Talking Simpsons - Talking Simpsons - Days of Wine And D'oh'ses With Nick Prueher

Episode Date: November 18, 2020

It's time for Barney to get sober, and we've got a great guest to help with his 12 steps, Nick Prueher from Found Footage Festival/VCR Party Live! We discuss our own histories with knowing the newly sober, our thoughts on how exploring Barney's drinking works for comedy, and also some thoughts about forest fires! Don't be glum, listen to this podcast! Support this podcast and get hundreds of bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! Check out our new shirts on TeePublic! And please follow the new official Twitter, @TalkSimpsonsPod!

Good news everyone Talking Futurama is coming back for Talking Futurama season 2 part 2. Fresher than a summer ham this podcast comes every Friday and if you sign up at the five dollar level at patreon.com slash talking simpsons you can hear each episode as it goes live. That's right sign up today at patreon.com slash talking simpsons for five dollars to hear Talking Futurama every Friday throughout the rest of 2020 and also all the previous episodes we've done so far. So head over to patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons now or we're gonna clamp you! Shut up and take my money! I heartily endorse this event or product. Ahoy, ahoy everybody, and welcome to Talking Simpsons, where we promise all the sugar cookies and secondhand smoke you can handle. I'm one of your hosts, the disgracefully hilarious Bob Mackie,

and this is our chronological exploration of The Simpsons. Who else is here with me today? Hey, it's Henry Gilbert, and I'm never throwing out my She-Hulk vs. Leon Spinks comics. And who do we have on the line? This is Nick Pruer. I'm driving under the influence of being a jerk. And today's episode is Days of Wine and Doses. I'm a tanked up loser?

Is that how you see me? Oh, sounds like a certain loser could use some tanking up. Today's episode aired on April 9th, 2000. And as always, Henry will tell us what happened on this mythical day in real world history. Oh my god! Oh boy, Bobby, Nintendo sells its 100 millionth Game Boy slash Game Boy Color Metallica file suit against Napster, and in a big moment for comedy nerds,

the More Cowbell sketch airs on Saturday Night Live. Oh my gosh. Yeah, it was a big weekend for a legacy of unfunny people quoting it over the next two decades. Our entire lives of a good, it was the

great sketch that then everyone had to say all the time. You know what this podcast needs? More Cowbell yeah when the shirts started showing up at target that's when you knew it was over yeah yeah i i feel like it completely like he'd hosted snl before but i felt like that made christopher walken like the comedy star after that sketch i i also heard our friend of the show scott gerner who's also an amazing like sketch comedy writer uh he worked at funny or die with a person who worked on the cowbell sketch who that guy was like yeah everyone works at funny or die because they saw this sketch in high school

and started writing their own sketches like it was that influential of a sketch and and it is funny yeah yeah it's really really good i think i was there the night it aired and i was just like uh blown away by christopher walken having a really hard time reading those cue cards you know what there's a sketch that's really similar that happened during the chris farley era where it's he's in the recording studio and he's recording the monday night football like the whole season's worth of monday night football jingles where it's like are you ready for some football and he's playing uh hank williams jr and he's doing bangles and the dolphins coming out tonight packers and the vikings coming up and the the people in the sound booth are

making fun of him and uh they really hurt his feelings and then he sings a soft ballad rendition of are you ready for some football and to me that's the better sketch i put that one up oh man i never saw that one yeah i need to look that one up i i do i do feel like homer though like a homer after listening to the rap and ronnie reggaetape like oh he does say well a lot whenever i hear uh don't fear the reaper i'm like oh there is cowbell in this song you can't unhear it you're right i didn't see it live It was one of those early internet, your friend saying, you've got to see this dude. And it was like in 2000 or maybe early 01 where it's just we all stand around the computer and try to show each other something funny, like that early experience.

On your real player. Yes. I got to assume more cowbell was put on like Style Project or something that my friend was taking me to or some other. Consumption Junction, perhaps? Oh, maybe that one. Poe.TV. Fark?

Oh, man. Yeah, Fark, of course. And the Game Boy, like I bought at least three Game Boys with two Game Boys and one Game Boy Color. And that began a whole lifetime of me buying at least like three of every Nintendo console that that was portable at least i think i have like four or five 3ds's sorry yeah i think uh i just had two only two 3ds losers i think i did have three ds's though three or three space ds's uh game boys i actually resisted getting the Game Boy SP. I was like, you're not getting me this time. SP? Yeah, wasn't that the bright one?

Was the SP with the clamshell closing thing? Oh, Game Boy Advance. Yeah, Game Boy Advance. Yeah, yeah. And I still call everything a Game Boy, except for the Switch. I called the DS a Game Boy and people made fun of me. But it is, it's a Game Boy. It's fun to call it a Game Boy.

I mean, and they wouldn't have hit $100 million had it not been for Pokemon. But yeah, a whole decade of Game Boy. It's fun to call it a Game Boy. I prefer, I mean, and they wouldn't have hit 100 million had it not been for Pokemon. But yeah, a whole decade of Game Boys. Or the Walkman. Walkman had to walk before the Game Boy could game. Oh, and Metallica suing Napster. What an uncool thing like that. I wonder if that still like hurts their reputation or if people are just like, ah, they're just a cool band now.

They're not like corporate guys suing a company. Speaking of that early internet video stuff, that reminds me of those web cartoons that were making fun of Metallica. The Napster Band. Yeah. Oh, that was like early Jib Jab, wasn't it? No, it was like literally the cartoon, like actual drawn cartoons. Oh, okay.

And you could buy like t-shirts with Napster Band on them and stuff. And it was James Hetfield and Lars were the stars of those cartoons yeah that's right you had fields yeah i recently watched uh some kind of monster again the metallica documentary and i i just couldn't i can't not think of lars as the anti-napster guy right he's he's likable in the movie you know he seems kind of like the voice of reason but i'm like but why why were you doing that i can see it from a certain standpoint if you're you know an egotistical rocker who is like hey they are stealing my music that's my music and they're stealing it but i think most other musicians realized it kind of comes off as just like selfish on your part of just you're a rich person demanding more money or i i mean another thing with napster is that a mistake people make with most piracy is thinking like

well if they pirated that that would have been a purchased copy like it not really i mean you know hey look piracy not good don't do it blah blah blah i'm saying that but uh parody just but uh but i mean you know metallica of all people incredibly rich people complaining about it and if they're going to be mad at somebody stealing from them perhaps their record company should be the first one they're mad at i think so not napster yeah it also reminds me of the weird al song don't download this song where i think he says even lars ulrich thinks it's wrong is one of the lyrics to that. Well, according to Napster, Weird Al wrote every song. That's right, God, yeah.

Including the famous Donald Duck blowjob clip. That's right. See, Weird Al had much more reason to sue them because of all of the fake Weird Al songs that were on there. I'm glad you brought that up, Bob, because one time for my birthday, Joe, who I do the Thon Footage Festival with, made me a compilation of all songs downloaded from Napster that were Weird Al Yankovic, but spelled W-I-E. Weird was spelled wrong, and then it was Yankovic. And I believe Oops, I Farted Again was on there. And a sketch about Yoda smoking pot. And all the classic Weird Al hits.

You knew if there was weed or swears, it was not Weird Al. Of course. Man, well, I guess actually, you know what? Napster did sort of give us Facebook, at least if the film's social network is to be believed. So, you know what? Maybe we should be bad at Napster.

I'm changing my mind now. Anyway, hey, welcome back to Nick Pruer from Found Footage Fest. Thanks for having me back, guys. And as of this recording, we are in late August. And recently, you just kicked off the Kickstarter for Life on the Farm, a new documentary. Can you tell us all about that? Yeah, we are in progress on this documentary. And basically, Joe and I were doing a found footage live show in milwaukee and a filmmaker who's from england originally came up to us afterwards and said can i show you this video and you know like you're talking about how everyone was gathered around some kind of device

saying here look at this funny video that is the bane of our existence you know like we do a show where we show funny videos that we found physically at thrift stores and, you know, lovingly curated. And then somebody's like, dude, you got to check this thing out. It's insane. And it's like a fake German forklift video that somebody found on YouTube. They're showing it to us at a table after a show. And it's like, you know, come on. This is a rare case where it was actually worth watching.

This guy, Oscar, brought his laptop and he showed a VHS tape that his grandfather, he inherited from his grandfather after his grandpa died. And it was his neighbor, a farmer named Charles Carson in Somerset, England, was an early pioneer of video technology in the 80s. Not, I guess, using the technology. He had a video camera and he would use it and make titles and then film the titles and overdub his voice and make these kind of crude videos of what life was like on his farm and it it starts off you know fairly normal and it gets very bizarre he he um shows how the cock at one point he holds up the placenta of a cow who's just given birth and says it's lovely and um he is yeah his parents are on the farm life and death happens on the farm Oh, God. scene. So the filmmaker Oscar has been, you know, we came in and agreed to help get it made. And

we've been helping guide the documentary as he's gone to the farm, interviewed the man's relatives and tracked down even more footage of this really unique, eccentric man from England. I recommend our listeners go and check out the trailer. It's compelling. And I just realized while you're telling the story, you are living that Mr. Show tape trading sketch. It's exactly that. 20 plus years later, you're still that Mr. Show tape trading sketch. It's exactly that. 20 plus years later, you're still living it. I know. I know.

Yeah, it's exactly what it's like. Oh, you know, one of the other things is like there's this whole the times at that point in the 80s because he just you know life and death were a matter of fact on the farm so you get used to it very very early and i i also i i totally identify with that annoyance you have when somebody's showing you like they promise you a cool video and they're like no this is real and then as you're you're it you're like this is a sketch this isn't real this is a sketch from some other country or whatever and and you realize it's you're this guy got tricked or whatever that that always bugs me yeah and if you're in media like we are you'd get better at sniffing it out but you know people get better at fooling people

as well so yeah that's true uh yeah that's the scary part but occasionally you do find good stuff so you can't throw the baby out with the bath water you gotta listen to people they're very excited to show you something and and you just hope it's it's something real you you guys are like a sieve for the just the world of content that was put on a videotape and you find, you find all the good, uh, good in quotes stuff out there. Yeah, we try. We've just been doing it so long that I think people know our sense of bully now. And so we get boxes in the mail.

I just opened one today that was, uh, had a tape in it, uh, somebody found called, um, how to beat a speeding ticket. Um, and one was called, uh, the other one in the, in the box was called What Me Juggle, and it was an instructional video that came with juggling scarves, still in the package. Oh, that's wonderful. It's like with Mystery Science Theater when that was on the air, people assume like, what happens when you run out of bad movies? You guys are the same way.

It's like, it's bottomless. The VHS market is bottomless, the amount of things that were produced. That's what I realized. And thrift stores, you know, we can't really go to them safely right now anyway. But even when we could, they're seeing fewer VHS tapes being donated. A lot of them are just standing up in landfills because nobody's buying them. But we have 11,000 tapes we've collected, and we haven't gotten through even a third of them yet. So we have enough to last us for a long time. And which people can see on your VCR party live streams that are still going, even in these times.

Yeah, we've started doing that. We've started doing another show on Saturdays, which I think you guys will be interested, called Saturday Morning Cartoons. And I feel like there isn't appointment television for Saturday morning cartoons. There hasn't been for a long time. So we're going to watch Forgotten Cartoons on VHS with various special guests. And air those at 10 a.m. Eastern time on Saturday mornings. All right. I'm watching the next one for sure.

Yes. If you want to see the Garbage Pail cartoon or uh laverne and shirley's cartoon with mr cool and uh fonzie and the gang uh join us we're both laughing for whatever reason the laverne and shirley join the army cartoon keeps coming up on our podcast i can't believe yeah i i have to laugh it's so weird it keeps coming it's just weird it's weird thing where like it organically comes up like every three podcasts now i think i remember watching it it must have been in reruns but i remember doing an impression of mr cool fonzie's dog and uh as as a kid so i don't know where i saw it but it stuck with me i remember him being like a mutley style character yes yeah and i don't think talked in words i think it was all

sort of gibberish a lot of like hand over mouth i almost put my hand over my mouth as i said the hand over mouth laughter that uh apparently all dogs do in cartoons he was the original poochie uh but uh but let's animate that way right i guess yeah if you cover the mouth and lip sync oh my god like a cartoon that takes place in the pandemic. Oh, no lip sync. No lip sync at all. Saving so much money. But I guess, Nick, were you watching this episode live when it when it came out in 2000?

I was. I stuck with The Simpsons as a regular Sunday night viewer from, you know, from Tracy Ullman all the way through the way through i believe 2004 which is when we started going on the road a lot and i was not at home on sunday so uh but yeah i would watch every sunday and i was at this time was collecting a lot of the simpsons play sets the talking simpsons play sets and i remember i was working at the letterman show at the time, and my coworker and I were obsessed with those. And there was a website, Entertainment Earth, that would always have the new ones that came out. Or we'd call down to Toys R Us in Times Square and find out if the new set came out. And after work, we'd go down and I'd pick him up one of each and we'd grab one of each. i just hoarded those play sets just building your

two model set of springfield in your basement or something yeah and then my girlfriend at the time was like we can't we have a 400 square foot apartment we cannot have all these play sets and so i remember going to a comic book store and selling them all and being very heartbroken the kitchenette is springfield now i don't know what to tell you. Yeah, I know. You can just eat sitting in the toilet or bathtub. Just do that. That was my suggestion.

But yeah, I remember watching this one live and then being sort of blown away at the continuity of, oh yeah, Barney's still sober in the episodes and thinking that was kind of groundbreaking. Yeah, yeah. At the time, King of the Hill was the cartoon making these big continuity moves. Simpsons wasn't really into this outside of the stuff that Bill and Josh did in 7 and 8.

Yeah, although in season 11, they're starting to take the big swings with Apu not only marrying but has eight kids. And a few episodes ago, Maude has died. And now here goes Barney into sobriety. It was a weird spring of 2000. Yes. What is your thought?

What do you think about that? Because I know Joe's dad loves The Simpsons, and he was very against the idea of the characters changing permanently in any way. And I sort of, you know know as the simpsons as comfort food you don't like that either but as as somebody who's written for tv i it's so stagnant to have to reset every week too so i could see that you as a writer it'd be more fun to have things permanently change what do you think yeah i agree i mean it does feel weird because the simpsons is such a static show that change does feel uh alienating but i mentioned king of the hill earlier like i

think they did a good job of like every 18 months introducing some kind of new element to the show either a character you know goes somewhere or a baby enters the picture or there's some sort of growth spurt or a new job or something that kept new stories happening and i think that helped the show uh stay good until the very end i i think with every change the the main question and i think the writers at least ask themselves when they make this choice on the change even if uh some uh i or others might disagree with the results of it but i think they at least ask themselves like are these jokes getting stale and would making this change make us have better opportunities for better jokes and like i think they felt with maude well partially it was about not liking the voice actress quitting the show but also i think they were like what do we do with maude she's just the boring wife like there's nothing

there maybe we can find new jokes with net if he's a single guy dating around and same deal with like apu oh if apu's like the new married guy the newly married guy and the new father maybe there's more jokes they can do there but i but as bob had pointed out very well in that episode it's like they kind of wrote themselves into a corner and barely used apu after that and and i think barney might be one of the worst examples of that for comedy's sake because every joke with Barney is about the heightening of alcoholic tendencies when you take those away if he is just a functional man who has no problems he loses a lot of the the comedic potential he has as as important it is that somebody gets sober and you want to show a person succeeding at getting sober, you lose opportunities for jokes. Yeah, I think with this change in particular, it took something away from the character.

I will bring up Milhouse Divided in Season 8. That change actually gave us two functionally new characters. Like, Kirk and Luanne Van houten had basically no personality i think kirk's like one line today was get off our property yeah he became a character in that episode as did luann they became like defined characters so that gave them something in many of these cases it's taking characteristics away that we like and and also giving millhouse jokes about being a divorced child which were jokes they weren't telling before and i i don't know if this opened up as many barney jokes of like i felt like every barney appearance after this one until he just became a drunk again the word jokes about what they weren't

even jokes about it was like oh and you're at mo's bar and barney's there drinking coffee and his hair is combed his hair is combed. His hair is combed. He doesn't have much to add, you know? You're right. It's in how they do it. And I think like, you know, as much as you want characters from a narrative standpoint to grow and be interesting, there are some characters in The Simpsons that I just want to be comedic. Like, I don't need to know about their inner life.

I don't need to know anything other than come on for a few jokes, be a sidekick. Like, the the family you know explore their emotions i think they've been able to do that with a few other characters but barney the town drunk just seems like he should have stayed the town drunk yeah i agree and i did want to talk about barney as a character just to sort of uh explain who he is and where it came from i'm sure we talked about it before but barney is one of the many elements of the show that was intentionally a throwback in 1989 like remember when old sitcoms had crazy drunk characters wouldn't it be like not politically correct if we did that and that's what they did along with all the other choices like you know bart being a dennis the menace style character

with a slingshot like all of these 60s and 50s tropes in a late 80s early 90s show and barney is one of them and barney is essentially this is like such before our times of barney is basically crazy guggenheim from the uh jackie gleason show and jackie would have these sketches on his show where he'd play a bartender then this guy called crazy guggenheim played by frank fontaine would come in and like tell these crazy stories and talk in barney's voice and then then Jack, you'd be like, I think I heard somebody put a coin in the jukebox. And then he'd sing in this beautiful voice, like a very melancholy song. That's why Barney does that.

Yeah. It would be sharps. Yeah. So I have a clip here. You can at least hear him tell like the beginning of a joke. And I'll tell you when to cut it off because it goes on forever. Remember the pet shop on the corner where we used to walk by and see the monkeys in the windows and everything? They're tearing that down.

I know. I'll never forget that. Boy, one day I went in there to go get my mother a birthday present. Oh, they had a lot of nice things to get in there. Yeah. I wanted the best for my mother. You know how it is. I went in there and I said to the clerk, Marty, I said, give me that parrot.

That's the one I want. Beautiful looking parrot. He says, that'll cost you $20. I said, for what? A parrot? Okay. That's basically where Barney comes from. It was a crude character for 89 because like cheers was an

incredibly uh popular sitcom about a bar nobody was ever this drunk on cheers there was no crazy drunk character on cheers maybe like there'd be like a like an extra character in the background or something but like norm or cliff or sam or carla or frazier they were functionally like half drunk in the show but no one was talking like this and slurring their speech they were all functional alcoholics on that show and i i mean the comedies would more have a very special episode about an alcohol problem not a recurring character who has a drinking problem and just everyone accepts it there was also uh otis the town drunk of course and uh at the andy griffith, who was one of the funniest characters. And I thought like, you know, the good part about him is he never got sober.

He was always like locking himself up because he just knew, you know, he should be in jail. And then I was reading about it before recording and then returned to Mayberry, the 1986 TV movie. He got sober and became like the ice cream man of the town so everybody tries to i guess everybody tries to make their alcoholic characters not alcoholics anymore yeah i mean it came from a time when being an alcoholic was more socially acceptable like oh that's just you know sam he's a drunk that's what he does drunk guy not uh as we talked more about like oh no alcoholism is a horrible disease and people need help with it. Yeah. So Barney was an intentional throwback of that kind of character. Plus, it's I mean, it's it's giving Homer the Fred Flintstone of the show.

Oh, Barney. That's who you are to accept. This one is drunk. Also in the in the early seasons, he's a bully to Homer. It's not he's not as easily cowed in those early seasons. And as Lenny points out uh he makes uh homer's alcoholism seamless monstrous right exactly yeah all of that that's the that's the i think some of my favorite stuff in this episode that anything barney does to get help is something homer needs

just as much but he's like hey i'm not as bad as barney so he doesn't need that help but yeah the that's it's also funny seeing that glissing clip because like i don't know i feel like i look at jackie lee so i'm like you're probably pretty sauced right now too yeah but but that's just the 50s that everybody drank like fish that was yeah it was always like ah the lighter side of alcoholism that was sort of like a whole character trope in the 50s and 60s when in real life that character would like fall uh leaving the bar and crack a set open and die on the pavement there's nothing funny about it uh now that's well yeah when we um we just did a bunch of research into

like disney's classic animators and a couple were like oh this guy was a raging drunk and it's like what oh what happened that guy well he drank himself to death or he had a raging drunk and it's like, what, oh, what happened to that guy? Well, he drank himself to death or he had a car accident and died. Like, that's why he didn't do anything after 1959. Did you ever wonder why that was? The Simpsons will be right back. 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. More exciting than dogs playing poker, this week's episode was brought to you by our cool guest nick perure we thank him so much for coming on one of our best friends of the show definitely

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a brand new Talking Fut talking futurama where me and bob cover a different episode from the second season of futurama that was airing at the same time as season 11 of the simpsons and you'll get access to all of the previous mini series as well where we cover shows like mission hill king of the hill previous episodes of futurama and the critic all of them are yours at five bucks a month at patreon.com slash talking simpsons you know what's awesome to listen to while taking helicopter lessons that would be the what a cartoon movie podcast our extra premium podcast that we do each month for our ten dollar

and up subscribers in addition to all the five dollar stuff i just talked about each month me and bob do a podcast that is sometimes even over four hours long about a different animated feature film in the same style as talking simpsons and what a cartoon we just covered wallace and gromit curse of the were-rabbit a ton of stop-motion fun there we chat about cheese quite a lot previous ones have been scooby-doo on zombie island ghost in the shell aladdin a goofy movie beavis and butthead do america the iron giant and tons and tons more you can hear over 100 hours of classic what a cartoon movie podcast and a brand new one each month if you're a ten dollar and up subscriber at patreon.com slash talking simpsons But I guess we should talk about the writers of this episode as part of this very long preamble.

So some new guy, Dan Castellaneta, never heard of him, never wrote anything before. But he wrote this with his wife, Deb LaCosta. And of course, Dan is Homer. Of course, I was pulling your leg out there everybody I was pulling so many legs but yeah Dan wrote this and the story goes that he and his wife wrote this original script the way Dan tells it was he

dropped it off to Al Jean the day of the table read of Dufflis so I guess he didn't know what the premise of Dufflis would be and Al was like a previous show on Al Jean with Mike Rees in season three and four was like you know this is a great script but it is too similar to duffless a show about homer you know you know going on a 30-day uh hiatus from drinking so we can't do it now so they waited seven years and basically the same thing to mike scully is like leave it on his desk and surprise

him yeah as we we talked a little with mike scully about this in our december 2017 interview if you're on the patreon you should check that out in the archives but uh he mentioned like how it was kind of terrifying for him for a little bit in the morning to come in and see like basically the lead voice actor in the show wrote a script and if you don't like it you've got a real problem on your hands and you're gonna have to deal with a star who wants to make their episode but he was like oh no this is really funny like so he yeah they decided to go through with it i mean it also too is like that i wonder if castlenetta had extra confidence in doing this because this was right after the pay dispute thing so he was

like oh hey we asked for more money and we got it maybe it's time to push for that other thing i've been thinking about too i think so and it does help that dan really defined homer like so many of his ad libs made into the show as dialogue we remember and he just you know he is the voice it's going to be very hard to replace him but yeah he is not just some random guy writing an episode like he so much of him made who homer uh is the way he is he's i mean crusty too like i think homer homer and crusty are like two of the best cartoon voices that ever were and i think too it shows that dan is incredibly good at improvising in character uh and also you know you got barney and willie and quimby and mel and gill like all these amazing uh voices he does like so it it makes sense that he could at least like write

i mean uh simpson scripts are so heavily rewritten anyway that i mean why not let him write a script that they're gonna heavily rewrite instead of like you know somebody's harvard buddy perhaps was dan there when you guys went to the table read? Oh, yeah. Yes. Yeah. It was something else. Did he do any improvising?

Do you remember? You know what? I don't think I think he you know, I think he made a couple of like, yeah, it was like a fight scene that happened in it. And in character, he had to make like fight noises. That was pretty funny. I guess I think there were like a few fun comments he sprinkled in just to make people laugh, but nothing like super ambitious. Yeah, I remember that too.

I went to a table read and Dan was there and he would make asides or things that I feel like were just trying to make the table laugh that weren't in the script when I was following along. Because he is like a true performer too like even though he's like you know in his plain clothes and wearing a baseball cap and just reading a script i think he still has the want to perform in front of people like his i mean his background totally lends itself to that i i looked up some of the stuff so he was in second city improv and i wondered like who did he do improv with because you know lots of people work for second city but they were wondered like who did he do improv with because you know lots of people worked for second city but they were in like they had like even back then five different troops so just because technically he was in second city the same time as stephen colbert doesn't mean that he

knew stephen colbert or worked with him but uh the ones he mentioned that he worked with a lot were like richard kind of the famous people richard kind uh rich hall bonnie hunt oh mo himself rich hall yes the oh you wonder if he suggested like hey you know who was ugly i worked with rich all make him look like this ugly guy you know and and also he went to college and did uh college radio with ucb founder matt walsh as well oh awesome yeah yeah and he didn't have any like professional tv or movie writing credits before this outside of one sketch for the tracy allman show uh that's all i found from him but uh he and his wife would go on to write eight more episodes between 2000

and 2018 maybe even more in the future i don't know what their plans are but yeah like after this they wrote uh i guess like the wraparound stuff for a clip show. Yeah, that's not, yeah, Gump Roast isn't the best episode. No, let's not parody Forrest Gump in 2002. Let's not do that. And then they went on to write a lot of actually good episodes. Yeah, they wrote the Artie Ziff Returns episode that I thought was a pretty good new Simpsons episode. And by new, I do mean 15 years ago. But yeah, he and Deb have been married since 1987 and uh they're

still together they met in a chicago improv class in 82 their relationship is as old as we are bob that's uh yeah i mean she's she's a writer and performer in her own right too this isn't just like give a favor to the actor's wife like they've been writing and performing together for like you know close to 20 years by the time this episode aired yeah and you can hear some of the sketches they wrote on dan's cd he put out in 2002 called i am not homer i've never heard it so i can't attest to how good it is but i assume it's on youtube or whatever like every old piece of music is. I listen to one where Deb plays a radio show advice host and Dan plays a series of silly characters who call in and ask about problems. And it's fun. It's a fun.

I mean, when I hear them together, I'm like, if you guys got together now, you would be a popular improvisational podcast married couple. Yeah, they'd be like on comedy bang bang every month totally and i was looking to see like what has deb done uh like acting wise and she was like in one episode of tracy allman uh and then in some dan adjacent stuff like she was in one episode of aladdin doing a voice she's actually doing a ton of incidental voices in the back to the future cartoon so like just dan probably got her into it because they needed somebody and she's obviously talented so yeah like but not a lot of stuff outside of this oh and she was a copywriter at the same ad company as John Swartzwell oh really yeah damn the I I remember Dan said that on an old

commentary but I was watching like a Dan interview about how he met Deb and he was mentioning like yeah at the time she was a copywriter in Chicago and we're working with John Schwarzwelder in the same building so which is really crazy so I mean IMDB kind of undersells their writing abilities because they don't count like radio and that's where they were doing a lot of their writing and like on the stage too and and also I turned up one other interesting thing they worked together on the Simpsons, which was in the early days of the Simpsons comics. That surprised me. It was published in February 1994, probably written late 1993, which actually would time out to around when Dufflis was being worked on.

So I'm wondering if they submitted that and after it was turned down they're like hey mad we want to write a comic book instead so uh this was a backup comic in simpsons comics 3 called crusty agent of clown which is an eight page full-on like panel for panel parody of jim staranco's nick fury agent of shield Shield comics from 68 and it's it's very involved you if you didn't read those comics I think it probably makes zero sense to you I think I just remembered uh looking through this trade you have Henry like every Simpsons comic in the beginning at least was just like a reference to the 50s or 60s like Tales from the Crypt or The Amazing Colossal Man things like that I had actually asked

Bill Morrison about this on Twitter before Bill Morrison was one of the artists who drew that comic and I asked like oh how involved were Dan and Deb because from the credits I thought it could just be like it's just a series of names it doesn't give story by or whatever I thought maybe Dan and Deb just said hey you should do like a shield thing with crusty but here's what morrison said when i asked him i believe steve vance did the plot and dan and deb scripted it but it may have been the other way around in either case they were very involved so that's great it's uh if you want to look it up it's in the first simpsons comics collection it was simpsons comics number three but it's the backup of it unfortunately not in the matsumoto era so i can't read it i think it's a good thing that they wrote together and did so many plots together i think it's you know similar to how on live action shows eventually

most of the cast directs an episode like brian cranston directed a lot of episodes aaron paul directed episodes of breaking bad like it's just kind of what ends up happening for these stars on popular shows. They want to diversify their skills, too, and work on stuff that they couldn't otherwise. So, yeah, I think, I mean, is it a little bit of cronyism? Perhaps, I guess. But I think this was a fine, fine script. Yeah, I think so, too. And also, one other behind the scenes thing before

we start is that i think i uh i believe that scully uh said in our interview he didn't want to say this was definite but as he remembered he's like i think dan castellaneta was also just getting a little tired of barney and playing barney drunk and like that he i i mean too bill and josh they wanted to put barney in jail at the end of and write him out of the show at the end of Who Shot Mr. Burns that's right yeah like they were already tired of him but the end of season 6 yeah I was thinking like I think Barney like his greatest hits

are really in the first 4 years of the show and then he was really used sparingly like did he have any plots after Deep Space Homer hmm I'm scratching my head for that I'm sure we're forgetting a big one but uh i mean there was the film festival you know don't cry for me i'm already dead but i guess he wasn't the the lead in that yeah yeah i think i i mean it was whenever he'd even get a joke in

episodes i was like oh barney got a joke like i guess he made Homer go to New York City by stealing the car. So I think that was in the season nine season premiere. So that might be the last time he was that plot focused. Like just two episodes ago in Pygmalion, he is just like a silent creature who's like a prop, really. He doesn't say anything. Yeah. creature who's like a prop really he doesn't say anything yeah oh and also on the commentary the the director of the episode neil affleck he brings up that like he has his own has had his own issues with getting sober and then he put that into the episode uh though the way he brings it up is like

kind of uh uh uncomfortable because he's like anybody else here have problems with drinking because i did and put it in the show it's, maybe people don't want to talk about that in the commentary. And also, yeah, Scully mentions on the commentary and in our interview that the original script did what a Simpsons script is expected to do, which is return to the status quo. Barney falls off the wagon. And Scully said partially influenced by like the extended family he knew who had problems with drinking that he said while it is realistic that someone would

fall off the wagon after like a few weeks of of going sober it was too dark and he kind of wanted to hope for the best with Barney instead that's the socially responsible thing to do i don't know if it's the funniest thing to do yeah yeah you know it's uh well that's why eventually i feel like they i feel like after this in the writer's room they probably were just nudging each other like come on can barney just be drunk it'd be funny if barney the drunk guy did a thing here the way they make him drunk is just very unceremonious. He just has an unrelated relapse. And I think I'm spelling as fast as I can.

I forget which episode. Yeah, that's right. I think it's season 14. Let's see. 14. Yeah, season 14. So he's sober until February of 2003. So he's got three years of sobriety.

It's better than some people do, you know? But all right, now at the 38-minute mark. Great. Let's get into our first clip here as Bart and Homer search through some trash. Ah, trash night. In France, they call it la nuit de poubelle. In Germany, it's crappenfest. I can't believe it only comes 52 times a year.

Quit gabbing and start grabbing. And remember, the best stuff is usually deep in the garbage juice. See? A new pacifier for Maggie. Looky here. Cardi-bord tubes. Now we can have indoor plumbing, just like they's got at the women's lockup. They spoiled you, Brandy. Sometimes I don't even know who you are anymore.

Looks like Milhouse's mom finally threw out his blankie. He'll pay a lot to get this back. Especially when we send it to him piece by piece. Milhouse is an OG brony. I forgot about that. You're right. Ten years before the reboot, Milhouse. The accuracy of that My Little Pony logo is striking to me.

I'm like, wow, you just drew it. You just drew the My Little Pony logo on there. Yeah, it wasn't Happy Little Elves. It was just My Little Pony. You know, that's the thing in season 11. They're getting more into, like, just name the thing. Don't make up a thing for it. I guess the Teletubbies show up soon.

The Teletubbies do. Amber Reynolds as well. Making their third appearance in this season, I think. You're right. Yeah. And Homer's French apparently translates to Knight of the Bins. So, well, I think Crappenfest is not a real german no i don't know you're you folks in germania tell me otherwise did either of you guys have uh

have blankies oh yes yeah i had i did have a blankie i uh i held on to until uh 13 or so i don't recall i think it was more like a stuffed animal but i think the peanuts cartoon uh brainwash generation into two like well every child has a blankie right and we were just giving them well so my blankie was one with like balloons on it and i well i did okay i did sleep with it every night but it was more like i just placed it on top of my other blankets like just a a stack of blankets so i could say no, I don't need my blanket. But if it was taken away from me, I would have said, no, no, don't do that. It's not a crud. It's something you've come to rely upon to live.

Yeah, I think I had a blankie too. I was a blue blankie that had kind of a silk border to it that I would always like, you know, it was like a self-soothing thing. I would touch the little silk end of the, but yeah, I think i got rid of it around five or six but i love that blankie i would take it to if we were going to a restaurant with my family and yeah i think i would have been upset too if somebody threw it away and was sending it to you back piece by piece and i also like the implication that bart and hom just do it every week. Every week they go through the garbage together. It's a good return of the term garbage juice, too. Oh, God, yeah.

The zoom in on the green liquid dripping off the pacifier made it extra disgusting. And also a very dark joke that Brandy never knows plumbing until she is put in prison. Then it's Henry's time to shine because comic book talked oh i did a bit of research but i figured you knew all this oh yeah i i had to look this up for the specific dates but yeah so uh comic book guy is throwing out the she hulk versus leon spinks comic uh which just so you know leon spinks he made the news in 1978 because he got a shocking split decision win over muhammad ali yeah it was sort of like a buster douglas style move where no one expected it and that was the

height of his career and he never i mean ali beat him the next time and it's just a series of losses after that so the implication is nobody would buy that comic because leon spinks is a loser nobody wants to read his comic book i had buster douglas boxing for sega so i will defend any one-time win boxers that's right he got that game deal right before his big loss that's that's why sega genesis signed up for evander holyfield right after that the boxers in that game were just massive they scared me they wanted that they wanted that game because they're like oh he beat tyson and mike tyson's game is on the nes so if we have the game of the guy who beat tyson then we beat the nes it was one of sega's stable of celebrities alongside

tommy lasorda and michael jackson yes yeah uh before they got sonic they just were like can we have every celebrity but but so this parody though of a crossover is actually based on a real crossover comic from 1978 the same year that leon spinks beat uh muhammad ali and that is superman versus muhammad ali which i don't know if you guys have read uh or looked into it that i was looking at some scans of it on google image search as far as i got it was a big event comic at the time because not only was it you know the fictional idea of like who'd win in a fight superman or muhammad ali uh but also that like it was drawn by neil adams written by dennis

o'neill who were like the a-level folks working in dc comics at the time and uh and like they drew every possible celebrity they could on the cover if you want to see the celebrities of 1978 they are defined as being on the cover of that comic book but uh in that comic uh so space aliens invade and force muhammad ali to fight superman because they want to know who'd win in a fight superman gets depowered so it is a fair fight and muhammad ali knocks him out and so that is who would win in a fight. Muhammad Ali would defeat Superman. And that book came out like right after he lost the title. Yes. So it wasn't that big of a deal.

Yes, it was less of a big deal. But I mean, Muhammad Ali still was was famous and stuff. But yet actually it came right after the Spinks loss. So the specificness of that and also knowing that like most of the writers on the show are comic book dorks I think it is a very intentional joke there well speaking of superheroes crossing over to the real world I wanted to ask Nick if he ever asked David Letterman

about meeting the Avengers ah no I didn't my very like minimal interactions that didn't come up I mean there's proof. I'm looking at all these drawings right now. He got to ask Wonder Man questions, and Spider-Man webbed his hair.

What were some of the other, were there other crossovers like that? Oh, the classic Obama-Spider-Man one? There is that one. That's the one I'm thinking of. But around the same time as the Letterman one was, it was the Avengers meet meet the cat the original cast of snl as well they did that comic ah and uh and of course before that in the 60s jerry lewis just had a series of comics of just jerry lewis where he'd uh fight the joker on on occasion so there's

there's been a number of celebrity superhero uh mash, but I just don't get it for kids. You know, they're not actually meeting because you're looking at a drawing like it's just it's a drawing of a celebrity meeting somebody. It just doesn't feel the same. I also don't get the Jerry Lewis comic book. Like, you know, it's funny pictures or sorry, drawings of Jerry Lewis drawings, not his voice or anything like that. Well, you know that that uh for this saturday morning cartoon show we're gonna watch an episode of the police academy cartoon and the they have the michael winslow character in there who was doing funny voices but they just dub in like a police siren with his lips with his lips moving so the whole reason for his character is he could

do funny noises with his mouth and he's not doing those it's a cartoon that's what i paid for what a mistake when i saw him in space balls i stood up and applauded yeah we all did uh also the nerds reading around through garbage bob got to see me do that exact thing uh when we got to take a tour of the dc comics offices in burbank because at the end of the tour they're like hey we got all these comics we're probably just throwing away because we got too many comics you want to just grab them or have some i'm like i'm just searching through it desperately like little free comic books it was pearls for swine for me if they had old mad magazines i would have walked out there with a box we get a quick joke about homer wearing a sports

bra like uh this is not too far removed from his large chest jokes done in the Alone Again Natural Diddly as well. Homer used to be just his gut poked out. He didn't really have a large chest. But now we're in the man boobs comedy years here. I mean, this is after Fight Club that's true yeah more mainstream than ever and i also wanted to cast lonetta himself choose to make all these jokes about hairy italians because oh well he's lacking some hair somewhere it's uh it's his jealousy coming out there yeah i you know he must have thought i mean okay he joined second city in 1979. He must have thought he was getting on SNL, right?

That must have been his dream. He's like, I'm the next Bill Murray, but his hair left him even faster than Bill Murray. Or he didn't invest in the hair plugs Bill Murray has. I don't know. I've never seen him not bald. Yeah. And then we get a Bob's Big Poi comedy joke. That's not bad.

That's cute. That's cute. Yeah. I just miss tiki bars. They're fun. I know. Yeah. This felt so LA to me as well,

these tiki bar jokes. I mean, I guess tiki bars are all around. Are there a lot of them in the New York City area, Nick? Yeah, there's a handful of them. You know, you get a $26 cocktail that comes with a ceramic Buddha mug you drink out of, that kind of thing.

I'm there for the tackiness well though also the talking tiki feels like a reference to the disneyland's enchanted tiki room as well okay yeah uh and homer references the billy ocean song get it about get out of my dreams and into my car and then comes a joke about leaking gas which which Marge and Maggie should be dead walking through a wavy kitchen. That's so crazy. It's a good, it's a great Marge line. Like, they're so wavy. And a great animation effect on the waviness, too, as she comes in.

Yeah. And, but yes, Homer has gone drunk with fiery god power here. I don't remember the air in the kitchen being so wavy. Good lord, that's gas! Behold, I am King Talky Tiki! Hey, Flanders, can your god do that? Actually, Homer, you and I worship the same god, so... Irregardless, I am your god now.

Homer, you can't just reroute the gas line. Do you know how dangerous that is? Do not anger Talkie-Talkie. I am all power. I'll be at mode. This is one of the more insane things homer's done i think yeah yeah it's uh i do like him saying irregardless that's that's just a funny fake that's like a harvard word joke a little bit of like is irregardless i guess it is officially a word now it's officially

a word yeah still bothers me still bothers me It's like the people who want you to say champing at the bit. It's not going to happen. You can try. I'm going to say chomping. I love chomping all over those bits. It makes more sense to chomp on a bit than champ on it. People that say primer instead of primer, get out of here. Well, it also like, I feel like Bill and Josh would have frowned on Homer just lighting everything on fire and screaming at people.

Running away? Yeah, he literally leaves his house to burn down. The way Marge just is like open mouthed, you're running away from a fire that's moving towards the house. It's a show about an alcoholic, this one, but it's not Homer. Homer set that lawn on fire and then is going to get drunk. Yes. this one but it's not homer homer set that lawn on fire and then is going to get drunk yes and on the dvd there's a hidden deleted scene that shows marge puts her foot over the fire moving through the hose to cut off the gas and so that explains that there's no fire that spreads and they put out the fire by turning on a uh sprinkler buddha it is a buddha that is a sprinkler as well so i

thought we were missing a scene of marge like taking care of it it felt like that was missing i guess they liked it better of just like the smash into the next scene you know and homer runs away and leaves a fire like he's that big of an asshole uh and also the albeit moe's transitioning to the next scene like that's out of out of the Helen Hunt episode as well of Homer. In that case, actually, that one was Homer leaving Marge with a problem of water. Now it's fire. What element will be next?

I like the whole thing of them finding garbage and that leading to the fire. But it could have been anything. It doesn't connect in any way to the rest of the plot, like a lot of the later seasons. But, like, I got to go to Moe's. Could have been said for anything, and then it would get us into the regular plot. any way to the rest of the plot like a lot of the later seasons but like i gotta go to mose could have been said for anything and then it would get us into the regular plot it could have just started

at mose yeah exactly yeah uh at any point it could have changed and i mean also like garbage garbage diving to tiki torch man also doesn't really connect too much either no uh but uh then it comes to the bar lenny has a funny opening gag that also is like no you're an alcoholic this is uh this is a cry for help as well uh which that is the danger when you do an episode about how no these jokes about barney actually mean he's in a bad place then you have you think about like well wait what about those other jokes about being drunk by other characters should we be worried there too like how how much should we laugh it becomes kind of the question then i mean again lenny points out they're much more functional than barney yeah yeah it's true they all can hold down jobs he puts things in

perspective for perspective for them and i also love the use of all of the times they say glum in this next clip, too. So he says to the cop, no, you're driving under the influence of being a jerk. Hey, Barney, what's with the glum face? You glum or something? That glummy? You know, it was my birthday last week and no one remembered what are you nuts i threw your party at my house you lie why would i not remember my own birthday but we did have a shindig for you barn we even videotaped it look

and uh then uh you know nick in your time with VHSs, have you found anything of someone filming a male carrier? Nothing like that. We did find one at an estate sale in Queens that was an old man wearing like a dress, like looking into the camera and dancing to the Phantom of the Opera soundtrack, and then it cuts abruptly, and then it's the same guy behind the camera recording somebody demolishing his house, or demolishing the house across the street like a construction worker, and he gets into a classic Queens expletive-laden argument

whether he's allowed to film that or not, and then the videotape ends. So it was just a weird whole movie we found in a video camera that leaves you with more questions than it answers. He had a lot of interests. videotape ends so it was just a weird whole movie we found in a video camera that uh i leaves you with more questions than it answers he had a lot of interests uh you know you know this guy better than his family did i think so uh yeah but uh this is a difficult needle to thread here that i think the episode in it does pretty well but like they want

you to feel humanity for barney here they want you to they give him a realistic thing of like an alcoholic blacked out and they don't remember something and you're and they're frustrated at you telling them that like all of these things it uh but but it's also like i don't know what what you ask yourself why do i feel bad for barney now when i was told to not feel bad about him going like, I'm supposed to be the mayor. Why do we feel bad now? But I think it's just letting it, I think starting it with him thinking everybody forgot his birthday at least,

that puts you in an empathetic place for Barney at least. And glum is a funny word, you know? Glummy. Glummy, yeah, glummy. What's on tape too too, is just very realistic. Oh, I mean, having aged 20 years since this aired, I definitely recognize this than a lot of people I've known over the years. Right. And hopefully not myself.

I feel like when I am drunk, I am either sleepy or wanting to show people YouTube videos. That's my attitude. I don't get belligerent or become professor bob or uh you know get sad so i think i lucked out there yeah yeah yeah i i uh drinking makes me too sleepy to i feel like by a fourth drink i am like i need bedtime i just have no i don't have much tolerance for it despite you think you know i got a few extra pounds on me that could soak it up and yet i really can't handle it very well in our lives uh we've i've experienced folks who like then have done the things i saw barney do in this episode that

i didn't know when i was 18 and watched it the first time yeah yeah and it is very well i mean it's as as far as a comedy about observational material it is very observational of people with drinking problems and what it's like to be around them especially at a party where they have the permission to be more drunk yeah i just i think of the phrase professor barney uh over and over with people i've known in my life especially when barney is being as racist as to let him be on tv yes yeah and i love the uh his response to lisa no i'm not that is uh see that is one of the most painfully real moments in the episode yeah yeah it reminds me of um the they might be

giant song your racist friend a little bit like exactly he's at a party and they let the contents of the bottle do the thinking and they're. And they start telling you things that are couched in, you know, what does he say? Everybody has a different planet they can live on. And we'd all be happier. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, yeah.

I've had that thing with family members of extended family members of saying, like, you're making me uncomfortable with what you feel you think you can say now. And then he's like no i'm not no actually the the one before this uh was bart to the future right yes like i feel like deadbeat bart also has a lot of the alcoholic traits i recognize and people i've known over the years like everybody i i know i know how to do everything every uh no one will give me a chance everyone's out to get me and something homer says later also i've heard uh people in my life say like i could do a lot of things if i had some money yeah that's i'm laughing out loud at that quote uh why don't we hear a little bit of professor barney here i'm just saying that when we die there's gonna be a

planet for the french a planet for the chinese and we'll all be a lot happier. Mr. Gumbel, you're upsetting me. No, I'm not. Gee, is that what I look like when I'm drunk? You wish. That's the stage we call Professor Barney. Talkative, coherent, even insightful. Here's drunk. Well, I'm off to market. Marge, you're making a complete fool of yourself. Oh, it's just Barney.

It's also strikingly similar to the David Hasselhoff video that his daughter made him eat a burger on the floor, which I think did push him to sobriety, I believe. I think so. It's funny that whenever someone has to dress up as Marge, there's always a blue wig in the house. Yeah. How do they have so many? I mean, we've established before Homer got those free blue wigs. Yeah, free wig with purchase of large wig.

That's right. Yeah. I mean, the professorial position of somebody who's drunk like that, that is one of the more frustrating type of person to be around when they're drunk. Yeah, especially if you're just like i'm here to like hang out and have some drinks not be lectured right yeah it's at least some alcoholics might be at least like chummier to you and they're the life of the party but the one who is just so like smugly full of themselves and like all right time to tell you how it is to everybody here's what you're doing wrong yeah oh yeah i had that we we played a underground

film festival in sydney australia a couple years ago and a filmmaker afterwards at the after party clearly had a few and started telling me about how 9-11 was an inside job and it didn't really happen the way you think it did and i was like i was in new york then i saw the second tower come down don't tell you know i was like in this argument. It was supposed to be a fun, you know, like, and the conspiracy theories came as soon as like three drinks in. Had to get away. Oh, boy, boy. Yeah, that's these. We didn't know when we were watching this young.

Like my friends, when I was 18, I didn't even have any that heavy or 17. I didn't have any heavy drinking friends at all like i i am lame in that i didn't even have my first drink until i was like i believe i was three months away from turning 21 and my friends were like you should really at least drink before you're 21 once so you can say you didn't wait until the day you were 21 like uh i didn't really start drinking until i was 21 i had some drinks before that but it was such part of being like social in the rust belt area where there's no hope like yeah most people's dads were drunks like just incredible drunks violent raging drunks i had a friend it's like where did where is this kid's dad he's just in this closed room drinking all the time uh not good

not good so yeah like i would eventually like a lot of people in their 20s just like, here's the one day of the week I'm going to be catastrophically hungover. It's always Sunday. So no plans on Sunday. And then you realize, like, that's kind of fucked up. I should I shouldn't like arrange my week around when drinking will disable me. I mean, but this is a problem, though, with exaggeration. exaggerate once you come into these jokes about like barney feeling bad about himself you start thinking should i feel bad that he like that i laughed at when he drank paint thinner you know or or wakes up as in as a member of a sailor crew or whatever like is is it funny is it not funny now because it's about a joke about blacking out or uh being a embarrassing drunk but they they never gave having barney reveal like a mildly uh xenophobic let's say tendencies through that that's extra dark too

like that that's an unlikable they didn't want barney to say something funny they wanted barney to say something that makes you very uncomfortable with his observation. Say it to a child, too. Yes, yeah. Having Lisa be the one to react to it, too, that also is like, no, it's not funny. It's not. This isn't supposed to be funny. You're supposed to feel bad. How we use electricity can be smarter, cleaner, and greener.

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and you know like but i i some part of me just wants him to be that guy who does funny one-off you know jokes about him being drunk so i i still am a little bit conflicted about this episode yeah he's kind of like grandpa simpson in that he will just be written into a scene to give it a punch line yeah or to sweeten it a little bit and if then they did a it it would be comparable to just doing a regular episode of like no grandpa actually is senile and we need to deal with like real senile it's like well that's a bummer like it's it's not well and also that they follow it up with barney going is this how you guys see me and everyone just points and laughs at him. And it's like, you're, it's telling you, like, you laughed at him too.

You're just as bad as his shitty friends who laugh and enjoy that he is. I mean, this also shows that like Barney has to fully extricate himself from this lifestyle. Like he can't, he actually shouldn't still be friends with Homer after this or any of the other guys. If you, if you want to look at this as a realistic situation uh but yes everybody's having a good laugh at barney oh i'm a disgrace disgracefully hilarious you passed out before we could even give you your presents i still got mine body i got you with no drug could do without morning after stationary and i got your helicopter flying lessons can you imagine this booze bag at the wheel of a whirlybird he'd be all look at me i'm a tanked up loser in a helicopter

uh anyway happy b-day punk'. That's just so mean. Yeah. Is all this helicopter joke stuff, helicopter lesson stuff, just like the joke is that you would not just get lessons. You would have to go to flight school. It's like helicopters we've learned in recent years, very dangerous things. Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah, I guess.

I think it's at least a novel thing to think up of like what would force barney to be sober like what like they could have given him scuba diving lessons and they'd be and it would probably work the same but well except it wouldn't they'd have to it'd have to lead to a heroic thing at the end that's different if it was scuba diving lessons but i i don't know how easy it is to take helicopter lessons. I have heard stories of like, oh, yeah, you can just pay to be a co-pilot or whatever, like with an actual flyer. But I mean, Barney, I think in this episode gets to fly a helicopter much faster than most people get. It's true. Yeah, it could have been, you know, just like the joke could have been like, here's some heart surgery lessons, you you know just like what's the worst thing that you could give to a drunk but helicopter leads to a more filmable

uh conclusion i guess and uh then barney comes to a realization in this next clip hey hey where you going i'll show you i'm gonna take these helicopter lessons wait a minute barney you gotta be sober to I mean, it's not like driving a car. Then I'm gonna quit drinking. No, I mean it. You won't see me here again. Ever. Wait, that ain't funny.

He's my best customer. Well, the handwriting's on the wall. To stay afloat this bar is gonna have to go queer you mean it's not oh wrong again gay guy to springfield i i forgot that it said that gay joke yeah well we know there's a lesbian bar in springfield that's true yeah it needs that one how can mo even uh compete with the anvil though i well yeah yeah that comes back in this episode actually the return of roscoe yeah but uh but i'd also uh dan plays a lot of gay characters i had forgotten i didn't you uh i guess it's old when this episode comes out but bob you just shared a really good video about married with children that uh reminded me of dan castellaneta's appearance on that he plays a gay man yeah Peggy is cheating on his husband

yeah with his uh Tracy Ullman uh fictional husband Sam McMurray yeah that's like maybe too the stuff about him having writing with his wife maybe that was a surprise to some people who had seen Dan play gay so many times like and earnestly too not like as just a well this was him playing a very extreme stereotype but in that episode of married with children there's no like affectation or anything yeah he's supposed to be a regular guy that i was like wait you're a gay and a regular human i remember the tracy oldman sketches i don't remember the appearance on uh married with children but i think the tracy oldman was one of the first times I saw like gay characters on TV. Yeah, it was the first for me, too.

And the joke about them is, is that they just have regular married couple arguments between them like that. That it isn't really jokes about are gay people weird. It's more about the normalcy of their situation. Yeah. And yeah, I also think Homer saying it's not like driving a car which again it's like these are cries for help from over there uh but if i may complain about continuity here when mo says barney's his best customer i don't feel that the history of the show supports that i i thought it's more often that barney is like a loser with no money who has to like get other people to buy

him liquor like the for example the the Mary Poppins parody. It's him in the gutter begging for money to get more alcohol. I will bring up the fact that that is a song sung by Sherry Bobbins. So she's creating a scenario about the booze hound. And they always lie to you through song. Exactly. I hate that. Exactly.

Sherry Bobbins is no better than a poo. Well, all right, then. I guess, I mean, there's no other. Barney must pay him, actually, a bunch of money now. I take that back because in 22 short films about Springfield, there's the joke that Mo says he has calculated Barney's bar tab at NASA, but it is to such an extreme amount that it's not actually real. It tricks Barney to handing him two thousand dollars and mo's like oh yeah i'll take that showing that it was a scam so actually barney does give him lots of money we just don't know where the money comes from yeah well hey he's got

all those ears on his back for a reason it's all that medical testing you're right uh but okay i take it back barney could be his best customer uh comes back from commercial break and barney's already cleaned up his act he's tucked in his shirt he has somewhat cleaned up his filthy apartment comb back his hair uh he still has the quivery lip and teeth sticking out so not everything's better but uh and i i really like the drawing of him looking through those empty bottles there i think these moments feel like neil affleck the director getting through his own experience of getting sober into the character of barney especially his looking through like just tossing out all these bottles and we haven't seen his apartment that often in the show and it's moved location since then but it's not quite as messy as the last time we saw it like when we saw it in season one it was just like a where's waldo picture it was so cluttered and

full of crap and uh but he'd never lived above mo before this one either but great joke though great joke i love he says we that's actually that's extra funny to me realizes he can't do it he's already jonesing for it and we him asking homer for help does it's a good gag of like homer is a terrible sober buddy you should never ask him for help you need you should get an actual sponsor not your drunk friend his first step is to truly enjoy a beer in front of barney and i think on the commentary uh devil kusta she brings up this was partially inspired by a scene that stuck with her for its tragedy of that homer homer's the one who got barney his first beer and turned him into a drunk

and in the when he was going to go to harvard like barney was on track to be a harvard uh valedictorian even until he got drunk i want to bring up something from his house that i forgot about which is he takes off a framed picture from in front of duff that says thank you barney and i feel like that's a great piece of merch like somebody needs to make that as a framed picture you can put in your house oh that is good yeah i'd want that that i would want i'd hang that right next to the bart holding up the word balloon to homer that says i smell exactly it could be a pair uh but yeah the so homer decides he's gonna help barney and that's when they head over to aa which is instead triple a uh which yeah that's a joke yeah our third mention of east st louis yeah you're

right we had just heard an east st louis reference again in missionary impossible which is all because they made fun of east st louis in they saved lisa's brain in season 10 which led to infuriating the city of east st louis so then they decided to mention it two more times yeah i don't know at this point it seems like there's a bit of a racial context to it too you know what it struck me as odd hearing it in this episode yeah i mean um uh then also that the the writer of that episode defended it of like it's a crack-ridden slum was what he said in the news i'm like wow that's yeah yeah yep yep problematic well and then we head over to aa and we meet many characters oh yeah drinking problems in the past i'm glad they put in uh sue sin from scenes from the class struggle in springfield she

definitely had a drinking problem and kurt granhouten had before that too but i know there's one that you've been waiting to see this uh like more of the quiet alcoholism of a certain character throughout the series is is here in this group uh mrs hibbert she's just sitting there you know what i didn't write that down but yeah that she this is uh bernice i think yeah she got a uh an act break in the uh the homer versus the 18th amendment that's like the act break is her passed out in the chair when they find out that its prohibition is installed yeah i think i think that's the only she drinks too much joke in the show but yeah it's uh it was funny seeing her there i'm glad

somebody remembered she has a drinking problem i don't i don't think kent has a drinking problem more than any other celebrity like honestly they it should have if i could replace one character in there i would replace kent with melvin van horn because he got whacked out on Wowie sauce. For a second, I thought the two big guys in there were gyro and another guy from American gladiator, but they're just there to beat up gills. So I think they're just large men,

general. They're too tough. Hired guns. I wonder if they, if those guys, once they gave up alcohol, their new addiction was bodybuilding and that's why they're so huge. Uh,

but yes, uh, Homer and Barney head to AA. Welcome back Homer. alcohol their new addiction was bodybuilding and that's why they're so huge uh but yes uh homer and barney head to aa welcome back homer i see you finally hit rock bottom not a chance i can sink way lower i just came to help my friend barney we all know why we're here don't we to keep ourselves sober and to network so let's get started well after I lost my third job in two days, old Gil was in a pit of despair. And that's when you realized you were an alcoholic.

Oh, no, I never touch the stuff. But you don't have to be drunk to know the value of Amway. Now, this is used crankcase oil, which you ladies know is murder to clean up, you know. And company's coming. Ah, you're doing this at the worst possible time oh your fingers in my eye that's a good i i like you that fingers your fingers in my eye that's a good random thing for for dan to add in there i i still don't really know what amway does

other than being very rich uh amway is a big giant uh multi-level marketing scam in which you sell your friends things they can buy in stores but for more money okay I how I I did look that up and like they still haven't been found like it proven in a court of law to be a scam like they're still and also they they gave us Betsy DeVos like she's oh I figured like one of the Trump people was an Amway person because you got you like your my pillow weirdos and every kind of scam people are running i figured an amway person would be there oh yeah i had i think an uncle who got into it uh at one point and was like trying to sell our family like detergent and things and you know they might make a fine product i think that's how they get away with it like their products are are fine but like then it's never about buying the products about getting

you to sell for them you know which is like any pyramid scheme does and so eventually i think my parents were like hey we love you just don't bother us with this stuff anymore i i somehow i the wikipedia said in 2018 they made 8.8 billion dollars like that's that's a big amway is i think they own they own some stadium i look i'm not a sports guy but they own some some places called the amway is i think they own they own some stadium i look i'm not a sports guy but they own some some place is called the amway center i know that i also love that gill's not even there he's just there to sell stuff he never drinks and uh and they also they make they they say it's based on real life of like you go if you go to aa or narconon at in hollywood you do some people do just network oh it's a parade of stars even though it's supposed to be anonymous but i guess if you're you know a movie star and you're

there how anonymous can you be i have so many friends who are aa guys now i think maybe it's just my age where people went through their phase and but i'm not a drinker no one in my family drinks and uh so i've whenever i go to bars it has to have something interesting to do in it like even if it's like one of those like mega game like uh erotic photo hunt or you know the game where you put the hook on the the ring on the hook or something like i hate that game but if you're not drinking you gotta have something to do i mean what else are you going to do? Talk to people?

But so now I think that's why I have a lot of friends who are AA because they bring over a lot of kombucha or iced coffee, and we play board games and stuff like that. So AA people, good people. You know, I think the last time I drank in a bar was watching your show at SF Sketchfest. Probably maybe the same for me. I mean, I'm at the point of quarantine six months in now. Just like I kind of miss going to a bar, staring at my phone and hoping no one talks to me.

That's an experience I greatly miss. Phones have changed it. Yeah. Now you can do anything on your phone. You know, I think seeing the X-rated found footage fest stuff was like aversion therapy for me now. I don't want to drink a screwdriver ever again. Yeah, you're going to have a negative connotation with any alcohol now. When I taste vodka and orange juice in my mouth, I just think of watching wound videos or a live burn.

Well, you can thank us later uh but yeah then homer you know makes a very corny joke about uh taking 12 steps to a plate of cookies which is at least funny that they like toss him out of the church like yeah the smash cut to him getting out of a bush is uh very funny and it shows that it's he's outside of the church so it is the classic like aa is done in a church basement kind of gag too though that sugar cookie specific uh i again i've never attended an a meeting but the jokes i've heard in a meetings is stale donuts not sugar cookies or what was it in in i think it was donuts that they eat in fight club when uh ed norton's character goes to i think so yeah to it yeah that's what that's what i think probably all these a jokes i was like well i watched fight club so that must be what a is

yeah i've seen it in so many shows that i just i always think of steve earl being the like the a leader and then having one of those coffee machines with styrofoam coffee and cups and everybody takes a break and smokes, like kind of chain smoke cigarettes after the meeting. But yes, it now comes to the B-plot of the episode, which is Bart and Lisa hearing about a contest. Hurt everyone. Did Gaga just say hurt everyone? Gaga, cute name.

The Springfield phone book needs a new cover. It does? Send us your snapshots, and if we select yours, you win a fabulous mystery prize. Cute name. The Springfield phone book needs a new cover. It does? Send us your snapshots, and if we select yours, you win a fabulous mystery prize. To enter, send your film to this address. Too quick? Try again. Did you get it?

Here it is. Coming in from the left. Don't delay. Do it today. You think we should enter? Well, it shouldn't be too hard to beat the old photo. It's Mr. Burns on the cover, tending his fingers. Does that mean that he owned the phone company then with that one?

Yeah, I guess he owns more than one utility. But yeah, these things are real. And the people are still doing like your photo on the cover of the phone book things in 2020. Wow. Like you take a picture of something in the town, you send it in, and that becomes the picture on the phone book. Yeah. I don't think I've gotten a phone book. I had my old apartment that I lived in until the end of 2017. I would still get the yearly phone book, and I'd be like, wow, still doing it, huh?

But these days, since I moved, this place, if it gets phone books, I never see them. Yeah, I haven't gotten one in years. And when I got one, I thought of the Mitch Hedbird joke about getting a pamphlet like here you throw this away yeah this whole uh b plot seems like something out of a dennis the menace episode it's very quaint like kids trying to get their photo on the cover of a phone book which i feel like even in 2000 people weren't really using phone books that much. Well, you're right. This script as written would be in Dennis the Menace. It's exactly the same.

And that hurt everyone thing is extra weird to me because like, okay, let's not fully go into it because we already talked about it before. But Jerry Falwell Sr., not the sexy junior Jerry Falwell, Jerry Falwellwell senior in 1999 was saying that Teletubbies was making kids gay including subliminal messages was one of the things he said about it and so I wonder if because the lip syncs way off on that hurt everyone thing and it just something doesn't feel right about it to me i wonder if originally the character said like kiss boys or be gay or whatever and then they changed it to hurt everyone i i don't know it just doesn't something feels off about that to me it's a weird joke it's also kind of a family guy joke it's pretty low-hanging fruit like what if the teletubbies were naughty like just like then

plus they just did they just did like two other teletubbies jokes before this be two or three they had homer say i'm tinky winky the teletubby and i'm all man despite what you heard and then homer runs away from teletubby shooting lasers at him in missionary impossible three episodes earlier maybe two in one season is enough teletubbies jokes someone had a new kid and was pissed off at Teletubbies. But yeah, you're right. It is a bit Family Guy-y, which is the worst thing a Simpsons episode could be, I think. I also like when you pause the address that it has a P.O. box, a room, and an attention you have to add to it, too. So there's so many ways you can get wrong the thing that's appearing on TV.

Part of the contest is actually writing down the address and time. I think they must have been the only ones who got the address down, and that's why they end up winning in the end. And they head over to the memories closet, which is much bigger than it was in the season nine episode, Lisa the Skeptic. I guess, did we ever go fully into it in that episode? No, Homer just puts a thing. He puts it outside of it and then grabs

the billy beer uh but this time it we fully walk into it and uh there's honestly too many to know but one of the ones i i really noticed was the motorcycle is there that was just from like four episodes ago and it made me realize like oh yeah homer still has a motorcycle at the end of that episode and it never comes back he won that motorcycle the deepest cut i could find was um bart sombrero from crusty gets busted it doesn't say mexico in that episode it does in this one though but that's i think that's where it came from either that or it came from the the reel before the credits of uh camp crusty when they go to tijuana but in that case the sombrero is not this a straw color so yeah i you know man we were both playing find the sombrero thing i remembered one other time bart wore a sombrero but it didn't say mexico

on it and it wasn't frayed either and that was when patty and selma are showing off their slideshow from their trip to mexico that's crusty gets busted oh that okay my bad sorry okay well i also like seeing spiffy cleaner there that was was my favorite deep cut, which they didn't even... Homer doesn't buy in that episode, but I guess he bought it some other time. And if you don't remember, Spiffy was the cleaner that would clean the headstone of Edgar Allen Poe. Oh, right. And also, there's a cut from Nero's Palace the uh from viva ned flanders their vegas trip

episode i that one i pulled up like oh that's the exact one i think for some of the more recent ones the animators are like just pull a prop out of the pack from a previous episode and draw it in there i noticed a pig in there that looked a lot like sir oinks's a lot from Homer Goes to College. But so I wondered if it might be stuffed. Like, you know, it's not alive. I couldn't place what that pig would be from. It's right next to like a lobster trap, too. But that's not where he kept Pinchy. So that's kind of out of nowhere.

Also, I don't know where they got a menorah from either, which I think is a joke. They stole Krusty's menorah from either which i think is a joke like why did he stole crusty's menorah a joke they do twice in the episode is bart forgets that they are doing a contest like he just in this case he starts dribbling the camera like a basketball and then lisa's like bart the contest like contest it's a weird joke the the bouncing camera uh it's uh very strange it makes like hannah barbara noises when it bounces yeah actually i guess it should more make like a clock sound or something there uh and then barney goes to take his tests and we see a brand new character who's going to teach him how to fly but he's talking to arnie pie the only like regular character who flies a helicopter in the series no dialogue from him oddly enough you'd

think that dan castellaneta would have wrote in another line for a character he talks as maybe in his original script he's like and so arnie pie it's teaching barney how to fly and then he just acts out the whole thing there uh but yes instead he gets uh barney starts taking his lessons from a very calm guy el Elvis played a chopper pilot one time. He made so many darn mistakes. We were just laughing at him. Great singer, though. Oh, absolutely.

You know who else I like is that Leo Sayre. Anyway, we're nice and level now. How'd you like to take the controls? You think I'm ready? Sure, I do. One sec. Testing black box one two she's all yours friend

hey i think i'm getting it yes that's great now let's just pull ourselves out of this tailspin here oh i'm sorry about that it's okay that's what the diapers are for really good laugh on that uh yeah i i it just i don't i like the realism of it it's like oh sorry about that that's all you can say after after you like avoid your bowels in front of another person. And after Barney barely gets the thing functioning as intended, he's like, let's try the hardest thing ever. Yeah. Let's challenge you with that. I love this helicopter pilot so much.

This character, just his matter of fact, this is horrible taste in music. And, you know, just like, oh, absolutely. Just kind of always talks in that same register. I just, for some reason, it's kind of a nothing character. But it's Hank, right? Yeah. Just really funny and on the nose. It's great.

He's okay to die and he's ready. Yeah. I love how he's calm no matter what situation. And did you look up what movie they're talking about with Elvisvis there oh no no it is a real movie or at least he might have even been a helicopter pilot in more than one movie but i believe they're referring to 1966 paradise hawaiian style oh i figured it'd be hawaiian in some way uh in which elvis plays a helicopter pilot name get this rick richards is the name of the pilot i i'm not going to steal the joke from sharpling and worcester on the best show they they have a whole run of jokes about how elvis character names are so weird that make you go it's it's like the arnold schwarzenegger names

for characters of its day or you're you know this is elvis they should just name the character elvis but they're like rick richards that's that's a name yeah zane would like a jackie chan whenever he plays a character not named jackie you're just asking yourself why aren't you just calling him jackie jackie chan up there did you guys look up leo sayer at all uh you know not no what's his deal 70s late rock musician and uh you will probably recognize his hit was 77 hit when i need you it's it's pretty sickening but uh i just like that the pilot likes him that he he likes that and elvis that does that is weird yeah also uh you make me feel like dancing oh and hummer and barney sang that in the 70s that's their favorite song yeah oh you know what

then barney must love hearing this guy's a leo sayer fan uh we have a quick cutaway to the kids trying to take a cute picture of uh birds and then there's a joke about mcbain being fat which he says he's doing for a fat secret agent thing i think that's a reference to a fairly new movie cop land where stallone famously gained like 50 pounds to be get this a fat cop. You're right. You are right. Thank you for bringing up the I was like, was this about how the close second thing of like every now and then you'll see a story of like Arnold Schwarzenegger is kind of husky at the beach. But you're totally right.

It's all about Copland. Now, you know, Stallone really thought he was going to get that Oscar for Gaining the Weight. He's like, all right, if I gain the weight and play a bad cop, I'll finally get that Oscar. Yeah, I did not get that reference at all in this. I was just kind of like, I thought, is the joke that that wouldn't be a good movie, that there's a fat secret agent? That too. I mean, I think he's just lying, but it was inspired by the idea of like a Schwarzenegger style figure gaining weight for a role.

Yeah, makes sense. Well, and also it's so ADR, so it was something else beforehand. The mouth movements are all wrong on Fat Secret Agent. And you know, I'm looking at pictures. He was so in shape in like 1996, like gaining 40 pounds. He just looks like a slightly bigger in shape guy. I heard Paul F. Tommpkins tell the same joke about where he made a similar observation when working with matt damon on a movie uh the

informant where for the movie matt damon gained a bunch of weight for him uh but paul f tompkins at the end of the movie finds out he's trying to start losing the weight and paul's like you you had to gain all that weight to look like a normal person like me yeah the cop land thing it reminds me too that like stallone he couldn't get that oscar even for doing the whole cancer thing with rocky and in creed yeah he couldn't get that oscar he probably i don't think he'll ever get it for acting i think he did get it for right and i and for best picture he did get that but anyway, then Homer and Barney are hanging out. Barney lands a helicopter on their front lawn to ask Homer to fly with him, which is very crazy.

And I forgot, too, that they have a quick little joke about Homer becoming the new Barney. Hey, Homer. No, no, no. Don't sit there. Take this seat right next to the tap. But that's Barney's seat. Are you trying to make me the new Barney? Hey, every bar needs a world-class drunk.

Someone who makes our alcoholism seem less raging. Well, forget it, guys. I am not Barney. See, Homer? It's not so bad. Now, hey. You danced for hours just because they told you to. If I didn't, I'd lose their respect. That's that Homer so happily gets bullied by his friends. He just takes it.

It's funny to me. I mean, sometimes at a point in your life, you need that kind of person around to keep your own habits in check. It's just like we've all known that person where it's just like you're wondering, like, am I drinking too much? And then you go hang out with them and it's like 1030 and there's already like a half drunk beer in their hand. You're like, probably not. I think I'm OK. Yeah. I mean, it's a it's a sign of a bad friend group that you hope, like, this is something you grow out of. But definitely in, like, my 20s, I had, you know, well, friends who would say, well, I'm not as bad as that guy, so I'm not so bad.

Or I'm not that. We all counted on each other to, like, cover for our own problems just to be like, well, I'm not bad as that guy. Yeah, it's nice to have one friend who's a cautionary tale yeah yeah uh that well that homer so easily becomes the new barney i think they had these conversations in advance just like if we ever lose barney home we all agree homer is the next in line right though those bar flies should be the next really i think so yeah which they were at the party they're in the party video i was i i forgot to mention that that i was like wow barge let the bar flies into her house i think one of them is named larry yeah and the one who calls me bill is the other one uh and so homer

is then invited on a helicopter ride with barney uh which then leads to again another like good observation of how it can feel like spending time when someone changes their life and then they spend time with an old friend and who liked the old negative patterns that were broken from that life and uh i it's a realistic tension between barney and Homer here. I think about all the time I wasted at Morals. Wasted? What about our steering contest? And the way we always knew what football coaches should have done. Remember the day we jumped that census guy and stole his clicker?

Those are all priceless memories, Homer, but I don't want to do that stuff anymore. Oh, so you're better than me, is that it? I didn't say that! Take me home. Oh, don't be that way, Homer Is that it? I didn't say that. Take me home. Oh, don't be that way, Homer. I'll scream. Okay, okay. I gotta say, I've read more newspapers while urinating in the past 20 years than while not urinating.

And in the wildly better country of Canada, I've been to several bars in which there was just literally an iPad screen in front of you at the urinal. Oh, man. I've never seen these things. We live in the bad country, so you've got to go up there to get that. And health care. I don't know if women know about the sports pages. If you go into a sports bar and they're just hanging there so you can read while you pee and update on the scores.

And I don't know if there's an equivalent like the inside of stalls for women on the inside of the door. I don't know. I don't know. I've more experienced like funny cartoons in front of the urinals, though. Though maybe that's me self-selecting. You don't want to laugh. You're going to just be spraying everywhere. And Marmaduke gets into another scrape.

But it seems in England, we were on tour there last year, actually, right before this pandemic happened. We were on tour in England, and they just have a lot of peeing troughs in the men's room of disgusting bars there. But without fail, they advertise the food that the bar serves above the urinal while you're in the most disgusting urinal you've ever seen. I could go for some chips yeah exactly yeah it's always like some kind of pork product or some some sort of like savory pie that you can order at the bar while you're peeing into a gross trough yeah you know maybe i i guess you know the pipes all go to the same place anyway but the troughs if on the rare times i've seen them in america i'm just like i really intermingling with other p i just don't like ideally i need the divider like a

urinal is preferred but divider i'm in heaven it's like i got my own little space uh yeah the this is the pains of being a man but i also also, I really love Homer's stance on like the way we always knew what football coaches should have done. That's my favorite of his observations. Though Homer's I'll scream moment, that edges up to a type of joke I'm not the biggest fan of. But it's that Homer, but again, very realistic that like if you're still drinking and you're trying to stay friends with somebody who got sober you are living very different lives now and you're just going to find uh problems with getting back into your old pattern yeah and not even with drinking you could be in either role like either your life is going bad and you're kind of resentful your friends are

doing better or you're doing well and you kind of have to tiptoe around that yeah if you're around someone who isn't doing so well and but you want to talk about like the things you're doing but you're just like oh i don't want to hurt your feelings yeah it's uh yeah the it these are the pains of aging into long-term relations or long-term friendships with people yeah but uh i mean also too if you i i know from experience if you're somebody who's like i don't want to drink at a party or you just turn down a drink everybody treats you as like a monster you're just like what why why don't you like i know how a vegetarian feels at things oh yeah yeah so homer runs home and i do like that the commercial break joke is the marge walks away from homer just sobbing yeah

it's good she not rarely do they get to make jokes about Marge being insensitive. I like that joke. But it comes back from commercial break. Marge is reading Meddling Today in bed, which it's a good joke. I wish she was reading Sponge and Vacuum. I like Meddling Today comes with too much negative energy to it. The 2000 Sponge issue is out.

I think the unspoken thing in homer's anger is that i think homer's saying oh so you think you're better than me is the closest they come to acknowledging it but uh homer i think is mad that bernie's sobriety makes homer feel like a drunk which but i i know if they approach that more than it's like okay what do you do about homer if you establish that he does have a drinking problem, too? Then Marge has a great sad line of saying she hasn't had a friend in years. And then also she considers Homer her friend, and then Marge reveals he does not consider her a friend. Yes, that's especially cruel.

And Homer then also saying he hates Lenny and carl but then doesn't want them to know that also works well like well yeah you should hate them they're torturing you for being the new drunk in the bar and i think for some younger people the joke about oj and ac seems like a non-sequitur about orange juice and uh air conditioning yes uh the the falcon and the snowman joke was lost to me until now when I actually looked it up. Had to look that up too. Yeah, it was a movie from 85 about two Americans that sold like government secrets to the Soviet Union based on a true story. 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. No one remembers it, butger ebert gave it four stars so there you go it starts sean penn you know it's probably worth watching i bet it's all right yeah i remember the title and nothing else and i mean though honestly i had to look up i knew oj was referring to orenthal james simpson but i forgot that ac is al cowling oh man he was like

he was the driver my man yes yeah that's well that's all we know him we know him from for the bronco chase even though like he drove the hell out of that bronco before that he played football with oj simpson for 20 years like they were on the same high school team together that's how long of a friendship they had uh a oj and ac but yeah now now everybody just knows them for the bronco pro follow on twitter oj simpson hilarious funny guy i'm sure he's got so much to say now i'm gonna get a cameo for him uh advertising talking simpsons oh god no it's a one from simpson to another i love this this podcast is a killer not like me oh god oh god uh but then it cuts back to

bart and lisa they have posed a bunch of dogs playing poker together i think it takes a little long but it is a funny visual game the bulldog forgot to auntie made me laugh though nelson should have won with this stolen photo you know or uh i mean bart and lisa shouldn't give up they should be like let's see if we can submit ours first and prove we're first in this. Don't give up there. Well, meanwhile, Bart just wants to dump spaghetti on Peggy's head, which it's funny. It's the funnier of the two. Bart forgets there's a contest.

Yeah, I like that. Then it cuts to Homer shopping in the Quickie Mart and we get a joke about Alestra potato chips. Anybody remember these? Yes. we get a joke about alestra potato chips everybody remember these yes uh like i think it was like a sort of a fat substitute kind of thing but i think what happened was and i have like some research on this is that it was not actually making people sick it was the fact that people thought they could eat more because there was less fat and those habits were making them shit themselves oh really yes okay man yeah i remember there was a brand called wow or i think it was like ladies wow doritos wow and uh yeah the i

remember the phrase anal leakage coming out and as soon as people heard that i think that was the end of olestra yeah they needed a warning label on their chips until 2003 and after that the f the FDA did a study and was like, you don't need a warning label anymore. And I can read you like a little quote about this. The FDA cited a six-week study of more than 3,000 people showing that the Olestra loose stools abdominal cramps or any other gi symptom compared to subjects eating an equivalent amount of regular potato chips wow so it was it was just that they were eating too many potato chips in general and it was fucking up their guts like well i'm losing by not eating all these chips so yeah i guess uh nick you're right once you just say, once the anal leakage stuff hits the news headlines, whether it's true or not, you're done for as a potato chip.

It did make your stools fattier, I will say, but, uh, I don't know if that really matters. I, I feel like I had some, I ate a, I only ate a couple bags of these, uh, regularly and when they were around until the news started coming out. And in my memory, I feel like I had some bad toilet experiences, but it honestly could have just been fully psychosomatic. Or I mean, also, I was a 17-year-old kid who ate any garbage in his face. So it probably was unfair to blame the Olester potato chips. And now it's baked Lay's that are the big deal.

Anyway, they've replaced those as the low-fat chips. i could go for a bag of those those are my airport staple bag of baked lays they're not healthy but they make you think they are exactly that's what i'm looking for uh also uh 13 months after this is when futurama would would do their olestra joke oh what was that they're walking by a dump and they're digging up old stuff. Fry says, hey, a bag of Olestra potato chips. Bender eats one and literally shits a brick. But Homer wants his to do spring cleaning, which just get one of your favorite pina colones, Homer.

So Homer and Barney then run into each other homer's buying beer and he's feeling defensive about buying it when he runs into barney uh then he's leaving without paying and apu really should not let homer back into the store after he steals that he he sent march to prison for doing less it's true well homer's uh finally his wish is coming true to rob the quickie mart without a gun. I mean, Homer walking out with two six-packs does seem like a lot of beer for one evening for just Homer, since Marge clearly doesn't drink anything. But yes, Bart and Lisa, meanwhile, are going exploring, taking photographs, and starting fires.

Boy, you can see everything from Mount Springfield, the squid port, the old monorail, the Play-Doh factory. Crescent Moon! Crescent Moon! Come on, Springfield. Sparkle for me, baby. That's it. Heads up! Ow! Barge, that's hot. I said heads up. It's good Big Brother talk of, I said heads up. Ow! Bart, that's hot. I said heads up.

It's good big brother talk of, I said heads up. Yeah, and this episode is 2-2020. We've got helicopter crashes and forest fires happening here in this episode. But yeah, Bart should be punished. Yeah, they started a fire. You would think at least responsible Lisa would be like, don't litter, Bart. But I guess she's still just in pain from getting like a flash bulb in her head I mean at least it's a clever old-timey way to start a fire of like the they they use an old camera that where the flash is a bulb you have to replace every single time

and like what 1940s style like it's it's a very ancient camera and the uh also the the shot of the whole city i really like that like i think the squid port she mentioned that's the boardwalk from uh the lisa babysitter episode yeah and uh and just hearing them wink back at the monorail i feel like this is their first reference looking backwards at the monorail since then i think not counting monorail appearing as a in a clip show i think this is the right uh and what it was like uh last year the year before in an episode they in a new episode they revitalized the monorail as like a new downtown area and they even had a a statue in tribute to leonard nimoy which that was the weirdest part it's like oh so everyone's the same age but you recognize that leonard nimoy has died since the last time only only celebrities age in

the simpsons universe uh and the play-doh factory joke's okay but i like that all the gay steel meal steel mill guys are there and it's the same buzzer from the steel mill as well yes yeah you're right yeah that sort of saved the joke for me because, it was feeling a little family guy with the non-sequitur there. But that sort of breaks reality. But then when you saw the steel mill guys, that sort of made it. Yeah, actually, that Play-Doh factory joke would be exactly the same in Family Guy. Like, unchanged. Yeah.

I guess it's also poetic justice that Bart and Lisa almost die in a fire they started, I suppose. But yeah, the casual nature with which they treat forest fires in here does strike me as somebody living in California now where fires are very serious and happen every year at least and ruin everything. But in here they kind of treat it as like, oh, it's a thing that threatens two kids. And once it's over, once they're out, they they're fine just stays on that mountain it's fine yes we come back to the bar and uh as homer is trying his best to befriend his bullies uh barney returns lenny carl i know a lot of people bad mouth you and focus on how you suck but not me to me you're true Oh, thanks big guy now dance Rummy

I am oh well if it isn't little miss I'm not wasting my life anymore Which he is oh I've come here to make amends for my disgraceful behavior over the last 20 years No, that's okay bond. No, it's not okay. I broke bar stools, befouled your broom closet, and made sweet love to your pool table, which I then befouled. Well, that would explain the drop-off in play. This is a Channel 6 news bulletin.

Fire has broken out on Mount Springfield, trapping two youngsters and their camera. Oh, no, that's Bart and Lisa. Unfortunately, fire trucks are unavailable to fight the blaze as they're all being used to film the new Burt Reynolds movie, Fireball and Mudflap. I caught up with Burt on the set. I at least like the transition that Kent's talking about a natural disaster

and then goes, like, I caught up with him on the set. It's got a nice segue. And I guess Dan and Deb wrote Burt Reynolds into the original script. script he was going to be uh like at aa to research for a role so maybe they thought in 92 or whatever they could get burt reynolds obviously this is hank's area and i like how fireball and mudflap aren't two characters it's his full name that's right i play fireball mudflap you can see a bit of the poster too behind him in the uh press junket thing that brockman is at it's uh it implies that burt reynolds in his you know a career resurgence post boogie nights is like you know what i'm gonna make another of the 70s style films i got to make uh but in the year

2000 uh but the that befouling of the pool table that I I like that because it's okay so he just says he befouled the broom closet meaning he I guess defecated in it but when he says he he makes sure to say that he can make sweet love to a pool table and then to be foul it the making sweet love is not befouling the table so which also makes it sound like he rubbed his genitals on it and then defecated i think he ejaculated okay oh all right so the befouling is the ejection in one of the several holes yeah not not to get too crude here but uh just to paint a picture for everybody at home it's a it's a let's let's dig into this let's figure i i i saw it the same way you did henry where he he ejaculated and then defecated in one of the pockets but who knows that'll be

one of those mysteries you'll have to you ever get dan on the show that explains the drop off in play uh that's the first question we asked dan castellaneta how was it befouled and uh but uh but it's also it's a good it is a good uh story excuse to get barney back into the bar so him and homer would be forced together in a in a crisis like having having barney do the 12-step apology thing i you know i don't think i've ever gotten a 12-step apology to from somebody because i don't i'm owed several i i think of my friends who went into aa from uh my early 20s i moved away before they all did that so i missed out on it i was out of town they they honestly should have used my space in 2005 to do the apology then i'm old one there's probably some sort of e-card for that, right? 12-step e-card. So yes, Homer and Barney, they're going to go save the kids because there's no firefighters to do it.

And Homer saying like, will you accept the charges? It's a little too earnest to me. I feel like there's like one extra joke missing there, you know, of just him picking up a phone and saying, will you accept the charges? But yeah, then I also... I think the joke is that it's calling collect. I see. Yeah, okay.

Yeah, it kind of fell flat for me too. But yeah, I know what you're saying. It felt like there should be a button on top of that button. At least do a 1-800-COLLECT reference. It's the year 2000. Just go for it. What's Chris Rock doing?

I only trust David Arquette if he tells me to use a number i'm doing that one somehow barney gets the chopper without the instructor and is just flying alone which i don't i did he steal that helicopter does barney somehow own a helicopter now that's how successful he is now just just comb your hair and tuck in your shirt people it can happen to you there seems to this makes some sense if you imagine that Barney is like independently wealthy somehow or like he's a trust fund kid or something. Because otherwise he never has a job or anything. But yeah, so they fly off, but Barney is too nervous to do the flying.

And he's, you know, the stress is making him tempted again. And Homer does a really heroic thing for his good buddy. Beer! That's what I need! Bernie! No! Don't! Yes! I need it! No! You've got to be sober for this! Give me that! It's warm. You can't drink them all!

Oh yes I can! Give me that! Oh, yes, I can Won't let you give up now when you work so hard to be the greatest World I love you. It's the loose touch after graduation You brave man. You took six silver bullets for me. Stay away from my wife. Looks like it's up to me. Homer becomes like every kind of drunk in this scene too.

Yeah. You know, we've seen a lot of good drunk voice acting by Keslanetta, but he does a really good job here too, with a lot of good drunk voice acting by Keslanetta, but he does a really good job here, too, with a lot of good, funny, drunken non-sequiturs, to say. And that silver bullets thing, that's about how, apparently, it's that Coors in 1959 was the first American company to use aluminum cans, which made their cans silver, which was different from everybody else at the time. Cardboard.

Didn't last long on the shelves. So that's why they specifically got called silver bullets. But even in 2000, I think calling alcohol silver bullets was an old reference. I think this is, I mean, I didn't know. I never heard a friend refer to them as silver bullets. Just Coors in general. We're all very brand focused in America. You just call something by its name.

I only drink craft IPAs with ridiculous names. So I will not go New York Silver Bullet. I'm sorry. I do remember, though, they had hats, Coors hats, like the Mesh Trucker style caps back in the day that had werewolf ears on them because of the whole Silver Bullet branding. So it apparently took off enough to have merch at one point.

Those are cool. I want this trucker hat with werewolf ears. It feels weird, though. It's like I'm going to take a bullet to my mouth. Delicious. Oh, now I'm banned from Twitter. You know who I think should drink course? The president.

He'd love it. He'd love it. He'd love it. He needs a silver bullet right now. But anyway, I do think it's, so this is the turn in the episode that I think in a darker episode or another episode of Simpsons or in South Park even at the time, I think they would have just done the joke of, you know what? Sometimes you do need beer to level out yourself. Or actually the beer made him better at it like they do some sort of joke against expectations there that's also like kind of like we're being naughty saying it's good to drink but i i kind of like instead they went with the emotional thing of like you know what homer is just a good friend who won't let his friend relapse when he's

having a moment of of problems like i i like that it's it's it's sweet that and the sweetness is balanced out by homer doing a bunch of great funny drunk lines it's also an opportunity to drink for free yeah that's true it's he's this is the second time this episode he's stolen duff it's a good yeah i like the resolution to it. I'm always a little bit, whenever The Simpsons becomes kind of an action show, like I'm thinking about the runaway train with the baboons and all. I just, I don't know that it does it that well

because you have to be so heavy on plot then that you can't have the funniest parts of The Simpsons, you know, which are times where there's funny asides or character moments and things like that so it dealt it i think it sways a little bit too much into the action set piece resolution for for my taste but it's still getting home homer having to heroically get drunk is a good way to end it i i guess the monorail episode handled that action joke balance a bit better. Yeah. But I do like there's some fun animation of like as they approach the fire rising up and like the Bart and Lisa climbing and Bart saying like, I'm pretty sure fire can't climb trees.

And then a very like random joke of the bear climbing the ladder. Yeah. very like random joke of the bear climbing the ladder yeah which i that feels like a network note of show the bear lands safely and does not fall into fire and burn to death or just like break its spine on the ground and die i was seeing the exact same thing yeah network note on that one it's just like earlier this season where that goat killed all the tobacco executives but they had to show that the goat lives in that uh in that other helicopter crash this season is just a helicopter crash season wait a minute uh well you know it's something after playing all those video games that have helicopter crashes in them

it's just like i i just noticed them too much and stuff it's just an easy thing of like i i remember seeing the movie suicide squad in theaters and every helicopter in that movie crashes there's four helicopters and they all explode because they just never they're just not safe they're supposed to look safe and then they blow up what is your experience with helicopters have either of you been up in one no never hey honestly too scared yeah and at this point no not gonna happen me too i was Yeah, and at this point, no. Not going to happen. Me too. I was going to do it at the Grand Canyon, but it's surprisingly expensive. And yeah, it just seems way too scary to me.

I have had those. I've had the temptation moments like that of walking down the strip in Las Vegas the few times I've been there and seeing the Grand Canyon tour thing. And you consider it for just a second but yeah i mean you know after the you know tragic passing of uh say kobe bryant and the other people who were in that helicopter it was just further reminder of the dangerousness of it plus you can't even have a conversation in there unless you have like a headset on it's all too loud i don't i don't need that noise i'd rather ride a donkey through uh the

grand now we're talking i feel like that would hurt my legs a lot though i don't know maybe maybe i'm against that as well i think uh but hey when will we ever go to las vegas again at this point uh never no uh but yeah so there is some it's at least some well done animation on the action of homer uh in a very like cartoony drunk way falling out of the helicopter and spinning around it and hanging by his leg uh he saves bart and lisa i think bart and lisa are very relaxed for being held by like one hand by a drunken upside down guy yeah yeah they should be more like please stop moving dad you don't know uh but yes bart and lisa are saved and homer uh this is my favorite line of the episode here too of homer you did it dad you can't prove i did it

no you saved our lives i could do a lot of things if i had some money now there's a picture. Kids! The new phone books are here and your picture's on the cover! Oh, cool! Let me see! Isn't that adorable? I guess some baby pictures were on that old roll of film. Aw, we'll be the laughingstock of the whole town. Well, at least we won the bike. Actually, I took the picture, so I gave my prize to the orphanage. What?

How could you? Just kidding. I would never do that. Apparently that just kidding line was added by Julieie at the table read and they thought it was so funny that they kept it in the episode so that is a good ad lib uh i i mean i also love that i loved in the commercial that you knew it was a bike the second they showed the mystery prize i gotta think bart and lisa destroy they just can't share that bike and it only causes them more problems but i mean first off why would the

phone book want to have a picture of a of a forest fire on their cover that seems like a bummer who'd want to see that uh but i now we're looking at children on the toilet come on yeah that's uh was just cute then uh but i i do like you know marge is actually right she says your pictures on the cover and it is a picture of them on the cover it's it's a fun word play also you notice that the the phone book mail was delivered by the woman that mo was photographing oh you're right holy crap nice detail i like that it all it all pays off uh that uh and uh also when when Bart and Lisa scream in reaction, it's a classic like big mouth, wavy lip kind of scream. You don't see as, I miss those old screams.

I thumbs up to Neil Affleck and his team for keeping those classic style screams in there. But yes, we come to the happy ending for Barney as he has not relapsed, but is the cure worse than the disease? Well, I'm glad we're friends again. Yeah. So what do you call this stuff?

A double tall mocha latte. It's not bad. Well, it ain't beer. Well, at least I got that monkey off my back. Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah. I got that monkey off my back. Nobody gets away from Moe. Nobody. You know, just a few years ago, Moe did say that ice blended mocha drinks were in

oh that's right he's ready but i'm just concerned about all the empty calories barney is consuming perhaps more than even beer with all those double mocha lattes that's right black coffee's where it's at this uh feels very 1999 uh mocha frappa chino latte. Though apparently it was slightly inspired by Dave Merkin, writer on the show, himself giving up alcohol and then being addicted to caffeine instead as a replacement. It's a healthy addiction, I tell you. Keeps you on edge, ready for things. Yeah, short temper, high blood pressure. I just need a reason to get out of bed in the morning, and my addiction is what it is.

It's like that first drop of coffee makes you know I'm alive. Yeah, it's funny how addictions, they transfer over. Yeah, coffee's probably a little healthier, or I know a lot of former addicts who are now not only running marathons, but super marathons and Iron Mans. And it's like, in a way that's more annoying than alcoholism to me oh that's irritating it's just yeah it's just irritating i get it you're healthy but you're still addicted to something and could rubbing my nose in it i feel like as

soon as i entered my 30s all these people around me were like entering triathlons and stuff like listen we're gonna die you can't stop it It's a hell of a toboggan ride. You know, I live a pretty caffeine-free life myself. It's the healthiest thing about me. I have improved my diet a little bit in the last few months, but just I don't like the taste of coffee. But I also don't like drinking the milkshake versions of it either. And, yeah, I just wake up in the morning. I'm like, hey, up in the morning i'm like

hey it's the morning all right like yeah i don't understand you people i know see i'm not i never acquired the coffee taster but let me ask you this bob how did you get into coffee was it through the sugarier drinks and then you transitioned to black coffee you know what it was actually just starting with black coffee because i was on a uh I was going to college in northeast Ohio and it was like freezing like it's just so cold in the winter and the campus is huge and you're outside for like 20 minutes walking between classes and like in every building is this little kiosk selling you hot liquid and that is how I got a taste for coffee and also I was like oh this will keep me awake as well and make me alert so I got to like coffee through that and

basically the only coffee I like is black coffee I don't like anything in it I think it's a will keep me awake as well and make me alert so i i got to like coffee through that and basically the only coffee i like is black coffee i don't like anything in it i think it's a sacrilege to like sully it with creams and sugars just black coffee for me but yeah it was just like hot it was like oh hot brown on a cold day yeah i would get uh i went with chai tea which was more palatable to me but also has three times the sugar if it's like a latte. So I do drink those occasionally. That's kind of my caffeine fix. And I didn't even know, like I probably would have

started drinking coffee earlier, but like occasionally I'd have a cup of coffee, like my parents were drinking, and I'd be like, oh, this is disgusting. But then I realized over time, like, oh no, they just drink disgusting coffee. Like every boomer has a can of like Folgers or Maxwell House, the most vile, barely coffee. Like every boomer has a can of like Folgers or Maxwell house, the most vile, it's barely coffee.

It's just gross. Maybe that's why I only associated coffee with that. And then once I had real coffee, I was like, yeah, I guess it's okay. But I, I will actually know the last time I think I ever drank coffee,

uh, was like four years ago when I was covering, uh, the New York comic Con for a website. I was like, oh, I need extra energy today. And three hours later after I just drank one mocha frappe latte, after drinking just one of those, I was shaking. I couldn't stop shaking my arms.

I was like, what's going on? I feel like I'm going to have a heart attack. Oh, I had one coffee. That was what happened. My friends who were in AA and come over for board game nights, it'll be like 9 o'clock at night, and they'll have two iced coffees, and they won't even be feeling any effect from it. It just doesn't have any effect, and it just keeps them awake a little bit,

but it doesn't make them shake, nothing like that. They've, I guess, acquired an immunity. I also another like one of those if you read it too realistically it's very dark homer having to have a flask of liquor to pour in beer uh coffee is like i cannot drink straight coffee homer simply can't do it like that's very dark yeah the secret flask is never a good sign and i do like i do like the ending with you know the evil mo i always like the unnecessary like you know mustache twirling or like when they zoom in on the koala's dead eye you know in the australian episode i don't know i always think that if if you can't find a great ending that's a nice little hook at the end and i do think it's

at least there it's their closest to resetting that they can do without having Barney be drunk anymore. Because he still burps. He still has some addiction problem. And because Mo now owns a thing that makes coffee, Barney will still be in the bar. But, I mean, that's why he fell off the wagon. He's still staying in the bar every day. Like, come on. I mean, like, most of the bars I go to or used to go to would always have like a pot of coffee brewing behind the bar usually for the

people that work there but i assume you could drink that if you asked for it like i need to sober up and then drive uh that's uh yeah it's which that doesn't actually no it doesn't no but it puts coffee on top of the alcohol in your stomach uh that uh but that's i mean that's also a very 1950s drunk way of thinking like get him some coffee put on a stomach uh that uh but that's i mean that's also a very 1950s drunk way of thinking like get him some coffee go down a pot uh that episode is interesting for a uh exploration of the character of barney and and having a somewhat realistic like borders on just like how alone again natural diddly i think bordered on being a very special episode about like grief but then was like nah we don't really

want to do that this is kind of that for barney of like okay is this actually a very special episode about the struggles of sobriety or is this crazy and funny like they they kind of have it both ways in the show which uh can lead to some off-kilter stuff but i guess the more i engage with this episode about sober barney it makes me feel retroactively bad a bit about laughing at him and also uh it makes me feel worse that he like falls off the wagon and they're just done with it they're like you know no he's drunk he's yeah we had uh three years of uh simpsons of sober party from here on out so like 18 months of our podcast yeah i mean what does that say it is though it's kind of like how you want itchy marge wanted itchy and scratchy to be less violent

and then everyone hated the violent the non-violent version so they immediately went back it's uh it's just funnier to have a drunk barney i guess they didn't follow their own advice based on the episode uh they they make a great comment on the commentary i think uh when they talk about how they had him go back and mike scully says like let that be a lesson to you kids you're more funny when you're drunk so just stay drunk it's true so nick thanks for being on the show with us please uh once again plug everything you're doing right now including the new documentary yeah the documentary is called a life on the farm um we're hoping to finish it and have it out next year and uh you can find all of our stuff at foundfootagefest.com

including our weekly youtube show called vcr party and hopefully we can see you guys touring again whenever that happens uh we want to tour as well by the way i i personally missed like four events uh in the past six months so uh it sucks for all of us live performers i know so in the meantime hopefully more outdoor shows and you know we'll hunker down this winter and be back in the spring well hopefully so hopefully but yeah i think it's always awesome to have you on here nick so thanks so much for coming back yeah guys it it's uh it's been a a glum year It's been glummy. But your podcast has really kept people like me going.

So thank you guys for continuing to do what you do as well. Aw, thanks. So thanks again to Nick Pruer of Found Footage Fest for being on the show. Check out Found Footage Fest and also check out the new documentary upcoming Life on the Farm. The Kickstarter for that has long been over at this point, but you can still check it out, watch the trailer, see what that's all about. But as for us, if you want to check out more of our stuff and get all these episodes one week ahead of time and ad-free, please go to patreon.com slash

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And the previous Talking Futurama episodes are all on the Patreon behind the $5 paywall at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. And there is so much other stuff happening behind that paywall. Too many things to list here, but we also have a ten dollar tier you sign up for that you get all the five dollar stuff but also one mega long podcast once a month for patrons of that level or higher and henry what is that why bob you're talking about the what a cartoon movie podcast on the what a cartoon podcast we talk about a different animated series each week. And for What a Cartoon Movie, we do the same thing for an animated feature film each month. We've covered films as diverse as Space Jam, The Black Cauldron, Akira, and right before this one, the Aladdin Return of Jafar sequel.

And this, well, actually, I guess in October we did a different one, but that hasn't been decided at the time of this recording. But the important thing to know is that you get all of that $5 stuff Bob just mentioned, and you get the What a Cartoon Movie back catalog in each month. A new one over 100 hours, two years worth of episodes are at your fingertips. If you sign up at the $10 level or increase your $5 pledge to $10 a month at 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 and my other podcast by the way is retronauts that is a classic gaming podcast about old video games you can find that wherever you find podcasts or go to patreon.com slash retronauts for two exclusive episodes every month henry how about you you should follow me henry gilbert on twitter at h-e-n-e-r-e-y-g i'm certain i'm saying some

stuff right now is the time you're listening to this you can stay in the loop there also you really should be following the official twitter account of this podcast at talk simpsons pod at talk simpsons pod that keeps you up to date whenever new things happen in our podcast. Whenever a new thing goes up on the free feed for this or what a cartoon, whenever stuff goes up on the Patreon, whenever we have a poll to pick the next thing we're going to do, we always tweet about that and other cool stuff

at TalkSimpsonsPod on Twitter. Thanks so much for joining us, folks. We'll see you next time for Kill the Alligator and Run, and we will see you then. We'll see you then. Farewell, my long neck friends.