Talking Simpsons - Talking Simpsons - Homer The Heretic With Tim Kalpakis

Episode Date: August 16, 2023

For one of the best-written and animated eps of the series, we welcome back comedy performer/writer/musician/podcaster Tim Kalpakis from the band/podcast The Sloppy Boys (check out their new album)! Production season 4 begins with two new animation studios, as Homer loses his faith when he sees how awesome wasting time is. But will his pride destroy him in this perfect George Meyer script ruminating on the nature of faith? All that plus some of the best jokes ever in this week's heavenly podcast! Support this podcast and get over 150 bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! And please follow the official Twitter, @TalkSimpsonsPod!

This podcast is brought to you by patreon.com slash talking Simpsons head there to check out exclusive podcasts like talking Futurama talking of the hill the what a cartoon movie podcast and tons more I hardly endorse this event or product Our product. Ahoy, hoy, everybody, and welcome to Talking Simpsons, where we celebrate the feast of maximum occupancy. I'm one of your hosts, Garbage Island resident Bob Mackey, and this is our chronological exploration of The Simpsons. Who is here with me today in the same room? Hey, it's Henry Gilbert, and I owe all of this to Skipping Church.

And who was our special guest on the line today? Tim Galbagas, what is up? And this week's episode is Homer the Heretic. Pride goeth before destruction. Boy, everyone is stupid except me. This week's episode originally aired on October 8th, 1992, and as always, Henry will tell us what happened on this mythical day in real world history.

Oh my god! Oh boy, Bobby. Under Siege tops the box office, but we're more interested in watching the debut of Reservoir Dogs, plus it's the official release date of Mortal Kombat in arcades. Oh wow wow it's a good day for

violence it's a very violent day the 90s have begun the steven seagal era begins the quentin tarantino era begins and the scorpion and sub-zero era begin all all in the same week and seagal's on the way out oh well now he is yeah i mean then he was falling out of favor right as the mid 90s but under siege i guess that was big that's big time for him man it's funny to think that under siege and reservoir dogs coming out at the same time i was probably two three years late on watching reservoir dogs the cool movie but under siege i saw that probably week one was right on it i think i saw reservoir dogs yeah after i believe i saw pulp fiction on like video in 95 or 96 and then reservoir dogs soon after that yeah you know spike tv would call me a guy who likes movies but i have not seen reservoir dogs yet my wife is the

quentin tarantino fan i'm failing as a cis white straight guy yeah i need you to watch it so you can explain it to me the time i just it goes out of order i did is somebody mixed up the reels on this did this did this get a wide release reservoir dogs later well wide so this is the debut in 19 theaters okay yeah and it goes a little bigger after this but no i mean yeah this is like a jersey films thing we talked about it on the uh danny dev but no i mean yeah this is like a jersey films thing we talked about it on the uh danny devito episode we just did we're like danny devito uh or his jersey films uh group they were behind tarantino early and then they were supposed to make pulp fiction but like the budget was too big for them and that's when uh miramax and a certain horrible man enters the story of Quentin Tarantino. Kevin Smith?

Despicable. So Under Siege, I did see that on VHS within a year of its release, and that was when I was introduced to the idea that strippers pop out of birthday cakes. I didn't know that was a thing. With Erica

Alenica's topless turn. Oh, it taught me that diehards can happen anywhere. The cake scene is truly all I could picture. And that is what I would have brought up. I was like, oh, yeah, that's the movie where the lady pops out of the cake. That blew my little mind. My God. Well, the other bit I remember from it, though, too, was the knife fight that they're at the end.

But it's like Steven Seagal fight scenes are actually very boring because he can't move but he does like hand tricks and so it's basically him and Gary Busey like trading knives around until one of them gets stabbed you make it sound like he does close-up magic and uh and yeah I mean Mortal Kombat it's arrived it's gonna change video games with its extreme violence. There'll be a Senate sub-hearing in about 14 months about violent video games. Yeah, Mortal Kombat slowly gains ground, but it's when it's released on consoles, I guess, the next year is when it really becomes a hot topic. Damn.

Was Mortal Kombat before Street Fighter or after? Because we had, at my dad's pizzeria, we had video games, and it was the coolest thing ever. And we had Street Fighter 2, and I remember that coming into the pizzeria, and it blew my mind. But I didn't play much arcade Mortal Kombat. I played it on Sega. So your dad went with Street Fighter over Mortal Kombat.

Every household at the time had to either be a Street Fighter home. You had to choose. Or a Mortal Kombat home. Yeah, Street Fighter was about 18 months before Mortal Kombat. Yeah, I feel like Mortal Kombat was like, I don't think it would fly in like a family pizzeria to be ripping people's heads off and having their spines dangling during the finishing move.

And the game originally, a fun little trivia fact, the game originally was sold, like they tried to sell it to Jean-Claude Van Damme to like star in it it'd be like jean-claude van damme the game he said no and so they were just like we'll just make up a guy who just is him called johnny cage and just do all this stuff and now jean-claude van damme has fallen so far that he has agreed to appear as a skin like as a his character model will appear in the new mortal combat game as johnny cage yeah we're coming up on uh the 11th game this fall yeah yes yeah yeah though it's called one no it's the 12th oh it's the 12th okay but they're just calling it mortal combat

it's called mortal combat one okay one yes yeah it's uh very confusing needlessly confusing sorry we're confusing tim here with all our gamer talk. No, but that is a weird, you know, there is this tradition of like film franchise and stuff when you're ready to just reset and say like Rocky Balboa or like go back to the original name with no numbers. But then to say one is just a lie. You can't do that. Well, that's also in the music world, where you self-title your album, like your fifth or whatever album, to say we're back to basics. You know, I wanted to check.

The thing is, they did this before in 2011. I think the ninth game was just called Mortal Kombat. Yes. So they couldn't do that again 12 years later. They could have said Mortal Kombat 2, and it's a sequel to that game but not the other one it's very confusing but yes but anyway that's what happened when this episode of the simpsons aired and joining us once again is tim kalpakis from the sloppy boys you last

heard tim on our show for flaming mo welcome back to the show tim hey thanks for having me back guys uh what a great time to be back yeah tim you're you know i it's a great time to be back. Yeah, Tim, it's a great time because the Sloppy Boys, your band, and also podcast, but the band, your fourth album is out this month, I believe. Yes, we just dropped an album streaming on Spotify and Apple Music and everywhere. And we did consider, because we had kind of done three albums that were a trilogy, we thought maybe this is an eponymous album because we've never just called one the sloppy boys but it's felt special we recorded it in uh in west texas in torneo on a pecan farm called the sonic ranch and that felt like it informed the uh the recording process enough that we ended up calling it sonic ranch but it's a big swing for us we got Money Mark from the Beastie Boys producing and we really went for it it's our first time first time in the studio we used to record in a a practice space and they had a studio at the at like we

used to rent out this place where there was a studio it was too expensive so we used what they called the writing room to record our albums now that that you're being produced by Money Mark is so amazing like he I guess at the time the Simpsons album is coming, or the Simpsons episode aired, the album Paul's Boutique is being worked on. That's the 90, no, yeah, that's the 92 Beastie Boys album, I think. He's about joining up with the Beastie Boys, right? He comes into the picture. I think Check Your Head is where he, again, get really Money Marked up.

That's the one, yeah. He, yeah i feel like he had like known those guys before but it was like when they timed out with their move to la and he had a studio in atwater village which is funny because like now it's it's i mean then it would have just been like this very cute little uh neighborhood and even now it's still just sort of like brunch town but i love the idea of the bc boys coming out and be like all right hollywood let's do it and they're in this like cute little homespun studio but yeah he's the coolest we're actually recording during the 30th anniversary of check your head and he was like we have this song gardens of gamora that's got a little clav on it a clavinet and the day we recorded that he was he was like oh it's the anniversary of uh check your head let's get some clav and uh we had one

like wheeled in so that he could rock out on it was so fun oh cool and and he did the uh the keyboard intro to where it's at the beck song that's that's all that's him isn't that crazy if you're gonna be if you're gonna be a keyboard player who's like tied to like cool scrappy like hip-hoppy music that is like the iconic hook and yeah he played that the time of this recording i've only heard the first song from it the uh your your single gardens of gamora which is a whole lot of fun oh yeah it was it was great we really i mean just signing up with a new producer give like inspires you to like he did worked wonders with our music but also i think we were just writing we were like let's make some beastie boys type stuff because we have mark so it affected how

we wrote. But it was also just whole process. The goat, we lived for a week in this like house on this gigantic pecan farm. And we were writing the album as we were recording it. So it was one of those things of like getting drunk together at night and eating too much food and waking up in the morning and like working on a song that had kind of come up over dinner. And the whole, we really like dug into that, like the location informed the thing and the people and the collabs we felt like artists is what i'm getting at actual artists and gamora is a very blasphemous song though so is this episode really get touching you that is perfect uh yeah yeah gamora is a whole song about my

hedonism and yeah i love homer's like heresy is a little more informed by laziness, whereas mine is more aggro. But no, it's a perfect episode because the Sloppy Boys are sort of having our nasty boy summer. Jeff put out an album called Dutz that's raunchy as hell. So it's our rule-breaking summer. So it was a good time for me to take take a look at homer and see how he did it well and also you're uh we're talking to you after you've had a whole year of working on digman since the last time we talked so i was curious like has that given you a new perspective as a writer on a show like the simpsons having worked on an animated series it uh it really does and yeah this is like my my first foray and i'm and i'm learning it and it's really

uh fun and really watch re-watching the simpsons after having given some notes on animatics and stuff like that for the first time it really made me appreciate visual comedy like any physical gags that you're like god damn it like to make a physical you know like in a movie you'd be like oh chris farley is funny and the way he falls down is funny but like to have that come across in animation and like the notes process and how well directed these episodes are i don't we'll get into it but there was like specifically one gag when when homer like uh flanders throws homer off the roof and he bounces off a mattress and then she goes right back into the house shatters to the window i watched that like three times and i was like that is so funny just looking at it, that is so funny. Just looking at it.

They made that so funny. And it's really, it's hard to, a lot of times animators like on our show are making the thing way better and adding ideas like that. And a lot of times like you write something that you think is going to look super funny and then it doesn't yet. And you have to think like, oh, right. We didn't like explain in which way this character should be funny. But like the, the, the, the writing staff and the animators seem so in tune on the Simpsons.

It's crazy. This, this is one of the best animated episodes in the whole series too. On top of it being a great, a great script. I, oh, and also,

I mean, I know you mentioned before you had a fun story about meeting George Meyer, but this is like, this is also George Meyer, I think is one of your favorite writers too. Yeah. Oh my God. And, and that that he he put himself into it like it doesn't really get to happen a lot right on a show like the Simpsons you can influence things here and there but George Meyer is sort of

I believe but like a prominent atheist and a questioner of things and kind of a dead head and maybe dabbled in Buddhism at one point i don't know but even just like cold opening this episode with homer safe in the womb and then being like tugged out is so like uh artsy you know like more than than you kind of expect uh a show like this to be and it really felt like you like a guy like george meyer was like this is my masterpiece it's uh they he he is very nice on the commentary to credit it to Gene and Reese, who, you know, really came in with the outline for this. But they totally trusted him of like they did want to do Gene and Reese, the showrunners. They did want to do another like religion episode because the one with Thou Shalt Not Steal was so great for them in season two.

That won the Emmy, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So they're like, let's do another one but this time they turn to meyer for it who you know he is a uh yes a lapsed catholic is a is one way to put it and it was all of their shared memories of the joy of missing church which i definitely experienced as a kid meyer has a great joke on the commentary too where he says that he learned that some groups like taught this episode in christian school or whatever and he's just like i felt that i have failed they missed the point well definitely corrupted me because as a kid i went to catholic school my parents were not that religious i think they tried taking us to church a few times but they were like homer and their

mentality was i worked all week why do i have to get up early and dress up to go to this place it's really boring uh so I would kind of uh just be in the world of other Catholics and not really uh I'm not feeling the same things they're feeling you know and then this episode airs I'm like oh there's so there's something out there is echoing what I think and I'm not able to really uh articulate those thoughts until much later in my life but this was an important moment for me uh seeing these kind of concerns voiced by a character even if someone as stupid as homer yeah i um at the time my best friend at the time

this kid tom i'd sleep over at his house and they were catholic and then on i was sort of like lazy catholic and went to catholic school but but my family wasn't super into it but i remember sleeping over at tom's house saturday. And then Sunday we would go to church because his mom brought him and his brother to church. And they were, they were like really into it. And I would, I would go along with them if I slept over. And even though I didn't, I don't think I did the communion stuff. I didn't really know what I was doing, but this was a case where the dad stayed home. Like it would be like his Tom's mom would be like, okay, boys, here we're going to church.

And then like the dad, the dad would be like, bye bye everybody and it's not even like he was being lazy he would be like mowing the lawn and they would just he just stayed home and i remember asking like my friend's mom might be like janet how come ed doesn't come to church and and she didn't want to like answer uh for real in front of uh the kids so it was just like, oh, he just doesn't go. And I'm like, okay, that's an option. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up, Tim, because there were a few families growing up around me where the dad didn't go to church.

And you also mentioned the sleepover trap, where it's Saturday night, we're having fun, we're watching movies, we're watching SNL, we're eating pizza Sunday morning. You're in church with a weird family, and you don't know what's going on and they won't take you home. They think you need to go to church with them.

And when I tell other people that weren't part of this world that a strange family would just take me to their church, they find that offensive, but it was just part of me growing up. Yeah, and I think if I heard about that now, I'd be like, what? Like they made you practice religion?

But like, yeah, I just like went along with it and would be like bored. And then my parents afterwards would be like, oh, they brought you practice religion but like yeah i just like went along with it and would be like bored and then my parents afterwards be like oh they brought you to church cool and like they would think it was like a nice thing because they weren't going to church but uh it's that's a very funny imagine if you just if you were like yeah some other religion and you just like bring a kid along and convert them you would think parents these days would have harsh opinions about it and one friend of mine he was the most fun friend to hang out with because uh it was the dad's weekend friend where i got to go over his house when it was his dad's weekend we got to do

whatever we wanted but then it was church on sunday and it wasn't just catholic mass it was catholic mass in latin and it was twice as long as a regular catholic mass henry is being conspicuously silent i know he didn't grow up with any of this, and I'm resentful. No, so I was, well, lucky in some ways, but yes, I grew up in the South. I grew up in Ohio, by the way. Tim, where did you grow up?

Upstate New York. Okay. So in Arkansas and Florida, well, in Arkansas, my father's extended family, my mother's family, completely godless Californifornians and that's how i like it but my my dad's side of family were like uh mostly hardcore baptists but my dad wasn't like i also had like the non he was the non-religious guy his family but if you asked him to like have, like, hey, do you have this conservative religious opinion? He did, but he didn't want to go to church.

And also part of it was, it unlocked for me that I realized, oh, tithing. He doesn't want to give any money to anybody, and that includes the church. That was really it. Wow. Isn't a tithe like you're supposed to give 10% of your income? Yeah. I'm'm with my dad there that's a scam i mean that's what i gave to my agent that's me that's a godless californian the one of my friends who had to go to church on sunday uh for sleepovers um i would see the mom's tithe check on the kitchen table in the morning and it was for hundreds of dollars she observed that 10 rule oh wow and i guess one other story i can tell before this starts up is that my

mom never really tried taking us to church outside of when we were really little and then she kind of stopped but then in seventh and eighth grade in my catholic school uh the administration thought like oh these kids aren't going to church enough so what we're going to do even though they're paying to come to this private school we're going to give them even though they're paying to come to this private school, we're going to give them all slips. And they need to turn in these slips at church on Sunday to prove that they went. So I think my mom and I said, well, I guess we have to go. And we went once and we were like, we're not doing this ever again. Because I think we're sitting around a bunch of sick old people. We had to shake their hands and stuff.

And we just were grossed out by the whole thing. So I think my mom were on the same page there when it came to religion i remember looking forward to you mentioned shaking old people's hands the the sort of peace be with you moment when in church where you had i remember looking forward to that being like bored and being like hey at that one moment i'm i get i get to like work my magic and just shake the hands of all the old people around me but like this is fun that was the highlight i i like that meyer was able in this show to teach the kids watching this, like, it does have a moral at the end, but it's so heavy that I feel like it is against itself. But just in the way the second act starts with just telling you, like, hey, here's all

the good reasons you shouldn't go to church. I was like, oh, this put them all in my brain as a kid. It's ballsy to do that. And even their resolution there's like you know a bit of a heartwarming tv end to this but i i felt like they didn't chicken out entirely there are ways for like god to teach homer a lesson and they didn't do that and the way it comes together is like oh it's it's palatable for a broad audience but it is still they didn't totally wimp out about like being realistic about making this choice for

yourself in life so now we want to pause for a second and talk about uh the animation in this episode because it's a big move for the simpsons and by the way tim kalpakis we recorded this without him so he won't be saying anything or doing anything because he's not here all right but he'll be popping back in in just a second yes he'll be back and this is the first of production season four which means a lot of new firsts we talked about it in camp crusty how that was the final in production order of klaski chupo doing the show and uh basically they seemed like they were not uh liked by uh james l brooks for one him and gabor chupo had had issues we also heard they came up a little bit in our interview with david silverman a while back where he mentioned that like david

silverman became the series director in part because it seemed like gabor chupo was supposed to be series director but was working on other stuff you know that uncensored unofficial simpsons oral history by john ord fed that came out in like 2009. It's mostly bad, but there were a few anecdotes. Like you do hear the Klasky Chupo side of the story. And I believe in that book, someone was on the record saying, oh, the Simpsons wanted all these retakes. They wanted the animation studio to pay for them. Which is not normal.

And it's not what animation studios budget for. And it kind of like kills any profitability in it and meanwhile by 1992 or i suppose late 1991 when this deal would have ended or early 92 they're already rugrats has debuted and that's doing very good for them not as great as it'll do like within like four years but klaski chupo has their own original productions and meanwhile if Simpsons is one costing them a lot of money and two they're having a lot of problems with James L Brooks I can see why they're it's not the worst thing to lose the Simpsons anyway and they can always still advertise themselves as oh by the way we were the animation studio for the Simpsons and so

they're shopping around for new people this is where two new studios enter but the first is film roman and we've talked about it a whole lot on this podcast but you guys should listen to our garfield our what a cartoon garfield podcast to go into the full blow by blow but basically phil roman is a granddaddy of animation in america like he worked on so many things he worked on for instance how the grinch on, for instance, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, one of the first television animated specials. He also worked on a ton of the peanut specials as well. And at that studio, that studio then first worked on the Garfield specials. And then Phil Roman was like, hey, Jim Davis, why are we doing this? You know, we can do this ourselves. I'll set up my own studio, call it Film Roman,

and Phil Roman is in charge of it. And so with the backing of Garfield and Jim Davis, Phil Roman is able to launch his own studio, which at first can only really do an annual Garfield special at a time. But then by the late 80s, they're doing the Garfield and Friends show. In the early 90s, they sell Bobby's World as well oh that's right they had their own simpsons right before they started

doing the simpsons it is real simpsons practice yeah and then they're ready to try out for prime time like this is their first prime time show and they signed the deal with simpsons for season four and as we've heard as we asked many animators when we've talked to them it didn't sound like it was the easiest changeover uh because film roman was first off not ready for the quick pace of simpsons and i speaking of those retakes like you said i would bet that crazy films is demanding a lot more retakes than jim davis is doing on the garfield show or that howie mandel is doing on bobby's world so uh it was it sounded like it was tough and i also love hearing the stories from suzy dieter told us that like she loved the parties at claskey chupo and that film roman

seemed a little more buttoned down and less fun what was the process like moving from claskey chupo to film roman uh was were the people just moved to a different building they had new employers is how it worked that that is how uh yes uh i i believe that is how they worked it because you know when you when you hire class kichupo obviously simpson still had a ton of directors layout artists storyboarders all that stuff who transferred from studio to studio they didn't fire everybody from between season three and four but at one it's where you're physically located because the animation team at klaski chupo then they're in the klaski chupo offices which are in downtown hollywood to go to film roman they're based in burbank and in cheaper real estate in

burbank so they have to transfer there so basically your entire office moves and then second even though most of the teams were kept intact managerially like who's who's in charge in the office and who's like it is Phil Roman's place and I mean maybe you could go up the chain to say like well Phil wouldn't let me do this to Matt Groening or James O'Brooks or Al Jean or something but it is structurally where the animators are working. It is Film Roman Studio. And I think Susie Dieter implied to us that Roman had his own picks of artists who he wanted to get working on The Simpsons and not every director agreed

that those people would be the best for the job. So it did sound like there was a little turnover and new artists coming on when they went over to Film Roman. Hey, that's a clever title. It is. It is really cute. And well, apparently the problems they had in season four were pretty smoothed over over time. They got used to it.

And they worked out of Film Roman up to season 28. So they do this for 24 more years and it's only then that i believe uh we talked about like 20th television uh is the cartoon studio that that takes over and this is something about the simpsons animation pipeline that uh you may not know is that you have the u.s side which is a studio where the animators work out of and they're and that's film roman for now until season 28 that then is where the americans make the layouts direct the show storyboard it all that character design background design and then that is shipped over to the korean studio that pulls it all together animates it colors the cells photographs it all that stuff so that's why this is a crazy episode too,

because not only do they start new with film Roman, but for this episode, they're shipping it to a new Korean studio too. Yeah, and that's Rough Draft Korea. And looking into it, it made me realize just how important Rough Draft was in the 90s to get American animation looking very good, because you couldn't always outsource to a TMS, especially as the 90s to get American animation looking very good because you couldn't always outsource

to a TMS, especially as the 90s would go further down the line and they would become more of unavailable. Reading about Rough Draft made me remember, oh, they were started as part of the Ren and Stimpy machine because John Chris Felici, you know, terrible man, we know all of his crimes, but also he knew that with animation this specific and good, you can't just trust a Korean studio used to making garbage, which is what the animation industry was for the past 20 years or also he knew that with animation this specific and good you can't just trust a korean studio used to making garbage which is what the animation industry was for the past 20 years or 30 years even yeah yeah the a downside to overseas animation and this is a thing to clarify whenever you complain when when people uh in the industry want to complain about the overseas production

mess this up it could sound like it could come off as saying these stupid foreigners don't know how to do something but it's that they are paid shit to make it like terrible wages in some cases to make it as fast as they possibly can and so on top of also with that kind of speed if things are going to get lost in translation if it's going that fast it definitely will get lost in translation and so it it is far more the fault of the demands of the system of uh of capitalism yeah that that makes it happen then stupid koreans don't know america the people animating saturday morning cartoons throughout the 80s they don't know how to handle something like ren and stimpy when it comes in and the demands that the people in the states want from them they're just not used to working at that level they're not paid to work at that level so that so that was the interesting thing that happens

thanks to greg vanzo and his wife nikki vanzo and honestly his brother also there greg vanzo if you look in the simpsons credits you'll see him up until they change the opening because he's one of the main animators on the season two to season 20 something opening of the the classic opening of the show like van zoe has been a simpsons guy from the beginning he and he also is a co-director on one of the season one episodes where they fired the director and he took over that was like kent butterworth i believe it was the butterworth one yeah yeah so so greg and nicky vanzo they open up rough draft in america and and greg's wife is korean american as well and so i think he real they they realized that they could be this bridge like if they moved to seoul korea and could open up a studio there they would have an edge on so many other studios that are usually like greg

would live there and his brother would live there and they would be this in between that could better translate the desires and i mean when you see rough draft korea productions compared to other korean productions uh overseas productions done for american tv at the same budget rough draft usually is a level up from what you would get from from overseas productions yeah especially if you look at a show like ren and stimpy uh the first season is like six episodes i guess not even counting stimpy's invention which came much later and there are some rough and bad looking ones where they were just trying every different overseas studio they could and no one really understood what they had to do

once they get rough draft and you start watching some later Ren and Stimpy's, you can tell when Rough Draft is not the overseas studio. You're like, oh, this one looks bad for Ren and Stimpy. You look at the overseas studio. Oh, they can't get Rough Draft for everything because Rough Draft is in demand. And Rough Draft is also the reason why Beavis and Butthead turn into a good looking show. Right, right. Yeah, Rough Draft really explodes on the scene.

Like they pretty much go into existence around Ren and Stimpy. And again, telling people to listen to other podcasts. If you find our What a Cartoon went on, The Max, Bob does an amazing breakdown, much more deep, about Rough Draft and Rough Draft Korea. I forgot that I did that. And The Max, by the way, was another part of how Rough Draft were pioneers. Not only in a better production pipeline at least as far as americans uh using overseas animation talent but also digital max is one of the first the max is one of the first real digital productions uh to air on cable as far as animation

that actually like looks good when it comes to the simpsons they've been in there from the beginning like vanzo i believe is it was good buddies with silverman i mean vanzo silverman they all they're both from that generation of the guys who'd be well they'd be at the john k parties i don't want that sounds bad to say now i don't like you putting it that way well it was circles circles let's say parties let's say circles you're right but it's all the same circles of the young guns of animation living in the Los Angeles area back then and Vanzo like a big boon for Rough Draft right around when they were getting Ren Stimpy in 91 was also to bring up Klasky Chupo again midway through the late late 1990 I'd say in late 1990 was when the Simpsons decided to stop working with Gabor Chupo's friends in Budapest as the outside animators.

Because they did the Do the Bartman video. And they also did some of the first Butterfinger commercials. And then Rough Draft is they can take on the commercials, I think, to prove that they could take on full episodes. So if you watch the very first Butterfinger commercials and then you watch like the 1991 Butterfinger commercials, like the one where where the BBs are delivered to the Quickie Mart and Bart is trapped in the BBs. Rough drafts look so much better. They are way, way better. Yeah. And revisiting old 90s cartoons, you can definitely tell when you went to the credits like, oh, this was a rough draft, not just because the credit is there.

But then you reflect upon like just how everything was nailed down and there were no weird inconsistencies and there's usually even some real like flashes like whoa amazing animation like also not only were they taking care of a lot of the commercials but also rough draft starts doing some uh a handful of the uh the couch gags in season three so working their way up uh then as we talked a bit about in when flanders failed season two is when simpsons realized that acom could not do 22 episodes in a season and so in season three they found the company anavision uh which they're the korean production company that i think does do a better job than acom though of course they don't love how cute everybody looks but i love the cuteness i love the cuteness when it's this season though they then find five episodes that rough

draft can take on a rough draft is this is their first primetime network animated show they are starting to get pretty busy they're getting hired for beeves and butthead there's also technically there's a giant order for new ren and stimpy's in 1992 but uh they're they're not actually getting to work on and i'm looking at the ren and stimpy credits and i believe rough draft is on every episode in second season just that's why that's such a good looking season they uh rough draft is killing it at this point and i think this this episode has such amazing animation in it i think because rough draft is hungry to prove like this is their big chance and they don't want to waste it and do something crappy so they i think they are over

delivering on the budget they are given just so they know that simpsons is going to be a calling card to get them a million jobs and it does uh so the five episodes they do in season four as rough draft korea is homer the heretic itchy scratchy the movie marge gets a job mr plow and homer's triple bypass i would say some of the best looking episodes in the whole series yeah and i think who the overseas animators are uh it's more noticeable on things like batman the animated series and animaniacs and tiny tunes but if you watch this show closely enough you'll notice that oh i can kind of tell nowons, but if you watch this show closely enough, you'll notice that, oh, I can kind of tell now. The more you watch it along with us,

it's easier to tell once you know. And Rough Draft, they've become like a pillar of the animation industry. They're some of the best. They still are like one of the best. People want to work with them. Our pal Ian Jones-Cordia on OKKO, they were excited to get to work with RDK.

That's how we learned the term was RDK internally. Yeah, now we can sound cool saying it. And I guess by the time this airs, New Futurama will be on TV. So I'm wondering, they have to be involved, right? I don't think I've even seen the animation yet. As of this recording, we are now in June 13th, 2023, by the way.

I think so, but it could be they got titmouse titmouse is getting a lot of rdk old jobs these days i wonder but but also yeah rough draft they'd go straight from this or not straight from this but clearly they were liked in their production by simpsons because they are hired they produce the critic pilot and i think about half the critic episodes too and that's why the critic pilot has has that amazing CGI scene because this is what they're eventually known for. Like we can kind of do this and that's where Futurama takes off from. Yeah, they get Beavis and Butthead as well.

That also leads them to being the main overseas production for King of the Hill. And then Futurama really takes them up another level. And Rough Draft is now like seriously a huge part of the industry the simpsons loves them so much that they still do a handful of episodes every year at rough draft i think silverman works with them pretty closely on the the shorts uh that the promotional shorts i mean this shows you where rough drafts at the 750th episode they just did with lizzo on it that's a rough draft one which is a very animation you need the animation to look good for that one to work of homer in slow motion flying through the air for like two for like 10 minutes and and they also were the studio used for the movie so rough

draft is i think the a studio when it comes to to simpsons productions uh and has been almost since season four going forward so you may not not know this, but Rough Draft is a huge part of Simpsons history. And it all begins with Homer the Heretic. The Simpsons will be right back. Thursday, when Homer puts football before church. Woo-hoo! He gets a surprise visit. Does St. Louis still have a team?

No, they moved to Phoenix. An all-new Simpsons. And... Martin makes a big impression on Gina's parents. Get your hands off of my wife! An all-new Martin. Then, it's a special presentation of two new Fox comedies, starting with The Edge, followed by the sexy new comedy, Flying Blind, Thursday beginning at 8 on Fox 5.

Welcome to the break, everybody. No matter who you worship, we at talking simpsons thank our guest tim kalpakis for coming on this week amazing writer performer when you really care about someone you shouted from the mountaintops so on behalf of desjardins insurance i'm standing 20 000 feet above sea level to tell our clients that we really care about you. We care about you. Home and auto insurance personalized to your needs. Weird, I don't remember saying that part. Visit Desjardins.com slash care and get insurance that's really big on care.

Did I mention that we care? Musician and podcaster Tim Kalpakis of The Sloppy Boys, The Birthday Boys, and so many more things. The Sloppy Boys new album, it's out right now. Look for it wherever you listen to music. And of course, check out The Sloppy Boys podcast every week, as well as their Patreon. Thanks so much, Tim. We love having you back on the show. And if you enjoy the Talking Simpsons podcast, you should know it's only possible thanks to subscribers at patreon.com slash talking simpsons podcast you should know it's only possible thanks to subscribers at patreon.com slash talking simpsons for five bucks a month listeners there not only support me and bob doing

this is our full-time jobs but they also get access to monthly episodes of talking futurama and talk king of the hill us covering a new episode of both of those series once a month just like we do an episode the simpsons and you get the entire back catalog of over 150 exclusive to patreon podcast today all of our previously released episodes about futurama and king of the hill as well as us covering every episode of the critic every episode of mission hill and many of our favorite episodes of batman the animated series a ton of awesome exclusive podcasts at your fingertips patreon.com slash talking simpsons but if you want something even nicer than recanting on your deathbed you need to sign up at the premium level at patreon.com slash talking simpsons 10 bucks a month get you all the five

dollar things i mentioned and our monthly super premium podcast what a cartoon movie us covering an animated feature film as in depth as we do on the simpsons which often means talking for over four five or even six hours about an animated feature film we're finishing up our summer of pixar as we cover cars the terrifying film that shows a world without humans where cars take over there's actually some really interesting history of it that not a lot of people know and we uncovered for this podcast so please check out that one about cars the summer of pixar that preceded it was us covering toy story 4 a bug's life and the incredibles and we've covered so many movies in the last five years everything from Akira to a

goofy movie Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse to Beavis and Butthead do the universe and our longest podcast ever six and a half hours about who framed Roger Rabbit and so many more check it out for yourself the dozens of what a cartoon movie podcasts and everything else we do at patreon.com slash talking Simpsons. One last thing I want to ask you, Tim, was like, this was a big production change for the show, too, went from the klaski chupo studio doing the animation to the film roman studio doing the animation and you've you've lived in los angeles for a while now which would you prefer to work in location wise the downtown hollywood offices of klaski chupo or the burbank

offices of film roman oh hollywood or the Burbank offices of Film Roman? Oh, Hollywood all day. And that seems like a cool company and a little bit of like a subversive kind of animation vibe. But Film Roman, so when I worked at the Simpsons, I did a lot of runs to Film Roman and it's a big building up at the Burbank airport and truly a place you would only ever go to if you were making television fully boring boring boring boring to the core type place so i'd be hanging in hollywood we've heard stories that the klaski chupo holiday parties were uh some some ribald events as opposed to film romans yeah like pre-covid henry and i would take a lot of podcasting trips to la to record with local

people there and one day we realized oh that's the kasky chupo building and we're staying nearby so we passed that building multiple times during our trip and what is it now is it is it i think they still own it but like it was lot the gates were locked all right and this was like 2019 yeah i mean they have to be making some kind of rugrats income that you can't be that profitable in the 90s and then just have nothing coming in. Well, now there is new Rugrats out there. Oh, yeah. There's like a movie coming, I believe. There's the new CGI show, I think, on Paramount+. Oh, that's what it is. That's what it is.

What about... So I'm forgetting on Film Roman. It's Phil Roman? Or like, what else do they make? And who is that? Yeah, Phil Roman is the owner of it. And they got their start making garfield specials and then the garfield series but they sold out to stars about uh six years ago i think that's when simpsons

stopped using film roman in in season 28 so damn that makes sense i i was a big garfield and friends watcher when i was a kid and i feel like i remember seeing film roman in the credits no yeah they they they were pretty big. I think they're just the Starz studio now. And Simpsons has been working with a different thing since 28. So yeah, if you were still working at Gracie, you would not be heading to Film Roman anymore. I don't know where the other ones. This is why I don't work there anymore.

This is why I left and became a writer instead of a production assistant. It's just because of the film Roman issue. I think it's just called 20th Television Animation. Oh, they're right. Yeah. Like they have their own in, not in-house. I don't know what you would call it, but they made their own company to do animation. I've had general meetings with them and like soft pitch them TV ideas and stuff like that.

And yeah, I do. That's like, it's like the separate thing where it's like, oh, we're not the network. We're the studio. But we are mainly here to find the next like sunday night animated shows for fox now i mean they gotta they're they're always looking for the next thing to go in between bobs burgers and simpsons there yeah yeah they're really and it was interesting because they are kind of the opposite of what so much tv is now is they look for like low concept you know because those bobs and simpsons stuff is just like the characters that you just want to hang out with because you love them. And they don't really like, like almost every company in TV now, especially streamers are like really high concept pilot that hooks you into one plot line. And each season is like

very precise with what it's about. And then Fox is sort of the last place I can think of it where it's just like, oh, we just want last place i i can think of it where it's just like oh we just want fully open-ended we just give us our homer like give us our our bobs and we just want to have you be like people that you can trust and chill out with yeah they just really want to show about a family which is why futurama had such a hard time on that network right yeah well on that well tim what's uh what's the animation studio you guys partner with for Digman? It's Titmouse that does a lot of cool stuff like Big Mouth and that type of thing. And they have offices in, they have a small original office in Hollywood. And then they did the expansion out by Film Roman.

There's a big office park type studio out there now. And then the actual animation for digman happens uh up in vancouver of office there that i've not been to yet but that showrunner goes up that's cool titmouse is really doing a lot of stuff they they're also the new beavis and butthead seasons and yeah they do uh star trek lower decks and beavis and but that was all there like while we're writing digmans they will like in the little kitchen cafe there will be like the wednesday social all the different writer writing staffs come down and eat cookies together and i'll bump into friends who are working on like yeah beavis and butthead or star trek and

they're building a good vibe that's my favorite thing about working in tv is like when i was doing the birthday boys show on ifc we were on the company was absolutely tim and eric's production company and at the time they just had like this total like goof factory vibe like this building in glendale where we'd be writing birthday boys in one room and like nathan fielder would be out in like in the like talking to his writers like just outside of our office and then eric andre would be editing upstairs and like you're bumping into other shows and it feels like alive and that doesn't happen too much anymore like usually you're just like hidden at some office off on your own or you're on a zoom screen and you're sad the the Simpsons writers they're very

they do seem a little alone in the Fox studio space doesn't seem like there's it's a beautiful spot like the bungalow where the writer's room is really nice and then the the offices it's like a motel where everybody's doors open outside and there's another writer's room there it's like it's a very pleasant vibe but then around it when i was production assistant there there was not much hobnobbing with other shows but it would be like i remember seeing kelsey grammar drive by on a golf cart a lot uh he was he was starring in uh back to you at the time a multicam about a newscaster and but that lot will just be like a lot it didn't feel like there was tons of related tv like it would be movies

happening there or like procedural tv shows but i never really saw the simpsons writers like palling around with other comedy writers on the lot but uh but this episode though begins first with uh we we talked a ton about it before but the chalkboard reference uh references i will not defame new orleans which is because the week previous was the streetcar named marge episode with the the joke anti-new orleans song which then got uh people the people in new orleans didn't get the joke or some people didn't and so this was their apology they put an apology in that fast or within a week yeah back then they could in the opening they could change out the uh the chalkboard gag uh that quick back back then yeah i think it was an early digital element they they had to work with in the

show and pretty pretty rare they could do it otherwise but then we begin with like i should say like this seriously is like top 20 episode of simpsons for me i think like this is just so gorgeous so funny like so yeah and deep like yeah it's i mean i have so much of the show memorized but i think this episode is in the top five that i just can know every line as it's about to happen and i don't know why maybe it's because it spoke to me as a kid so much and i held it up as an important moment in my life it's definitely one that you would see it like back when i'd be like flipping through digital cable to see like when where i lived we had simpsons reruns at like 6 6 30 and 11 30 and i remember like flipping through looking at the titles and if you saw this one you'd be like oh hell yeah i'm gonna make sure that i'm home

tonight at 6 30 and watch that i think it's really good because it starts within 20 to 30 seconds the plot kicks off it's not like at the end of act one you find out homer says he's not going to church it starts immediately and that's the only story throughout the entire episode i think that's why it's so strong and that's hard to write yeah there's no b story and they didn't do that thing they eventually i liked how they got to the point where they would almost do use act one to do an entirely different episode and then find their way like just before the commercial break to what the episode was going to actually be but that felt like a thing that happens later but this is so measured so confident so straightforward every time i come on this show with you guys it's it's my excuse to like revisit these old episodes where it feels like an old timey pacing of television, but not in a way that just is like dated because there's lots of stuff.

I watch some of my favorite old Conan bits like Late Night with Conan O'Brien, like desk pieces that are 13 minutes long. And I'm like, wow, this is funny, but way too slow and hasn't aged well for the pacing. But when I watch something like a season for simpsons yes it's maybe half the speed of modern animation but it's it doesn't feel like oh this is boring it feels like a movie or something you know like it feels like it's taking its time with purpose and it's intentional and it's very charming and and this opening is one of my all-time favorite openings like homer it's such a weird opening like wait homer is in the womb like where what where are we here and it's it has i feel like a 2001 space odyssey type vibe just with classical music in a fetus i

guess but yep just but also it feels extremely george meyer to me that it's just like oh like the second you're born everything's awful like you don't want existence is pain kind of thing yeah that's it's i like how that's implied and that comes across. It's not just like he's cozy sleeping and then Marge wakes him up. He's like, I don't know if it's like, it feels kind of like he's dreaming about being in the womb and being comfortable. But it really is also saying like, that's the only time that we're comfortable and happy. And if you're Homer Simpson, like you peaked as a fetus and everything since then has been annoying. And the way he's holding on to the edges of the screen to represent the rest of the uterus.

I just left him pulling the umbilical cord, trying to find some sort of safety. Like, how do I hang in here? Oh, yes. The shock at the umbilical cord. He's like, no, there's an end to it. What's happening? No, no. But Homer is ripped out of the womb and

into consciousness and i also love i'm all naked and wet that's another great line uh but this is uh in our first clip where homer uh announces he will not be going to church so marge tells him he's got to go like it's easy to miss that marge is i forget that marge is so strongly religious in this like she's right behind ned of like no church must be done and it is your moral center like you gotta do it yeah it's funny because it is just like i i get jealous also like being not religious i i sometimes get jealous of religious people having so much direction in their life so when i'm looking at marge in this episode, I'm like, oh, she's not even, I like that they didn't really even,

they didn't choose to make her pious here. It's more just that she's never questioned anything. It's just like her duty. It's just what you do. So she feels like Homer is bailing on her as a co-parent, but like, she's not even being like, oh, we have to go because Jesus is our savior. It's more just like,

I haven't had these thoughts that Homer is having. I'm not going to question things. Yeah, they're being respectful to her as a religious person as much as this is a sacrilegious episode in a way they're saying well no martis or beliefs and we respect that but also homer's kind of right yeah but then he took it too far he's i love homer's stupid itchy church pants and also it is too cool don't like that she is endangering their lives like to go to this they're going to die on this trip uh and uh yes that homer uh homer then splits his pants and says he's not gonna go and this scene here in our first clip here this one is another like perfect george meyer to me because yeah he just talked about this in a ton of interviews, but this is a comment on his crappy family dynamic

growing up of like, Bart is trying to negotiate with Marge what the code words are for dark things in their lives. Like, hey, where's Homer? Your father's resting. Resting hung over, resting got fired. Help me out here. I'm just a big toasty cinnamon bun.

I never want to leave this bed Uh oh Gotta take a whiz Think man think Think think think I better get up I'm whizzing with the door open And I love it

You know so many things from this scene I took from uh I apply to living alone in the future oh for sure yes this so this whole episode definitely reminds me of being recently my my husband had to move up to to seattle for a few months to to start a job so i had a return to singledom uh briefly and definitely i had this whizzing with the door open moment of like I guess I can't just pee with the door open like this this is his entrance into sloth again I guess you'd say it's perfect because there's I've had this moment too and like there's nothing good about whizzing

with the door open it's not bad like there's no reason that you want that but merely the fact that you have the power and you're allowed is like hey this is kind of nice i can uh you know nobody's gonna tell me not to i can just piss and it's gonna go and then and also that homer in the bed i've my my husband loves that scene because it's also like the it's such a fantastic drawing but the way homer is like uh just a warm toasty cinnamon bun oh but i gotta pee think think think like there's no there is no fix to this other than you have to get up and pee or i guess piss yourself in the bed that's i mean i always think about this when i have to pee and i'm comfortable in bed just like well i guess i gotta do this homer proved there's no way out there's no way

that that think think think though is like there's a weird logic when you're half asleep that makes everything a math problem that is solvable and you're right like you're either going to get up and go to the bathroom or you're going to pee in your bed but the idea that you're like going to think of like a loophole in the universe but yes the the resting hung over resting got fired like that's such a great great joke about code words parents use with their kids that part is unlocked and uh so then homer after peeing he uh he then heads into the shower sings a little bit of the tom jones song delilah and then no soap radio which is a joke about a joke of a non-joke you use to trick somebody into admitting they're stupid yeah it's a prank basically you and a confederate you conspire to make someone look stupid and uh in doing so you tell this person this trusted person

a joke where the punch line is no soap radio and they laugh as if it's it made sense and you see if the other person watching will laugh along with them and then you can say you're an idiot that made no sense so really it's just cruelty man this really took me back because i remember this i remember that gat like that parlor trick of doing this no soap radio thing and i remember i feel like i remember my like dad saying that or doing it to me but i didn't have the reference point of what a no soap radio was so like seeing this episode and seeing a no soap radio i was like oh it's a shower radio like i didn't i didn't know the source material i just thought it was nonsense words my dad was saying

and you know digging deeper i found out this expression or this prank was so popular at one point that there was a one season sketch show in 1982 called no soap radio and it starred a young steve gutenberg wow well like network sketch shows those those pretty much do only last one season unless they're snl now i think uh well i don't know about you tim but me me and bob both have just bluetooth speakers that are our no soap radio to to never be away from podcasting while even in the shower i meet you i've got the bluetooth going there i can't imagine living without it but it's outside of that i can't imagine living without it but it's outside of that i wouldn't mind bringing it do you have waterproof ones that are right in the

shower oh absolutely no not me i got it come on henry step it off you're not taking this seriously we're podcasters i also uh it almost feels like this wouldn't happen with homer by the end of the season but it's kind of cute how he has a little pause to say like you bet your sweet ass like that's when he realized like wait yeah i can say ass like by by season five homer would say ass without even a thought in front of his family but i i love uh i love that that that uh that's him cutting loose and i was also thinking how funny it's that he cuts loose to this tom jones song delilah and it was making me wonder about the uh do we know yet like eventually we find out homer's music taste when which episode

is it when he's like i like bachman turner overdrive is that homer palooza where he's like into a classic rock that definitely that's it's a big part of of that yeah like he that he knows everything about that he thinks current music is 70s music. Yeah, right. Because I was wondering at this moment in season four, do we even know Homer's music? Like because just Tom Jones is so corny and uncool that it's it's really funny to see Homer rocking out to it. And I was wondering, I guess we don't know yet like that he like ever liked rock and roll or was into rock and roll.

This is definitely more when Homer has the taste in music of crappy novelty songs instead of dad rock yeah i mean they started as parents of the 1960s so there's a lot of early jokes about them enjoying mambo and novelty songs from that era and homer didn't know who michael jackson was in 1991 so at that point in time he was like the 60s dad but then by the time season 8 rolled around he was the dad who like he did grow up in the 70s and he likes, you know, all of these classic rock bands. Well, definitely in Mike Scully, we just did the rock camp episode that Mike Scully wrote, which is Homer is the biggest dad rock super fan out there who always dreamed of being in the road in which they still Tim.

I know you're a big Bruce Springsteen fan. They still haven't gotten Bruceuce on on simpsons i wonder if there have been offers or it just it feels like they've gone especially an episode like that where there is tom petty and elvis costello and and just like everyone of the era it feels like there had to be an invite for bruce and i would love it if bruce was like no i don't do cartoons i i. I read on Twitter this former Simpsons writer, Jay Kogan, tweeted about, I didn't see any other follow-up details, but he did tweet about how he saw Bruce Springsteen after he went to the movies or something, and he talked to him, and what happened next was disastrous. No way.

So maybe the Simpsons pissed him off, and we just don't know why. We need to get his best friend Obama, get him on The Simpsons first. Michelle, turn them down. This is his chance to make up for that. I would love it if you could have Barack Obama as a guest on this podcast. And your main question is, do you know if your co-host Bruce has ever been asked to be on The Simpsons? That's all we want to know. By the way, we're talking to the writer of one of the funniest jokes ever done with Obama in Between Two Ferns.

Oh, thank you. Yeah, my big joke that I insist on bragging about all day, every day. It's a great joke. Look it up on Tim's. I think it's your pinned tweet still. Oh, yeah, and I recently pinned it on Instagram. Just be fully pinned. I like this driving the track. The traffic. If you want to know my funny joke I wrote 10 years ago, you have to go to at Tim Kalpakis

on Instagram or Twitter. I think they tell a story, too, that they sent a very expensive gift basket to Bruce Springsteen to try to get him into it. And they said the reaction was basically, hey, thanks. That was it. We appreciate the gift. He does stuff right i mean it blew my mind that he's in the movie high fidelity which is not i believe he is right is there's like a shot where he's like

explaining a song or something anytime i see him i mean i guess he likes to to collab with like music people and do cameos and music people's stuff but it's it is funny like simpsons is a generational definitive thing i would and bruce is like a fun guy that likes to goof around always does a bit if he's on fallon or whatever he's not like joyless he likes to be funny also feels like uh simpsons is a kind of a critique on the like 20th century nuclear family in a way that bruce is is interested in as well so i kind of would expect him to be a fan of the show. Does he have kids? I don't know this about him.

Yeah, he's got kids. And it's funny because one is like an Olympic equestrian rider. His daughter just won a silver medal at the last Olympics. So that's the mark of being the child of a billionaire. But his son is a New Jersey fireman. Oh, wow. Interesting. Yeah, I think his son is is a new jersey fireman oh wow interesting yeah i think yeah her his daughter is some uh equestrian famous equestrian but then i was reading about who wins these events and it's like well it's jessica springsteen and becky spielberg right well i guess then that means his kids didn't have the good taste to like the simpsons because then that's

how they get so many guys his generation of like lenny kravitz literally said that in his uh interview of like i did this so my daughter will think i'm cool that's why he did that episode and that daughter was zoe kravitz like eddie's talking a cool daughter damn but anyway we cut to uh everybody freezing at church and lovejoy isn't uh helping any with going through the long versions of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, which is a very boring part of the Old Testament. Just a lot about suffering. Then Homer, I mean, I love his little walk from the shower into the living room. Like, that's fun animation.

And then we have a risky business reference, which if you put that in something now, do kids get it? Like, do they even just slide into the room in your underpants? It just would look like a shot that a lot of things do you know like just the doing it as a parody has become its own trope and people would just be like oh yeah sliding into a into a shot that's what you do in movies yeah i mean it got big because like tom cruise was relatively new then and then it was seeing him in his underpants because he was a bit of a sex symbol. And Homer, of course, though, he dances to an even cornier song than what Tom Cruise dances to in Risky Business. That song would come back in like season eight in The Mysterious Voyage of Homer.

That's right. Because all the hot pants wash up on shore. Yeah, it's the outro song of that one. By the way, the song's by the Royal Teens. Royal Teens. That's kind of a pun. It's probably made them like millions of dollars just having that one hit song. Then Homer makes his, patented out of this world space age, moon waffles, which this,

again, I'm telling a lot of husband stories, but he really does love this episode. Early in our relationship, on my first birthday when we're together, he made me the moon waffles as uh but it's a more appetizing version he's like look this is some caramel mixed in basically there was a guy online who made like here's the not crazy version of this what was what was in the center of the moon waffle a big pad of butter that he's like you can just not have this but if you don't want it was a pad i thought the stick is there to stabilize the uh waffle wrapping yes yeah this this was more just like a caramel waffle with liquid smoke poured in okay like yeah uh liquid smoke goes a long way by the way we never got rid of that because i was like look this tasted fine for this one but i don't want to put liquid smoke in anything this does remind me like every shitty bachelor has their own like fun food that they make.

It's either like when Barney was sleeping over at Homer's during Homer alone, he wanted to make omelets. Or it's like, oh, I make the best homemade mac and cheese. And it's really just like a can of cream and mushroom soup just glopped onto noodles with a ton of cheese stirred in. Like just the worst possible food. But they think it's special uh mine that when i when i'm alone and eating dinner and i and i'm like hey uh time for tim to be bad i i've got the uh i've got the hot ones hot sauces that i used for a podcast one time and but then i had a bunch left over so i'll fully do it by myself i'll order wings plain wings so that i can watch tv by myself and line up all the sauces as if i'm on hot ones and have

no one to even say to look oh this one was hotter than that one but i'll do all the steps by myself and be sweaty and just be like well that was me cutting loose it was the hot ones home game yeah exactly now this has one of the weirdest drawings of homer in the world uh when he does the waffle runoff if you look at his head i feel like the layout artist started drawing and was like oh shit i can't fit all of homer's head in this in this frame well i'll just make the back of his head twist out at 45 degrees you're right it's such a slant on his head in this shot whenever it comes up i'm like oh that looks so weird but i want that cell this is why i stopped making waffles because it's hard to resist injury from wanting to scoop

up waffle runoff from a hot waffle if you're doing it right there won't be a waffle runoff you got to be conservative i get too uh too greedy with like i can fill this this doesn't look like enough waffle batter that waffle runoff is definitely an early instance of that homer like so and so like we eventually hear that a thousand times and uh this has to be one of the first of drooling over a weird gross thing as a child i didn't realize like how fucked up the recipe is but just like he empties entire bag of caramel squares pours the waffle batter on top of it a little bit and then a hearty dose of liquid smoke then slams it down and it's just and you see later this has ruined the waffle maker marge is cleaning it with an

ice pick later right it's her job to take care of that mess and it's really just for homer to eat an entire stick of butter which is so funny so then uh we cut back to the uh the simpson family freezing uh as they dream about hell instead then uh then homer also gets again in a very dirtbag quality of just like ah the dog will lick this off my chest that's cleaning and then cut back to the church everybody tries to leave but they're trapped and again more animation i love way Ned screams, it's the only way out. Like, it's such a fun drawing. I love the drawing of him in this. But this then we cut in.

Speaking of Homer's taste in music, we learned that he is a big fan of a hard right wing novelty musician. Now, we've had our fans solve some issues in the past. Like, what is Marge saying during the Tonight Is Scene and the auto show? I really want to know what is on Homer's coffee mug. There's an image there that's only there for a few frames. But it's so small, and this is such a low-res show, that I could not make it out. When he's going down to sit on the couch to listen to Bill and Marty and do the contest, I really want to know what's on that mug.

So, crowdsourcing. Please, please. Crowdsourcing this answer officially. So, Homer even wins something with his terrible taste in music. That was Johnny Calhoun with Gonna Find Me a Genie with a Magic Bikini. Of course, Johnny's next record was a spoken word album of his right-wing political views. It kind of killed his career. If you can tell me the name of that album, call our contest line now.

I know that hello this is homer simpson homer can you name that title this things i believe uh can we accept that it's such a great george meyer joke that like the the the knowledge that a silly 60s musician who did a novelty song then in like 1968 did an entire thing like man fuck these hippies I'm sick of like it's just hard turn right it feels like yeah like the guy who made Little Abner or whatever where he became an outspoken conservative pro-Vietnam and he made this silly comic about hillbillies or I was also thinking of the uh johnny calhoun by the way not a real person uh but in that uh i also looked into i like as a

cheesy novelty song the gilbert o sullivan song alone again naturally and then i was like uh whatever happened this guy and the thing that killed his career was like three years two or three years later he did a song called like a woman's place is in the home and it's just about women should only be wives and in the home and he's wasn't their response to these boots were made for walking it should i i can see that ruffling his dander yeah man one from this era of parody song that i love there's an alan sherman song called pop hates the beatles like pop goes the weasel but it's pop hate the beats the beatles and it's about how like it's you say like that a parodist of the era struggling with hippie culture is is the same kind of thing where here's a guy who

thinks he's a satirist and he's kind of bad a bad boy funny guy and he can't handle he thinks that the beatles is like this sacrilegious awful music that is just noise that needs to be taken down a peg and like within like a year he would be so proven wrong and the beatles are just like so mainstream but i love the thinking in like 1964 that like a cool guy would think that shitting on the beatles is like being on the right side of history it is the precursor to uh now of many many uh say of comedy people take take a hard turn that you don't expect you're like whoa wait a minute oh yeah having fun yeah i mean my favorite somewhat recently is uh jim brewer's stand-up where he's like all these liberals sound like uh birds just walking around being like trust the science

trust the science and he's like making fun of the concept of trusting science like it's laughable oh boy i want to think that once he's done playing those like chud cons he goes behind stage and just deflates like crusty like yeah y'all try to be his friend he's like half-baked was a long long time ago and also this this contest of only knowing something me and bob just won a a tiny little contest in a movie theaters with similar hardcore knowledge though we had to do with teamwork we joined our knowledge together yes but what was the question it was at a screening of who framed roger rabbit but it was about uh who won the oscar for live action animation hybrid about who won the Oscar for live action animation hybrid. Yes, who won the first Oscar for that. And I knew it was the lead of Song of the South,

but I couldn't remember the actor's name. And then Bob knew the actor's name, which is James Baskett. And so we, yeah, nobody else knew that. And we won a Judge Doom action figure that I happily donated to Henry. Thank you, Bob. So kind. and song of the south is the one that's like stricken from the record right it's like not not streaming anywhere and it's yes yeah it it no longer exists uh disney i mean you know and they're about to

end its existence even at the parks on on uh splash mountain which uh yeah but but one of the few positive things about it is the one of the first black actors in america first black actors ever to win an oscar was for that movie like so it is it is an important part of uh film history in at least in that regard so yeah but anyway so uh so yes uh everybody's trapped in there in the church willie is uh willie is burning it trying to open it up and we hear about the church bulletins being read instead oh that like these are the years where i was watching with my parents and this joke about the him trying to sell this unusable card table really made her laugh it is great that's it that's exactly what tries to be sold at at a church otherwise fine otherwise

one dollar or best offer and another another joke that has stuck with me forever is mo is their leader just that he watches the whole scene and that's his observation yes it finally dawned on over like mo is their leader you needed this extra time to study the shorts yeah it's also a great commentary on what Sunday television was then. Like Sunday morning TV then was like Three Stooges reruns, PBS news hours, and like one or two NFL games. Like now NFL owns Sunday all day, but it wasn't as big a part of TV. It was giving me pangs of like remembering what it was like to turn on tv and it's a crapshoot of like hoping when he's watching like a political round table

that gets preempted by a football game like that you would just like reach for the remote and turn on the tv with no idea but like what am i gonna watch i know i want to sit on this couch and look at this tv whether it's something good or boring to me i'm going to be watching tv now it is so different from now of just like when i sit down i'm like i know of like a dozen two dozen things i could watch before even like taking a chance on so then it's overwhelming and you just don't do it yeah then i just go to youtube and watch youtube video that's i mean that is me every night of my life i'm like so many shows that i'm like i know i really should but i've turned it into homework and now i'm just going to watch a dumb youtube video some could even say there's too much tv thank you i find that comment offensive

everybody look up look up the birthday i think you mean to say there's too many shows god damn it's too many messed up the quote from leave this in editor yes everybody go to the the the center for uh media and watch go look up the birthday boy sketch about how there's too many Leave this in, editor. Everybody go to the Paley Center for Media and look up the Birthday Boys sketch about how there's too many shows. It is embarrassing to misquote it to the guy who said it in Red Road. It's been nine years,

so I'm a little loose on it myself. And Tim, didn't you say I'm Gumby, damn it? Was that you? Yep, that was me. Okay, I thought so. So they're trying to escape the church. damn it. Was that you? Yep. That was me. Okay. I thought so. So there was, they're trying to escape the church. Homer is given,

even then they're still frozen in the car. It's another like very, this feels like more pulled from George Myers life of like when you're having a little fun needling a parent at a stressful time. And when they just snap of like, Oh, I went too far. Like, she's like,

what, what would help? And then we cut back to homer he's watching the greatest game of football ever give it a little more gas no no that's too much you know what i think would help what what Oh, doctor. A 98-yard triple reverse ties the score at 63-63. We have seen nothing but razzle-dazzle here today. Three visits from Morgana the Kissing Bandit and the astonishing return of Jim Brown.

Woo-hoo! It's tied 63-63, and Jim Brown, who has not played football in 27 years at that point. It was for this research that I looked into how insane this game is because the highest score ever in a football game was in 1940. It was 73. One side had 73. I think the other side had zero.

It's also there was a 98-yard triple reverse play that tied the score. So they both scored that high. And then Jim Brown returns. Also three visits from Morgana the Kissing Bandit. Three. And this Jim Brown reference, you know, he passed away just the previous month when we're recording this. Oh, you're right. Yeah.

And a legendary NFL player, actor and stuff, too. I will say this is a not fun thing to talk about on a podcast. But until he passed away, I unaware of uh the number of assault allegations against him that you can a lot of them were in the recent uh secrets of playboy a and e documentary it's uh these aren't fun things to talk about but uh yes yeah look into it folks anyway homer also great dirtbag technique of and what i've used many times uh well oh the chips are all done oh wait there's a treasure trove of chips sitting right below my mouth here the way he like sweeps it up is is very well uh

well done and this is when homer finds a penny and he realizes that this is the greatest day of his life and he thinks through all of his other options and is like, no, yes, it is this day. Wedding day, second place to the overturned beer truck. And then, nope, we have a new champion. I like that the overturned beer truck happened. Like, it's the type of thing that would typically be a Homer fantasy. But in this case, it's like, no, he lived through that and this is better. It happened, he had a swimsuit ready. Okay, yeah, that's true.

Yeah, the implication that, like, did he go home and get the swimsuit ready okay that's true yeah the the implication that like did he go home and get the swimsuit where did he where did he how prepared was he for this and so this is when homer meets his family again great little animation bit the way when mart they're all freezing coming in and the way march snorts like she is clearly clogged up and she's trying to clear her nose the animation on it is so like good it's like a very like specific and and small it's small movements but done so well like yeah and just just all of their poses as soon as the door slams open you see them all in a different cold pose it's very very funny immediately this is when homer tells the uh mars that he's got it all from skipping church and like funny don't he is going to stay over church and.

Ah, my beloved family. How was church? I, on the other hand, have been having the best day of my life. And I owe it all to skipping church. That's a terrible thing to say. Kids, your father doesn't really mean that. Like fun. I don't.

Marge, I'm never going to church again. Homer, are you actually giving up your faith? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Well, yes. When we come back from the commercial, this is when Homer has some very strong arguments about why he's done with church. I can't believe you're giving up church, Homer. Hey, what's the big deal about going to some building

every Sunday? I mean, isn't God everywhere? Amen, brother. And don't you think that the Almighty has better things to worry about than when one little guy spends one measly hour of his week? Tell it, Daddy. And what if we pick the wrong religion? Every week we're just making God madder and madder. Testify!

These all make a lot of sense the one that he's right the one that really stuck with me as a kid was like well what if you did pick the wrong religion you're never gonna know like i i suppose a gambler would tell you like well if you don't pick anything you definitely lose with god but if you pick one your least odds are better henry that is called pascal's wager and it's real it's like you might have you might as well believe in something because you don't know so just you know roll the dice well actually the homers recant on his deathbed one that also has stuck with me forever since childhood i was like you know what i can't just you can't just do that you get away with it yeah i remember being a kid in catholic school and not totally buying into it but that sort of being my backup plan like i'll do the deathbed one yeah what's god gonna do just gotta make sure you don't die suddenly that's the danger that is the yeah i also this episode has so many great that like

bart's little dance of waving his hands in the air and and also homer's dance when he throws down the uh beer can in the first act and then does a little dance. Those are two of my favorite like little dance animations in the whole series. And they cycle. If you use it as like a gif on social media, they cycle perfectly. They're really great. So we cut to Marge praying for her husband's soul. And I like, I love the posing on Homer, like sexily enticing her to bed.

Like, hey, come to bed. And just the drawing of him with his just like gut hanging over it's great and then march has to turn it down like her little muffled prayers that and homer thinks he can uh wait all night but he instantly falls asleep yeah and george myers said that in order for homer to talk to god it always had to be in a dream so homer is just falling asleep a lot in this episode he's almost narcoleptic it's funny that i love thinking about where a show will have rules like that because yeah it's like the simpsons is like oh we don't really want to just full on have god come talk to homer let's put it in a dream but then later when god saves flanders's house from from burning

like that is feels like an act of god so it's like they need there to just be a little bit of a detachment a little bit of a wink but we can't just full-on have god be a character in springfield especially because god appears and tells homer he's right yes that's true yeah you know they'd get a little more lax with god's appearance i i mean by season six god's hand appears from the clouds and goes oakley dokelyokalee to Ned after saving his son. They like having God in this world, and of course, they draw God with five fingers, not four. And it's a mistake. There's no other purpose to it.

Oh, wait. So, no, wait. Is this a mistake, or is the four-fingered one a mistake? He's four-fingered at the end, and that's the mistake. It's five all later appearances. Okay, so he's supposed to have five. Yes. Got it, got it.

Okay. He's superior. He has five fingers. And also in Disenchantment, God not only has five fingers in that Matt Groening series, but also instead of just constantly obscuring his face, it's a blinding white light is the representation of his face, which is more of like, I guess, the medieval idea of portraying God. Yeah.

And also he is drawn to be black and uh and voiced by phil lamar instead of uh harry shearer here but yeah homer there's again i i'm gonna say this every time but homer's face there's so many faces of homer in this that just make me laugh the way he's watching tv with just his blank stare on his face before god pops in is such a funny drawing there's so many drawings of this guy like god damn did we mention jim reardon directed this oh yes jim reardon he's one of the best best directors in the simpsons like period who oscar winner jim reardon uh yeah for i think he is for wally yeah yeah oh damn man i love just a blank face homer making me laugh that is one of my favorite things and that the simpsons can pull off is just like a lot of these characters like their eyeballs are funny and when they have deadpan faces and they

blink it makes me laugh and it's like damn that's just uh like imagine coming up with a character design that is just funny to look at they don't even have to do anything because they look dumb with big eyes and teeny little pupils and they're just like especially just tomer just empty face either taking in television or eating food is just, it's just hilarious. This, because this is the first real episode of season four in production and all that, this is also why it feels like

this is when it became the Homer show. Like this. Oh yeah, absolutely. This is them just, you know, inaugurating this as the Homer series now. Because what? Season one, well, that doesn't really count because uh it starts off with episode seven or eight in the production run season two bar gets an f season

three what's the first episode in that why am i drawing oh it's barth the murderer barth the murderer one yeah is that the season premiere barth the murderer not the premiere but first in three i meant like uh what do they premiere with oh uh one episode that no longer exists that's right that's right i guess that is a bard episode too it's the michael jackson episode tim it works they removed it from my brain yes yes i wasn't even doing a bit it's just gone it's completely gone yeah they've given up on this being barb though the you're right the premiere episode of season four for uh broadcast purposes is a bard episode yeah with camp but i guess the inner mentality of the show is well uh that phase is over we sold all the merchandise now we can start

writing about homer who is kind of us at our worst until the show ends in like season six when they've got the hundred episodes for syndication and then you know simpsons goes away but when uh when uh homer talks to god there's a great bit that god doesn't even know that the uh st louis's team left for phoenix uh so funny the omnipotent omniscient being is like oh they moved to phoenix interesting and uh though now he uh this could be god seeing the future because st louis would three years after this, get back a team. They'd get the Rams, but now the Rams are back in Los Angeles. So St. Louis, I believe, currently does not have an NFL team.

They've got an XFL team, though. Will there be the first second season of the XFL? Will they survive into next year? Will the Battle Hawks play again? They're the battle hawks that sounds so fake like a battle hawks are already fierce predators why do we need to add the word battle even stronger there were several jokes in this my mom had to explain to me and one of them was the idea of like god appearing in things in mexico like i didn't know but that god has an

appointment to appear on a tortilla in mexico is a pretty funny thing it's a thing that's scheduled out and put on a calendar so it's like you turned to your mom in that moment and said why tortilla yeah it's like why why would he be in a tortilla i don't understand that she explained that that's a you know a phenomenon a lot a lot of religious phenomenons like that happen in Mexico Or are promoted as such Yes God Thou hast forsaken my church Well kind of But

I'm not a bad guy I work hard and I love my kids So why should I spend half my Sunday Hearing about how I'm going to hell Hmm You've got a point there. You know, sometimes even I'd rather be

watching football. Does St. Louis still have a team? No, they moved to Phoenix. Oh, yeah. You know what I really hate about church? Those boring sermons. I couldn't agree more. That Reverend Lovejoy really displeases me.

I think I'll give him a canker sore. Give him one for me. I will. So I figure I should just try to live right and worship you in my own way. Homer, it's a deal. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to appear in a tortilla in Mexico. So, and again, such a cute drawing homer eyes closed drooling smiling waving such a funny try uh so then briefly homer becomes saint francis of assisi here

as he explains to lisa why he's uh committed his life to blasphemy he's wearing basically a bathrobe but he's dressed like a monk yes yeah yeah he's though he has the his toothbrush in the pocket just so you know that it's his bathroom and this is when marge brings over lovejoy to confront him which i love how lovejoy is pissed like his reaction like what like that a reverend should think he got invited over for a specific reason not just to hang out but he's he's so mad about it and but homer says that he knows it was a real dream when he met god because he normally dreams of naked march and these are accurate quotes i love i saw this as a screenwriting rule and i don't know

uh tim if you believe in this but it's like this is a screenwriting rule if somebody says a bible quote another character will finish it for them like that's always in movies yeah oh yeah no i i feel like i've seen that in in so much stuff and it makes you feel weird for not having memorized the entire bible but this joke love joy like when uh homer like just naming off a random verse and having love joy just say some of the most the bible really does have so many random little pieces of like shoe leather in it that are not quotable, interesting things. And so this, this verse that comes up there that Lovejoy says as is one of my favorite jokes and makes me laugh so much. Cause that is so much of the Bible is

just like middle boring stuff that is not anything you can glean a lesson from. Well, Henry, as a wrestling fan, you surely know Austin 316. Well, sure. That's I just kicked your ass. Yes. Yeah. But I love that Homer's, Homer's wager is that he's like, if I can say 2170 and these random numbers, it might make a point for me. And then he picks one that's just about how Jesus went to Bethany and he lodged there.

And then he goes, yeah, think about it. He sticks to his guns. It's a really great pose of him. His arm is over the back of his chair and he's like kind of pissed off, but also a little cocky. Yeah, he can't let it down. Like his face of like, nope, I quoted this scripture. I got to stick with it. We have a quick gag at mo's where we find

out mo is a uh a snake handler again i had asked my mom what that was uh but i'd also what maximum occupancy meant i didn't know that as a term as a 10 year old either well now i always think of this joke when i see those signs in public places for sure yeah though uh the snake handling i don't believe that has stayed true with uh with mo after this is not uh stay accurate well you do see mo in church a lot with the simpsons holy water burns him at the church not only is he a snake handler but as well his real name is momar and it seems that he might be secretly like of descent or something. But then he's got an Italian accent. Hey, yeah.

Those origins are strange and twisted. Oh, and also he's like 80 years old and was one of the original little rascals. Yeah, well, he was 80 then. Now he's 110. I feel like they didn't write this show with any internal consistency. What the hell? Now, Tim, on Digman, you'd never write a joke that would like

uh destroy continuity you'd always very close to the everything is canon and i meticulously make sure the the timeline checks out that's really what got me into writing is just make sure the ages we that is actually a thing that comes up a lot uh in the digman writers room is like how much we can stretch things because it is it's a goofy show and it's animation so you know we had an episode where in season one where amelia erhart they find amelia erhart and and she's like a character in the episode so we had to talk about like can amelia erhart just be a lot like she ended up being sort of like half woman half machine in like a steampunk way and that's how she could still be alive in 2023.

But we did have a conversation of like looking her up and be like, you know, if she's 110, that's somewhat possible in the real world. And maybe a cartoon could push a little more. But I think we found out she's like, you know, like 130. And we're like, no, you can't quite just have someone be 130 with no reason for it. And that stuff does come up a lot. We've pitched other things where we're just like fudging the numbers. Like, could these people have crossed paths on the planet?

Or when we're looking back into history about like an artifact, like, are these people in the same century at least? And if they're not, we're like, that's probably too much to fudge. And these writers of the early 90s did not have Wikipedia. They needed Harvard educations to know all of these things yeah now we can just look them up easily it's true what did they do like i guess that's you would have a research department there but but those researchers i get are they're just like looking through books and magazines it's so weird it did seem like a lot of the time it's just and occasionally they would get it wrong or

ever so slightly wrong that you're like oh this is just remember trivia but a lot of the time it's just, and occasionally they would get it wrong or ever so slightly wrong that you're like, oh, this is just remember trivia. But a lot of the times it was just like, well, yeah, they know this. Like there's some obscure presidential facts that get sprinkled into these early shows. And it's just because they went to Harvard and remember this stuff about like, you know, Thomas Jefferson or whatever. And or when there were a certain number of stars on a flag i was thinking too somebody made a good point i was looking up several interviews with with myers and they made a good point that a lot of his best episodes are especially uh this one and mr lisa

goes to washington where lisa it's about losing faith in something and homer loses faith in religion lisa loses faith in the government or american politics and this isn't as mean as that one was in getting back his hope but similar it seems like something meyer is really into that's like the perfect place for for the show to dwell is is because like the simpsons are like innocent enough to start off believing in institutions and it's not it's not a fully cynical show but then it when characters flirt with becoming cynical it actually reads as sad and you're like no I don't want that to happen and uh speaking of how this show feels written different than how shows are now this does feel like Homer's watching the tv and I'm surprised like normally they'd ADR in or just have an audio only joke of something on the TV is like and now back to a joke TV show and it's where they would put in one more joke but

Homer's just watching TV when Flanders interrupts him and he he goes to meet Flanders at the door and this is where he's singing rise and shine parentheses arky arky I love that one I love that Ned is written like a cool youth minister that he's like hey dig this and then pulls out the guitar i got such a great joke oh yeah we had a cool guitar lady in our church that would show up every now and then and you could tell this is season four because ned is not only the goody goody neighbor he's also so religious he'll get in a deadly car chase with homer yes so season four really has truly begun and apparently the the song has no written writer it goes back to apparently it's adapted from an an african

american spiritual song that goes back to at least the mid-1800s of course ned is doing it in in the most like nerdy white bread way possible he's singing it is uh henry tails to the tape when i talk about these episodes being lodged in my brain because i re-watched them 100 times taped off of our vhs tv we had a glitch in our tape during this scene so the middle part until the chase is lost to me every time i see it on on dvd or on disney plus i'm like right this scene like it's it's always i can never put it new in my brain like it like my 10 year old child memories yeah i i had some t.i.d seinfeld tapes that were had chunks like that and then it would be such a treat to see a scene and be like oh okay it doesn't just skip ahead there well also like some people uh

have it memorized like the syndicated versions where they have to cut out like a couple minutes right right is some jokes are new once they watch them on Disney Plus or on DVD. Though now, you know, shows are much shorter, Tim. So you guys, you know, you guys are right to be paid less because they're getting paid. Let's put the word out to all the studios and the companies. Pay your writers less. And it's the writers' fault the shows are shorter. They just refuse to work more.

Yeah, we couldn't come up with anything else for those last couple minutes. Now, there's a great joke. Meyers jokes about how like, oh, well, they did have to cut all these things now. And he's talking about in 2003 or two, how they have to shorten shows to fit in more ads. He couldn't imagine how much more they'd have to chop down. And he made the joke like, oh, it's actually better for viewers because now they're more informed about consumer products i get it at another interview i read with him where he was asked like how much he hates advertising he said if i could magically get rid of nuclear weapons or advertising i'd actually pick advertising it's the like literally the worst

thing for all of society damn amazing chase scene all great animation like very george meyer wrote separate vocations which is also an episode about lisa losing faith in the education system and her future and that one also has an amazing car chase scene yeah i rarely think of a funnier end to a scene of just like garbage island like just what a great way to end the scene uh we have a quick itchy and scratchy scene which unlike most itchy and scratchy cartoons has nothing to do with an allegory for the plot it's just a funny cartoon uh with crazy wild takes and the mood crushing scratchy double rough draft did amazing animation on it and so this is when just like how we all want to do of not going to church and instead watching cartoons, so does Homer.

And this is how Marge has to explain and beg Homer one last time in our next clip. How come we have to go to church and dad gets to stay home and watch cartoons? I have a responsibility to raise these children right. And unless you change, I'll have to tell them their father is, well, wicked. Kids, let me tell you about another so-called wicked guy. He had long hair and some wild ideas, and he didn't always do what other people thought was right. And that man's name was... I forget. But the point is... I forget that, too. Marge, you know who I'm talking about.

He used to drive that blue car. Kids, could you wait outside for us? Homer, please don't make me choose between my man and my God, because you just can't win. There you go again. Always taking someone else's side. Flanders, the water department, department god i'm only going to ask you one last time are you sure you won't come with us to church coming up next make your own ladder

very sure very sure now henry at the age of 10 did you have to be explained uh who jesus is i mean i knew who jesus christ was okay no this this joke did fly over my head as a kid though because i did not i just thought like if you didn't go to church and i guess you were in the south but how would you know you know right no i mean i was aware i mean i knew christmas existed for a reason and obviously easter let you you'd see i'd see crosses around and i did have a best friend in, in Arkansas when I was like seven, his family was Catholic. So I,

that's where my first questions of like, wait, who's this guy on a cross in here? Like, but who's that dude. But I guess beyond just knowing who Jesus was as a kid, you would have had to be familiar with the cliche of people saying, let me tell you about a little someone who was understood. But I,

this joke is so good because doesn't it feel like him saying you know you you're expecting him to go to jesus and then it's like two levels because when he says that man's name was i forget for a moment there it's already it's a great joke thinking just that he forgot jesus's name but then when he forgets again then he says uh marge who's the guy with the blue car you're like oh so it wasn't even jesus at all it's just a weird guy that they know and it's the most vague description a guy with a blue car yeah meaning he's like a friend of theirs or something or like a blue car also a very good parody of like a long-time married couple arguing like always taking someone else's side flanders the water there's a story there with the water department too which you don't yeah i like to just where the mind goes like she's sided with the water department and uh yes

homer homer's more like hank hill here wanting to build his own ladder but like this is but this is when homer sees that he can have too much of a good thing on a sunday laziness which there's no such thing still i can't soak in enough sunday laziness and I'm trying to be my most Sunday lazy. It's such a, making a ladder is such a perfect, non-entertaining, boring thing for him to want to stick around and watch. And I love a joke like that where you could, you could feel like the punch up in the room of where there, there was probably like a placeholder joke and they're like, okay, what are some boring things that Homer would want to watch instead of going to church? And it is just the perfect, like Homer's not going to build a ladder. There's no way, but he would watch a TV show about it. And it's the perfect thing to want to build

in terms of making a joke about it because a ladder is a tool used to build other things. No one is out there building their own ladder. And if you are, I don't want to hear about it. It seems very inconvenient to build your own so we go to the church seemingly whoever wrote the church sign knows the plot of this episode because it's called when homer met satan is the name of it again talk about funny designs when lovejoy is trying to describe the devil that he's among us and bart just get ready for las Las Vegas-style action at BetMGM, the king of online casinos. Enjoy casino games at your fingertips

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and your world brighter. Find our Net Zero Hub at electricireland.ie. The guy who looks like the devil that Bart grabs like, I got him. That is such a great joke. Just a guy hanging out at church that happens to be wearing a red suit and looks like the devil.

I just happen to go here. A deviled ham mascot is sitting in front of the family. Yes, this is where Lovejoy, I like to think that Lovejoy, after seeing that Homer has spurned the church that's what found him this new passion for his sermon of just like this fire and brimstone kind of speech it's such a great cut that he said that you know a more enticing or attractive devil and then homer rarely has looked more disgusting in his underwear wearing vintage porno, picking his ear.

There's a lot of gross ear foley, too. Yeah, you're right. Today's devil has assumed a more seductive form, pleasing to the eye. An interview with Lorne Michaels. Wait, that's no good. Hey, now we're talking. Our unabashed dictionary defines IUD as Love Springs Internal. I don't get it. Hello, I'm collecting for the Brotherhood of Jewish Clowns.

Last year, tornadoes claimed the lives of 75 Jewish clowns. The worst incident was during our convention in Lubbock, Texas. There were floppy shoes and rainbow weeks everywhere. It was terrible. Wait a minute. Is this a religious thing? A religious clown thing, yes. Sorry.

Well, bless you, Eddie. But I can't believe they got away with it. I mean, the implication here homer is jerking off like that's like that's why he's though he's reading a vintage it's a 1966 play dude which the extra joke only visible really on an hd television is on the 1966 cover it says don't laugh it's a car from japan don't laugh so meyer says this was not in his script and it does make sense because there wouldn't be an interview with lauren michaels in a 1966 issue of playboy that would make it a current issue of playboy yeah george meyer he takes no responsibility for the snl joke he says i always

liked lauren like john vd has this later in the season two where like gene and reese seem to put in these jokes at the expense of Lorne Michaels. And they never worked on SNL. While meanwhile, the SNL alums who wrote on the episodes are having to say like, hey, I didn't I didn't bring in this knock on Lorne Michaels here. I got to take responsibility for this. Yeah, because I feel like for for people that work there, it's almost just like too much of a thing to even touch. But people that don't, it gets to be like, oh, you're talking about the icon that is fun to undercut. But I do think that in 1966, Play Dude could have done an interview with young Toronto television writer Lorne Michaels.

It's very possible. And also where, I mean, Tim, you've written, you've worked on SNL, you've appeared, you played Max Rebo in SNL. I did. And I got to meet lauren i had a couple of short interactions with them in a way that made me like him i was like in no way can i say that i know lauren michaels because i wrote there for two weeks but uh he uh he had a good i was like when i was going like under the the bleachers when i was in that sketch and stuff i love seeing him like hang out and uh sipping on some uh on rosé during the rehearsal and tossing little ice cubes to himself from the ice chest.

He's I like him. I'm a fan. I looked up what were some of Myers best sketches or his favorite sketches. I saw a list of three of them. And there are three of my favorites, too, as a kid, which were he wrote the the commercial parodies Big Red. OK, yeah. Which is great. Big Red. Oh, okay, yeah. Which is great. Big Red.

Can we explain what this is? It's a toy that is meant to destroy your home and spray red blood everywhere. Seeing red blood all over. I believe it's like Phil Hartman is the dad in the commercial. He's just like, Shane's like, oh, Big Red. And then another one that i loved handy off the acid you pour on your extra fingers that you have on your hand i forgot about that one i did remember big red though and

another of my favorites i i only remember reading his thing was this was a live action or a non-taped one dana carvey plays an angel and john lorikat goes to heaven and he's asking this angel all these questions about for the answers of life which is kind of like the end of this episode but i just remember like laraket asked dana carvey like for the angel what's the grossest thing i ever ate and then he's like oh you don't want to know that like i won't tell you he's like okay what's the 40th gross thing i ever ate he's like remember that peanut butter sandwich where you thought like there was just a crunchy peanut in there? Like that was a roach. And he's like, oh, that's the 40th. You know, I think I finally at long last fully understood this IUD joke.

I was like 80% of the way there last time we covered this episode, but now I really know the full extent. And it is the most too clever playboy joke to ever be written in so they did a great job because their unabashed dictionary defines an iud as love springs internal now it's a joke on the phrase hope springs eternal but the iud literally is uh internal springs it's an intrauterine device it goes into the body and it's literally a coiled spring of copper so that's every it's it's it's so clever meyer is a great writer about jokes about jokes yes that is such a clever joke i i i didn't fully get that until now yeah no i thought i like got it like enough but then didn't know that it is

actually like a spring shape damn they're good but it is like well it's what playboy was known for where it's like yes there's nudity but there's also urbane cocktail party jokes you can take to your sophisticated gatherings um i know that that was um harold ramus like in his like second city days early on that was his first comedy writing job was those like parlor classy naughty parlor jokes for playboy magazine yeah i like uh that homer actually accidentally is reading the articles and the way he says now we're cooking when he says now we're cooking you're also supposed to think he's finding a pictorial instead he's like now we're cooking the unabashed dictionary that's what he's excited about but of course uh this is

interrupted by crusty arriving and so this was apparently a touch that uh jim brooks put in there which i think was really a smart one which is if you take this out that it's just christian saving homer and that's what restores his faith but they have to establish like here's crusty and he's jewish he talks about a jewish clown thing in the next scene with homer we're going to see apu establish he's hindu to make it clear that homer is saved by a large a wide range of beliefs not just christianity saves his life but i love the the description of jewish clowns with floppy shoes and rainbow wings everywhere that so many clowns are dying from a tornado like a tornado killing 75 clowns in lubbock texas that is

quite an insane uh vision to bring also just as like a religious clown thing yes and he gets the door slammed in his face when he says well god bless you anyway just homer slams the door right in his face the nicest crusty's ever been he must have had his own like crisis of faith recently and was getting back into his judaism it is funny the need to have to establish that as if we couldn't have just like if they would have just said the crusty is if the judaism and hinduism i think we could have figured it out at the end but i like to them thinking like no we have to demonstrate in season four they couldn't count on their audience knowing everything right about every character we then cut to homer as as lovejoy is making all

these pronouncements we then cut to homer going to the quickie mart he buys a crate o'duff and it's very quick but that's where he gets the cigars he's smoking that starts the fire and and also i mean he's so dirtbaggy that he just he just wore his underwear and then a bathrobe over to the place like this is homer is really a personal low point right now i feel like ganesha is the only hindu deity the simpsons know thanks to video games i know about rama shiva vishnu and hanuman who are all collectible demons in shin megami tensei the video game series that's basically where my knowledge comes from which which i'm sure isn't uh you know uh insulting to the the hindu believers and practicers at all that they're that all their

deities are demons in a video game but yes homer actually is quite offensive to apu talking like hey no offense but and then directly insults his delusion of religion into his face almost said delusion we know what henry thinks i thought i was thinking about that scene in the moment and how homer is being like offensive there but i i guess i liked that when the way i took it in the scene is like homer is saying a jerk thing and we you know like because obviously the the whole apu situation is is very loaded but in that case it's it's a moment of like, we side with Apu in that moment and Homer's being a jerk to them. So like, it feels like, you know, dicey

for television, but it still is like the viewer knows which side is correct in that moment. It's not like we're siding with Homer being like, that's a bad religion. Yeah, the joke is not on Apu. And that's important because then he has to help Homer, despite being viciously insulted to his face about his faith. I suppose back then there could have been jerks watching it who thought, like, yeah, I mean, an elephant? That is stupid. Homer's right. Offer it a peanut.

I'm going to assume as a 10-year-old I thought it was stupid. Like, what, an elephant? Even when Apu is offended, he still is a businessman and tells him to come again. But yes, another of my all-time favorite lines, and this is George Meyer-like perfection writing, pride goeth before destruction, and then cut to Homer saying, everyone is stupid except me. He's smoking a cigar while being surrounded by beer and pornography. Yes, it's amazing i

love that shot and the fire that starts is like this is their house is gone like they're it's it's really obvious at the end but even the way this fire starts is like well this is the end of their home they need to buy they're gonna need a new home after this but the fire spreading again amazing animation and i talk a lot about mistakes i made recording this but this is one of my highest points of pride when we were recording this off of television in my youth i was able to hit the pause that it perfectly cut out the commercials and went straight from the exact same shot of homer it goes out on homer surrounded by fire and back into some homer surrounded by fire so when i re-watched on my vhs tape it looked like it was just one continuous shot a young steven spillbear go

i love that that just like a small personal victory that only you know about but you're like i nailed it yes everybody needs to know i paused this time perfectly well because a lot of the times the stories are oh i hit pause too soon and i missed a joke or whatever but um i was thinking about those type of act breaks and i because that is going out like dipping to black during a scene and then coming back to the next scene in the same moment is something that i don't really love to do and i was thinking of it specifically in the case of streaming and how i just watched this episode that it is it is it feels like an outdated thing that when you had

commercials it would have been a cliffhanger and now that we don't have commercials it's not but i was i briefly met dan gore the creator of brooklyn 99 and i was venting about that problem and he was like i promise you the viewers don't notice this like He's like, I know what you mean, and I've thought about this too, and it simply is only a concern of ours. People are just enjoying it. So I backed off on that fear. Yeah, when we dissect these shows, we often notice they'll come back from an act, and then the person will say, I can't believe you just did this.

Right, reset. It just happened about five seconds ago in our viewing. It's a great like this is a uh like a pushing a sitcom joke even further where the act break is homer is falling asleep the house is on fire and he says marge could you turn down the heat that would have been the exit line in any other sitcom the joke is homer says that's better the fire has not decreased in any way but it feels lower to you all of a sudden i feel like that was the act break but someone said let's push it and make some kind of weird absurd absurdist like addition to this

joke when it comes to streaming i do miss the like uh we talked about it with a great new season of beavers and butthead that i like that they still keep the tv pacing even though it is like a it's a streaming original but it's still like well here's where the commercial breaks would have been back then and it it there's something about that tv pacing maybe it's because what's what we grew up with but like it does feel different when i watch a streaming show obviously when you watch streaming shows that are like 20 30 minutes you can tell where like acts end or whatever but without commercials the three acts it feels different to me i i don't know it feels listless to me yeah it's funny to think that it's a structure that like the format dictated that you had this we had sponsors and we

had commercials so you had to write tv that way and then it just became then it started to influence stories and now it's just like the way we learn story structure and what feels right but then i was thinking about it's weird like movies have three acts and movies don't have commercials so it is just like the way that that are that like narrative works for human brains i guess when i learned through doing this podcast like the viewers in the uk for their broadcast their commercials are different they only have like one big commercial break in the middle so what we think of as three clear acts, instead it's like, it's a two act show where they just shove commercials in the middle

and like, well, this is where the one commercial break is in the Simpsons episode. And now the Simpsons has been a four act show for over a decade now. I think, yeah, yeah. Where the fourth act is maybe like a 90 second epilogue basically.

Yeah, it's weird. We're in the zone where I guess network to network it's different almost every show i've worked on is four acts certainly recently but then they'll have a different time clock like because when i hear four acts i kind of always assume what you're saying of like act four is sort of like a tag that's like inconsequential but then i know that certain networks are like please don't do that because we want we want people to feel like the plot isn't resolved yet. But then they still do want it to be the shortest act.

So you're you're kind of like having a climax happen in a 90 second act. Or then on IFC with Comedy Bang Bang and Birthday Boys, we had something called a pod buster that was like a 30 second thing between acts one and two that would just interrupt the commercial break to keep people watching and on on comedy bang bang and birthday boys we tried to like string it along with the plot but then we found out that when it would go to streaming those podbusters were not there so sometimes there'd be like plot points that are missing so you had to be really careful like where you're putting stuff but it's really i would say four acts is the norm but like everything is very network to network right now as far as like what they want where and it's weird were these were these little birthday boy segments were they actually on the dvds or on the digital versions

because i don't remember those and i never watched the show on television because i didn't have access i just would download it from itunes and then i got the dvds i believe that they were on the dvds because because we asked but you probably wouldn't even have known because we threw in those bumpers so haphazardly like on birthday boys you go like and it would say birthday boys with like a black and white picture we use those as act breaks but we we also like i think you should leave uh we just threw them in as interstitials between sketches as well so there was no unless you were paying attention to the number of frames of black black screen you wouldn't really necessarily feel what was just the end of a sketch and what was a commercial. I was trying to think what one of those would have been like in this is, I think, the final episode.

But the when the the very funny skeleton that Mike Hanford plays does like a list of his favorite things. Was that one of those? Yes, exactly. Exactly. of those exactly exactly so and then by that point in the show we were like writing the show and then coming up with a pod buster after the fact to make sure we weren't burning off some like sketch premise we loved just in case it was gonna be left off on demand or something like that but yeah that was like a little bit that i remember us pitching on like what are the loose things that we could bring back a heartbreaker for me was that in our pilot we didn't have a pod buster

and then when it came time to like air the show they had said like we need 30 more seconds of show so we the the pilot episode was like about the computer garage gang like a parody of uh steve jobs and steve wozniak and and we needed 30 more seconds of that episode and it was so heartbreaking because we we had like worked and worked to cut it down to time to make it a deliverable pilot and then we went back and we just found like 30 more seconds of cut stuff from the computer sketch and we just plugged it back in and now when i watch the show i'm like we hit this we hit this runner too hard and we like this feels like we're a little too pleased with this joke we had and we we just like hit the premise too many times and i've seen like redditors and stuff like that say like okay they kind of beat a dead horse It feels like we're a little too pleased with this joke we had, and we just hit the premise too many times.

And I've seen Redditors and stuff like that say, okay, they kind of beat a dead horse with this computer joke about these guys in a garage bragging about their garage. And it was because we couldn't air the show. We had no budget to shoot or edit anything new, so we just had to find an existing 30 seconds, and that's what we found on the cutting room floor. This is how the business affects the the art of telling story exactly story has changed i mean it's all about i get into story just so that i can sell the sponsor's products and if a pod buster is

going to help uh cheetos then that was a funny thing right now running on ifc by the way is just knowing that your biggest sponsor is cheetos or Cheez-Its or whatever, and they have their demographic they're going for. So anytime you're looking to branch out or appeal to a different audience, they're like, you know the 14-year-old boys that eat Cheetos? That's who we want to watch the show. So just write for them. Thank you very much. I think everyone needs that Stranger Things clout where you can say, okay, new season, first episode, 42 minutes, second episode, three and a half hours. Homer is seemingly about to be saved by Santa's little helper, but it's just to get a chocolate bar out of his pocket, which again, you know, that would kill Santa's little helper.

So I hope he didn't need it. There's a good little joke. I have a quick clip here. Homer fails to remember the safety song of his youth here ah fire what do I do what do I do oh the song

the song when a fire starts to burn there's a lesson you must learn something something then you'll see you'll avoid catastrophe don't fire at the old simpson place the old simpsons place that's what they that's what they call it in the in the town you know what i don't know the rest of this uh the lyrics to this no no what would it like uh something something then

you'll it's like you couldn't fit in stop, drop and roll in something, something. Maybe Homer is skipping like five, five lines of lyrics here in the directions. But yeah, when Homer falls down, like in real life, you're dead. Like that's the end of Homer there. Like either the fire consumes him or he stops breathing about five seconds after this. You know, massive plot hole, though. It always has bothered me. Why is Ned home?

Yeah, so here is the fake reason I made up in my head. Yeah. That Ned went to church early and left early only to try to drag Homer out of it and go back to church. That's my guess. But you're right. It is a big plot hole. Ned should not be around. Yeah, maybe he went to an even earlier service.

You never know. They have got those really early services sometimes. And if we take it as God is real, maybe something happened in Ned's life that made him miss church that morning just so he'd be there to save Homer. Apu has to leave to be the community fire chief, which I don't think has ever come back in the show uh and he leaves little jump shed in charge which uh that's named after indian american classmate of george myers and harvard apparently the only one he knew and i think it was just in primary schooling or high school or something oh yeah i think you're yeah just like well this is

the only uh indian name i knew and apparently the censors did not like the shot of the child holding a shotgun which sam on digman any censor notes on children holding guns or uh or violence wise stuff no you know what's funny is is honestly we're at a point now where like almost everything gets flagged but it's internally by lawyers on our side that just flag everything it's almost like they're just justifying their jobs where it's internally by lawyers on our side that just flag everything. It's almost like they're just justifying their jobs where it's like anything remotely dicey, they flag it and then we'll be like, yeah, well, we want to do it anyway. And it's like, okay, you are allowed. We were just the lawyers just trying to keep his job at the network. But I when I think about the only we

purposely sort of chill out on guns because because like anytime there's an opportunity to make a gun like a knife instead or something funny or there are guns anytime there's an opportunity to make a gun like a knife instead or something funny or there are guns there's certainly people getting shot up by guns but just try not to overdo it and then i really feel like the stuff that that we can't do is just because of licensing just like you know like you guys wrote spider-man into the scene and we don't own spider-man so you're not allowed to you're not allowed to do or songs you know like song parodies that have kind of crossed the line into just doing the song or something like that been flagged but not not content not shock value or violence are you jealous of how

much money the simpsons seems to have to license almost any song and just have like five five songs i cannot imagine just being able to do that i I never, I've never, I've done so much like obscure TV that I could never even just imagine to be like, yep, we're taking like, usually if I were to write a song into a script, I would then offer 10 alts to it, you know, that like fit the mood, but are not that song.

And then like eventually just have to settle for a library, a free public domain song that conjures the same feeling but so jealous if i hear a licensed song on a cable comedy show i think it's like the biggest special effect of the season like it's yeah like on the joe para very funny joe para show the that was on adult swim they wrote one episode that was built entirely around him listening to a who song for the first time and he plays it and he gives a speech at church about how great it is. Like they must've spent an entire episode's worth

of Adult Swim budget to get that song, but they really got the real song. I know, Micah, I should ask, that was written by Dan Licata and I know him. I should ask how that happened because it's like, they're not even using it in a parody context. Joe just loves, sincerely loves the song

and you're right usually the loophole is that you can afford the publishing but not the the master so you end up recording your own like on birthday boys we we had one time we had um werewolves of london in the show for kind of no reason but it was because we had there was somebody at the network that was like friends with warren zeevon's son and we're like can we get werewolves in london and they're like yes but the the label said no to the actual song but as far as like warren's writing rights that song that's free so we like recorded it ourselves but that i mean baba o'reilly has to be one of the the most expensive and like the who is notoriously expensive and licensing music to commercials and tv shows is like a big thing for pete townsend and it's like that it seems like it would be a million dollar song but maybe it'd be

a quarter hour show it's new media or something and they got a little loophole to make it cheap oh yeah i wonder we covered it in season three but it's because uh we mentioned it before jay cogan is a is a family friend of the herb albert's family or at least someone in his band and that's how they were able to license two herb albert songs in season three no i think it won in season two and one in season three right i've tried i tried to get tijuana taxi i've tried to get tijuana taxi and couldn't and had to do a sound alike god you know superior to spanish flea i think oh yeah oh yeah the real fans know yeah well you know what next time give a shot give a shout out to jay kogan and maybe his family friend who stays who's probably like a 90 year old uncle at this point maybe he can still

i do i do have a i have a friend who co-wrote a pilot with jay so i would love to i pull all those favors just because like i need to but kind of douchey to say one of my own sketches is a well known one but amongst the birthday boys oeuvre uh sort of a classic is uh the sketch all your favorites are back and it's like this long tv intro and you hear the theme song for a long time in our rough cuts that was tijuana taxi and we had it there temporarily for a long time and then we had to get uh eban schletter our amazing music guy who had done mr show and spongebob he did a sound alike that we loved just as much and that is rarely the case that the sound alike is just as good for comedy purposes uh jomshed character apparently it is technically it is the season 27 episode where jomshed returns and for some reason he has he's a college-aged man he

ages like and he's he's like i go by j now that Who's he played by? The comedian and performer Utkarsh Ambudkar, who's a very funny guy. And he has a story about trying to add a line to the episode that's featured in the The Problem with Apu documentary. Yeah, I know that episode they were trying to address Apu in a modern way, but that was before the Apu discourse started. The current Apu discourse started right yes yeah yeah but so technically this child instant by season 27 he ages in real time unlike unlike every other character so uh they try to rush off but ducks are in the way i do what george meyer loves adam west batman i do wonder if this is a little reference to the the when he's when when batman's trying to throw away the bomb a bunch of cute ducks are in the way and he has to change his

direction like uh but yes then ned busts in strives to save homer again another thing i see in tons of simpsons memes the way ned kicks that door i see that door kick is such a funny drawing i see that used a lot too. And so. We learned Ned is powerful. I mean, they made the episode, but it hasn't aired yet. The streetcar named Marge. We see how strong he is in that episode. You're right.

He's a big buff man, which explains how he can carry Homer. TV viewers had not seen it yet, but they had already made the episode. And Tim, like you said at the top, I mean, all it's uh it's like out of backdraft or something the way he's like when that giant beam falls again it's like well okay this house is gone like this is not or the hole falls out in the ground like the house is destroyed yeah that's funny that it is just like oh they put it out and it's happily ever after it's like no that's that's a charred infrastructure but yes the way sorry they saw the previous week oh right i'm mixing up production and air dates and i apologize profusely

but the way homer falls out the window falls back in through the first floor window just blankly and kind of goes and then the way ned perfectly like he's spider-man just somersaults out and then bounces back inward is just amazing he's barely deflated because he knows he can do this when he sees this happen to homer he goes okay yes god god's making it just a little harder for him this perfect olympic tumble backwards too he's he's like an athlete he's he's like a gymnast in this scene that that you know what that joke reminds me of him yeah being like coming off the roof and then bouncing and going straight back into the burning building is there's an episode where he's like trying to homer's trying to ditch a car and he like opens the door and rolls out and then like hits a rock

or a log or something and rolls right back into the car that he just rolled out of and it's that's a very simpsons joke to just be like all in one shot and then he's back off the cliff yeah uh so ned saves him says he did homer do the same thing for him and then homer has a little dream balloon of uh excitedly watching ned burning to death and laughing and then homer reflects on our magazines and roach traps gone magazines we see the crusty saves the cat which is how you know that he's an important the the protagonist of this series and you're supposed to like him on yeah this uh very likable anytime anyone saves any cat you're like that's my guy that's the character there's no continuity but in uh barkets and elephant we'll learn that all of their tv guides have uh remained intact thankfully you're right yeah i guess i guess it didn't get that far down into

their basement i suppose even though oh wait it explodes from the basement yeah that and look maybe they were inside uh extopaloppa kettle oh kept safely inside the the the old mecca yeah i agree yeah so another great little joke of barney just chopping down their mailbox for no reason it's great and it's one of the few times where wiggum can feel superior to someone who's who's stupider than him that's right by a couple seasons wiggum would be as dumb as barney or even dumber actually flanders you saved me. Why? Heck, you'd have done the same for me. Help! Help!

That's right, old friend. Dad! Oh, homie, are you all right? Our magazines and roach traps. Gone. All gone. I saved your cat. Oh, that hurt. Hi, what are these axes for? I don't know. Chopping stuff.

Gotcha. That's some nice chopping. Then God saves Ned's house because he is a regular charlie church and you know what homer he should have stuck with his lies when that guy says like not just made up stuff for his house insurance he should have said like i know and i had a picasso so and where do you guys fall on these uh clothes pins i like the springy clothes pins over the other guy yeah we're in the 21st century we need the springs i'm a spring guy for sure also i was gonna say it's so funny the thing when homer is listing off things to the insurance company like the picasso and then the guy's like oh has to be real things

not not uh imaginary ones there's a funny disconnect did you notice that the animation when homer's next line he's like well that's just great. And it kind of looks like Homer yells the line, but then Castellan at his vocal performance is way more calm. And it's a very funny choice. Just like, well, that's just great. He's kind of defeated. And it made me made me laugh out loud to just let the line be kind of like more resigned. Well, Homer looks like he's yelling. It was very funny.

Yeah, it's well, that's just great. But his arms are just folding in like, yeah, he's yelling it was very funny yeah it's well that's just great but his arms are just folding in like yeah he's angry homer will talk to total disaster insurance again in mr plow different guy but same insurance company and with another lie another per at that time it works yeah but uh so it's another great joke that when they go around the house it is completely destroyed and they're just all drinking cocoa together. Like, everything's fine. Let's all drink cocoa in this burnt-out home.

There's so many of like, oh, these are some of my favorite lines of all time in here. But the way Reverend Lovejoy replies to Apu in this next song. Oh my God, so condescending. This little clip here of Homer trying to learn a lesson. You know, I have a feeling there's a lesson here. Yes, the lesson is...

No, don't tell me. I'll get it. Oh, I know. The Lord is vengeful. Oh, spiteful one. Show me who to smite and they shall be smote in. Homer, God didn't set your house on fire. No, but he was working in the hearts of your friends and neighbors

when they went to your aid, be they Christian, Jew, or miscellaneous. Hindu, there are 700 million of us. Oh, that's super. I was rude to every one of you, and you saved my life when you could have just left me to fry like the proverbial pancake that I am. Oh, homieie i'm so glad to hear you say that now would you give church another try i'll be there next sunday

front row center homer's giant snoring mouth is also another great drawing i love it but march looking very mortified next day but yes the oh that's super like so great like treating something that yeah he said like it's like we're talking about like a significant percentage of the planet and he's like oh i uh that's good for you but to me that's some peripheral thing that i don't have to ever hear about yeah that hindu is miscellaneous uh and currently it was i believe it was accurate then with 700 million today it is 1.2 billion hindu practitioners those are my numbers too uh two which is about half of what christian uh number is at least on the on the sources we found christianity is still number one uh apparently according to that list

yeah but uh then uh and number two islam with 1.9 and also i think it is very accurate that lovejoy is like oh i'm gonna use this to get you to come back to church like this crisis uh this is now at the time to convince you to come back to church but this is the first time it really hit me the joke of homer homer's lesson seems to be like he's like god tell me who to kill like that he's homer's about to go on a killing spree he's like tell me who to smite and they shall be smoted he's ready for it so uh this is when homer has his uh his dream and god is drawn incorrectly with four fingers now god is referencing when he says nine out of ten religions fail in their first year that's a myth about nine out of ten religions fail in their first year that's a myth about nine out of ten restaurants fail in their first year and tim your family is from a restaurant a restaurant

owning family i don't know if that a bit i read online that that's more that's a bit of a myth that it's more like 60 percent fail in the first year i i my dad our our restaurants lasted for uh decades so my dad liked to amp up the numbers in his favor and be like, 99% of restaurants fail within the first month, just to make us feel extra good about his 10 year pizzeria. But it's hard. I mean, in LA, it really feels if you open a restaurant, if it's not like the hot thing, then it's just like, oh, you're toast. You can't possibly just open an okay restaurant. They have another great gag about uh the cliche of like oh and i'm in heaven i'm gonna be playing music with jimmy hendrix like but it's you're

you're playing uh you're playing air hockey with jimmy i guess they had him responding to ben franklin but they cut it because people actually know what he sounds like and i'm guessing it was hank azaria doing the voice or somebody yeah probably right to assume a kazoo again i love how homer is non-plus when i saw this with my mom when they said you can't wait six months my mom gasped at that at the idea that homer would die in six months like she's like are there are there several bad fan theories based on this where it's like well yeah and then of course he died in uh homer's triple bypass and uh it was six months after this i'm sure it's highly unintentional but yes six months after this homer does sort of die briefly in uh in his

triple bypass when he has a heart attack and it was six months after this but so this is the last joke here that i have a teeny clip for so on the commentary they say that they thought that fox screwed it up but the intention was and it doesn't work on dvds or disney plus but the intention was god says the meaning of life is and he's supposed to be cut off by an ad for what's next on fox because they kept having very aggressive ads of up next on fox blah blah. It would have been Martin, right? Normally it would have been, yeah. But Gene and Meyer remember that it didn't happen. But they are remembering incorrectly because thanks to the very useful Twitter account on Twitter, Daily Simpsons, they have a tape of the original broadcast and they uploaded what the original ending clip was.

I wish it was a funnier thing they're throwing to, but here's how it played the first time on TV. Well, okay. The meaning of life is... Don't go away. Coming up after an all-new Martin is a special presentation of two new Fox comedies, The Edge and Flying Blind.

So stay tuned. Hey tuned hey hey it worked yep and the edge is david murkin sketch show yeah it's uh i don't know if you've heard of that one another light briefly live sick uh sketch show on tv there too yeah it had jill talley it had tom kenney wayne knight julie brown jennifer aniston is a sketch performer in that show you said this is a david merkin show yeah it's what he did right before joining the simpsons showrunner wow so he's coming off it would get a life i guess he must have a fox overall deal because they kill get a life and then he sells this show with his then partner uh life partner and writing partner uh julie brown the the white julie brown uh and nobody thinks about the other one anymore i guess i should have just said down

not downtown the non-wubba wubba julie brown and when i found a commercial for this the when they say like and up next is the edge and all they have is like a two-second clip of a bunch of fish biting wayne knight's face and i'm going ah i was like this sells the show to people i'm just like look at the screaming guy i gotta i gotta see what this show oh man alan ruck was a performer on the show they got it wow that's uh ferris bueller's friend by the way you mean the the succession son uh he's what he's one of the loser sons on that show, right? He's Succession Jr., right? Yeah.

And that other show, I was shocked to find out Flying Blind somehow actually lasts a full 22-episode season. It is not canceled midway through. I'm pretty sure I watched all of it because it was just on Fox Thursday nights. And I know it's Tay Leoni, and that's her. She's the biggest star in it. Yeah, yeah yeah or at least of the main cast apparently if you go to the wiki page it lists a few other people like they actually appeared on this like oh that's a famous person but yeah tay leone is the only like name star on it yeah yeah so when people were watching this episode the night it aired did they that that like cut off joke about the meaning of life plays really funny but did people

think that that was a network mistake and then they revolt when you hear the theme song come in you think oh that was intentional but if you just heard plug for fox shows you'd think it kind of like the way the sopranos finale made people think their cable went out or something i mean i i like the prankster spirit of it that it may i don't recall feeling like oh wait i was gonna hear the meaning of life or whatever i i just thought it got cut off i think i did read it as like oh that's a joke right they're not gonna tell me the meaning of life which i uh the one last compliment i want to throw tim's way it's funny to have these jokes and comedies where they set up like here's an unknowable thing and we're not the joke is we're gonna deny it to you like we're not gonna actually

say what the meaning of life is or whatever and in your episode of digman you do uh uh it's about a poem that makes people to quote the show shoot ropes you know how it is yeah yeah it's a lost shakespeare sonnet that's so romantic that it makes you have an orgasm if you read it and and you tease in it that you're going to do the usual comedy thing of not saying it of like oh the the character the viewer won't actually hear it but then you have it at the end of the episode and it's just read read on screen that from the beginning that was the premise to me that's what was fun about it was to be like you just expect the tv trope to be like skirting the issue but i was like no i do. I really do want to

show this poem. So what's funny is the way that ended up is different than initially, because you know, you you you come up with an episode, like you pitch an episode of the room, and then you all break the story together, you kind of write an outline together or in like small groups. And then when you're on script, you have a week to write the script by yourself. And then you come back and you rewrite it. So we had always just slotted in. The joke was like setting Tim me up to have to write the most romantic poem ever. So I, it always, in the outline, it just said, when it came to the poem, it just says the sonnet happens and it's so romantic that it makes everybody orgasm. So, so then when I sat down down it was time for me to write

it and i just went for it with no jokes initially i i read up on sonnet structure and i spent a day and i wrote the most romantic according according to my sensibilities a jokeless sonnet that was the most romantic thing i could possibly muster and it the, the thrill of it to me was to be that vulnerable and go back in. I was like the only male staff writer. So to go back into that room and be like, Hey everybody, here's what I came up with as the most romantic thing you could ever write. And I just had to grin and bear it. And we did a table read and everyone like everyone got a huge kick out of like seeing me expose myself that way. But then when we talked about it, we were like,

we should make it funny. So then we, the first couple of lines of the sonnet are what I wrote. And then it gets into like, like funny, raunchy, filthy, and like hip hop,

pop lyrics written in Shakespearean ways. And I think that was the way to go with it. But internally the thrill in the room for me was to turn to all my coworkers and show them my heart. Wow, man, that's such that I love I love the episode because it was such a great it pulled against my comedy nerd expectations like, oh, well, they never actually we're never going to actually hear the thing. We're never going to see the best movie ever or whatever. It's really hard to do effectively. One other thing I can think of is the Monty Python Meaning of Life movie

where they actually tell you the meaning of life at the end. It's very straightforward advice. The best choice. Just give it. We have some stuff. There's other stuff coming up in Digman where part of the fun is like,

what's something that's hard to execute? Where it's like, we're writing ourselves into a corner and we're going to have to figure out what to do there. And're writing ourselves into a corner and we're gonna have to figure out what to do there and it just makes it like a fun challenge for yourself i i can't wait for that season two but yeah this but yeah this perfect episode of the simpsons one of the best like it's but this is like a season season four is full of so many perfect ones that this it's almost like well is this better than mr. Plow? I don't know,

but I, this like, this is at least top 20 for me. If not, top 10 is really full for me. It's hard to say. This could be tough. Like watching it again,

make me realize how much I love it and how, uh, how much it says about religion, how well animated it is to there. It's just firing on all levels. The beginning of a season, I think season four, as much as we like it,

it does get a little weaker by the end because these guys are all just so tired and they're so sick of working on this show and i feel like there are some weaker ones like the front and even last exit the springfields a little weaker despite some of the most classic jokes of all time but they are starting so strong yeah and i love this one so much oh and i should also say at this time in my life the last thing i want is comedy atheism i'm sick of it and yet i love this episode so much it still feels it's fresh now as that yeah same here any final thoughts tim on this one just that i mean i i like that i i thought this really aged well and i was i was kind of shocked to think that it's its stance on religion still felt like worth watching and worth thinking about and and i'm with you i the idea of like even

though i am an atheist or at least agnostic like the idea that i'm i don't want to hear some comedy writers try to freak us out by saying that religion is fake and it's like not fun for me and and then also more recently there's shows that are a little too sweet and comedy writers trying to have heart and trying to make you have faith and making me barf so i felt like i i laughed through this whole episode and then really appreciated that like i do like the moral and i do think they didn't wimp out on being like a reason for homer to like maintain some faith in his community as opposed to like oh i because whatever he felt he fell asleep and he started a fire he didn't like it's he didn't really go too far in a way that felt judgy or pious or whatever. It was sort of like he learned the right lesson for Homer and the

show wasn't trying to teach us a lesson quite as much. Yeah. The show was not a post from r slash atheism. Right. Yeah. Or like say some South Park episodes perhaps. Yeah. Yeah. Although they came down pretty hard against atheists. They were anti Dawkins. That's true. Yeah, yeah. Although they came down pretty hard against Atheists. They were anti-Dawkins. That's true, yeah. They really hate that guy, just as much as they hate the Catholic Church. Yeah, that's true. But Tim Kalpakis, thanks for being back on the show.

Please let us know where to find you. Of course, you've got the Sloppy Boys podcast, you've got Sloppy Boys the band, and you're right around Digma, which is coming back for a second season. What else is going on with you? Yeah, Tim Kalpack is on all the social media i got all kinds of stuff going on but yeah the main thing is check out all the sloppy boys

uh music and we have two podcasters there's a there's a free podcast every week where we make a different cocktail and then on our on our patreon we have the sloppy boys blowout where we're just wilding out with all the effed up stuff that the sponsors won't let us do which tends to be us just like arguing about taylor swift songs or stuff like that but yeah that's all uh at the sloppy boys and uh and also i forgot to mention too you guys uh in about a few weeks after this in what started september or mid-august you guys are even at a at a festival aren't you uh performing at our very first festival uh we're doing hopscotch in uh Raleigh North Carolina and we're really pumped to uh it's got a great lineup that I'm super pumped to be a part of and never played a festival before and then also you

just it reminded me this is turns out this is the 10th anniversary of the birthday boys on IFC and that would have debuted in October. So this is like, I'm like, I should text the guys and we should do something. Let's do a panel or a live, uh, something to celebrate that. But that's also the birthday boys on it all on all socials.

If you want to see what I eventually came up with us doing, you know, where it's, where it's currently streaming. I have the DVD. So I'm not sure where the birthday boys is right now. Well, first thank you.

Thank you for buying that DVD. I got got a penny a penny off of that i think i bought them directly from you at uh cobs comedy club or something oh hell yeah then we then then then i made all that money that's that's the way to do it best i like watching it on 2b because 2b kind of makes also they they have like a um i mean pluto it's on 2b as well but pluto tv has makes you feel like you're watching live TV and has a whole IFC channel they throw it on somewhere. And then it's also on AMC Plus. And it's also on Plex. That's great. I look forward to this 10th anniversary celebration.

We're seeing you brainstorm right here live. It's got to be something huge. Maybe it's going to be Carnegie Hall. Well, but thank you so much, thank you tim thanks thanks for having me back and thanks for giving me an excuse to re-watch this fantastic fantastic all-timer episode thanks again to tim calpakis for being on the show please check out the sloppy boys the podcast the band and hey why not check out the birthday boys uh great two-season sketch show check it out on i think you said to be pluto it's on everything plex pluto to be all the come over to my place and watch the dvds

they do you should buy those dvds they got great commentary on every episode yes but as for us we want to check out more of what we do and get these episodes one week ahead of time and ad free please go to patreon.com slash talking simpsons sign up there for five bucks a month you get just that but also access to everything behind that $5 paywall. That includes over 150 miniseries episodes covering shows like Futurama, King of the Hill,

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head on over to TalkingSimpsonsPodcast.com. Thanks so much for joining us, folks. We'll see you again next time for Season 14's Helter Shelter, and we'll see you then. The service has ended. Go in peace. The door's frozen shut. And it's the only way out. Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Lisa, this is neither the time nor the place.