Talking Simpsons - Talking Simpsons - Das Bus With Louis Peitzman

Episode Date: April 24, 2019

Grab your conch, roll your grapefruits, and get ready to lick some slime on this week's podcast about a controversial episode! We welcome back Louis Peitzman (be sure to check out his awesome newsletter!) as we dive into a Lord of the Flies parody! We also talk about burning tastes, delicious wine, and some long discussion on how much online media has changed! Internet, eh? That's right, so listen along and by the end you'll be saved by... oh, let's say, Moe? Support this podcast and get hundreds of bonus ad-free episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron!

attention talking simpsons listeners we have a special mini-series just for you we're going through the entire first season of king of the hill and you can only hear it if you're a five dollar and up patron at patreon.com slash talking simpsons we're giving the talking simpsons treatment to all 13 episodes of king of the hills first season and if you want a free sample you'll find the first episode available for free in the talking simpsons feed patreon.com slash talking simpsons it's the only place you'll find the first episode available for free in the Talking Simpsons feed. Patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. It's the only place you'll find the first season of Talk King of the Hill. Made you go click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click.

It's real easy, man. I heartily endorse this event or product. Ahoy, ahoy, everybody. Welcome to Talking Simpsons, where we do some serious boning. I am your host, religious hook, rug, weaver, Bob Mackie. And this is our chronological exploration of The Simpsons. Who else is here with me today? Fan of delicious wine, Henry Gilbert.

And who do we have on the line? This is Lewis Peitzman, a land of contrasts. And today's episode is Das Bus. today fan of delicious wine henry gilbert and who do we have on the line this is lewis pitesman a land of contrasts and today's episode is dos bus internet eh today's episode aired on february 15th 1998 and as always henry will tell us what happened on this mythical day in real world history oh my god oh boy bobby the first cloned calf is born aljean and mike reese's teen angel is canceled by tgif no and the 1980s are alive again in adam sandler and drew barrymore's rom-com the wedding singer number one at the box office even though it has a rapping granny i will say that could be the best adam sandler movie

at a time when 80s nostalgia was still a fresh novelty i think that's why i enjoyed it 98 i i think it might be his best movie but i still since i saw happy gilmore at the exact right age to like an adam sandler film that's still my favorite but i think him and drew barrymore are there they have a really great chemistry together so it makes for a really good movie that's a very charming movie and you could kind of overlook the fact that adam sandler's in it which is always yeah well he's not playing like a baby voice man so it's like that could be a human being on the screen right there he's an actual person you the biggest disbelief suspension you have to do is that uh billy idol has not aged at all

from the 80s to then he pulled it off yeah yeah but like in the 90s 70s nostalgia was everything we were steeped in it so like what if we thought about the 80s once in a while and it's like wow we could do this and then we're still doing it to this very day there's things uh like i don't know we have never escaped 80s nostalgia i think the millennials are going real hard on 90s nostalgia though now i think 80s nostalgia is i think might be in its dying breaths now 20 years i hope so i'm sick of you as someone who runs a classic gaming podcast even i'm sick of 80s nostalgia well bob look at this it's a cd player it's it's so gigantic. And it's new. Great. B.S. Teen Angel, not long for this world. Al Jean Reese would... Mike Reese would just quit television altogether

except for Future Simpsons freelance work, basically. And Al Jean would come crawling back to the Simpsons. Yep, the world was not ready for a sitcom about a sassy angel. I wonder if that show would work now. Maybe it was just ahead of its time the first episode begins with a teen dying of eating a bad burger i wonder they'd have to go uh a darker realer place instead of making it a joke now i think yeah like the critic was them making a simpsons for abc a teen angel was them basically fitting themselves into the tgif

mold i think it didn't quite work out. I've never seen the show, but I have not heard good things. I don't even think they like it very much. Oh, no. Yeah. Maureen McCormick from the Brady Bunch was on it, which is a big selling point for me. Yeah, she's great. She almost seemed too young to be playing a

mom of a teen in need of an angel. Eternally a teenager herself. I forgot she was on that show, but Al Jean left Gracie Films and Fox to work for Disney for a while. A lot of people got great development deals at that time and that era, and he would talk about on commentaries on these DVDs that we watched

that whenever he was at Disney, he hated Disney. He's like, I wish I was back at the Simpsons. Why can't I be back at the Simpsons? He eventually found his way back to the Simpsons, but now he works for Disney again. I wonder how he feels about that. He hatedney so much openly so well i've said before my theory that they're going to once the current deal is up disney didn't keep employing george lucas they didn't bring him back for more movies i have a feeling they're going to want to clear the deck of original creators on simpsons it's going to be interesting uh but yeah and then

calf was cloned. They were cloning all the animals in 98. They were working their way through the whole barnyard. And now we have cloning for everyone. So we've come so far. Just constantly cloning people and things. Did we get to the point yet in history where Bill Clinton was like, no more clones of people? That's my Bill Clinton, by the way. It's terrible.

I think 98 is when it was signed into law. I forget what. The tiniest thumbs down to clones. All right. Das Bus. Lewis, you were last on our Treehouse of R7 podcast. You're a big Simpsons fan, quite an expert. Out of all, I gave you a list of upcoming episodes.

You really wanted this one. Why? You know, season nine, it's so weird for me because i always forget that things really got wacky in season nine like it's a it's a big jump from season eight and so i was looking at a lot of those episodes and in terms of like weird high concept things uh lord of the flies parody really worked for me i i remember loving it at the time yeah i was just looking for a chance to revisit and uh were you a reader or watcher of lord of the flies as a youngster i had i definitely pretended to read it in school but i found it too traumatizing

and i similarly had like seen part of the movie but was like just deeply upset by how they treated piggy so i couldn't actually watch it wow yeah I have a master's in literature. And I've never read this book. It just never surfaced in any curriculum I was part of. So I just never encountered it. I know all the beats of the story. I know Piggy getting his glasses broken and the thing with the boars and everything like that. But that's basically, I just know it via parody. Right. I mean, I feel like we all know that people are generally terrible, especially boys. And so I don't need to read or see something to confirm that for me yeah that's true as uh as a young picked on child for me too i didn't really

need that thing to let me know like oh i would be piggy on this island and i don't like this it confirmed the existence of bullying yes i needed that in your life we're confused about that yeah and i also fear it could give bullies bad ideas like oh i could do this i could just take it over and make people do kill someone for me i never read it as a kid either it wasn't forced upon me in school uh nor was it played for me at school on the tv the uh the film from the 70s i think it was or 80s i i so i only know it through cultural osmosis as well you know listeners, listeners out there, I'm sorry. We're such Philistines.

We have not read or watched it. But when I watched this episode, though, in 1998, I knew this was a Lord of the Flies thing. Like, it's such a well-known story. Oh, yeah. So they didn't need, and they hit it so hard on the head, all the famous Lord of the Fly beats. It's not hard to guess. I will say that on the Gilbert family VHS, this was one that I would skip over a number of times in my rewatchings

because I didn't like it very much in 1998 either. We're having a lot of discussion in this room before the recording. There's a lot of hate for this episode. I like that. No, I just was wondering. I mean, I didn't know there was backlash. I recall I was, at this point in my life, I was on all TV Simpsons, the news group, reading reviews and things like that.

I wasn't writing a lot, but people hated everything about The Simpsons, I think, forever on the Internet. But especially at this point in time, there were more people getting on the Internet than ever, as this episode reflects with Homer. And people really hated the ending. And I think the ending cast a shadow across all the funny things that happened before it in the episode. I guess we'll get to the ending, but it is still kind of controversial,

even though they have done this ending several times. Before this, and before it, too. Yeah, and before. They did, yeah. I mean, not to jump ahead, but just because it's like a deus ex machina ending, or like, what is the complaint? Like, I guess that you're robbed of a

satisfying conclusion well yeah that it's a it's a rabbit out of a hat ending but also like the effort was put into i that it is kind of a middle finger to you as well that they're like look we did not put effort into explaining how the kids got off the island, but we did put the effort into getting James Earl Jones to say the line about how we didn't try to write something. And so it's, which, which does make it funnier than if like Dan Castlenet or whoever on the did the voiceover and said, there's no ending to this episode but but yeah that's that's what bugged me at the time but also just the in 1998 as a grumpy 15 year old i didn't like spending this much time with only the kids i didn't find the kids classrooms funnies all that funny by that point

i was no longer in elementary school and so just spending that long on the island and also like millhouse sucks and i just hate him in this episode i i love millhouse mostly but he's so detestable in it and it doesn't it isn't fun to go back to for me i guess my only my only thought about the ending though is that it feels very much like similar to the rest of season nine things you know you have like this is the season of principal the pauper which also has a very silly like middle finger ending um so i guess i just kind of accepted it as part of this era of the simpsons yeah well i i'm glad you brought up principal the pauper because this was my reaction to this was more of what people have said their reactions to the pauper were of the moment where

you're like this is where the downward trend begins for me more so than principal the popper this is not i don't want to really shit all over this episode because it is there are funny bits and i will point out where i think there's really funny stuff but principal the popper is the very least that i believe them when they say it was a meta-narrative about how people reject changes to a tv show so a a hasty ending that jokingly undoes all these changes is at least like an intentional commentary on a theme they built into the script, even if it doesn't work or not based on who feels that way. This was not about that the entire way to the end of the episode. It was just, they did a Lord of the Flies parody that went too long and they ran out of time and they're like fuck it this ending and i think that it justifies them in the future also not trying because they said hey

but remember how funny it was when we said let's say mo do that again well i think uh an older episode set a precedent for this but it was done in a much better way so the day the violence died we love doing that for this podcast because it's even more creative when we look back at it. Because essentially the story ends in Act 2. And Act 3 is characters of a show in some sort of existential dread state. Like, what do we do now? How does this show even finish? And then at the end, it's like two clones of Bart and Lisa save the day.

And they devote an entire act to giving you a screw you ending. Here, it's just like five seconds. So when I watched this episode as a 14 or 15-year year old, I was like, oh, it's like a version of that ending. That's kind of fun. And I moved on watching King of the Hill next. I wasn't that caught up in being mad. I was mad about a lot of stupid things as a teenager, to be fair, but this didn't really

offend me. I guess it was that I had less satisfaction on my repeat viewings in 1998. Maybe not the minute it ended on the night it premiered, but in repeat viewings in that year is when it really started to sound. We're going to work through this on this podcast today. Now going back to this though, I had completely forgotten multiple,

any other plot that was not Lord of the Flies in this. And that includes all the internet stuff, which I liked in 98 because i was kind of online then and now i actually love these internet jokes quite a lot yes uh having worked for several internet companies since this episode has aired i think it is very prescient i think it really just predicted the dot-com bubble uh we'll get into more of that later but uh i really identified with all the computer companies our internet company things in this episode. I mean, it did also predict that porn would be the big motivating factor for many people to get faster internet.

That too. Yeah, having an internet porn joke in 98 felt like way ahead of the curve. I think we're going to all have some porn nostalgia later in this episode. Looking forward to it. And, you know, another nice thing about returning to this though because i always skip this i usually skip this on the gilbert family vhs i have been wrong in previous episodes of this podcast where i say well after realty bites we've only got one more phil hartman because i completely forgot that troy mcclory is in this episode i forgot too it was a

nice surprise i mean treasure every bit of phil hartman you get because we're running out at this point like so there's just one more after this right yes yeah bart the mother season 10 that's the last of it but this is our second to last phil hartman here we're on the countdown to uh the tragedy right now yeah two months in this timeline yeah two months away in real life may of uh 98 yeah uh anyway let. Anyway, let's remember the fun times of this clip. Noah, thou shalt build thyself an ark measuring 300 cubits in length. 300 cubits, give or take. Exactly 300. And thou shalt takeest two of every creature.

Two creatures? Two of every creature. Even stink beetles? Especially stink beetles. Whoa, cool. God is so in your face. Yeah, he's my favorite fictional character. It's so late. You kids have to go to bed.

But the flood's only knee high. At least let us watch till the midgets drown. Yeah, Mom, come on. You're going to stay up to watch Troy McClure and such other Bible epics as David vs. Super Goliath and Suddenly Last Supper? Go, Lise. Way to cite precedent.

All right, you can stay up late tonight, but tomorrow, everyone's going to bed at five o'clock. That was my experience whenever these biblical epics would air on TV as a kid, because they were three hours long with commercial, like, three hours long originally, and then have to be, have

commercials spliced into them. So it would be like the entire day, like, is this still on? When are they going to crucify this guy already? Get get to it i'm glad that era of movies is over i like the joke about going to bed at five because when i was a kid i definitely did not understand why you would want to go to bed at five and now i fully understand it's uh it feels like a real reprieve from life. Yes. Yeah. Well, it also means Homer gets to go home early from work because he just says, well, my wife said I had to go to bed at five. I recall I think I watched half of The Ten Commandments this way and just eventually I got so just tired of waiting. The only times I watch movies on TV now with commercials on it is when I visit family and they have on Christmas

movies. So, A Christmas Story, I swear it was every four minutes they had a commercial now. And the commercials are very loud. Yes, twice as loud. And A Christmas Story, you're just waiting for the racist last scene. So, really. I thought every commercial was just a Geico ad at this point in history.

Well, actually, last night I did a rare watching of live television, too. But this was a pro wrestling event. And so most of their ads were the nootropics they're selling to old men now. They all are like, you got to dye your beard, and I bet your dick doesn't work, so take some nootropics. Here's a guy who used to be a baseball player. His dick works now i have never read ad copy for dick pills yet on a podcast nice vow to you listeners i never will i do like

the bit here of the kids in their negotiation tactics like that was a favorite of mine as a kid too as a clever little snot nose kid saying like hey you let me do that this time what what about now setting precedent is very important as a child. Now as an adult, though, if I had kids, I feel like I'd say like, yeah, well, I'm setting a new precedent. You go to bed now. Laws just changed.

This is not a democracy. I like the cut from them deciding they're going to watch the whole thing no matter how long it takes. And then the cut is Homer has completely finished his personal bowl of popcorn and Maggie's just passed out on marge's legs there it's also it feels like a commentary on how fox would you know condense

the credits with when kent brockman comes in and ruins the end of a movie yes yes and i love the thing about the real life noah's ark yes he kills two of every animal a tragic story of animal abuse is the lighter side of the news. And though the AM Springfield just has the same music as I on Springfield. Yeah, hey, small budget. It's a local station. Is that a continuity error? Let's just say they reused it for the show.

I mean, we could call it a continuity error. Let them have it. It was intentional. So the kids then run off to their Model UN club And where some boning goes down Okay delegates, you leave tomorrow for the statewide Model UN So this is our last chance to bone up And bone we will

Lighten up, please Finland, let's see that native dance Smile more Work that pelvis No, too much smile Sit down Poland, tell us about your nation's achievements Well, uh, I heard they sent a rocket to the sun once

At night And there was that submarine with a screen door. No, no, no, no, no. Young man, you need to do some serious boning. Oh, grow up, Lise. A brief note about some design things in the show. I love all the costumes for the kids. One thing really annoys me, and we have Simpsons comic book artist Nina Matsumoto sitting here in the room.

Not allowed to talk on mic, of course. She's not mic'd up. But when Bart is wearing these sunglasses, normally the Simpsons' eyes are just connected to each other. The two eyes are just together. But when he wears the sunglasses, there's a strip of flesh they add between them. There's an episode coming up where Homer is a bodyguard. It's like a bodyguard parody, and he's wearing sunglasses.

I think it's the one with Mark Hamill. Yeah, the Bayman sci-fi con episode. Yeah, yeah, yeah. mayor to the mob right uh throughout the entire episode he's wearing sunglasses with just a strip of flesh between his eyes and it doesn't like it's so weird and then i looked up other i was going deep on this i was like just typed in bart sunglasses and it like varies between adding a strip of flesh between the eyes and having the sunglass lenses smashed together to fit the Simpsons' connected eyeballs. There's really no good way of doing that, is there? Yeah, I don't know if this irritated anyone else, but whenever I see this, it really bothers me.

They add a strip of... That shouldn't happen. It shouldn't be. It will annoy me from now on, but I never really thought about it before. From a design perspective, perhaps they saw, like, well, we draw Milhouse and other permanent glasses wearers to have a strip of flesh and showing the thing that connects the lenses together. So perhaps that rule in design overrules the rule of eyes connecting on characters that don't normally wear glasses. Yeah, and Milhouse's eyes are very far apart in his head and very tiny as we see in this episode. Yeah, which that's a great idea.

I'm looking at images now. I Google image search Simpsons sunglasses because you sent me down this rabbit hole. And there was a GIF of Marge wearing sunglasses and taking them off. And the strip of flesh disappears as she takes them off. Oh, no. That's creepy. Yeah. I'm glad I can give our guests the same kind of mania that I have.

I hope we've infected the whole kind of mania that I have. I hope we've infected the whole audience with it now. They're all searching right now for it. I don't know if there are still Polish jokes or Polish stereotypes, but I grew up in an extremely, extremely Polish town. And my mom married a very, very Polish man. So I've heard every Polish joke. The word Polak was thrown around. I hope I don't get canceled for saying Polak.

Is that a slur now? Maybe. I think it's always been a slur. I think they've been invited into the white people club, right? Yeah, but I mean, you couldn't say, I feel like you'd get in trouble if you said a slur against Italians, even though they're in the white people club. Well, if you are Polish, I've got a Polish stepdad. He said it's okay.

Okay. Meanwhile, I lived in a very thankfully free of Polish people area. You're not getting pierogies there buddy yeah i know i missed out but i never heard any of these polish jokes this scene in the episode was my introduction to mean jokes about the polish though you can replace polish with any any uh ethnicity you want to slur and the jokes work the same are you giving tips on how to slur different ethnicities you know if you know i i'm sorry uh the bit there with lisa is being the french person not laughing uh i that it it's obviously a joke

about french people have no sense of humor that's the comment there as long as we're making more generalities about ethnicities there's an extra gag to it that then lisa starts to laugh that it feels like a joke about how once we stopped laughing at jerry lewis for example that's when the french start laughing yeah okay i could see that i was wondering if there'd be a jerry lewis connection that's i feel like i have to make a jerry lewis connection but uh i could be just reading things into it it's also weird that skinner tells a child to move his pelvis that bit did make me go like hmm that odd. I don't know if you have the Bart speech about Libya. I do.

So why don't we hear that real quick? Okay, Libya, exports. Yes, sir, you American pig. Nice touch. Let's see. The exports of Libya are numerous in amount. One thing they export is corn, or as theians call it maize another famous indian was crazy horse in conclusion libya is a land of contrast thank you i have heard that uh memed

and it's quoted a lot i think it's actually from a life in hell comic where it's like the perfect way to end a bunch of bullshit if you're trying to like explain something and want to get out of it in conclusion blank is a land of contrast i've heard that said so much since this episode people say that the later eras aren't referenced as much that i can hear that a lot yes 100 on the internet well it's very useful it's sort of like i mean since we talked about the last episode i did with you guys it's sort of like the twirling toward freedom speech nothing but it's very useful when you're dealing with like politicians saying absolutely nothing and trying to sound very deep but i also do love and i also occasionally

quote the as the indians call it may's line which i don't know what it's doing there but it's it's perfect it's it's all great filler of like a yeah the i i love it as a person who had to write too many essays in school and just these are all the filler things you get to get to a word count it's almost too smart for bart to know all these easy filler things on it i i like all the empty platitudes talking about like skinner gives him a real look of like corn really but then bart moves on so fast and yeah the land of contrast that's the great the greatest especially i think it gets memed a lot now because especially with twitter but we're just in such a pundit era now that everybody has to try to say something with saying nothing and you need

different ways of saying like well aren't both sides wrong in this or we live in a society or yeah you know, America's positives outweigh its negatives or any of that bullshit. And so a land of contrast, especially when you're talking about a place that you don't know anything about, which for most Americans is anywhere outside of America. It really covers your ass. I mean, I am criminally miseducated because I grew up in America. So only upon this viewing did I realize the Sherry and Terry being Trinidad and Tobago. They are a dual island nation. I didn't know that until now

because I'm stupid about geography. Thanks a lot, American school system. Well, two quick things. One, Lisa literally says we live in a society later in this episode. Oh, wow. And also I was in Model UN when I was in high school. Oh.

And had no idea what I was doing. Did not do any research or know what Model UN was supposed to do. I just needed something to put on my college applications. And so I joined the club and there was no instruction on how to do anything. So I was Cameroon and then I was the Netherlands. And I couldn't tell you what I did except sit around a bunch of people and hope that no one called on me that sounds like a good i mean and you got it on your college application and that's definitely why i got into college yes model una welcome aboard it's fun to just say something a that's a really good i i've done that a lot does that come from this episode

i do that all the time, like, blank, eh? These Libya jokes are also quite dated because it's very Gaddafi-era Libya. According to Wikipedia, we're very friendly with Libya now after the revolution there. I literally know nothing about Libya, so I know it's a line of contrast. And then Gaddafi got killed. But Skinner banging his shoe on the desk. Did you get the reference here? Yes. It's a reference to an event that might not have happened or I think, I forget, it's kind of fuzzy,

but Nikita Khrushchev did that in a UN General Assembly in 1960 when someone was talking smack about the Soviet Union. And I think that is what made him a disgrace, like doing that during the General Assembly. When I looked into it, it says there's no photographic evidence of it happening. It could just be a myth, but it's like this is in the pre-c-span world where just

everything was filmed all the time another representative of another country was uh giving a speech or reporting on something and then like you know insulting the soviet union and that's when he got upset so reportedly even posed wise the photo that i saw that it's not him banging his shoe it is like right after he apparently did it but he has stood to the side of a desk the same way skinner is as well so they're getting the reference as close as they can there i though this takes me back to we've seen this a ton we've been doing king of the hill at the same time as this and there's multiple gags where dale talks about how the un is going to control you and like yeah this captures much more like the uh emptiness of the un and it can't

really at least to america and our government it can't really do anything or enforce anything it's funny to think back on whether like well the un is going to force us to get rid of all our churches like they couldn't even stop us from invading Iraq. I don't think they can get rid of our churches. Not with that attitude. I mean, like the folks who were using the UN as the scary thing, like Alex Jones, they don't talk about the UN anymore. Like it was FEMA. Now I think they just trust our government.

It's the deep state, the deep state now because the government otherwise is great because it's run by our strong powerful president that's why you have to worry about the secret deep state inside the government that's trying to destroy the president i have not dipped my toe too deep into the waters of q anon you will lose your mind yeah you really should not i mean it's made all of our parents insane It's insane. The Sentence 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? I'm putting down my chewy, chewy cocoa beans just long enough to thank our guest this week, Lewis Pitesman. His commentary is always welcome and we thank him so much for doing this week's episode. And you should definitely check out all of his stuff. Learn about it on Twitter or at his sub stack.

Once more, that's Lewis Pitesman. And if you want to check out more podcasts from us we have so much to offer you at the patreon patreon subscribers at our talking simpsons network get access to every episode a week ahead of time and ad free for this podcast you can hear next week's right now and the same goes for our sister podcast what a cartoon where me and bob go through a different animated series an episode each week you can hear that a week ahead of time and entry as well and that's only the beginning of what you get for five dollars a month if you're a subscriber at patreon.com slash talking simpsons best of all you get Patreon exclusive podcasts like our current miniseries, Talking of the Hill, where me and, where we go through both the first season of Futurama

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Internet, eh? Yes, on the internet you can find many things, including our most premium content at patreon.com slash talking simpsons. If you're a $10 and up subscriber you get to listen to our monthly what a cartoon movie podcast if you enjoy hearing me and bob go into great detail of a simpsons episode each week then once a month i think you'll love hearing us talk about a different animated feature film and go super in-depth into the history of that movie you can hear us talk about you can hear us talk about batman mask of the

phantasm kiki's delivery service akira a goofy movie the secret of nymph and our newest one for this month spider-man into the spider-verse those often go over three hours long and you can hear all of them right now if you sign up at the ten dollar a month level or take your five dollar and up pledge to ten dollars a month you definitely want to hear all this at patreon.com slash talking Simpsons. When Nelson is pinching his nose that's when it hit me that they all are dressed like small world characters oh you're right yeah wow okay that makes total sense yeah i've been on that ride a lot recently and uh it sucks which they did not i'm guessing in mama un lewis you did not have to dress in a uh costume like that in a culturally offensive costume no that's good um

but i would have had i you know uh yeah so after it's over they go they're sent to their bus and they're going to head off to model un this uh well actually here let's hear the clip order order do you kids want to be like the real un or do you just want to squabble and waste time? Have a great weekend, kids. Be nice to the underprivileged countries. Good luck, Ralphie. If your nose starts bleeding, it means you're picking it too much,

or not enough. Okay, kids, Otto's in charge. Remember, Otto, we're trusting you with our greatest natural resource, the school bus. I love the overly coddling Wiggum. Yes, yeah. It's very cute. Get off the stage, Ralphie. The nose-picking jokes disgust me.

It's pretty gross. I laugh much more at boning than that. And also, order at any cost is the slogan of that UN. With the dove dressed up in like uh with like bandoliers and guns and stuff yeah it's great i love that so if we want to get overly pedantic here well that's that's what we're doing here that's our job so look the the children are as far as we see they get on the island one night passes and then the next day happens so when they say they're going to be gone for a weekend they they are not gone longer than Homer and Marge expect them to be gone for.

So maybe that could explain it. But I would feel like parents would check that the bus made it to where they were supposed to go, you know? They didn't have cell phones, so there must have been no way to contact them. No. It was a simpler time. You throw your kids into a bus and you assume they'll make it back safely. And you go on with your life, happy of the freedom to be away from your children.

Yeah, like when I took a school trip a few years before this episode aired, there was no like contact with home saying I made it okay, mom, etc. Just like, yeah, I'll be at this location and then I'll come back. I guess I don't remember that either for the few times I did a long, I never did more than a day trip. I don't think I ever did a stay the night trip for school. But I would just figure like the teacher would call somebody else to be like, hey, just checking in.

We are there. I think that the idea is that if something horrible happens, you'll hear about it. Yeah. The news will let you know if your child is dead. That's true. So are all the kids on the bus later represented on the island because i feel like the only kids i see on the island it's been a few days since i watched this uh are the ones that actually have personalities like are lewis and wendell on the island too uh yeah they are on the island uh yeah

no i think that's all the kids are there yeah yeah they're all it's not a full bus wendell suffered enough i mean they they're doing their best and uh oh yeah we did skip past it too we had a nice ralph there's a lot of good ralph in this the iconic ralph here and him being canada and all he has is to sing oh canada which he does correctly people think he's a little slow but yeah so meanwhile we get the introduction of our uh really underutilized plot point here. But I love every second of this internet. I kind of wish it was in a different episode and could be expanded a little more.

But it is a really fun B story. Yeah, and David S. Cohen, at this point, his name is S. Cohen. At this point in time, he was feeling very anxious because he went into TV writing from going to Harvard and Berkeley. And his friends were making a ton of money in the now, or then burgeoning online world. And he was like, did I make the wrong choice going into writing for one of the most popular shows on television? So that is being reflected in this episode. His own anxieties about not having gone into this e-commerce world, not being a mega millionaire.

I'm sure he's a millionaire now. Oh, he's way past millionaire i bet multi-million developer of futurama yeah maybe keeps him out of some of that money no i in 1998 i was starting to get engaged with the world of purchasing things on the internet by this point amazon wasn't really around i wasn't by i think 99 was maybe when i bought my first amazon book which all it it was, it's a bookstore. I definitely shared an eBay account with my mom at this point. She was buying old toys from her childhood.

I was buying wall scrolls of Evangelion. And everything was as it should have been. And I think I maybe by the end of 98 or early 99 was when I first started actually selling things on eBay. But the idea of an internet business did seem very novel in 1998. I wasn't as online, certainly not as now. I didn't have as many tools. I didn't want to build a website. I really just kept visiting web rings of different anime or animated series that I enjoyed or mystery science theater too. I had built my own websites at this point. They were very dinky, like, tripod, GeoCities ones, and they were all mystery science theater related. I was in several of the rings.

I can't remember what I was doing online at this time, but it wasn't anything nearly as cool as what you guys were doing. Oh, come on now. Well, I think the idea that you could make money off the internet though was quite novel then that a regular person not a giant business but a regular person like Ned could make money off it was a very uh you know novel idea then now now I think most uh everyone I know makes money off of the internet yeah couldn't without the there are no real jobs apparently oh certainly not no it's all going away well that's depressing i'm sorry i have more to say about that but uh what homer does in this episode i've uh it reflects upon

several internet jobs i've had and how phony they were yes yeah but uh this might be my line of the episode just the uh the exchanges of a's here with uh with homer and ned is this would you agree to that bob yeah i know this is where I get the A thing whenever I reference it. Blank A. So officially, line the episode jingle. That's the joke. Flancrest Enterprises?

Oops, that's for me. Flancrest Enterprises is my home business. You liar. You don't have a home business. Why would you make up a lie like that? No, it's true. Mon and I sell religious hook rugs over the Internet. Internet, eh? Yes, indeedy. Making some good scratch, too.

Scratch, eh? Yep. Maude, eh? Homer, what are you doing? No time to answer that, Marge. I'm setting up a home office for my new business enterprise. What business enterprise? Ever heard of a little thing called the Internet?

Internet, eh? Oh, yeah. Everybody's making money off the Internet except us. We've fallen behind. Way behind. Is that my good butter? Can't discuss that now discuss that now march i have to write another delicious memo memo i'm surprised there's not the novelty version of that like a fake stick of butter you can stick pens into man that has to exist i've never seen it sounds like a good idea to me it's a real stick of butter and just and just really commit to it if you wanted to and then you got to change it out

like multiple times a day but worth it for the bit uh just like committing to the bit is important way free idea for an etsy store guys though you want to make uh everybody makes etsy goods for simpsons jokes now so that's an untouched one there i think that's another internet business you can start up yeah i think then too nobody like time magazine or whatever would have these covers of like the internet huh and they just have like uh basically a matrix uh rainfall type thing on it yeah and it's just the idea of this magic thing called the internet but you don't know what it is and just saying that you want to have an internet business somehow invents itself was definitely the feeling in 1998 among anybody back then yeah i mean we were leading up to in a few years the dot-com bubble of the of 2000 2001 where all the bad ideas it's like wait a minute we have to make money we can't just keep losing it and then

there's a bubble that popped well this is how I feel about Bitcoin and have for the past few years, where I know something's happening. I don't quite know what it is. Other people are making money, and I feel like I should understand it. Yeah, data mining, all that stuff. There's something to it, yeah. It just makes the price of video cards go up. That's all I know.

All I've learned about Bitcoin is that it's one of the key investors in it is a guy who is in the Mighty Ducks, who also invested in a very skeezy business that Bryan Singer also invested in. Keep digging more into that, folks. You'll learn some things you don't want to know about stars of Mighty Ducks. I feel I am in danger of being sued if I say more things about this. The moral is never Google anyone who was in a movie you loved as a child. It not emilio estevez right no no oh thank god it's uh i think it's the lead guy who didn't really go on anything you said too much okay um okay though as a as

a pedantic thing here though homer is never connected online that is the joke he sets down a typewriter he says he has an internet business but he has a pop-up ad later. How do those things happen? I assume that he went to Gary, Benjamin, and Doug. Oh, okay. And somehow had them make him an internet banner. But man, internet banner jokes. Yeah. Amazing.

Very new then. Network TV? Who was making those jokes? I mean, there was a point in time when we were... I thought we had gotten past the era of pop-up ads. Now, if you dare to go to a website, things slide to the left and slide to the right and slide down. It's like, do you want to email? Do you want

to get our newsletter? Do you want this? Do you want that? Do you want us to text you? It's like, no, I just want to read this article. Oh, how many articles have you read this month? This is your fifth article, sir. Speaking of that pop-up ad, though, and how it pops up on the uh porn image slowly downloading i wonder if anyone who wasn't using the internet back then understands how

realistic it is that images truly took that long to load yes yeah yeah later he says he has a 28.8k modem right yes uh that's a pretty accurate for that speed yeah yeah and um i mean we'll get to that scene later i guess but it's also uh i think the joke there is like looking up a naked picture of kate mulgrew uh that's a very unlikely search you would do in 1998 out of all the characters wouldn't have been like uh seven of nine or whatever when they wrote it maybe seven of nine hadn't premiered yet but i mean this is not my perspective but she was viewed as a mannish woman at the time i i hope that's not part of the joke and i think that is the joke okay yeah i mean jillian anderson would have been the

joke before that maybe they're like you know we can't make fun of a fox person i think it's just like what is an unlikely search uh well you know what we'll get to that well let's save this chat for i buy i also like homers honestly being really again he's a real jerk to marge this whole season but he's just yelling they're like we've fallen behind way behind uh which i guess he just means by comparison to nad the kids meanwhile are going uh on their drive soon over a bridge that uh is over apparently the entire ocean actually Actually, my in-canon explanation for this is they must fall. You remember the current that pulls Ned, Homer, Bart, and Todd out to sea? And Boy Scouts in the Hood?

Yes. They must fall into the same powerful current that pulls them out to sea as well. They should build a dam there or something. Seems very dangerous. The kids are having an eventful trip where you make your own fun when you're on these bus rides here. 63 bottles of beer on the wall. 63 bottles of beer. Oh, this song is driving me crazy.

B-I-N-G-O and Bingo, what's his name-o? Man, I don't know why I bought this stupid tape. Hey, Simpson, race ya! First one to the front of the bus gets Martin's lunch money. What? Go apple! Go orange! Go banana!

Go banana! Make way for grapefruit nothing beats that well millhouse really is you're right he's not this is not his finest moment the entire episode he kind of deserves all the punishment he gets for he's the catalyst for this accident for every problem is millhouse's strongest his fault yes yeah ralph's go banana another classic ralphism there but also yeah if i may be extra mad at millhouse he's breaking the rules of this race bart and nelson clearly define the rules as you place it down and then watch how it rolls well meanwhile millhouse just bowls it down the middle which is not the rules He's breaking the rules

And that's another reason to be mad at him In this game here He's just trying to be funny with his grapefruit The gods are punishing him for disrespecting the rules Of fruit bowling And yes, I do like the gag With Otto listening to children singing Songs to enrage bus drivers

It's rare they do a joke About Otto's headphones with Otto listening to children singing. Yeah, songs to enrage bus drivers. I mean, it's rare they do a joke about Otto's headphones that he's always wearing. That's true. They're rarely ever playing any music. And by 1998, still wearing, I mean, you would still have a tape Walkman, people would, but by the mid-2000s,

he's still wearing it in the age of MP3 players. It's a statement piece. It's not really about the practical. It's not about the music he's still wearing it in the in the age of mp3 players it's like it's a statement piece it's like it's you know it's not really about the practical it's not about the music he's listening to right it's just kind of about the look i do like i still love the look of his classic headphones of just the orange fuzz on it he is rooted in 1989 auto that's why i love him he does not change the world changes around him he does not change. How old do you think Otto is? Do we know that? Has that ever been established?

You know, he did see his license, but I can't recall if you see the birth date on it. I always read him as early 20s. Oh, really? I guess I never thought about it until like now-ish. I just could not tell you what age he is at all. I think Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein, they went on to make Mission Hill because there was uh the simpsons there's characters like up to age like

14 or 15 and then no one uh between that and 30 yeah so otto's like the one character who fit into that world and so they wanted to make a world of characters in that age range so otto would be like and i'm looking on the wiki and there's no age listed but i have to say like he's definitively like in his 20s he's lived a hard life though so who knows yeah yeah it seems like he could be much older right like i don't i don't know why oh okay that kind of like arrested development stonery thing where he could really be any age so according to uh the auto show he was born in january 18th 1963 making him 29 in that episode okay so that makes sense as someone i mean i guess you could be a bus driver and be happy with your life but i think the joke is he's still doing this and

he's almost 30 he has not found a real job yet quote unquote real job sorry to all the bus drivers out there we respect you i don't can't even keep track if he has his own mustard yeah i had mustard uh yeah i think you know that that puts him older but i guess he does when he talks about the bands he likes it's rare he's kind of specific about the bands and this one it's zeppelin which a metal head of the 80s certainly would like zeppelin but i feel like he would be calling out motley crew or quiet riot or uh one white snake i don't know one one of those, or Guns N' Roses, something from the 80s, calling out a 70s band, no matter how iconic they are, that does make him feel a little older. He was going to die. He didn't want to die a fraud. He knew what he really loved, and it was 70s classic rock. And yes, the grapefruit juice gets in his eyes.

I do like him asking them, like, I can't see, you got to be my eyes. And then he goes over the edge, like, how are we doing? There's a nice little joke when they come back of him spinning the bus wheel like a ship's wheel yeah it's very subtle i just i just picked up on it this time that was really clever and the act two comes back with just like a quiet silence and then the bus drops and then back to quiet and then it pops back up again that was really clever does feel like kind of a more modern later simpsons in the sense of like the first act has very little to do with anything that comes after it oh yeah that's very much like a season nine on thing i i can't remember season eight doing that as much

not as much there's a few things like the cider mill and things like that but for the most part they had one big story to tell in those episodes uh and that so the joke i didn't write it down but the joke is the bus goes under the water and then pops back up and then what happens and then it starts sinking again okay it's not the dumbbell indemnity joke uh no yeah homer pops up and down more than once okay is it it's the it's the backing up sound right that it makes when it uh that's really funny when it fully goes down yeah i like that a lot. It makes no physical sense, but it's very hilarious. The bus rotates so it can back up underwater. And also that when they come back from the commercial,

that Ralph is still saying, go banana. I like that too. And I looked this up. In 1989, there was a very similar type of school bus crash, and the results aren't funny. Oh, no. Let's not talk about that. Happened in Texas, though.

You can do the rest of the search yourself, guys. So Otto, I think, does the exact wrong thing, which is abandoning children to get help. Like, you probably shouldn't do that if you're the only adult around children in a bus crashing, I think. Is he really an adult, though? I mean, I know we just talked about his age, but I expect him to be the responsible choice. No, that's true. That's true. But, well, the way they write most of the, I mean, Homer has abandoned his children in dire need the same way.

So it's not so much an age thing. It's just a maturity level there. Yeah. Otto tries to get away. He gets swept away by the powerful current, abandoning the children inside the bus. And the kids realize they're all about to die. Just hang tight, kids. I'll swim for help.

What the? Zeppelin rule! I guess this is the end, Wendell. He's Wendell. I'm Lewis. Whatever. Just tell Wendell I said bye. As we talked about before in season nine, I think you pointed out, Henry, they're really dealing with the baggage of the history of the show.

And I love them throwing these season one nobodies under the bus, literally. Because it's just like, wait, who is Lewis? Who is Richard? All these like Shermies of the Simpsons world. Shermie. Yeah. That's a macaraning joke by the way it's like they're like a shirmy character just like who are you

did you have a personality ever in the shorts they never went to springfield elementary in a butterfinger ad they had one at the school and that's where millhouse was introduced but aside from that part had no friends prior to the series so when they set up the second series episode, Bart the Genius, they need him to have school friends. So they make up these kids and they think, well, these are going to be his regular friends where we put all this work into them. And as the writers would realize over nine seasons, those characters are boring. Are there one joke or not even a joke? Like Richard and Lewis are boring. They don't't have anything to them wendell has one joke of being the queasy kid on the bus but after the second time they do that they're like we're not

doing that again so now i mean that was wendell's only defining characteristic is that he is nauseated right that's like the only thing i can think of he threw up and they at least give him a couple throw-up jokes but yeah in the early openings where they pan across the town there's a sight gag of everyone fleeing the bus as Wendell throws up. Like in that pan across the town to the Simpsons' home. He's in every version of that. Yeah. But I guess they had big plans for Wendell.

But it's fun to, we've been doing this show for a long time now, and it's fun to just look at the classrooms of Bart and Lisa, looking at all the students. Like they are in every scene of these classrooms. They never talk. They've been there for 30 years. And they're all like these funky season one designs. Like the girl with the these classrooms. They never talk. They've been there for 30 years. And they're all these funky season one designs. Like the girl with the beret. Oh, yeah. They all have little mac.

The cool glasses girl. Yeah. Some have the little macaroning dot eyes like Milhouse. Like the Akbar and Jeff kind of eyes. I wonder if they got so specific with Wendell and Lewis. Because when they were picking which characters would be on the island, they thought, well, we need two more spots here. Who should they be? Do we have any other named characters after sherry and terry we can't think of any i want to say richard and lewis because it's a black character and a white

character they're like the lenny and carl of the child simpsons world there has to be an episode they've done after this that explores like who the season one nobodies are i wish they would do that if they haven't i just learned on the simpsons wiki that lewis's last name is clark oh cute i get it cute i want an episode with lewis wendell richard and janie and nobody else just them yeah and uh who is the girl who had the uh the broken spider-man doll oh clovis uh hortense hort like that. Wow. Classic names of young people. Yeah. So after the dumping on season one characters, they all get pulled out of the bus in a very like proto-Titanic scrape across the side of it

that then everybody flies out of. And that's when there's the bus backing up underwater, which they're very clever. And this is another moment of millhouse being useless he's like he he's not even saying he can't swim it's just that he thinks he has swimmer's ear and so then bart saves him again like he's there's so many times he'd be dead if it wasn't for somebody else and he is completely thankless and selfish and all of it he has a massive load in this therapist so when they land on the island, it was only...

So again, I said I never read or watched the film version of Lord of the Flies, and it didn't hit me when the kids landed on the island. But when Bart picked up the conch shell, that's when I was like, ah, there we go. I think it was basically advertised as a Lord of the Flies parody. I think I knew that going into it, or at least reading the episode previews. But I think they were up front like, in this of the flies parody comma hobart does this i don't recall while homer does it yeah i think i think it was like uh but it's possible you didn't see oh yes that's i don't copy yeah but they were pretty much it was not like a surprise or anything

like that and uh yeah this is beat for beat so much much how it goes in Lord of the Flies, starting with the lead boy, Ralph, I believe he is. Let me talk to the lead boy. He finds when they are all in chaos on there, he finds a conch shell, blows into it, and starts leading, and people recognize him as the leader, except for a tougher, meaner kid named Jack who is nelson in this uh they at first listen and then kind of have two warring tribes until eventually the more violent of the group

tears down society and makes it for themselves but so there here we have step one in the story of lord of the flies with bart getting the conch shell but i i also like though that these kids are in the lord of the flies parody but they think they're in a Swiss Family Robinson parody. Oh, yeah, yeah. This is all Lisa's fault. She started the stupid UN club. Hey, Martin seconded the motion. It's entirely his fault.

People, people, let's not blame each other. We all know this is Milhouse's fault. Yeah, you and your stupid grapefruit almost got us killed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's everyone's problem? I'm glad we're stranded. It'll be just like the Swiss family Robinson, only with more cursing. We're going to live like kings. Damn hell-ass kings. I love Damn Hell Ass Kings.

Damn Hell Ass Kings has stuck with me for years. Me too. It's one of those quotes that I don't really remember what it's from. It just pops in my head. So it was nice to remember that it was this episode. I like using Damn Hell Ass to precede another word. Yeah, Swiss Family Robinson. I think no one knows

what that is anymore in fact when you go to disneyland it used to be the swiss family robinson treehouse sort of like the little play area but now it's tarzan but i think even that's on the way out it's going to be like the moana jungle adventure or something like that that's why i remember being really annoyed when it stopped being swiss family robinson treehouse even though i have no connection to that at all was that like a 60s i just i was a purist i wanted it to stay what it was oh yeah as a kid i know i i knew the name as a purist yeah i like that but as a kid i had no love for swiss family robinson it was like one of the a live action disney movie was boredom to me like i never wanted to if it was like i was a daycare or whatever and uh

the minder said we're gonna watch a disney movie a live action disney movie like my my interest cratered at the second for that oh yeah they were so long and dreary i don't know why they were they were just like uh again i felt ennui as a kid like just having to watch those i did like mary poppins but as a little kid, it still was a countdown to like, when are they going to get to the Penguin Factory? You're not a fan of the Apple Dumpling Gang? No. But I realized that my reference point for Swiss Family Robinson is Lost in Space,

based on Swiss Family Robinson. That's right, yeah. So Lost in Space is like an adaptation or like a spin on that? Yeah, I mean, they're the Robinsons. Oh, I'm stupid. Instead of being on an island. I forgot you had Danger Will Robinson. Duh.

Okay. Very, very obvious. I don't think I made that connection until I saw the Matt LeBlanc film version. I've only seen the Prestige TV version. An excellent film. It is a child's idea of what getting trapped on an island is because you just imagine wouldn't it be cool to have all these like peewee herman breakfast machine type deals are on an island you just you it's what you draw on construction paper when your parents give it to

you uh to like imagine your perfect hideout fort for as a child when you're 10 you can draw that but you don't think about how do you build that yeah there's some good comedy there like building a nintendo as a joke later i think that was like in every stand-up comics uh bit in the late 80s early 90s like he built the radio out of coconuts oh yes yeah yeah when there's a mention of monkey butlers i like that that lisa like is also excited about that even though she should very much she should know better than that they will actually have monkey butlers. I love that she goes along with it and is excited like a kid would be about the idea of a monkey butler. Yeah, you know, it's a little while later before Lisa becomes a force of order on the island.

And it feels like she should do that earlier just to be consistent with her character. My excuse for that is that she's just so traumatized by what happened, she needs a little while to clear her head. She's swept up in monkey butler fever. It's so exciting. Think about it. As a vegetarian, though, she shouldn't want to enslave monkeys. As long as you're not eating them.

I guess. She likes ponies. She's a hypocrite then. You know what? Yeah, she rides those ponies. Just because you don't eat them doesn't mean you're treating those ponies well. But yes, as Bart presents the imaginations to them, the whole group gets together. And every night, the monkey butlers will regale us with jungle stories.

How many monkey butlers will there be? One at first, but he'll train others. Cool. Let's get to work. Me and Nelson will build a treehouse. Martin, draw up plans for a coconut radio, and if possible, a coconut Nintendo system. What about the rest of us?

You guys gather food for the big feast tonight, and maybe a little wine for the older kids. Delicious wine? Exactly. That's another joke I use a lot from this episode, where it's like, do you want to go out for ramen delicious ramen you know what there's there are a lot of great lines in this one i don't maybe i'm being too harsh to it i i just like it more is what it represents there's a lot of funny lines

in this though pedantic me as in 98 also didn't like that it was look i love my nintendo system even in 1998 but kids had moved on to playstation and i feel like a 1998 bart wants a coconut playstation not if you wanted a nintendo 64 well you should have said that yeah we are we were like a few months or actually we're about like uh nine or eight months from ocarina of time that's he wants to build that coconut nintendo before that comes out i was always loyal to nintendo i would have i would have gone from the nintendo even at that time oh i was too hey you're talking to mr mario fanboy here yeah i i would have but i now i feel like bart bart of 1998 he wants a playstation oh the next season they finally would have a playstation not a nintendo joke with the

crash bandicoot uh gag of the game lisa plays a lot it's an a so good yeah can't wait for that one see there's still good episodes in 10 well listeners stick with us you're still gonna enjoy it uh yes nelson's qualification of delicious wine is pretty good i i still you know i'm not i as i get older i like wine a little bit more. I went from, in my 20s, simply hating wine to now it's like, well, if you give me free wine, I'll drink it. Fine. But I still don't love it. Going to Catholic school broke me into the world of wine at an early age.

Get those kids nice and drunk. I'm not going to take that joke line you said it was for here. It was non-alcoholic wine they gave us in mass. I have to assume. I mean, it was mostly backwash from old people. Yuck. But it was blessed by God. I drank a lot of wine at Temple when I was a kid.

And they would put it in those little cups, like medicine cups. I see. They'd come with your diamond tap or whatever. And you would drink little wine that was mostly grape juice. I prefer that to just the communal disgusting uh chalice and then it's like you had the choice to have the priest literally put the thing on your tongue or in your hands it's like just stick it in my mouth jesus i guess these people just needed physical contact the ones the mouth people i worried about like but lewis was your wines as sweet as mo said about jewish wine yeah no it was made of

so it's it's really just kind of grape juice that's been left out for quite a while well that's why again i'm a real uh sweet tooth when it comes to alcohol i don't i prefer cider to beer hard liquor has to be mixed with something if i really want to enjoy it and rosé is my favorite of the wines because it's uh it's it's a nice in between on and lightness. And you're owning your basic bitch status. I am. As a rosé drinker, which is great. Alcohol tastes like wet fire and burning.

I like things that taste like burning, like Ralph. Yeah. Another line that I quote constantly. This episode is full of quotable lines, whether or not you think it's plausible. You're right. Well, before we get to that, though, we have another act in Homer's internet business.

Oh, what am I going to call my internet company? All the good names are taken. Wait, I've got it. Flancrest Enterprises. What exactly is it your company does again? This industry moves so fast, it's really hard to tell. That's why I need a name that's cutting edge like Cutco. What exactly is it your company does again? This industry moves so fast, it's really hard to tell. That's why I need a name that's cutting edge,

like Cutco or Edgecom. Interslice. Come on, Merge, you're good at these. Help me out. How about CompuGlobal HyperMegaNet? Fine, it's not important. What really matters is my title. I think I'll make myself vice president.

No, wait. Junior vice president. Come to Global HypermegaNet. Junior vice president, Homer Simpson speaking. How may I direct your call? Spatty. Spatty. How we use electricity can be smarter cleaner and greener

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and much more Making your usage clearer your trips greener your home cozier and and your world brighter. Find our net zero hub at electricireland.ie. I like the jokes about tech company names of the 90s, but now they're all, you're right, Henry, you were talking about this earlier, they're all four letters. Like Hulu, Verve, Lyft, Uber, they're all very simple, Or their existing words with vowels carved out of them. Like, no, too many vowels, too complicated.

That's apparently what the consultants you paid millions of dollars to come up with now. Just like, we got a four-letter combination. Whatever we can do. That's what sticks in people's memories for apps now. So we as humans never learn any lessons. And this episode is super prescient because I moved to the Bay Area where I live now to work for a website. And after about three times this happened to me, I realized like all the websites I worked at were basically waiting to be bought out. So you couldn't do

anything. You couldn't make anything. There were no opportunities. It was just like treading water until you were bought out. Of course, the people at the bottom didn't know that. They were told, no, just keep making stuff, keep doing stuff. But by the third time i was like wait a minute you're waiting to get bought out this is why we can't do anything uh so yeah i i totally like this i thought was hilarious like homer's company has no purpose his job title is meaningless and his only goal is to be bought out by microsoft yeah and that is like every every company in the bay area is waiting to be bought out by google or amazon or something like that. Facebook, too. No, I worked with you at that third one, and that was also when it finally hit me, too. My mistake as an internet writer of things and content creator, as I have the term, was that I thought that in my websites, my job was to make the best website I could and get more views on things and make good

content and and i would negotiate things with like plans or talk about plans with my bosses on the auspice of like what we all want is for all of us to make popular content that then gets more views and thus makes more money right we? We all agree on this. And my mistake was not realizing that nobody above a certain pay grade cared about that. They cared about being bought by somebody bigger or the venture capitalists would give them some VC money. One of those two things would happen. And that's what internet business really exists for. That's the secret as I see it. And that's why i went through a lot of like emotional distress yeah as i felt like my i wasn't succeeding at my job when i realized now i wasn't

succeeding because i was doing the a different job than everyone else was doing there but lewis i'm sure you have no experience with internet uh work of this kind no i just i i've never worked for the internet i repressed it so yeah i mean the the first uh job oh sorry lewis no i i'm good i'm just working through trauma oh we all are we all are i mean the first job i worked at i got hired at a website just as they were bought out and the lie that we were told was like oh this means more resources for you and a higher profile for you and you know access to all of these people that can help you but really it was just like no we're gonna slim you down we are only buying you to increase our profile and our portfolio and to increase our hits to sell to another company and they eventually did and then they shut our website

down but uh that's why i'm really happy to work for ourselves on patreon people think is it like is it isn't it weird to work for yourself like How do you do that? This is the realest job I've ever had. This is the only job that I feel that is real and that my work actually pays off. I'm not just making stuff that I don't own to be sold. And erased after you're gone. Yeah, exactly. And your name

erased or content erased, etc. We're all very traumatized here. And yeah, you're working for an obvious reason that is directly stated not a clandestine reason that technically you can't say out loud because then why do anything like if our bosses actually did say to us you guys are babysitting this website until i can sell it to somebody richer than me then who does anything why would you make anything then so i guess if looking at it from the position of the robber barons of the internet,

I understand why you don't tell your serfs that they're working towards nothing. But if I, every time I see people talk about how like depressed they are working on something or they're like, oh, my job is unfulfilling. I sometimes think like, could it just be that your job like hates you and is lying to you and you're working towards nothing and that's why you're so unfulfilled? And it's not this hard to define strain of depression going around? This is the feelings this episode awakens in me. It reminds me of. I didn't realize we'd be spiraling so much about this.

I was worried about being triggered by Lord of the Flies stuff. But now we're in a whole different area of horrors. I'm sorry. No, no. fly stuff but now we're just a whole different area of horrors i'm sorry i'm sorry no no i can't help but think of our own lives when we see this like fake internet company that homer's working at at least he's not hiring interns or whatever there'd be a joke about that like if they made this episode 15 years later homer having unpaid interns no it's just so depressing how little it changes just like i don't know and that i guess the only difference here is that like you know and i'll talk about this when we get to bill gates in this episode yeah that what feels different from now to then yeah it's really i feel so much more better now making my own content on

the internet it's uh though okay so also in this scene i felt like homer being shitty with margie suggestions was like an in joke about the writer's room yeah yeah just is like say yeah you can come up with idea okay here's a suggestion that's fine whatever like yeah you completely I that does drive me crazy in when I was a writer in an office around other writers and somebody would say like hey could you help me with this like uh how about this headline or this one or this one like no it's well never mind I'm like, well, fuck you. Like you're, you asked me for suggestions and you shit on my ideas, but you have nothing else like that. That drove me crazy.

And then Homer gives himself a junior vice president. Yeah, no, wait, no, wait, junior vice president. We go back to the island. After a few hours, the children have learned that they would all die. Like they have nothing. I certainly would have died on an island like this. But here we have another iconicconic Ralphism in this episode That's it?

What happened to all the lobsters, mangoes And chewy chewy cocoa beans All we found were these oozing berries And they look pretty poisonous I ate the purple berries How Oh How How are they, Ralph?

Good? They taste like burning. Okay, food patrol blew it. Yeah, well, your treehouse looks kind of crummy, too. Kind of really crummy. Well, when monsoon season comes you'll be glad it's there no food no shelter no monkey butlers this island is a death hole a death hole yeah i love the reading nancy does um yeah i say that whenever i eat spicy food i mean god i quote

this i quote like this episode more than most other episodes I feel now. Yeah, yeah. When you take it apart piece by piece, it's true. Yeah, there's so many quotable things. This just reminds me that when I was a kid, I was very bothered by how delicious poison berries looked. Yeah. They shouldn't look that good if they're going to be poison. It doesn't seem fair.

I'm still mad about it. Well, Henry, you reminded me of this During our second Josh Weinstein interview on the Patreon Yeah Patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons We talked to Josh Weinstein about the immortal writer's office And the antics that happened there Because they had no smartphones So they would often overeat or poison themselves for fun

And I believe at one point they dared Steve Tompkins One of the writers to eat the berries growing on this bush Outside of the office And he had to go home because it made him very sick. So I feel like they're referencing this because a lot of those writers were around during that time. I feel like... I think so too, yeah. To thankfully Steve lived to tell the tale.

Steve is more creative than Ralph, so I bet he didn't just say it tastes like burning. He's a real Harvard man. I love the pause before burning because you think he's just going to say, it tastes like fire. And so when he says burning, that's just an extra level of stupidity to it. He did say, I eated. Oh, yes. He's very proud of himself for eating the purple berries.

I also really do like that Bart is still very hopeful. Like, any good? Like, he's in so much pain. After Ralph moans for a long time. And I like the statement of kind of really crummy. That's another good one, too. Though the monsoon season one is such obvious ADR, it's kind of weak. Yeah.

But Otto is now a slave to the Chinese. Yeah. Was this them trying to write him out of the show? Oh, no. I just think it's like, well, now Otto cannot possibly. I just have a terrible fate happen to Otto. because who cares about auto and as they mentioned on the commentary they pulled in real uh speakers of chinese to do this scene i'm glad yeah uh and my good thing that they originally wrote it to be mandarin they're like okay say this in mandarin

and the as they say on the commentary, the actors said, well, fishermen would really speak in the Cantonese dialect. So they do it in Cantonese in this scene. I'm glad they listened to them instead of being like, we're from Harvard. Our showrunner is,

don't listen to him. Yeah, but yes, Otto is into slavery now from now on working on a fishing boat. Meanwhile, the kids are getting pretty hungry. Oh, here we go. Another line I use. Yes.

There's no monster, you big scaredy. Scaredy got scared. Well, you'd be scared too if you saw a monster. No. Uh-huh. Unlikely. Likely. Knock it off.

We gotta find a way to light a fire. No problem. We can use scaredy's glasses. Hey, what's good as new who's talking I'm so hungry I could eat at Arby's. Oh, my gosh. He really is hungry. It's a monster! No, it's not. It's my tummy. I mean stomach, gut, crap factory.

Wait a minute. We had a cooler full of snacks on the bus. Hey, yeah. And I think I know how I can get it hey i need that to live god yeah i love the joke where you think uh they're going to use millhouse's glasses to focus the sun instead it's like hit against the flint i love that but uh the arby's thing like let's talk about our you can explain it bill oakley uh talked about the the dislike of arby's at this period because we had the previous joke,

let Arby's worry about it. Yes. Like throwing the rat over the wall. No, it was a dead possum. A dead possum, right. But yeah, it was Bill Oakley, a noted Instagram food reviewer and also Simpsons executive producer. And created Mission Hill, who cares? Yeah, yeah. We love Mission Hill.

No, and we love Bill. But he worked on 7 and 8. They're consulting producers on 9, but they didn't really write for this. So I'm not – Bill Oakley didn't write this joke. He did oversee their previous Arby's joke. Bill is of the opinion that Arby's is good fast food. I wouldn't say no to it. If people said, let's go to Arby's, I'd have it.

I like their spiral cut fries. And if you're looking for something that isn't a burger like it's beef and cheddar is good uh but it's not the king of fast food it's not that great but bill oakley has the opinion and i i really agree with it that it's not that rb sucks it's that it is a funny comedy word of two syllables rbs yeah it's funnier to say if she said i'm so hungry i could eat at kfc or i'm so hungry i could eat at KFC, or I'm so hungry I could eat at McDonald's, or whatever. Too many syllables. Doesn't have the same hit

or even if like Burger King, Dairy Queen. But also, like the places you're mentioning, there are people who love those places, that that's their favorite fast food. I don't think anyone's favorite fast food is Arby's. That's, yeah, I'd agree with that. I don't think it is anyone's favorite. No one's first choice. No, yeah. I grew up in a real Arby's town

In fact, I grew up near the first Arby's Now closed in Boardman, Ohio But Arby's started in Ohio The logo's a giant cowboy hat What's up with that? I ate a ton of Arby's So when I watched this, I was like, what, Arby's is bad? I ate so much Arby's

There was an Arby's like three blocks from my house So I think I shaved a good five years off of my life With all the salt that I put in my body at that time. Like all the salty, salty sandwiches, man. They were good though when I ate meat. They were really good. Well, if I may tell a disgusting story, some listeners may have heard before. I know this story, but yeah. My, in stupid high school years, my stupid high school friends and I gave each other challenges. Not unlike Steve Tompkins in that writer's room. I, one time on a dare, ate five Arby's sandwiches.

And then they upped it to 10. And they're like, you couldn't eat 10. And I thought, I'll show all of you guys. So we didn't just buy 10. We went to an Arby's and ordered 10. And I ate it at the Arby's. I got to nine and a half. And this was simply just roast

beef roast beef say regular size roast beef sandwiches no cheddar no fries i get to nine and a half and everybody's like you're so close i was like i simply cannot eat anymore you also weren't allowed to go to the bathroom and you had official rules yes yeah well is there some sort of cash prize at stake or just like on it was for honor it was for honor okay uh and then nine and a half i was like i simply can't eat anymore and i think we uh i made it to the parking lot we drove out of the parking lot and i said park right now park right now so we parked right across the street from the arby's uh and uh i expelled a lot of things at that point. So don't eat 10 Arby's, kids.

Stop at eight. Stop at eight. Yeah. And that's perfectly satisfying. Oh, God. Did you never eat at Arby's again? Oh, no. I mean, I definitely ate at it less,

but I won't say I never had a roast beef sandwich ever again. So see, that's a testament to how good it is. But, okay, the glasses thing, thing too as a glasses wearer i did not like all these mean things about glasses wearers here but the uh i always fear scratching my glasses it's a it's a terrifying thought but the um but that is what happens in the book they actually do use his glasses in the joke uh the way they joke they're about to hear of using glasses to light the fire. And that's why Piggy gets to live for so long is because he has the glasses.

He's the wearer of the glasses. So in this scene, I've used the Arby's line a lot in my own life. I'm very annoying, by the way. I also have used the crap factory quite a few times. Like, my crap factory is growling. I've never used that one. It's a horrible turn of phrase. Yeah, I love that he's just trying to win Nelson's favor.

Just like, stomach, guts, crap factory. Yeah, I do. I like that you can read it on Nelson's face. He's like, what's tough enough for this? Guts isn't even tough enough. You need to make something up. Like, he's... Nelson doesn't...

He more rules through implied fear than actually, like, totalitarianism of how the other the his equivalent in lord of the flies yeah and i mean previously we were talking about pedantry uh and how we're giant pedants and we're even worse as teenagers the one thing that did annoy me about this uh episode was bart using the asthma inhaler to go underwater as a device uh as a sister i grew up with a sister who had asthma there's not oxygen in that it's medicine that is just sprayed into your lungs you're not breathing you know like i think i mean it's the joke is it's very silly but it's also uh no one on this staff clearly had asthma i think was this not in i can't remember maybe i'm just thinking about this episode but i i like recall something else from my childhood involving someone breathing underwater with an inhaler you know the club

would just be this yeah the closest i can remember is that like in the batman animated series he when he'd go underwater he'd have a similar little thing in his mouth yeah and it implied like well it's a look it's a batman scuba mouthpiece like you just accept that batman would have that technology it was more believable when batman did it as opposed to bart having a off-the-shelf medical inhaler that somehow is a scuba device i mean you just do a scene where bart holds his breath underwater you know like he could it's fine you know it's it's a weird almost like kind of too kiddy moment there that especially when i what i don't like about it is that this is

playing out how realistically the kids have their imagination of what being on an island is now we have the realism of them starving to death and they can't build anything but then they bring in a fantastical element of bart using an inhaler to breathe underwater and so it's like you're losing the if the jokes hang on reality yeah you are losing the reality that you are uh it necessitates jokes it's a real looney tune scene with how the pufferfish bites his ass with like the big cartoony sound effect yeah i do i do really hate that moment yeah it's one thing to bite his butt which is already like a very cartoony moment but uh maybe when they saw it come back that way they're like well this there's no way to make this look less cartoony.

Let's just lean into it and have a big Hanna-Barbera chomp on it. It's a very good-looking scene, I'll say that. And I like the touch about how the bus is immediately occupied by every deadly sea animal just inside the bus. That was good. Though also the animation on Bart and the tint of it, Bart swimming underwater, it really reminded me of the Bart's Bath Time short from the original Holman shorts. Oh, it's a great looking short. Bart comes back up, he's got all the food, and the kids

skip the fruit and just start eating the garbage and very wastefully as well. We may have to live on this food for a long time, so no more until tomorrow. But I'm hungry now. Yeah, me too. Yeah, who put the Duchess of Dork in charge?

No one, but if we're going to survive, we need rules and order. Let's not forget what we learned in the UN club. Not now, Martin. Martin is lucky that Milhouse is there to be picked on. Yeah, you know what? He's so easily the piggy, but Milhouse is just so unlikable in this. I think that's why people aren't scapegoating Martin as much. That's how it is. I know as a picked on kid in school, if you're in a class with a more visible target,

in a very cowardly, shitty way you you can slink back and allow them to take all the brunt of it i also again i really hate millhouse like he's it's a very believable shitty selfish kid thing to say but i'm hungry now yeah i mean bart has been in a starvation situation before in the boy scouts in the hood oh yeah yeah little bites he should have more experience you know when the time i was I was trapped on the ocean with my father and dad, we learned to do this. But they can't remember that right now. This is when Lisa, though, finally wakes up and becomes a force of order in the world. And, yeah, not really helped by Martin's dancing.

But it was cute to see the dancing resume. The moments they bring back up the UN club, that is very funny to me. They all rest they leave the food alone and they come to have a shocking discovery the next morning i'm so hungry i could puke where'd all the food go morning is it time to eat? Looks like you already did. What are you talking about? You ate our food.

Thanks a lot, Milhouse. Now we're all going to die because of you. But I swear I didn't do it. Nacho cheese. Get him! He still ate some of the food. Yeah. He did ate some of the food. Yeah. He did eat some of the food.

This confirms that bag of Doritos he admits to eating later, that nacho cheese is the smell of it. Yeah. Yeah. That's, again, fuck Milhouse. Like, he is lying to them. I am with Nelson. I never thought I'd take Nelson's side in Milhouse versus Nelson on these things.

Look who raised Milhouse. Does Milhouse deserve to die based on him eating the food? No. Where's the line here? I'd withhold food from him for a while and keep him in that bamboo cage. I'd keep him there. I wouldn't kill him. Certainly not.

No. But I'm against the death penalty in all cases, really. Sure. Yeah, but the Milhouse like so just lies. I mean, though, if I was Milhouse in that situation, I would lie immediately and say, no, I swear I didn't do that. No. Nelson looks really scary when he's poking him with that stick.

Yeah. It's like you're starting to see him as the avatar of death. He becomes in this third act here. And yeah, when they come back from the commercial break society is falling apart on the island uh as much as lisa tries to instill it you and dare hurt me you forget that i have the glasses yoink now that you've got everything you need i'll just just, you know, get out of your hair. Not so fast, two-eyes!

Come on, let's slice him open and get our food back! Wait! We're not savages! We live in a society of law! Milhouse has the right to a fair trial. Aww. Society blows! Society blows. I'm with him on society blows. That's the only way to, I guess, have a rebuttal to that statement? We live in society? Society blows I'm with him on society blows That's the only way to, I guess, have a rebuttal to that statement

We live in society, society blows It's not a wrong rebuttal True, true It's like, if this is society, then it sucks Points were made A nice little yoink moment there And then Milos kind of transforms into Woody Allen Which is like, who am I?

I'll just be on my way And the very cartoony gag that nelson apparates behind him i do like that yeah i like that a lot and uh but that is what happens in the book too in lord the flies they relieve piggy of his glasses are like why are we respecting your right to keep your glasses this is a resource for us and they just take it and yeah lisa yes we live in a society she brings up that that exact uh thing i mean she's doing it to prevent the rest of the group from murdering another child, which I at least is correct in doing that. And then we get a real callback to the days of internet pornography.

Oh, Captain Janeway. Lace, the final brassiere. Oh, hurry up. I'm a busy man. This high-speed modem is intolerably slow. Hey what the... huh the internet king. I wonder if he can provide faster nudity. Welcome to the Internet my friend how can I help you? I'm interested in upgrading my 28.8 kilobaud internet connection to a 1.5 megabit fiber optic T1 line. Will you be able to provide an IP router that's compatible with my token ring Ethernet LAN configuration?

Can I have some money now? I know what all those terms mean. I do too. Now. At one point, this definitely would have been super baffling to me. And now I'm like, I don't know that much about anything, but I do recognize all those words. It's really great.

Foley in his little, we have come so far and it's really great. Foley in his, uh, little masturbation room there where you can hear the computer fan. You can also hear like the hard drive crunching, like old hard drives used to do. Dan Grady earlier in an interview,

you talked about how comic book guy, the mike scully years really came to represent their fans and their internet fans specifically and uh them imagining him as just this like a very busy waiting for pornography to load as they drink soda yeah that's that's uh a pretty harsh call out there but also not untrue like this, this was me in 1998, whenever my parents were away, because I did not have my own personal computer. I had to wait. I had to, like, all right, my parents are away for a couple hours. Now it's time for the nudity.

Get an FC or family computer or Famicom. And that's how you kids with your incognito windows now, you don't know the pain of having to delete all your history. You have to budget time in internet viewing for deleting history in the cache. Yeah. The cache! They should just be up front with incognito mode. It's got a cute little detective on it and stuff.

Just make it porn mode. Come on. We all know. We all know. It's the brown bag of the internet. You don't know there's liquor in this bag very accurately captures the waiting for a naked picture of someone to load or or dirtier than that yeah what he's looking at too then really reminds me of the age of a fake nudes

of celebrities too back then yes that was a huge industry and you still get you know you still find him in whenever i do searches for just like celebrity name and just still get you know you still find them in whenever i do searches for just like celebrity name and just to get a picture you'll still find some fake nudes in there and like a google image safe search off and i'm just like why are you guys still bothering of this and how can they still be this fake get better at it i remember going for real celebrity nudes to mr skin oh yes still in operation he's still around i heard him uh maybe a year or two ago on gilbert godfrey's podcast he interviewed mr skin he's still doing it i guess he makes money off of that does he feel guilty for opening that pandora's box uh i don't know we all owe him though if he hadn't done it done someone else would have for sure yeah and these

days nudity is so fast we take it for granted like i get mad if a streaming clip doesn't immediately load. I'm like, come on, what's going on here? Back then, the video footage on the internet of porn in 1998, that was just a pipe dream. I'm horny now. Anyway, enough about pornography.

But also, yes, a bad pop-up while looking at pornography was also a frustration that many of us felt then too i was naive enough again to believe that we were beyond the era of pop-ups at one point yes yeah my internet enjoyment has changed so much since then like i even like 13 years ago i had the websites i went to to see if the websites had new content and I would cycle through my bookmarks. Now it really is. I live on Twitter and Twitter will send me to articles I might want to read. That's the only way I engage with articles now or podcasts or any other content.

Has yours changed much, Louis? I mean, yeah, no, probably not. But I don't know. All the websites I like just went away, though. So it's like, I'm trying to think. I really do feel like I spent so much, so many of those formative years online and have like blocked out a lot of that. Probably for totally like, you know, mental health related reasons. Yeah. So I can't be super helpful here.

It changed for me because it used to be like, I will go to a website because I like the writers and I like what they write. mental health related reasons yeah um so i can't be super helpful here okay it changed it changed for me because it used to be like i will go to a website because i like the writers and i like what they write i know their personalities and i like you know their output and then when writing became unsustainable as a career as if it ever really was i was like it's easier just to follow the people themselves and the many many sites they write for instead of just depending on one site yeah this is this is killing me inside. I'm sorry, Lou. No, it's okay.

It's okay. You know, I really didn't think about how traumatic this episode would be for me. I mean, we are the... All these repressed memories of my horrible childhood internet experiences and then like my adult life online. Both bad, just in different ways i mean we are personally benefiting from uh people following us regardless of the many things we wrote for yeah and produce content for i as i transition to like you know being a freelancer online and

try to get people to like follow me versus following the site i used to work for you know i i'm i'm i'm trying to to make that happen uh it is, you know, it's tough. I think you're doing a great job. Everyone should follow you on Twitter. Everybody should. Follow me on Twitter. Subscribe to my newsletter. Pay money so you can read my writing.

I agree. I agree. Me too. Thank you. These jokes are very pre-broadband jokes here about internet speeds. Though, now i think we are where we live me and bob in the bay area we can't understand that in some parts of america still there is very slow internet that you can't even like sustainably just stream a netflix thing in

hd let alone 4k and we we kind of take that for granted where we live here but yeah so we get back to the island and it's time for a kangaroo court court is now in session all rise major rise your honor the defense calls its first and only witness Milhouse Van Houten

Milhouse did you steal the food? Nuh-uh. No way. Could anyone else have taken it? Well, I guess you could have. Milhouse, I am defending you. Oh, sorry. I'm just saying it was either you or the monster. Monster? Oh, please. I remind you, we are not here to debate the existence of monsters.

Aww. I like the audience there. They want to talk about monsters. Milhouse just lied under oath, right? Yeah, he did. He just perjured himself. I also love how they're really just going hard on the unlikeability of Milhouse, that he is attacking the only person defending him the only person that prevented him from dying

already he's like well maybe it was you oh he just has no fucking sense though they were they built a really good cage for being so bad at building stuff earlier in the episode they built a good cage but still there's no bottom so he just picks it up and walks with it. That's very funny. Yeah. I like that. And Bart just makes himself the ruler. This is not a jury, I guess, because the jury would all find him guilty. They kind of can't do that. So they just put it up to Bart. And yes, then they call on the prosecution, which is just Nelson punching Milhouse.

I love his pacing back and forth and then just running over and punching him over and over again. It's really good. It's really well done. Is this an indictment of our broken legal system? That Nelson seemed just as persuasive as Lisa did there. Though, I think Nelson, he did mess up in his... The evidence is that his breath smelled like nacho cheese. So when Lisa's like, did any of you see this? They're like, well, no.

It's like, okay, you have no eyewitness i think the nachos are as close to dna evidence as you're going to get in this and he's surrounded by that's evidence like lisa is uh i think you could beat lisa in this case without punching millhouse yeah and there are no toothbrushes on this island i assume he still smells like nacho cheese on dorito have you eaten doritos and not been covered in shit afterwards like the evidence is right there if you're gonna steal food i mean don't steal something that leaves orange powder all over your fingers and smell and you know millhouse isn't a very smart thief no or it's smart in any way here bart comes to the verdict i also do like a good i'll allow it joke. That's always funny. Though that tenor of it that I just said is a John Mulaney joke.

I'm ripping off that. But anyway, yes, the verdict is in and nobody's happy. You liar! You did it, you lying jerk! Take that! You did it! You did it! He's not asking any questions! Hmm. I'm gonna allow this.

Prosecution rests. After careful deliberation, it's my opinion that Milhouse probably did eat the food. But since there's no proof, I must find him not guilty. All right! But he ate our food the law has spoken sucks to the law sucks to the law yeah sucks that's a good line too right there society blows and sucks to the law very good points by that's that's you know based on the line from lord of the flies that i

carry with me always that i have used throughout my life sucks to your asthma i do not know that yeah that is that is the lord of the flies pronunciation of asthma oh that's your asthma as a young asthmatic kid is something that i've always carried carried with me so i will always take a sucks to whatever. Oh, so it's a direct reference to a line of dialogue. Okay, no idea. William Golding, you've done it again. Boy, I also didn't know you had asthma as a kid, Lewis.

Of course, yes. This is a tough episode. I'm sorry. I also feel like that Bart's sort of verdict here is is quite evolved like i'm i'm actually pretty impressed that he not out of loyalty to millhouse but like because i've got enough evidence lets him lets him off it's a different level of maturity than you expect from bart it makes it all the funnier that he turns on it immediately like well i'm not happy with it either like that verdict made me pretty angry. It seems like the real Bart would have just said from the beginning, like, no, I would have found him guilty,

even though it's like he was, you know, the spirit of order overtook him in that moment then, but now he's completely let it go. Yeah, and the breaking of the glass is a very major moment in Lord of the Flies. That's when everything falls apart once they break the glasses uh without that context it's just seen as a very mean thing of like i don't know why it feels worse millhouse was just getting punched in the gut over and over again by nelson and that just read as comedy to me but when glasses are broken that feels like oh well, whoa, hey, you've gone too far here. Yes, it's time for Kill the Dork. Stop! Leave Millhouse alone!

Help me out here, Bart. I don't know, Lace. To be honest, that verdict made me pretty angry. March with us, law girl! Step aside! Hey, man, leave my sister alone! Oh, so you're one of them! So be it! Kill the dorks bash their butts so what is the chain and lord of the flies kill the pig kill the pig right yeah i i also got we talked a lot about season one of this i also got a little

season one feeling there of bart defending lisa from nelson a very similar part to the general scene in there hey man lay off my sister that's uh that so some continuity and character there that's the only thing that i like when bart becomes a defender of his little sister that that spurs him to do more brave things than he normally would do. How we use electricity can be smarter, cleaner, and greener. At Electric Ireland, we can help guide you there. You see, our new Net Zero hub has all you need to know about smart meter plans, EV tariffs, solar panels, and much more. Making your usage clearer, your trips greener, your home cozier, and your world brighter.

Find our net zero hub at electricireland.ie. And yeah, they all run away. And that's when Nelson says the hunt is on. He starts spreading the ash on his face as in the Lord of the Flies as well. Except Ralph paints himself up like the kitty cat of Kiss. Were there a lot of episodes before this that were this specific in their parodies that went on for this long? Cape Fear, 100%. Yeah.

Of course. And a couple others. I think they gave them permission to go this far with direct yeah parody for this long i it's a drawn out parody i mean it really is really you know the bulk of the episode cape fear and things like sherry bobbins and oh sherry bobbins yeah it's every actually this is closer than sherry bobbins because they don't watch as much television in it and the episode doesn't end in act two either hey i will give them like they gave you three acts of a story of the kids here before we get to the uh the conclusion on

the island we get one last scene here i like this so the four dummies brand is still alive and well today surprisingly so and though i never bought any of those books as a kid the uh the four dummies most of them were like internet they're calling you stupid now there's everything for dummies there's like fortnight for dummies and they make everything for dummies but yeah it must be an app now too right i'm sure it is wasn't there also the uh for idiot series was that like a competitor or was that a spin-off oh it was like the complete idiots guy to blank right right right yeah they were really insulting to all of us these

guys here i'm surprised they didn't use the uh they just wanted us to you know buy their books and feel feel dumb doing it it was the 90s i'm glad they didn't go beyond idiot or dummies to other offensive words that's also true yeah of course bill gates shows up he's actually the only thing that would change today now not that Microsoft doesn't also buy companies, but now it's Mark Zuckerberg, it's Elon Musk, it's Peter Thiel, all the fun guys, all the best guys. Yeah, Jeff Bezos. And don't believe Bill Gates' propaganda that Bill Gates is a cool, rich person. He's not.

He's not one of the good, rich people. There are no good, rich people. Yes, I agree. There's no ethical billionaires on this podcast. You actually listen to Friends of the Show, Citations Needed. Yeah. Did a very great podcast about breaking down the myth of Bill Gates. What is his charity?

Oh, okay. Wow. He said he was giving away all of his money, and he's only richer now than he was 10 years ago. Look up what a foundation is and what that does. But yeah, also, Bill Gates is not alone in this. Every company does this exact thing when they buy another internet brand. The only people who get rich are the guys who own the company, not the peons who built it. And then they literally destroy it.

And also there's definitely the feeling of the executives I've met in the internet industry that you don't get rich paying people. Like that's not how you get rich. You, it seems weird to you. Me now, or it felt weird to me as a kid of like, no, you pay people and then they make good things and you get enriched from that. Like,

but wouldn't you get richer faster if you didn't pay people? But yes, anyway, Homer gets bought out. They have the internet on computers. Now Bill Gates is here. Bill Gates, billionaire computer nerd, Bill Gates? Oh my God, oh my

God. Get out of sight, Marge. I don't want this to look like a two-bit operation. Mr. Simpson? You don't look so rich. Don't let the haircut fool you. I'm exceedingly wealthy. Get a load of the ball shop, Marge. Your internet ad was brought to my attention, but I can't figure out what, if anything, Compuuglobal HyperMeganet does. So rather than risk competing with you, I've decided simply to buy you out. This is it, Marge. I poured my heart and soul into this business, and now it's finally paying off. We're rich, richer than astronauts. Oh, look, Wyatt. You'll clear the deal.

Oh, right. I reluctantly accept your proposal. Well, everyone always does. Buy them out, boys! Hey, what the hell's going on? Oh, I didn't get rich by writing a lot of checks. I enjoy the nerd thugs in this. Great design on the nerd thugs in this great design on the nerd thugs this is when the talk of you know the microsoft monopoly was very popular we don't care about monopolies anymore not at all but it was like you know what they include internet explorer with windows that's unfair to net that not netflix netscape that's unfair how dare that was the most offensive thing a tech company could

do like include a free internet browser with their operating system. That's a really, I totally forgot about that. Yeah. Things are pretty different. They'd pay a lot of money because it was a monopoly, but it's like, Oh no,

a hundred million dollars to Bill Gates. That'll break him. It should be very obvious, but I, I, for a long time thought that Bill Gates was actually doing his own voice. Oh, I don't know. I don't know why I thought that, but that actually doing his own voice oh i don't know i don't know

why i thought that but that was like a an incorrect belief i cared with me for for many years did they try to get him or no i bet they probably sent a letter yeah call them but you know he he wasn't doing anything for anybody back then he kind of barely does that now yeah uh except for appearing on like talk shows to talk about his philanthropy. But this has the rare Simpsons. They did this, and they did this for Pele, where in the credits it says, celebrity voices are impersonated.

Yeah, do not sue. I mean, Bill Gates, I feel like a year later, Fox wouldn't allow them to do this joke. They'd be like, Bill Gates could sue us. You're saying he destroys businesses Like physically Like you've written a joke that he's a mobster type character

That's uh We could get sued for that By a billionaire so maybe don't do that He couldn't really sue though isn't he He's a public figure I don't know we saw what happened with Gawker Yeah That's just a little different.

Yeah. I mean, they could just waste time and money fighting like a nuisance lawsuit that they don't want to bother with. Yeah. Yeah. I think at the very least,

a cease and desist would have deleted that joke. I'm glad he didn't sue. So I'll just sue. He was getting made fun of and other stuff. Actually, the first time I ever heard of the person Bill Gates as a kid was on the comic strip page

because he was a regular up here in opus or bloom county okay he uh they he became like a regular in the comic for some reason and the plot was about him getting married and that he couldn't trust that his wife was only marrying him for his money and i was like who is this bill gates person and that's that's what i found out and i think his hair is slightly better now, I suppose. I am pro bowl cut. It says that was my haircut for about 20 years. It was a popular man style of the 90s. It's real easy.

It just dries itself. You don't got to style it, nothing. You've got other things to worry about than your haircut. See, I miss when you could just be an ugly billionaire. Now all these guys, they get dressed up by the same pr like jeff bezos just has to look like lex luther because he's like well this looks cool or it's even fucking elon musk with his bullshit i want them to just look like losers i miss the losers jack dorsey lately because he's not looking great oh no he's uh yeah but he he thinks he looks great he thinks he's becoming superman i mean he's not looking great. Oh, no. Yeah, but he thinks he looks great. He thinks he's becoming Superman.

I mean, him and Jordan Peterson are becoming the same person. I know. I love reading about this retreat he took. He paid all this money to some guru. I squatted on concrete for hours in a cave and I felt pain. Like, yeah, pain hurts.

You shouldn't be sitting on concrete like that. Give me a million dollars. I'll kick you in the dick. It's like, I'm so pampered. I need to spend money to feel pain again. It's like, you have bigger problems. I mean, this is the Gilded Age of today, man. That's how it is. But anyway, to get off those sad topics, let's get to child murder again here. And yes, the gang has rounded up. They're all chasing after them.

The kids have transformed, and it is very terrifying, honestly, when you know where this is leading in a parody. Like the kid like death is possible here with the children. Obviously, they're not going to get killed. We know that. But we didn't get to see the millhouse really sucks. One last time. I can't go on. You two go ahead and carry me with you.

Come on, man. Hurry, they're catching up. Here, Milhouse, you go first. Okay, now throw the vine back. There's no time. She says there's no time and runs off. he has doomed them to death they make you want millhouse to die yeah yeah i don't want to again i'm millhouse i don't want to be mad at the millhouse in the show but he's written so horribly here right i think just as someone who identifies

with him so strongly i was able to overlook a lot of his like just terrible behavior but once you brought it to my attention there's no denying that he is the absolute worst throughout the episode just this episode i mean millhouse he goes in and out of being unlikable he's not i like in a recent episode written by megan amram she very smartly cast him as a leader of a men's rights activist group like that's exactly what Milhouse of today would be. So he has that capacity. But other times I like him more as just a doormat, just a gormless doormat who doesn't really cause problems. He just does what he's told.

Bart and Lisa then have a very, like, kind of action movie escape of knocking over a tree and walking the rest of the way. They say on the commentary, they're like, well, we drew it more like looking like a dead tree. So it was somewhat believable. Yeah, that's pretty cool, though. They didn't make it into a cave in the great line of just like, oh, we'll be safe in this cave. They're in the cave. They're cornered.

Let's get them. And then Lisa says, oh, figs, which on the commentary, Lisa was supposed to say, oh, turds. But David Cohen pointed out that uh yardley did not like that line that lisa would not and also on the commentary he goes turds yeah because that's how david cohen talks and i love it in feeds turds yeah i think the line the the figs line is funnier you think it's like it's closer to an f word. Yeah. I like that, too. And I agree with Yardley, actually. I think Lisa wouldn't say turds.

She wouldn't say a dirty word like that. She's smarter, and she'd have a more clever thing that also sounds more like an F word. I think turds is too gutter for Lisa to say, I think. Perhaps in this kind of intense moment of seemingly about to be killed by the gang of their schoolmates, maybe then she'd go there. But I still prefer figs. It also lightens it more instead of just making you. Also, just hearing Yardley, we don't hear it, but can I just imagine hearing Yardley say turds? It just feels gross to me.

I don't like the feeling it gives me. But yes, the kids are saved by a monster. Look, we can hide in that cave. We should be safe in here. They're trapped in the cave. Move in for the kill. Oh,

figs. Stop! You are in violation of the model un charter uh that's right the un doesn't look too kindly on and uh the monsters reveal in the in the book apparently the uh i'm just reading this from i didn't read the book they there is they have they have fears of the monster on the uh i'm just reading this from i didn't read the book they there is they have they have fears of the monster on the island too they they believe it exists when it's really like a corpse that is accidentally strung up like a parachuter dies on the island and his corpse is just kind of floating there and the wind moves it around people think that's the monster at the same time they are hunting boars on the island for food so i think this is kind of like a combination of the two yeah and the actual lord of the flies is like

the what is the boar head on a stick yeah also that too which uh that explains what the lord of the flies is beelzebub as they talk about him or beelzebub uh that that is literally the lord of the flies from biblical history but they uh i believe they find out the real lord of the flies is man i think that is the message we are the walking down i was gonna say that damn it when you say it out loud it sounds very trite but uh i feel like if you it also sounds trite in context but you know yes tells other people yes yeah i feel like if you read it in the book and you got there over time instead of just saying it out loud it has more impact that's fair like like

after you spent a ton of money in scientology and then hear about xenu you're like well i got i'm in this far i'll i'll believe that we just spoiled who the lord of the flies is i'm sorry sorry i believe in the book too it ends with an even more kind of like trite thing of well actually it almost in the description almost sound like a deus ex machina too of like they're all about to kill each other and then they get found right at the last second and they all revert back

to their childhood selves and realize what monsters they become but and then the man who sees them he's a soldier and he's like why would you children do this and he realizes I'm in World War II what monsters are we and he looks in the mirror he's like i'm hitler that's a good twilight zone twist yeah uh but yes the twist here is that there was a wild boar there maybe the only boar on the island i have to assume they'll hunt for more before they're saved

uh but they do kill the boar off screen. So their bloodlust is sated there too. Yeah. But all right, look, this is just the last minute of it. Let's just hear the whole thing. There's slime for all. Up until, yeah. Okay, this also feels like a little shot at vegetarians to be like,

you would still lick slime rather than like eat the only food that's here because it's an animal i would think i'm not a vegetarian but i would think if i was on the island and it was either starve or kill an animal to eat it and live i do think i would kill that animal i don't know like bob you're you're kind of a vegetarian there are no atheists in a foxhole there are no vegetarians on a desert island sure i'd agree with that but hey vegetarians you tell us if you would lick slime or kill that boar i'm a pescatarian and i would absolutely have eaten the boar 100 yeah all right well well that's here the ending and then we shall talk about it your monster appears to be nothing but a run-of-the-mill wild boar. Hey, look at his tusk. So the boar ate our food. Sorry about that whole trying-to-kill-you thing.

Yeah, well, you should be. I only stole two sandwiches and a bag of Doritos. Hey, if a boar can survive here, there must be a source of food. Look, he's licking the slime off that rock. That's what he's been eating, slime. And there's enough slime for all of us. We're saved. All that slime made this boar extra tender.

More snot than anyone? How's your dinner, Lise? Ah, shut up. Savages. So the children learned to function as a society. And eventually, they were rescued by, oh, let's say, Moe. And the genial but authoritative voice of James Earl Jones ends the episode. They were rescued by, oh, let's say, Moe. And the genial but authoritative voice of James Earl Jones.

Yes, yeah. Ends the episode. Ah, yeah. I've gotten over it, Henry. I think it's clever and cute. It's a parody. Who cares? It's not an original story.

Fine. All right. It's clever. It is a clever way to get out of a thing they didn't want to write yeah and it would have by the time they got to this point if they then had like a minute of actually showing them get saved or them cutting to them at home and they have some joke about well now that we're at home i guess blah blah something like that that wouldn't have been better it was lame too at least this was a clever to storytelling. I don't like what it portends.

Now I'm sounding like Matt Chrisman in our episode of Homer's Enemy, but this does feel like a line is crossed. They decide, well, if we did this, we can have the Loch Ness Monster work at a casino. Who cares? They cross the Rubicon, if you will. I was trying not to say that. We're through the looking glass, Henry. I say Rubicon every you will i was trying not to say that through the looking glass henry i say rubicon every episode i was not saying it like do we know how mo saved them was it with his like falling contraption now i hope so see that's another pull it out of your ass ending

but at least it was like set up a little bit i i let's say when we say let's say mo let's say it was with his fan machine yeah i mean like i now that i've written like a comma so i write for something awful i've written a comedy piece every other week for 14 years i know what it's like to be like i have to end this i have no good joke to go out on i just it just has to be over so here's a wet fart to end on and then it's over just like they can't all be winners i i can identify with this now just like also like macraean points out a lot on commentaries on interviews like often like looney tune cartoons will just be like hilarious gags from front to end and the last thing will suck the last thing

will just be the character shrugging and the iris going in on them and that's it it's true and that's what this episode is because i feel like i quote so many things from this episode but so i can forgive the kind of lame ending because it's just like uh i quote so many things from this episode, but so I can forgive the kind of lame ending because it's just like, uh, I quote so many things from this. Like, it's okay that there's not a hilarious joke that it goes out on. I do like,

uh, Lisa licking the slime. I think that, I mean, I think that things have just changed so much and, and with this show and also with so many of the shows that followed, like this kind of ending and this sort of like shrug and not actually resolving a thing is so standard that like,

I might've been more in order of the time. I can't really remember, but at this point it doesn't, it doesn't really bother me. Like it's just the way things are. Well, see, that actually makes me dislike this even more. Oh my God. No, I totally, I totally get that. Well, that it, if it, yeah, that it gave permission, not just to Simpsons, but also clever comedy writers all over America were just like well the Simpsons just shrugged at the end why don't we just do that like let's that bothers me all the more I again

I think out of objectively it is funny to have James Earl Jones say uh to say oh let's say Mo that's funny and it's a clever concept and and the episode didn't have much you could cut. If I would change it now, I would get rid of any of the Internet stuff, save it for a different episode than the B-Story, and that gives you two extra minutes to either do more Lord of the Flies references or have a real ending. And I don't know how satisfying it is. Like, okay, here's my pitch for an ending.

Otto took back over that boat. He's now the leader of it, and he gets the kids and takes them home there that pays off the auto story too he's in every act to do that how about that this is indeed a disturbing ending this is also yeah the third appearance of james will jones on the show and his third two date is only one. But how did we get here behind the scenes? This ending? It's actually, we got competing stories here. Yes.

So the commentary version is on the commentary. Writer David X. Cohen is there. George Meyer is there. Matt Groening is there. Executive producer, Mike Scully is there. They talk about how Mike Scully says,

we're just so tired of this story. We don't want to take forever to get to the ending that you know we have to do where we revert everything to normal. We don't want to do it. And they thank George Meyer, who is present. They say, George, I believe this was your pitch. You said, let's say Moe.

And then they pitched on other people it could be, but they're like, no, Moe's the funniest name. And then George Meyer would pitch that it would be James Earl Jones who would say it to add even more absurdity to this real shrug of an ending. And Matt Groening also says he loves that ending. It's one of his favorite endings on the show. So he likes it. And Moe was not in this episode at all. Yes, which makes it even funnier. But in our interview with Dan Graney, when I brought up this ending, this was over a year ago, Dan Graney, who was a writer at the time, not the writer of this episode, but in the writer's room, he says he pitched it and that it was George Myers' idea to make it James Earl Jones.

So I don't know who truly did it. Dan Graney, in our interview, seemed to have a very good memory of jokes he pitched. That he pitched in Big End, that he pitched Everything's Coming at Millhouse. So I do trust his memory on that, but oppositely on the commentary, it's more than just one person who's

saying it. They're all agreeing to this memory that it was George Myers. I don't know. I wonder what it would have looked like though if they couldn't if james earl jones had said no for some reason yeah like they have done something totally different because it doesn't really work with you know there are um other announcers yeah other authoritative voices they probably could have turned to i can't think of anyone from that era anyone else or they just asked harry shearer to imitate yeah yeah that

makes sense i would figure like i believe it was harry shearer to imitate yeah yeah that makes sense i would figure like i believe it was harry shearer who did the james earl jones voices in uh round springfield so all right look ultimately in this episode it is way funnier than i remember full of a lot of quotable lines that have lived on iconic moments in the series it is a better episode than i recalled as a kid but as a whole as a thing to watch i really don't like where it takes things and i don't like all the kid stuff and i i don't like uh such an i really hate the ending i still don't like i like the ending as a joke i don't like where it takes the series. So that's, that's all I'll say for the rest of Das Bus. I do.

Oh yeah. Das Bus parody on Das Boot, which does like, it's really, that feels like a gag on that. They could have had a Lord of the Flies joke as the title, but instead they name it a thing that has nothing to do with what they're parodying.

It's a baffling title choice. And I also always pronounce it in my head as Das Bus, because I think it's the parody of Das Boot. I guess Das Bus makes just as much sense. I've said my piece. Any final thoughts about this, Lewis? or wackiness and unresolved endings. And yet I'm just so fond of this episode for the lines that I quote all the time and for the commitment to a parody of something I've always been too chilled by to actually read or watch myself. So this has been Talking Simpsons.

Thanks for listening. Lewis Peitzman, you are our special guest. Can you tell our friends listening at home where they can find you online and read your stuff? Yes, please follow me on Twitter at Lewis Peitzman and you can subscribe to my newsletter, lewispitzman.sub your stuff. Yes, please follow me on Twitter at Lewis Peitzman and you can subscribe to my newsletter, lewispitzman.substack.com where I write about theater,

housewives, and horror. Awesome. Yeah, you've been doing a lot of great freelance stuff. You're just a very funny tweeter. I like your tweets. Much appreciated. Thanks again for joining us, Lewis. Thanks for having me. So thanks again to Lewis for being on the show. Again, check out his stuff on Twitter and wherever you find good writing.

But as for us, if you want to help support the show and get our podcast one week ahead of time and ad-free and all kinds of crazy bonuses on top of that, please go to patreon.com our talking simpsons network and get exclusive series like talking critic talking futurama and the currently unraveling talking of the hill also we have many other bonuses at that level including nfc's and wrap-ups community podcasts every month lots and lots of interviews including two we reference in this episode one with josh weinstein and one with dan grainer just two of maybe 20 interviews we've done to date with ton of simpsons masters who have worked on the show in some cases since the very beginning tons of folks who know they know where the bodies are buried in simpsons land and we've learned so many things you won't even learn on the commentaries they're they're really really great

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sign up at the ten dollar level or up your pledge to it patreon.com 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 my other podcast is retro knots every monday and occasionally friday please go to retronauts.com or look for retro knots in your podcast device listen and subscribe to it i think you'll like it it's lots of fun henry how about you you can follow me on twitter at h-e-n-e-r-e-y-g if you follow me there you'll find out whatever new things go up on the patreon or other podcast announcements first at h-e-n-e-r-e-y-g thanks again for listening folks we'll see you next week with the last

temptation of crust we'll see you then morning