Talking Simpsons - Talking Simpsons - Grade School Confidential With Max Scoville

Episode Date: November 28, 2018

Good gravy! This week we're joined by The Comedy Button's own Max Scoville, and he helps us talk about love and birthday parties in this week's podcast. This is one of the sweetest episodes of The Simpsons ever, and we chat all about oysters, wearing Armour Hot Dogs, and Henry & Bob get into a heated discussion of whether Skinner really is a virgin or not! All that and more on this week's podcast! Support this podcast and get dozens of bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! This podcast is brought to you by the streaming network VRV: home to cartoons, anime, and so much more! Visit VRV.co/WAC to sign up for your FREE 30-day trial and kick a little money back to your friends at the Talking Simpsons Network!

hey everybody right before the show wanted to let you know we have an update to our patreon a brand new monthly movie podcast is available now for ten dollar and up patrons at patreon.com slash talking simpsons you want to hear me and bob talk all about mask of the phantasm the best batman movie of all time you can hear all about that in our long almost three hours long podcast patreon.com slash talking simpsons, where life is too short for fire safety. I'm your host, lucky boy, Bob Mackie, and this is our chronological exploration of The Simpsons. Who is here with me today? What kind of man wears armor hot dogs? Henry Gilbert, hello!

And who is our special guest today? Max Scoville! Excellent, and today's episode is Grade School Confidential. But seven goes into 28 four times. Ah, this is a magic seven. Today's episode aired on April 6, 1997, and as always, Henry will tell us

what happened on this mythical day in real world history. Oh my god! 1997 and as always henry will tell us what happened on this mythical day in real world history oh boy bobby daylight savings time officially begins today the crocodile hunter debuts on animal planet and dennis rodman partners up with jean-claude van damme to battle mickey rourke in the coke-fueled double team double Double Team. A classic. Isn't there some sort of basketball-related parachute or prop or something? They really reference basketball heavily in that movie, if I recall. I think so.

I just remember that it begins with a Jean-Claude Van Damme twin being murdered, but not to be confused with the other movie where he plays his own twin. That's not Time Cop. No. Okay. That's another, another movie that has multiple Van Dams.

Double Team is a movie that I desperately, desperately wanted to see what was in theaters and my mom was like, no, you're not going to see that movie. And it was, at the time, I was like, my mom won't let me see any good movies.

And when I finally saw Double Team, probably 13 years later, I understood that that was because it was a bad film and that I should have known better. Dennis Rodman is on the TV for free. You don't need to pay to see him act poorly. It was a great time in the late 90s where they were just like,

if you won a championship in basketball, you got to star in a film. It was Shaq, Rodman, Michael Jordan. And I guess we should pour one out for the Croc Hunter where, I mean, it was not surprising. This is not a joke about him dying, by the way. That's some poor taste. But I feel like what was running through your head is, this guy is going to die whenever you would watch that show.

When is this guy going to die? In fact, I think South Park had a lot of fun with that too, right? Yeah, and their big crocodile hunter. The South Park joke was that his show, he would meet a crocodile, and then instead of it just being him meeting it, he would put his thumb up its butt for no reason other than to anger it so it would put his thumb up its butt for no reason other than to anger it so it would

threaten his life and so that's that that was the general joke about uh steve erwin erwin steve erwin but he was uh killed by a very unlikely creature a stingray i mean i guess what it does to you is in its name so look out but uh i thought he would just be eaten by something bigger that was such that was so depressing on depressing on so many levels. Because he did his thing. He was a good dude. He was all about conservation and everything. He wasn't even in the middle of an actual typical Steve Irwin adventure.

It was sort of off camera almost. I think they were filming something. It was sad though. It was definitely tragic. But his show was a huge hit. I loved seeing him. He was a talk show staple and always fun they'd ask him about like the horrible injuries he'd have and just his bubbly fun with it and i

also think he had a movie because holly was like let's do crocodile dundee again and it didn't really take uh the second time yeah it's it's similar to emerald live which we talked about recently too just like a reality show guy who's then given a fictional thing. People aren't that into it. And I remember a little bit after he died, his daughter started making the rounds on talk shows. And she wanted to show like, no, I'm still having fun. I'm still in animal conservation. This is not just about the tragedy of my...

I'm moving past the tragedy. That's good to hear. But our special guest today is not tragic not yet it's uh the great max scoville max can you explain who you are in case some of our listeners don't know i am a host for ign.com and a bunch of shows there i do beyond the playstation show i do up at noon with brian altano uh it's kind of a sort of a wayne's world qvc uh wackadoo variety show we do that every thursday and i also do the comedy button uh which is a long-running just bathroom humor nonsense talk show for me and some some friends uh and i also do a show called weird

heat also with brian i just do a podcast with brian altano basically four of seven days of the week yeah i honestly mean henry this is good lord how many podcasts have i done this week already i think this is my fifth podcast this week oh my you guys get it i mean it's all the bank recording things and i think my record was 20 in one week. That is brutal. Yeah, across like three different series, maybe four. I don't remember. Yeah, I do a lot. But so does Henry. So we're all slaves to the podcast industry.

But thanks for coming, Max. And what is your history with The Simpsons? It's one of my sort of just a touchstone, kind of a security blanket of a show for me. I remember watching it at a very young age. I don't know. My mom was always, she was raised by a single mom and she's a smart lady, but had the kind of, you know, protective media nature of a single mom, like kind of a think of the children sort of thing, you know, wouldn't let me see double team, you know, violent moves like that here and there. I think initially the Simpsons was like,

oh, I don't need you watching adult cartoons on Fox. And then I think it was my best friend who I remember having Life is Hell comics in his bathroom. And his parents were like cool with my mom. And I think she was like, they were like probably, hey, this is actually a really smart show. And it's okay for him to watch it. And so it became like, and this, I'm talking probably, I don't know, five or six years old watching. Oh, I was going to ask like when were you allowed, but that's a good age. I have early memories of it hitting syndication and not knowing what syndication was, but being like.

Suddenly it's on all the time and it's on different channels. You can watch all simpsons sometimes twice on the same channel yeah back to back no that was that was the real sweet spot though and i think honestly that was sort of a bonding thing with me and my mom was watching you know two episodes a night basically that's great yeah so many of our guests have a similar background as us it's just like that it was a bonding thing with a parent that it was a i i think partially that is that the show has so many deep references in it that you almost need like a parental guide to like look to you to like what is who's president nixon or i mean it's educational there's all kinds of like i was just listening to one of your episodes and you were you're going on a long discussion about william howard taft and which got a shout out in, who was it, Mr. Burns' mom was sleeping with him

or something? Oh, Taft, you old dog. Yeah, and I was like, we have an ongoing sort of a Taft bullying segment on the Comedy Button, which is really more out of the fact that we don't

know enough about him. We're horribly uneducated, but we just like to go after him. I think he's known for a possibly false story about getting stuck in a bathtub, in his own bathtub.

I did. But the thing is, you put this and you guys know how this is. You put stuff out in the ether on a podcast and you say something offhand and then somebody hits you up on Twitter months later and they go, actually, and they give you some incredible detail. Somebody sent me a photograph of a custom chair that the town of Riverside, California made for Taft when he was coming to visit that was built for his large stature. And he was so insulted by it that he refused to sit in it.

But the city still has it on display. Hey, fatty, we made you a chair. Yeah. They would make a joke about Nixon or something. And I'd go, mommy, who's Nixon? Actually, our guests do that sometimes. Our one guest, Nima Shirazi, I didn't know anything about the musical Hair,

but he had basically his own eight-minute segment about the history of Hair and how important it was. I was like, okay, I'll stop making fun of hair now. It sounds very good. I've learned my lesson. But you wanted to do this episode. We offered you a few. What is your connection with this episode in particular? So yeah, you gave me a handful of options. Season eight is, I would say the last really good, or the last solid good season. I think it starts to turn in nine.

I think a lot of people would agree with that. And I know there's the sort of theory that the kind of beginning of the end of sort of the golden age of the Simpsons is the Armin Tanzarian episode. We're going to get to it.

I know. I've got some controversial opinions about that episode. I don't hate that episode. I think there's some cool stuff in there, but it does revolve around Seymour Skinner. And I think the interesting thing

about sort of him and Necrobopple is that they are some of the most fleshed out kind of background characters. And this is one of the episodes, the grade school confidential is one of the ones where they make out in the closet and they're making babies and the baby looked at me. The baby did look at him. And it's, but it does something that I, what the best Simpsons episodes do, where it manages to balance out the screwball antics with a genuine heart and to take these sort of background literal cartoon characters and to endow them with human emotion and really not just throw them around as punchlines for jokes, but to take time and build them up as

relatable people. And I agree. I mean, we just did this episode in July for the other Simpsons podcast, Everything's Coming Up Simpsons. So it's sort of, I'm revisiting it more than I normally would like twice in one year. And I was reflecting upon it after watching it, like, you know, this is probably in my top five, maybe even top three Simpsons episodes, not counting Halloween stuff. It just, it's so well done. It's so solid. They show a lot of self-control by not resorting to Homer. There's very little Homer. Homer's barely in this episode. And you know, they could easily find a way to work him in, like maybe Homer could get them together or something, but I love the self-control.

And I also love how season three-ish this sounds. Because as we talked about on our podcast, the showrunners of this era, they love season three. They pattern their seasons after season three. And this is sort of a sequel to Bart the Lover in which Bart catfishes Mrs. Krabappel into thinking that she's in love with somebody named Woodrow. And the writer for this episode used Bart the Lover sort of as a template. Like, what's a good way to tell a human story about Mrs. Krabappel and also help flesh out Skinner a lot more?

Give Skinner some love and happiness in his life. And season three in that episode, they have a joke of Bart saying, no, why don't you get with Skinner? And she says, his mommy won't let him out to play. And they had a lot of fun with that uh over the years too well and those characters you know skinner the the simpsons created the term

flanderization about how a character's one interesting quirk will then dominate their lives to the point that they become ridiculous in the name of humor which is the show is a comedy so it's fine to do that but edna and Skinner get to be so real here instead of like Edna in episodes previous to this, not even after, but before this one. It's like Edna, she sleeps around. She has sex with the drummer of Aerosmith. And Skinner, he's Norman Bates.

He's a weirdo. He's like Norman Bates, but he's also Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now. He's such a strange kind of amalgam of characters. I really love this era's sort of personification of Seymour because before, and Merkin especially, he is sort of just a stern disciplinarian, a joyless man. He is kind of joyless here, but there's a lot more depth to him. You can see why he's such a boring guy.

Boringness defines him and being very regimented defines his life and it's interesting to see them explore this and to see just how naive he is as a human being, too. Yeah, I mean, they walk a fine line because he has moments

where he's kind of cool and he's in this episode and he shouldn't be. And it's, I don't know, I think this one and Sweet Seymour Skinner's Badass Song are kind of a nice

sort of diptych, I guess. Oh, yeah. And I also, between that one and Bart the Lover and then this one, I get them completely mixed up and they all kind of a nice sort of uh diptych i guess oh yeah uh and i also between that one and bart the lover and then this one i get them completely mixed up and it's they they all kind of bleed together well yeah season five and six skinner is more the guy who gets mad at an independent thought like he just he shuts it down even any thought in the school yeah he's more of a guy he's more a vehicle to sort of satirize the school system for that showrunner, I think.

Which is totally valid and very funny. But Oakley and Weinstein, they talk a lot about how this was inspired by a specific teacher in their life. And getting to see what a sad man he was. They go from fearing him as their teacher to pitying him in his life. And so I think that's why they're more in touch with Skinner than other writers were. I think that also, I just recently marathoned through the first two seasons. I don't consider them sort of in the golden age. They're sort of a little rough around the edges. And I was like, I should go back and give those a shot. And what

jumped out at me is how infused with like John Hughes DNAes dna they are and skinner's one of the first characters you see who's not one of the you know titular simpsons and he's got this kind of kind of dick vernon assistant principal vibe to him and like the first thing you see him in in uh the first episode where he mispronounces someone's name and everyone laughs that was his weird character trait for i don't know five episodes and they dropped it yeah and it wasn't really funny it was very it was very like kind of Prairie Home Companion type of funny. It really was. It's so like softball.

Yeah, well, I think they were going for the very broad heist 80s comedy gag of he has a toupee and one of these days is going to fly off his head. I'm so happy they never did that. I like his hair. I think once they discovered his Vietnam veteran background, they're like, oh, they found a new thing with skinner a different avenue than

just more fun yeah the fun of being a vietnam pow the very funny concept i love that they they also touch on him not like you know he's always like i was a commanding officer and then you get the sense that like nobody took him seriously there either you know he was shot in the back by his own army at a p.s true at a uso show yeah but this episode is written by rachel palito i believe this is her first credited episode she wrote the bumblebee man segment in 22 short films about springfield and this is her first real uh real episode she wrote all by herself yeah i uh we talked about how this was one of the most feminine writing staffs in Simpsons history to this point because they had Rachel Polito and Jennifer Christensen. Two women.

Two women on the writing staff. It's crazy. I'd like to say they get better, but they actually end up with no women in the season 10 writing staff. So it's been up and down. But anyway, with Rachel Polito, also she is the real life wife of Bill Oakley. They've had kids together and they do the commentary together with their kids, which is really cute. And I did say this before on Everything's Coming Up Simpsons, but I feel still strongly about this. Like, I'm not trying to gossip about real life people who are cool people, but I do

think it is interesting that Rachel Politoito who i was at some point began a relationship with bill oakley writes an episode about the beginning of a relationship between a teacher and her superior in the in the on the job system i'd have to see fox's hr policy in 1995 to see if that really i think they should be reprimanded if my theory is correct james l brooks have took him taking them into his office i think that's interesting at the very least that rachel palito her first full episode she writes is about an inter-office romance between two characters that that gets it so right and it's a story about like people in their 40s who are still single and kind of sad getting to, it's the type of story

you don't see in like most television shows, let alone movies. I feel like looking at it now, especially in 2018, it's about a sordid affair in the workplace, which could be, especially with one party in a position of power, it could be very problematic. But I don't know, it's clearly, you know, sometimes people shack up on the job and it winds up with being a tappy family scenario. And it's more, it's it's clearly you know sometimes people shack up on the job and it winds up with being a tappy family scenario and it's it's more uh it's it's less problematic i don't think this is probably not at all by the way but i like that edna is the one that engages this uh seymour is above her it could be weird if seymour was the one yeah but he's not the kind of guy who would

do that to begin with it was it was handled gracefully yeah yeah no there's no power struck like the idea that he's her superior just doesn't even matter in there it's also because he is such a wiener wiener yes he is a i am a wiener as the spray paint said he he would never use his position to either boost somebody else or to influence his relationship with her like that's not who skinner is he's he's such a sweet innocent man in this episode especially that's what and that's what Edna loves about him and the rest of the time he's a complete uh buffoon who's unable to wield any kind of power you know a total doormat who lets a child order him around yeah multiple times and before we start this episode proper I have to say uh

directed by Susie Dieter this is a gorgeous looking episode like just earlier today I was tweeting screenshots from it it just is so well done in terms of staging and acting. It's very, she's so good. I have to say Susie Dieter, thumbs up to you. Susie Dieter is one of the best directors in the series history. I think she's a little underappreciated, even though I think people have heard of her. But if you don't know Susie Dieter, she is seriously one of the best directors and just like the angles in the scene, like the the staging one of my favorite bits in this episode she points out on the commentary that she acted out specifically it's the when endo walks across the table suggestively to at dinner with skinner and she just the way she moves her hand across the table it's like that was she's like i acted that

out for the animator like to get just right. And it's perfect. It's gorgeous. Well, and so this episode begins with these class announcements, and Skinner could not be more boring. And finally, the fake sale to raise money for the car wash has been canceled due to confusion. Well, that concludes this morning's announcements. I'm Seymour Skinner, and stand by to resume learning in five, four, three, two...

It's hard enough to keep the kids awake without you, Seymour. Mrs. Krabappel, I also have an announcement to make. Can't wait till I retire. I want one and all to join me in celebrating the anniversary of my portentous birth. Here you are, Nelson. A birthday party. Here you are, Nelson. Here you are, Nelson.

I said. So we're big fans of Martin on this podcast now. Yes. He's great. He's my new favorite. I think I myself am a mix of Milhouse and Martin. But what I love about Martin is that he gets bullied nonstop for who he is. And he is definitely they tried to put in some cheap gay jokes in him.

But this is him like owning his effeminacy. And even though the Nelson keeps going, like, I am not going to your party. He's like, here you are, Nelson. I love that. Just so innocent.

It's this one. And the one where they go on the road trip through Canada, where you're just like, why are Nelson and Martin both here? Like, why do they interact? And I remember watching that when I was younger, I guess as a kid.

And when you're, when you're in that, you know, child mentality, you're like, these are enemies. These are like, this is a, this is a is a you know other ends of the food chain but looking back like there were all kinds of kids that i hung out with who i didn't really like you know

you have those people in your circle of friends and it's out of you know out of convenience or yeah they're in your homeroom or they're your neighbor or whatever they sit next to you and you're like yeah i guess i'll hang out with steven or whatever well and martin definitely sees it as a one-sided friendship where he's like, no, Nelson's my best friend. Nelson is his burly protector. Yeah, his bosom chum. They're good buddies. It's Nelson who, no, I don't like you. Leave me alone. But Martin sticks with it. And I like that about him as the queen of summertime. A little bit of a gay joke thing at Martin, but I think it's also kind of funny how it's sort of classist too like it's like he's got rich parents you know

like they're they pay for his his schooling that's why he plays the loot he should be in a better school to be honest but yeah there is some kind of uh law or rule you call this where a character is written to be like someone you laugh at but they're actually awesome like patty and selma are the same way like patty and selma are written to be obnoxious and boring but i think they rule like they're awesome characters because they tell you what they think at all times they're totally real and they live their lives freely flavor country you know you're right about the class thing with martin though because also as we've seen his father is a stock market guy like these they're making good money he can afford that giant above ground pool as well and

this party is like showing off kind of maybe that's why maybe that's the root of nelson's hate for him the nelson is just so poor and has a broken home and they can afford he's got a shooting car though so they can afford image enhancement camp too nah on the day of the birthday party it seems like nobody's gonna go Bart and Milhouse are hanging out in a rocket ship that Homer made, which is one of the 20 seconds that Homer's on screen in this episode. I love him acting out Nixon specifically, calling the Apollo 11 crew. Yeah, it's weird that he would choose that role in their pretend game. Like, I'll be Nixon, and you guys can be the astronauts.

You're like, is Homer doing this for the benefit of the kids, or was he going to be doing this this afternoon anyway? I think he's having a lot of fun, because even when Bart and Milhouse are gone, he's still doing it. Yeah. The whole Nixon thing. Well, Homer, I like an active Homer. This is more fun than the Homer who's just like, meh, don't care.

Just like stuck on the couch, yeah. Exactly. This Homer, cut up cardboard, put it on the side of exactly this homer put cardboard cut up cardboard put it on the side of a radio flyer and then drove around in the backyard that's got to be ned flanders riding mower though they don't know the riding mower yes so they decide they're going to go to the party that's also a great joke about the elementary school hierarchy of knowing that like well we get beat up but we get an explanation like martin doesn't get an explanation that's there they know they're above martin which the food chain of the elementary school comes up a lot

in this episode it's really it's great every time no they always had a very very realistic depiction of that i like that they they're like we're we're like a three a 3.5 and they don't really they don't explain what that's really out of or like what the other sort of classes are it's like i don't know like a review score they're kind of inconsistent about bart though because we saw at the end of uh summer of four foot two or the beginning rather he's like a celebrity at the school he's signing autographs skinner wants his autograph so they like to pick and choose how much of a loser bart is well you know in season nine in the episode or 10 where barb are friends ralph they the bullies even say to him like sometimes you seem like you're cool but then then you hang out with lamoids like

this. So I think Bart's choice in friends kind of hurts his social status. His coolness fluctuates, I think. But so they head to the party and that's when Bart runs into Edna on a Saturday. Bart! No, Mrs. K! Hey, it's Saturday. Your powers are useless

against me. Relax, I'm just here to have fun like everybody else. Don't think of me as a teacher. Okay. So. Mm-hmm. Excuse me. Pulls a Jessica Lovejoy.

I have to go over there. I have to go over there. I have to stand over here now. It's funny, but I also wanted to keep in the Edna just sigh where she's like, this is my life, huh? Ten-year-old boy won't even speak to me. And a lot of this is about the oddness of seeing teachers outside of their normal habitat when you're a kid. And it's like you always have that fantasy. I'm going to tell her, fuck you if I see her.

But then you're just like, oh, she's just doing grocery shopping and your powers are useless yeah what do you what do you say i think a lot of that we also saw in skinner picking out his laundry detergent i only ever once ran into a teacher at outside of the school and that was like at the grocery store and i just got too scared to even talk to them and even though it was one of my favorite teachers i was like no i though i had a friend who in his late 20s ran into the teacher who was the cool teacher uh who i know as well you know i'm not gonna use his name because the story gets a little personal but i knew this guy as his mr blank but mr black my the guy who hung out with him who was also a student of his he just was like yeah fred i hang out with fred who was also a student of his, he just was like, yeah, Fred. I hang out with Fred all the time.

We get drunk all the time. He's divorced, doesn't see his kids anymore. Mr. Blank's my dad's name. Call me Fred. Exactly. It was scarier to hear that. I'm just like, oh, he's going through his midlife crisis with one of his coolest students now. Weird.

Yeah, I had a thing running into a high school teacher. I think it was shortly after graduation. Not that shortly, but i was at a bar in in town and he showed up and it was like it was like during a weekday or it was like not it was like not normal you know bar hours you know god knows what i was doing there and he shows up in a suit with a bunch of people and i was like oh what do you do what are you doing here and he's like uh my aunt died and oh man we're irish and i was like is everything going otherwise that's english class yeah what are you

talking about so uh fractions how are those treating you yeah no i mean mrs krabappel though is i have a weird crush on her i'm just gonna come right out there and say that she's got this sort of like she's yeah she's a teacher but then she's like also like oh yeah you know i'll have a you know dinner for one wine wine for three and you know shacks up with the you know aerosoft drummer or whatever yeah i mean they let her be a funny character you're not laughing at the things she says because she's naive or stupid or you know any other reason she is she's telling jokes in this episode and being clever and i like that they allow her to be a clever fun character and they kind of get to play with her previous jokes about her promiscuousness is just like that she can, unlike Skinner with his celibacy, she has a healthy sex life, except it's just empty. Like she can have sex whenever she wants, but she has no like emotional, she seems to lack any emotional fulfillment in that life.

Isn't she also, like you get like glimpses of sort of her personal life here and there in the show. Isn't she one of the people who shows up in like a rocky horror scene or something am i imagining that oh i think she had like a sort of burlesque act in a talent show a teacher oh yeah popping balloons i'm thinking of dr hibbert and he also yes he's the rocky horror gag yeah i mixed up the corsets or whatever this this was a helpful tactic for me at part at adult parties i was like and then but you have to pretend you have to get it you're getting a drink instead of just walking away now we all have phones we can pretend that we're getting messages on like oh i gotta go i gotta go also as a kid i was the kid who got scared on a pony ride like i at at ralph's age

not not at like bart's age i think i only had one i did not i didn't care for it i i just didn't want to write though i also like four at four i got very scared by dinosaur animatronics at a history museum too they're pretty scary though i'll give you that because i was sure they were real it was those one of those things where i saw ads for it for months and i told my i in in the way any four-year-old can tell their parents, but I just, I was excited to see it. And then the second I get in there and see them in person, I just, in tears, just screaming, crying. Well, you saw the Flintstones. They wanted to live in your house and eat your garbage, right?

That's, they're your friends. It's a living. The T-Rex animatronic was going to eat me. And that's when also we see the mathematician mathemagician never got to see one of those in my school days but the uh the different kind of stuff anytime there's a math joke it makes me think it's a futurama writer doing it ken keeler david x cohen one of those nerds although this this math equation was easy to figure out it wasn't some sort of weird like hyper math you need a phd to understand well to get the joke you need to know that the that the

fraction is being done wrong so it has to be a simple enough fraction that an eight-year-old like lisa can get it which is a pretty smart eight-year-old though yeah actually that's true she's long division yeah this is also a guy who does math at parties you know maybe maybe he's not great at it and just the parents really martin's parents really made mistakes here. They not only got a math magician instead of a clown, or a regular magician, but then they served those oysters. Like, what are they thinking? I wonder if that was Martin's idea, or they were just a little too high class.

They're like, we're not having cake. We're not having pie. We're having oysters. That kind of ties into the whole, like, classes thing. That's such a, like, a rich kid thing. Like, oh, you've never had falafel? And it's like, you're seven. Where did you learn that word? It's a really great choice choice it's not random at all it's like of course they

would have oysters they're they're a weird rich family or the fancy kid who just starts speaking french to their parents you're like oh your parents could get you a french tutor they they were watching muzzy yes you need to have a deep disturbing voice. Why be the girl saying it back to him? That's true. Edna and Seymour make their first connection here at the party. Edna! Seymour. Mind if I sit down?

It's a free country. I don't follow you. Just sit down, Seymour. It might be nice to talk to a grown-up for a change. Well, this party is certainly a break in my routine. You know, normally I spend my Saturdays carefully laying out my clothes for the following week. Then I stroll down to the car wash to see if Gus is there. Oh, yeah, you gotta keep busy.

I collect matchbooks from glamorous nightclubs. It's amazing. If you just write to them and ask them nicely. God, that's so dark. Is this how you imagined your life, Edna? Well, yes. But then I was a very depressed child. Two poor decisions. Here, here.

Seymour! I told you not to play in the neighbor's yard! It's a party, mother. I was invited. Well, then I must have been invited, too. Help me, Edna. I know where we can hole up for a while. So, boy, Harry Shearer and Marsha Wallace, RIP, by the way, so good in this episode, especially Marsha Wallace, who won an Emmy in 92 for The Simpsons. I believe maybe for Barthelover, perhaps? I think so. Yeah, but she is so, I mean, she's always good,

but she is so good in this. And they are both so good together. For as much as Harry Shearer seems to not really care and kind of always resented The Simpsons, he is so good as Skinner, especially here. They managed to uphold their sort of, their cartoony voices while still having that glimmer of humanity.

Yeah, especially just the sadness of skinner i really i really love it and that edna's sadness gets to meet skinners as well of just that that's that's where the facade breaks down where she instead of just saying that she i think she's giving away a secret she normally doesn't tell in small talk that she's like i collect matchbooks from nightclubs. And that's probably where she ends the conversation with other people. But this time she reveals like,

I write letters to them and they just send it to me. So I got to ask, who is Gus? Is he just, is that just a throwaway reference? Like we never meet a Gus who runs a car wash in Springfield. It says a lot about Skinner that if he sees this random guy named Gus,

it's like the highlight of his weekend. Well, I think it's hilarious that Skinner has a connection in Springfield that we don't know about as viewers. We know all these nooks and crannies and all these many faces in Springfield, and we never meet Gus because he just- That's a season 31 reveal. We finally meet Gus. I love that line because it tells you about Skinner. To me, it says he's the type of person who hangs around and bothers people at their jobs because they don't have other things in their lives. I say this as a former cashier

who had to see a lot of regular customers who I was like, you've been here for two hours. Those people. I mean, we both work from home and I'm always like working out at, working in cafes or at restaurants or bars or whatever. And the amount of lonely people in the middle of the day that just waste everybody's time, I feel so bad for them. At the same time, I'm like, I just want my coffee.

I want my coffee and this story. I don't want to mock people who are lonely, but the people at customer service jobs do know about them. It's true. When you become a regular, it's not always a good regular. There's always like, oh, there's – I'm the silent regular yeah no i i feel i didn't like it when i was a cashier and i especially feel bad for people in those positions now because on top of being paid probably as little as possible they also have to kind of be part-time mental health experts to people or at least just

like a shoulder to cry on especially bartenders those poor people yeah but i love how skinner is introducing this scene with him not understanding what it's a free country means it just shows how square and just sort of out of touch he is that that's not even like a new saying it's just like it's probably i don't know 100 years old at that point but honestly i don't follow he's just he's such a wonderful dork yeah he's such a he's yeah he's a square he's very but he's very sweet and naive you know like there's a real sweetness to him in this and in sweet seymour skinner's badass song that i love about this character and great staging on agnes's first appearance there she is literally overbearing on them and telling skinner like treating skinner like a child for playing in the neighbor's yard it It also kind of subverts the whole, what is it, Norman Bates thing,

where she's peeping through the hole in the wall and she pulls up. What are you doing? And that you don't see her mouth for all of it, too. It's all scary acting on the eyes. Like she's not moving. You don't see her mouth. It's just glaring at him. The eyes.

His mother never stops watching. he can't be free they have to hide in again the jokes about martin's effeminacy keep going to him owning a pink playhouse like as a boy i didn't know too many little boys who owned any playhouse let alone a pink one i would not even if you wanted one you would be afraid of getting beaten up for that what kind of boy has a playhouse a lucky boy there it is again it's a very it's a very sweet reaction because he's not reading the intent of that he's just oh you're asking me a question this this boy is very lucky to have this house you know it's funny i never even thought about the playhouse being a jab at martin i i think i grew up with so many kids who had like, you know, sisters or just,

I didn't think about it. You know, there'd be like a sort of inherited thing kicking around the house. You're like, oh yeah, maybe you had it when you were a baby or whatever. It came with the house or whatever. But if I may get slightly literary here, though, the whole situation does kind of remind me

of like a John Updike or John Updike-esque story too of a repressed older man getting with a you know perhaps an English professor an English professor I mean as a principal he's sort of an English professor John Updike and John Irving they're at the same damn books I've read them all with an overbearing mother and then finding new life with a sexually free woman it's all it has the feel of those kind of books that uh that the bill and josh probably grew up reading as literate harvard educated very very tweety books yes yeah i'm not saying they're great books but they were they shaped a culture at least i read one of those rabbit

books that was enough that guy sucks it was kind of enough for me yeah yeah take that up no i'm sorry up yours up we'll get to it We'll get to it R.I.P. The Simpsons will be right back Good gravy What a podcast this week and we thank our guest max scoville so much for coming by and you know that we're able to do all this thanks to your support at patreon.com slash talking simpsons you get so much if you become a five dollar subscriber to the talking simpsons network at patreon if you go there you'll not only get to hear next week's episode of talking simpsons a week early and ad free to hear next week's episode of Talking Simpsons a week early and ad-free,

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We'll see you there. I think with Rachel Polito writing it, I think it gave a little more feminine introspection to the life of Edna that you didn't see in previous episodes, too. I think that really helped it out. Yeah, and again, I think, I mean, I pointed this out earlier,

but you don't see the insecurity that we saw in like A Millhouse Divided where, oh shit, like get Homer in this, like let's have Homer take it over, or like let's get funnier characters in, or like more explicitly wackier characters. And they're content to sit with Seymour and Edna. And that's great.

Like they have a lot of self-control we don't see often. Bart's a good accessory to it. Yeah, yeah. He's a nice dash of wacky. It's still a funny episode, but it's definitely not a really funny episode. It's more of a tender one. It's a very like James L. Brooksy,

again, drawing back to season three, that same sort of season three heart that they love and they're trying to evoke in this one. And also, the more we talk about this, this absolutely is a sequel to Sweet Seymour Skinner's badass song, too. It's Bart befriending Seymour, but also this time Edna, and helping them navigate life and losing their jobs as well. He's fired by Chalmers and it is too. Oh wow, yeah, he loses his job twice at least so far. But so, it's time for Oysters, the perfect birthday

treat. I told you we should have served cake instead of oysters! I'm ruined! Ha ha! Ha ha! Bart, how come you're not sick? Eh, I gave my oysters to the cat. Hey, why'd you eat them? I thought you were a vegetarian.

I didn't. I just wanted to leave. I love when Elisa occasionally does very bart types of things yeah just a little bit of like she's just a little bit of an ass there and it's great she she found her excuse to leave and she's taking it yeah it was the most graceful exit she could do that wretching cat also is such a wonderful design i love how kind of space coyote it looks yeah yeah it's yeah it's very cool bart is so close to directing millhouse to the perfect prank of him running into that cactus and he's so upset i'm like no you're so close just do it but boy i would never have guessed

kids would have just eaten all those oysters yeah i've only eaten oysters recently and they're they're they're an acquired taste oysters disgusted me for the longest time even before i saw this joke i i have had them and they're not as gross as they seem but i i still just like swallow this fast don't even think about what this is and just be done with it yeah i love oysters and i still get grossed out by them while i'm eating them like i don't know why i love them it's i can't even i can't even defend them properly john hodgman had a great uh description of oysters that i'm probably ruining he said that they taste like a wet sock full of pennies that someone rubbed against a rock.

That sounds about right. So I'm pretty sure that's what he called them. And it's like, oh yeah, I can taste all those flavors in my mouth. My mom worked at a gourmet food store as a buyer or something. And I would go hang out there after school sometimes. And one time, I was milling around, kind of in that sort of,

you know, my kids just kind of hang around. And the seafood guy was sort of talking to her and he was like, hey, has your kid ever had an oyster? And she's like don't think so and he's like hey kid come here and then proceeds to open your mouth and just puts an oyster in my mouth and like my mom was like it's got to happen sooner or later go go ahead you know and i was just sort of like okay it's better that it comes from a stranger not me yeah i mean weird it's a weird food you know definitely not a thing a bunch of a bunch of fourth graders would touch. I can't even imagine that.

I've got adult friends who wouldn't go near them. Well, I wonder what kind of sauces they offered at that. Do you think they had horse ranch? Also, I love how there's like a, if you go on IMDb, there's like a continuity error where it's like, they said they should have served cake, but if you look closely when Bart's backing away from Edna earlier on in the episode, there are cupcakes on the table. And it's like, well, somebody probably brought them. Yeah, that's true.

I would still, if somebody had cupcakes at a party and they said they served cake i would say no you didn't cupcakes are not a cake this this feels like our hot dogs a sandwich type of argument but no cupcakes are nice i wouldn't say no to a cupcake they are not a birthday cake they are not a replacement for a birthday you had an actual cake for your wedding right henry yes yeah a uh a very expensive it was delicious cake i think for about a decade cupcakes sort of took over every event mostly weddings like we got cupcakes for our wedding it's just like oh well actually when my mom married my stepdad a couple a few years ago they had a really fancy cake but also really fancy cupcakes from the same place and i did prefer the cupcakes because it let me have a variety of flavors

instead of just the one cake flavor they had. Well, don't invite me to your wedding, people. I've noticed that cupcakes are great for parties because, well, that's not really a revelation. That's kind of a known quantity. But specifically, adults that I hang out with don't necessarily have the same sweet tooth that a bunch of eight-year-olds would.

And so the end of the night, there's frequently like if you have a full cake, you're left over with three quarters of a cake because people were busy pounding jaeger shots or whatever they were you know devoting their sugar energies elsewhere yeah and cupcakes people can just take them home with them you know you can give them out easier it's easier to bring them to work whereas if you bring like half a cake you just seem like a gross person nobody really wants to pick and it's all sliced up cut around the dry parts yeah yeah that's true cut all right the pro cupcake at parties it's a good argument for cupcakes stories here i'm waffling now yeah uh speaking of throwbacks this episode also has a very season one

wendell throwing up thing oh my god everybody's throwing up but he's one of them now now he fits in finally at this moment it's the only time he fits. Queasy Wendell hasn't had a line in about five years on the show. He should be the first one to throw up, but it's Milhouse. Yeah. And I love that scene of him throwing up in the bounce house. It leaves it to your imagination, but it's got to be disgusting. Yeah, it's more disgusting than, say, like on Family Guy Rick and Morty. They would just draw the vomit But your imagination of the vomit

In a bounce house where kids are bouncing around Is more disgusting than anything they could draw And you get Milhouse's cheeks Like puffing up And there's that sort of thump noise Which is just extra gross All in the imagination I was always really good Foley on the show

But Bart sees something even more disgusting Than a bunch of kids vomiting. More tea, Edna? What kind of little boy has a tea set? I think we both know the answer to that. A lucky boy. You know, Seymour, there's an innocence about you that can be

quite charming. Oh. Well, I've always admired your tart honesty and ability to be personally offended by broad social trends. Really? Very much. And your laugh. You mean, ha!

Mm-hmm. That's the one that makes me feel... Oh, boy. Do you have a breath mint I could borrow? I've got some menthol cigarettes. Oh, the heck with it. Mmm. Oh, the heck with it. Let's love this music cue here. Yeah, I love, again, they're more like

realistic readings, like Harry Shearer going, very much. It's a sort of reading you wouldn't get in the scene unless, I feel like they're together, these actors are together and acting off of each other. If not, man, excellent job. It feels like they have a chemistry here that you don't often get and the little intimacy of the way edna looks at him as she's rubbing his hand and he's just like that's so like it's it feels very much like the reaction of a man who is a 44 year old virgin

getting his hand stroked by a nice lady at the same time there's something kind of cool about being like do you have a breath mint you know there's like a it's almost like here you know what's going on you know it's it's he's not just going for it but there's something kind of playful about it i don't know i approve that is cute he's still like she wants him but he's still insecure like oh geez what do i do right and there's there's a little bit of there's banter there but they don't force it they don't make it they don't make it like a vaudeville sketch or something it's just you know they're not worried it's not jokey enough if it's not funny enough it's it's which sometimes on simpsons and other comedy shows it gets a little sweaty when you

feel like like there's not enough laughs here we gotta have more jokes and like i said on the other podcast i very much identify with edna's ability to be offended by broad social trends i i am that person you have so you hate marvel movies for example i'm ahead of the curve now everyone hates them right not yet okay it hasn't happened yet oh y'all you'll you'll be back i'll see you i'll never stop seeing marvel movies as i'm assigned to by society yeah it's a gift it is a curse uh bart's reaction is a great exit shot there too he's like oh my god what have i frozen in terror and so we come back from the break this is one of is this the line of the episode that i'm wondering which one it is is it brown and water okay yeah i love that line so much you want to call it uh for now yes yes. I think he might be right.

That's the joke. You know that playhouse? Well, I... Good gravy. Oh, thank you. It's just brown and water. So I looked in the window, and there it was. The grossest sight I have ever... Bart Simpson, report to the principal's office immediately. Now, Bart, son, I don't know what

you think you saw, but let me assure you... What Seymour... what Principal Skinner means to say, Bart, is that sometimes a little boy's imagination can run away with him. That's the best you can do? You could have at least said you were giving her CPR or rehearsing a play. Is it too late to say that? Mm-hmm. We're just a little concerned.

If people were to find out the principal was dating a teacher, they might see it as a conflict of interest. And there are those who might try to use it against us for their own advantage. Like me, for one. Like you, for... Bart, if life has taught me one lesson repeatedly, it's to know when I'm beaten. Let's talk deal.

Yeah, brown and water is good. I have to feel like, I wonder how that would sound coming out of Lunch Lady Doris' mouth. But that actor's been dead for a year at this point. But like, it's brown and water. Actually, I think almost two years at this point. No, just one. But they had to invent a lunch man. But it's still very funny.

Did they totally write off Lunch Lady Doris? For a time, she did come back, and then Tress McNeil voiced her, and then I think people were mad, including me, so they changed her to Lunch Lady Dora to make it a different character, but the actor who played her, she was also on The Critic. She was basically a script supervisor in her late 70s, early 80s, who was a chain smoker. That's why her voice was so great and why everyone wanted to use her in things because she had such a great authentic voice but was she the makeup lady in the crew yes she was yeah doris whatever her last name was in that show yeah they just call her doris and everything yeah like she if the critic had gone on to a third season she would have passed halfway through yeah i think it was december 95 she passed away but uh there are no

voices like that because everyone who has a voice like that is passing away i mean this eastern european pastiche of a brown and water brown and water the idea that that he takes it as a compliment on his gravy which no one compliments gravy and then just that the gravy instead of being like even it is the element of brown plus water it's like a purples of fruit kind of thing. Just a big bag of powder called brown and you just add water to it to make your gravy. For instant gravy instead of the... But I would definitely think at an elementary school cafeteria, they're using instant gravy, not making it their own with the food they're making. And to dig in deeper, Skinner is also the kind of guy who would compliment the gravy in a cafeteria.

Oh, yeah. He really would, yeah. He was complimenting the tater tots in, like, season three, right? That's true, yeah. The perfect tater. He has probably said good gravy in a non-exclamation way before, so maybe the guy's just used to it. Also in this, it's there so she can drop her cigarette into the water, but seeing her smoke in places with children now is the most dated thing in this episode it feels insane it's not even played as a joke it's just part of her character like she

smokes a lot because she's a smoker but yes in the in a school that'd be crazy now i also love that they they do that just wonderful simpsons just running out of the room thing you know like do you remember to pick up bart in his door slam and it's like he does that but just to get all the way to the office and get on the intercom and immediately be on the intercom before Bart finishes his sentence and calling out to him and their conversation with Bart is so great like he they try to treat him like a kid

he's like come on like you for and it's great that even Skinner can get a good joke out of his sadness he's like life has taught me to know what I've beaten. Repeatedly. Yeah, because he's just lost so much all the time. He knows when he's beaten. And that's his skill of just like, you know what?

I'm not going to stick with this more. I am defeated again, as usual. Why waste energy on trying? I've already failed. So they head to the permanent record room, and they switch it for Milhouse as part of the trade, which always good to have a permanent records joke. So a few things in here that I really love is heading into the permanent records room.

There's this wonderful, like Tom Clancy-esque, like very serious government music. And it's kind of like when, you know, when Lisa buys the Al Gore's book and it's got this sense of urgency to it. And it's very much kind of, I think, playing with the sort of, I don't know, political thrillers of the 90s. It's got that tone to it and it's very much kind of i think playing with the sort of i don't know political thrillers of the 90s it's got that tone to it at times the school has advanced technology like when they're tracking uh stanislaw little helper in the vents you know they've got like a crime lab but it's so funny i love the description of bart's uh future as gloomy and windblown it's like the two great adjectives for just a wasted life and it's all the all the wildest and loudest jobs or whatever yeah uh but no i think it's all the wildest and loudest jobs or whatever.

But no, I think it's funny because seeing that as a kid, you know, your perception of what adulthood is, like a lot of jokes just don't land when you're younger, especially about things like this. And also you're told in school that you have a permanent record. It is like literally the opposite. I wonder if people still tell that lie to children. It's so warped.

Yeah. That's probably why the kids love Snapchat. Everything evaporates. I think bill oakley on this commentary said he wanted to dispel the rumors or the myth of the permanent record for the kids watching this like it's all bullshit there is no permanent record oh he totally he totally did not get that across i was like this is believable this is poor millhouse he's screwed reality of permanent records all of my employers have looked at my high school sick days and took that into account no actually they never called any reference ever yeah exactly you can i i feel like these days if you just said you graduated from don't go nuts on say where you graduated from a college but you

have a mid-range college and just say you graduated there they're gonna look into it everybody's too busy they're doing four other jobs they can when they yeah they're interviewing you they can't check that i was i was recently a reference on someone's application and i was actually contacted i was like what what are we doing yeah what are we doing here and that was that was crazy i was like and they had like five i got the same thing and they had like five different questions like yeah do you know this person would you say this person was like did you get unfrozen from 1968 like this is not how businesses were it was bizarre yeah it's never happened before it's almost like a little meta job interview where they're like so

what do you think this person's shortcomings are and i'm like i don't want to i don't want to throw him under the bus like i don't just ask me yes or no questions he's a workaholic yeah real real go-getter and that drives me nuts personally i'm quite a layabout uh no the the permanent record thing that would actually be a really fun coffee table book of bart simpson's permanent record oh man and just a rundown of all of his antics throughout the years yeah over 30 years wow it'd be a real like rap sheet you know it would look like that it'd be this heavy leather bound you guys should get on that that is a book to pitch to fox publishing the racist from the podcast we're pitching it after this is over it's our idea now max Max. Do it. Sorry.

A boy's guide to life. I love it. I also love Seymour's celebratory, this is a great day for forbidden love. And then he thinks it'll all stay secret forever. Like, all right, we fixed it. It'll always be a secret now. Then we have a very cute, seductive scene between Edna and Seymour.

This dessert is exquisite. What do you call it? Applesauce. Of course. I'm sorry, I don't get out to restaurants much. That's okay. I don't entertain much. Usually it's just soup for one, salad for one, wine

for three. You know, I always thought I'd fall for a woman just like Mother, even though I didn't want to. And now that I haven't, I've discovered what true happiness can be, Edna. Seymour, swallow that applesauce and kiss me. I'm afraid I already swallowed it while you were talking. Charlie Brown melts away Good morning students

Way to go there Wendell There's Ralph, he knows the score Jimbo, how's that hat today? Janie, Janie, Bo-Faney Again, like a lot of great gentle humor That really says a lot about the characters They're not worried about having like gut-busting humor Or like gross-out humor Just like skinner is a very sweet like uh sort of

very very naive man and he's taking the applesauce thing literally like i've already swallowed the applesauce yes and that he he just doesn't get out to restaurants so he doesn't know what applesauce is i gotta say they're eating a lot of applesauce They have got each like a jar's worth of applesauce in their bowls in front of them. Such a weird dessert to have as an adult. It just really helps reinforce how sad this all is. Also, it's really easy for them to draw. They didn't have to animate much food there. They didn't have to do like a fancy cake or anything.

Just like a lumpy mess that the Simpsons used to eat at every meal. Well, and it's a low, it implies the poorness of Edna's life because she seems to live in a, at best, one bedroom apartment by herself in her 40s as a teacher. So I don't know, she can only really afford applesauce, perhaps. The Charlie Brown candle, I think, too, implies her that she just got it as a gift maybe like 10 years ago. And she's like, oh, I'm entertaining. I guess I should have a candle. That is exactly the kind of present that you would get a teacher for Christmas.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. And it's melted just enough that they don't have to pay for the rights to use Charlie Brown in the show. And they remark on the commentary that they color this Charlie Brown as Caucasian, which is not a skin tone in the Simpsons universe. Oh, you're right, yeah. Huh. This is kind of getting ahead of ourselves here but my major question in this episode okay i think we each

have different viewpoints on this at least me and bob do did seymour have sex in this scene and has he gotten laid in this episode and is he lying when he says he's a virgin at the end of it? To answer all your questions, no I say yes Skinner is too innocent and honest to lie And that blurting out of the fact that he's a virgin at the end Is unexpected even to him He catches himself It's not a planned thing But

And final proof is the champagne popping at the end That's him coming Okay Later, it's implying The metatextual, yes, it is It's a very Symbolism, yes I'm's him coming Later it's implying It's a very I'm not being crude it's a very Hitchcockian thing Like North by Northwest When that train smashes into the tunnel at the end

That is a laugh in a movie theater I've seen it twice people like lose their shit when it happens I was going to say the Charlie Brown candle melting Is like oh what are they doing for that long I think it's like let's say second Basie Sort of material My counter to that Bob Is that one are they doing for that long i think it's like let's say second basey sort of material all right my counter to that is that one him changing his outfit if we're talking about symbolism

he's changing his outfit into his relaxed jean jacket implies that he had finally had sex and he's feeling freeze like this is my just after getting laid relaxed look for fun day i think seymour has had such a little contact with women physically that like making out would be just like he's gonna smoke a cigarette afterwards or whatever like he is that like we can ask we can ask bill oakley we let's call him now all right i i want this answer from bill but i also we will find out i will record it and i'll post it on the internet i think too that he is lying about being a virgin at that same time because it is followed directly by him lying to bart that he's broke and everyone else that he and edna have broken up so i think that lying about

their relationship is actually a key part i do not buy this but please continue i i think skinner this is gonna end the podcast this argument right here and also i think armin tamzerian also did have some action and is not no no not suggestively oh yes all of his dreams involve combing his hair not getting laid but he owns swank magazine he has a sexual interest true but only for the pages not for the women inside all right max yeah yeah sorry we're having a conversation amongst ourselves somewhere in the middle there i really i see where you're both coming from, and I think getting a second base on Edna Krabappel's floor seems about right.

I can see things not working out for him necessarily. Maybe he gets nervous, and it doesn't go the way he plans, or maybe she sort of wants to take her time, or he's scared. Yeah, I think maybe Edna realizes just how vulnerable he is, and he might freak out if they advance this too fast yeah but at the same time the whole thing at the end where

he where he sort of where he lies to bart is almost uh it almost makes all of these awkward tender moments they have together even more special because you're like oh they still are they're being themselves with each other whereas they're projecting this lie to everyone else you know it's so i don't know i don't know if if seymour skinner had sex before the end of this episode or not we'll get to it but i don't think he would lie to the crowd i think that him bearing his like honesty and the secret about himself is like a sacrifice he's making that makes that moment important ah but what if as a man who says he knows when he's beaten he knows he's lost here so he would even lie about being a virgin to keep his job we're gonna have our listeners weigh in on this i look forward to

the reply i'm gonna have a heated podcasting moment you know actually this one goes up in about five weeks so we might have a chance to ask bill oakley in the meantime so we can edit him in to this podcast. All right. Well, then let's just drop it for now. Before we end our creative partnership. That's a good argument to have, though. Special update from the future. This is breaking news. so we recorded this episode months ago as of this recording of this special tiny segment so this segment is post our live show with bill oakley

that we recorded on october 20th it's it's about big time podcast planning folks behind the scenes hobnobbing but the important thing you need to know is that while we didn't get it on record as in you didn't hear bill oakley talk about it in the live show he did with him but when we met with bill oakley beforehand and had our geeking out meal with him we annoyed him with our worst questions and uh one of them was about this episode to get answers for you listeners and to settle the dispute between me and bob on this episode of whether seymour skinner is a virgin or not by the end of the episode and so i believe what he said was the original intent was that yes he is a virgin and

he is being truthful when he says he is a virgin to everybody. And that champagne popping is symbolic of that at the end. But... But he also kind of went to my side saying that when the line was read, that was an addition not in the script, that children will believe anything you tell them. And the delivery of it definitely had the implication that Bill Oakley recognized at the time too of saying he was lying

so basically it can be either way it's both and neither so original intent was yes later on developing the story they said let's give it wiggle room to make it so he could potentially not have been a virgin yes so the real answer is there are no answers everything is disappointing in life and even bill oakley our true God, can't help us. But we appreciate him humoring us with that very inane question. And the fact that he remembered. Yes. Yeah. Well, as I said on this podcast, I think this episode is a very important one to Bill. Oh, for sure. It's a Skinner-based one, and we all love Skinner. But yes,

thanks for listening, folks. We'll let you get back to the episode. But either way, I do love how Susie Dieter draws, Susie Dieter and her team redesigned them in their casual post-romantic looks. Yeah, Edna's wearing lipstick. And a neckerchief. yeah yeah it's really cute i like the the sort of the post-coital attire of seymour skinner maybe is uh like a mock turtleneck you know he still dresses like a doofus but it's like a cooler doofus yeah he's more of like a kind of sleazy english professor than a stuffy principal mock turtleneck is perfect for him that is a skinner that is skinner owns one of those.

And I love, too, how uncomfortable the children are with him being as fulfilled and happy, especially the way Janie just runs away. She's like, what is this? So it seems like everything is going fine, but Bart is not going to be as happy as he thought he is. Bart, so good to see you. I have a little favor to ask you.

I'd like you to give this note to Edna when you get back to class. I don't think I have to tell you it's for her eyes only. Dear Edna, I want to say there's another secret render. I hear reading I love that I hear reading That's such a Just a

Just a perfect Simpsons gag You know Just that It's so stupid And sort of smart And weird All at the same time

But he's such a good Disciplinarian That he can hear reading Yes Well I mean though Bart is like Muttering a little bit Under his breath this

is the first time it's all it's all gibberish by the way i did hear the word secret rendezvous yeah part saying that does he say rendezvez does he does he kind of read it the way a fourth grader would it's sort of like when you hear somebody whispering in a tv show they're not really like they're not really saying anything and it's a good plot point too because this is how bart knows where to find them later to for to expose them yeah the plotting in this episode is super good now this is one of a very strong plot that doesn't need a b story it's just all it it is fulfilled from beginning to end on the journey of their love and uh that includes their secret movie date which actually you know

what i gave it to good gravy but I think I love this Super Nintendo Chalmers line here, too. Do you think anyone saw us? No. It went just as we planned. Except they confiscated my thermos of cola at the door. Skinner. What are you two doing here?

Super Nintendo Chalmers. Why, we're on a field trip. With a student. Yes. He's purchasing refreshments in the lobby. I'll go get him right now. Car keys, car keys, car keys.

There it is. There's that noise. Stop pushing me. What's going on? Just enjoy the movie. is tom beringer you think they actually filmed this in atlanta i don't know i don't think it's important yeah i love i love i think that's my favorite line yeah i mean i like yeah at the end it's so great he's so into the movie he's not upset that that Bart's just like, I don't give a shit.

Or that he's like with an eight-year-old boy and his ten-year-old boy in his pajamas. Like, what? But man, this is like, what is this movie? The Big Chill or something like that? That's what is implied. That is a film that is set in Atlanta and has Tom Berenger in it. So though, that would mean it's like a revival house. They're seeing that.

I would suggest, I think the marquee of the movie theater also says movie with air conditioning. Yeah. are in it so though that would mean it's like a revival house they're seeing that yeah i i would suggest i think the marquee of the movie theater also says movie with air conditioning yeah yeah so the big chill almost there's a joke a secret hidden joke in there too i never thought of that yeah it's too clever by half that makes sense but uh i just yeah the chalmers bart relationship for like five seconds is so great he's like talking to a 10 year old boy about how great this movie is he just way into it the way that a parent would at home of just saying like do you think they really film this in north carolina or whatever but but the atlanta line and just that is a perfect reply to people who have uh people like us who have nerdy questions about things like i don't

think it matters like it's you say that for any trivial question i i love the chalmers skinner relationship and i think it's it's funny how he's he's kind of almost like an evolved form of skinner in a lot of ways and then he's like you know he's thrilled he gets his own honda civic to go to point c on weekends but he's going like skinner's going to the movies with with you know edna secretly chalmers is just going to see the big chill by himself like that's like even even more sad i guess i guess i mean like he's a very realistically observed uh normal guy in this in this crazy world but his life is also sad like you pointed out like i think his only power is having power over seymour that's basically it that's what gets him off well the chalmers is

more secure in his existence like it's a lonely life filled full of weirdos but he's like yeah i'm gonna see a movie and this is just me now i'm not the guy with the bone in his hair i'm not the bubblebee suit guy i'm just the guy with the job he doesn't live with his mom also that might help true you know it's so gross the way skinner crawls under the theater chair to get sit with her like i think it goes back to his special ops training though that answer of like was was this film in Atlanta? Everything is filmed in Atlanta now, or at least every Marvel movie is. If you see at the end, they got a big Georgia peach there because they-

It's the newest tax shelter. It is. It's probably a right to work state as well. They can get around some union laws, but that's the silly- That was so weird to find out with spider-man homecoming because it's the queen spider-man he's finally doing his stuff right where he lives you find out they filmed a tiny bit of that movie really there and the rest was atlanta posing as new york the final showdown was at the coke factory so it all made sense actually it was at an empty yeah it was just

nowhere it was like this could be anywhere was that Was that the case in 97, do you think? I don't think they filmed as much in Atlanta then. I don't think so. Vancouver was more the go-to place for every city in that era. Canada is still a classic tax shelter, but Atlanta will open up its doors to any... I love the through line in Act 2. The through line is Bart is being tortured. It's a great series of escalating incidents Of Bart just being humiliated and tortured

To support this relationship Which I can't think of a worse torture Than looking at cakes with Agnes Skinner Mother doesn't approve of me dating So I needed to keep her busy For a few hours while Edna and I sneak out Hours There it is

I can't take much more of this I collect pictures of cakes That I clip out of the magazines It all started in 1941 When good housekeeping featured a photo of a lovely cake You wouldn't happen to have any real cakes around here, would you? Oh my, no, I don't care for cake, too sweet Now, this is called a Lady Baltimore cake At my age, I don't have much saliva left So you'll have to lick my thumb before I can turn the page.

Oh, can I just turn the page for you? No, but you can pick out any picture you want to take home with you. Okay, that one. No, you can't have that one. That's a coconut cake. I love how pissed off Bart looks in this scene. He's so mad. He's getting pushed

really hard yeah here this this has some of the sort of the dna of the uh the radioactive man number one and doing the gardening chores for that what's that that old lady's name this is glick it was like yeah boys love candy it's got that that same just just sheer terror of someone who's so old and so on from a different dimension as a young boy. You have no common ground. Who will also not listen to you and have no respect for you or even hear what you're saying. But I think they truly discovered Agnes Skinner in The Twisted World of Marge Simpson. So they're really having fun with her here.

It means lamb, lamb of God. Yeah, just how brutal and angry she is. Especially her like that. She loves photos of cakes, but hates cake they're too sweet and that is a lady baltimore cake and i like the the weird cake rules that bart doesn't know but she thinks he should know like you cannot take the coconut cake picture i there was that was never established i think she would have said that no matter which one that's true yeah i think he well bark couldn't do his win she found a new young person to be cruel to yeah seymour's not there she that's the only reason she let seymour get relieved because she like a cat with a mouse she has a new younger

toy to play with and in torture to death i i feel like for the most part old simpsons is like the perfect comfort food for me i I'll rewatch it infinitely. Agnes Skinner stresses me out. Like I put her on like a Dolores Umbridge level of just like injustice where she's just, yeah, just gets under my skin like that. Great comparison. They're very similar. And scenes like this really make you feel more sympathy for Skinner. You know, just seeing just his awful mother who he's lived with forever.

Or at least for 30 years. Hey, do you want to be tortured, Henry? Here I am, sorry. Since his childhood, since his birth. Then Bart gets the final indignity of getting sent to the principal's office by Edna and having to say this. Mrs. Krabappel,

Bart has something he wants to say to you. I won't say it Bart I love you, Edna Krabappel Bart's gonna marry the teacher We're registered, Simpson Thank you, Bart That was very sweet

You may sit down now They're not gonna get away with this. I'm going to step out for a few minutes, class. Martin, you're in charge. Now, Bart, you must promise not to fall in love with me. Oh, man, I love how much he's relishing that. He clears his throat. He's like, there's a wind up to to this like finally i can be i can do this that's the hierarchy in play there that martin is like wait i can move up i can switch positions with bart and he'll be the low man in the class if i can score this but he's like martin isn't used to burning someone else in

class so he's like and that is a pretty good burn on him too like yeah i promise you won't fall in love with me and that's such that's such a perfect like portrayal of the the fickle nature of children yeah and that's obviously martin you know i think if you if you fast forward like four or five years the popularity structure would be more kind of like locked in but at that point it's kind of a battle royale and like the nerdy kid can still crack a joke at someone cooler than him and just ruin it has been stratified yet yeah it's all up for grab and it's also a sweet scene though in a way with it's easy to see from bart's position but from edna and seymour not understanding bart's feelings this is a sweet moment in that it's probably the

first time seymour has technically said i love you to edna her reaction seems to imply that he hasn't said that before yeah i mean this really is i mean obviously what pushes barter the edge but it's it's like this is them going too far like you've tortured bart but now it's like public humiliation he is now the courier not just of letters but like sort of like a singing telegram almost so warped yeah well but they're too in love to realize what they're doing is painful to Bart. But Bart's going to get his revenge when he runs everybody up to their secret rendezvous point. Okay, crew.

Set your faces to stunned. Um. Um. School dismissed I have a mini figure of the scene of them in the closet and you can open and close the closet door it's very cool that is an amazing pose of them like locked together and I love the little animation touch of Edna like gently pulling down her skirt a little bit like it matters

it still kind of stays in place too it's not moving any but they don't break their embrace they're just sort of like holding each other and like looking over at everybody in shock well and everybody else it's also great staging on that shot because everybody's in shock except for bart bart has this satisfied smug look on his face that he just humiliated them like he did they did to him i think this is like our one reference of the episode set your faces to stunned uh star trek yes a star okay well bob i am a little more on the virgin side of things just from this scene just because this is some over the pants fun that they're having here so yeah perhaps skinner still isn't comfortable yet going any farther i i've already rested my case henry all right but uh it's a family show you know you can't show everything it's the middle of the day you know

skinner going for his final trump card of just like school dismissed like even that is tempting as it is to leave the school early they'd rather gawk at them in the closet together it's an act break very much like did you just call me a liar? Oh, that's much worse. But so when we come back, the rumors are already spreading. And then Bart opened the door and Principal Skinner and Mrs. Krabappel were kissing and swearing. Father, Uncle Apu, a teacher was in the closet with the principal and he had as many arms as Vishnu and they were all very busy. I was in the library at the time, but Janie told me that Principal Skinner and Bart's

teacher, Mrs. What's her name? Krabappel? Yeah, Krabappel. They were naked in the closet together. Oh, my goodness. Wait a minute. Bart's teacher is named Krabappel? I've been calling her Crandall.

Why didn't someone tell me? Oh, I've been making an idiot out of myself. Mrs. Krabappel and Principal Skinner were in the closet making babies, and I saw one of the babies, and the baby looked at me. Baby looked at you? Sarah, get me Superintendent Chalmers. Thank you, Sarah. It's so great how ralph's mood shifts and then the baby looked at me he sounds shocked then he sounds like delighted that the baby looked at him

he has no idea what he's saying that that whole stretch right there is i mean from the from the closet scene kind of onward out there's so many great goofs just back to back which i feel like is is nice because it kind of perks things up because this is like a slower more i don't know more more personal episode i guess and it's less it's less about the gags but then you get a little bit of you know a little bit of action in there all these kid gags are great in how it captures how kids lie to their parents or do you see well you say in millhouse's case he sees the reaction of just saying the truth about kissing. And he's like, oh, and swearing like that. Is that even in the closet?

Yeah. And same with they make it so Lisa has heard it through the grapevine. Because if Lisa was there, she wouldn't say a lie. She would say what really happened. Did she remember it correctly? But she's too trusting of Janie and Janie's account of what happened. That was a good move. Yeah.

And one of like three Homer jokes this entire episode. We see him with the bullhorn later. I wanted to see like the percentage of Homer. This could be the least we ever see of him in any episode. Because like I think Dan Castaneda just like, I'm taking the day off today, guys. You used me for like 30 seconds of this episode. I think Sweet Seymour Skinner had just as little Homer as well. I'm glad you brought that up because they were originally going to have Homer be a much bigger part of the plan to get Skinner reinstated.

But they cut that because it's like, no, no, let's let the ending be sweet. We don't need to have Homer hijack the show. So they learned the lesson that time. Yeah, and this also goes more on the sweet, though. The Homer, I love that they have Mrs. Krabappel, which from the beginning is a joke that her name is obviously Crabapple, but no one says Crabapple. And that they could go for it right then, that Homer's always been calling her Crabapple, but he says Crandall. Crandall's so much funnier. Like that's someone's real name or something. That's so good.

There are so many badly named Simpsons characters in the first season like jay lauren prior and mr largo krabappel is one of the ones that really works yeah it's well even skinner is just like yeah bf skinner reference yeah or uh arnie pie with arnie in the sky one no jokes that then just kind of stick around i just become part of it uh so one thing i love is is the restraint with ralph wiggum stuff i think that it's i i have this this i don't think it's a theory it's just that less is more and i think i agree yeah i think uh they after this i think sort of more in the mike scully era and like in the 2000s i think they kind of leaned into sort of like oh yeah let's make jokes about the intellectually disabled and ralph is one of them and in this in this

episode it's like no he's like an innocent little kid who could be a little slow but i i think the peak of that is him putting a ice cream cone on his head and saying i'm a unitard yeah there's a lot of that yeah you know he's also the one who says super nintendo shalmers it's true it's a great i like the innocent ralph jokes more than just like oh there's something wrong the part in the beginning where he tries to pin a tail on a donkey and he misses and then cries and yeah that's like a thing a little kid would actually do and it's it's it's less like oh he's got things wrong with him and more like oh he's just he's not the smartest kid he's sort of not lisa he's not bart i think he's sort of like the

butters of the show where um you always knew a kid in grade school who would pull his pants all the way down to use the urinal just like he hasn't figured it out yet totally yeah i think also just like there's the the the boba fett effect where when he's like a background character who just does something here and there has a line once in a while you're like hey all right and then the second he becomes a fan favorite they're like well let's flesh him out more and it just kills it yeah they just they completely were like i mean this little wiggy another episode entirely but i it's got like a couple fun sound bites but overall i don't like that episode yeah they i mean they misuse ralph later and i feel like a good ralph line requires a careful touch and a lot of it is sort of like monkey cheese you know at mad lib

humor at a certain point but here i here i really like ralph i love this scene too that we get to first time we learn that her name is sar Wiggum and that's his wife and I just love her satisfied. It's so sweet. Another clone wife in this universe. Looks and talks the same. Very odd. But so as the rumor spread it comes back to

Chalmers. Get her! Super attentive Chalmers. The whole town's in an uproar about your sleazy shenanigans. Now, I'm going to give you a choice. You can give up this tawdry, fulfilling relationship, or you two will be out of here so fast your mortarboards will spin. And where is your mortarboard, anyway?

Right here, sir. So, what'll it be, Seymour? Well, I'm sorry, but I can't give up the woman I love. Well, then I'm afraid you leave me no choice. I want you out of the building by three o'clock. You're fired. Edna two. It's another really greatly framed shot when Chalmers is revealed.

The shot is framed by his like clenched fist. And I love Seymour's pen flying out of his hand when he sees Chalmers. It's a great little touch. Which is the one where he gets the hiccups. Oh, that's sweet Seymour. Okay, yeah, yeah. Again, get them mixed up. That trait didn't last more than an episode.

It's so funny, though. Skinner, you see such a cool side of him in this, or not cool necessarily, but like a more, you know, it's up close and personal, and then it does kind of pull back and get you this side that's just flustered at the side of Chalmers.

Just the suggestion of having to talk to Chalmers. But I guess, what did Skinner expect after being caught by the kids? This is going to come to Chalmers eventually. I guess he was just hoping he could ride it out and maybe Chalmers wouldn't find out. Yeah, we don't see what happens in the moments following them getting caught. I really wonder what happened after that. Also, Chalmers' insistence that they should always be wearing mortarboards like they are in Oxford or something. It's so great, too.

They're esteemed educators. They need mortarboards. Chalmers fires Skinner again, though in a less humiliating way than in Sweet Seymour. Except the way he says edna too it's just like ouch ouch and we get edna saying goodbye which is like this scene does feel sadder to me now that martial arts is gone i was thinking about that the way she says like where does the time go i was like oh boy also sad seymour and Anna are leaving, and they even apologize to Bart, which I think really helps the emotional clarity of this, because you see that they feel bad.

They don't just forget about what happened in the previous act. They apologize to Bart. They know that they hurt him by making him a third wheel to their relationship. Yeah, I wrote that down. That was a very sweet touch, because they're so consumed by what's happening to them, but they realize like, oh, we humiliated Bart, and that was a very sweet touch because they're still consumed by what's happening to them but they realize like, oh, we humiliated Bart and that was wrong.

Even though he got us in trouble and we're totally screwed, we still kind of ruined his life temporarily. But things aren't as done as it seems. Wait a second. You don't have to leave just because Superintendent Chalmers told you to.

What are you getting at? You spent your whole life following orders from your mother, the army, Superintendent Chalmers. you to. What are you getting at? You spent your whole life following orders. From your mother, the army, Superintendent Chalmers. Just this once, man. Stand up for yourself. Okay, Bart. Let's go, Seymour.

Okay, isn't it? Uh, no, wait. We're not going anywhere. I'm going to do what Bart should have told me to do a long time ago. Attention, Springfield. We have barricaded ourselves in the school and are not coming down until our demands are met. Willie hears you. Willie don't care. That's another great line.

Understated. Yeah, it's Willie's only line in this episode, which for a school-centric one, it's funny that willie is not really involved in it but uh i'm not even gonna tell you what he's into is it all right but uh you know the i like that bart command it lets bart have an active part in this third act too that he's the one that commands them to like none of this would have worked if without bart telling them to do it him calling in kent brockman and causing a scene like bart's bart's very helpful in all of this and it's it's cool because

it's the the renegade showing these two authoritarians how to yeah you know repurpose that and try you know take a page out of bart just like in sweet seymour skinner's badass song i just love when there's like a connection between the authority figure and like the troublemaker it's very sweet they have some common ground like they can each teach each other something which like at the very end of sweet seymour skinner's badass song uh so they call him kent brockman and kent will fall for anything he's not a particularly good journalist kent brockman is i'll be right there all right people we've got an escaped octopus on the roof of springfield elementary let's roll two Two cameras. So once again, I've been had. But an even more interesting story has developed high atop this two-story school.

A love story. Skinner, get off of my school. No, you get off of my school. Homer Bart's up there. Give me that. Bart, this is your father. Do you know where the remote is? I looked all over the house.

Did you check your pocket? It was in my pocket. They had a real megaphone in the booth, and that was a Dan Castellano ad-lib, still leaving the megaphone on. It was my pocket. Dan is a great improviser, like still leaving the megaphone on. It's like, it was, it was my pocket. Dan is a great improviser. Say it again.

It's true. He's so good. I remember that one, that soundbite being used. And I think, you know, the local UPN station when they were like, The Simpsons every night at 630 and also at 7. And it was the remote thing. And I'm like, that's not really a super great joke. It's sort of funny.

It's a nice little, like uh it's off tone for this episode so it kind of stands out but i think on its own like isolated it really doesn't yeah i could see the ad package people going like do we have one about remote controls or changing on your television what if people are looking for the remote when they see this ad and it resonates with them i think seymour's retort to chalmers is very underrated. No, you get off of my school. It's very lame and not thought through. And I giggled now. I missed it so many times.

Kent Brockman saying, high atop this two-story school. Oh, yeah, a love story. I do think an octopus on top of a school, that would be pretty interesting, though. That's kind of the last time Homer talks in this episode, too. There's one more, but it's good. Then they have some really quick jokes about police or government agents trying to get people out of a hostage situation. So they have them blaring the music. They say it's specifically the Noriega thing that they are doing there.

Yeah, it's also, we saw that i think it was really seen the most when waco the waco siege happened you know playing music though in the waco siege it wasn't just music i believe i heard that i'd read somewhere that they played like the sounds of animals being slaughtered yeah that lord yeah it's a you know it's a don't mess with the government man they've got all types of things to fuck with your head. Didn't they have like a room full of, it was Teletubbies on loop and the one in Cuba. Oh, Guantanamo. That was like a real torture innovation lab. Finding new things to do all the time there.

It's America's number one part of innovation there. Just torture. But this torture, this is torture I could go for. Alright, boys. Roll up the sound truck. We'll blast them out with music. Embrace me Oh, witness I hope this scene never ends Seymour, you're heaven in hush puppies

Turn the music off Ha, it's working like a charm, boys Now cut the power and hit them with the lights You're irreplaceable boys so cut the power and hit them with the lights it's a great scene yeah i gotta say suzy dieter once again just the acting and also the lighting when the light hits the colander and the spinning the animation of the first person perspective of both seymour and edna so great and when they're like the shot of them like all sleeping like in chairs on the floor it's also a very sweet looking setup for a scene yeah i mean the simpsons doesn't need to have impressive visuals you know it's mostly about what they're saying but occasionally you get

moments like this and it's just like wow that's really actually beautiful any scene with like lighting is just or like like any sort of nighttime scene where the colors are different is very very nice to see in the show and they don't overstuff it with jokes you do get the joke of bart being tortured by it but the edna and seymour are enjoying it but it's more just like a sweet moment of two people in love and just the it's played straight the the shot reverse shot of them just swinging around and in happiness it's like this is just lovely yeah it's just fun to look at it touching and uh this song was also played in the episode old money when abe and b were dancing and uh when they come back that's another great little addition bart could just be laying on the floor

on anything but the oh yeah him having the toilet paper as a pillow it shows that at some point part was like well if i'm gonna lay down i need a pillow oh here's a giant pack of toilet paper i guess i can sleep on that i did notice it yeah and like seymour has his shoes on but i took hers off it's like all these little character touches it's something you don't notice unless you look closely but it's extra thought put into something that some other shows don't do attention Attention to detail. That's great. They get a faithful phone call. I'll get it. Talk to me.

You have got to end this thing, Shemar. We're not coming down until our jobs are reinstated and you acknowledge and celebrate our love. No one would like to celebrate your love more than I, but I am a public servant and not permitted to use my own judgment in any way. Then let us take our case directly to the townspeople. Oh, yeah, that'll be real productive.

Who do you want to talk to first, the guy in the bumblebee suit or the one with the bone through his hair? My opinions are as valid as the next man's. All right, just come on down. He's had it. That exasperation is so good. All right. Chalmers has a little of Frank Grimes in him there, I'd down. He's had it. That exasperation is so good. All right. Chalmers has a little of Frank Grimes in him there, I'd say.

He knows he's in a cartoon and he's kind of sick of it. Yeah, he's a wonderful sort of universal straight man. Is he stationed there? Does he go to Shelbyville or Ogdenville or whatever and the schools are slightly more normal and people are regular? It seems to be his district, I think. I don't know. I think he talks about the other schools, but we never see him at the other schools.

Yeah, he says like, when I come here, row classroom after classroom of ugly, ugly children. He takes care of other schools, though I think, too, he didn't grow up in Springfield. Yeah, he's from Albany.

That's right. So he doesn't know that kind of background. I almost, some mimetic way of remembering that. If only I had said, I almost said Utica. I was like, no, no, no, that's the other place. But him just pointing out that the absurdness of that these people, Krusty, Sideshow Mel, Bumblebee Man, they are performers always walking around

in costume. They never stop. And just like any random crowd scene, we'll have people there for no real reason. Just for familiar faces. If you see a court scene, why is Skinner at the Itchy and Scratchy trial? Why is he there? It's like, oh, it's just a character that we can draw in here. There's no reason.

That was something that always sort of rubbed me the wrong way about the movie is that Mo went to see Green Day. That was something that always sort of rubbed me the wrong way about the movie is that Moe went to see Green Day. That is weird. Yeah. Like, I feel like it's one thing for it to be sort of a public gathering and it's almost like, well, what else are you going to do? But when it's specifically a concert, they always seemed better about that. You'd see Otto and you'd see like generic teenagers.

Moe can't afford Green Day tickets and he's too hateful to get into Green Day. Well, my justification for that is one that mo would probably sneak in or steal tickets and then two mo is the first person to one of the people who throws the worst stuff at them to kill green day and so you need mo there to be the one to injure green day horribly and kill them yeah in 2007 was the best time to make a titanic joke yeah oh yeah i'm glad they saved it in their pocket for that 10 years later oh boy eventually we'll get to that take that movie i i look forward to i think of someday we will do a four-part talking simpsons movie analysis before but before we get to that it this uh gag of faking a bombing is very pre-9-11, for sure.

I mean, you'd seen this in a million things. A guy with a bunch of dynamite saying, I have a bomb. You'd see that stuff from the 70s. Superman stops those guys. That's the end of Tommy Boy, isn't it? Yes. Oh, you're right. Wow.

Actually, they ripped this off from Tommy Boy. Tommy Boy was like the year before this. 96 or something, yeah. So I think, okay, so this is referencing the Armor Hot Dog song. And I think in the episode, which one is it? Lady Bouvier's Lover. Yep. They sing the entire song.

You go back to that episode because it was part of the Wiener Wars of the 60s in which Oscar Mayer and Armor had competing hot dog jingles. They're both very catchy. But Armor Hot Dog stuck it to sissies, finally. I think Armor Hot Dogs is too. No, wait, they embrace sissies what am i talking about even yeah sissy kids their hot dogs are for sissy kids but i think oscar meyer it returns to a theme of more armor hot dogs is more of a list if i may compare their jingles i i prefer oscar meyers to it i think yeah oscar me Myers is like imagining

yourself as the product which is like the ultimate act of hubris like you will become the product imagine yourself everyone would love you if only

yeah I think the Oscar Myers one is definitely more accessible you know it feels the armor one feels very pandering

you know it's sort of be all you can be whereas it's more like yeah you want to be us. You want to be the hot dog. If only I was a processed meat product, I would have friends.

Though it fits, too, that Simpsons would go for the deeper cut of the hot dog jingles, the less famous one. Well, they already did the Jay Sherman one. They had them having an Oscar Mayer singing contest. Wow. So both hot dog jingles were in the Simpsons.

You're right. They were crazy about hot dogs apparently. Though as Bill Oakley opines they never got a free hot dog from Armour. They put their song

in their show twice. Armour hot dogs which like shipping a crate of hot dogs to The Simpsons people probably would have cost them like $10 wholesale. Just do it.

Man you know what they were sticking on this for way too long but they love to refurbish these jingles for a new crowd. I really want to hear the SoundCloud rapper versions of these jingles. I think that'd be perfect for today's youth. There's got to be a YouTube compilation of 50 years of hot dog jingles or whatever.

There's got to be one with a rap beat from the 90s, I swear. That must be terrible. Here's how Chalmers interprets that classic song. Good. I have a bomb. Hey, wait a minute. Those are hot dogs. Armor hot dogs.

What kind of man wears armor hot dogs? Very Hestony. What kind of man? He's judging Skinner as a man. What kind of man? This is the first time I caught that, like, Wiggum knows that they're armor hot dogs instead of any other hot dog.

Wiggum would know, yes. It's a great way to just work the lyrics in as dialogue, though. It's very clever. And the way the hot dogs fall off of him with one single wiener, like, limply flopping off of him. They're a little too droopy to be hot dogs the hot dogs are usually pretty firm right they've warmed up against his skin that's what i take to me that that last hot dog that last straggler i would put that if you're looking at sort of

attention to detail in this episode i think it's the the illustrations of cakes oh yeah mrs skinner's house and then if there's the the hot dog sad hot dog and then the toilet paper roll that barth's sleeping on those are the three all-stars just the real it's really like you didn't have to put that much effort into it, but here we are. A lot of thought put into those. Yeah, CZD and their team, they are the best. It's time to explain themselves or lie to the people of Springfield. We're talking about S-E-X in front of the C-H-I-L-D-R-E-N. Sex cauldron? I thought they closed that place down.

What are you people talking about? My child told me you two were having sex in the school janitor's closet. You know, making babies. Yes, illicit sex. Doing it, it, it! Assaulted public sexual congress! This is absurd.

I did not have relations in that closet, and the fact is, I haven't... Um... I did not have relations in that closet and the fact is I haven't Yes Seymour I think you'd better tell them it's the only way to clear our names Well everyone the fact is I haven't ever had relations. I am a virgin. Hey, does this mean that Mrs. Kripopple is a virgin, too? Well, Seymour, it's clear you've been falsely Accused Because no one anywhere Ever would pretend

To be a 44 year old virgin See case closed That's what he wants them to think No Henry everyone tell Henry he's wrong I have to say He'll agree with me After I give him $20 But Seymour is so pure

This episode is about how he's an innocent He's got a purity and a gentle quality to him If this was a deception I think there'd be a scene Where Bart would have this idea Maybe not Bart, but Edna would have this idea Edna is like, I think you should tell them I think they didn't go all the way

Because Seymour's probably like I'm a virgin, I need to figure this out. And Edna was very sensitive to that, even though Edna's had a lot of sex, apparently. Waiting for the right person. And at the end, I think that is when the consummation happens. Hence the champagne cork popping. And Edna's like, let's take care of this. It's out there.

Now we can start working on you. But everybody tell Henry he's wrong. Well, I also like that sex cauldron is one of my favorite lines, too. Sex cauldron. I get that confused. That's so similar to a moment that could have happened in Bart After Dark that I often remember that scene is happening in Bart After Dark. Well, they both have an angry mob. Yeah.

Of course, Krusty's there. So in Springfield, there is a bordello, a burlesque house, and a sex cauldron. Or there was a sex cauldron. Wait, the sex cauldron, there is a bordello a burlesque house and a sex cauldron or there was a sex cauldron but wait the sex cauldron was that the bordello oh i bet it could be talking about the bordello well the bordello seemed to still be open when abe and jasper were talking about it so though it could have been shut down in the interim between Bart After Dark and this one. Sex Cauldron. Great. Sex Cauldron. And you may think that Skinner's phrasing of, I did not have sexual relations, is a reference to Bill Clinton saying that. But this actually aired nine months before Bill Clinton said that. Yep.

Bill Clinton said that Januaryuary 25th 1998 and he when he says i will say this again i did not have sexual relations with that woman monica lewinsky though and your thumb is way too big for that you're getting to shrink down your innocent thumb uh yeah smaller thumb yeah too i have too aggressive a thumb yeah small little pinch yeah boy talking about it like clinton basically aped up the same cadence That Skinner has Yeah It's like That's a good episode

Yeah I will be this in the future Simpsons did it We talked about The lady Baltimore cake And all the nice little props I really love The look of the shock crab

But also the dangling Handcuff And you can hear The handcuff foley There's like a There's like a noise Of the rattling handcuff It just

I love that That's the only action In that scene Of shocked people Just the handcuff dangling. And 44-year-old Virgin, years before the 40-year-old Virgin film, that seven years beforehand.

It is a funny, they just all looked out on Seymour, just like, really, a Virgin at 44? Ooh, you're even more pathetic than we thought. And when they got their answer, everybody wants to leave. Talmors is like dissolving the situation as walks away yeah they're almost they're almost they're just disgusted by it they're it's it's so mundane it's just upsetting yeah as lenny says it's more than he wanted to know now the commentary too they mentioned how like for a show that had a larger kid audience

they don't really they a viewer under 10 might not even know what a virgin is so now they have to have an uncomfortable conversation with their parent about like well what is a virgin what does this mean i remember and i think i've talked about this before on this podcast but uh i remember seeing the movie uh the movie twins with my mom with arnold schwarzenegger and dana vito sort of like the metal gear solid story of the 80s never put that together yeah you're not wrong at all. I'm sure he saw it. It was like,

I'm going to make my sci-fi thriller masterpiece based on twins. It's a melange of 80s things in Kojima's head. With fake science. But in the movie, Arnold Schwarzenegger is a virgin.

He tells Danny DeVito that. In that scene, I was probably six or seven watching it in a theater with my mom. I was like, what's a virgin? And I was laughed at.

And then I think I didn't ask any questions after that for a while. Though, you know, I would hope these days maybe people are a little less judgmental of a 44-year-old virgin. I don't know. You don't have to have sex to feel complete in your life. Like, if you're not, if you don't want to have sex, you can be a 44 year old virgin. No one, you shouldn't feel the societal pressure about that. So I don't want any like people on the asexual spectrum out there to feel sad about or bad about the 44 year old virginity, but the angry virgins. Yes. Stop shooting people,

please. Yeah. Please don't, please don't do that anymore. If you're like, if you're one of our listeners, stop doing that. You're happy virgin.

I do love Chalmers' exit line here, too. Okay, well, Edna Seymour, in light of these revelations, I suppose we overreacted. Do we have our jobs back? What? Oh, yes, yes, sure. Just, you know, keep the lewdness to a minimum. He feels like he has to say something, a committal, and like, you know, an authority figure would say, but he just, that doesn't mean anything. He's just like, yeah, don't, whatever, who cares?

He leaves. Keep the lewdness to a minimum runs away from the awkwardness. Well, that's such a proper representation of how the public does react to things, where it's almost like controversy reaches a boiling point, and then you don't really know what to do about it and everyone just kind of moves on that's we see a lot of that these days in the news i feel like i like how like they really wanted salacious details they really wanted to know like the dirt but he they were like punished with this story of a sweet virgin yeah and the least sexy dirt ever instead of salacious details it's that he is a teetotaler who's never had sex they're like i didn't want to know that this needed to be dirty and sinful not you being more chaste than than we are we are the real monsters oh no no scandal ends like this i swear no it helps that people actually believe him. In the real world, people would be like, he's lying.

No. Like I'm saying. Like, I don't believe him. We then get a very sweet ending here. So I guess now you'll be getting married or something, huh? Well, actually, Seymour and I have decided to break up. Huh? We can't continue on like this, trying to build a private relationship in public,

the whole town watching our every move with a fine-tooth comb. I'm used to humiliation, but not in front of a crowd that size. Oh, but you seem like such a good couple. Bart, when you get a little older, you're going to learn that sometimes romances don't turn out exactly the way you'd like them to. That's why I love elementary school, Ed edna the children believe anything you tell them oh seymour okay come on come on the sound effect you got the oh seymour i didn't mean to say come on i'm sorry that's disgusting

But yes I mean The children will believe Anything you tell them Not the adults And then the champagne pop Champagne cork popping Champagne runneth over O Seymour

Blah blah blah Okay Alright Well let us Let us know in the comments What you felt about this How does Max feel Max? I think it's a lot better

When there's a visual component to it i think just listening to the audio is gets a little asmr and i'm not wild about it okay you know that could be any liquid it really puts you in that closet it's up in there you know this ending too is very much of the theme of season eight which is it pretends that things have been reset like say in millhouse divided it teases that things are been reset. Like, say, in Milhouse Divided. It teases that things are going to reset to how they were at the beginning as a normal sitcom does.

But instead, they say, like, no, we're still in a relationship. This is, we will be in a relationship. The next time you see us, continuity has begun here. It is not reset entirely. Yes, big status quo changes were a big thing in seven and eight

like uh destroying legends like gachi and scratchy and jebediah springfield of breaking apart families pairing characters together it's all building to the ultimate one in arm and tim's area and it's hard when you have that kind of specter hanging over the show especially in a skinner episode it's hard not to think about it that's why i keep saying like well but you know armin tamzerian did this armin tamzerian did that but it's i wonder if they were thinking of that while working on this episode if well if they were planning like boy going into skinner's interior life and this is so interesting what if we went farther someone say they went too far yeah i think it's just it's it derails it so much you know it has there's so much sort of patience and tenderness and it's it's not a bunch of grand gestures like i mean i feel like they

could have done an episode where seymour and edna break up you know and that's and that how it affects i mean we sort of saw that there's the the teacher strike episode almost has undertones of that yeah i mean they did break up eventually spoilers by the way about about 10 years later and for a very bad episode a very bad reason like uh skinner was left for comic book guy yeah that's that's when they stop becoming characters and start becoming just puppets that they bash around skinner gets in a fight dressed as cat woman which is uh as in the tim burton cat woman and i just like yeah you know i like hey i like a comic con joke as much as the next person but yeah comic book guy is another character like ralph wiggum who's great in very small doses in the second he's the center

centerpiece it's just but i i really love this version of skinner and i feel like later episodes would really sort of draw more into just like brutal humiliation often painful uh physically and mentally and i feel like the sweet kind of weird man is a very, very fun character to watch. I do love this episode the more, now that I've re-examined it closely twice this year, it is one of my favorite emotional episodes. I am feeling what Max is saying too about how it is not the jokiest or funniest. Not that there aren't like,

there's multiple lines in this, are some of my favorites ever, but I wouldn't say it's in my top five just because I tend to lean more to the uh gag heavier ones but i do i love this episode gives me more warm fuzzy feelings than most do even without the gags the fact that there's no sort of you know b plot line is is i feel like it's noticeable uh i remember the what is it the date with density episode i remember that being the first episode when it aired that i felt like something was missing like i felt like things

and maybe it was just kind of you know the getting old enough to notice things changing and being like oh this isn't how i used to remember it it is um the first i think oakley and weinstein era episode with a b story or one of the first it's it's the first b story in a long time it doesn't really fit it sort of feels out of place and it's not the best part of that episode. So maybe that could be why. Yeah. But this one going back to it is like, this feels like really just a, just a triumphant episode. Cause it isn't, it isn't just a parade of goofs and gags and it, it still has some very funny moments in it, but it's, it's so, it's so patient. It takes its time and it's, it really handles these characters with care. And that was, I think this quality

that makes the Simpsons so as special as it is when in its in its heyday so thanks for listening folks this has been talking simpsons i've been your host bob mackie before we talk about our plugs max where can we find you uh what do you do once again you have a patreon you have two patreons i have two patreons uh let's see i do the best people have two like me it's really it's a cold unforgiving world out there we need to put gas in the podcast car whatever a blanket full of money exactly uh no i do uh the comedy button that's a cold unforgiving world out there we need to put gas in the podcast car whatever a blanket full of money exactly uh no i do uh the comedy button that's a long-running show it's uh me and a bunch of kind of uh video game industry veterans and we've all sort of grown up together it's

effectively me and my three best friends we just had our 350th episode a few weeks back i don't know when this episode's going up but yeah we've been doing this for seven years uh in in the long run it's not a show about anything it's kind of just a show about us goofing around give it a shot you know it's very very bawdy and blue and uh nonsensical and then on a more sort of somber serious note a newer show called weird heat it's uh me and my one of my other friends the same guy from the other show and we're just kind of talking about uh i don't know art and mental health and growing up and uh i don't know kind of it's it's trying to think so that's patreon.com slash comedy button or patreon.com slash weird heat all those things are available

of course on spotify itunes soundcloud all that nonsense uh and if you want to see me at my day job i'm at ign doing you know video game let's plays and unboxings and you know interviews and whatnot i was waiting until i finished spider-Man to listen to the spoiler cast you guys did with Brian and Tahar. Yeah. I didn't know they'd hear that. That was wonderful. I love that game.

That was the, I've never planned a Mavidia PS4 game before and this was the first one. It's a very attainable platinum, I will also say, but I love that game.

I'm saying it here. It's a wonderful game. I'm sorry, I'm saying it here. All the comedy button guys are welcome on the show. Yes. But they have to ask first.

They can't just come over. It's not exactly an open door policy. But yes, thanks for coming by, Mac. What's your Twitter? Oh, it's just MacScoville. M-A-X-S-C-O-V-I-L-L-E. Awesome. So as for us, we are supported by Patreon. If you go to patreon.com slash TalkingSimpsons and give at the $5 level, there is so much bonus stuff happening. We have exclusive miniseries like Talking Critic and Talking Futurama.

All future miniseries will be Patreon exclusive, so check them out there. We also have, dear Lord, like over a dozen interviews with Simpsons all-stars like Bill Oakley, Josh Weinstein, the two showrunners of this episode. Also, people like David Silverman and Mike Reese. You name a Simpsons person, we probably talk to them or we will in the future. Also, we have season wrap-ups, monthly community shows. So much is happening there and if you sign up at the five dollar level you'll get every episode of this podcast a week ahead of time and add free and the same goes for our sister show what a cartoon i think that's it henry is that everything well and also if you can only give a

dollar we still appreciate that and as a little thank you you get access to our monthly community podcast talk to the audience and you can hear that too and so whatever you can give we appreciate but you do get them a ton of stuff at five dollars so again that's patreon.com slash talking simpsons check it out we have more goals we'd like to hit including more podcasts and more episodes so if you want to help us out you can help us meet more goals that means more podcasts for you and that sounds like a great deal so as for me i've been one of your hosts, Bob Mackey. Find me on Twitter as Bob Servo.

My other podcast is RetroNauts. Just check it out at RetroNauts.com or look for RetroNauts in your podcast machine. It's a classic gaming podcast. We've been going on since 2006. I recommend finding a topic that you like, downloading that episode, and then subscribing to the podcast. It's that easy, folks. How about you, Henry? Where can we find you?

H-E-N-E-R-E-Y-G on Twitter. Follow me there for updates on when all this stuff goes live on our Patreon. H-E-N-E-R-E-Y-G. And also updates when we say do another live show. You can find out about that there, too. Oh, yeah. So thanks for listening, folks. We'll see you next week with the Canine Mutiny. Newton.

Um, um, school dismissed.