut out and they sent it overseas so when they go back to the scene with a father whatever coming in it's kind of like an abrupt cut i guess you could see part of her breasts or something like that originally that never aired of course he's got such a good facial expression i like the reardon reardon jokes of like well, we kept it for ourselves. Obviously now I let my freak flag fly about professional wrestling. But when meeting new people and I've been in Marge's position of going like, you know, I only sort of watch pro wrestling. You know, I just I only know.

And then you start listing like, oh, you watch every single day and you know everything about pro wrestling. Or when you're talking to somebody and you're excited that they're a fan like you but they get something wrong and you just have to stuff it down in your soul and just grit your teeth like i love the simpsons you know it got really bad when conan o'brien left he wrote like most of the show i think he created homer you just have to go like we're at this nice party i'm not gonna you're or you're my friend's boss or whatever yes uh i uh and yeah this just acceptance like yes and his little helper is awful like it's then there's a long montage that's too cutesy poo as as burns would say it's just like bart's trying to teach him to do stuff and he's not while the dogs the only thing i really love about it uh

and also the music is too cutesy poo too but the only thing i really like about it is the realistic dog actions on on slh of him chewing on his foot the way he's like positioned to chew on his foot i do like that drawing otherwise it's just kind of like lame like yeah sands little helper isn't learning deep and also in the original airing the entire scene of bart cleaning up his dog's urine and talking about like we like a hose uh weird that was cut not in original airing like uh which it is weird as i i think too he just shouldn't be peeing inside at all but apparently he also just unfurled like he got an incredibly powerful like horse-like uh movement of his urine but uh yeah they've also got a clip of that along with the uh search for the sun

animators saved it they sent back 45 seconds of a dog pissing uh they use this they did it for free it's not part of the budget uh so then homer goes to the back to the shoe store this is again feels like it's seeing the animators just stuck part of the budget uh so then homer goes to the back to the shoe store this is again feels like a scene the animators just stuck in of the guy like kicking another dude in the face as he tested his shoe it's a yeah it's a weird joke it's a kickboxing shoe he's like in the kickboxing department so i guess that's the joke yeah but it looks like a painful kick i do like that and and as a kid i did not get the play on words of acts of dog but that's cute it's cute it's a long wind up to that joke yes so i you know you know what i think now homer

sends those back to amazon amazon just goes like yeah whatever we got a box back we don't care and you just get your money back i've i have heard from people that were you to have say a a nintendo switch that doesn't work very well right now, one could buy a new Nintendo Switch from Amazon and then return it in the box and just get it back. And you've got yourself a brand new Nintendo Switch. The FBI is scrambling into their vans right now. This is the mail fraud case they were waiting for. Look, I'm just hearing these things.

I'm just hearing that it could be done. Obviously, you shouldn't. And that's a scam of some sort but is it still mail fraud if it's a ups package or i wonder well now crime oh but it's like honestly amazon doesn't miss those things they just throw them in a dumpster somewhere they write them off yeah yeah but uh but yes homer homer goes from uh sadness to uh to acceptance of of his lost money on shoes in this next scene. I changed my mind. I decided I don't want these shoes. Wait a minute. What happened here?

Well, my faithful dog was bringing me my shoes and they fell apart in his mouth. I'm sorry, sir. I warrant he doesn't cover fire, theft, or acts of dog. Big cookie. Aloha! Aloha! Would you like a free sample? The price is right.

Mmm. Ooh. Macamathania nuts. If you'd like to buy some, they're only a dollar each. Oh! So that's your little plan! Get us addicted, then jack up the price. Well, you win. Property of Homer J.

Simpson. Hands up. You know, even for the time, a dollar for one of those giant cookies is a good deal. Oh, yeah. Really? Homer should have paid that much for it. i also he seemed to eat the equivalent of one cookie off of her tray so he's really it wasn't even like a joke where it turned out to be not that giant it was you know it was too big to fit in the cookie jar did we all have the big cookie stores at our malls i did then i i thought the one that i had was you know worldwide like not worldwide but nationwide

chain but no it was limited to like the Ohio region. It was called the original cookie. Oh, and I bold claim. Yes. You know, I never I never got one. I knew I can't remember the name of it. But yeah, definitely in our food court. I remember it was like there's a Taco Bell and the Chinese food place. And then in between it is a place that sells a giant cookie that like show off like you can get a big cookie that has like happy birthday on it.

But every time I'd see those, I just think like if I was at an office and I got that instead of a cake, I'd be pissed. It's like, just give me if you're going to buy a big calorie rich cookie or sweet for my birthday. Just go with the cake. cake like what are we doing with this like cookie bullshit they passed them off to us as cookie pizzas and then you would you would top them with eminems and marshmallows and coconut stuff so that was something that i appreciated as a as a wee one it feels like the era of the cookie cake and the cookie pizza has come and gone i think it's because malls are dead well sure sure well so now sharing a cookie pizza like it's uh that's verboten first you first you won't pet a cat now you won't share your cookie pizza where do you think covet comes from you never know bob things that start with c

yes yeah no i i know we're on a podcast somebody in connor we have to log off uh i also love homer's defeatedness like he's he seems to be charging up for like a dennis leary style rant about like this is how they screw you man but it says it's like well you win i'll just do it like he's like you get you got me like it just did that he gives up i i like how the commentary to vini is critical of like we're having him say macadamia macadamia nuts he seemed to think that was too stupid he even writes macadamia on his note and yeah keep in mind uh hard word to spell sure it is and uh yeah actually i misspelled it and uh my doc is letting me know that so i'm as dumb as homer and uh yeah so homer paid one dollar for this cookie compared to the priceless quilt yeah yeah it's uh i i know that's meant to be what uh is the joke that homer gets more upset

about that than the quilt but i still i feel so bad about that quilt it's so sad but uh first we get a friday the 13th reference of uh this time when we view it through slh's eyes uh it's like you hear a version of a riff on the friday the 13th theme of on the commentary they seem to think it's predator but it's not yeah no way it's not i mean predator had first person vision too but this is very much the friday the 13th is what they're going for maybe in their script they wrote predator and then al clausen is like oh this is friday the 13th and he did a riff on that people know what the friday the 13th theme is people don't know so much the predator theme song you know and like you said it was before the internet like the guys i work with when they did mystery science theater they just like they'd say like

oh this is how this was there was no way to look it up so they put in something it was just outright wrong yeah yeah uh i miss those days just like i i think i remember all the words to the scene from monty python and then you later find out like i said it wrong that's it's not how the knights who say me talk uh but yeah homer i also think um this shows the degradation of homer over time season two homer is like i bought this big cookie and i'll take it home to eat it later no way season four homer doesn't eat it instantly and then buy three more he's not gonna savor it yeah it's gone before he gets to the parking lot it's a walking around cookie yeah uh but meanwhile lisa sews her first patch they say it on the commentary but i think it's true

it's weird that she immortalizes a music teacher she hates in her thing it's also weird because it's these two season one losers nobody cares about i think the most dialogue largo gets in 10 years is ew a bug yes yep and that's it uh but yes lisa gets her piece of the quilt done marge and lisa leave the quilt alone for literally 20 seconds like they walk to get homer and when they come back with homer they find that the quilt is gone come on homer i want you to see what your sick little girl did my quilt six generations ruined no march Marge, honey, honey, honey. Come on. Come on, don't get upset. It's not the end of the world. We all love that quilt, but you can't get too attached to... No! My cookie!

This is not happening. This is not happening. Everybody in the kitchen, we're having a family meeting. We never had a family meeting before. We never had a problem with a family member we can give away before. What are you saying? I'm saying... I like that the stakes of the end of Act 2 are set in gibberish. I like that the stakes of the end of act two are set in gibberish I like that it's it's clear you know what's happening but also it's unclear I was just thinking of a future joke when they say we never had a family member we can give away before cut to grandpa in the home yeah picking up his

phone and saying hello that's a better version of this joke yeah yeah barge is acting on the destroyed quilt very good by julie like she actually seems uh correctly distraught realistically distraught for losing all of that also right before that there's an et reference as well all the other references in this thing it goes straight from a friday 13th to the e3 reference it's such it's such a critic uh the critic thing because it's et it's uh it's also uh the creation of adam yes yeah yeah and just uh the sound margin lisa make when touching fingers yeah it's very weird it's an et noise is weird moaning also lisa developed that callus in like uh three days tops like so pretty pretty impressive march should be impressed at her her skill uh and i mean later we'll see the patch she makes of the dog destroying

it lisa is very skilled at at quilt work for sure it'll come up multiple times throughout the next 30 years oh yes so many times lisa sews so all the time homer also i love as he's saying this is not happening like he is eating crumbs of the cookie that the dog dropped meaning not only are these just cookie crumbs but they literally fell out of a dog's mouth after he ate it which i i guess that that cookie if it's full of macadamia nuts that i guess there's no chocolate in there but i one would assume there'd be chocolate chips somewhere in that cookie and i looked it up later slh eats a toffee apparently like a one vet on google says well it's not going to kill your dog but you might want to be sure about that like sometimes toffee

has other stuff that so slh is a very uh you know they should just waited for like he was going to eat chocolate at some point and die anyway. Just wait a couple more days. Yeah, that seems like something that's like our dog ate a whole bowl of like Christmas M&Ms at some point in time. So it's like either that's not the right kind of chocolate. There's no actual chocolate in M&M or it's just overblown. You know how much damage a piece of chocolate can do to an 80 pound dog. And it's probably more of the latter.

Yeah, the M&M chocolate is such a poor quality it's like go ahead dogs love them hey don't say that we that's a joke said in parody don't do it but yes the kids the kids are shocked at this i mean as a little kid definitely the thought my my dad would joke about like i want to get rid of your cats. I hate your cats. But I knew he didn't mean it. Secretly, my dad liked the cats. When the cats finally passed away, he was as broken up as anybody about them. But he would joke in Homer's style of, we're getting rid of them. They're just a cat.

Just dump them. I think of what's lost in this episode today that we're not really seeing is that a lot of it's just like, here's what a realistic bad dog is like, because dogs on TV were just cutesy things that would come in and cover their eyes like, oh, no, or spin around or do something stupid. This is just very realistically portrayed bad dog behavior, which in 30 years, you've seen it. But at this time, it was like, wow, a dog sniffing a dog's butt. They do that. I've seen it but at this time it was like wow the like oh a dog sniffing a dog's butt they do that i've seen that wow like it's true yeah it's uh but now it's just like yeah who cares i don't i've seen this stuff into an entire uh ripoff animation show about a family dog that would be that's true man i bet that was starting to premiere around this time actually the family dog show i think about it and uh yeah then uh so they decide

they're gonna get rid of them but uh bart and lisa are against it the kids are on one side uh margin homer on the other i totally agree marge understandably sides with homer like she's like look it's not just a quilt he's awful he's terrible he's not even housebroken which that's pretty bad for a dog but i mean as we know santa's little helper like he's a racetrack dog like he probably he wasn't trained to be a house dog he probably had uh well later episodes will reveal he had a lot of bad upbringing and also the kate blanchett voiced a person who trained him or whatever wow yes that was a christmas special from this three years ago above sansel

helper but yes in this case marge sides with homer homer taunts the kids that marge actually is on his side for once but this is when lisa does what she often does in season two which is give a speech that moves the family he's a nice dog but he chews up everything he doesn't obey he's not even housebroken and we've spent all this money on an obedience school, and I don't see any improvement. Oh, right. Oh, right. He sent his little helper studies real hard and passes

his finals and becomes a perfect dog. Can we keep him then? No. Dad! This is our pet. We can question his integrity and disposition, but we can't question his heart. Are you trying to teach us that the way to solve a problem with something you love is to throw it away?

Oh, Lisa, if they're ever going to pull the plug on me, I want you in my corner, honey. Oh, all right. If he passes obedience school, we can keep him. Yay, right. He just coughs up the buffalo. No, Largo's head. Largo's head. Yes, it was the buffalo that was in his mouth when they discovered him.

I like after this, I normally don't follow the plot of this episode too closely because I know what's going to happen, so I don't think about what's happening in each moment. And I think it's funny and really cynical. The parents are being dishonest to Bart and Lisaisa like all right he gets one more chance they immediately make arrangements to give him away i love yes i love the march saying like can't we do it after that happens like no no no you gotta do it now like i i mean that hey that's planning for the future homer's right that's hedging man there's no way he's possibly going to do that so give him away to you know the equivalent of mr blackheart yeah and also homer i uh speaking of him planning ahead when he hears lisa's speech

he's like someday i'll be on my deathbed and she's that i need lisa to have my back and not pull the plug uh i i also again i think it's very realistic bart's like bargaining with the parents like i did that as a kid too like okay well wait if you do this and like all your tactics to try to bargain with a parent over something like that that feels very real too I like that Lisa she's so empathetic that even though the SLH did the worst stuff to her she's just like I just can't hate him he's too stupid like he's a big dumb idiot he doesn't know what he did was bad i can't hate him for it uh so we go back to the training santa's little helper is put in the kujo classification which uh goes by so fast i never noticed until this watch of it there's like toto's and benji's and he's in the

kujo class rintintin yes yeah then this is when winthrop offers bart a toffee for doing the rollover which then bart doesn't even get to eat it sands will help her just eats it which that made me look up the toffee you know also a danger of eating toffee for dogs or any heart candy it could chip their teeth you know their little doggy teeth yeah i like homer yes when they put the ad they also say this is a pre-online world where they have to pay money to put an ad in the newspaper uh i like homer he's just saying like no we have to commit ourselves like it's also very realistic yeah it's another literal money it's another literal scene where it's like well does homer just you know ad lib the ad no he and marge sit down and write it you write that scene john

vd yep and uh then is as more training fails are happening for Bart, he's seeing that things are getting worse for old SLH. Now, sit. I said sit. Take a walk. Sniff that other dog's butt. See, he does exactly what I tell him. Oh, no, we'd never give him away. But we're moving to another country where dogs are forbidden. Hear what? Oh, sure. Come here, boy. Put that prowler down. Come here.

Come on, boy. Say it, boy. Say, I love you for the nice man. I love you. Good dog. Good doggy. Isn't that amazing? See you soon.

Woo-hoo! I love Homer acting out a dog saying, I love you. You know who else liked it? Frank Zappa. It's a real name drop by Groening on there, yeah. Matt Groening said he became friends with Frank Zappa around this time this episode aired,

and that was his favorite joke. Homer saying, I love you in a dog's voice. I like that the guy on the other end of the phone was you know that was a part of the selling for him is that he was he was very you know concerned that that was an actual detail that was true i guess it's the farmer who shows up in the next scene that yeah he was convinced by it i but i mean later uh maybe season five uh sanzal helper will say we love you that's true yeah so Yeah. So, hey, Sansa will help her finally learned. Yeah.

Includes the cat in that sentiment. I also like that Bart, it's a good strategy on Bart of pretending the bad behavior is an order he's giving to the dog. I like that too. It's cute. But in the next scene, he can't stay away from that beef wellington a very classic like britishy food thing which is just like i it's hard to think of a more british food of just like a very rare red piece of meat then wrapped in uh in bread and then fried up you know with one mushroom on top for garnish

which at first i thought it didn't i was like oh that doesn't look like a beef wellington because i was thinking of it in loaf form me too yeah but if you cut it into portions that does look like a portion of a beef wellington which i've never made it seems very i think i've eaten one once and it is it is a very heavy meal yeah it doesn't come up too often these days it seems like we've moved on and discovered better ways to prepare everything uh well now you know the uh also like beef beef not so great for you or for the environment so i uh i've i live i live a pretty beefless life and a beef wellington is a beef full life instead it's a great pan across all of the dogs excitedly like staying back even though they're like drooling for it and then it pans across and then it's just bart holding him back with all of his strength and he just can't

stop him sanzel helper overpowers him and just eats it yeah i'm looking at beef wellington now and the proposition is what if there was a loaf of french bread that was just full of red meat you cut into it instead of bread it was just meat why have like a roll with a steak when you could have a steak inside of a roll before they had invented turduckens where you stuffed other meats and other meats it was just what can you stuff bread there we go like we'll take it from here i can i can just imagine a you know british bulldog type man with his brandy in one hand a cigar in the other and a beef wellington just sitting right in front dying at age 36 of heart disease that's how they talk at it yeah all right yeah sure that's

a uh that's a dish the dog not doing so great and we also get to see a farmer is going to put him to work which for viewers let you know things are going to be real bad for santa's little helper wherever he goes especially the way he says patient people know better like that's creepy like he's he's going to torture this dog until he starts doing uh you know uh mule chores yes yeah they they did not work farm animal they did not invent uh cletus yet So this is sort of like the predecessor to Cletus. It's a creepier guy, too. Like, Cletus is more of a fun cartoon. This guy, like, he's too realistic. His jaw's not slack. And, I mean, they got away with him just, like, grabbing Santa's little helper's balls

and the dog, like, yelping at it. Like, that's very... Also, I don't know, get SLH fixed. Maybe that's also why he's acting out you know and it's the responsible thing to do yeah there was no humping in this episode i was kind of let down yeah they saved that for season six with 2001 greyhounds out of all the daytime tv they were not watching the prices right otherwise bob barker would have told them ah see that's their mistake if they didn't watch that they'd know also there's some

very helpful adr at the end of the farmer scene because Homer says, you can pick him up tomorrow, which he's completely off screen. I think they originally thought showing Bart distressed about it, it lets you know Bart's worried that it's definitely over. But having Homer say, pick him up tomorrow, lets you know this is the end. It's much more of a ticking clock, I'd say.

And that leads Bart to make one final plea to Emily Winthrop. You know what? I kind of agree with Bart. It's like, you get paid either way. Who cares? It's like, what do you owe? This is a farce. Yeah, this is not a police dog training where, like, a life might be at stake or something.

But unfortunately, Bart went to too good or too rigid of a dog obedience school. Since you get paid either way, would it be a big deal to just let my dog pass? I see. Rubber stamp, thank you very much. Next in line. Is that it? Yeah.

Heavens to Murgatroyd. But perhaps I cling to the old ways like a well-chewed shoe as the traditions I was weaned on are put to sleep or neutered one by one. But my time has not passed yet. The world does not

need another college graduate who doesn't know how to sit. He'll sit. He'll sit. Come on, boy. Sit. Sit. Blah, blah. Blah, sit. He'll sit. He'll sit. Come on, boy. Sit. Sit. Blah, blah. Blah, blah.

Pull the chain. Huh? Correct the dog. I don't want to strangle my dog. Pull the bloody chain, boy. Sorry, boy. Can't help being dumb. That's just so sweet. I don't know know that gives me a little bit of goosebumps just part hugging his dog and saying like you can't help you're dumb i'm sorry

you're just a big dumb idiot i wish there was more of the bart seeing himself in the dog thing because that was kind of what he was going through and bart gets a nap where he's like i'm stupid okay i don't know what i'm doing let's give up. All right, I can't help it. There needs to be more of that because I didn't really put that together until you guys pointed it out. So it wasn't as... Yeah, like they, you know, they did that journey during like, you know,

when he got banned from Thanksgiving and stuff. So they do have that sort of bond as dumb outcasts. But yeah, I didn't click for me last night. Connor, thank you for saying that because I didn't, you're right thank this is a sequel to thanksgiving like the thanksgiving episode is bart and him both being thrown out of the house and going on an adventure together this is kind of continuing that idea yeah yeah and i also i like hearing the margaret thatcher parody say the snagglepuss line heavens to mergatd. Snagglepuss stole that line.

Did you know that? No, I should have figured him being a Hanna-Barbera character. He couldn't be original. That was the catchphrase by Burt Lahr's character, the 1944 musical Meet the People. I see. So there you have it. Does it make sense in the context of that musical? I think it was just like his heavens to Betsy kind of exclamation.

And Burt Lahr, the Cowardly Lion, I believe, which Snagglepuss is also just a full- Wait a minute. Yes. I'm just connecting these right now. I thought Snagglepuss was the original character. Well, no wonder he's gay. No, he's the one who makes the most sense to make gay though honestly other than augie doggy and doggy daddy who are a you know uh created from a heterosexual coupling i'd say all of the original

hannah barbara characters are gay uh definitely yogi and boo-boo are gay for sure they sleep in the same bed in the same cave bears for god's sake they're bears yes yep and we all know the tagline for the uh live action yogi bear film good things come in bears as we know anyway yes and the images of of course yogi behind boo-boo yep that's what they knew what they were doing i i somebody knew for sure yes also just bart's desperation of like i don't want to strangle my dog and you just like yeah i feel awful doing this they're coming down hard on the choke chain in this episode and i appreciate it yeah yeah it killed it killed choke chain sales from then on in america we then cut to lisa well she is honestly i read her in this little clip here as insulting Marge personally.

What are you doing there? Sewing a new quilt. You know, it's one thing to be a link in a chain. It's another to start one of your own. This patch commemorates the destruction of the old quilt. Wow. You certainly captured the moment. See,

I think that the way Lisa says, like, you know, it's one thing to be a link in a chain. Like, she's insulting Marge for caring about the quilt at all. And her first patch is commemorating this moment that is traumatic to Marge. Yeah. If you hadn't gotten the mumps, honey, I wouldn't have even lost this sixth generation quilt.

Yeah. Maybe it's your fault. Back on the sarcasm. Yeah. You know what? I trusted you with the quilt and you left it on your fault the sarcasm yeah you know what i trusted you with a quilt and you left it on your bed for a dog to destroy so you like that if uh in a meaner sitcom that's what barge would have said to lisa i think i took it as just too mean of lisa one insulting the very idea of tradition to the person who shared their tradition with you in a heartwarming

way and then the margins just reaction like you certainly captured the moment this chain does not include you mom yes yeah yeah also invite marge like hey you know what how about you sew a new one here and how about you call up patty and selma they'll sew one and you get your mom yet yeah exactly it's a little mean but i think intentionally it's done of like oh this fixes the quilt problem. Lisa started a new quilt. No one's sad about the quilt anymore.

It's fixed. It's all good. And so then Bart is trying futility with futility to save Santa's little helper. I also love Lisa just showing up to be like, no, leave this dumb animal alone. Like you're just torturing him in his last hours of freedom. Give him a break and but even lisa's like okay let's have fun get it and as a little helper does literally nothing i do love the frisbee bouncing off his dead eyes that's great yeah that was the shot i remembered

from this like you know that was the one that stuck with me all the rest of it is just very normal like there's not a joke to it bart and him just like frolic in a realistic way it's too wholesome yes yeah bart yeah much too wholesome yeah bart not caring that a frisbee bounces off his dog's eyeballs that's the funniest one in there for sure and then the dog doesn't care either so it's not like it's not like he's hurt and bart doesn't care it's the the dog doesn't give a shit either does the dog seem dumber in this episode to you guys? I guess he has to be for the plot to work, but I never thought of him as being like one dog that a frisbee would bounce off his eyes

and he'd just sit there smiling. No, he's smarter. Honestly, he's too smart. I suppose in the laddie episode, he's dumb enough to just stand still. He's written close to as stupid as this in it, I think. But that's the only other time i can think of him being a really like written as a just dead-eyed idiot dog bart has a final

night of fun with his dog and then comes an ending that pretty much is exactly the same as bart gets an f right down to bart's tears. I'm gonna miss you, boy. I thought we were gonna be pals forever. But we're gonna have to say goodbye because you don't understand a single word I say. If you just knew how important it was to learn blah, blah, sit. Wait a minute, you did it.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah did it. Lay down. Shake hands. Stay. Speak. All right, good boy. Roll over. You son of a bitch. Good show. you son of a bitch god sure that thing with homer is so weird yeah and i've heard the commentary for this a lot because i was

i was watching these and listening to them before they were a podcast. And Al Jean points out, this thing with Homer is a parody of a scene in the movie The Oscar from 1966, in which, I'm not going to give you the entire plot of the movie, but the main character is named Frank. He's a big asshole, and he's up for an Oscar alongside Frank Sinatra. The end of the movie is him not winning the Oscar. The presenter says, and the winner is Frank. The lead character stands up, is ready to accept the Oscar. And then the presenter says, Sin Sinatra and then the guy just

Like weakly claps and the movie ends Wow that is a parody of that Scene which apparently these people knew Yeah I have never seen a Reference to this movie I have never heard anyone mention the Movie the Oscar in my life never Never ever that is why Homer's like a Huge dumbass to stand up before she was finished

Speaking yes it's a real Plot hole but that's why homer is like weirdly just grumbling and then eventually becomes happy the becoming happy doesn't get happy no i looked up the scene too the guy doesn't get happy yeah yeah probably another one they sort of misremembered or something like not like you're walking into every blockbuster to rent the 10 copies of the oscar they had this uh i i actually watched the oscar or not the full thing i was gonna say yeah it's two hours long but it was one of those movies it's like oh where is it streaming anywhere and it's streaming on one of those very helpful websites like if you have a library card

you can watch it and so i pulled it up there uh and the weirdest thing is they like filmed a movie at the 1965 oscars and cut in scenes of the guy for a 1966 film and it's very strange but the rest of it it's like it's it's remembered as a terrible film apparently but uh and but hey it's got a jill saint john strips to her underwear in it so as it's not uh in in the same movie with bob hope in it which made me think of the joke in the simpsons and bob hope and milton burles in this movie yeah yeah okay no i mean it's a hollywood set it's hollywood sending up itself it's right up there with the start of austin powers three with all the movie stars hanging out with austin powers it's it's reminiscent of that but yeah i'd literally never heard of it before even even he tosses it off so quickly in the commentary i never bothered

to look up the oscar before same here and and plus guess what searching for the oscar film that's not easy to do google doesn't like that that's. You mean the film that won the Oscar in 1966? And then we roll from a parody of the Oscar to Animal House. Yes, yeah. I love that VD on the commentary dumps on it for being like hacky to do an Animal House parody in 1991. I like that. He jokes. Probably the equivalent of doing an Austin Powers parody in like 2001.

Yes. He says like, oh, it was a joke. Like, you know you know in 91 it was only a decade old it was it was still fresh yeah yeah uh it reminded me the whole the the dog speaking thing reminded me of the far side cartoon where the dog is you know all it hears is blah blah blah ginger for what dogs hear so i don't know which one of those came first i do like that bit yeah i i like that uh you know the very least all this dog vision stuff pays off that the gibberish turns into a word he can hear that's that's a fun or that is a a good plot wise moment the the the animal house parody feels like it came in later or uh it's all like uh freeze frames and like the freeze frame of sandals of him in the backyard earlier yeah so yeah but poor poor martin's dog ate a is in a coma ate a poisonous toad that's uh yeah

loud zoo the dog his his picture is him looking at the beef wellington too so they didn't draw a new one for him either which yeah poor martin martin's parents are there i noticed it's the correct parents also in the shot of everybody in the class the twin women who were on that double date with burns and smithers right like they also have a dog there like that's weird like i never thought i never thought those characters made another appearance but they did i was wondering who they were yeah i mean they're unnamed i was like oh now i remember them as the double date ladies which one were they from from homer's night out homer's night out yes yeah at the at the night club where of i could love a million girls and everyone in the audience smithers and birds are on a double

date with those ladies they look like they're from the simply irresistible video yes yes you're totally right and i think one of the people in the crowd that we're in we're identifying everyone now but one of the people in the crowd is of we're identifying everyone now, but one of the people in the crowd is of one of like the wine moms who gets Marge drunk in No Disgrace Like Home. Yeah, you're right. It's the one Marge is talking to about like, you know, yeah, drunkenly talking to over the picture.

You're right. Yeah, totally. She's one of the freakiest looking ladies there. I'm shocked she got a second appearance, but she ate that same poisonous toad and they got away with saying son of a bitch on tv because i i would bet in a very bart way they're like technically uh calling a dog a son of a bitch is correct as a third grader i would have appreciated that and then that's that's where they were writing out a lot of the time where they're like we got to pass the sensor things of like this will

entertain the third grader that we got away with it but and also i like the animation of the transition cut of bart saying roll over in the backyard and as he's rolling the backyard becomes the graduation and uh and winthrop being uh learned like having to admit she was wrong and that the dog was teachable so a happy ending and all with a tearful moment i mean you know a boy and his dog kind of stories it's easy to get emotion out of people with that i still emotionally respond to it on some level but yeah it's such an average story of just like the family might lose their dog there's the best stuff in here just like the little sketches of like watching search from the sun or whatever search for the sun those little moments are the best ones in this

yeah i'll repeat what i think that seems to be my favorite the uh the priest coming back is pretty damn funny yeah i forget it's from it's from this episode and like i said i've said it before i'll say it again dog of death is better i think it's more imaginative it's not funny. I forget it's from this episode. And like I said, I've said it before. I'll say it again. Dog of Death is better. I think it's more imaginative. It's not a repeat of Bark Gets an F. It's like the dog gets sick. They help the dog, but then they're resentful towards the dog because it costs them so much money.

And the dog runs away and there's a Clockwork Orange parody. Mr. Burns is involved. It's so many better ideas. This is a little too stock for The Simpsons, I think, what we're seeing here. A little too stock, a little too slow, a little too, yeah, a little too normie. But I mean, also, I think it mistakenly, I didn't say this before about how they had Tracy Ullman, but it seems mistakenly built around a big guest star in her and making her character central to the episode.

But it doesn't have the punch. Like when I saw it, even then I was was like tracy olman's finally on the simpsons i was just like uh who's this like i i never even though i watched tracy olman with my mom i still didn't take it as what a big moment that tracy olman finally is on the simpsons here even if i was disappointed to this right when it was over at age eight bart instantly comes in all over the credits to be like stay tuned dude a deep deep trouble's coming up right next watch it and so once that aired it erased my memories of this episode anyway boy i gotta say uh henry we gotta correct all these wikis now because the simpsons wiki has very fraudulent information on it they say they claim the lawsuit was resolved and then allman voices character as

a show of goodwill the timeline is all wrong wrong. No, I've laid out the time. People, I've given you all the information you need. You can look up the LA Times story from April 19th, 1991 of when it was filed, making it a month after six weeks after this episode aired. And then you can pull up the Variety story from October 24th, 1992 when it was resolved. This appearance was before she did the lawsuit.

Time for an edit war, baby. I'm not doing this on the wiki, but other people need to. One final thing about Winthrop. She'd appear two more times, non-speaking, of course. She'll be in Old Money. She's one of the people in line for Ape Simpson's money. And also at the end of When Flanders Failed, she comes to the store at the end.

She is left-handed. So after season two, she's done. They're like, get her end of When Flanders Failed, she comes to the store at the end. She is left-handed. Oh, okay. So after season two, she's done. They're like, get her out of here. Ullman is not coming back. I mean, yeah, once the lawsuit is over, I could see perhaps James L. Brooks or Richard Sakai saying, no more of this. You don't say Tracy Ullman's name here.

Then again, if they still had bad blood with her, then they'd have been mad at Julie K cavner for being on her tv show in hbo but then what are you gonna do you're not gonna fire julie cavner no yeah so connor thank you so much again for being on the show even though this is a lackluster episode you brought a lot of levity to the podcast so please let us know what's going on with riff tracks we're recording this way in advance unfortunately uh it'll go live after the most recent uh live show in october so what's going on with rift trucks yeah we'll have just done our our halloween show which is about an evil lamp it's an amityville movie but that'll probably be out before the end of the year on our site and we have some cool stuff coming by the end of the year we've got we're

doing a a uh featured length club bed infomercial starring jim carrey oh that's gonna be a very fun one wow like an early 80s Jim Carrey. We're doing a movie called Dangerous Men which is absolutely batshit. That is a... I don't even know how to describe it. It's another movie where the guy was the writer, producer, director of music just like movies like

The Room and Neil Breen and stuff like that. Oh boy. If you like the vision of an auteur being fully realized, that's going to be a really good one. We've got our friend subscription. So you can watch just a ton of stuff that we have on our site for, I think like five or six bucks a month. It's the best deal on streaming. And, oh, sorry. I was going to say right now, you guys are putting a lot of stuff on YouTube

for free, like whole movies. So if you're new to Riff Track, it's a great way to get into it. There's shorts and full movies on your YouTube channel too. Yeah. Those are usually some of our like, you know um older and more popular stuff so you can watch setting up a room or talking cats or some of our live shows are all up there those are those are all pretty fun and yeah i guess i guess that works out uh youtube youtube channels like uh so that's pretty new so it's uh go and like it and so that we keep doing more of that yeah and then uh check out our uh me and me and mike from riff tracks do a podcast called 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back.

And we just started reading a new book, which is called Irene Ittle Slay, which is from like 1897. And it's one of the guys like Mark Twain and C.S. Lewis thought was the worst book they had ever written. So we're going to read it and see how like their quaint version of what a bad book could be like matches up with some of the other stuff. Oh, wow. That's awesome, man.

I, that's the, with the holiday season coming up, I always remember Riff Tracks has some great deals at the holidays as well. So I. Absolutely. Great deals. And like the Christmas content out there is so, you know, the bottomless well of crap. So. That's my favorite time of the year.

Yeah. Yeah. We do have some awesome stuff, you know, like Wizzo the Clown on our site, old Christmas shows we've done. And for the life of me, I can't remember if we have a feature-length title this year but i'm positive we do at least some shorts lined up so yeah check it out it's always fun and i appreciate you guys uh you know plugging it and coming to see the shows and stuff oh yeah we can't wait hopefully you know in the new year maybe you'll come to our town again who knows yeah yeah i gotta

look into that too maybe we'll be in san francisco for sketch fest you know hopefully uh if not this year the one after that but thank you so much connor absolutely guys anytime so thanks again to connor for being on the show please check out riff tracks of course we love it and also his podcast with mike nelson 372 pages will never get back but as for us if you want to check out more of what we do and get all these episodes one week ahead of time and ad free please head on over to patreon.com slash talking Simpsons. Sign up there for five bucks. You get just that, but also access to everything behind the $5 paywall that includes over 100 of our mini series episodes that you haven't heard. If you're not on the Patreon, we've covered things like The Critic, Mission Hill, King of the Hill and Futurama. And right now we are covering our 10

favorite episodes of Batman, the animated series with our newest miniseries, Blabbing About Batman, the animated series, only on the Patreon. You can only get it if you sign up for the $5 level at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. And there is a $10 level as well. When you sign up for that, you get all the $5 stuff, but also access to one Megalon podcast once a month only for patrons of that level or higher. And what is that, Henry? Bob is talking about the What a Cartoon movie podcast podcast we have a sister podcast called what a cartoon where twice a month we cover an animated series super in-depth just like we do with the simpsons and at the end of each month we cover an animated feature film crazy in-depth often over four hours long even five

hours long last month to tie in with our current mini-series we did batman beyond return of the joker the very very good and also somewhat controversial at the time batman beyond film we super get into the interesting history with that and at the end of this month to tie into the holiday season about to begin we're covering the rankin bass 1964 classic rudolph the red-nosed reindeer a childhood favorite for uh people our age and slightly and older but so check all that out a giant back catalog that's over three years old of what a cartoon movies i'd say 200 hours just about now of what a cartoon movies at your fingertips and a new one each month and all the five dollar things bob just mentioned if you go to that ten dollar level when you visit patreon.com slash talking simpsons as for me i've been one of your

hosts bob mackie you can find me on twitter under bob servo and my other podcast by the way is retronauts is a classic gaming podcast all about old video games find that wherever you find podcasts or go to patreon.com slash retronauts sign up there for two full-length bonus episodes every month henry how about you you can follow me on twitter at h-e-n-e-r-e-y-g please follow me there for all your updates for all your updates in my world plus you should follow the official twitter account of this podcast at talk simpsons pod whenever there's new things up on the, whenever there's stuff on the free feed, if there's a sale on our t-shirt store, which, hey, check that out at TeePublic,

you hear about that first if you follow at TalkSimpsonsPod on Twitter. So do that today. Thank you so much for joining us, folks. We'll see you next time for Season 12 Simpson Safari. We'll see you then. Hey, bird dude. Hey, auto man.

Yo, hairy bro. Go home, boy. Go home. Blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah.