Talking Simpsons - Talking Simpsons - I Love Lisa With Mike Maronna

Episode Date: April 10, 2024

Not only do we have a Valentine's Day classic this week, but we're also joined by the great first-time guest Mike Maronna from The Adventures of Pete and Pete, Home Alone, and the returning podcast The Adventures of Danny and Mike! Mike reflects on how his career intersected with Bartmania, and then we dig into this iconic ep of misplaced crushes when Ralph falls for Lisa. Plus we talk filming in The White House, anniversary specials, orange drink, mediocre presidents, and so much more Support this podcast, experience it ad-free, 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 talk king of the hill the what a cartoon movie podcast and tons more. I heartily endorse this event or product. Ahoy, ahoy, everybody, and welcome to Talking Simpsons, the podcast full of crude, off-color sentiments. I'm one of your hosts, angry young man Bob Mackey, and this is our chronological exploration of The Simpsons. Who is here with me today, as always? Holding my evil in check,

it's Henry Gilbert. And who is our special guest on the line? I'm Michael Morona and I choo-choo-choose you. And this week's episode is I Love Lisa. Mr. Simpson, the tar fumes are making me dizzy. Yeah, they'll do that. This episode originally aired on February 11th, 1993. And as always, Henry will tell us what happened on this mythical day in real world history. Oh, my God. Oh, boy, Bobby. Janet Reno becomes the first female attorney general. Groundhog Day tops the box office.

And everybody's watching Oprah interview Michael Jackson. Oh, I see. This is the, to go to the last news story, this is the Vitiligo conversation, correct? It's basically Oprah asking all the questions that everybody wants to know at this stage in his life. Yeah, the sleep in an oxygen tent one that became a joke on The Simpsons, his skin coloring stuff, all that.

Yeah, it came right after the big halftime show at the Super Bowl just a couple weeks earlier. And now, you know, he's chatting with Oprah. And I believe she gets on the Ferris wheel at Neverland Ranch with him in it, too, I think. It's like a whole tour around Neverland. Was there not a rumor that he slept on a bed of tofu in between the like the pressurized air and and everything that i hadn't heard the tofu bed the high out the altitude chamber the oxygen chamber not the altitude chamber i imagine that was either in the national inquirer or perhaps like a weird owl lyric reference that i will believe both and it was one of the most watched tv interviews of all time in the

u.s too like yeah the the first half of 93 great for michael jackson uh second half not not good that's good that's good yes uh and yes groundhog day top in the box office coming seemingly coming out like the week after groundhog day because this is, you know, the week after it. But I just saw it in theaters again for like the 30th anniversary last year. It was still still a good time. You don't ever get over that when you just start speaking French to Andy McDowell. You're just like, what? He did his homework.

Weirdly enough, this is the movie that destroyed the relationship between Bill Murray and Harold Ramis because Bill Murray thought, no, this should be a serious drama about the effects of time loops on the human psyche. But Harold Ramis is like, let's make it funny and heartwarming. And I think they never talked again until close to Harold Ramis's passing. Wow. It's too bad. It was, yeah, I mean, I think they ended up making such a great movie together. It's sad that like the either them separate was less than when they were working together. Like they were both not to say Harold Graham is still making movies and Bill Murray still acted in stuff and was good.

But yeah, it's just like they it's sad they reached such a great peak and then they thought it wasn't even a good movie when it was. It's like still an unforgettable like classic to this day greater than the sum of their parts the way that they worked off of each other and yeah i mean also uh it's not because i love the movie uh that much but it is groundhog day is my wedding anniversary but that was not intended as a tribute to like groundhog day it's well it's the day you want to live over and over right henry yeah i do it is my wedding anniversary is leap day just to call just about a week ago and it's because it's a forgettable day that i never want to come up again i i figured two two would be easy to remember because i just wanted two two i was like let's do something february that's not valentine's day mine is one two so also easy to remember i just found out that uh my boss's

anniversary was one two because he couldn't get married on new year's day the the place was closed oh man yeah i was married on one two because of uh covid that was the the closest date we could get after our wedding was delayed but it worked out to like a very memorable 1-2-21. So it's 1-2-2-1. So everyone listening, that's when you send us presents on that day. And yes, Jan Arino, the first female attorney general in the relatively new Clinton administration in 1993. Sure, there was sort of shaking off the Gulf War and that ossification of post-Reagan bullshit and seeing that you could, oh, have a guy who plays saxophone.

You can do different things. But I'm sure the country was still reeling from the changing of the guard from this sort of like old patrician, waspy George Bush to Billy Joel Saxophone. I think the Simpsons called him a drunk hillbilly or something. Was that the joke headline? The critic, I think, was fat, lecherous hillbilly elected president. I reference it all the time. Unfortunately, I never really started learning about serious American politics until after high school. So when I think of Janet Reno, I just think of Will Ferrell.

Yes. Yeah, the Will Ferrell impression on Saturday Night Live. Unflattering, let's say. I was going to say a sensitive portrayal of Janet Reno. I guess I went to a pretty political high school, so people were more in tune with that stuff. But I didn't ever see like electioneering around high school or things of that nature. But people were definitely up on the news as far as who was in and who was out. Did you at least know enough about the presidents to get the jokes in this episode about President's Day?

You're next, Chester A. Arthur. Yeah, I think I mostly learned about old presidents through Simpsons references until I started going to real school. Was that a Saturday Night Live? I learned my presidents from the Simpsons and the Die Hard movies.

Oh, right. Yes, yeah. Sometimes the Simpsons will appear in a Die Hard movie, too. Every once in a while. Yeah. Though also, I guess, we have a special guest star who's been in a, not in a diehard movie too every once in a while yeah uh though also i guess we have a

special guest star who's been in a not in a scene with but uh it was even in a motion picture with another president as well oh yes yes uh joining us today is mike marona he is from the adventures of danny and mike podcast welcome to the show mike we're big fans of your work today and let's say between 30 to 35 years ago as well every mike marona era we're into thank you uh about 24 years ago i appreciate it thank you bob thank you henry uh about 24 years ago i did appear in a in a video with uh aforementioned lecherous hillbilly uh president bill clinton and also like you don't share a scene but but you, uh, uh, both you and a much, uh, a horrible, horrible president can say they're in home alone too.

Yeah. Uh, about that. I think I got a free night at the Plaza because we shot a couple of times at the, we had a couple of scenes at the Plaza. So instead of getting driven back to Queens that night, Teamsters are just like that. They're really just like that. I stayed in the plaza overnight. And it was not the largest room, but it was a room of the plaza. And I went right back to work the next day in a bathrobe. I put my bathrobe on and went back to work. No, I mean, this is such an honor for us.

We both grew up watching uh pete and pete loved loved it so much we did a whole podcast about it i uh and as the as an older brother i always did identify with big pete in the show as uh that is my avatar in the show so this is extra honor for me bob dick can't steal older brother valor he's a he's a little brother i projected onto arty that's what i was going for he is the uh he's the tangent of the bunch yeah well in this episode aired like when i i was trying to chart it out like you might have been filming pete and pete when this aired the first season or it's like uh when the show was coming out yeah i think we went into series production the following year in 1994 but we were still shooting we're still shooting the 60

seconds and specials in 93 for sure i think what we're getting at here is did your career as a child actor interfere with your simpsons watching goodness no i mean the at that point the fox station in in new york played it obviously wasn't in syndication at that point, the Fox station in New York played it. Obviously, it wasn't in syndication at this point, so you could catch it on Sundays. And that was about it. So it wasn't really like it didn't get in the way of my schooling. It didn't get in the way of acting either. So yeah, it was kind of its own entity at that point. And Rupert's Money Cash Cow. I mean, what else did they have? Kung Fu movies is what I was acquainted with with Channel 5 Fox before The Simpsons.

It was just like, yeah, watching Kung Fu movies on the weekends with Uncle Pat. I mean, for us growing up, I would be probably watching the night before I, on many Simpsons weekends with uncle pat no i mean for for us growing up i would be like probably watching the night before i uh on many simpsons nights probably the night before or the weekend after i'd have watched snick and seen uh pete and pete on there i think so it's they they fit very close together in my memory we did uh we did get a weekend slot there for a while and so more kids were home to be able to watch and i was home to be able to watch or at that point maybe a little more mtv i would i would probably admit more than in in the viacom unity still but not less nickelodeon and more

and more uh teenage stuff as long as you were still in the viacom family with your viewing habits that's what mattered some to redstone yes i think the ren and stimpy slot and snick it's straddled the nick and mtv platforms really i think that's accurate something for everybody kind of the the amount of litter box jokes and snot jokes like kept it in the in the kid realm but there's like so much adult shit in there too uh from another flawed creator might we say yeah you know the kids who couldn't stay up until nine they weren't ready for ren and stimpy well also with valentine's day being the the point of this episode i was also reminded like the the first full pete and speed special like the the not uh maybe call it the first episode but it was that was a valentine's day episode too

a lot of fun uh yeah that episode was filmed on the football stadium of bayonne high school which is known for the not a surf video popular and wow we had the whole we had the run of the place so and we had art donovan you know former offensive and defensive lineman i don't think he was a two-way he was not a two-way player but yeah the only guy um i ever worked with who wrote an autobiography called fatso that's it was a winner yeah i mean you see these holiday specials that take place, you know, say that was in between Home Alones. I think we shot that in 1991 and we shot part of it. And then I broke my collarbone playing football in the schoolyard. I think Eddie Kim and Dana together conspired to send me flying.

We played on asphalt in a city schoolyard. And yeah, I broke my collarbone quite grievously close to the middle of December of that year. And consequently, we were all off for Christmas. The crew was actually thankful because we did not have to work close to the holidays because they could not shoot any more of my scenes while I was in a sling. So you'll notice that my home-based narrative, where I'm just sort of describing things to the camera, all of a sudden I have longer hair, and I caught a cold. And so all of a sudden some of my narration is very nasal and mucousyy and congested because I managed to, while I was on the mend, first bone I had broken, really didn't enjoy.

I managed to catch a cold and grow my hair out. So there was slight continuity changes within that episode for the clear the clear-eyed viewer i guess no uh that's you know something too similar with simpsons and pete and pete if i could uh compare would be that like in both cases when i was a kid i didn't like appreciate like the deep i just you know like them as kids shows and then later with like pete i came to recognize like who michael stipe is or who iggy pop is or all of these, you know, much deeper references that flew over my head. It's an honor to be compared. I definitely appreciated some of that stuff a little bit later.

Even myself looking back, for sure, not knowing the references and sort of learning about these figures later in life. But, yeah, like, you made time for The Simpsons in between all of the kid acting. Sure. And then as it went into syndication, it's much easier, you know, to make the sort of stoner appointment of 1130 Simpsons viewing is a bit easier as you're a grown-up and living on your own, as opposed to battling your siblings for the television set. I definitely, I don't know if I was a blend of Bart and Lisa at that point, because I was the oldest of three, but also tended to act out. So I kind of, I gathered from both baskets, as as it were i was definitely not a pacifier sucking

maggie that was just never me i wasn't good with guns it was never me well you know if uh listeners might be saying like henry's not big pete he's teddy obviously i'm like yes fine i'm out you know i never thought of it like that henry but But now you put it in all of our heads. Just FYI, Bob. That's what I'm going to start saying trivia with. Well, what? You didn't know that? Oh, he's doing it.

He's doing the glasses move. No, I guess I had one more question before we get in the episode itself about uh your your career mike uh that now that you go back and watch home alone don't you think the mcallister family seems like way richer than they seemed when you were a kid i haven't gone back and watched home alone to be honest not in a while okay well it's a mansion i'm like how rich are these these mcallisters i have a seven-year-old son and i don't want to give him any ideas. I just don't want to wake up to a paint can. My son is resourceful and likes building things. And I just don't want to give him that temptation.

On the other hand, I meet people who say, oh, it's my kid's favorite movie. He watches it every day during Christmas. And so I'm imagining these kids who are sort of like cramming for the test, watching Home Alone so many times. And my son's just falling behind. So eventually I'm going to have to educate him on the subject matter. And yeah, I didn't know anybody with a lawn jockey. I grew up in New York City in Brooklyn. I didn't know the suburbs. When we came to Chicago to shoot the movie, we were in sort of the first suburb outside of Chicago called Evanston is where we

were staying. And that abandoned high school, Nutria North, that John Hughes used as his studio was quite roomy. And it let them build both floors of the house in different ways. And it was quite advantageous to them to be able to do that. But yeah, yeah. From the outside, it looked like a nice house. And on the inside, it looked like a nice house. I'm reminded of a job I did about five years ago, an HBO job called The Plot Against America, a very heavy Philip Roth book. gaining sort of popularity and power during World War II and about this Jewish family in Newark living in a Jewish neighborhood and feeling sort of the pressure of World War II and the sentiment all around. And when we constructed the set, I'm a rigging electrician, so involved with lighting on television and movies. When we constructed the set, I walked around it and I said, this place is too big.

These people are not rich. It's like, it's World War II. And because the set designers are used to sort of like, you know, these very privileged people living very sexy lives in modern television. But this was a period piece. Like the last thing I had worked on was Shades of Blue, which I called the J-Lo cop show. But it was one of the last things that Ray

Leota did. One of Ray Leota's last ventures into television before he passed away. That was, again, J-Lo's apartment was fabulous and the other locations were fabulous. But the family, the set designers are just used to a certain thing. And so they actually came back and chopped off like about four to six feet of the set and made it smaller to sort of reflect what buildings actually looked like in that time. Well, you know, if the McAllister's can afford to fly like 36 family members to France, I guess they probably would be pretty rich. There's a lot of discourse around that. And yeah, it's not like airfare was that much cheaper than that you could do that. Yeah, I think the speculation was that Peter, John Heard's character, was a hitman, a G-man, investment banker.

There was just like a pick five of careers that would sustain that sort of family and living. Well, you know, this isn't a question. We will get started. But I will promise our listeners that by the end of this podcast, we will find out where the season three DVDs are, which warehouse they're rotting away in, and we're going to liberate them. That's my promise to

all the Talking Simpsons listeners. I'm sure Mike has never asked about those. That's the Bob Servo lock of the week. Yeah. I'm ready for the road trip to do it, wherever it's at. Yeah. It just, you know, I have my DVDs. It feels just incomplete, just the one and two next to each other.

By stating the existence of these things, you've now been inculcated into the strike team you know i have i have a i have a shuttle crew but i need a strike team to get into the the warehouse so i hope you've both been training with grappling hooks and the like how hard can it be yeah we'll be repelling down something tonight. But yeah, this is a real classic episode we've got you here for, Mike, with I Love Lisa, one of the most beloved, heartfelt ones. And I think it stands up pretty good to all the years later, 31 years later. Fair enough. What I said to Bob earlier was that it's just it's so tight there's like no air in it it's just like gag to gag to gag to gag to gag and advances a story very effectively at the same time

oh no b story to distract things like very focused on on the a story too yeah that's true i was thinking about how little barney is in it like barney's just in the cutaway to giving Mo a valentine like some of your beloved characters are just just there to to move it along and don't really have anything else going on in that way there's no Artie there's no Artie the strongest man in the world in this one at all so you miss him yeah I was thinking just how many all-timer jokes are in this and then I remembered oh Henry and I have stolen a lot from the show just for our patreon because uh i believe two of our tiers are named after jokes from this episode and then our talk to the audience our monthly community podcast is named after a joke in this show so personally we we have profited much that's always death we we owe too much to this

yeah the uh and it's uh it's one of the more beloved ones by the longtime executive producer, Al Jean, on the show, too, because it's inspired by his childhood. He was given a I choo-choo-choose-you Valentine, though by a mysterious girl. He didn't know who did it. It was just, like, unsigned. He never knew who it was and uh later he's you know tells that story to his co-writer mike reese and they're like mike reese convinces him to use that for an episode like oh that's a great idea for an episode and it gets assigned to to a writer and uh yeah and it's also that uh al and mike as well they sort of they did co-create ralph wiggum too because he first

appeared in moaning lisa their original the one their first simpson scripts they wrote in season one so they they also have a real attachment to ralph yeah it is a good breakout for ralph and you see i mean we've always set him up to be a real like crayon eater in that you know it it crayons have been like a an indicator for stupid you know put the crayon back in my nose put the you know, it it crayons have been like an indicator for stupid, you know, put the crayon back in my nose, put the, you know, take the crayon back up my nose. I want to be normal. They've been an indicator for that for a long time. And glue like these are just like universal kindergarten themes, even though he's supposed to be in second grade.

Right. At that point, he's in Lisa's class. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Nobody was eating glue when I was coming up. maybe the boomers just had tastier glue the boomer writers but they didn't they were still made from cow bones at that point we we only got a cow-like substitute by the time we uh we got to school and uh and yeah too they they uh they really wanted to do something about valentine's day and then also bring in another holiday, which Al Jean talks about how now when they write episodes, they're like one holiday per episode. Don't waste a holiday. Don't waste two holidays on one episode anymore. popularity contests under the guise of holiday celebrations where the most popular kid in class

would get a candy cane or whatever you know whatever it was for each for each holiday and rack them up definitely you can feel that pain in uh in ralph in a in a real way oh yeah when uh and this episode is written by frank mula yes and we put together a little writer's corner about Frank. So now let's talk about a little guy named Frank Mula. And by the way, Mike Morona will not be joining us for this writer's corner because we actually haven't started the podcast with him yet. Yes, we're going in a weird order. That makes sense to us. But just so you know, if you're wondering why he's so quiet, it's because he's not here.

And that's a great excuse. So Frank Mula, he passed away in December of 2021 at age 71. We're starting at the end here. Yes, yes. Just to let you know, there will be no more Frank Mula episodes from this point forward. But he wrote a few great ones. So he was hired at the tail end of season three as a producer on Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes? I believe that's the first episode that Conan O'Brien is as a producer on brother can you spare two dimes i believe that's the first episode that uh conan o'brien is also a producer on so there were some like super super last

production of season three episode hires and he was one of them because as we've talked about before season four there are a lot of guys quitting so i would guess they're starting to at the very end of three as they know this is coming and they can start staffing up. They're transitioning in the new writers that they've got. That's right. In this era, he is credited for both I Love Lisa and The Last Temptation of Homer. So he leaves the show halfway through production season five. Apparently, the script for I Love Lisa is what he wrote to get hired for the show. And Al Jean and Mike Reese really loved his work on the NBC sitcom Grand, which starred Pamela Reed herself, a.k.a. Ruth Powers.

That's really interesting on the commentary to hear them talk about Grand because graining seems slightly dismissive of it. Or just he's just like, oh, yes, Grand. We all know that. Yeah. And then Mula, who's on the commentary, says, actually, that was the best working experience of my life, the show Grand. We all know that. Yeah, and then Mula, who's on the commentary, says, actually, that was the best working experience of my life, the show Grand. Ooh, slam.

And I believe Grand was like a soap-style soap opera parody, but then people weren't that interested, so it kind of removed that element towards the end of its two-season run. And Al Jean was very complimentary of it, too, on the old commentary, saying that it was a little darker than regular tv was at that time too yeah for uh from what i remember from watching it as like an eight-year-old uh i think he's accurate i don't know where grand ended up it's not on dvd i don't think but someone some psycho probably uploaded all of it to youtube on their their grand specific channel i should have

searched out some grand before this i did not give it a look maybe by the time we do the this season five episode so by the time he leaves the simpsons he gets one of those development deals for fox and he ends up creating the jay moore sitcom local heroes it's a 1996 sitcom it only aired five of its seven produced episodes so not a big hit for frank mula's only created show. So Frank comes back to the show in 1998 as a consulting producer and he was a co-executive producer in season 11. So during this era he's credited with writing the episode Faith Off and also he's an older writer compared to the staff at this time so when he joined the Simpsons he had already been writing for TV for a decade so he started in 1980 with the Steve Allen Comedy Hour. And in 1982, he would

write or be a writer on 19 episodes of Madam's Place, the puppet show featuring Waylon Smithers namesake, Waylon Flowers, and his saucy puppet, Madam. At the very least in season four, most Simpsons staff writers do not have that background. Yeah. gene and mike reese are the most experienced and that's why they were given the reins in seasons three and four because they had worked on elf and it's gary shandling show and carson and a few other things and of course harvard we can't forget harvard yes yeah i don't know if i don't think mula was a harvard guy though i i feel like he'd get a bigger obituary that we would have heard of if he was a Harvard guy, like just through the connections he would have made. I think so.

It's funny, too, to hear that he he got a development deal and got to leave. But that's because he was at Fox. And I bet because he was at Fox instead of like, you know, John Vitti or Jeff Martin and Kogan Waldarski. They had to finish out their season four assignments before they could leave for like their Disneyney deals uh and then meanwhile mula gets to leave in the middle of season five but that's because he's got a deal with fox so fox isn't gonna punish themselves for him moving yeah i mean just speculation here i'm wondering if he got along with david merkin because some writers didn't get along with david merkin and reading mike reese's book uh i forget the name was it called the springfield Files?

Is that the name of his book? Springfield Confidential. Confidential. Got it. Yeah. In his book, he says, you know, Mula was one of the quietest guys in the writer's room. But when he said something, it was one of the funniest things you ever heard. So maybe him being kind of a quieter guy didn't mesh well with the very loud David Merkin,

the very loud and animated David Merkin. But that's just speculation on my part it did sound like some people made you know they who came in for gene and reese weren't as happy to be around merkin yes that i mean that's literally in the unauthorized history of the simpsons is a big one of those stories but oh and also that thing with jay moore man fox was really into jay moore like they really thought they had something with him because after that show fails so epically then they still make that action show with him too and is greg moore and greg the bunny or is that just a show with the word greg in it i'm confused

sorry no jay moore is jay moore and greg the bunny i called him greg moore boy i don't think so now i gotta look this up let's see no he wasn, he wasn't. I don't know why. Maybe I just thought his name was Greg Bunny for a second, so I apologize there. I failed at my job as a podcaster. He was in all of this crap, man. I just keep seeing all the things. in his career listen to the gayest episode ever podcast i did about nicky uh the show all right starring his ex-wife uh one-time wife and creative partner nicky cox that's right uh i'm not a huge fan of jay moore but they tried to make him work so i do want to go over frank mula's writing credits before the simpsons so uh he wrote for what a country the yakov smirnoff sitcom he wrote for i marry dora out of this world where presumably he worked with Brian and Mike Scully. Sibs, which definitely helped him get a start on The Simpsons because Sibs is one of like the three or four, let's say four Gracie Films TV shows.

And he writes on that. And by the way, Sibs has Dan Castellana and Alex Rocco as two of the principal actors in that show. So I feel like at some point we have to do Talkin' Sibs, at least one episode. We do. We do. Wow. Sibs gets him in the Gracie payroll. Yes. And when it comes to Sibs, the show that Sam Simon left the Simpsons to work on,

there are episodes written by Frank Mula, Kogan walidarski nell scoville and david m stern so it's a real murderous row of simpsons adjacent writers man they really thought they had something there with sibs but i'm sure the critics gonna go better yes and so this all like contributes to my did he not get along with david merkin theory because as soon as he leaves the simpsons he jumps to the gracie film sitcom phenom and writes a bit for that so there was already a gig waiting for him as soon as he left so maybe he didn't get along with david murkin maybe he was tired of the simpsons you know uh late hours who knows but he immediately jumped to another gracie thing to uh maybe fill out a contract who

knows but that's just what he did when he left the show. Some people do have to just write some scripts to finish a contract, like when we asked Jeff Martin why he wrote an episode of Homeboys in Outer Space. Everybody had to do their Homeboys in Outer Space probation in the early aughts, or late 90s. I forget when that was.

Yeah, UPN is a gray area. And by the way, I think it's Homeboys from Outer Space. I always say, yeah. Okay, I think you're right. Yes. the way i think it's homeboys from outer space i always say yeah okay i think you're right yes i apologize to the creators of homeboys from outer space uh actually maybe it isn't i feel like i'm being gaslight i think somebody just wrote a correction in the comments so i'm not going to worry about it so after he comes back to the simpsons he goes on to be a consulting producer on one episode of the hugliesies on weirdly enough and then he was a co-executive producer on the bonnie hunt sitcom life with bonnie so not a whole lot after returning to the simpsons and it it is

in in is it's homeboys in outer space i i apologize henry i get that title wrong every other time i say it it's uh now it's fine i mean i'm not clear on it either, so I couldn't. I was actually, sorry, I was thinking of Muppet. The title of the Muppet movie is Muppets from Space, not Muppets in Space. And I think everybody I know says Muppets in Space, and I correct them even though I don't like the movie. So that's where I am right now. Maybe I get that mixed up with Pigs in Space and would just think, oh, it must be Muppets in Space because it's Pigs in Space. Not a great title. So Frank Mula has not been credited with anything since 2004,

though that means he was in the TV writing biz for almost 25 years. And I looked up his obituary page and I saw a nice message from Brian Scully, Simpsons writer, brother of Mike Scully. So I thought I'd wrap up this writer's corner by reading it here. To quote Brian Scully, Frank was my friend. Wait, that's the wrong way to Scully, Frank was my friend. Wait, that's the wrong way to start this. Frank is my friend. And I say is because just thinking in this moment of the many laughs we shared over 35 years in writer's rooms, going to good and bad movies, losing money at the

horse races and eating dinners, lunches and breakfasts in restaurants. We enjoyed restaurants. And the countless jokes both told and heard makes me smile as I write this. Being friends with Frank is about as close as anyone could get to being friends with Groucho Marx. I think that, to Frank, would be the highest compliment he would ever hope to be given. Frank Mula was the Jay Cheever loophole, Rufus T. Firefly, and Wolf Jay Flywheel of his times, and he was and is my friend. So a touching little memorial from Brian Scully. And yeah, Frank Mula, he was on the show for a handful of years, wrote some great episodes,

and then contributed jokes to a lot of other great episodes. But yeah, only three episodes to his name. Yeah, also it was one of those things where his passing was learned about by us as well, because an episode of The Simpsons was dedicated to him. It was his dedication at the end of the episode and that's when i went wait what like that's how we i think we talked about it in the news in the community podcast that month we mentioned it on episode of talk to the audience and not not to end this on a morbid note but in your googling you may find a link to frank

mulo's obituary service i'm letting you know that if you click that link you're going to see his body for about an hour so that is me letting you know what you're in for. And I was not in for that when I was doing research on Frank originally when he passed away or when the news came out in January of 2022, I believe. That is the third link here on the Google search I just had here. So I'm glad I didn't click on that. Yes. Just a friendly warning from us to you. But RIP Frank Mula, you were an amazing writer. The Simpsons will be right back. Thursday, someone has a crush on Lisa.

Ralph, just make up some excuse. The Simpsons. In a can, go away. Thursday on Fox. When you really care about someone, you shout it from the mountaintops. So on behalf of Desjardins Insurance, I'm standing 20,000 feet above sea level to tell our clients that we really care about you. We care about you. Home and auto insurance personalized to your needs.

Weird, I don't remember saying that part. dejaden.com care and get insurance that's really big on care did i mention that we care welcome to the break everybody it's henry gil Gilbert thanking you for choo-choo-choosing this week's podcast. A special thank you to our guest this week, Mike Morota, the co-host of The Adventures of Danny and Mike podcast, who me and Bob grew up watching a ton as a kid. We were so excited to have him on and chat with him about his career, about his love of The simpsons about this classic classic episode of simpsons mike thank you so much again everybody should check out the just

resumed podcast he did with fictional brother the adventures of danny and mike please check it out and thank you so much again mike for coming on and being subjected to all of our nerdy questions about your amazing career thank Thank you again, Mike. And if you guys enjoy this week's podcast and all the ones we do on Talking Simpsons, you should know it's only possible thanks to the support of listeners like you at patreon.com slash talking simpsons. $5 and up folks get to hear this episode a week at a time and ad free. No ads like this one. And you get to hear next week's right now if you were to to sign up at patrion.com slash talking Simpsons,

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six and a half hours about who framed Roger Rabbit without a second wasted. Check it all out for yourself one more time. It's at patreon.com slash talking simpsons yeah he didn't write too many episodes but the ones that he did were yeah yeah just uh two in this in this era and then one much later but uh yeah the two that he did were yeah yeah just uh two in this in this era and then one much later but uh yeah the two that he wrote are just a very very funny and of course you know he did contribute countless jokes we just can't pin which ones he wrote onto him at this point only they were noted when they did it but yeah it's uh well and i uh in research for this too i gained an

extra appreciation for frank mula's uh writing skill because on the Internet Archive, and I believe this to be real and not fake, is a table draft version of the script that's dated July 24th, 1992. And I would say it's 85% there, which Simpsons goes through a lot of rewrites in the animation process. So it was a real testament to how strong his writing was that that much of it made it to the final episode that's cool oh yeah I uh I would wonder how that compares to like in you know in in live action uh I would think once you've got the script for a table read there's probably not as many rewrites as there are on an animated program like the Simpsons. Yeah, I was only recently acquainted with the concept of an animatic, the way you can sort of rough things out and trim your jokes. And, you know, because the world is something you're creating, you know, it's not,

you don't have to think about the things like in Pete and Pete, you know, we can't rent a helicopter, but you can drop somebody out of a helicopter quite easily in the cartoon land. Yeah, I guess at this point they could still change things very, very late. It was before the animators kind of pushed back on that and said, there has to be a point where the changes can no longer come in. Oh, the Disney line, in other words. Yes. The Disney Marvel line. in other words yes the disney marvel line yeah i think uh the the simpsons animators union had a

better union than the the disney uh special effects people right have you seen the south korean labor movement like it's amazing when they mobilize they really go out like the u.s is a much larger country and the u.s labor movement could learn a few things from the south korean labor movement for sure that's cool yeah i feel like every country does it better when i hear about what's going on in terms of like shutting down factories and walking out of jobs and things like that telling melon musk to go take a hike in uh finland or sweden or something like that because he wouldn't negotiate with one union the postal service won't deliver his things the doc workers won't unload his his gear and uh i think it works better when we all work together for sure

so the opening is the uh the classic sign that they are killing time or or they need uh longer stuff because they do the full circus opening which they only do in an episode is is light on time yeah that's one of the best couch gags it in like from the beginning of the show on like obviously the couch gags have nowhere to go but to branch out like i love the deep fried couch gag as well taking a bite out of the deep fried um family but the circus couch gag given that they had sometimes worked within this framework and then just widening and widening and widening the picture the guy's balancing and the guy's breathing fire and the they took advantage of the frame and of the of the genre pretty well i think in that in that tight amount of time that yes and what you're what you're referring to sort of like

is contained in the episode because it has references to a clip show they're like they're trying to stretch because crusty is doing a clip show because he doesn't have the material or he's really mining the vault for that stuff it's it's such a gorgeous opening i wish it got it's one of the most like played ones that you get kind of so used to it you're just like all right it's another it's this one again like you it it stops being special unfortunately but uh and then we have one of my favorite openings this like the book end of this episode is one of my all-time favorites of just the use of the monster Mash on a Valentine's Day episode is so great. Just to hear the Monster Mash and to hear Bill and Marty sniping at each other about playing the wrong thing.

And trying to justify it. God, it's so good. Maybe that gives you a little bit of Groundhog Day. Or Back to the Future, you know, with the clock rate, waking up to the clock radio. When they play the, you know, in Groundhog Day, when it's finally the 3rd, February 3rd, they still play the song again, and much to their annoyance. Yeah, I love him trying to justify this mistake where he's saying, you know,

oh, the monsters have put aside their differences and they're enjoying each other's company. It sounds like a very dad rationalization of, you know, oh, yeah, yeah nobody everyone gets along this day i love how he says like there must be thousands of love songs and uh just he breaks the act entirely goes like why are you doing this to me just so this is one that i i note there's about four big changes from the script uh This was one of the first ones. The original opening, in the script, it is to the Monster Mash,

but it's a scene of Lisa getting ready in the morning, and the joke is that she has a closet full of different colored dresses she could wear, but she picks the orange dress she always wears again and gets dressed for the morning sure maybe i was more acquainted with the closet like and uh that reliability from mr rogers you know every damn every damn day he put on the same thing who else does that like and maybe there's a takeoff on steve jobs who does it or i like to think that these cartoon characters could always like they could wear so many different outfits but it just happens to be that they always wear the same clothes maybe peewee herman oh yeah peewee peewee or like earnest i think i believe earnest would open the closet and you'd see all the the

denim vests and the uh whatever else he wore the khakis all the khakis yes or the khakis. Yes. Or dare I say, Artie, the strongest man in the world as well. No. And instead, we get to see Bart working on his prank with a jeweler's loop just to get it exactly right. Then from the Monster Mash, we cut to the Springfield Retirement Castle where Cupid is being stapled over the previous holiday. Right in the middle of the head. It's just such a cruel moment. Yeah. It could just as easily be public school. And, you know, the feeling is,

is that Grandpa and Jasper are both trapped in an institution just the same way as a, you know, as a public school teacher would change over that decoration with a staple through the head, probably. It shows they never even bother removing things. They're like, whatever. It's just stacked up holidays. And we also see we cut to Valentine's Day at Moe's Tavern,

and we see that Moe has a secret admirer, which is Barney, which they don't do much more with Barney's love of Moe. I think Moe is just supposed to be such a love-lore and sys-lack. You know what I mean? Like just incapable of expressing his love in normal ways. That sort of, of course, this is going to happen to Moe. Like nobody he likes is going to give him a Valentine. No.

He's lucky that Barney is there to give him a Valentine. No, it's he's, he's lucky that, uh, Barney is, is there to be his Valentine. And, uh, and yes, we then cut to the home as, uh, Homer gets lucky in our first clip here.

And this is for my huggy bug in honor of the special day. Special day. Oh, what am I forgotten? No, I don't panic. Is it bacon day? Nope, that's crazy talk.

She's getting impatient. Take a stab at it. Happy Valentine's Day. Oh, thank you, dear. Woo-hoo! I'll bet you have a lot of things planned, eh, Dad? Uh, kind of. Nobody makes a big deal out of Valentine's Day. If you think I'm cuddly and you want my company, come on, wifey, let me know.

Ah, ah, ah, oh! Hey, Dad, why don't you give Mom her present? What a nice idea, son. It's, uh, I, now as a married man the the thought of like guessing and the excitement of like i guess correctly like that does feel i identify with homer now more than i did that sequence introduces like a lot of good simpsons things which is bard is the tormentor homer is the oaf but it's a real breakout for Flanders because I think in general, he's portrayed as like, obviously we don't see Rod and Todd identified as Flanders, but he's

identified as like a much more asexual character, I think, in other parts of this and just a very like vanilla guy. So this to me, you know, with stupid, stupid sexy flanders is sort of like that this plants a seed for stupid sexy flanders but in between he's like not he's not a sexual being at all like he he probably does it in the dark with his eyes closed just in case holding a bible in one hand no i think uh well i i do think it it speaks Ned's sexuality that he takes Rod Stewart's Do You Think I'm Sexy and he removes the word sexy from the song and just says it's about cuddly and do you want my company? He softens this song, which is not an R-rated song anyway. That's fair.

I just feel like it's so overt, his sort of like his public lovemaking to Maude. It seems out of, I believe it is life on the fast lane. That is where Homer forgets it's Marge's birthday. He says, I think I'll go for a walk. And you hear him running down the stairs and you hear the car taking off here. The family, they're following the noise with their eyes. And then they see him fall out of the window and then get in the car. So that's how far they've come in four years with that style of joke. It's a great heightening uh i yeah that homer and his scream off screen and then flying into screen is is such a great

great shot too this is when he heads over to the quickie mart apu uh this is holds his love hostage i mean also too i love his reaction to bart homer somehow saved himself with his lucky guess and now bart knows he's in trouble and so he's like hey so where's your gift dad and just he i love his like what a nice idea like he knows bart's screwed him once more here but he bought dusty old chocolates which this is basically like any now i i after living in a big city, I was just like, oh yes, bodega, dusty bodega items are a well-known thing. Gastation roses. Yes. And you know, Mike, you're a father.

How expired can baby food get? I mean, those little jars are sealed really tight, aren't they? Is it worth the, what was it, five cents off? I don't know if it's worth the five cents off, but the kid is pretty lucky as far as what they get. They eat a very high-grade slurry at this point, so it's not, yeah. Well, you know, a nickel off expired baby food meant a lot more in 1993 than now. That's like $3 now. A nickel went further, yeah. Why are bottle deposits still five cents?

I was proposing to solve the litter crisis of New York City by making the bottle deposit a quarter. If all of a sudden all those cans and bottles you collected were worth a quarter instead, it would change things. You've got my vote over Eric Adams ifams if i was living yeah well can't someone else do it exactly i also love that uh homer yeah he instantly caves sold uh in the in the original script homer doesn't even need to be offered a a deal he just instantly caves and buys a lottery ticket a keychain and quote overtly hostile bumper sticker is what he asked for uh though when apu says uh just because i'm extra nerdy about this when apu says nikolov expired baby food they are reusing the shot from lisa's pony where he says you should have at least jammed a

gun in my ribs so it's them uh that's where they took that shot from they they knew the mood i guess of that framing and wanted to use it over again like michael bay oh yes yeah it is very similar to how michael bay has the same car crash like in three movies or something yeah i think he reused like blackhawk down in transformers or something like that like there's some some like oh it's all sandy we'll just use it and uh so then we cut to mrs hoover's class and it does feel like i wonder if like marcia wallace was out that week or something because there's no edna krabappel in in this episode it's all this is the most miss hoover you'll ever see in a simpsons i think and her hair changes it's uh it's the old old hoover is

you have to you have to have sympathy you have to have sympathy. You have to have sympathy for someone who has to. And I feel this, my son being in second grade, for the teachers that have both a Lisa and a Ralph and have to teach both equally. It seems like a lot of the time Hoover's even more annoyed. She likes Lisa this week, but another episode she gets tired of Lisa wanting to answer every question or ask it. Hoover really wants to take it easy. And Mike mentioned her hair change. Yeah, I think this is the first one where she does not have the blue hair. She's officially brown-haired Hoover.

I think so. I think they finally got past the blue hair rule. Because it made sense in season one characters could have blue hair. But by season four, they're like, if it's one characters could have blue hair but by season four they're like if it's not marge blue hair is not allowed i think we're down to a blue-haired lawyer in wiggum yes that's right yeah they they get to they're that important they get to keep though uh there's a one scene in this episode where it feels like they forgot that wiggum doesn't have black hair anymore where they colored it black for the night scene i also just love that lisa she unlocks the secret to most of schooling of just like wait isn't this just pointless busy work when asked to bake bake the thing and hoover isn't even ashamed she's like bingo get to it get

to work yeah i mean when i saw this as a kid it was basically ripped from the headlines because this was my life in school every valentine Day, you would make the mailbox, except Mike is like slightly older than us. I don't know if the same for you, Mike, but it was basically everybody got the same thing. You were given basically a list of all the students and you didn't choose who your candy went to. It was very equal in the Valentine's distributions, but not in this era they're drawing from it was equally distributed for sure i think i'm thinking of the candy canes might be something that was like a pta fundraiser or like a you could buy the candy canes to send to other kids is what i remember i think the the valentine making i'm not sure if there was sort of like a ralph cushion uh for people who wouldn't

for people who wouldn't get one otherwise like if you just got one from your teacher because you couldn't do that these days oh that's yeah it's i i remember too when this episode first aired i i was thinking like wait they don't when when ralph ends up with no valentines i also was thinking well that's not how it is in my class. Like it was everybody gets one like that was. And I didn't know as a kid. The obvious reason for that would be to make sure nobody is left sobbing like Ralph and not getting as much as other people. It was some of the only socialism we were allowed to experience. It happened on Valentine's Day.

Well, let's talk a little about Ralph's characterization here, too, because it's like when they created Ralph, he actually was like kind of smart or at least he had like good one liners. He was originally written to be like Ralph Cramden, like he was the Ralph Cramden in the class. That's why his name's Ralph. But over time that that changed and he was already getting slower by this episode. But I think this really solidifies. He inhaled too many crayons at this point. I think it took a toll on his brain tissue. Yeah, I mean, at this point, he still has some talents he can draw from.

But they learned over time, let's just erase, I don't know, 100 IQ points. Ralph can barely function. And then there are certain episodes, certain jokes where it's like well ralph is troubled and ralph is going to burn down the building or ralph is going to do some dangerous activity sure sure a ralph line that sticks out as he told me to burn things yes right that that's that's like the leprechaun it's an because it's an edgy line from him like most of his stuff is is so like oh he's just a he's just a dumb kid like that's but the burn thing stuff is like so troubling especially when you consider that he does have access to the forbidden closet of mystery and could conceivably,

like, obviously the Simpsons never dealt with that. Like, what happens when a kid gets a hand on an adult's gun and shoots themselves? They didn't really, they didn't go after-school special on that particular concept. No, thank God. You're right, it would be an easy entryway to an after-school,

a very special Simpsons were they to traffic in that type of show. Yeah. But I think it's like, maybe Ralph isn't exceedingly dumb. Maybe he is just written like an average eight year old boy. And Lisa is written like a 33 year old woman. And that's why they seem so mismatched.

I fell in love with your Lee Smith and the legend of Billy Jean. Fair is fair. I don't know if you've seen that movie. Oh, no, I haven't seen that. Really? That's a great movie. Young Christian Slater and a young Yearly Smith. Oh, that's cool.

Yeah, that's definitely one to enjoy. But yeah, it was slightly earlier than The Simpsons. It was like mid-80s early 80s and uh and she still uh sticks up for herself you can still see that spirit of that indomitable indomitable uh spirit of lisa in there i i'm sure she uh has more to do in it that's good than in maximum overdrive the stephen king movie she was in yeah that's the yardley smith role i'm most familiar with outside of the simpsons but yeah so uh i i also wonder how much ralph the way he kind of laughs it off a little bit he does seem slightly more self-aware than ralph is normally written like he when the kids all laugh at him saying he's not allowed to use scissors like he can't there's a little look that he gives

it like huh oh people are laughing i'm getting a good reaction kind of thing whereas whereas you think of other you don't think of him as like a stephen wright he's just more of like just tosses off non-sequiturs in general or they're slightly related they're slightly related to what the teacher says but they're often tangential at the same time as opposed to this is going to get a laugh he's just sort of saying what's on his mind he's reacting stream of consciousness and it happens to be funny uh to this to the class now him having any self-awareness like in this scene is unusual for ralph really but i i think you need you need even just a little of that for you to feel bad for ralph like other episodes you don't pity or you

know you can't you don't have as much emotion for ralph because he's you know nothing really makes him sad you know he's just a happy-go-lucky kid who doesn't notice things right he gets bullied by nelson but mostly he's like immune to sort of teasing when somebody is like too dumb to get the joke that you're making fun of them. And it just sort of like bounces off of them. And then you sort of get the villain gets frustrated if they're trying to to needle Ralph in that way. Yeah, I think the most popular image of Ralph I see online is the gif of him saying I'm in danger. But just having the flat affect the flat ralph affect on his face there's a brief break in the valentine's reverie though as uh principal skinner gets on the

intercom and uh tells the the school that valentine's day isn't all fun and games and this is when he has his flashback to vietnam and it like again as a kid this is i think this is how i learned that vietnam the the war in vietnam happened was through simpsons jokes like i don't think i ever became aware of it otherwise in the arman tanzarian era it made sense sort of and the like him what is it like it was a broth with fish head shrimp and then I spent all this time trying to recreate it. Like that stuff, like they've had time to flesh out the Skinner as a vet with PTSD. But this is just like straight, like it's not like him because he's so, he's shaving with like a bowie knife. He's shaving with like a hunting knife.

It's like it presents him as very masculine and very uh like forthright but then also there's like the tenderness of we went through a lot of shit and i still carry it with me it's i think it softens the the um sadness of him remembering somebody he knew dying in in war because it it's a scene from apocalypse now they're like oh you're it's couched in a movie reference so you can even see that he has while he's shaving next to him is a photo of what you can assume is kurtz the uh who he's he's hunting down and he's right to assassinate yeah yeah and they draw it like lawrence fishburne's character too in the background and one of the other actors from from it as well.

This era was more like, wouldn't it be funny if he was a vet? And then a few years later, they would say, well, how does this inform his character? And like, what if Skinner we know today was sort of like the same guy in Vietnam? And we have that joke in the Skinner's Badass Song episode where he's showing Bart the picture of him and his troops right before they shot him in the back. In the butt, right? they shot him in the back right in the butt in the butt right they shot him yeah he's like saluting and they're all like sneering at him and he's like is that was strange because it was during a it was during a uso no yeah yeah also the way i mean though it's brutal like the guy johnny gets shot in the chest through the heart he was sent so he shot in the heart through the heart. He was sent. So he shot in the heart through a heart like it is.

It's a brutal vision. And then the way Skinner just screams, Johnny, like it is like he is a broken man, which is great. Makes it even funnier. The bar just goes like, cool. I broke his brain. Like Bart doesn't feel bad at all. Yeah, I think he has that sort of escalation where he can be much crueler to Skinner than he is to Homer because he doesn't see the consequences in the same way. Like he doesn't give a shit about school or grades. He just knows that Homer can choke him out legally at home.

Like there's a limit. There's a limit to his his torture at home whereas at school he's just constantly escalating you know the pranks and the humiliations that he can lay on skinner i've i've brought cool i broke his brain into the life if i if if i if i best someone on twitter or whatever it uh i broke his brain if you make someone too mad online without getting too mad yourself yes that's the danger keep it cool and calm like bart uh but yes and in our next clip here this is where ralph uh is a bit heartbroken and lisa makes a choice a choo-choo choice poor ralph

here you go ralph here you go ralph you choo choo choose me happy valentine's so yeah it's uh that that gift is it's so sweet of lisa like she sees like ralph nobody gave him one. He's crying in class. Like it's, it's very sad for him. And so she wants to give him a, a Valentine, but they buy it. Nobody's at fault here. Like,

cause Ralph, he's a simple boy. And the one person who gives him a Valentine, he takes it very seriously. He latches on. It's a, and the design on choo, choo,

choose me. Valentine is adorable. I love that design. It's a perfect kids Valentine. And because he's so poorly socialized, he's a misfit, and that's why he does not know how to act under these circumstances. I think he takes it a little too far

when he confesses his love on national television, but up until that point, it's like, well, poor Ralph has no experience in the world uh he's been uh dropped in right now that's put very well he you know maybe you wouldn't think of like the kid of the police chief as being so isolated but that's like part of his ralphness is like you never see him playing with kids after school the same way because mostly because he could be used as a human football it is also i guess important that we see later that yes at home he's getting the

wrong messages too so he's not getting great guidance on this information either uh but yeah the the choice of i choo-choo choose you is is a very important one to al jean as well because his uh his his wife uh stephanie gillis who also is a writer for the simpsons when they got married got put on his wedding band i choo choo choose you that she put on him and yeah it's uh it's very very sweet they got they got married in 02 there he's talking about on the 04 commentary and yes it's uh it's that that's how important this episode is to to al jean and his love life that's a lot to inscribe on a ring i will say yeah actually that's me pretty small letters i guess for i have two words inscribed on the

inside of my ring and it's like i don't know 75 of the uh inside of that thing or his fat tony size digits it could be one or the other. That's true. Al Jean can have much bigger fingers than ours. We never met him in person, so he can't say. It could be like just a big high school-style ring where there's the big area underneath. Oh, so he'd room for a paragraph, in other words. And yeah, also, Al Jean says Ralph's his favorite character, too. I saw that in multiple posts he did about this episode of why he loves this one so much. But so yes, then, you know, again,

I could certainly not identify with, you know, you mistaking somebody's affection for like feeling sorry for you. That would never, never happen to me in my life, right? Frankly, it's science fiction. Yeah, yeah. But then we have a quick scene uh at the

cafeteria which it's great that the the themed meal is that they buy beef hearts like just like it's just a giant pile of unclean beef hearts that get dumped on the floor yeah there's a really nice beat of uh inactivity before all of the hearts fall out of the truck it's just that that little bit of silence and no movement is great they kind of miss an opportunity to make a captain beef heart joke here uh but it also seems like it set the table for the um the telltale heart you know it's the hideous beating of the of the of that hidden heart uh you know that that bart used this as a it was perfect for him because he's a little guy and it's gross like it's it's a perfect gross out vehicle for him i love the animation of how the heart flies out of his chest and he and the way that like the like

the arteries like flop around extra like that is so and also they take a second to show bart kind of pleased with himself like yeah that worked out that worked pretty good yeah it's a callback to the christian slater movie where he gets a baboon heart oh is it it's like a there's a christian slater movie with him and marissa tomei and he has a heart transplant and he has to love wow i see this is this is second christian slater movie to come up here it's called untamed heart and i think it released around the same time as this episode so maybe that the story was in the news if it's based on a true story yeah i think it untamed heart is is

is definitely what it is and he's just doing that like he's doing that brooding thing it's it's a good it's a good christian slater movie actually legend of billy jean was where he made his debut uh with yardley smith in the mid 80s though i i know because we just covered another cartoon about gout uh that uh eating eating beef hearts that's uh at least one of these kids is gonna there's gonna be a massive gout outbreak in uh in springfield elementary with it i mean i i like the uh heart joke, but it's just really laying the groundwork for more testicles means more iron. Yes, that's true.

In a few years. Yeah, you can go back to the lunch, you can go back to Lunch Lady Doris as many times as you like, and there's always going to be stuff there between the cigarette butts and the great F meat. Yeah, it's Doris Grau, a perfect, the late Doris Grau, it's just a perfect perfect voice

it's uh also you know yeah lunch ladies i i mean i guess i i definitely recall lunch ladies but i just like it's this and a lot of nickelodeon content in my youth including pete and pete was about like lunch ladies were a big chunk of them for sure i i I had a nemesis when we moved to Queens. When I lived in Brooklyn, I used to walk to school. And then when we moved to Queens, we took the school bus. So you became acquainted with, I didn't know this was a name of the job at the time, but she was a bus matron. Dolores Zamplioni.

Miss Zamplioni. I've never heard the name before or after. I've never heard anybody else with that name, but she ruled those bus lines with an iron fist, I swear. And she was also watching the cafeteria during lunch. So these were two times a day when kids are super restless and breaking out. And you just had this not so tall just acid-tongued screaming italian woman trying to keep us in straight lines when all we wanted to do was run around like superconducting molecules yeah i never had any of the classic lunch ladies that adam sandler so aptly described in his song lunch lady land they were all just the normal middle

age women i guess there were no there were no hair i guess there were hair nuts but they weren't like the the image you get when you think lunch lady with you know smoking a cigarette she's got like a mole maybe she's a little stouts etc one like fiddler crab sized arm from constantly scooping gruel the other the other one just a normal size arm oh and by the way because i looked up untamed heart spoilers it doesn't not a good idea getting a baboon heart it turns out it doesn't turn out well for young slater yeah does it explode out of his chest like justin bart's joke too no and this is not a joke in the end of the movie he uh a hockey puck hits him in

the chest and he dies it's stuff oh my god that my God. That's incredible. It's a cool, yeah. It was, it contains, you need a lot of suspension of disbelief. But, you know, she had just popped out with my cousin Vinny just a couple years before. And this was like the, this was her follow-up. And, yeah, something's got to give there. So it had to be more of a drama. The movie should have been called What Are the Odds? Who to thunk it.

Yes. So then after school, Ralph offers to walk Lisa home and they play this so great. The way Lisa realizes like, oh, like Ralph is being like, too. She's like, yeah, nice gag. Like, as he says, like, uh-oh, like, Ralph is being, like, too, she's like, yeah, nice gag. Like, as he says, like, do you like stuff? Like, she's realizing the trouble she's in now with Ralph's attention. Get ready for Las Vegas-style action at BetMGM, the king of online casinos. Enjoy casino games at your fingertips with the same Vegas strip excitement MGM is famous for

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Find our net zero hub at electricireland.ie. And when they get home, Ralph has clearly been oversharing for a long part of this journey yes i like it because it just feels like such a um sort of middle school level of discourse where you're you like somebody but you're so nervous but you're you're eager to find that way to connect and i feel like lisa and nelson just do they not use a similar line when they're when they have that awkward courtship? Oh, well, he definitely, like, he says, like, you got to blow up something. Like, definitely got to nuke something. Got to nuke something.

Yeah, but you like stuff is definitely a classic Ralph line up there in the Pantheon. And same with the yes. I don't know if he's better off on a first date type scenario of saying, do you like stuff or getting very specific with your medical problems? Well, I mean, those are both giant mistakes. Self-inflicted medical problems. Yes. and sort of openings in that getting-to-know-you space of courtship to show that you're both a vulnerable individual and a little quirky and a little off-center. How many of those just say,

my cat's breath smells like cat food? You know what? If you get 100 no's on that who don't get it, it's worth it for the one that gets it and swipes right. And it means they will be over 35. I'm guessing. So Lisa runs off and Ralph does not register that that is a bad sign that she runs away. There's something very sweet about watching Homer and Bart watch cartoons together.

It's just it's adorable as they watch itchy and scratchy and uh we see scratchy uh is given his own heart as a valentine and then he dies as he learns you need a heart to live which is very funny top top five uh headlines in all of and the simpsons do a lot of good newspaper gags but you need a heart to live is definitely top five of all time uh newspaper gags i think and uh after the cartoon this is when we set up the act two destination as crusty shows his first clip don't forget to watch my 29th anniversary show featuring clips like this one of sideshow of Sideshow Mel whacked out on Wally's sauce. Everyone's always kissing your ass. Well, I'm not afraid to tell you

you're a... Oh, I'd give anything to go to that show. I'd sell my firstborn son. Hey! You'll do as you're told. Oh, man. So, Mike, you might not know this, but Al Jean and Mike Rees got one of their early jobs before Simpsons in comedy writing was for Johnny Carson.

And it was some real ups and downs of writing for Johnny Carson. And so this is another of these moments where they are putting a lot of their Johnny Carson knowledge to use via Krusty references here. Oh, sure. The black and white sort of the excerpts. And I mean, even though, like I say, that this episode moves so quickly, the sense of like, you got to fill time. You got to fill time. Why? I just this crusty stuff here. Like, well, this is right, Bob, a very specific reference here of the wow.

I mean, yeah. Ed McMahon famously getting very tanked during recordings of the tonight show this is an air in which you can openly drink and smoke on the tonight show yes yeah it's uh so i have a little bit of it here at least one of the times but basically i don't know if this happened more than once but this is the one that is uploaded on the official johnny carson uh youtube channel which is called like ed mcmahon seemingly drunk on johnny carson they need a disclaimer yes he's i mean i guess uh the mcmahon estate maybe he could uh well if he's he's no longer with us so maybe he can't it can't be liable i think all the rights reverted to publishers

clearinghouse after he passed away so they uh they've got a lot of money behind them if they want to get litigious. How have they not had an A.I. McMahon in a Publishers Clearinghouse commercial yet? That sounds like a character from a Confederacy of Dunces, A.I. McMahon. But yes, I have a little clip here. McMahon in this scene. This is from 1977. He is a little mad that Johnny Carson is talking about Joanne Embry in a way he doesn't agree with. It's okay.

But you're upsetting me. No, no. I don't upset you. I went down Jonah and I wrote it. I know you did. That's all right. Don't say. What? I know her. I went down. I know you did. That's all right. Don't say... What?

I know her. I went down there. I know you did. I know you went down there. I held a baby gorilla. I couldn't go with you that week. You held a baby gorilla. Good. All right. And let's get her out here quickly.

Would you welcome... He, again, whacked out on Maui Sauce. Yes. Besides Joe Mellonon his clip is a little more uh confrontational yeah it's a it's more pointed and of course this is written probably around the spring of 92 it airs in uh february of 93 and what's happening then is johnny carson is stepping down from his late night throne after a little shy of 30 years and it's such a huge moment for television both this and crusty gets canceled are based on that event okay and i'm sure you both experience times where you

have to handle your co-host with kid gloves in certain instances you know when something gets sensitive but it's great because well carson also was a kind of a drinker and you wonder how they held it together sometimes back and forth with also the Jane Goodall or whoever you know next to them like some celebrity guest trying to earnestly get some point across about something yeah I think I think in our earlier podcasting years uh we were both Ed McMahon because alcohol was involved. And now we're sober podcasters drinking coffee. And hey, green tea. I see Henry's got the green tea. Well, yeah, and the 29th anniversary thing is funny, too, because it obviously is like, why isn't Krusty waiting another year?

Why is he doing a 29th anniversary but that also is Carson in October of 1991 did a 29th anniversary special and it was because he had already announced they were he was ending his show the next uh May so he wouldn't make it to 30 so they're like ah let's just do like it's a joke on the special you can watch a little special on YouTube. But Johnny Carson really did do a 29th anniversary special. Also, Homer and Bart's Exchange, they reused that animation from Dog of Death. That's what I was wondering. And hey, Johnny Carson stepping down at only age 66. Conan O'Brien is 60, and we're still waiting for his new show to start.

That's not a podcast. He's going to get a new TV show at some point. Why now? Why not 30 years ago? Yes. Yeah, it's crazy. 66 was like so old when we were kids, but now celebrities keep going like, oh, this person's still acting when they're in their 80s

and it's just normal now. I think Harrison Ford, it was 79 when he filmed the Indiana Jones movie that just came out. Presidents are in their 80s now. Clint Eastwood still going strong as a director at 90. No one's going to die from now on. I died in 30 days.

Except for that guy. Yeah, that's how old people were then. Sure. People at that age were shorter. They lived near the water. They died younger. And so then we have a very sweet scene of Marge and Homer both offering Lisa advice. Marge giving the good advice of just like, tell this boy you're not interested and you're too young because you're eight. And he's just a dumb kid.

But let him down nicely. Meanwhile, Homer has amazing suggestions of all the ways he's been pitied or rejected in his life. I'm not gay, but I'll learn is one of the funniest. It's another just, sorry, six simple words. I'm not gay, but I'll learn. And it is an escalation of when they're writing the letter to Edna and Bart the Lover. He goes, three simple words. I am gay.

Oh, yes. Yeah, you're right. For the last time, I'm not writing that. It's true. That was three simple words. Now he's doubled the words for another. But that was an easy out back then. But yeah, I love Lisa listens to Marge, not Homer.

She lets Ralph down as good as she can. But Ralph is a slow boy. He's just like, I think so. Like, Lisa does everything correctly. And we see what the problem is. Ralph takes that to his father. I remember when this moment happened as a kid, I thought it was so wild. I had no clue they were ever going in the direction that Ralph's dad was police chief Wiggum. I never saw that coming.

This is the first time we see them together? Yes. Yeah. There is a reference in Camp Krusty where they're distributing the confiscated mail and Lisa goes, Wiggum, Ralph. And he goes, my insulin. So I guess Ralph does not have diabetes at this point in the show, but at some point he did. Right. But they did kind of reveal it a little early, but now you see them together. You remember. course that was like i don't know six months earlier that that joke happened so yeah it was a big moment and you can tell they didn't originally plan on him being his son because they are not drawn to look the same as most parents and students in in springfield are like say millhouse but i yes this reveal my mom loved it too like She laughed out loud at seeing Wiggum revealed to be who Ralph was talking to

and that he is smashing walnuts with the butt of his gun. And then even funnier, it is revealed his gun is loaded, meaning it could have shot him at any time. And also I think it shows you something too that Ralph is so used to things with Wiggum that when Wiggum just shoots his gun in the kitchen, Ralph, he covers his ears, but then everything's just back to normal. Like, he doesn't, this is not a shocking moment for Ralph. He's not traumatized. This is every day with Clancy, which could be its own show, which is sort of like Clancy's foibles. They should have done that spinoff.

They did the spinoff showcase. That should have been a real show of him and him and nolan i know but uh but no yeah al aljean said it was mike reese's idea that ralph is wiggum's son that was his uh he said it was his idea and also too i love i love how he tries to be the tough cop the bad cop with the nuts like let there be a lesson to the rest of you nuts uh and also uh i love the drawing of wiggum's gut exploding out of his shirt that also is like it's it's it's horrifying but funny very great foley of just the buttons flying around the room yes. And so after that goes to the commercial break, it actually blacks out on Wiggum eating. So you get some extra just sounds of him,

just great Hank Azaria sounds of him eating food. Very funny. So then back to Krusty. And I also love this moment of Krusty yelling at his reviewers. 29 years. When I came on, they said I wouldn't last a week. And you know where those reviewers are? All dead.

How you doing on there, fellas? Eh? Eh? Anyway, here's a clip. Now why do they call this a urine monkey? Oh, I just found out. That's funny for so many reasons. The ah, ah is,

it feels like a Pee Wee Herman sort of affectation in there, but also like the typical like vengeful, bitter, cynical Krusty. Yeah, I love that it's Krusty not taking the high road, that he's like, he's cursing his critics in hell.

That's what we do when we look at our old iTunes reviews from 2015. I love that, just that he's like, he could just stop it all dead, but he's like, how you doing out there? He's loving it and also yes i love that there's play on the you know it wild animal scenes are have been a part of like talk shows as long as they've existed but the the way they set it up of just like it doesn't just pee on him but it's specifically a urine monkey and that uh and then bart this very scatological joke, Bart acts like it's incredibly deep. Like, that's funny for so many reasons. It's just the shortest distance between setup and payoff for something like that. It doesn't let you go somewhere else for a minute.

It just goes right to the punchline. And his brain is wired that way. That's a reward to him. And so you can see how he's like, yeah, I could, you know, Krusty is his idol. You know, that's a theme for him for a long time. But this he he kind of like watches. He's like, oh, OK, so this is how his comedy evolved. I can do this. And he's letting everybody know he really wants to go. It's the hot ticket in town. Homer comes in. So this joke is clear to me reading

the script uh is that it's supposed to be a toilet brush like that's why homer goes ew like it was it's been a toothbrush used as a toilet brush that's how homer realized was that the stage direction homer is holding a toothbrush used okay yeah that was uh it makes it i mean it would be disgusting to use a thrown out toothbrush in general but a toilet brush makes it clearer and then of course yeah homer uh is told to make an excuse for lisa once ralph arrives and uh homer of course then uses i think too if you want to say why ralph gets the wrong idea homer should have just told him get out of here but he realizes he could instead take great advantage of r of Ralph and make him do horribly dangerous things.

It summons the hammock joke of I hear digging, but I don't hear chopping. Like you can see how it built the lazy dad. It's laid the foundation for the lazy dad brand of jokes that Homer has. Some of Homer's funniest lines are said from a hammock. Holding a beer i i mean i love that just statement of fact like yeah they'll do that like he's not gonna help he's just like yeah we'll do that it it it's almost like he's a different character because that's not his usual approach to things that's almost like it was somebody else's line uh like you could see

uh wigum saying the chief wigum saying the same thing like in that way but uh homer's got the the whip hand on this one i guess i i think it is contextually when he's in a rare scene where he's smarter than another character this is what happens to homer yeah yeah it happens when he's in a scene with wigum it's hard to tell who is stupider, but whoever isn't as stupid gets the upper hand. Yeah. I'd say eventually Homer becomes smarter than him in almost every scene, but it's a test each time. Actually, Homer's smarter than him in a scene in this episode even, too. But yes, then we cut to the classroom.

The kids are trying out for the school play. We see Rex. And this did make me I was like, oh, wait, this is even better episode to have Mike on because like this is a little a little of the story is about child. I guess I did catch some flack in school and I was I went to to a nerd school as I say that was a little bit more politically aware. But I was pretty much blacklisted from student theater high school that the academic side of high school rendered me ineligible maybe to participate in sports. I don't know that I would have affected my auditions for the various musical theater and other things that they put on during the year but the only uh show that i did while i was at in high school was a student written plays that uh as opposed as opposed to like the pajama game or something like that

so you never tried out for George Washington in elementary school? No. And I feel like Rex is a character like he is. They use his face for the young Quimby. Like he's got the shock of hair for Freddy. And also that's sort of the prince that Lisa falls in love with as well. Just that hair that's out there. The advancing front. Maybe it's a Conan O'Brien shape to his bangs. Oh, yeah. It is like his papadour.

He never appeared again because he became Stewie on Family Guy. They had to stop doing these Rex Harrison references. That is why he's rex he's rex harrison you're right well and mike you didn't get the part of big pete because somebody put a boot on the director's car right reaching to the blinds right now to yeah to signal uh no i think they had i think they had redheads in mind. So Dan Tamberelli and I came to the callback together. They had us in the room together, and I guess they liked the redheaded alchemy. And that was something that they wanted, I guess, was this sort of brothers you don't see too much.

Oh, yeah. I wish, you know, you guys, you were brothers who liked each other. You know, me and my brother should have learned more. We watched every episode, but we didn't take enough lessons from it. I have a fake TV brother named Dan and I have a real brother named Dan. Wow. That's got to be a little confusing. Are the Dans jealous of each other ever?

No, I actually get along with the fake TV brother better. Oh. But yeah, so Hoover, though, is bullied into, or not, now bullied, that's not the right word for it, like intimidated. Coerced. Yeah, there you go. Yes, yeah. To give Ralph the part, which, yes, I wish we could have seen Lisa try out for the role. Lisa isn't normally the type to try out to be a lead in a play, normally.

Not really. She'll volunteer to write the script or do something maybe more around the more, you know, something more administrative as opposed to creative. Or, you know, the band does something, too. Like, yeah. as opposed to creative or or you know the band does something too like yeah i mean it's possible she saw martha washington as a feminist figure but the play really throws her under the bus oh yes oh as as the as the erstwhile collaborator with the british just just surrender just it'll be fine i know we won't hang we won't hang it's also yeah hang. It's also, yeah, you know, the night of plays, I don't know who puts it on there, but it's like, it's a lot of death. Watch presidents die at this elementary school. But yeah, so then Melissa goes home.

She's feeling sad that she's going to have to be on stage with Ralph. Then she gets a delivery of the Malibu Stacy convertible. My mom loved, my mom would repeat that's impossible all the time. And she would say, look in the tongue all the time. My, my mom loved that one. Uh, but yes, they have tickets to the hottest show in town and it's a really good, you know, plot plotting like Lisa has to choose between going to a thing she really wants to go to that she could never get to go to otherwise. But or, you know, give give Ralph the wrong idea again, which like, yeah, it's it's it's a tough, tough choice for her. We're kind of we do get different slices of Bart in drag throughout the seasons. But this would have been an early opportunity to see Bart go as Lisa in, you know, in order to do sacrifice.

He says, I'm willing to make that sacrifice. You don't know how you don't know what I'm willing to sacrifice. You don't know how far I'm willing to go. And sorry, the writers did say during this uh era that what if a character was gay was often a go-to joke and we saw that uh with barney earlier oh yes yeah you're well this also earlier in the season like bart knew how to walk in heels better than lisa like they've they're playing around a little with bart uh dressing up as a girl for sure. I consider it a missed opportunity for them to have Bart do like a Lisa, you know,

do a drag Lisa as far as like, you know, magnifying certain, because we've seen him do a, a Marge. We've seen him with the John Waters episode with the wigs and, and also, yeah.

And walking in high heels and it just like, yeah, it just feels like a missed opportunity for him to do a caricature of Lisa. And Ralph would not have known the difference anyway. He would have been fooled. Lisa's extra pointy today. More spikes than usual. Yeah.

And so then she also turns to Homer, which I love that when Homer gets that question, he's like, you do mean stealing. Like Homer tells her to do gets that question he's like you do mean stealing like homer tells her to do it he's like you do mean stealing right meaning you should steal as he stole ned's degree from oral roberts a private christian college in tulsa oklahoma oh and also you get to see on his shoulder the uh the good homer the one who is uh who will soon be dead by whacking day that uh it's his grave that evil homer dances evil homer is not there he's plotting right now that's why he doesn't appear on the shoulder crusty brand as the uh as the coyote and roadrunner acme brand with the yes the crusty home pregnancy test may cause birth defects i mean it's something that i didn't want to think about at the time but still as a teenager i understood the the uh the contradiction that to have big on your birth control on your on your pregnancy test a

sign that says may cause birth defects that's uh and said by crusty is is that's also great with this big smiling face yeah right you can see a legal department made me write that, you know, type of collar tugging regret. And so Lisa decides to go. And I love Ralph says, I'm so glad he thinks he's very clever saying, I'm so glad you chose to come. And Lisa is just getting sick of it. She's like, yeah, why don't we give a take a break for that, Ralph? Yeah. You can't really humor him anymore.

The pity, the pity juice is running low. And this also is when we learn how he even got the tickets, which clearly, I would say, clearly a reference to the late Paul Rubin's arrest in 1991, this porno theater bust on Krust crusty absolutely yeah it's uh which you know it's too sad that happened to again we were big peewee permanent fans that was too bad that happened to him but uh and though apparently i do think i saw somebody say this online and when i looked at it i was like oh i think that is true the way crusty is like touching his face while the porno is playing i think it is

supposed to be like the scene of travis bickle taking civil shepherd's character on the date in taxi driver and her reaction to the movie oh man i mean that was at the time the most famous guy in a porno theater scene i don't know if it's been outdone at this point the one from taxi driver as opposed to the peewee herman reference yes yeah it's you know you combine know if it's been outdone at this point. The one from Taxi Driver as opposed to the Pee Wee Herman reference. Yes. Yeah. You know, you combine the two. Yeah.

Reinforces Clancy as a blunderer, as just a, you know, but who has blundered his way up. Like what could have been the previous police chief of Springfield in order that this guy would succeed him. I love that Wiggum just shows up to eat pie and he says, nothing beats a good porno movie, like just sitting down and then he has to cover it. Oh, this is a bust. Yeah. Sitting too close to the only other patron in there, by the way. That's poor porno theater etiquette, I'm sure. For the sake of framing, I understand the joke uh and then we find out I mean this might be one of the filthiest jokes in this era that uh Chief Wiggum was in the act or preparing to

begin the act in the original version of the story that's like I keep my pants on in this version meaning his pants were off in the actual story I was like oh my god yes that's uh you're right 10 times is disgusting yes and also it's just uh chief wiggum proudly telling a story to children about like how he coerced someone into getting a bribe at a porto theater then it's time to go to the uh the the big show uh the announcer you hear announcing crusty is the writer of homer Triple Bypass. Michael Carrington, who's also an actor and the first black man to write for The Simpsons 2, Michael Carrington. He's also Saichar Rahim. Yes. He does have a great announcer voice. And I

forgot to even mention too, much like you, Mike, he was also a Viacom employee at Nickelodeon as well. Oh, wow. Yes. Michael Carrington was a host of the, God, I should have wrote it down but he was a host of a, I think Bob's looking up for me. You know what? It's no double dare. It was a one season Nickelodeon

game show. Think Fast. That's the name of the show. I'm not telling it to anybody. It's an imperative. We couldn't think fast, but Think Fast was the name of it, so yes. I't think fast but it's think fast was name it so yes ironic isn't it when uh when crusty comes out you see some of that like real vintage uh cell filling of the audience cup the audience in different solid colors they're almost like in the colors of the german flag or something. They're just like they're yellows and browns. And it's like a real stylized illustration of them.

And it feels in that way like very old Simpsons and like a classic. I think it's what Matt Groening told the artists that Dumbo had the best crowds because they were all in the dark. And it was easier to depict a lot of people when the details were not necessary. Good call. And very important in the front row, and I was glad I read the original script to confirm this. So in the July 92 script, it says, seated in the animators to put in who it would be by the time the episode aired because they uh they weren't sure then and Groening Groening tells the story on the commentary that he he was like the only person who thought Clinton had a chance of winning he

said the rest of the writers like laughed at him and it's saying like hey we should animate Clinton in case he wins you don't know like yeah he they both ended up being um real sources of comedy for uh for the sentence both bush and clinton in different in different times in different ways keeping in mind that i already explained the way why i'm wearing the wig i mean it came in so late it's why it's a it's a still drawing of bill and hillary they're they're not moving they're not saying anything oh that's i think later we see him laughing do we see the laughter do we hear it you do see a laugh yes he has a good laugh at it yeah but i mean i also love the i i love crusty sentiment i campaigned for the other guy but

i voted for you like a perfect perfect thing to say on tv and we brought it up earlier of course but mike was in the short film the final days with bill clinton mike what did he smell like it's what i really want to know powdery like a baby powder smell i think i held my breath the whole time but i do remember he drank a lot of diet coke okay wow that's like a trend with presidents i guess aspartame you wanted to you know oh yes yeah i trump is a big diet coke yeah i do remember that yes yeah i uh i i found out this was later i found out while i was in film school that they wanted to do this and uh where i went to school had an airport right up against it. Westchester

County Airport is right next to SUNY Purchase. And so it was a pretty simple thing for me to go down to DC to film this special. But I went to the airport and started bullshitting with the guys who worked at the airport because my documentary filmmaking class had collaborated with the airport the year before yeah in 1999 to document the emergency drill response to a fake plane crash like how howarsdale, Harrison and White Planes would all work together to rescue people when a plane crashed at Westchester Airport. As you can see, the special was made because this airport had, I believe, two gates. And I missed the flight to Reagan National Airport, to Washington National Airport. And instead, I caught like a half hour later, a flight to Dulles, like was conveniently the other plane leaving from this airport right next to my school. And so I had to take a taxi across town to get to the White House. And I didn't have any cash on me. And I made the taxi driver, who was a Russian, I don't know why I remember this, was a Russian taxi driver in DC, stop so I could hit an ATM and get the cash to pay him in the midst

of my cab ride to the White House. To drop you off at the White House. because they recognized me from the Ameritrade commercial, which was sort of the reason that I got this invite to the White House in the first place. And I tried to just walk into the White House and it was literally like the leaders cult episode where it was just like a speaker on the wall was like, don't go any closer step back out of there and finally i was i was buzzed through the gate uh to get into the white house and it looked like the most um sophisticated airport security you ever went through i loaded my things onto a conveyor belt and there were dudes with large machine guns watching me the whole time uh as i made my way

into the white house with just nothing i don't know what i was carrying with me the whole time. Uh, as I made my way into the white house with just nothing, I don't know what I was carrying with me at the time. It's the perfect atmosphere for comedy, you know, let's get ready to have some fun. The fear, the fear of death. Uh,

yeah, I requested some food and they had run out to like the local gap to get me a sort of like, what's an intern going to wear a outfit to, for me to, for my wardrobe for the, uh, the sketch.

And so I got a, uh, a chicken sandwich from the white house canteen and made the mistake of leaving it on a chair on my chair in one of the rooms. And that was, that chair was eye level to the president's chocolate lab, uh, buddy, buddy who made short work of my the half of my chicken sandwich that i did not eat so i got half the sandwich buddy got half

the sandwich and bill clinton got the diet coke well i was not planning on hearing about a buddy interaction this is great oh that was it i didn't i i moved to have him struck from the record but they there's favoritism and i could not prevail and i was more excited to hear about buddy than bilkman i was like wow buddy oh we we shot we shot the thing and one of the uh one of the director one of the camera operators was a director of photography that i had known who had worked on pete and pete i think by the name of mike meyer and his uh most of the time in the white house was just spent waiting for clinton to get there from wherever else he was for us to shoot it and the director was uh phil rosenthal of everybody lovesves Raymond fame. Oh, wow.

And we shot it in the Oval Office, if you'll remember. And they were trying to do a pretty fairly one-to-one parody of the Ameritrade commercial. And so they asked me to dance and gyrate at one point. And in film school, I have dyed hair and listening to Fela and just some other things and just decided to go do my own dance. And we did a take of that. And then I just I'll never forget Phil on the megaphone, the director's megaphone. He goes, OK, and now do the dance that we all remember from the Ameritrade commercial. You know, just asking me to say the line.

It was basically say the line. So I did the dance that we all remember, and then we went down to the basement and shot the Bill Clinton gives the ice cream machine, the Fonzie elbow, so we can get free ice cream. And it was over pretty quickly. I got the plane ride back to the same airport. I called I rough cut of my documentary due the next day. And I knew that that wasn't happening. So I just started drinking.

My college roommate that year coincidentally worked as an intern, I think, on Hillary Clinton's successful New York Senate campaign. But I'm not sure that they had put two and two together at that time. Like I figured they got fairly deep with those background checks, but I'm not sure that they, they put together that coincidence. I mean, you could have told your professor how close to the button you were and you could have just made your own due date for the project.

I could have you vaporized. And so, well, that's funny to bring it back as simpsons phil phil rosenthal he has a cameo in the simpsons movie as well so all all comes full circle wow but that that's no i i remember seeing that uh and and the the video back in the year 2000 and what i was most impressed with, Jess, that you were in it. I was like, oh, wow. It's a fun, it's a cute little comedy video for the president. But you being in it made it special to me. We said Clinton Schminton.

I see this guy all the time. If we could pause, I'll find the appropriate prop. Oh, boy. time if we could pause i'll i'll find the the appropriate prop and uh oh boy i've had this uh this i've had this coffee mug for almost 25 years and it has the it's amazing if you want to zoom in on there uh wow it's well preserved oh it's so cool oh it's almost gone but yeah uh this was i documented a fake plane crash and all i got was this lousy mug but it's still with me today that's great yeah but uh well so yeah so uh the the fake clinton unlike the real clinton you filmed where they have a fake clinton in this but then crusty does a joke that

does not go over well uh nobody cares i love love that he's just like, because the joke does make sense. It's like, yeah, the Ayatollah has a long beard and he only had to go tea. Get it? But I have decided that from now I'm going to save. I'm going to reuse this line every time we have like a joke that doesn't work. I'm just going to replay it. I'm like, ah, let's just play some clips. Yeah, I think that'll work from now on.

The Krusty sort of Doors late 60s psychedelic croon with Krusty has such a TV of that era age where they would, you know,

like they put a lava lamp in front of the lens type of thing and shot through it. Yes. The video effects that you would see maybe Sonny and Cher were messing with or something like that in a variety show sort of format where you could just do stuff. But they were experimenting with video as a new format with this music. You will not see me stopping here to watch his woods fill up with snow. Hey, Frosty, you want some snow, man? We discussed this, and I said no.

Now here's a clip from 1973. Try to run, try to hide. Break on through to the other side. Yeah! What was I on? Lisa, do you want a bite of my ice cream? No, thanks. Send it this way, boy.

Whoops. Aw. Aw, nothing way, boy. Whoops! Aw. Aw, nothing gets chocolate out. See? I worked with some marvelous second bananas over the years, but none more memorable than Sideshow Rahim. Uh, the script says I'm supposed to bonk you with this. I wouldn't.

Right on. Angry. with this i wouldn't right on angry angry young man and same with when it's a sideshow rahim it does feel like it is framed like how it would have been on sunny and share or or laugh in too uh wait i i gotta think that's a reference to radio rahim the character from do the right thing uh calling him shite show rahim i think yeah this guy yeah and i in general i love the high level thing that i never thought about as a kid where suddenly this show that for four years has been just basically bozo the clown but for springfield is now this esteemed institution that's been running for 30 years and celebrities have been on it that we've heard of yes yeah that robert when when i first learned who robert frost was in school i was like oh that's that simpsons reference like that's uh he's that guy uh crusty dropped snow on they did

yeah they missed they missed an opportunity to have spalding gray here or something like that no it's great it's yeah they've said it before they're like what show is crusty show like what is this show like it's not it's not an afternoon clown show it's the tonight show and they want it to be or it's it's the laugh-in or whatever like oh yes sorry here is the clip i've now set aside from the future what's the matter don't you people read the papers uh let's look at some clips. Anytime a topical joke doesn't go over now on the podcast, I'll just play that. Get ready for Las Vegas-style action at BetMGM, the king of online casinos. Enjoy casino games at your fingertips with the same Vegas strip excitement MGM is famous for

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please contact ConnexOntario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. ev tariffs solar panels and much more making your usage clearer your trips greener your home cozier and your world brighter find our net zero hub at electricireland.ie and yeah so then uh crusty after they they play a bunch of clips then uh we see lisa with with uh ralph and they pass chocolate down i just love to like chocolate spills on her and he says nothing it's chocolate out see and his police uniform is covered in chocolate down the entire left leg you know not always true but whenever chocolate does land on my clothes i hear the words of wiggum echo through my brain. I have said that to myself recently and having a baby and then also having a kid who likes ice cream in the summertime. You do mutter that to yourself under your breath sometimes.

I spilled some chocolate recently and yes, it entered my mind as well. But yes, so then it's time for the namesake of our community podcast. That's why we say it because it's always death. Now for my favorite part of the show. What's that say? Talk to the audience. Oh, God, this is always death. All right.

Oh, no, please don't show me with Ralph. What's your name, son? Ralph. And is this your name, son? Ralph. And is this your girlfriend, Ralph? Yes, I love Lisa Simpson, and when I grow up, I'm going to marry her. No! Now, you listen to me. I don't like you. I never liked you. And the only reason I gave you that stupid Valentine is because nobody else would.

Watch this, Lisa. You can actually pinpoint the second when his heart rips in half. you and the only reason i gave you that stupid valentine's because nobody else would watch this you can actually pinpoint the second when his heart rips in half and now bart gets over the disappointment of not going to the show pretty quickly by taking part in this ritual humiliation of Ralph, but also turning it around to needle Lisa about what a bad person she is. If he'd have been there, he couldn't make Lisa feel bad by replaying it to her over and over again. I guess the moral superiority matters more to Barth than having seen this show. It's the dunk. He's able to get the dunk.

VCR slow-mo does not work like this you don't hear sounds but i do love the the breaking of that rule to hear the weird ralph death rattle it's so good now it's uh this this is a one of these great when you can read the script you see how they made the show better in editing sometimes and this is one of these things were so originally the end of act one act two is just lisa says all that and then sorry then ralph says to himself oh i feel like such a loser and then crusty says loser that's our word of the day and a big sign that says loser loser loser like blinks on top of them and then goes to commercial break and then when it comes back from the commercial then it's this but i like it so much better that lisa says this and then instead of being in real time

it zooms out to be like this is the next day and you're watching it with them it's i i love that yeah it's really lovely it also is really great with Krusty. This is something, it feels like you would never do this now, but the weird thing where it's like, oh, two, a little boy and a little girl together. You say, is this your girlfriend? It's just like, oh God, poor, poor Lisa.

But that's something that uncles everywhere will do. And Krusty is, you find out later that he has a kid but i think for a lot of those kids he's more of like the eccentric uncle figure for for the his audience and uh yeah that lisa she can't take it anymore like she instantly regrets it she didn't want to humiliate ralph on television like but she just she can't take it anymore like I just love the way she just screams no like in her her mouth on it is just so great same with there was I meant to say earlier when Bart and Homer are laughing at itchy and scratchy I I posted on Twitter because I was like

oh this drawing is so funny Bart laughs in a way that it's most of his head is his mouth when laughing it's just such a funny drawing, too. There's so many great faces in this one. The joy of watching Tom and Jerry type of violence along with your dad. I think, you know what? You guys have convinced me. I'm going to watch Home Alone with my son. I'm going to do it.

I'm going to do it. I'm going to watch some cartoonish violence with my son and laugh uh hey all right that was our secret plan all along now mike your character is never injured you're having a pretty bad time you know but uh no paint cans are striking uh the mcallister you're playing so it's true i get a relatively unscathed you just have to wait around in france for a while that's all you're killing time in france running running in an airport uh tell him that you can't do that anymore they will take you down yes that's dangerous oh man yeah no i don't want to i don't want to teach him to run in an airport but that was truly my favorite part of shooting home alone was was the o'hare uh sprint just

because i liked running so it was something it. I didn't mind doing more and more takes, even though we had to do it in winter clothing. And yes. So we come back from commercial break. Ralph is very sad that even the ducks don't like him. And it's another great bit that Wiggum does it. He's like, isn't great. The world's your oyster is like, no, dad.

She humiliated me like ralph is smarter than his dad here come to think of it she did and then and then it's the uh grandpa with the tortoise that stole his false teeth gag the same thing that the hapless guy chase chasing the animal who has something of his that's important when the duck steals his badge, the old, the animations almost exactly the same. The director, uh, Wes Archer, his team did a great job on the waddle he does after it. It's just so like sad and pathetic. And he's, you know, he can't keep, catch up with this, like not very fast duck. Oh, it just gives it up. Yes.

Uh, and, uh, then we see, uh, chief Wiggum gets a little comeuppance against Homer with just breaking his taillight. And I love that Homer instantly scares him by saying, like, people are going to stand up to corrupt cops like you. And he's waiting for he's like, do they do they set a date? Like, Wiggum's terrified the second he hears that. He's ready to put his papers in immediately. He's ready to give 30 days notice if that will save him some small confrontation. This was before the Springfield Police Department had a tank. Right, yes. So citizens were more of a threat. again 20 years later in Dwayne the Rock Johnson's remake of Walking Tall where he becomes the sort of like hacksaw Jim Duggan

large wood wielding sheriff after he ousts the other corrupt sheriff and he tells the villain you got a taillight out and he smacks his car around that's right and he stole it from wiggum he stole the move from yes it turns out that you know manic mailman was just a copy of mr mr zip and that's and that's how i made my money back uh and uh so yes we then go to the third big set piece of the episode. So we already have been at Krusty's 29th anniversary special.

Now it's time for a school, well, a big school production school play. Like they have a Broadway level budget for this school play, I would say. Actual fire on the stage. I think they're not making their money back because the props are too elaborate. They're just missing i

think in the there's a a back to the future uh one earlier where there's sort of like a smoke machine and uh in another episode of of uh and sort of lights to give you that the ballyhoo of like lights going everywhere you could tell that it's not referenced that because they clearly don't to fly up later in it or whatever? What does OSHA inspector to look the other way. And Skinner sort of spending the money, what meager money they had. When we get to the watered down punch, I'll mention that. Oh, yes, I have that right here. This is another.

In this clip, too, I appreciate that it took them this long in having groundskeeper Willie, a Scotsman, on the show. It took them this long to do a Scotty reference with them. To do the full Star Trek. This orange drink is the only way to recoup our terrible losses from fire drill follies. I just don't know what went wrong. You opened the show with a fire drill and everyone cleared out.

So mother was right. It was my fault. Go ahead. Water it down some more. My God, man. I've watered it down as far as shall go. I cannot water no more good evening everyone and welcome to a wonderful evening of theater and picking up after yourselves i i believe bob has used that uh that that very saying when we we've done a couple live shows i think i might have started or ended the show with that it's a good rule of thumb pick up after yourself we not not to do another story of i went to japan and saw something but when i just when i i went to tokyo over the holidays and i went to a big wrestling show at the tokyo dome and everybody there uh knew to pick up after themselves and clean up except for the section that was sold to international tickets where i was sitting

where it was like a bunch of americans and british people there everybody just like treated it like they were back in america of like well yeah you just leave your popcorn bucket or whatever at the seat whatever you don't pick up after yourself like it we we were not looking good as the the tourists visiting this uh uh tokyo dome when um when we moved to queens my parents kept us going to church and what i remember about church was that the second it that was it was done we would tear downstairs to the basement because of the sweets that were served afterwards like someone took it upon themselves to just get the entomans chocolate frosted donuts and have them or quarter them and then like put them in something else put them on a plate with a paper towel under it there were chopped up donuts there were there

were baked goods of every kind and the only thing there was never milk the only thing, there was never milk. The only thing that you could wash it down with was the most watered down orange punch ever. So this really hits. The Skinner ordering Willie to water it down further really hits for me because it's sort of what I associated church with was the the sugar rush afterwards and then there's just not being any milk to wash down those donuts just just the most dilute orange it's like four parts per million orange that does feel like the ironic punishment homer faces the so you like donuts huh and then you have now it's orange And then it becomes just a got milk ad immediately after that. No, yeah.

Yes, I love the orange drink is such a great specific. Even the machine is the perfect like machine you were seeing back then. Like now, now everybody can just like do the squirt of Mio and things to have their orange drink. But the water, the squirt of Mio. That seems like an organ that we only recently discovered after inventing MRIs and things of that nature. Only then could you find out what was wrong. It was the squirt of Mio.

I'm just taking Henry's word for this, that it's a real thing. My husband is a big fan of Mio orange drink. He does like it. It's a concentrate that you can carry in your pocket rather than an entire sack of Tang. Which I grew up, I'm of the age that I grew up having Tang at grandma's house instead of orange juice. I think my own parents favored Five Alive citrus drink as opposed to tang but yeah tang i associated with grandma's bacon eggs cooked in a square cast iron pan so the fried eggs came out square and uh good rolls from the corner bakery and washed all down with tang there's a lot of orange uh washing down

memories coming back here i mostly associate a very stale Pepsi with my grandmother's house because she kept pop in the house for the kids. But the kids didn't come by often enough to, you know, necessitate the buying of more pop. So just like the flattest, nastiest Pepsi you can imagine. But hey, the treats, the cookies, the brownies, those are great. I think it's also great that here they this whole scene is about how crappy the orange drink is, and then it cuts to Homer drinking it. He bought it and loves it. And so, yes, we then go to a big song that I'll just drop in right here,

the Mediocre President song. We begin with a tribute to our lesser-known presidents. We are the mediocre presidents. You won't find our faces on dollars or on cents. There's Taylor, there's Tyler, there's Gilmore, and there's Hayes. There's William Henry Harrison. I died in 30 days. We are being adequate, forgettable, occasionally regrettable.

Caretaker presidents of the U.S.A. This is how most anytime I needed to know presidents names in school, you know, was from this or the they might be giant song about James K. Polk. Those were two things how I knew about any president before 1940. It's a good gateway drug to learning about history when you sort of have it snuck in under the guise of popular culture or your favorite your your cartoon characters that you already like singing about something where um the schoolhouse rock amendment to be definitely rings up in that in that area in that same place yeah when any of these guys come up in conversation or i see the name i'll i'll think of this song and then I'll think, okay, I'll go to Wikipedia and just see how mediocre they were. And usually, I mean, they lived a life.

They had achievements, but in the grand scheme of things, not that important. But who among us is? Precided over the largest interest rate cut of the 19th century. And it seems like, you know, people are very anti the Federal Reserve. That's like a big, big meme being mad at the Fed. Rand Paul is very, very mad at the Fed. Ron Paul, very mad at the Fed. But the story of the 18th and 19th century is just like one of panic after panic. There was the gold panic. There was the corn panic. There was the gold panic. There was the corn panic. There was the wheat panic. There was a sugar panic where just like things just seesawed

back and forth based on what a couple of people in a couple of newspapers did and bought and said and kind of need a couple of shock absorbers in the economy. Not that the Federal Reserve does the best, but I'm just glad we don't have the same kind of panics you have different panics now so yeah you're you're not about bringing back the old standard then mike that's not what your platform that was the point of his entire appearance yeah redeeming yeah bringing yeah right and that's where i've come to say save those jfk quarters and the sweet, sweet silver off of them. Yeah, whenever I hear William Henry Harrison, I just think of the kid pointing at himself like, I died in 30 days. All you need to know.

All you need to know about him. It's such Harvard humor. These guys love learning about American history and presidents, and this is when they can roll up their sleeves and put that all to work in this sitcom. To put obscure and gross historical facts coming out of the mouths of seven and eight year olds is sort of like that's that's the Simpsons raison d'etre right there. So and it's it's an incredible performance for these kids. And they're done the songs written by Frank Mula and Jeff Martin. They they did the music for it. and it's it's really great uh i one of the most fantastic songs in the whole series and then uh we cut backstage bart is taunting uh the kids with his nixon bud impression which is pretty funny especially uh then hoover gets him in line. Hoover and Bart don't share too many scenes together.

Not really. I was shocked again. It's not Edna. He stole this gag from I'm making my rounds. I'm a little behind. Oh, right. Dr. Butt. Yeah.

Dr. Butt. That is pretty much it's pretty much the same gag, I think. I mean, within the family. Oh, no, Dr. Cheeks. Oh, Dr. Cheeks. Yeah. Within the family, this is just like a shared humor because when Homer entertains at the Mr. Burns party, he pulls down his pants and does the Mr. Burns impression. Mooning humor is a key part to the whole Simpson family.

Yes. I also love how Bart quickly pulls up his pants like, I'll be good. I'll be good. He doesn't want to miss out his chance. He's still right. He still wants to play the Terminator. Isn't that great? Yeah, for this kid's play, all they do to tell the story of Abe Lincoln is the night he's murdered.

And it's just about his assassination. That's all they did. Now to soothe my head with a night at Ford's Theater. That's a great line. And then as Bart's trying to kill him, everyone's in shock except for Homer, who's like, come on, boy, finish him off. It's good to be proud of your kid, especially in those. That actually takes me back to the music man where the sort of the hoodwink parents are standing up and saying, that's my boy. That's my Clance. That's my Clancy. Sortancy sort of like you know wailing away on a tuba i like this rewriting

of history where lincoln is aware of john wilkes booth and their nemeses or something that's right and then he's gonna kill chester a. Arthur all the same, too. It's great. I wonder who in Springfield Elementary rewrote this story. It seems to take John Wilkes Booth's side in this play, whoever wrote it. That's definitely Bart, though. Bart was just a knee-jerk contrarian. So even though it's universally acknowledged that Confederacy was terrible, he would still find a way to play john wilkes booth in a in a badass way bart just wants to kill on stage that's the and so then we think

it's over but it's time for a lengthy retelling of george washington's life i do wonder like in real time how long was this on stage is this like 20 minutes or like a whole hour like how i it's a great deal. I don't know, Mike, how much you've experienced this now as a parent yet of going to events like this and finding out that your kid's only going to be on stage for like five minutes or something, but you've got to be there like three hours. Sure, sure. The awards ceremony usually starts with the kindergartners and works its way up the grades. So you have to watch all the kindergarten classes get their awards before you can see anybody else. And that time when your kid is on stage in the spotlight always seems to go by so fast.

And then while you're waiting for the 15 other forgettable presidents to do their part. But yeah, George Washington deserves, you know, a thorough retelling. So it's kind of like it's both justifiable that would be long, it's both understandable that would be long, but also understandable that Homer would be so bored with it by the end. But he doesn't sort of like feel the same way about lisa maybe because she's a traitor collaborator yes and i mean ralph really pulls out this acting talent that we never see again i mean having a hidden talent such as stocks a complot i wish we saw more of this side of ralph but in order to make him the character he would become he can't have this kind of uh skill at really anything ralph learned a bunch of lines and how like memorize them and then also it's i i love that on the commentary they bring up like a live fire on

stage how they do that but it's perfect for storytelling purposes that he burns the choo choo choose me card now that he's finally given up and realizes what Lisa feels for him. He is so mature. When he puts on the George Washington costume, he all of a sudden is wise beyond his years as far as how maturely he handles acting in a romantic role with somebody who's romantically rejected him, and then just sort of the big words that he wraps his mouth around in this speechifying, in the george washington speech of fine and it's so powerful he even gets the bullies to

want to go to the library to learn more about their founding father they're gonna miss the rest of the play yeah they do leave the play in the middle a lot of characters just get a little dip in uh here as far as barney or you don't see any of homer's co-workers i i'm missing lenny and carl for for sure in this one mr burn should have attended this and enjoyed it too lenny and carl probably didn't exist yet i'm sorry oh no they were there they could have been there no children though it could have been weird yes yeah they don't have kids but they they existed by this point yeah uh but yes then we also get a great great little gag that Rex did get a part in the play. He's just the butler who shows up to be yelled at and told to leave.

That's a great bit about just being with the life of an actor, of having to act against the part you wanted to play. Isn't that the way? I also love how he just undersells like yes very good like just leaves oh yeah he's he's gonna phone he's gonna phone it in at that point because doing it to the best of his ability would either stand out or make teachers feel like jerks so he's got to find his way to drip acid all over the whole thing. But this is when it's the death of George Washington played amazingly, again, with a huge budget on stage here.

This is like Phantom of the Opera chandeliers level. I mean, I just saw Back to the Future on Broadway, and I think this outdoes it. Wow. Your broth, Mr. President. I asked for no broth. Away with you, lest my cane find your backside. Hmm, yes.

Please don't leave me, George. Dear wife, if I could take but one treasure with me to the next life, it would be your tender kiss. Now that's a man. I didn't cry when my own father was hung for stealing a pig. But I'll cry now. It then lifts up from Sea to Shining Sea plays and that also Skinner

talks through Mount Rushmore to tell them to take some orange drink was this prop just created for these 10 seconds I mean the spending is just irresponsible for this production yeah I'm gonna have to guess that wiggum stole some money from

the like the misappropriated funds uh from the police budget and gave it to this for ralph's purposes that's that's all i can guess right because he couldn't just let hoover do a crappy job having cast ralph it had to be over the top just in case him and lisa were you know going to be a hit the hit item of the of the show or let's say he got like uh he worked with fat tony and fat tony gave him like a big payoff to fund the school yeah it's a nice turn so we just did an episode where i felt like a character apologized to another character for no good reason and it's like it's like no but you weren't at fault kind of thing it was like marge apologized to another character for no good reason. And it's like, no, but you weren't at fault kind of thing. It was like Marge apologized to Homer when Homer did the bad thing.

But here I do think that Lisa doesn't really, well, actually she does say, I'm sorry, Ralph, and Ralph isn't listening. But the way they make up is just like it's a much more understated, they see eye to eye now more simply than just having to say it with words you know it's so mature uh ralph is so mature in the way he handles it and rex is just by comparison is absolutely regressing to the seven-year-old that he is or the eight-year-old that he is as far as being unable to control his emotion it seems like lisa realizes that the best way to communicate with ralph is through a car with a cartoon character saying a statement and he understands that yes again i love uh uh our uh the artist for the the tier images we have on patreon.com slash talking simpsons of the the bee and the choo-choo

like both are uh by maddie copp a great great art she she did a great job with that also it's sort of my note-taking process of writing down it says bee and there's a picture of a bee on it that's basically what i do when taking notes for the show but uh but yes let's let's hear the heartfelt finale thanks for coming and don't forget to purchase some orange drink For the long ride home Lisa! Hi Ralph, you were great tonight Aw, thanks

I've got something for you Let's be friends It says bee And there's a picture of a B on it. I thought you'd like it. Oh, look at that.

Attention all units. Riot in progress at... Not tonight. Hey, hey! Bill and Marty here wrapping up a beautiful President's Day. To George and Abe and all the rest, here's a special song just for you. I was working in the lab late one night when my arms began. It's very sweet that Wiggum is watching the kids just get along,

and he's drumming on the steering wheel to Monster Mash, not even questioning why it's playing. Yes, God, it's so good. And also, the way they're swinging is like to the tune of the music too like it's like to the b i it makes it i get goosebumps every time i watch it it's just such a sweet weird ending too just like here the ridiculousness of playing a halloween classic on valentine's day which was just a silly joke to open the show, now has this whole new heartfelt meaning on President's Day of hearing the monster bash and these two characters

starting a brand new friendship. Obviously, this has to reset by the next episode. All the girls in class have to lose their respect for Ralph once more once more he's never a good actor again but for this little moment it's it's it's sweet and special i feel that uh that the class dynamic is really hard on ralph so he deserves a few wins people respect him for his ability as an actor too like and they think like oh wow all the girls want is a signature like it's's, it's just nice. And Lisa gets to see that Ralph, uh, he's, he's okay. And,

and he, you, like you said, Bob, he finally understands via a cartoon that, uh, that they can be friends. A cartoon bee had to,

you know, let him down instead of Lisa. I also love that Yardley, the way she says, like, uh, I thought you'd like it. Like she, she, she realizes the level to work with him on now, too.

It's nice. Everyone learned a nice little lesson. It's so sweet. Except Rex. And Rex. Oh, and Rex. Yeah. Homer still stealing.

Rex still salty. Yeah. I mean, Flanders gets just that little dip in. Barney gets just that little dip in. Dolph, Carney, and Jimbo gets just that little dip in. Barney gets just that little dip in. Dolph, Carney, and Jimbo get just that little dip in. But they're all rowing in the same direction to keep the episode moving, I think. It's great. They've done other Valentine's episodes that are good, but this is such a great –

I mean, this is one of the best Valentine's Day episodes of – and we all know, obviously, it's a thing made to sell cards like just like just like ape simpson says correct but i guess we're doing final thoughts yeah i feel like this is nearly perfect and it is the simpsons thing where just as it's getting too saccharine or risks getting too saccharine they start playing monster mash and you know it's going to be okay because it's just a very weird idea that somehow just is heartwarming at the same time. So, yeah, there's a reason why our Patreon is stolen so much from the late Frank Mula's script for I Love Lisa. Definitely a great episode and one that makes you go back to that time.

It places you back in that time. Like for me, it's the watered down orange drink. But there's a hundred other moments in there that make you uh that bring you right back to that feeling of being in school yeah it's a it's a beautiful uh beautiful story that's so well animated too by uh west archer and his team uh as usual like it's yep just a a true true classic in in the series so thank you so much mike for being on the show a great first time guest your podcast the adventures of danny and mike is back after hiatus. Please let us know more about that, where we can find you online, what you're up

to, any plugs you want to drop in. Thanks. You can catch The Adventures of Danny and Mike on Seltzer King's podcasts. We're also available in other places where you do find them. Whenever you type in The Adventures of Danny and Mike, you'll find us. We will be summoned.

And you can equally summon our ghosts in the A24 film coming out this year called I Saw the TV Glow, directed by the talented Jane Schoenbrun. Ooh, I can't wait to see that. That sounds awesome. It's been great to hear your podcast back after the hiatus and hear you guys having fun again and telling stories about imbibing certain things while watching great music, going to concerts. That's maybe something you would say for croon with Krusty in the annals of history. But yeah, you could still enjoy it today as well. No, it was such a treat having you on, Mike. We grew up watching you, and it's right there with The Simpsons,

the connection I feel to your work. So it was such a great, great treat to get to talk to you about The Simpsons. Absolutely, yeah. 1993, what a year i i salute your uh your dedication to dissection of these uh very dense and also delicious art form that we uh that we can still watch today thanks to the mouse having bought the fox out and uh it, streaming the box into our homes. If someday Disney can buy Viacom,

then Pete and Pete can be on the Disney Plus 2. And then won't that be great? A nearly perfect world. Just did my taxes. So the closer I watch these corporations buy each other as I get less and less W2s over the years. Well, sure. It's bad for, you know, people. Creative people. Hey, the years. Well, sure. It's bad for people.

Creative people. Hey, the content. Right. Yeah. Right. For a while, we created a lot of content value for shareholders. Yep. But thank you.

Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Bob. Thank you, Henry. I really appreciate it. Thanks again to Mike Morona for being on the show. Please check out The Adventures of Danny and Mike wherever you find podcasts. But as for us, if you want to check out more Adventures of Danny and Mike wherever you find podcasts. But as for us, if you want to check out

more of what we do and get these podcasts one week ahead of time and ad-free, please head on over to patreon.com slash TalkingSimpsons and sign up there

at the $5 level. When you do, you'll get that advanced access and also access to nearly seven years worth of miniseries episodes, full-length episodes about shows like

Futurama, King of the Hill, Batman the Animated Series, The Critic, and Mission Mission Hill and that five bucks a month will also get you monthly access to new episodes of both Talking Futurama and Talking of the Hill and it's all happening at that five dollar level only at patreon.com slash talking simpsons and there is a ten dollar level as well when you sign up for that you can get access to all the $5 stuff naturally but then you can also access one mega long podcast once a month only for patrons of that level or higher and what is that Henry Bob's talking about the what a cartoon movie podcast where we cover an animated feature film as in depth as we do a classic episode the

Simpsons often for over five or even six hours, about one animated movie. This month, you're going to hear us clown on the 2005 Disney classic, Chicken Little. The month before that, we covered the actual classic Studio Ghibli film, Porco Rosso, and we have done over five years of What a Cartoon movies, over 200 hours at your fingertips. In addition to all the $5 things Bob just mentioned, we've covered tons of Pixar movies. We've covered tons of the Disney Renaissance and the classic Disney. Ghibli films.

All of this great stuff. And there's a new great one each month, including our longest one ever. Check that one out. Six and a half hours about who framed Roger Rabbit. Sign up today at patreon.com slash TalkingSimpsons to see what you are missing out on. And I've been one of your hosts, Bob Mackie. You can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo and Blue Sky as Bob Servo.

And my other podcast, by the way, is Retronauts. It's a classic gaming podcast all about old video games. You can find that wherever you find podcasts or go to patreon.com slash Retronauts and sign up there for two full-length bonus episodes every month. And Henry, how about you? You can follow me on Twitter and Blue Sky at H-E-N-E-R-E-Y-G. And you can also follow me on Instagram at Talking Henry. And if you're following me and Bob on those social media sites, then you should also be following the official one for this podcast, which is at TalkSimpsonsPod. Pretty much all the socials at TalkSimpsonsPod keeps you in the loop when new episodes go live, either on free feeds or in the ad-free Patreon feeds, or when we do

live shows or any other cool stuff. And if you want an easy list of our previously released free podcasts, head over to TalkingSimpsons.com thank you so much for listening folks we'll see you again next time for season 14's three gays of the condo and we'll see you then surprise he did the match he did the monster man the monster match it was a graveyard smash he did the match it caught on in a flash he did the match he did the match. It caught on in a flash. He did the match. He did the monster match. From my laboratory in the castle east to the master bedroom where the vampires feast. The ghouls all came from their humble abode

to get a jolt from my electrode. They did the match. They did the monster match. The monster match. It was a graveyard smash. They did the mash. They did the monster mash. The monster mash. It was a graveyard smash. They did the mash. It caught on in a flash. They did the mash.

They did the monster mash. But the zombies were having fun. In a shoot ball. The party had just begun. In a shoot ball. The guests did... Shh! Shh. Johnny.

Johnny! Johnny! Cool, I broke his brain.