Talking Simpsons - Talking Simpsons - Behind The Laughter With Matt McMuscles

Episode Date: December 30, 2020

We reach the end of season 11 (and 2020), so we're joined by the returning Matt McMuscles -- check out his YouTube channel and his Patreon! This extended parody of a lost-to-time VH1 series worked great 20 years ago, and allow us to explain the many references lost to time. Listen along to find out if those roses are hiding ready-to-sting bees in this week's 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!

Good news everyone, Talking Futurama is coming back for Talking Futurama Season 2 Part 2. Fresher than a summer ham, this podcast comes every Friday and if you sign up at the $5 level at patreon.com slash talking simpsons you can hear each episode as it goes live. That's right, sign up today at patreon.com slash talking simpsons for $5 to hear Talking Futurama every Friday throughout the rest of 2020 and also all the previous episodes we've done so far. So head over to patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons now or we're gonna clamp you! Shut up and take my money! I heartily endorse this event or product. Ahoy, ahoy, everybody. Welcome to Talking Simpsons, the podcast that's listed in the Encyclopedia Self-Destructica. I am one of your hosts, the angry yawner, Bob Mackie, and this is our chronological exploration of The Simpsons. Who else is here with me today?

Hey, it's Henry Gilbert. I was so gay, but I couldn't tell anybody. And who do we have on the line? My name is Matt Mimuscles. Will he destroy this episode of Talking Simpsons? Maybe, but we're not really sure. But the answer, of course, is yes. Or is it? And today's episode is Behind the Laughter.

Tonight, The Simpsons, as you've never seen them before on behind the laughter today's episode aired on may 21st 2000 and as always henry will tell us what happened on this mythical day in real world history oh my god oh boy bobby in a very behind the music type moment rapper 50 cent is shot nine times but survives in a very matt mcmuscles moment di katana is released for the pc and in pro wrestling news the undertaker debuts his american badass persona at the judgment day pay-per-view so that was when he became a celebrity of getting shot before he became a celebrity of rap. 50 Cent, yes. It's a shame that history never really got better from then on out. You have American Badass Undertaker, the birth of 50 Cent.

You can't do better than this year. 2000 was the last year. Everything was bad after that for sure so like i am not uh i'm not very clear on this american badass uh rebranding of the undertaker did he only bury like the war dead like he would only bury coffins wrapped in flags well he definitely became a very uh flag worshiping guy even before 2001 though i mean undertaker now is like 100 a blue lives matter dude that's who he is and and also and also an exotic cat owner too so oh so he's gonna be murdered by one of his pets soon uh hey the undertaker's too tough

for that man but yes the american badass was his new rebranding because he had been you know basically a goth uh tough guy and this was him just throwing that all away and he's like no i'm just on a motorcycle you call me the undertaker but i'm just like uh a dude a biker dude now that's a downgrade but he would come out to american badass in some ways but it's not in others because of course he had kid rock and limp biscuit as his theme songs and just 2000 like you could and plus that's what he wanted like the actual guy the undertaker like uh mark calloway he's like oh this is what i wanted to be all along this is me the real me how i like to be and like everyone hated it and he was bitter at everyone for not liking it. Yeah, it was weird.

About four years after that, he'd kind of re-debut as Spooky Undertaker, but he's still kind of like, no, I have cool tattoos, and I'm still kind of a tough guy who's also in MMA, but sometimes druids with flames will walk me to the ring uh but yeah the 50 cent uh shooting this was before he was a particularly famous rapper and then you know I think a year or two after this was when the marketing push for him as a the new big rapper began related to like hey he got shot nine times like Chris rock had a very funny bit about it that when i say 50 cent was shot nine times i just hear chris rock's voice in my head which i will

not imitate on this podcast who are you jimmy fallon he got blood all over my sand this 50 cents yeah like uh man i need we need another 50 cent game but i think he's too rich from the water he doesn't need anything else he could be a fortnight skin or something uh but daikatana i know matt you must be fascinated by this as well we have like we can't uh mention daikatana without mentioning the ad campaign not not thought of by the creator of the game but the the classic ad uh john romero is about to make you his bitch suck it down people people knew the names of uh first person shooter directors in the year 2000 this was the the age of like the rock star developers and now i think people just know like oh yeah miyamoto and um kojima that's it yeah like do you know who directs assassin's

creed games can't think well like sadly i know who mojang is but yeah i want to but you mean notch notch so yeah i mean he develops like uh like stomach problems in his candy room that's all he makes now unfortunately when you say the words not sadly always appears right after but uh daikotan is weird because for that particular ad even as a kid i was like yeah make you his bitch that's cool but suck it down actually offended me i was like oh that's too much and i love dx at the time we're all about sucking something so there's something weird about that tagline like when people talk about it like suck it down is always like really this is the weirder part to me. It's very strange. Yeah. A marketing executive talked John Romero into doing this.

He was like, I don't know. I think it was not more about it being offensive. It's like, what is this telling anyone about the game? Like, this isn't anything. And they're just like, no, no, it's got to be edgy. And I'll grab headlines. And he's like, yeah, I guess you're right. It would.

But then, you know, it's not like it hurt its sales it's not like someone said like oh i'm never gonna buy die katana because of that ad people were like i'm never gonna buy die katana because it's die katana it's terrible the reviews told me not to but yeah you're totally right matt uh people never reference the suck it down part i think they're just too hung up on the word bitch which is in the ad but it was an interesting time when you could be like, why don't we threaten our customers with sexual violence?

I think that'd be fun, and they'd really use the eye-catching ad with the bright orange background, black text on it. Well, like bitch puts a period on the end of the sentence. You don't need to think of the next thing. Maybe also they wanted to just put suck it,

but they were informed like WWE had the copyright on that. They're like well we gotta add down to it i mean really even in like nintendo power and magazines like they'd always have those really gross ads like around 2000 like it'd always be really weird like uh jars filled with toenails because you're i don't know the reason why and like they just have pictures of weird shit like burnt toast or the even like a few years earlier in 95 the you know the all our emotional scars are derived from that one commercial for yoshi's island where a man explodes yes yeah like it was it was the style at the time i recommend that people look up issues of the uh the magazine pc accelerator which was basically a lad mag in the u.s for pc gamers and it's everything you think

it would be and i'm sure that daikatana ad popped up in it several times and matt you on your uh video channel you have uh i believe you definitely have a well happen for uh di katana right i do i do yeah and well i guess let's i guess formally welcome back matt mcmuscles to the show welcome thank you thank you i am pleased to be here it's it's the highlight of the season i think it's the best episode of season 11 yeah what i think you're right i think you're right this is a real uh treat to get to finish up season 11 and also to have on matt who uh you know you've been uh doing a lot of playthroughs but your one for uh simpsons hit and run has been especially awesome because uh me and bob got featured in it and that's uh yes but it's also just we like it because we're in it yes

the time this episode airs i'll actually have gotten back to finishing that uh unfortunately uh the halloween spooky season kind of delayed a lot of work on it because i'm like oh great i legally am obligated that like most videos this month or that month rather i need to be you know somewhat spooky theme but hopefully by the the time this podcast airs, I will have gotten back on that and finished it up because I was enjoying it. And you guys, even in some episodes that you're not in, you're still used as a running gag, which is great.

I appreciate it. Thank you. But yeah, this episode, who was watching a lot of behind the music at the time weren't we all i definitely i was watching it any time there'd be a new one on vh1 it just was when you could just leave the tv on and there'd just be marathons of this and you could just like be playing you know game boy advance and just having it behind you and yeah like i really feel like this and uh i love the blank years, I think they really influence like millennial content creators like us where it's like we want to know everything about a subject and then be very clever about it. And I think these shows really influenced all of us.

You know, I hate to admit it, but you're right, Bob. This way of salaciously, the behind the music style and the many, many imitators, their salacious way of explaining the arc of someone's career uh like i think that informed so much about how even podcasters today discuss people's careers and on top of that all the i love the blanks like we i think that definitely influenced listicle culture and then podcast culture as well like I've used jokes in this particular episode in my What Happened videos because behind the music style shows, this was what informed me about how they were

because like, sorry, Canadian moment here. We did not have MTV. Maybe if you got like a really expensive cable service that could pick it up. But what we had was Much Music, which is the lamer, friendlier Canadian version of MTV. And they could only play like scraps of what MTV could.

So behind the music wasn't a regular thing. Like I never remembered seeing it like on at the time. I had seen like one or two episodes like later on, but of the time of this episodes airing, like I didn't know what Behind the Music was. And apparently it went on until like 2014. They must have had phases because I just remember it being like they made this at the perfect time when the show started in 97. The show was probably written in 98, definitely written in 98. So it was like the time when it was just exploding.

Unfortunately, everybody did their Behind the music sketch yes before this episode came out uh it's great on the commentary to hear matt selman go like yeah i know we know saturday night live and mr show and every other show did a behind the music parody and we are late to mr show did one that's right there's fucking rule it's uh this and mr show's one of the cory feldman parody those are tied as my all-time favorites of the of the parody of behind the music and like zoomers must have no idea what the fuck this is or why the show took this format for one episode if they're going through like disney plus ask your parents i guess but these are all like on youtube right no one's protecting these well some aren't some aren't i so like the full mc hammer one just on youtube like complete and i watched the guns and roses one but when i tried ahead of this recording to watch the tlc one which was a real favor to mine especially hearing the late left eye uh just happily described like

burning down her boyfriend's house like that that one i think is getting content claimed on the music because you hear their voices and then they try to quiet down the music as much as possible and it's just too distracting but uh there were so many i loved i but i did look into it yeah so it debuted august 1997 with two of the best they ever did. That was their pilot program of Milli Vanilli and MC Hammer. And they're like, oh, they could easily find MC Hammer, but they actually had to do some digging to find Milli Vanilli. And in August 1997, showing a thing that's like, hey, what did ever happen to those guys?

They just kind of disappeared. And here's your explanation and they talk to tons of people and you get fun salacious stuff of like i did so many drugs or i had all this sex or just tons of fun stories and those two were such huge hits the mc hammer one was such a big hit they actually made a tv movie on vh1 based on it and they even made like a tongue-in-cheek one for weird al i love that one that's when he debuted his real his new look which is now 20 plus years old uh i remember there was a bit in there where they're just like they said do you have any girlfriends he's like uh people have even family members have wondered if i'm gay because i've

i do not publicly date anybody uh but yeah the other great ones like Leif Garrett's one, that one was so memorable that they did a joke about it on Family Guy that it was a sign that Brian Griffin was very depressed because he knew all the words to the Leif Garrett behind the music. And this actually reminds me a little bit of the Mission Hill episode about the real world

where it was this like one little bubble of time and the show is like we've all seen this right we know all these moments from these episodes but now people would just be lost but the good thing is you don't need to know what behind the music is to find these jokes funny yeah because there's a million imitators of it too and its style was really like captured uh by pretty much everybody else. But I liked you, though. There were tons of parodies. But as Scully explains on the commentary, thanks to his friendship with the co-creator of the series, Gay Rosenthal, he was able to just work directly with them like it no here's the real graphics and they just sub in laughter for music and make it look exactly like it with all the sounds like so it is the

perfect parody of it with all the right uh signifiers for it and the voice of jim forbes who uh is the journalist he's apparently his first job was a journalist, but his voice over is just so perfect. He's been doing that for years and years and years, and he'll still do a behind the music parody if you hire him for it. I think he's, uh, and yeah, so I looked up the history of the show too. So debuted 97 with those first two that actually don't have the Jim Forbes voice. Then they did over a hundred of them after that with Jim Forbes. And they pretty much had done everything they could with like every band you'd ever care about.

They even had to do like Behind the Year 1979 or whatever. And on the commentary, they say the worse the band, the better the episode. Like the Styx one is very good. Oh, I love that Styx. Now you're getting all these memories for me because it's all about the rest of the band going like mr obato sucked like we didn't want to make a musical we're a rock band and it's just about how much they hate the other guys in the band which they do perfect with homer in here of when marge goes like i think we had

real chemistry i wanted to fire her every day just to shake things up uh and and yeah so they pretty much ended episodes in they they stopped doing new episodes in about 2005 then brought it back in 2010 with the remastered series which was basically just going back to the ones they'd done before and updating them with like 12 to 10 years of new information then in 2013 they did their last original one so two over 230 episodes if you count the remastered episodes of behind the music and gay rosenthal would go on to create little people big world oh wow okay i did watch a lot of that for some reason yeah she is a queen of reality television and uh yeah i mean this again in 2000 i think when i first saw this i did think behind the music parodies were a little played out

even then i'd seen them for like two years straight but i did like this episode uh and it also briefly scared me into thinking it was a secret series finale at the very end i think it's also what i took away from it this time it's a love letter to the show and also a hate letter yes i love how much it makes fun of itself uh and how corny the show can be especially in the early years well yeah and uh and man i mean you were still watching regularly at this time and uh you were excited for this season finale when it aired when i like i would never hear that much about like you know episode episodes being the season finale like i wasn't keeping track or you know uh counting them down or anything so

i'd just be whenever whenever this business would be on which usually for me i think was on sundays because again like uh our tv channels were kind of limited like i would always just be generally excited whenever there was an episode on, I'd usually tell my, my family, like, leave me alone for like 20, 20,

21 minutes, please. Cause yeah, I was absorbing like every episode and like, yeah, I do have a lot of good memories. Like I'm sure you already talked about before, but like in general, because of the behind the music thing wasn't as ingrained,

like it wasn't that familiar with that show. I always kind of prefer the uh 138th episode spectacular from season what was that season 10 yeah it was eight yeah that has more than a little in common with this one yeah yeah especially but it's weird i i've never listened to either episode with commentary but but like, I've always kind of wondered like, because these are the most fourth wall breaking episodes you could possibly have, right? Especially the 130th episode,

because there's no framing device from an outside source. It's just, it's just Troy McClure. Just, yeah, The Simpsons is a fake show, you know, but I'm a character from The Simpsons. So is there any like thought process behind why we want to like break down the show and really sort of poke fun of it in in this way like so overtly other than like you know a character winking at the camera or anything like that like was there what was their thought process behind doing it doing episodes like this so

before we get a comment it was season seven okay I just want to make sure that's out there. Yes. But also I think what, what informed the 138th episode spectacular was the fact that they hated making clip shows. So Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein wanted to make a special clip show, but also the person writing it was writing it against their will. It was a contractual obligation that they didn't want to do. So it was naturally like,

you want to, you want to show, I'll give you a show kind of thing, which is why all the clip shows are shitty because they're being done against their will which is why they didn't really do them well this borders on clip show at a couple times yes it's a full i'd love to we've interviewed mark kirkland before but that was before we'd done this episode i want to interview him again because i wonder if this episode like there's less full animation in this one than a typical one but it seems also much more complicated to do animation there's like a thousand cuts in this episode yeah and so many times they have to like hold on an image for much longer so you have to you know you have to i think take

those images more seriously or that you've got to be even more dedicated if you're going to have like okay it's the 18th magazine cover of the simpsons or when you draw crustaphenia yeah yeah or like whenever the narrator makes an allusion to like you know bad news coming it cuts like six or seven different objects each time like a woodpecker chewing at an awful olive branch or anything there's there's a lot that goes on it's very quick this show it's like very fast paced and they also had to like fake documentary footage of like well we still kept filming marge as this narration started but she has to like look at her fingers so

you how do you time that out how many extra seconds of marge just sitting there do you do like yeah it definitely seems like a more complicated one to do than usual my only wish for this episode is that they uh got rid of the traditional opening but it is funny that it goes from that to the opening again yes yeah where it kind of fools you into thinking you're gonna watch the opening a second time i guess for fox they couldn't air the commercials the same if it didn't have the full opening and then commercials and then the show. The Simpsons will be right back. When you really care about someone, you shout it from the mountaintops.

So on behalf of Desjardins Insurance, I'm standing 20,000 feet above sea level to tell our clients that we really care about you. Home and auto insurance personalized to your needs. Weird, I don't remember saying that part. Visit Desjardins.com slash care and get insurance that's really big on care did i mention that we care we promise this podcast isn't full of ready to sting bees and a big thank you to this week's guest the awesome matt mcmuscles good friend of the show always love having him on you should check out all the cool videos he does

both on his patreon and on his youtube channel i mean especially check out the great simpsons reference ones he does about where he plays through simpsons hit and run that me and bob have even gotten to guest star on thanks again. And also a big thank you to our listeners this week at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. Those supporters help me and Bob do this as our full-time job and they get so many benefits

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You can only see that if you're a $10 and up subscriber at patreon.com slash talking Simpson. So please consider signing up today. But yes, after the regular old opening, then it comes to our introduction to Behind the Laughter. Surfing a tidal wave of halakha. introduction to Behind the Laughter. piece of us they told us what to wear how to dress which clothes we should put on the cops found me driving on the sidewalk i had no business hosting the oscars after the show meryl streep spit on me uh man the transitions in this are so like uh meryl streep spits but the spit goes into the simpsons living room and hits the picture of them and knocks it over. There are so many amazing transitions that are just so overwrought in this episode on purpose.

It's a nice twist because you are expecting slow motion, spit glob hitting Lisa's cheek. And you're kind of hoping for that. And then when it changes, you're like, oh, okay, that's different. And you're like, no, this is actually better because it sets the precedent for all these fun transitions uh and the way the picture falls and that's not good enough for them like it breaks perfectly into four they're like no break it more there needs to be more symbolism of this with a hammer with a very long handle yeah and i guess originally maggie was in that picture but they took her out because i guess you can't smash a baby's face with a hammer I think they give Lisa like an extra like crack with the hammer like everyone gets four and I think she gets five uh and I I think it's supposed to be uh look like the the beat the

meat of the Beatles cover to uh to that yeah there's god there's so many things packed in here like the fake magazine covers uh though they're they don't look accurate to me of early Simpsons success magazine covers because the majority of them were just Bart. They didn't want the whole family. Though the first Simpsons TV guide cover was the whole family. But most of them, I think, of like the not particularly well-drawn Bart that's on the cover of Rolling Stone the first time where he's like surprised he's like whoa i'm getting photo taken and then giving the people what they want bart by the barrel and then they do just the regular music for behind the music and i

was like is this a parody because this is really bad and then i went to another episode of this actual show i was like no that's the actual music it's like it's like a regular guitar riff while a synthesizer is having a sneezing fit in the background. It's so weird. I love it. It's terrible, but I love it. Blah, blah, blah.

Oh, God. Also, I caught in the Times Square version. Me too. Yeah, Sorni Brand back. I'm so glad that said Sorni. There's also a Panophonics sign. Oh, I missed that. That's awesome.

And then coming in from the top of the screen is BOX. I want to believe it said Magnet Box. I want to, too. Yes. And Marge vacuuming is the first of the many, like, in-universe real clips of the show that are just so great that it's like, what were the jokes? Well, Marge vacuums. Homer gets a lobster on his nose. Like, it looks like a terrible show in the show

I think it is also like a lot of these people outside of George Meyer looking back at the first season and saying why did anybody like this it wasn't very good I think they are being extra look you know all this season we've mentioned like oh they're really feeling the history of the series and I think it really was writing season 11 during season 10 where also they did the 200th episode right before that and all of that was like so much press they like the fox pr machine was really getting behind a decade of the simpsons 200 episodes and so if you're mike scully and all the other writers who are doing all these reflective interviews in the year 1999, 98, you're thinking about like, oh, let's let's put this to bed or let's let's rest on our laurels and think about this. I just love that whenever you see a clip of The Simpsons within this show, it's always like Marge vacuuming Bart skateboarding or Bart going cowabunga.

Just like it's the lamest shit possible but the the audience is like like can't get enough of it re-watching some behind the musics before this was really helpful too because the lines they're giving jim forbes are not even that much crazier than the ridiculous he has to say the way he says uh the way in the guns and roses one he's like and the guns were loaded but were they going to turn them on themselves oh wow that's great uh and all the all the cuts to like uh b-roll or like footage that i don't mean literal bees but like all the just the it reminds me too and it's something mr show i think got even better which is that like the behind the music producers only have access to so many photographs and publicity stills or footage

of the people they're talking about and so they have to show the same thing over and over again but from different angles and the mr show one was my favorite of that because they had the one piece of footage of the cory feldman guy dancing at a music premiere and they played it four times in a row with like different effects on it too yeah but yes we we get the opening and behind the music that's where the clip show feel was really coming in of seeing all the uh the different scenes from previous episodes and oh yeah and also marge's thing of like they told us how to dress like that that is almost every behind the music had somebody going like and these managers they were just too controlling uh and uh so yes the uh the clip packages are done

and we get a setup of this weird universe that this episode existence where springfield is real and all the people in it are real but homer and other people write scripts that they then do and film and those are episodes and people in town play themselves yeah it was just i was just saying under my breath that makes no sense yeah the reality like that was a challenge for them like what is this reality if we do it behind the scenes like it's not just that they're actors but springfield is also real and all the people actually exist within the town yeah like it's really funny that like they poke fun later on like oh uh later uh seasons of the simpsons degraded with nonsensical plots or is like the plot in this episode is super nonsensical it's true yeah yeah there's uh we

get some quick clips of the family i like seeing marge save her babies and then just giving up on the third one it's like who cares third uh and then i heard saying they almost drove me to fortified wine like that is way that mouth movements are way off that's definitely adr and also that's the same thing troy mcclure drinks delicious fortified wine uh and uh and yes then Homer talks about how much he loves television they're all loving tv on this unassuming street two nobodies named Homer and Marge Simpson settled down to raise a family first came baby Bart then Lisa Simpson and finally Maggie nobody told us how tough it is to raise kids they almost drove me to fortified wine then we figured out we could park them in front of the TV that's how I was

raised and I turned out TV. I'd see him sitting on that couch all day long, just staring at that Hollywood hogwash. Our favorite show was Hollywood Hogwash, but we also loved The Dreck Squad. The Milwaukee's, thumbing it down. Sheriff Lowbrow, home improvement. We never saw people like us on TV. TV families were always hugging and tackling issues. Homer kept saying he could do a more realistic family show.

Finally, I said, so do it. Either **** or get off the pot. And **** he did. Oh, God. I mean, that cut to Bart saying home improvement every time. This makes me laugh. I was going to say, up until this point, I was giving out sensible chortles at the gags,

but Hollywood hogwash was my first big guffaw of like, oh, that's too bad. I don't know why that's so funny. Every bit of that is the way that ned says it then of course the obvious gag but then when you just start thinking about a little bit more about what hollywood hogwash the show would actually be it's it's a dynamite joke to me i i love the slam at home improvement because you feel like these writers are still bitter for just being dominated by home improvement in the ratings where like we have to remind people simpsons was enough of a hit to stay on fox but home improvement was like number one

simpsons is like number 30 in its prime yeah well after like the first season not to mention you've got the co-creator of the critic which uh oh yeah partnered with home improvement and immediately unpartnered from it because it failed. I also love when Ned presents the idea of Hollywood hogwash, the shot of the family, just slack jawed, staring at television. Uh, and I definitely think of that and I turned out TV. I think of that line many times in my life. We did turn out TV. And yeah, Bart, uh, I mean the way Bart is presenting how the characters like nobody on TV was like us, that's literally how the show was pitched in in 89 and in 90 they they're they're just saying that the write-ups about it i think on the commentary too when they

bleep marge uh the the writers are like they were tempted to just have marge say way more swears because they can bleep whatever in this and it doesn't break reality of the show uh and uh yeah so homer writes my funny family which i guess the shtick with this is that it's sort of about how weird the shorts are and how they don't seem i mean it's not really a joke about the shorts i guess it's just that homer's a bad writer it just feels like they're making fun of uh like 50s sitcom tropes but yeah this is my least favorite part of the episode because it's just like i wish they're just making fun of themselves more yeah it should just be them reenacting the original shorts or like looking weird and draw our homer homer talking very slowly and they're like why do you

talk like that dad though i do like that lisa homer is like putting too much soap in there and lisa does what she always does like hey that's too much soap like ruins the scene ruins a joke uh while maggie does a great job of acting and doing the mama mia thing and you think this is where that's why i like this scene just because maggie's doing the mama mia look without saying i think this scene could have done with like three or four more mama mia's i wish there was something from the narrator like and homer found his famous catchphrase because i feel like they're trying to say like oh yeah homer does say mama mia right that's his thing he does just accept yeah that would be great for the rest of the episode anytime doe would have been said in a clip you saw homer

says mamma mia but we were well into the mamma mia era of mario so oh yes yeah i also i like that homer casts everyone as themselves except for Bart, who he makes his boss. That's funny to me. And I like that Lisa goes like, it's amazing how fast Dad betrayed his vision instantly. That's when there's the great line of Homer saying he was thinking of firing Marge every single day. It's an easy editing trick, but it always got me in behind the musics where somebody was like like slasher axel slash would say about axel like uh man he drove me crazy and then you show an old clip of axel going like i think the band's working really well together like uh that's that's something i learned too in those behind the musics that even if you are still mad at everybody you have to agree to do it too or

else it'll just be your bandmate bad mouth yeah and you get none of the say like that was in the guns and roses one where it's like well i guess slash is right axl's just an asshole no other stories about it they then take the pitch to hollywood uh there's a pretty good joke of homer driving seemingly towards hollywood and then finding out he was driving 400 miles away from hollywood uh and then it is really weird when they list all the places he took it to to see the abc and nbc logo on the show like that and telemundo oh yes yeah uh and then there's another just great joke about the locking gates with the guard's neck the neck is making the noise of a slamming gate i love it and uh marge then is able

to pitch the show to fox because her hairdresser is the president of fox which is that a reference to john peters the famous hairdresser who became like a producer i bet you're right i bet you're right i think i just took it as a general like diss on fox being a low rent network at the time but yeah i bet you're right it's an official joke about that but i mean yeah the it does speak to the real truth that fox was a small enough network that it would really give just 13 episodes to an animated series in 1989 like nobody done that before her though i guess it would make more sense if you showed the mr moneybags version of jim brooks there and doing it but we get a nice uh rupert murdoch slam though at least those make me so wistful we're like three years removed from the

rupert murdoch era Fox now. There's like nine more evil billionaires to worry about. He's so old now, too. I thought he died. Is he not dead? No. But his career is. I mean, we are two months away from this episode airing.

I won't play the anti-death jingle because he's a monster. I'm saving it for somebody else in this, so I don't want to play it. But yes, yeah, he's 89 years young at the moment that we're recording this. Will he make it to 90? We shall see. I bet he'll have another wife before this all ends. I can squeeze one in there before I die. His wife only 35 years younger, so good for her.

Oh, wow. That's relatively old for a billionaire wife yeah uh but yeah so they signed the deal and there's a great gag about the hysteria ward going crazy for bart skateboarding and just the women hosed down is so funny uh and obviously it's not the beatles version of twist and shout i couldn't see what it was my gut tells me it's an rbq i thought that too but it turns out they never covered it officially like on a release okay though mike scully one phone call he can get them to cover twist and shout just original for the sims you guys need beer money come on down that's so they're so lucky that the beat covered a song like Twist and Shout and everybody knows it as a Beatles song. But you can just pay for the Twist and Shout from the not Beatles people.

Do a Beatles reference without spending the millions of dollars to use a Beatles song. And I also it did make me laugh that like Bart a decade later is referencing the T-shirts that kids wore to school of him. Yes. And all of the comma man sayings. When so like I think when we did Bark It's Famous, Bart of Darkness maybe didn't have his Instagram yet or maybe didn't wasn't as public with his collection. Because I remember seeing it much later and then noticing like, oh, Bart does say man a lot. Like any any product is just like it's not toxic man like and then uh later on like maybe a year ago uh that guy on twitter the guy who

posts all the secret simpson stuff he was showing like oh i i got the simpsons like here's how you promote the show kind of package from fox and in the in the rules it says says Bart Simpson does not say man. He says dudes. So I think they were tired of all the marketing saying blah, blah, blah, man. Oh, that's great. I love that. So after like 1994, I think it was like, no, Bart says dudes. It's all inclusive.

Oh, I didn't even think of it as like a woke choice there. I don't think it is. He would say y'all now. Incidentally woke. Yeah. choice there that's i don't think it is he would say y'all now incidentally woke yeah now that uh yeah all of those man shirts i i can see by 1994 when they make that that guy i i appreciate him very much for spending whatever money it costs to get that like official syndicator packet of rules and ads and stuff and there's like i like how there's an anti-choice bart simpson shirt that's officially licensed uh that all the rest are him just stealing somebody else's catchphrase

like you bet your sweet bippy that's great comma man uh that life begins at conception one that's if if i could ironically wear that without with while also wearing like a planned parenthood hat to make it clear this is ironic, I would consider wearing that shirt. I posted two clever tweets during the first presidential debate this year where Biden, shut up, man. That became a T-shirt. So I posted that alongside of the guy holding up the high man T-shirt. And you know what?

The Joe Biden shirt was also 30 bucks. What a ripoff. Exactly. And then Lisa has a cute little line about getting invited to so many birthday parties. She'd have to read the cake to know who she was singing to. That sounds like the kid version of the bits and most behind the musics where they just brag like, I had sex with so many women I didn't even know who i was waking up to or whatever also i didn't know bumptious was a real word i did not i had to google that one

but the bunch is just mean uh rocky yes yeah uh but that sounds like a real harvard these harvard guys showing off their harvard knowledge uh also in this first act here, we get to see how a hilarious running gag was born. I first knew the show was a hit when I walked into school and a kid was wearing a Bart Simpson t-shirt. Fox had an endless supply of clever slogans, man. Suddenly I was invited to every birthday party. Sometimes I'd have to read the cake just to know who I was singing to.

The Simpsons was a smash. Viewers couldn't get enough of the show's fractured take on the modern family. The funniest stuff came right out of real life. Son, let's go out for frosty chocolate milkshakes. Calabunga, dude! And cut. Dad, I've never said calabunga in my life.

Your script sucks. Well, you little hey that's funny and that horrible act of child abuse became one of our most beloved running gags i think that moment is where it hit me of like me too it is fucked up that that it's strangling bart has been in the show for a decade and also the reason the crew that are watching it transpire like it's not like someone watching on tv going oh it's fake it's the crew really there watching this act of child abuse take place yeah that's funny i i like how they underline it as child abuse and then they

cut to like the assembly line of all the homer strangling bart figures but i honestly feel like somebody on the staff was really mad that there was this idea that bart said cowabunga because like on a season two commentary they are all shocked to hear bart actually say it but he actually says it in a season one episode the telltale head is the first time he goes cowabunga when he's skateboarding in a very straightforward way. It's just like, Oh, well,

Bart is that moment feels like, well, telltale head is so recut and so, uh, 80 yard that I think they're just like, what this scene of Bart skateboarding is kind of boring. What are we goose it with? Well,

he just haven't say cowabunga, but him saying cowabunga also is like it just felt like they knew that the ninja turtle said that so bart would yeah he just copies what he sees on tv yeah they definitely were very defensive on a lot of those commentaries and like they put it on all of the t-shirts but bart never said cowabunga and that's why they would you know in jokes like in summer four foot two they joke that bart hasn't said those kind of things in years but he did unironically say it at a certain point and then like cowabunga that's the spirit yeah uh and homer saying his old frosty chocolate milkshakes there is pretty great uh and uh then when they talk

about the simpsons getting so rich that them rolling around in money is a top gif oh yeah yeah this killed me because i remembered what was coming up it's like oh it's it's the two pets uh also swimming in the money but i completely forgot about the goldfish gasping for air on top of the money. Like I laughed really hard when I saw that again. All the pets are rolling in dough. You're right. I think that goldfish has left out a lot of the gifts. I forgot about that too.

And also, I just love the idea of regular toilet paper becoming dog toilet paper. It's just so... The idea that dog toilet paper it's just so just the idea that dog toilet paper exists uh obviously they must have hired someone to use the dog toilet paper on the dog instead of uh i don't think marge is uh using it uh and this is also where i learned that you use toast points to eat caviar i'd certainly never i think i probably had caviar once after this and to me in my low rent palette i just saw it as like salty goo but i think also too they said they had a real conversation about like well wait does lisa eat caviar because that's she's a vegan and or vegetarian and they said like well this is a

flashback so it's before she's a vegetarian i think she would maybe still eat eggs i don't know she said she ate cheese which disgusted apu but i think she'd still eat eggs i think she's uh an egg eating vegetarian uh and then we get jokes about mc hammer's house which yeah that was the major takeaway from uh the first band behind the music with him just the insane hubris of like i bought a house up in on the hills so the poor could look up at me and aspire and this is happening in oakland right uh yeah actually in fremont in the fremont area i i looked it up bob if you want to take a uh hour long trip we can uh take you go check it out for ourselves it still stands the it got bought by somebody else uh 23 years ago and i think it has two other owners

since but uh at least based on google maps uh photographs i saw the mc hammer house still exists in fremont california i like how it's like well the simpsons are moving to california so the house is helicoptered in that's great yeah uh yeah and that it did say hammer time on the gate and uh homer smashing it into into Homer Time is pretty funny. That rules. And I mean, that also is in the Mr. Show sketch too, they say. They talk about buying a house on a hill above the poor people so they can look at them.

But I get it from MC Hammer's perspective. If you watch his special, like he is a very religious guy who also talks about how hard he worked and how he wants to inspire people i i don't think that's like fake but i do think he misunderstood the hubris of having that kind of mansion above uh all the poor people in in fremont it's pretty misguided it's like he deserved to fail it's why everybody remembers it like honestly but best rap about the adams family to date i think i haven't seen the new one so i'm not sure if it's if there's a better rap in that but uh i would say there probably isn't there was another

clip in the behind the music with hammer that made me like him a little more which is it's a a clip from him talking about his money problems on Oprah in like 96 or 97. And she asked like, so when you say broke, what do you mean? He's like, look, I'm naive. Make sure to say there's real people who are really broke. I am not really broke, but I have a lot of taxes I need to pay and I got to sell my house. But please don't worry about me like you'd worry about actual people with real problems so i liked that i at least like seeing that there's they don't do as many jokes in here

about what really seemed to cost mc hammer a lot of money which is he befriended way too many people and was too nice to a giant entourage of people that just like ate all his money you have to decide how big your posse is going to be before you become rich you have to establish that early on you got to keep it on a lockdown man then uh the simpsons how big are they getting well they've got their own album yeah i've seen all the overnight sensations brad hall rich hall rich little little richard but the simpsons blew them all away. They even had a hit record. Meanwhile, crustafinia sits on the shelf. None of us had ever sung before, but Mr. Geffen believed in us. We're gonna prove tonight we'll make you feel all right.

Simpsons Boogie! Simpsons Boogie, lovely to love your lovin'. And Simpsons Christmas Boogie went mega-platinum and swept the Grammys. Right, and the award for best hardcore thrash metal goes to... Simpsons Christmas Boogie! For America's favourite family, everything was coming up roses. But those roses contained ready-to-sting bees. When we come back...

I want to set the record straight. I thought the cop was a prostitute. That was before Ozzy Osbourne redefined himself as a stumbling man with dementia, screaming his wife's name. That's right. Because I know what he looked like you know back in the day but like my my only thoughts like yeah he has long brown hair that's like very straight and wears his little glasses when i saw this guy pop up i was like that's not an ozzy osbourne and i was like oh wait it probably was

circa when they were animating this maybe i think that bad thing is also from behind the music i didn't know it was a real bad yes yep that's right uh yeah i think i think that's supposed to look like 80s ozzy like yeah 80s ozzy yeah the the osbournes wouldn't premiere until uh years after this. I have one thing, though. They're definitely making fun of how bad the Simpsons albums are. Bringing up Mr. Geffen, David Geffen by name, who did release the Simpsons album. And it was his idea, like, I'm going to make them stars, music stars. According to Matt Selman, at the end of this episode, he says that Simpsons Christmas Boogie was based

on the BTO version of Taking Care of Business called Taking Care of Christmas. And I would like you to play this up until the

refrain here, Henry, because it is so low effort. Oh, God. Okay. It's the time of year again to get some paper and a

pen and write your Christmas letter to St. Nick. Send it to the It's the time of year again to get some paper and a pen And write your Christmas letter to St. Nick Send it to the North Pole to his workshop in the snow And he'll put his house to work in on it quick Tell Santa you've been good and done the things you should And you're waiting for his visit Christmas Eve If you're dead by nine you will give him lots of time It's coming. It's coming.

There you go. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. That's enough. And I think it's like everybody wants to write a Christmas song because you want to get a hit Christmas song because then it's played every year for like 40 years. Yeah.

You get millions of dollars every year. Like that is your forever money there. If you can score the next standard, that's it. But that is your forever money there if you can if you can score the next standard that's it but that is so mariah carey is going to be famous in a thousand years yeah she'll be just that christmas person mariah carey saints mariah carey the christmas creator but yeah just a very lame variant on an already lame song which is what simpson's christmas boogie is i'm surprised there was not i guess simpson sing the blues came out uh in the fall of 90 so it could have been like a christmas gift oh it was the christmas release for sure yeah we uh i think many if you

didn't get it on launch day you got it as a christmas gift for sure that was that was uh we talked about it on that podcast uh just a few months ago but yeah it was a huge push to get that done in time for christmas also because uh geffen records they had a contract ending with warner and warner was like we want to release this get it out by christmas but man that bto who they were guests on the simpsons just a few episodes ago that taking care of christmas is so lazy it sucks and they're not even trying it's like taking care of christmas is so lazy it sucks and they're not even trying it's like taking care of christmas it's just like so flat i especially like that seemingly they're saying that santa claus is taking care of christmas when you really care about someone

you shouted from the mountaintops so on behalf of desjardins insurance i'm standing 20 000 feet above sea level to tell our clients that we really care about you home and auto insurance personalized to your needs weird i don't remember saying that part visit desjardins.com care and get insurance that's really big on care did i mention that we care but then they say every day which is like no that's the point it's not it's just one day oh god a lot of it's done via magic yeah uh yeah he he's not working overtime either i don't think the elves are but not him the this song has many flaws and yeah you're right also like bachman doesn't sound like he could even get too up for it he's like and working overtime like he's not he's he doesn't care this is a hungover recording uh and uh crustafenia that's a reference to the who's 1973 album quadrophenia

i feel like this podcast is just going to be explaining references but the ozzy one not only the biting off the head but the anger at this grammy award is a reference to the 1989 grammy award oh really okay because 1989 was when they introduced their first ever heavy metal category because you know through the 80s uh a lot of music guys like god the grammys are so stuffy they never give it to young guys like metallica and so they created they'd never win the rock section so they created the heavy metal one pretty much so metallica or other bands could win and so metallica was nominated everybody is sure they're gonna want metallica is certain about it the first presenters include alice cooper and he reads that the winner

is jethro tull oh you're right and metallica to this day is furious at jethro tull for beating him even jethro tull in interviews the the people in it were like we don't know we didn't want to win it this is we and so it turned the grammys that's one of the many reasons the grammys are a joke but it was alice cooper presenting it not ozzy you say that now but wait until there's a podcasting category uh we'll probably lose to npr every year some year wolf thing that i also love that rose analogy that he could just say those roses had thorns but instead they contained ready to sting peas i noticed that as uh the show increases they get they get crazier and crazier so like the metaphors start off pretty you know basic and hacky but then they get more and more tortured like soon we're gonna have fire hoses

of respect but then they get even more crazy after that like how they just gently amp it up yeah uh and also homer's thing is exactly it is a parody of many of the behind the musics where the rocker goes like tries to explain away why they got arrested with a sex worker for some reason but homer yeah just straightforward he thought the cop was a prostitute the end when they come back from the commercial break we get more funny graphics of sex fame millhouse then we come back uh to show that it's an international hit and i do think you know the british i've said it many times they love the simpsons so seeing the queen herself watching it spinning out her tv dinner

and then it's a it's a lobster pinching homer's nose that makes her laugh extra that's great and also the fire hose of respect is that's just a funny line and that it's a fire hose of cheerleaders shooting homer into the air and so yeah the simpsons are so big even santa and the pope get ignored but as all behind the musics do the second act is where you start to show the cracks forming and uh that's what happens in this next clip oh homer was spending money like a teenage arab he bought me a ro Rolex and cashmere jeans. I felt kind of guilty because I was always trying to squabble with his wife. So when did we start filming?

Oh. Even Bart was throwing dough around. He paid me and Carl a thousand bucks to kiss each other. Hey, did we ever get that money? But reckless spending and interracial homoeroticism were just volume one of the encyclopedia self-destructica

great that's great that's why i led with that yeah that the encyclopedia closing is good enough but it has to explode too that's uh and also seeing the words interracial homoeroticism on the page is so great i like too this is the scene where in the mc hammer one it's his barber like that's the weirdest thing like one of the talking heads used a lot is his barber who's like i was his closest friend his longtime barber lived in oakland and he's just saying he spent money on this he spent money on this he should have known the trouble was coming and that that's Moe's role here, right? Yes, yeah. And Lenny and Carl, this is not the last time

they will make jokes about them being sexually attracted to one another. It feels like the first time. I think it is. Yeah. I think it is. Usually they are commenting on how a woman is hot together, which is the opposite of kissing each other for money. And then not only

do they show the encyclopedia exploding but then they have to give you a jack in the box of scare too like right after with the with the month of april on a calendar popping out of it that is hilarious it doesn't even matter that it's like this thing happened in april but it's like it happened in april yeah uh and so we then see the gorge joke the classic homer gorge fall from a whole nother angle as bart has been he was apparently in the kayfabe of this bart was supposed to do the fall in the script but he was too tired from making people kiss all night and and so homer took the fall and this gorge fall was definitely one of the funniest earlier moments but i think so much so many things have eclipsed it that uh especially by this point

in time that it's weird that they would go back to it i feel like there have been funnier things but i think internally they're still in love with this and al jean's there of course and george meyer is there so they're still remembering this is like the funniest thing they did in those early years it sets a precedent for all like the physical abuse Homer. Like because if you think about like every time he did something dangerous or stupid, like it's it's it sets up the rest of the jokes. Like, oh, this is when his crotch kept getting hit by hills on the on the snow ski slope or everything else. So I think like you have to have that in there if you're gonna have like a little two minute bit about all the uh punishment he endured so yeah i think on the first

uh clip show the april fools one yeah they mentioned that like this was in every clip package they do like every clip on tv they'd show it which is crazy too because like it's supposed the whole point of that joke is what if a character took a wily coyote fall except had but they had realistic damage yeah and the most the blood maybe the bloodiest we've seen homer like most realistically hurt oh extreme yeah it's it's our like as a kid at at nine when this was on my tape, I would fast forward through the scene or look away because the damage to Homer was too grisly for my little nine year old eyes. So I have some shocking facts about this. This is the second time they have reanimated parts of this scene. So if you remember in the original clip show, so it's come to this season four, they add an extra scene of Homer.

What you actually see what happens to him after he falls out of the ambulance in the original episode you don't the kids are looking down and you hear him but in the clip show they add a scene of him falling down the uh the cliff again while bandaged in this one for whatever reason they reanimate the original falling down the cliff animation because i looked it looks newer not only that but the big telling evidence is in the original clip from season two you can see the blue sky behind homer and in this one it's a brown and but i do think that they reused the same drawings to make this but i don't know why they reanimated it they they were using clips in this episode i

have no idea why but it looks like they were using the same layouts or whatever. I think it's traced over. Maybe it was that in that shot, it is angled at a different angle. Yes, that too. So maybe they're like, well, wait, we don't have lines here for this angle, so maybe just trace it and redo it but yeah it is it is strange

that they've reanimated it three times or twice now then homer gets a pain pill addiction which is meant to be a reference to jerry lewis and chevy chase like comedians who took pratfalls and then found out that like oh my back actually hurts in a lot but but every behind the music has the addiction bit like that's why i'm glad i watched the guns and roses one because that one literally is like every person in it is an addict like every every single person because they for some reason homer got addicted toas while showing you the visuals of like a thousand pills landing perfectly in his mouth. It's just such a good marriage between a visual and an audio gag. And this is when opioid addictions were just for celebrities.

Now they're for everybody. Homer, Homer was a trailblazer. I also like that they, for a lot of the montage of Homer's injuries it's a lot of Scully episode stuff because I think they really Homer took a lot of beatings in other seasons too but I think the cartoonish violence really went up from season nine forward I think especially because Bill and Josh I think were trying to tamp it down in their season and i think of merkin like the realistic violence like realistic and painful not cartoony uh well though in his seasons they did do the one where homer is uh which is in the clip show of him holding the wrecking ball and getting crushed oh yeah

ball in the house uh and homer's great line like what was even more like a drug was the drugs uh and then we get a cute little american beauty reference just to mark that this was written in 99 so fresh at this point in time black and white footage of a floating paper bag which was everywhere uh and then we get a joke about the hollywood walk of fame me and bob we've walked that walk of fame though we didn't look at mac rainings i don't think it's filthy don't go there there. Yeah, no, don't, don't ever. I don't think, uh,

man, have you ever visited Hollywood? Um, yeah, no, I, uh, once,

never again. After the first time that I was on the Hollywood walk of him, I forgot what, what celebrities, uh, stars we saw, but I did like a fan meetup around that time. There was like,

um, I'm not sure it was a Dave and busters, but it was something. So, so just like five minutes out on there. I was like, was like a, I'm not sure if it was a Dave and Buster's, but it was something. So, so just like five minutes out on there. I was like, yeah, no,

I'm good. That's fine. Yeah. It was, it was, it's just one of those mystical kid things. Like, you know,

growing up watching the Simpsons and other stuff, you're like, wow, the Hollywood walk of fame. But it's like, it's not in the, you know, it covers a lot of not great areas too.

So, yeah. Well, I'm probably also like an armed militia around Donald Trump's star. Oh, yes. Probably. Yeah. Well, yeah.

And you're also surrounded by other. For me, when I first visited LA and got to see the Walk of Fame, I was surrounded by other goofball tourists who were like gawking at it. I was like, oh, I feel I can't act like them. I feel like I'm better than them. So I can't just gking at it i was like oh i feel i can't act like them i feel like i'm better than them so i can't just gawk at it did you immediately go and put your hands in marilyn monroe's hand prints uh you know i've never gone that close to the uh i guess now it's the tcl theater but uh was grauman's then uh yeah also i was shocked to see that it took matt graining until 2012 to get

his own walk of fame star which was done to commemorate. They did it around the 500th episode. That was the marking time. But the honeybee of Cheerios still doesn't have his own walk of fame, his own star. Is he still getting play like on boxes in TV and whatnot? You know, I don't see how the box is, but he's still there. He's not he's not on for all those cheerio spinoffs like it's always honey nut that he's there are there is there any cereal mascot that has the hollywood

like if it's not the honey nut cheerios be me captain crunch maybe i kind of doubt it i mean i put tony the tiger as the most famous i think he's not the tricks rabbit no i don't see that yeah i guess you know people have the most passion for count chocula but he's he only got to work one month a year you know i i appreciate more the uh the the honey bees or the tony the tiger who puts in the work all the time well i also know that tony the tiger is still very active in the commercials because uh when i put on that cartoon network app to watch like craig of the creek i have to see the same like tony bring out the tiger commercial for frosted flakes i'm reading here that in 2011 honey nut cheerios was the best-selling cereal in the united

states and i have to ask what's wrong with people the hell maybe like babies eat it it's because it's fine you know what i mean like it's not offensive it's not it's not like weird it's it's completely normal so i can imagine that yes it would be the best selling one by that regard you know what i mean i also think 90 of a baby's diet is just a baggie of cheerios that too yeah so uh and maybe with honey nut you don't feel as like sugar guilty as an adult if you're like oh i can't eat cinnamon toast crunch anymore it's too unhealthy for my adult body but a bee kissed As like sugar guilty as an adult, if you're like, oh, I can't eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch anymore. It's too unhealthy for my adult body. A bee kissed every one of these O's with its sweet mouth.

With its ready to sting stinger. Just as a little segue into Honey Nut Cheerios, there's like this new type of Cheerios. It's called like Honey, not Harvest Crunch, but it's my, now it's my favorite all time cereal. And it's just, it's super, super amazing. If I could just look it up in a second, but like, I just really need to put this cereal because Oat Crunch. Cheerios Oat Crunch. There's two flavors, one with, which is oats and oats and honey one which is a cinnamon and it's amazing it's like it's hard to describe but it's a lot of added oats to the cereal and it's not too

sweet it's very very crunchy it's just i had this and i was like i could literally have this cereal for the rest of my life sadly it's not readily available in canada like it is in some spots but yeah just want to give in cheerios oh crunch a shout out use the promo code big muscles at checkout i wish i wish get on the phone someone get on the phone the general mills for me please i i appreciate your views on this mac because i know i've i've seen your tier lists for cereals and i i agree with them i think at least 80 i agree so yeah like i see people put like raisin bran and i'm like are you 80 raisin bran is s tier and it's like tournament level street fighter players who like they're like oh there's no there's no debating this i'm like yes there is

there's i mean raisins alone like yeah hey and i look i like raisin bran fine but it turns into like a gloop that's the thing it mushes too much you gotta go you gotta eat fast well then you can't you can't savor the raisins but but uh all right anyway enough serious talk um it then cuts to skinner i feel like you can tell the age of a simpsons fan if if they're gonna bring up money stuff, if they say Skinner's Pickleman line instead of the finger thing. Ah, Pickleman, yeah. Doesn't pay the Pickleman.

Basically the same posing as the finger thing means the taxes. But I think if someone's a younger Simpsons fan, they'll use that reference over the finger thing means the taxes. But yeah, Lisa talking about how they were you know we were making all this money but i was always strapped for cash though that was why i love the tlc one because it was so eye-opening to me that they talk about like i never realized until then how much money the record company takes because in it they say like people say you guys sold 10 million albums how did you not have money and they're like well we got 10 cents off of each album and then we paid taxes on it and i was like wait people pay 10 dollars there's

20 dollars for those cds you get 10 cents of that what what a scam it's such a shame the napster destroyed the music industry yeah oh yes yeah uh but yes where did the money go why did i take such punishment let's just say that fame was like a drug but what was even more like a drug was the drugs but despite their melting problems the simpsons star continued to rise like a plastic bag caught in an updraft. It was such an honor to be on the Walk of Fame. I mean, there we were with Hollywood royalty like Milton Berle and Nelson Mandela. And just a few stars down from the Cheerios honeybee.

Awards and honors are great, but they don't pay the pickle man. We were earning millions, but we were always strapped for cash. One time, Lisa bought a first edition of Susan B. Anthony Man. Her check bounced higher than Rubber Girl. Where did the money go? Marge lost much of the family fortune investing in birth control products.

I learned something. When people reach for their diaphragm, they don't want to see my picture i love the finger yeah oh that's so great that marge not only selling diaphragms but also ones that judge women for using it because were you to were you to use it you're having sex and marge is judging you for that like hey uh gentle comic book guy's nameplate just says comic book guy twice oh that's that is great my name that's my job uh and uh you can catch in the background they drew in an iron a giant figure oh cool i missed that yeah it uh was shout out to brad bird's movie which had premiered the november before this episode aired that was november 99 this was may 2000 so a shout out from they lost

a lot of uh if i i said it a lot in our iron giant podcast we did but a part of the brain drain uh or the talent loss for the animators was when brad bird left to do iron giant he took like a handful of the best dudes working on simpsons and was like, no, no, no. Your animator's on Iron Giant. You're coming with me. But I like that Mark Kirkland had a little wink towards his old buddies there. Yeah. And most behind the music's the where do the money go answer is like they invested in a

restaurant or they wanted to do a music or they had insane music videos that spent too much money. Like in the Guns N' Roses ones, it's like Axl Rose wanted to be the star of movies. So they spent like $5 million on November Rain. Then they show just like literal posters that were sold of the Simpsons. Yeah, the classic. Then like every character posted from like 1996 or 97 with the yellow background, everyone crammed together. I love that poster.

I can name everybody in that poster, I think. Yeah, that was one of my favorite times with my mom at Universal Studios when we went to the Springfield section at the Krusty Burger. They have that sign, but then it's just outlines and numbers. It's like, like okay can you name that number and my mom would just say like all right 127 i'm like i don't even need to look at the picture i can just see the outline boom that's who that is like i i was the king of the dorks that day and your mom thought you were cool yes yeah she said as much when i she photographed me sitting next to the millhouse uh standing there she's like she

thought we were both cool your mom burned you uh but yeah I do I do like Wiggum's remarking on the cast as well in this next clip as the Simpsons money dwindled their expenses soared from the original group of five the cast ballooned to dozens then hundreds I've never acted before in my life, but if the sea captain could be in the show, why not me? I've even got a catchphrase. Yeah. Wah. Wah.

Wah. Wah. Now I lost it. It's like the penguin, I guess. Yeah, he became Burgess Meredith's penguin there. Yeah. penguin i guess yeah he became burgess meredith's penguin there yeah uh and then we find out i i like that the dramatic reenactment is trying to hide who apu is but his accent and the it being in the quickie mart makes it extremely clear who yeah and his silhouette really yes you could hide

the background and the voice but the silhouette's still very clearly Apu. And yeah, the owing back taxes thing, it definitely comes out a lot in Behind the Musics. I mean, there's the Willie Nelson one that is all about that. Also Chuck Berry, they talked about that too. Chuck Berry had a lot of problems. But I do think Simpsons do so many IRS jokes that I think occasionally do come from the fact that these are rich Hollywood producers who are mad they pay taxes. I think a little bit of that. But though, let me say that the Simpsons kind of it gives you it might trick you into thinking that the government goes after the American government through the IRS audits the very rich quite a lot. Not the case uh you guys should just

look up this pro publica article uh about like irs sorry but it's just easier and cheaper to audit the poor is the name of it where it's like yeah with if you're auditing poor people you send them a letter in the mail and they're so terrified they send you money well meanwhile if you're going to audit a super rich person who they have they know every trick in the book they can afford the count accountants who can hide everything so and also the irs has gone through a bunch of budget cuts that they don't have a lot of the prosecutors who oh coincidentally they'd be the one enforcing on rich people so that's weird right but don't let the simpsons trick you into that or let's see if you run a leftist organization you might get audited you might get audited quite a lot yeah if you're

say the democratic socialists of america you might get audited every single year just you know accidentally uh but i do love the irs taking everything from home earlier including his nipple rings the the ripping out of nipple rings that makes this again feel like a very 2000 joke of like we all remember men could have nipple rings just the very idea at least it was like they came out clean it wasn't like ripping off his nipples yes seeing homer lynches when they come out seeing like homer drawn with visible nipples is weird though that is true yeah and i like how long they hold on him crying i'm just like wow the person filming homer just like zoomed in on his crying i like there's a lot of great jokes in here about like bad editing

like that you i wonder too again i want to talk to mark kirkland like how do you animate bad editing to look correct like how like when they zoom in on the flower they can animate it better of just showing a bee coming out of it but instead they cut to just a bee on a red background that's like how you would film it poorly for bad editing i wonder how just how many stage directions were in the script you know just because there's so many visual things happening here and uh then we get a parody of a couch gag filming which is a real one from season eight's the homer they fall uh the cowboy jumping away couch gag oh right right and one thing i wanted to mention i forgot to mention it up front is that uh

this episode was not written like a normal one there was no like draft that one writer wrote it was like a collaborative effort so there are four writers on this script that were just like kicking an idea kicking it around for like however long it took to write so there was not one guy who brought this to the table to rewrite you're right yeah it does feel a lot more room written they uh they really talk up gamble and pross who aren't on the commentary uh as as huge parts of that but yeah you're right that i think that's why too this is just a collection this feels much more like a episode long sketch than a normal episode where a person had a draft that then they rewrite uh and i do like the joke too that bart is at the certain level of sitcom level fame that he'll be offered teen wolf which famously like michael j fox did

the first one and hated it and then the second one they can't get him back so they get jason bateman who at the time was a sitcom kid actor hogan family yes yeah and so the idea that like well who would be in teen wolf 3 bart if bart was jason bateman he'd be in that uh and i also like the march tells homer to poop in his hat when uh lisa brings up child labor laws and i love the kang and kodos they're trying to be professional but they just can't take it anymore they're they're tired of waiting around to film i love that they're ballet tickets not that they'll do any good now uh and uh so then comes a joke that i don't like that uh i think is i think uh trashing tom kite yes yeah no they when okay i'm totally cool with the show making fun of itself like that's cool but i think it's only fair you can only make fun of episodes you worked on and

if you make fun of an episode you didn't work on then you're attacking other people's work i i would have respected them so much more if they had cut to so the the the uh the setup for this is like gimmicky premises and nonsensical plots and seymour goes i am an imposter and you see the clip from principal and the popper that is that is in bad taste i say that's but don't do that if they would have cut to maude flanders dying my respect would have like soared through the roof at this point in time they knew how hated it was and they could have immediately reacted to it with that clip totally 100 that you just take that out and put that in there that joke works 10 times better i mean definitely in the

year 2000 people were calling it the online fans were saying it was their least favorite and if you ask like harry shearer and matt graining on the record they said that was a bad episode or i think that episode was a mistake and and poor bill and josh and ken keel they're not there to defend themselves but yeah i think they were trying to distract from the fact that they just came off like three of the most polarizing episodes ever that spring and we're just like well this is written way in advance but they could have changed the clip but i feel like don't don't do this guys if i was bill o'clavey pissed off he probably is let's ask yeah because i i obviously laughed at this but then i did not know about the like who wrote what obviously so yeah that that is kind of in poor taste do you think they could

have like uh maybe not got their blessing but like say hey we're gonna do this gag or do you think fuck it let's just do it you know it's possible it's not like they never talked to each other right i could see it being brought up to them but also you know it's uh i could see them not no not from like 1997 until the airing of uh maude's death i it was common belief that like oh yeah principal and the popper worst episode ever to the point where people still believe that but i know like on when i was on the internet as soon as ma died that eclipsed anyone's hatred of principal in the popper at least within those communities yeah when you're seeing this in may 2000 and you're reminded of armin tamzeri and you're like i can't believe i was ever mad about this you guys just killed. You made me appreciate that more now.

But yes, nonsensical episodes are brought up in this next clip. With the family in disarray, episodes increasingly resorted to gimmicky premises and nonsensical plots. I'm an imposter. That man is the real Seymour Skinner. Trendy guest stars were shamelessly trotted out to grab ratings.

If you are looking for trouble, you found it. Just try me, you... Oh! Yeah! But there were bigger problems offscreen. After judging a Miss Hawaiian Tropic beauty contest at the Sheridan Haleakalua Lea, Bart created a ruckus on a Hawaiian airline jet, After judging a Miss Hawaiian Tropic Beauty Contest at the Sheridan Haleakalua Lea, Bart created a ruckus on a Hawaiian airline jet, attacking several flight attendants.

While he was in rehab, the part of Bart Simpson was played by his good friend, Richie Rich. Bart, what do you mean you have jury duty? Don't have a cow, mother. Fans reacted to these slapdash episodes with yawns angry yawns oh the angry yawn is like it's great i love it so i i always forget that bart goes to rehab in this so that bart had an extreme drug problem as well and like coming out of the the plane with his like pants unzipped some real like lascivious behavior was going on oh man yeah the well also i've said it before and this will be the last time i say it about season 11 because this last one but like the horniest season the horniest season like

bart surrounded by those hawaiian tropic bikini oh my god yeah this is the most boob filled the season of the simpsons there ever was i think they calm it down a little in season 12 but my goodness that i feel like that joke with him being a judge is that the my first thought that was a joke about david faustino that i feel like he's the type of dude who hosted like wet t-shirt contests like the real bud bundy uh though i feel like if they'd written this joke like one year later they'd replace hawaiian tropic with girls gone wild and i think they at least updated their jokes where they're not doing like the you know child stars robert liquor store kind of thing

where they could have easily done that especially with gary coleman they have gary coleman references in this episode and then to show him on the commentary they note that like gary coleman was happy to be paid a second time for an appearance on the show. I think, too, Bart's arrest is a reference to Paul McCartney's pot arrest in Japan. I think that happened in 1990. But, yes, the Richie Rich drawing, too, another note. They draw his clothes to be green because then it counts as a parody. Oh, 10% different.

Yeah. Even though they just call him Richie Rich. And, sadly, that charting of the ratings is kind of accurate to what happened to the show though i think it never pretty much it like it if it was going to be super accurate it would be up super high season two and then a slow decline just from then on and then a sharper decline in like 2000 uh but yes then the family heads over to the iowa state fair I really love the poster design on that. Like, it's so great. A state fair is the perfect, like, kind of washed up,

but semi-respectable place to go for these celebrities. Well, yeah, and you're around all the hicks in Iowa. Like, that's great. And yeah, this bit about the one bad gig that destroys a band, that's in so many of them too. Like the Guns N' Roses one, they're like, and then we were doing a double show with Metallica. James Hetfield got set on fire by a bad pyrotechnic,

so we needed to do the full show. But Axl couldn't do the whole show because his voice was screwed up, so he just left, and it just caused a riot and we knew it was over then man that happened in montreal by the way that riot like i was i was gonna say like that led to a ban of any indoor pyrotechnics for wrestling shows concerts i'm not sure if it's still in effect but you know that a lot of people in montreal dislike metallica because wow i didn't know that metallica is blamed for ruining all all explosives indoors from then on man well you know like not you know it's not their fault obviously but some people were like

he ruined it for everybody uh well you know if axl Rose had just heard his voice a little more and sang that night, no one would remember that. I wonder now, you know, once Montreal can finally have anything indoors again, they'll be like, let everything off. Who cares? Just blow it up. But yes, the family has a meltdown in Iowa. Hello, Iowa. Does anyone have a donut? Now, Homer, this is no time to be thinking about food.

Yeah, forget the donuts. We're here to go nuts. Musically, that is. What kind of song should we play? Something that swings with the beat of New Orleans. No, something that rocks. That's the sound of today. Swings! Rock today. Swings. Rocks. Swings.

Rocks. Sadly, this argument was not part of the act. I'll kill you. You don't have the guts, little man. Folks, we're just having a little family tiff, if you'll just bear with us. Oh, shut up. Always trying to act so mature.

I'm glad you make the least money. Oh, that's it. Hey, stop it. Stop it. You that's it this actor's arguing over money thing makes reminds me of the mod uh firing and what happened there it's fresh in their memories and jimmy carter's comedy break dancing is great yeah on the commentary these writers talk about like we still get checks for these very very tiny songs like simpsons christmas boogie and the jimmy carter comedy breakdancing song like literally 40 cents yeah yeah and uh not you know we're recording this october hey a long we wish a long and healthy life to uh to jimmy carter i think we

need to redefine the uh the anti-death jingle if you're just mentioned or not actually in the show you you you deserve to die no i'm not going to say that but we we can't ward away your death our powers are only to kill uh you must be voicing somebody on the show that argument joke is so great because march still says it in a presentation like no there's something that swings with the beat of new orleans but then when you know it's not part of the script it's like well then why are you saying it that way makes it even funnier and you think it's gonna go swings rock swings rocks and then it's gonna play up into a song but no it's an actual argument where a husband is telling his wife on stage i'll kill you uh and uh after the break dancing fantastic slow-mo animation of the head exploding like the the fake head falling to the ground and breaking really well done my favorite i had to

rewind this joke about three times after this my favorite line of the show the dream was over or was it coming up was the dream really over yes it was or was it no i've got it okay i'm sorry i didn't know if you got it but that's my favorite whole line of this the dream was over coming up was the dream really over yes it was or was it and homer finds a new passion dusting and polishing mixing boards when behind the laughter continues and that is always like everybody you see who just is no longer a musician is a producer now yeah that's like the last thing it's like he's producing this band you've heard of uh i love at the end of all of those because they're just like and then band's new thing is this and you just hear them singing a song that is not that interesting to you but then they cut

to the band going like and this is the best stuff we've ever done man i'm telling you we're back on top or it's like i think there was like a flock of seagulls one where it's just like yes we'll sing i ran so far away this is our hell that we live in now and this is all we'll ever do just accept yeah no the the mixing board shot is so perfect like because it is if you get access to the people for the interviews in the show, I think they always were like, no show that I'm not a loser. I'm still making new music.

And here I got my home studio, huh? A guy who doesn't record music. We couldn't move this knob up and down. Could they also that cut to the pay phone off the hook? I feel like that was used multiple times in the show too, in the real show. Yeah, they said that was a real shot that they were stealing from the original show. I think it indicated, but Selena would never answer that phone call or something like that.

And this is the line, where is he? What are they doing? The one you just referenced, the one you just played sorry because there's so much to that line that i always i always stumbled through it but that's the joke that i've used in like what happened episodes like twice i'm just like i'm just using it again it's too good it's so fun it's just so like you and you test like, how many times can they just say, or was it? Yes, it was. Or was it? Yeah. It was all over.

But was it all over? Because when you watch, like, five Behind the Music's in a row, you see the trick. You see that they all tell the same story every time. And it's like the cheapest act break. Like, it was all over for Guns N' Roses. Or was it coming up next it wasn't over pulling the pieces back together it's like yeah there's more show i understand we we all know these people are dead you've been talking to them in current days also

it's 9 47 the show ends at 10 i i know what tv is like uh another compliment i want to give the animation team is that they follow the rule of behind the musics that you can tell every interview is filmed the same day so it's always the same place you cut to so all the bart ones are on a playground all the lisa ones are in front of her desk all the marge ones are in the backyard and all the homer ones are like on a set he's i think he's in that mixing studio isn't he yeah you're right yeah it's like the mixing board is right off yeah those are some of my favorites like the dude's sitting back in his chair next to the mixing board going like and i just couldn't control him there was cocaine everywhere they come back from commercial break and i like this time in

the in the graphics it says the word graphics i i just like a blink and you miss it kind of thing and i actually just like straight up love the drawing of the characters in a recording room together like it actually feels like the voice actor is in character it's really cute but uh but yes the show was on fire that was the the actually i I got the clip here. This is great, too. Fox put the show on hiatus and replaced it with hidden camera footage from the dressing room at Ann Taylor. That slugfest at the state fair was really a blessing. It gave us a chance to pursue solo projects. I returned to my first love, the legitimate theater.

As a young female artist, I really love living in this East Village loft. Oh, that must be our new landlord, Mr. Stingley. Mwahaha! Where is the rent? I must have the rent. Dollars, dimes, and nickels,

I need them all right now. I literally chewed the scenery. The other family members were also spreading their creative wings. Mark replaced Lorenzo Lamas in the syndicated action series, Renegade. If Esposito thinks he's going to muscle us, he's wrong. I hear that, Renegade. Let's do this thing. But yeah, this is the first time I had heard of rent in the year 2000 so i

was like whenever uh you know rent comes up i think of homer's song i think that's what the musical is about not that it's about aids this is four years before the team america joke yes yeah that's right wow my sister was was obsessed with rent around this time so like i was like hey look there's a rent joke in there for you uh yeah the rent spoke to a certain i i've seen many great videos or testimonials from people who are just like yes when i was a teen i loved rent and as i grew up i realized that this is not how uh being an adult actually is there's a great uh lindsey ellis video on Rent that says everything you need to say about it. It's perfect. Also, the essayist David Rakoff, the late essayist, he had a great speech about Rent and how much he hated it.

But yes, the idea that the Simpsons version of Rent is that Snidely Whiplash comes in and demands the Rent. Mr. Stingely. in and demands the rest mr stingley yeah and on the commentary mark kirkland shouts out assistant director on the episode matthew fawnin for animating it i saw fawnin in season 18 and become a full-time director and still is one of the the full-time directors talk about him in 2035 uh but yes also i forgot i didn't get the clip in there but like but now the wing was on fire the prayer had been answered by Satan. And then like fake stock footage of a man in a devil costume running around. That's so great. That is such a great extra joke because it's about how behind the music was cheap and could just use public domain footage from like some 1940 silent or 20 silent video of a guy in a satan costume i love it looked like it was fake

colorized too yes yeah uh there's so many layers to that i love i this is the kind of like so many extra details and packing in of jokes that a lot of this season was missing i feel like and it's it uh it makes this one stand out i think at least in the in perfect in being a perfect parody i also just love the image of homer that he saved the scenery that he literally ate and took with him that's and he's just staring at it happily and the show renegade i did not watch that either it it apparently went off the air in 1997 which i guess fits for bart being on the show he had a native american sidekick but not this uh black woman psychic i think that was the added joke we're just like well there's another minority he works with minority sidekick there could have been another

sidecar attached to her sidecar so he's got like three people with them uh and meanwhile marge is singing it up marge put together a nightclub act. I shot the sheriff, but I did not shoot the deputy. Oh, my gosh. She didn't do it. She didn't do it. So the next time you see a sheriff, shoot him. A smile.

A night off one. She didn't do it! She didn't do it! Lisa sang, too, in a tell-all book blasting the family. To prolong the run of the series, I was secretly given anti-growth hormones. That's ridiculous. How could I even get all five necessary drops into her cereal what i like how uh marge cannot carry this on her own so it's just like just marge and friends in parentheses but that i love any joke where an audience reacts in horror to an obvious like

kind of cute line setup where it reminds me of uh in the the octopus episode this baby's got a fever dance fever oh uh yeah that one especially marge there's thing of like shoot him and she's doing a finger gun she and then she pulls back like a smile when you really care about someone you shout it from the mountaintops. So on behalf of Desjardins Insurance, I'm standing 20,000 feet above sea level to tell our clients that we really care about you. We care about you. Home and auto insurance personalized to your needs. Weird, I don't remember saying that part. Visit Desjardins.com slash care and get insurance that's really big on care did i mention that we

care uh and then also like the idea of bastardizing a bob marley song especially is just so awful and and also the gag of it being laughlin like the this is a joke about a vegas act but this act isn't too good for vegas so the next thing you'd say is like reno and i was like nope not good enough for reno or tahoe either it's laughlin level like that's how unfamous or how low rent this is uh and it is also perfect like lisa would be the one to write the tell-all and uh like i think this is the the joke of where are my residuals taught me that word as a as a viewer which that is technically the main gripe in a lot of those tell-all books from sitcom actors of just like i made less money than other people like uh definitely

the residuals complaint the original star trek Trek actors and Gilligan's Island actors, they starred in shows that were not hits at the time and then became giant hits in syndication and they got no money from it. And it was a problem for them for a very long time. They didn't go for the parents stealing the kids' money either, Joe. There are several kids at this point who emancipated themselves from their parasitic parents. Did you also know that former child star alissa milano her mom is

still her manager oh i just found that recently like wow really you can't uh that explains a lot that's the opposite of emancipation in that case uh but yeah lisa a hom Homer outing himself is pretty great too. I like that. Then we cut to the Thanksgiving dinner. I like that Abe is the one who sets it up. And then you get to see Abe and Maggie awkwardly posed at the kids' table. That's so cute. Though, screw up in this episode. Blue-haired lawyer's hair ain't blue.

I don't like it. Real mess up there. This must be a reenactment. Yeah, you're right. They couldn't get him. They had to get somebody else. And Gloria Allred, who is that? A shrill feminist attorney, according to the caption? According to the show, yes.

I mean, definitely that joke is of the 90s era of like, aren't feminist man haters kind of joke. But she was usually representing a lot of people who sued uh over sexual harassment and whatnot and like in more recent years she worked with the victims of bill cosby and donald trump and harvey weinstein and bill o'reilly uh some criticisms of her says she's more into being in a famous and as the person representing those people but i mean she's she's going against the bad guys i you can't i don't blame her for that but they also regret speaking of bad coloring they regret not putting her in a red dress which she normally is in for for appearances the homers talking thanksgiving turkey just makes me sad for

not eating one this year eating your turkey alone i going to make the same size of turkey and just eat it. Me and my husband just eat it over the next like rest of November. Although we're in December now in this podcast. Did you infect your racist uncle? You could have. Don't pass up that opportunity. Oh, by this time you probably went to his funeral. Given how the virus works.

Yeah, like our Thanksgiving is like this weekend and then thankfully both sides of my family like my wife's side of my and my family's side they're all like yeah i fucking stay home yeah we don't even care about thanksgiving that much so you know don't worry about it like we're all fine and i'm like okay good because i like okay because in canada like thanksgiving is certainly a thing but it's not nearly as big as it is in America. So it's never usually that big of a deal. I force my American values onto my fiance. We celebrate American Thanksgiving as well as Canadian Thanksgiving.

When I move, I get two Thanksgivings. Oh, God. You're like, wear the pilgrim hat. I better see buckles on your shoes. Oh, and on your hat. Yeah. I better see buckles on your shoes oh and on your hat yeah uh so then comes in the thing that happens in a lot of behind the musics but not all of them is the reunion like some of them would go to the trouble of if we can get you guys in the same room let's reunite you like that happens in

the leaf garrett one for example they reunite him with a man he disabled through a car accident that he caused. And it's like, whoa, they're meeting each other for the first time in forever. Some of them at least tease like, hey, Slash, would you get back together with him, with Axl? And they're like, no, I wouldn't. But they would in 2016. They actually did reunite. But this time, the reuniting is done by a guy who had his own behind the music in 1999,

one Willie Nelson. And I will, because he's 87, play the official jingle. Jim Pudgert, I ain't dead yet. It's weird that they draw him with red hair because his nickname was the Red-Haired Stranger, but maybe that ended in the 70s yeah king of the hill drew him with accurate hair yeah i guess because they're gonna do a pippi long stocking joke that's why uh but yeah the the idea that willie nelson went to college with hibbert it does make me go like how old is hibbert that's weird uh but obviously that doesn't it's it's a

silly joke it doesn't really make sense but we get a phony award show joke about how anybody would show up to an award which i do think is a joke about how simpson staff if they got they would go to any award show they were nominated for and uh the fake awards are to promote awareness yeah the new awareness or oh god i love I love Bart going. General awareness. Yes. And Bart going like, I had to think about it for about a microsecond. But yes, Willie Nelson reveals that it was all a trap. Thank you, Taco, for that loving tribute to Falco.

And now to present the award for most violent rap group, Homer Simpson. Hi. And Marge Simpson. What? What is she doing here? And Bart and Lisa Simpson. Hey, what's going on? Well, I'll be honest. The new

Awareness Awards are all an elaborate sham. What? I knew it was too good to be true. So this whole thing was just a trick to get us back together. Well, I'm also trying to patch things up between Van Halen and Sammy Hagar. But the main thing is for you folks to stop this silly feud. Isn't that right, people? Hug! Hug! Hug! Hug! Hug! Hug! Hug! Hug! Hug! Pippi Longstocking joke

that's great I forgot I goofed up there though I should have had the clip of like would his fence mending eggs bear fruit? Or would this olive branch be torn apart by woodpeckers of this frost? Those are accurately rendered woodpeckers as well. That's good.

That's good. The idea of fence-mending eggs bearing fruit was such a ridiculous. Yeah, they really topped themselves with these tortured metaphors in this last act. And yes, in case you were very confused by references to taco and falco which sounds like a food and a smash brothers character i i know what falco is but i didn't know taco was a real performer yes yeah he's the guy who did putting on the ritz the 80s version of it he is still with us and uh Falco did Rock Me Amadeus. And he tragically died in a car accident at age 40 in 1998. Oh, that was Rock Me Amadeus.

Okay, yeah. So it actually is fitting that in the year 2000, Taco would do a tribute to Falco. And as of this recording, Eddie Van Halen passed away. Yeah, it's sad. All the people who are worse than him and didn't die by the time of this recording really upsets me. Man, yeah. So, yeah, it's Sammy Hagar and Eddie Van Halen.

They were on the outs when this was written in 99. In 2003, Sammy Hagar did rejoin Van Halen. But then they'd have a disastrous tour where they broke up like double broke up like worse than they broke up the first time in 2005 apparently because eddie van halen fell off the wagon during it and so after that one it became this big divide of like sammy hagar and bassist mike anthony they do their own thing while eddie van halen and alex Van Halen continued the Van Halen band, replacing Mike Anthony with Eddie's son on the bass. But as was revealed, sadly, when Eddie Van Halen passed away in October, Sammy Hagar said that he had actually reconnected with Eddie this year, but they didn't want to tell anybody because it would it would make people think a reunion could happen but sammy hagar knew van halen's situation and he was like well no there's not going to be a reunion but uh so yes tragic tragic ending for that in the like 2008 recorded

commentary they're like oh they're on the outs again now so they they laughed at how it was still true uh but then we come to the end and i this was what i talked about like for real i thought this was the series finale when they when homer said this is the last season for just a moment in my viewing for like one day i thought is this really the end of the series uh and in this clip i'll play it in a sec the last clip they say northern Kentucky, which is what it is in the DVD and on the show, or in the streaming version too. But I swear on my VHS version in my area, it was Massachusetts.

It was Southern Massachusetts. Yeah, they recorded quite a few variants. Yeah. They said some were Southern Missouri, some mentioned Oregon. Another, they said in one place it was small island of Lanai. Because they didn't want to lock it down to any one place. But yes, here is the final happy clip. The Simpsons' bitter past was forgotten. And now the future looks brighter than ever for this Northern Kentucky family.

We put all the craziness behind us. And now it's time to get back to what matters. The show. And the Sunday comic strip. Which Homer writes himself. So you know it's great. You little... So, whether choking their son or poking some fun, the Simpsons

will keep on gagging for years to come. I can't believe it. We won another contest. The Simpsons are going to Delaware. I want to see Wilmington. I want to visit a screen door factory. This will be the last season. Next week on Behind the Laughter, Huckleberry Hound.

I was so gay, but I couldn't tell anyone. And they use that entire Delaware set up in the next season for Simpson tall tales. That's the first thing you hear in that episode. It sets up a trip to Delaware before they have to take the train car and hear all the tall tales from the hobo. That's so. I love how a variety of media has never, like mostly throughout the 90s but i'm sure it's bled into other decades or it's just delaware sucks yeah we're in delaware wayne's world yeah it's like we're in delaware delaware fight club taught us that delaware should be exploded because that's where all of our credit is kept. All the credit places. Yeah, you're right. They don't pay no taxes.

Oh, man. I also love whether choking your son or poking some fun. Gagging, that fits in with choking. Gagging will continue. And as far as I could tell, there was never a Sunday comic strip. Ah, there was. Really? Actually, for real.

Okay, I couldn't find anything on this. Well, fortunately, not too long ago, I saw Bill find anything on this uh well fortunately not too long ago i saw bill morrison uh comment on this on twitter oh my god did they make him draw all of them well definitely the bongo team worked on it so yes in the year 2000 there was a simpsons comic strip oh shit uh and it was only in sundays and so bongo which was the comic book publishing arm uh as Bill Morrison recalled on Twitter this is his version of events I'm paraphrasing in the United Kingdom they okayed a Simpsons comic strip and so like okay only for the United Kingdom it'll be in their funky newspapers but then a U.S. press syndicate was like hey we want this simpsons comic strip and so as morrison put

it it was drawn to be a two-thirds of a page big like it was a huge chunk of a sunday comic page full of not just a comic strip but also like activity stuff like it was meant to be a silly fun thing but because it was so huge if a newspaper in the united states got it it kicked off like three other comic strips at least and so when newspapers did it he said that the locals were really pissed off that their favorite comic got kicked out for this simpsons comic so it turned out to be very unpopular in in the markets that got it in the u.s and by the when the year was over that was the end of it and it never got an official collection you'd have to scan newsprint to have any of these saved that's crazy so i guess they were thinking

like well yeah this will probably run forever this new thing that's happened i thought it was just some bongo bashing i i think it is a little bongo bashing though. You're right, Bob. Of the writers. The way Bart said that, it takes me back to Tim's story saying like, oh, those comics suck. These writers didn't go to an Ivy League school. But I was shocked to find out

that when they make this joke in 2000, there actually was a Sunday comic strip. I think I got pissed when I saw that as a youngster because I was like, hey, it's not in my neighborhood. I don't see a Sunday comic strip i think i got pissed and when i saw that as a youngster because i was like hey it's not in my neighborhood i don't see a sunday comic strip these are lies and i was still a dedicated sunday funnies reader but uh well the last bit about huckleberry hound me and my me and my jocular pals would say that many a time to each other i was so gay so uh what element of huckleberry

hound is different in that drawing to make him not an official drawing? I don't think any is different. Yeah, I think it's, well, Mark Kirkland worked on Hanna-Barbera stuff, so I think he actually helped keep it on model. I was like, how is that a parody? It's just the character. But hearing him say, I was so gay, even though I'd say Snagglepuss is the gayest. If you got to pick the gayest Hanna-Barbera character, I think Snagglep is gay yeah Huckleberry Hound just an Andy Griffith ripoff yeah he's straight as an arrow well I don't know about that Andy Griffith's wife is dead really I don't think so I think

that's a cover this uh handsome bachelor sheriff uh but yeah that was a really fun finale to a weird ass season i think that the punchiness of this season of going crazy works perfectly in this parody setting and yeah and also in strange timing to this being our christmas episode this episode will take you out with simpsons christmas boogie just like the episode does yeah i feel like uh the mean spiritedness and punchiness of these seasons uh it's more palatable when it's not applied to like the reality of these characters it's just a lot more fun when you're removed from that so i think it works the best here well yeah man any other uh any closing thoughts yourself when i saw this at the time i i forgot to uh throw this in when you were talking

about it originally but like yeah i got kentucky for i remember very specifically kentucky was the uh the city that canada got i guess the rebroadcast uh so i i even then i was like oh that's just a dumb gag because this isn't a real episode you know so yeah that that shouldn't hold any any weight but until you guys just said it now i had no idea that other regions got other and it makes total sense uh other regions got to others or other cities to throw everyone off the scent i guess i i really liked when you said like the the reasoning for this whole episode was like oh we kind of have to do a clip show or the 138th spectacular i'm sure it's a little bit of that in here too um that i have kind of you know we can save a bit of money by having a few clips uh a lot of these jokes like i haven't

watched this particular episode in quite a long time but a lot of these jokes were like you know i i had a really good time time watching this one in particular. And like I said, I've stolen jokes wholesale on this episode in my own work, as I am one to do a lot. So I really enjoyed it. And I mean, season 11, it's like after, you know, I want to say two, three more. I'm sure we've talked about this in the past like whenever i've been on the show but it's like i don't think it's that far out where i like i started catching episodes less frequently and less frequently like you know somewhere around season 11 12 13 something like

that so uh going back to this particular episode was a nice blast from the past now yeah we thank you so much for joining us again matt this was so dense and full of references that we had we were going speed at lightning speed but just to get it all in but but matt thank you again for coming and i mean where where can people find all of your great stuff uh thanks for so much for having me you can find me on youtube at matt mcmuscles um we've already referenced it once or twice, but I do a series called What Happened, looking at video games with tortuous development cycles

or movies or consoles or et ceteras. And I also am currently, hopefully finishing, my kind of narrated where I sort of guide your hips through Simpsons Hit and Run, which I think I talked to you about. I think I talked to you guys about this specifically. kind of narrated where i sort of guide your hips through simpsons hit and run which uh i think i talked to you about uh i think i talked to you guys about this specifically it's like man going back to that game joke wise authenticity wise it still very much holds up but in terms of like actual minute to minute gameplay oh simpsons hit and run just it loses steam after you play as like Lisa and after that and that's

like the third level and after that it just kind of goes downhill it's just very repetitive and just gets hard to the point where it's just not enjoyable usually when you're a YouTuber and you make like a series and you start saying like yeah this is getting a little rough you kind of anticipate everyone telling you how wrong you are and you know get good and all the associated things that they yell at you but i was actually kind of shocked to see the amount of people it's like yeah you're getting into those missions that were when i replay a hit and run i stop playing hit and run i get to these certain missions so i feel you so that was that was a nice change of pace but yeah you can also find me uh on twitter at matt mcmuscles as well even even so uh hit run is like uh dark souls compared to space mutants or

any of those older ones it's like a stellar amazing game definitely like even the super like i'd still rather play space mutants on the nes than like the super nintendo or the genesis ones because those were just like not barely games like a bunch of mini games really and it's kind of I thought one of them wasn't like oh no it's an actual level but the level based game that I was like oh god that's Krusty's

super fun house is what I'm thinking of which still boggles my mind as how that was even green lit but whatever man but thank you so much man we'd love to have you back in and now in the next seasons we do thank you so much guys so thank you so much to matt mcmuscles for being on the show check out all of his stuff and as for us if you want to check out more of our stuff and get all these episodes one week ahead of time

and ad free please go to patreon.com slash talking simpsons sign up there you'll get just that but also access to everything behind the five dollar paywall that we've made since the very beginning of this patreon three and a half years ago that'll all be yours the second you sign up and that includes all of our limited miniseries the most recent of which is wrapping up now and that's talking futurama season two part two we are doing the back half of futurama second season using the talking simpsons format and that is only on the patreon along with all of the other existing episodes of Talking Futurama. It's all waiting for you right there for five bucks a month at patreon.com slash talking

Simpsons. But if you sign up for 10 bucks a month, you get all of the $5 stuff, of course, but also access to one mega long podcast once a month only for patrons of that level or higher. And what is that, Henry? Why I'm talking about the what a cartoon movie every month we do a what a cartoon movie which is us covering an animated feature film in the same way we cover the simpsons or other cartoon series on our what a cartoon podcast but it's only once a month in full for our ten dollar and up patrons they get to hear often over four hours of us talking about a different animated film.

As varied as. Walson Grumet. Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Or Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island. And a huge back catalog as well. Over a hundred hours. Of exclusive extra podcasts. In addition to all the $5 stuff.

You sign up at the $10 premium level. At Patreon.com. Sl slash talking simpsons. So as for me, I've been one of your hosts, Bob Mackie. You can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. And my other podcast, by the way, is Retronauts. That's a classic gaming podcast about old video games. You can find that wherever you find podcasts or go to patreon.com slash retronauts.

Sign up there for two exclusive episodes every month that aren't on the free feed henry what about you why i'm henry gilbert follow me on twitter at h-e-n-e-r-e-y-g i'm sure i'm wishing you all of happy holidays on there right now if you follow me and of course please follow the official twitter account of this podcast at talk simpsons pod you stay informed whenever cool stuff comes out free feed patreon exclusives polls all that stuff you're in the loop if you're a follower at at talk simpsons pod on twitter so that is the end of season 11 before we move on to what we do next we're going to give you guys in the feed our full-length episode of what a cartoon movie about the iron

giant that's coming to you to wrap up 2020 and we will see you next week We're dancing to the beat. We'll make you move your feet. Since it's Christmas buggy. Since it's Christmas buggy. Since it's Christmas buggy. Ooh. Shh. Since it's Christmas, buggy! Shh! In that family, nobody trusted nobody. They even brought their lawyers to Thanksgiving dinner.

So, uh, how's everybody doing? You don't have to answer that. Shut up, all of you, or I'll sue. Oh, save it for your next book, you little snitch. That's assault. That is assault. It was the best Thanksgiving ever. I mean, emotionally it was terrible, but the turkey was so moist.