Talking Simpsons - Talking Simpsons - Last Tap Dance in Springfield With Gary Butterfield

Episode Date: December 2, 2020

This week we're joined by Gary Butterfield from the Duckfeed.tv podcasts, all for a discussion as simple as "tapa-tapa-tapa!" We discuss season 11's big Lisa episode as she learns dancing isn't as easy as it looks in the movies, while Bart goes camping in the mall. So turn on your self-tapping shoes, because you'll enjoy this podcast ever so much!! Support this podcast and get dozens of bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! Check out our new shirts on TeePublic! And please follow the new official Twitter, @TalkSimpsonsPod!

Good news, everyone. Talking Futurama is coming back for Talking Futurama Season 2, Part 2. Fresher than a summer ham, this podcast comes every Friday. And if you sign up at the $5 level at patreon.com slash talking simpsons, you can hear each episode as it goes live. That's right. Sign up today at patreon.com slash talking simpsons for $5 to hear Talking Futurama every Friday throughout the rest of 2020 and also all the previous episodes we've done so far. So head over to patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons now or we're gonna clamp you! Shut up and take my money! I heartily endorse this event or product. Ahoy, ahoy, everybody, and welcome to Talking Simpsons, the podcast that ruined Buddy Epson's

credit rating. I'm one of your hosts, the wise but alcoholic dance coach, Bob Mackey, and this is our chronological exploration of The Simpsons. Who else is here with me today? Hey, it's Henry Gilbert, and it says in my notes, I ate pee-pee? And who do we have on the line? I'm ever so Gary Butterfield. It's true, and today's episode is Last Tap Dance in Springfield. Tapa, tapa, tapa. Today's episode aired on May 7, 2000, and as always, Henry will tell us what happened on this mythical day in real world history.

Oh my god oh boy bobby the new metal infused mission impossible 2 soundtrack is released into record stores ahead of the film uh termite terrorist veteran art davis sadly passes away and vladimir putin is officially inaugurated for the first time as the president of Russia. Don't you meet President Trump's boyfriend? Honk, honk. He was already putting on his chapstick for making out with President Trump. They kiss. They kiss. They're boyfriends.

It's gay. And that's funny. Fourth bit of news. The boy known as Bob Mackie becomes the man also known as Bob Mackie. And I turn 18 on this day. Wow. Congratulations, Bob. Yes.

It was quite a journey. Did you do anything to celebrate on your 18th birthday? No, I believe I was working a shift at Taco Bell that day, so not a fun time for me. Not a happy birthday for Bob Mackie. I didn't get my banana kaboom. And that was the Fred Durst song, Am I Too? Yes. Yeah, that is the... So you just summed every Limp Bizkit song.

They had a song already that was on one of their albums originally, but then the Mission Impossible soundtrack was like, oh, we want these guys to be hip, you know, with their hip 2000 film mission impossible 2 so they needed to have the stars of new metal uh singing over that song so yeah the uh i watched the music video for it it's very annoying it's just like what if what if uh fred durst was a secret agent guys that's the chunky agent that's the thing like fred durst unlike say west borland his uh bandmate he never wanted to look dumb in a music video he's always like this music video is about how

cool i am and how all the girls dress like me and then dance like me and follow me everywhere it's like be ready to make a joke about yourself because you are a joke like you're a red hat wearing buffoon be funny about it but i was gonna say that red hat would give him away as a spy exactly yeah he uh his instead of wearing the full face mask like they have in mission impossible 2 it should just be a yellow hat on top of his red hat this was also before he guest starred in the fight club video game which happened after the cell by date which is really strange yeah in my head i was just like is is beautiful joe a little fred durst like queasy he had red durst he had the same joe mentum as fred durst

it's really incredible like little red-headed little thick guy yeah there has to be a connection there i i think at the very least it was you know the Clover. They said, what is a cool American dude? What does that look like? And so they see Fred Durst, the coolest of American men in the year 2000, and they go with that. And Art Davis was one of the longest living Termite Terrace guys. By this point in time, they were all croaking. I think Chuck Jones was next on the chopping block. Yeah, I believe you're right yeah that uh art davis i i think uh we should have on our our friend thad to really say this but i

think he's one of the more like underrated guys because he like didn't get to direct a lot he was more like an assistant to like clamp it and jones on stuff i think took over bob clamp its unit when he left so he did direct quite a few things but if i told you the name of them you wouldn't know because they all have like pun names that don't describe what the cartoon is actually about something with the word hair in it i'd expect or bunny or but yeah and yeah vladimir putin still still added what a cool guy riding that horse around shirtless i haven't seen as many shirtless vladimir jokes as honestly i i'm happy that four years later, it feels like there are less Vladimir Putin jokes on SNL and whatnot than there were, or on Simpsons, for that matter, than there were four years ago. They've all moved to MSNBC.

Though I guess when you listeners hear this post-election in December, maybe there's been a new spike in them. I certainly hope not. But joining us today on the show, his first appearance on talking simpsons gary butterfield of the duck feed.tv podcast network you probably heard things like watch out for fireballs or bonfire side chat but welcome gary to the show thank you uh little little trivia little comic book guy trivia i think i actually guessed it on a talk to the audience once oh i think maybe it was a what a cartoon well we did a what a cartoon uh yeah listener feedback yes yeah the listener feedback for retronauts was the same day oh gotcha we did those no no wait it was a listener feedback

for your show it was like a dating advice thing that's right well it was but after that in the same session because we recorded about spider-man right yes what a cartoon and i recall i thought it was a uh talk to the audience but maybe i'm misremembering. I don't think so. But this is your first time on Talking Simpsons, for sure. Real, yeah. A mean mind show. And normally, we sometimes try to pick guests based on their expertise. But often, we'll just be like, well, that person is funny. We'll just have them on because they're great.

You're great, Gary. But I chose you for this one also because you use the phrase tap-a-tap-a-tap-a on your podcasts a lot. So I have to believe you have some affinity for this episode because that is your shorthand for like doing like combos in a video game or like doing a QTE. I hear that a lot on all of your podcasts. So when this episode came up and I was like, Gary Butterfield, he's our guy. He's a tappa, tappa, tappa guy.

He did. And my nine years of tap training. It's true. So that would be the thing. Before I got into podcasting, I was the baryshnikov of podcasting i think about this is a weird thing because i've been revisiting the simpsons with disney plus which i imagine a lot of people have and i'm finding that a lot of simpsons that i have references to or phrases that are stuck in my head are comparatively late um i think about like

tap a tap tap a lot i think about the end uh like this is you know from the end of the episode but where he's like you could write a depressing play about people coming to terms with things. I think about a play about people coming to terms with things a lot. And like, I do have some affection for this. We're in early October now. And recently in the news, I'm seeing a lot of references to Three Stooges Syndrome, referencing our president getting COVID.

And we're not adding anything to this podcast if anything happens, by the way. Yes. It's October 9th right now 7th 7th so yeah yes uh but i've seen that a lot i'm like people remember season 11 that's interesting yeah i think season 11 we it's turned out is more memorable and more heavily memed as well like i think the the the memeing of it uh has stuck it around more this episode has more things in it i feel like that deserve to be memes than there are i think i can only think of a couple i've seen that are like heavily gift but tapa tapa tapa i think deserves more recognition as well and it's this is just a funny

funny ass episode like i yeah i think the only negatives i would say preemptively about it is there's a few jokes that i'm like i kind of seen a joke like this before in Simpsons, but they're all funny. And the villain of the episode is really great. Like, it's a great one-off character. And it feels like a bit of forgiveness or just mercy after the dark cloud of Alone Again, Natural Deadly, Saddle Sword, Galactica, and Kill the Alligator and Run. Like, the last three are just like oh smooth sailing regular episodes yeah nothing insane or dark or just uh cruel for the viewer maybe it wasn't after kill the alligator and run they're like we got that out of our system let's let's finish this up strong we took it too easy that

week the weirdest thing about this is the magic shoes i feel like and but once you accept the magic shoes like i think this is pretty fun good jokes i like the b plot of this a lot i had basically forgotten about it because it's not as uh i don't associate it like they're very disconnected oh yeah than a lot of times but i really do like the b plot of this i think that it has a bunch of good stuff in it yeah i think of this b plot but i never knew where it belonged until i re-watched this one i'm like when does Bart go to the mall? And I was like, does Bart go camping in this episode? There's something about a big camping trip.

I mean, did you see this one live? Were you a regular viewer back in 2000? Yeah, I watched this shortly after this. I was no longer a regular viewer because I didn't have a TV. I moved out from my parents' house. But at this point, I still had that. And I saw this. This was probably the last season I watched live.

Well, la-di-da, Mr. No TV. Yeah, I didn't even own two TVs. It's even better. And then eventually I came back and revisited all of them through the magic of DVD. But at the time, the little tiny one room roommates. No TV. And this episode originates from the scully family a lot of their episodes are drawn from life because the writer of this episode julie thacker is the wife of mike scully and still is they created duncanville recently and this all stems from a summer in which

they have five girls they need to do something with these girls to keep them you know busy so they enroll them in dance class and this whole episode is written based on that experience and also the experience with the parents and especially the teacher who was a someone who formerly had hollywood aspirations but became increasingly bitter and took all of that out on the children oh my god to get i i mean you think of like local dance teachers in the rest of america like they they might be kind of intense or like oh you you didn't fulfill your dreams but if they're still in hollywood like i bet that dance teacher is like 10 times as bitter about failing because it could almost still happen yeah your parent could come in and enroll their kid and be like you know you have a look and they could just lose their mind i'm sure

you get that also with like a screenwriting class like the guy is your teacher he like wrote one designing women in like 1992 and he's still just waiting for that uh that hollywood rope ladder to come down for him rescue him yeah oh i and i don't think this episode is ripping it off at all uh but on look well that's the great thing oh yeah yeah that he's an acting teacher and that the his students are like can we do shakespeare instead he's like no no watch this episode of my show you'll learn so much more there yeah i mean julie thacker while listening to her on the commentary it's very funny because she is so in mama mode in it which which I really like that she's like, well, you know, maybe

my kids aren't good dancers, but I'd never say that. Never, ever, ever. And it's yeah. Mike Scully is like, remember, you're signing yourself for all of this boring crap when you enroll your kids in things, which made me realize my parents are so smart. They never encouraged me to do it like extracurricular things because I realized like that's that's cutting into their free time. They don't want to watch a boring baseball game full of children.

Soccer games with children having to run back and forth. Awful. Have you ever seen a child play? You know, that you're getting into trouble there. They can't act. They can't sing. They can't dance. They look like garbage.

Like, just children play. What good are they? It's down for me. It's as good as children's theater. And if you're a slightly empathetic person, you also know you can't tell them they're bad at it because you're just like, they're just a kid. They don't know.

Like, you got to be encouraging. I think after trying three sports, my family and I had an understanding. Just like, well, we're not doing this anymore. Yeah, no, I didn't have many after-school programs either. Obviously, I didn't take any tap classes. But I like that Julie, I think she brings a lot to this one

with like mother-daughter stuff too. i think she brings a lot to this one with like mother daughter stuff too i think it's it's a kind of energy they didn't otherwise have in the writer's room in season 11 that is good the one woman in the room i guess yeah yeah yeah and also there's uh so part of this is inspired by real life too and that lisa being inspired to be a dancer from this movie this movie parody believed all the girls wanted to take dance classes because they all had just seen like strictly ballroom on videotape or something the 92 Baz Luhrmann movie so they're like immediately after watching that they're just like dancing around the living room and stuff and they all wanted to try dancing you know now that Julie Thacker all of her daughters are adults I wonder if she'd be honest if you asked her like

so come on were they bad dancers and she she would know she isn't hurting her kids' feelings now. I mean, honestly, listening to this one with the commentary, it made me really now want to, we got to interview Julie Thacker. We've interviewed Mike Scully twice, but I feel like Julie has a lot of things that folks haven't heard because folks aren't asking her as many questions about Simpsons. Let's just call Mike Scully and ask for Julie. Yeah, it's like, hey there, Mike.

So can I get Julie on the phone here, please? Stop interviewing my wife. about simpson let's just call mike scully and ask for julie yeah it's like hey there mike so uh can i get julie on the phone here please stop interviewing my wife um the um the i'm glad you brought up the thing about uh kids like girls seeing uh strictly ballroom and then wine to dance because i have a huge affection for episodes of the simpsons that let lisa be a little girl you know it doesn't happen that often like burke gets to do all kinds of little boy things and lisa always has to be the adult in the room and like things with like the Corey hotline or uh things like this where Lisa is definitively like a little girl as I understood little girls as a little boy uh is just really great to me doesn't feel like she gets a lot a lot of chances for that

yeah that she gets to be that she wants to do something else also I like any jokes where Lisa wants to do something and when she isn't instantly good at it like she is with school work she get she gets sad and she can't deal with that it's relatable very relatable to to all these gifted kids you're hearing on this podcast i'm starting a go fund me it's really hard to be a gifted kid guys i know we already talked about this on malcolm in the middle but it needs to be said again hey guys at what point in the show do i come out as an introvert oh we declare that and then you guys will know how hard it is for me we're gonna spend at least 25 minutes talking about imposter syndrome and our struggles with it uh and and yeah this is uh i think also just a

really great one because they really found something with little vicky like she's she's so great i wish she she returned for later episodes. And we'll talk more about Shirley Temple later, but they wanted to get her and couldn't because of scheduling reasons. And also this is good for me because I just for the first time watched Singing in the Rain.

It's a movie that's just like 90% tap dancing. And while watching this, I was like, they chose the most difficult kind of dancing to animate to go with this episode. The dancing, the moves, just like how fast it is and how you have to get it so right to make it look like tap dancing. It must've been a huge challenge and it sounds like it was for Nancy Cruz, the director. Oh yeah. Nancy Cruz is one of their best directors of season 11. She's maybe the best her unit is, but there's only so much you can do on a TV budget and

time frame. And I feel bad for them. This is already after they had to do a bunch of horse racing and dance stuff in like four episodes ago in Saddle Sword Galactica. And now they have to do like, well, first they have to do the Tango de la Marte and then they got to do a bunch of tap dancing. It's crazy. I feel for them.

Always compliment the animatorsators even if it's an episode you don't like as much so this is i think a good episode but yes as this episode begins uh like many late in season episodes uh especially very season three and four kind of feel it basically starts with homer watching a sketch on television it reminds me of a gian reese episode like season three or four that always starts with like a parody of something. Yeah, there's definitely when a character starts by watching TV, it feels like an Al Jean kind of touch. He's on the show, though. He's on the show at this point, back.

Yeah, that's why I feel like it is. Gene is getting more and more power in the writer's room redirecting things. Because two acts in this this two of the three acts start with watching television and also a lengthy film parody as well like two of them yeah yeah actually two of them but yes the the episode begins with the cyborg organizer the cyborg organizer a high-tech robocop created for one purpose only, to help the NYPD tackle its tedious paperwork. Good work, Cyborgonizer. I can streamline any procedure except this thing you call love.

Oh, poor Cyborgonizer. Homer, sitting that close to the TV can't be good for you. Talking while the TV's on can't be good for you. You should get your eyes checked. I'm taking Bart to the mall to buy camping supplies why don't you come along yeah i want to enjoy this show before the network retools it how can i organize this modeling agency and still be a good single father i love you daddy oh too late so it became like just shoot me and something else yeah you're right it is just you model think and just shoot me uh though i gotta say homer should already he knows the dangers of

retooling because that already happened with police cops in his life except at this point it seems to have happened during the commercial break yes yeah so we're not even really a commercial break just a pause like he just looked away between scenes yeah it's a cut it cuts over to a model cut i love how cyber organizer is a high-tech robocop they don't even like hide yes robocop thing like a free-standing robocop that is a thing the design is robocop and then they just say robocop in his description uh just to get get extra uh direct with it this definitely feels like writers on the staff the aging writers of the staff are maybe getting worsening eyesight and uh we're following that into homer here uh and homer

straight up threatens marge by the way that's true yeah uh i thought in my memory i thought he raised his fist at her even but he holds back from that at least and uh yeah i guess i also got jokes about retooling sitcoms i was trying to remember what was the one that like it happened to the most i watched as a kid definitely was ellen's many different titles of her show with many different friends that come in and out of ellen's life there's a few like hanging with mr cooper changed and ellen changed uh yeah there's it's it's more for the other ones i can think of were like late seasons ones like coach coach for the final year of coach he's like he's not a college guy anymore he's working on a major

league team now uh but yeah homer giving up on the cyber organizer the second he sees he got retooled oh perfect strangers they get married and live in that big house and then it's like wacky town and there are ghosts and whatnot and potions and hot air balloons man i forgot the potions they got family matters wacky in its final season they they saw the way the wind was blowing on tjf if they needed wanted to fit in balky's balky's catchphrases were getting old they needed some magic can they be pirates is there a way to make them pirates the simpsons will be right back a tappa tappa tappa to you great listener thanks again for following us and a big thank you to our guest gary butterfield from watch out for fireballs and all the other great podcasts

duckfeed.tv really cool to have him on this week to talk about such a classic episode and if you enjoy hearing us talk about this and other Simpsons episodes, you should really consider supporting us at patreon.com slash TalkingSimpsons. Why there, for $5 a month, you'll have ever so much fun hearing every TalkingSimpsons podcast one week ahead of time and ad-free. And you'll also get that same courtesy for the What a Cartoon podcast, our sister podcast we do every week alongside TalkingSimpsons. Plus, that $ dollars a month gets you access to our many patreon exclusive podcasts like our weekly for the rest of 2020 talking

futurama podcast where we're covering the back half of season two of futurama one friday at a time only for five dollar and up patrons and if you signed up you'd get to hear that and all of our previous talking futurama podcasts plus our exclusive podcast covering the critic king of the hill and mission hill to boot so please consider signing up today at patreon.com slash talking simpsons for five bucks a month but if you want to have ever so much more fun ten dollars a month gets you the premium subscription patreon.com talking simpsons all that stuff i just talked about and then you get our most exclusive podcast the what a cartoon movie podcast me and bob covering an animated feature film the same way we cover simpsons and other cartoon shows often for over four hours

this month if you signed up you get to hear hear our one for Wallace and Gromit, Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Coming at the end of this month, you're going to get to hear the End of Evangelion podcast. And so, so many. A giant back catalog of them is wide-ranging as Tiny Toon Adventures, Summer Vacation, Akira, Kiki's Delivery Service, A Goofy Movie, Space Jam movie space jam and so so so many more you want to hear them all over a hundred hours of exclusive extra podcast in addition to all the five dollar things if you're a ten dollar and up subscriber at patreon.com slash talking simpson so sign up today so they head off to the mall we get some fun mall kiosk jokes uh i carumba that's a cute name i will

say though i feel like the animators and the team were not given a list of store names, and it was very late in the season because outside of the stores they visit, the stores in the background just have names like Hobbies and Yogurt Hut and Fashion, just like placeholder things. I just feel like they weren't given a list of names to populate the backgrounds with in this episode. Occasionally, you'll see things that were old jokes like the tam o'shea hut or the leftorium appears i wish there had just been a direct leftorium joke in the episode they should steal from the leftorium or break into it or have a joke of ned opening it and they see him in the morning or they got to hide from them there's so little

leftorium on the simpsons like this is a weird weird thing like i remember in the episode uh that's genesis and then in the hurricane yeah but it just doesn't show up very often like you guys are no better than i do but yeah the idea that ned flanders like runs a small business is so unimportant to his character i think that when when al jean takes over the show again in season 13 he does bring back a lot of older elements in leptorium like makes one appearance a season or every few seasons there's like a scene there yeah i think uh i can't recall if there's a leftorium gag next season in the praise land episode but the the last time i can remember like jokes in the leftorium was in listen lady when uh when ned is telling the kids to leave

because they're slacking off and he ends up at donnie's discount desk yeah yeah exactly and the thing about that with ned is that, like, we've got this election coming up, so I've been listening to the political parties. And as a small business owner, like, Ned Flanders is a very coveted demographic. That's true, yeah. And he's got a middle-class family, too.

Yeah. American hero. By the way, all this small business owner talk, they never talk about podcasters. And that, again, much like being a gifted kid like being overlooked here as a small business owner of a podcast it's a real job yeah dad okay uh but i i could also really identify with part i was taken to like these lens crafter type places as a kid and they are very boring and you you want to just start having a fit to leave even though you don't

have your new glasses yet that was before you could just get an ipad and you know be a four-year-old watching joe rogan clips yeah i know how man i i just re-watched the hateful eight for the first time in a long time and there's moments in it where i'm just like oh yeah what did you even do before you couldn't like look at a screen while you're bored? You just have to sit in a cart? Think about your favorite Bible verses. Recite them to yourselves because you've been wicked. They cut to Homer showing that he's got such poor eyesight

he grabbed a baby that's not Maggie. That was baby Gerald. Yeah, and it's handed off to a one-eyebrowed mother as well. Though I double-checked this, in Canine Mutiny, yeah and it's handed off to a one-eyebrowed mother as well uh though i double checked this in canine mutiny the woman holding baby gerald does not have a single eyebrow perhaps that was their au pair yeah she's growing she's changing like i don't know if you guys's eyebrows have come in yet but if you guys i'm sure it'll happen for you if you just wait i've had to turn them back hard i wish there

was like one extra twist to it because when it says oh his eyesight's getting really bad and it cuts to homer throwing a baby your first thought is like yeah it's the not the right baby and i wish there was one extra thing to it instead of just exactly what you think it's like it's like under a magoo joke doesn't even go up to magoo levels of blind jokes so then homer is getting left at the eyeglasses place there's the lead a joke about how it's uh eyeglasses in an hour and how that's impossible did you go to the hour i mean you guys are both uh glasses wearers yes yeah have you like what was your lens crafting like there was at the hour long lens crafting or i think when i was a kid i did get it a couple times but I think eventually we just settled for

my regular optometrist and we just go every year or two and get get the ones that have to be sent away for I should also say uh by 15 I was getting uh worse than regular vision so the hour-long places I think they would even tell you like no no he needs he needs stronger than we could do in an hour we need special glass for this send away for those antique coke bottles yeah same thing i ended up going to a place in my hometown called specks express which i don't think is a chain i think i think it's local but i could be wrong uh and in no way was it express um it was it was glass as molasses like it was it was very slow and i just had to wait i know i haven't been i'd be pathetic if i had been sitting on that glasses molasses joke for like a long time

i swear to you i just came up with that that's good you and the listeners there's actually i was planning that sad there's actually a store in berkeley i don't know if it's still open but it has a simpsons caliber pun name uh it's called sight for sore eyes s-i-t-e and i got my vision check there when i was like running out the clock on my insurance for my last job like all right check everything out and you found out your eyesight's great you're like it's perfect in fact you wasted my time get out as bart's taking away this again it's the henry guilt about uh things corner but every time i see like the kids being a jerk to the mom who's just trying to shop with them,

I think about how I was probably many times a bad kid who was impatient when all my mom wanted to do was buy me clothes. Like, how dare she? But I was not a patient shopper as a kid. The way Bart gets out of it, though, is through method acting tantrums. Come on, Bart. While your dad gets his glasses, we'll go shop for your trip. Oh, I hate shopping. Just give me a deck of cards

and I'll win whatever I need from the other kids. But you need to try things on. Every brand has a different idea of husky. I'm in tantrum position. T minus five, four, three, remembering dead cat for real tears. Fine, you win. I'll do your shopping for you tantrum averted

but now i can't forget the cat snowball one yeah so many callbacks in this episode all right not just any old dead cat they didn't make one up he's uh i bet he was probably pretty brokenhearted about snowballing actually i guess if you take it that they're always eight and ten it happened within a year snowball one's death so did you guys remember getting clothes where you wouldn't have a number assigned to your size you just have a kind of mean adjective oh sure yes yeah like i remember getting husky clothing it's like uh boy okay thanks clothes no i I was a beanpole, so things were just held up to me and purchased. They didn't have a mean stick boy or anything like that for you. No, I definitely had to.

I'll just say that King of the Hill episode, Husky Bobby, really spoke to me. They don't use that word anymore, do they? I don't know. I wonder if there's a nicer word for it now like extra extra large pants or whatever soft dig rubenesque uh that's uh that'd be sweet i'd like that over husky it does uh point out like yeah bart has like he has the same like light bulb body as every man on the simpsons yeah it's one of those jokes where every every five years or so they remember like a part is kind of fat like that or well a little overweight like they uh actually i guess this is kind a little

bit similar to when he took karate in flanders failed uh lisa doing this class but i remember in that episode they don't draw a part any differently they just like zoom in on his gut and have his stomach like pop out a little bit it's a good reminder apparently uh the husky size still exists and uh cole's the the cole's company defines husky as a roomier fit throughout the waist for growing boys who need a little extra room around the middle there should be a little winking emoticon after that that's great i i love that like i'm just a growing boy who wouldn't want more room would you want less room i just realized this when you when you talked about doing the close-up on bart's gut during the karate thing is that sometimes like bart has the

same proportions as mega man like every once in a while mega man you can see his gut like when he does the top man spin or something like that or certain jumps. That's where he holds all those things he shoots. It's his ammo gut, his ammo sack. He's been eating too many E-tanks, that's what I say. But yeah, so Bart then stays behind just to taunt his dad with, I don't want to blame every joke I don't fully like on Al Jean, but that I ate pee pee joke really does feel like an early season one or two bart style rambunctiousness joke of like in the in the early seasons bart does things that like oh that's what

a kid would do like no extra joke to it or anything and that includes writing i8pp it's really just to set up the classic better or worse better or worse like that uh my eye doctor says uh better one or better two better two or better three better two or better three like better two or better four like that's the uh the i'm still on the same old machine they haven't changed 20 years later uh at the very least my local optometrist still uses that same big heavy thing they just lower down i think that if like it was the end of the world and i couldn't find my glasses, the idea of mounting one of those to my head, the better thing, and just kind of going around like a power armor.

Because it would function as glasses. And you'd be good forever because as your eyes got worse, you'd just flip it to the next number. Yeah, because I have to adjust. No, I mean, as a glasses wearer, that is a fear of mine and apocalyptic visioning. Like, well, that glasses is i'm really in a lot of trouble it's that twilight zone episode they let you know ahead of time like have a backup

pair on you yeah again or like or you're you will also be suicidally sad like the man in that so uh homer tries on a bunch of glasses which even he's kind of bored by uh and they have a joke about glasses val kilmer val kilmer wears which uh you know i'm actually just for saying his name i'm just gonna play that anti-death jingle no safe i ain't dead yet is has has some sort of illness befallen val oh he's been suffering from throat cancer for a couple years now okay uh you i found that out because he has a cameo in jay and silent bob reboot and that it is hey silent bob it's batman well he doesn't talk at all in it so okay and i was like boy he looks weird what's going on yeah val doesn't say anything and he plays silent bob in the movie uh and basically he like stood in

front of a green screen for like five seconds and like yeah they'll kill her how you like that it feels like most appearances in that movie were just like someone was sent a green screen and an iphone and they were told like hey kevin smith almost died all right get in front of this green screen and say these lines uh and save for yoko ono that was for yoko ono as well she ruined plastic ono bands i love homer brings up that she ruined a band that she started instead of saying that it was the beatles she ruined she ruined the band that she began with i guess really it was more of an art project not just a band with john lennon the uh plastic ono band

uh and then we get our second joke in this season about the dangers of laser eye surgery. Maybe you're a candidate for laser eye surgery. Will you get me out of having to choose classes? Well, yes, but I must warn you it's an experimental procedure and we still don't know the long-term effect. Less zapping, more zapping. Well, looks like we got everything for Bart's camping trip. Lair of witch repellent, antler Saw, and Deepwood Scrabble. Ooh, Tango de la Muerte. I've been dying to see that movie.

It got rave reviews from both the Entertainment Radio Network and the Radio Entertainment Network. Let's go. Wait, you've got to use these drops. They prevent your eyes from crusting over. Here we go with the add-ons. No thanks. Oh, truly vile joke. One of the grossest things that happens in this show. We have to remind ourselves there is a Ren and Snippy writer on the staff. That feels like a Ren and Snippy joke.

Eyes crusting over. Eyes crusting over with mucus is a very Ren and Snippy thing. Yeah, you're right yeah and there's a grosser joke like and i think the next season where uh ralph touches like homer's wound and it like scabs over his hand yes and he says it knows you're afraid yeah that's from that i got the eye crusting over i kept waiting for him to say that kind of line in here but i i mixed it up with yes it's children of a lesser clod from season 12 that's the one where where homer becomes a good father to everybody but his children thanks to a knee injury uh and

yeah i feel like this comes right after the joke about how in the future ned's eyes fell out because he got uh laser eye surgery they don't tell you after 10 years your eyeballs fall out well i looked it up and uh weird al got lasik in 98 january 98 so his eyes are still intact yeah he's he's good 22 years on now yeah i uh i mean if you want to hear look i'm not going to repeat all the laser eye information i shared in uh in that podcast but uh it's not dangerous i'll just say that or relatively not dangerous like i think it's like less than five percent people suffer eye pain afterwards it doesn't cause like barbecue smoke to walk out of the operating room uh i again i never had it because of jokes like these they

terrify me i'm just like uh i mean the the the risks seem they're the same on home movies there's an episode all about being blinded by laser eye surgery what a weird uh what a weird agenda tv had at the time it feels like like the fact that actually influenced you and and probably influenced more people to not get it the laser eye council should have been spending more money lobbying for the hollywood writers to get laser eye surgery there's probably like a picture of weird al in every lasik surgery center just like thumbs up smiling yeah these these aren't glass don't follow ion on like these and uh the first of two next week's episode also has a blair witch joke to really ground this in the early 2000s this is like the summer after right yes yeah that was what a summer of blair witch that was i uh i

don't know about you guys i saw it in theaters excitedly i only found out after seeing it that it was fake that uh so i even like fully bought into it too i didn't see it because i i thought it was fake and i didn't want to buy into i was i was too much of like a jerk to be like well i can't even buy into this if it's fake so i still haven't seen it i got i got to have the experience of not you know kind of missing the the cultural hype cycle of it at first and having a friend bring over a bootleg on a vhs tape which was the ultimate immersive experience hell yeah like just being real uh it was pretty cool and then later i looked into it i was like oh yeah okay this is actually a thing and i just don't watch enough trailers so this this tango de la muerte thing there are like two full

film parodies in this episode which i find interesting but we're talking about uh aljean we're slagging on him we're gonna scare him away from our show but one of his trademarks and he's not even in charge of this season but one of his trademarks is like a too late parody of something which is why there's a seat there's an episode next season called children of a lesser clod yes yeah uh this one feels like it's referencing the like uh lombada movie craze of 1990 with both the forbidden dance and lombada being competing movies about lombada in 1990 the one they reference on the commentary of strictly ballroom like that was eight years old when this came out so that was like early boz lerman like uh like uh moulin rouge i think was just about to come out when this uh when this episode aired uh but i mean there's always going to be dancing

movies for young people to watch like that's it's one of those genres that they just they they have a formula and then every five years they just make a new one of those in that exact formula because there's a new generation of little boys and girls to watch that kind of stuff. And there were so many jokes about like Lombada in Mad Magazine and on comedies as I was becoming aware of like, oh, here's the kind of comedies I like and I'm understanding the world now. To me for like at least 18 months, I thought Lombadaada was like you're just having public sex in front of people uh i i also really like the joke about lisa saying the entertainment radio network and the radio entertainment network i read that as a great joke about how at least back then you'd see posters that would have like positive reviews on them and you'd be like wow this got four stars and then you look on you squint your eyes and look underneath it and and see it's like a thing you've never heard of like

the radio entertainment network now like clear channel is what like i love music or something like that i heart radio i heart radio yeah just like well i heart radio too they got to be right uh i'd heard all these bad things about clear channel but i heart radio they heart it and uh don't bob you're gonna get us not purchased but i heart radio they heart it and uh don't bob you're gonna get us not purchased by i heart radio for an exclusive podcast i'm holding up for spotify the uh i love i associate lisa with those kind of jokes about like just the inanity of language and you know things were just kind of meant to accept for like for some reason that joke reminds me of um the pier one or that pier one down by pier 17 or the uh the bus like oh you're

looking for the 92a you know uh you know things like that like these just really dumb little uh you know there are unlimited words out there but we keep taking the same ones and putting them in different orders in ways that are confusing and hostile i also like this comes from like a mother-daughter experience like marge it sees this movie that you also see all the the women in line for it it's it's all yeah it's like edna krabappel and luanne van houten are in line just to really let you know it's a chick flick and so it's marge excited to see a chick flick and when she takes lisa to it lisa is totally engrossed with it like julie thacker has this great comment on the commentary

about how like little girls don't know how tired these tropes are when you take them to these movies so when they see the nerd girl they go like she'll never dance with her no way and that shot like she's holding shoes oh yeah in one of her hands like a book in the other but yeah they like gary was saying they let lisa be a little girl she's not too smart for this movie she's not someone who's seen a million movies and knows every movie trick so she's instead instantly falling for it also this really gave me feels like i forgot it was also in the same season the zoro film parody yeah i wrote down the poke of zoro as well because i think it's just just Hank Azaria playing a Latin guy. I guess, yes, you're right. It's that.

And also how there's lines like in this one that give away that there's so, you imagine such a crazier movie around lines like reattached foot and wise alcoholic dance coach. Like, what have they been seeing in the film up to this scene? It is like the characters in the movie are catching the Simpsons audience up with what they didn't see in the movie yet uh but yes the uh the dance instructor the the star of the movie he's looking for dance partners and you don't have to tell those horny animators to draw sexy dance partners this is seriously i say i've said it before i'll say it again this is the most like bo-filled Simpsons season there ever was. But yes, Lisa is really enjoying this movie. Now that my severed foot has been reattached, I must win back the coveted dance title, Loco Legs.

As your wise but alcoholic dance coach, I know that somewhere your father is looking down on you and smiling. Oh, there he is and now i must choose a beautiful partner for the big dance contest no oh he'll never dance with her she'll have have to settle for some Mexican millhouse. I demand to know your name. My name is Lisa Bella. That's my name with Bella on the end of it. Ask her, oh God, please ask her to dance. I shall dance with her.

Que malo. Once again, I must sugar my own churro. Oh man, Mexican millhouse made me laugh a lot. It did. Mexican millhouse is gonna go masturbate alone yes the joke yeah this is a real direct uh he's going ghastly double entendre he's going straight to the bathroom and getting that done once again once again this outs mexican millhouse as a public masturbator

i'm looking on the wiki the trivia section for this wow uh and uh you know obviously in the new rules of uh simpsons casting these would not be the voice actors doing these parts but it is funny to see that the makers of the film knew about millhouse and cast a guy like millhouse to be the uh the baxter i guess would be the term for it and lisa sorry arlie smith plays both lisa bella and lisa jr in this season yeah two like lisa stand-ins this has to be the most uh she played a non-lisa part in one season yeah uh and i i love the design on lisa bella i mean her transformation her hottie transformation is so great it's again mocking the the nerd takes off the glasses and undoes the ponytail kind of bit and but the extra flourish is that somehow it

also enlarges her breasts oh yeah yeah like the dip makes her breasts pop out yeah uh what she likes she enjoys every part of it oh no the spin does sorry so that makes sense scientifically sure the propulsion augmented her breasts or moved them around but yeah that lisa is just all in as they come to the finale of the the film uh i think their finale costumes are like straight out of strictly ball room i think or they look like the outfits on the poster uh and again another great line of like where he died i shall live in his apartment the dancing is great like him spinning uh her around his body and it's like sonic the hedgehog kind of oval you're right it is just like sonic's feet yeah the and uh man the animators already are tasked with like dry crazy crazy dance like start with the tango and then have it turn extra cartoonish this

though this is the same season where homer does basically the same dance to marge at uh the jack rabbit slims parody right right and also at some point during the dance he impregnated her she no one knows it's a mystery so i was correct in the Labada is just public sex. Oh, okay. A public sex act. Exciting. And your old Bob was correct. And so Lisa is in love with dancing. Oh, Mom, I want to be a dancer. That's wonderful, honey.

We should ask your father, though. Where is he anyway? Now, homie, when we get to the liquor store, buy me some Jack Daniels and a carton of smokes. Yes, dear. I mean, I love when anyone else in the voice acting cast gets to make fun of Marge's voice. Yes. Or in real life.

Like, I'm very sensitive to a Marge impersonation because it's such a hard voice to get right. Even Julie Kavner can't do it anymore. You sound so ghoulish when someone else does it. Like it's a Crypt Keeper kind of thing. Nancy's in particular. I love it. Like her doing it in Kearney there. It also reminds me of the one where he sure can.

Nancy is masterful at doing it. Do I sound like that? And I i also it's really cute animation of lisa dancing out of the theater that's really nice uh but yeah homer got kidnapped and i wonder how he got the the kid the family even got home that day maybe eventually homer wiped that mucus out of his eyes uh also i noticed that uh clearly they didn't feel like doing a retake jimbo's hat miscolored oh okay i must have missed that is he in the back seat yeah he's in the back seat giggling with dolph and if you look at jimbo's uh typically purple hat here it is brown brown yeah uh not brown are you okay you sang brown an awful lot and so we come back from commercial break straight to

little vickies i love the shot of the finger the automatic finger grinding into the dimple on the sign it's a great sign it's been doing that for a long time they must have to like fix it every like year or so it just gets ground down and I'm really glad they didn't get Shirley Temple Black in there because, you know, the late Shirley Temple Black. But Tress McNeil is probably 20 times funnier than Shirley Temple would have been in this. Like she is so, Tress McNeil, she can do like, she's channeling a lot of, I think, Dot in here. It's similarities to her dot character well where dot can be an animaniacs you know nice and cute but every once in a while like boom just like turns on it and uh but she brings so much like angry aged negativity to the role it does right beneath the surface i love that

with little vicky and do we have anybody on the podcast have familiarity with shirley temple the the real life uh lady child star of the great depression not a ton myself now i i watched a youtube in preparation of this and it was uh not unlike the parody you know that comes later it was you know a little less extra but it was a kid dancing yeah you know which has previously established i'm against she uh she was a like a huge star like supposedly saved ho in the Great Depression because their movies were so big. And I have a connection

because my grandma is also named Shirley, RIP, and was born in the same year, the year of Shirley's, 1928. But I recommend in quotes. So she was just like a, you know, her movies are adorable and cute and she was just very precious and was a

great dancer and everything and supposedly wasn't abused too much like uh judy garland you know she got to live until she was like in her 80s judy garland seemed much more scarred by it than shirley temple black was yes but i recommend it in big quotes here and you might get flagged by the fbi if you watch this but it's on youtube if you look up her her first role it was in this series of shorts called baby burlesques and uh it is just like nine minutes of child abuse on camera and in this short it's a fun short where uh it's like a bar set in world war one amid world war one little three-year-old shirley temple plays a sex worker trying to get GIs to come up and see her sometime and uh and uh yeah real children are crying in this short and uh yeah it's uh it's called War

Babies it yes it was very upsetting yeah I watched I could only watch like a minute of it skipping around because I was like god just again there was no standards for how to film children then and they're just like i just put a make a mac hot lights on them all day like drink no yeah like you can just imagine the director off camera yelling at them like no pick up the milk you did you would just go back to the bar and pick up the milk right now you call that a strip tease oh god yes take two uh i'm not i'm not even kidding there's like a strip tease joke with her being like a stripper it's horrifying yeah it really is the nice thing is thinking about shirley temple this whole time i kept having the phrase shirley

temple of elemental evil pop into my head which is a dnd joke but that is more wholesome than the child stripper i like it reality her her like true hollywood career was more wholesome than the child stripper reality. Her true Hollywood career was more wholesome than that. But she started in those body shorts. And I guess her name still lives on in the drink, the Shirley Temple, which is the ultimate virgin drink, I suppose. And I think the Fox commissary is called the Shirley Temple commissary or the building. And we ate there. That's right. They mentioned it on the commentary.

Yeah, you're right, man. So we have more of a connection to this than i thought uh great grilled cheese sandwich is that that commissary as a quality day i mean though if you ate anything after the fun day we had i think you'll like the taste of it i think if they handed you like a moldy sandwich you'd be like i'm so happy to have sat in the same room with dan castellanet i don't care what i mean uh but yes let's meet little vicky i remember little vicky valentine her perky smile and dancing brought america right out of the depression well i think world war ii helped a little mom don't smart mouth lisa a great big sunshine hello to you hi little vicky oh that was such a long time ago i'm just plain Vicky now.

All right. I'd like to sign my daughter up for lessons, Vicky. Little Vicky. But you just said... So what dance style were you interested in? We have ever so many. There's ballroom. Ow!

You stepped on my toes again. If you would just let me lead. You're not a leader, Seymour. Never have been, never will be. There's square dancing. Ah, the birdie in the cage, out lady in the center. Now the birdie is birdie and the crows hop in. Put the feather all together, hell bent for leather.

Put your honey in the saddle... Or there's the dance that made me ever so famous, tap. But I want to learn a dance I can use in real life, like the tango de la muerte. Oh, bless your heart. Let's get you some tap shoes. Little Vicky, I really think she had her heart set on. Little advice?

Don't live through your child. Okay. It's great. Like, Tress McNeil can do six different kinds of old ladies. Yeah. Oh, God. She's so... I can't think of playing this this any better because she totally is

just as like oh that was so many years ago please call me vicky it's little vicky yeah yeah god just the mind games right off the bat yeah and it's great uh setup of the shot too because she's like that was so many years ago surrounded by black and white photographs of herself from from childhood i love that now it's also the name of the studio yes henry i know you're a fan of the the sweet girl drinks as they're called i enjoy them from time to time have you ever had a shirley temple you know i haven't actually it's non-alcoholic so yes yeah that's well if i'm gonna have a girl drink it better have liquor in it that's that's how i feel give me a judy garland that's just a handful of pills oh

bless your heart judy i love that i love that square dancing joke in this where he's just kind of saying this uh string of rhyming nonsense and all the dancers just kind of shrug at each other what does the crow come together and then find it in a feather mean in terms of dance did we all have to take square dancing in uh in school i did in ohio it definitely happened during a gym class it wasn't a dedicated i think i could have taken a dedicated square dancing class but didn't but uh there definitely were gym classes of all right let's do it and of course we played achy breaky heart to hear the modern square dancing yeah i mean it feels weird now to think about it but it was just like the remnants of a program engineered to destroy jazz to promote like American, quote unquote, real American music.

I think like Henry Ford was behind it. They should make you read the Bill of Rights in the As You Square Dance just to fully program you. I also like a good little joke about Skinner being a simp and not being able to lead. I like that. I use that word ironically, guys. I also like that Vicky instantly disarms Marge and just like, don't try to live through your children. And Marge just shuts down.

Like, oh yeah, sorry. And same too. I wonder if little Vicky gets extra money from teaching tap to people instead of like selling the tap shoes and everything. I also bet that little Vicky couldn't do the Tango Del la muerte and that's why she's uh not gonna teach it uh and so meanwhile bart and millhouse are gonna head off to a week of camping uh i wonder if this bit of them about to go camping and then realizing the bullies are gonna do are gonna torture them if somebody pointed out like you know it's kind of like camp crusty and they're like okay let's let's uh veer off somewhere else no they escape from that bat from

that b story uh i do like seeing millhouse throughout his ear medicine that's a good joke too yeah that's like the third uh ear medicine joke in the show so far i think oh yeah there's a cat ear medicine uh your medicine joke with the nerds oh yes yeah he forgets his ear medicine forgot his ear medicine yeah your medicine is just the funniest kind of medicine uh i guess it is like an extra level of nerdy it's like an asthma inhaler it's like well you know he does kind of need that to live but ear medicine is even even dorkier to me heat i love the cat ear medicine that has the pull tab oh yeah like easy chug, like, easy chugging. That's right. I just watched that episode last night. Me and my girlfriend have been watching three House of Horror episodes for October.

I love, Homer loved that cat ear medicine. You know, maybe it's actually, well, I should be drinking it. It maybe tastes really great. Could be very alcoholic, too. But, yes, Bart and Milhouse decide they're going to have a different bee story this episode. Yes, sir. This is going to have a different B story this episode. Well, I don't want to go home. My grandma's sleeping in my bed and she has skin like a basketball. Wait a minute. Everybody thinks we're at camp this week.

We can stay wherever we want. Yeah, like the Four Seasons. Each room has its own safe. I've got a better place. The mall? Yeah, it's just like my dad always says. For an evening or a week, there's no place like the mall. fun and fashion the mall has it all what what did he say homer is really brainwashed by this mall propaganda uh i love that joke that millhouse couldn't see the thought balloon and

so he's so confused like i love any variant on a character thinking of something and then the scene continuing as normal. Just the characters. This is a great extra spin on it because we've already seen this season, like in Saddlesore Galactica, of what does it look like to watch Homer have a vision? So this one instead, we get to see the thought balloon, but Milhouse didn't.

And he's just very disturbed why by bart wouldn't tell him what his dad says and uh and also i like the millhouse loves that there's a safe in every room in the four seasons that's pretty funny uh and so uh meanwhile as the boys run off lisa learns the key to tap dancing now the key to great dancing is one word. Tapa, tapa, tapa. Tapa, tapa, tapa. Teacher, my shoes are making noise. You must be Ralph. My daddy shoots people.

I forgot that reaction. I get it now that her reaction is him. She doesn't know his dad's a cop. So she's just like, what? What did your dad do? Surprisingly, 2020. Oh, yeah. Just straight up admit it.

I like how unhelpful just tap a tap a tap is. It's like, duh, it's tap dancing. It reminds me of this is this is for nobody and it's hard to explain. But there are these these birthday boy sketches about like tips for how to do sports correctly and it's just them like owning at every sport it's like just hit it in the hole yeah it's that easy just hit it in the hole now it's uh this also really captures like a frustrating thing not just when you're in a class but also as an adult of like having a bad instructor or a bad teacher just like well the, the way that you do it is you just do it. Or just the outright refusal to help in any way.

And on top of that, you get a lot from Vicky. Those are some of my favorite lines of hers from this forward where it's about how Vicky is scarred by her childhood and she's passing along that pain to others. She can't break that pattern so instead she's like well i i wish i had tapa tapa tapa but yeah it's just tapa tapa tapa i suppose it's like through rote memorization maybe and constantly repeating one action maybe it'd be better tap dancing i suppose the weird thing is it works really well for everyone else it's true like everyone else instantly learns the tap dance ralph wiggum best among them but even just you know sherry and terry like everyone gets really good at it just from

tapa tapa tapa it's been like um seven years since i love lisa and ralph wiggum was just a real showman in that episode he was a true thespian so he's good at performing i think oh yeah wait this is president's day weekend as well isn't it right you're right wow i hadn't thought of that it's like his talents only come out on president's day he's like a very specific like canthrope yes just on president's day weekend he turns into a star and i mean of course too if you're gonna do comedy show about a dance class you need to have some jokes about the one boy in the class. So since Milhouse is busy with Bart, then it has to be Ralph. Like I could see in another episode where Milhouse isn't in the B plot. It's Milhouse who is the good dancer in the class, though.

I guess Lisa, I prefer Lisa partnered with Ralph jokes than Lisa partnered with Milhouse jokes. I think actually that joke earlier in the episode, that to me is how I feel about like, why does Lisa always have to get partnered with Milhouse? She shouldn't settle for Milhouse. I don't like this. I hate the Lisa in Milhouse dark future. I like the Milhouse doesn't count future. Exactly.

She had a one, one time thing withhouse for and we all just look over it uh and yeah so uh i i also couldn't help but identify with lisa as the awkward nerd who's like oh just do it it's easy and then uh when you're not instantly good at it having everybody laugh at you as you try to learn it's uh sucks it's not fun yeah well this happens a little bit later but it's a similar scene when she relocates herself to be further away from the teacher oh yeah yeah little crooked here that was highly relatable like anytime when i was in school and there would be some kind of group activity like we were all learning the recorder those weird little kid instruments you have to

learn that nobody plays as an adult uh and me just like not feeling confident in it and just trying to be as far away from the teacher as possible and just not making noise you know just faking it you know my mom she still picks up the recorder every now and then and enjoys really yes yes she's well my mom plays a lot of instruments so uh not you know on a on an amateur level but she's good hey i love my mom she's great at playing all music. She's the best. So we cut back to the mall. We have a quick Moog selling store joke, which is there was a real spate of them at this time,

wasn't there, Bob? Yeah, I mean, I think it's definitely referenced in Mission Hill, the organ store. And just like, yeah, this was like the end of the mall piano slash organ store. But this scene is weird because there's the there's a cut scene that pays off this guy because he will go on to sing about the shoplifting policy at the store yeah it's funny here there's uh me and bob watched the deleted scenes together right before

recording and there's like a few in here that just go like oh that's really funny they should have kept that in but especially i i wish we'd seen just a little more of this guy desperate to sell his moog or his morgue and not a move yeah there's like as a big keyboard dork like this this this turned me into an internet pet ant because i'm like that doesn't sound anything like a move like a moog like a moog has a very specific sound and then i realized oh it's supposed to be a corg which is another you know thing but adding the m there kind of muddies it oh so it's kind of it's similar to the the moog logo but it doesn't sound anything like it sorry i'm mispronouncing it with that moog i'm uh i'm a philistine hey man i i could totally be wrong too i think it's mo no it's it is moog it's actually mog i play final fantasy quite a bit the sounds that come out of that guy uh yeah i think duckman had a uh a mogs show store joke

as well i think when when we did that podcast oh yeah the fun machine was that that was mission ill okay now i'm thinking of one of them too in his house too so yeah that was the other one we've had so many of those jokes in in recent. This was like, I think 80s was peak mall, but this is just as people were learning about buying things online. So I think the decline happened here. Like this is the beginning of the downfall of the mall. Yeah, you're right. In 2000, this is one of the last times I could make a joke about like the mall. We all go there.

We know these things. Hadn't been killed by amazon and the big box retailers just yet now this this has to be the end of malls right right now if they're not dead already they this this is it this is just yeah they're in hospice care yeah there's a mall uh close to my old house that i moved from and what was really interesting was in kind of an attempt to stay alive um they were taking those those empty kind of dead storefronts and doing pop-up, like local pop-ups. Like, do you want like a taste of Portland? You know, do you want to get locally handmade coffee and stuff?

And they would just rent it temporarily. It'd be like one month only. Okay. Yeah. It made me kind of excited for the idea of a mall that, you know, centers that. Like the idea of a rotating selection of shops that are just there for a month or two like actually sounded kind of neat to me but i have no idea how successful it was i still like malls a lot and when i visited home for the last time uh a few

years ago or a year ago rather i went to my local mall i probably talked about this on podcast before but it is like 80 of the storefronts are closed it might as well be abandoned and then there is like local stores in it and maybe like oh that chick-fil-a is still open that was predates me but that's basically it you can't stop the the christian chicken seller they know they've got christ on their side and they're very close to an entrance which is why they're still around and whenever i go to canada hopefully i'll be going there a lot more soon uh I would have my my fiance like just take me to a mall I want to see what Canadian malls are like and for whatever reason at least in

Vancouver malls are thriving like people go to malls every storefront is open there's like crowds here it reminded me of like being in the mall like 1994 that's wild I mean well when I visited Tokyo their malls were still pretty active up until early 2018 that's the last time i was there but yeah i think uh you know i haven't visited my local childhood mall in like five years and it was basically it was like basically a movie theater that was still active attached to a rotting body like that pretty much everything else was uh was gangrene except for that movie theater uh but yeah it's bart and millhouse are having some fun at the mall they didn't find out it's closing and

they don't know what to do uh they go they run up into the air vents i like bart's direction of like quiet just keep scurrying that's a good one i love that it happens uh immediately including trapping stan oh yeah inside there the shutters just roll down instantly and you see stan disappear behind the metal door uh i guess he's uh just gonna enjoy his uh his machines all night long so yeah then bart and millhouse uh drop down into some kind of store and they realize they're surrounded by it's they think they land in golden worms but it turns out it's chocolate and gummy gummy and i do think their their reactions and this montage is it's just so similar to the season nine thing where bart and ralph have the the magic key all right it is like kid chaos having kid like unlimited freedom as a kid yeah and and very specifically like um dawn of the dead

yeah yeah you know like uh oh you're being alone in a consumer paradise and having no rules it was fantasy yeah i mean there's a zombie reference later and it was pretty hip to reference dawn of the dead in in the year 2000 oh yeah yeah that was that was the cool guy thing like you could really get a lot of cred if you said um dawn of the dead is way better than night of the living dead okay what it says about consumerism is chilling and also in accidents but uh but yes barton uh barton millhouse's reaction to the candy it's a cute little clip clip here where are we going why it just keeps growing worms gold wait this is just chocolate chocolate and these are gummy worms gummy warheads jelly bellies we're like two kids in a candy store yes uh when i did like the gag of bart eating that one type of fruit flavored candy and

like it losing flavor within four seconds and just spitting it out that's uh i think it's pretty realistic for that old timey candy it reminded me of working at a grocery store we had all those like giant like bins full of bulk candy and it took me like a few months into working there to realize like oh just steal food it's fine everyone's stealing food left and right so just like you'd be stocking shelves you just swing by the candy aisle grab some pieces of candy and you know hit the road oh man that's so that's so nice when i worked at the movie theater you had to like whoops somebody returned an m&m's uh cash out too bad and then you just eat it it's been 20 years i can't be tried for this uh well just like marge eating that grape

though you need to apologize to god bob you broke a command i'll make my peace with him soon enough also in there they're bits i like them going to the uh the big cookie store which uh homer bought a big cookie from in season two big cookie stores are no longer a thing uh man the original cookie is what it was called well that uh well also that type of candy bin thing. I feel like that is another thing. The virus cleanliness has gotten rid of, too. All of our Mr. Bulkies are just being set on fire now, cleansing them.

I don't miss communal food troughs. I think that that was probably something we should have thought of before the pandemic. But it puts you closer with your fellow man when you're all like putting your gross fingers on the same thing just sticking that filthy hepatitis covered shovel into a bin full of warheads the mall is like the number one place for communal bins because that's how you get legos as well ah yeah i remember just feeling really good to put my hand in a bunch of legos and then realizing how many kids horrible disease limits have gone in there well let's not even talk about the fun pits in uh i also i like that behind the scenes at the giant cookie place that they just have a giant roll of pre-made cookie dough that they slice out that's

really great yeah they name check toll house for some reason. That's the cookie dough choice. And I like the... I think of the only memes I've seen made of this one, the image of the stuff shooting out of Milhouse's nose, I think I have seen that one shared around. Just because it's a funny... It's a funny Milhouse drawing. And Big Cookie, I wonder if that's the one with Macam and Damien. That's the Bart's eating.

And then then very briefly it becomes a jaws parody oh right yeah oh my god look at this place how could this happen candy chewed wigs pulled from stands cheese packages poked and repoked every sign points to one obvious culprit a giant rat you'll have to shut down the mall don president state weekend are you crazy crazy with concern for the public yes now shut this place down before the old folks come in for their morning walk and that's our dawn of the dead joke yes yeah that's great i uh man but just that it becomes like a giant shark and the cop trying to shut it down but he actually succeeds he does a lot better than uh roy scheider roy scheider whatever but

how he does it in jaws rob schneider rob schneider thank you i kind of want to be uh i kind of want to be a mall walker now basically every morning i walk i walk around my neighborhood a couple miles so you know in a way i'm a mall walker and i i see actually the same a couple of old uh old folks walking by and we wave at each other now we've got we got that level of familiarity but also cheese packages poked and repoked great line yeah which is what kids do man if i saw a cheese package as a kid poke definitely poking that cheese it's so cold and satisfying uh then squishes right back it's like cold silly putty uh but uh but yeah so wigum it briefly is going to become a wigum versus the boys kind of thing uh while meanwhile lisa is

having a really hard time learning to dance okay Okay, from Tapa Tapa Tapa. Lisa's bad dancing makes my feet sad. Ugh, let's take five. What am I doing wrong, little Vicky? Well, you're falling a lot. Maybe you should work on that. Well, no offense, but maybe I need a little more instruction than just Tapa Tapa Tapa. Why, back when I was your age, I had 43 movies under my belt,

and I had to do it without tappa, tappa, tappa. I would have killed for tappa, tappa, tappa. Sorry, I'm just frustrated. Well, you'll never save Grandpa's farm with that attitude. You've just got to turn that frown upside down. That's a smile, not an upside-down frown. Work on that, too. I love it. Work on that, work on that too oh so mean so mean

well it's like lisa can't do anything right in little vicky's eyes like that and and it's it's so real how they've got little vicky like when i was growing up i didn't even have that so you're lucky and also uh i have no other way to teach you other than just say you suck uh it's you feel so bad for lisa but vicky like even she can't do a smile what is the difference when you smile and upside down frown vicky knows whatever it was lisa was not doing it uh and also just say like you're not gonna save grandpa's farm that way. Another great line. Like, ah, everything little Vicky says. I just love it. Really good.

The next scene begins with Homer and Marge getting a postcard from Bart. I feel like Bart's in danger of revealing his whole scheme by sending him that. Yeah, classic blunder on Bart's part. Writing from the old vitamin barn. Yeah, the idea of getting a vitamin barn postcard is hilarious to me. And I would do that like i think that sending a postcard that's the outside of a mall story is very funny uh i guess mark could count on homer not getting it and having no thoughts about it uh and so then lisa appears

and like many of us who start a thing and you're instantly not good at it you want to quit i i i mean i had this with uh and i didn't have a little vicky i had very supportive teachers but it was when i was taking japanese class uh as an adult like eight years ago i did good with the first one because they were like afternoon classes on the weekend but then the second run of it was 7 a.m in the city and i was like i don't fucking live in the city i gotta wake up at 5 a.m to do i i did it for two weeks and then i was like fuck this like i i should have stuck with it i probably could be uh chatting away in conversational japanese now if i hadn't uh but someday someday there'll be a japanese class that won't be at a bad time of the day for me uh but yeah in this case marge and homer are the most supportive they have ever

been to lisa in the show the complete opposite how they usually act there's our broadway baby hey dig that crazy rhythm. I'm just walking. Listen, I know I said I wanted to be a dancer, but... And you will be a dancer. Look at you, all sugar and spice instead of equations and test tubes. You're daddy's precious dancing queen. And you look adorable. Now, honey, what were you trying to say before we kept interrupting with our loving proudness?

Yes, our tiny tapper. What was it you were going to say after I wanted to be a dancer, but? But I just need more practice. See ya. Oh, what's that awful sound? The furnace? It's me. Oh.

They have some good apparent blindness there. I love that. I love the term loving proudness. Like, that's so funny. I like that Homer's line also makes it clear that he's, in a very sexist way, happy that Lisa is doing something feminine instead of test tubes. Equations and test tubes. Yeah. is doing something feminine instead of uh test two equations and test tubes yeah uh and they the

one time they've decided to be nice but i also just love marge's very stupid line of like what were you going to say after i wanted to be a dancer but once they know it's lisa their objectivity goes away and they they just love every sound being made lisa raised the bar too high i think i think in the household yeah that's uh bart would be telling her right now she should have been coasting on on disappointment all these years uh so then we come back from commercial break to our second of the two of movie parodies yes this one i, there were several of these types of movies. So I believe it's a parody of the film The Little Colonel. But Shirley Temple was in four movies with Bill Bojangles Robinson. And this is one of them.

And just so yeah, Harry Shearer doing this voice. And Mike Scully said when he was in the booth, he said, how racist do you want this? They definitely wouldn't have this voice acting choice now yeah but i think they knew like when the shearer saying that is him accepting that like this is a parody of the racist portrayals of characters like these movies like because i i don't think the actor himself bo jangles talked in that way but he was instructed to by white directors yeah the magic black man and then he was like well you know i don't know nothing about blank you know

yeah and in other words i don't want to repeat on yeah yeah but uh the the whole dance sequence is very well done too like and no gags outside of the cat like the fake rubbing its eyes cats that's my favorite then it dances perfectly afterwards yeah it feels like there's like a little person in a cat costume at that point this is a great episode for animals in the simpsons yes like i love the way that the simpsons draw animals and their facial expressions and the cat looking shock shockingly disbelieving and then getting up and uh just having a big dancing smile they love that cat so much it comes up in the uh the stinger like interrupts the credits the gracie film logo

it pops up they've never had a visual interruption of the gracie film logo but they love they love that shot so much i mean the the impossibly long cat arms coming sideways from the screen to wipe its face is so good like because i've been you can just imagine the people working on it on the day they're like well if we put the cat arms in front of the cat it kind of bats at them so we got to come in sideways uh to really make it work on the cat like uh so and and all the dancing animation is just really well done. I mean, it feels like sometimes there's some dropped frames or it's like not obviously as fluid as a dance sequence would be like in a cinematic animated feature, but they don't have that kind of money for that.

But I think they do really good for this parody. Like it does have the feel of one of those old-timey movies they're not moving the camera around very much just like a flat shot of like characters performing in front like almost like proscenium staging totally yeah that's like so uh you i would never watch those movies in full i maybe have seen clips of things like this because that's all those movies were that they were like well you're gonna get to see an excellent dance sequence in between a bunch of plot that is completely meaningless and garbage like of just oh i'm i'm ever so sad my cat's going to die like just junk like that or saving grandpa's

farm or they're they're all just setups for like uh like the get happy song that judy garland sings nobody remembers the you know all of the plot about building up the farmhouse to save the farm from before that they just remember that great dance sequence singing in the rain had a pretty good plot i will agree yeah that's the first time though well it's a good plot for like an hour and then he's like and then i imagined this would be in the movie yeah it's just a long uh symbolic sequence it's very silly in that it's just like they find ways to justify, well, his friend is tap dancing and singing to cheer him up.

It's like, oh, no, this is a rehearsal. Now it's just like, well, they're just singing in their apartment because they're insane. Yes. It's the morning and they've gone insane. I mean, they haven't been up all night, Bob. It's true. I'd be dancing and singing and breaking my couch all the same

as Debbie Reynolds was. The Make Them Laugh laugh that maybe is my favorite in that it's the it's a great danny k is great yeah yeah i just imagine how much like nerve damage he did for that one scene though uh but uh yes after that lisa realizes the cat dances better than she does and she's not she's got no chance uh then cat dance is really good though i think lisa's being a little hard on herself. Can't compare yourself to a professional movie cat of the 30s. The cat's been trained and abused.

And is long dead. Meanwhile, we cut back to Wiggum in a bit of a well, I guess actually it's a mall rat scenario. We'll catch that mall rat. Sure hope this Acme kid works.

Gosh, that cheese looks good. Think I could grab it before that anvil hits? I don't know, Chief. It's a million to one. I like those odds. My mistake was grabbing the cheese. It's funnier that it doesn't hit him in the head. It hits him between his shoulder blades it seems more painful yeah you're right yeah uh it lets him say a line afterwards too instead of

being knocked unconscious yeah maybe maybe too since they knew they were going to crush the head of a cat later they're like i haven't hit a different place uh but his his lines are like i like those uh and my mistake was grabbing the cheese like so a wigum underrated wigum episode this one he's really great there's and again man there's a good deleted scene here that uh i wish was in the episode where wigum is saying he got the cheese like he stole it from a business and lou asked him like, hey, you need a court order to do that. He's like, well, the mayor's got a problem with it. He's just got to speak to this.

And he pulls out a piece of paper that is an official court order signed by the mayor. Yeah, I think Lou goes, he signed it and everything. He's like, yeah, so that's why I don't think he'll be bothered by it. It's another of those jokes that I'm like, God, we'd be quoting this all the time if it had been in the episode. But that tap dancing, it takes up a lot of time and you can't cut if you cut that it's a real pain on the animators then we see that frank somehow got hired to build a spaceship that he seems to be treating like a real spaceship with like wires and everything inside but lisa finds out she isn't getting a part okay kids, kids. Tonight's the big night. Now remember, the important thing is

to just dance flawlessly. Excuse me. Why isn't my name in the program? It is, silly. You've got the most important part of all. Curtain puller. No one can see the show if the curtain isn't open. My parents are counting on seeing me dance. And I've worked ever so hard.

I'm sorry, Lisa. But giving everyone an equal part when they're clearly not equal is called what again, class? Communism! That's right. And I didn't tap all those Morse code messages to the Allies till my shoes filled with blood

just to roll out the welcome mat for the Reds. All right. I'll be that stupid curtain puller. Smoothly. Pull up, pull up, pull up. right i'll be that stupid curtain puller smoothly i get your puller puller puller excuse me lisa but i couldn't help it over here you're a nerdly predicament maybe i can be of assistance with the dancing and twisting and the kung fu fighting i like to think that little vicky had befriended ayn rand yeah she was part of that early objectivist collective this feels like it's the same message as the incredibles ah you're right very popular film if everybody's this special then no one is i mean this definitely

is putting vicky in stark contrast to uh what most teachers do which is probably the right thing to do or a better thing to do with kids which like look who cares if you're bad at it every kid should get a chance don't make a it doesn't matter if a performance is good of a thing nobody cares about so just let every kid dance and don't make him feel like shit uh but that's not what vicky agrees with she probably also wants kids to still be playing dodgeball that little vicky i i like the uh the very subtle little note of lisa picking up little vicky's language oh yes you know i tried ever so hard like just picking up that cadence that comes up a couple times in this episode lisa gives an extra smile when she says that she's like huh come on i'm i'm fluffing your ego by saying ever so i just i i enjoy

a patronizing pulla pulla pulla she's even bad at like pulling the the curtain open vicky won't let her do anything on her own it's it's so cruel yeah that that also uh she tapped morse codes that's so funny till her shoes filled with blood uh just to roll out a welcome wagon for the reds love that she's and obviously the cold war long over in 2000 but she is carrying that onward uh there's a really hard implication here too where because she says what's that called children and all the other dancers are like communism which implies that she's been teaching them her objectivist philosophy that's true lessons yeah you know she's uh she knows this these are the right kids to indoctrinate. Like, she's planning for the future.

A bunch of new Ben Shapiros were born in that class. I'm sure Terry and Terry co-run TPUSA. Yeah, I like, too, I think in the Scully years, they were doing more stuff where Frank would befriend the kids. Like, this, especially him connecting with Lisa and the nerdiness. It reminds me too of they saved Lisa's brain. Yeah. Like they give him a reason to be in this scene, not just because he's Frank.

Yeah. And to help Lisa. He's building a rocket ship. But could you, they must still sell them, but I haven't seen anything like those dancing Coke can things in a long time. I haven't either. And apparently that was like a fad, like novelty item in like the mid eight 80s i didn't know like it was that specific but yeah the dancing coke can was like the fun like the cool novelty thing yeah i i have owned several dancing coke cans as a kid

the kind of thing that my my parents would get and get bored of and then give to me and i would stand and play music and it would you know it lurch oh that's funny, that's funny. I had the opposite of, I would beg my parents for these things and they wouldn't get them for me. They bought me a lot of crap, but if it was on a vacation, that's normally when I'd see one of these things and I'd be like, hey, we're on vacation, buy me that. And they were usually less ready to do that. Where's the dancing cat ear medicine can?

You have to mod your coke can but you've you violate the warranty in that way so i wouldn't i'm gonna download some plans on the dark web also in this scene here it looks like there's a globe with darts attached to it that looks a lot like the artist's rendering of what the coronavirus looks like so i'm pretty sure the simpsons predicted this in this one scene here i mean obviously frank's plan of taking the dancing thing that reacts to clapping and putting it in lisa's shoes absolutely makes no sense it doesn't physically work in any way he should have altered it in some way like i added something to it but i mean whatever yeah who cares but there

uh it's i feel like another episode would work slightly harder on a physical explanation for it. But you know what? I just pulled out a pair of shoes. Instead of taking the chip out, just been like, I've been studying this technology. Here's some shoes that do that. That's true. Just give her magic shoes instead of augmenting her own. You know, I bet if all those dorks hadn't been taken over to the Futurama writers room, I bet they'd have pitched that kind of thing.

But Colin and Keeler are not there anymore. So yes, Lisa gets some electronic help with her new shoes. Then we cut back to the mall for the final scene of that sequence. And I know it's animal violence and it's kind of cruel, but I really laughed hard at that cat getting hit. I'm going to assume it lived. Yeah, it's kind of cruel but i really laughed hard at that cat i'm gonna assume it lived yeah yeah it's just sleeping bob upside down and inside out and there's a backup lion yeah oh god just the quickness of like jump out hit the cheese bam you want me to release the backup line yes yes please and these are female lions the hunters oh okay these are male lions i didn't catch that that's smart well they don't

mention that but i know that from lion king oh that's the classic movie then there's another deleted scene that's why i pulled up the deleted scene so means bob could watch it because when the lion is revealed to see the boys it's very distracting that millhouse is putting a shirt on after that scene i i don't know what was going on until now we found out yeah millhouse was diving for change in the uh the pond in the pool in the mall and uh goldfish were going where they shouldn't is what he says i love that yeah where they oughtn't and he's like looking into the front of his pants that's funny uh but the filth of swimming around in that pool and pulling out pennies like yeah it's oh yeah all the fountains were removed from my mall ages ago the fountain was a like a just a fixture of the malls that's so sad all

those pennies uh the town's worst supes like right there yeah uh and uh so yes there's a little bit of uh the mountain lion attacking here i've got a a sound clip. Okay, Mr. Rat, we've got a little playmate for you. Should I get the backup lion chief? Would you? Can you see the lion anywhere? Well, do you see him or not? Are you saying he's right on the other side of that plant okay run i like the lion doesn't make a sound until bart opens the yeah thing and if if you're

not like 90 years old millhouse is making luke costello noises like when he sees a frankenstein perhaps or a wolfman, or a giant gorilla. I thought it was like a Three Stooges thing, but no. I've never seen any. Like, I've seen your curly, I've seen your shampoo. I've seen your shampoo, yeah, that's in the vampire lounge in Burns' house.

I was exposed to so much Three Stooges as a kid, but never Abbott and Costello. Never seen anything. Except for, like, the Warner Brothers versions of those characters. The mice. might you must have at least seen like one version of who's on first right you probably saw that probably that in like like clip packages but never like abed and costello meets uh whatever go here i recall in childhood that i saw tributes to abed and costello and they mainly existed because jerry seinfeld was a huge fan of them and so he was just like i can make an abbott and costello documentary happen

by the snap of my fingers because i'm that powerful and uh in the 90s the reaction shot i like how it's it's played almost too long but i like that bart cannot understand that millhouse's reaction clearly means that the mountain lion's on the other side uh they run off they think they find an exit but it's actually an exit that's coming soon that's a good little misdirect and then they're about to be torn apart bart gets the smart idea of grabbing a ball of yarn distracting the cat with it and it's almost too cute until at the snap of a finger the mountain lion jumps on millhouse and starts tearing him apart until a new ball of yarn appears i i personally needed a funny yarn store sign and i didn't get one there's just a bin of yarn

outside of a store you know they could pitch on that yarn store name all night bob or they could go and hug their children those kids are all grown up now. They would have forgiven their dads. If they'd see that yarn joke now at 23, and they'd be like, I appreciate you missing my baseball game for that. This yarn joke needed to happen. I like, too, just the reveal of Milhouse

torn up back and hair. Not enough for me, frankly. If this was Homer this was homer i think we'd see like visible spine yeah like organs i can't like happened i can't remember what it is but there's one where his back gets torn open like a cabinet yeah that would be the badger that was in the uh the sanzal helper's house yeah tale to springfield i think that's the episode yeah like dad are you okay yeah and he pulls up his shirt and his has exposed intestines i think too he take homer takes some damage and a part of his brain is poking out in another one yeah but that might have been a treehouse that i'm not completely sure i guess

they can't uh like expose millhouses like innards there's there's a fine line of how violent you can be with millhouse but they push it farther every time i mean he it wasn't that long ago millhouse gets like knocked unconscious by by marge uh with a with a phone right a baby monitor yeah baby monitor to the dome yeah but uh but wiggum lets us know that everything's fine now you Milhouse? Nothing that a handful of gummy bears can't fix. Well, well. Looks like the cat got the rat. And that's the end of that tale.

Chief, should we try and get the mountain lion back in its crate? I repeat. I love that. The dusting of hands. They were very into the dusting of hands in this time on the simpsons i'm so worried about the lion swallowing an entire ball of you know of yarn it's gonna hurt coming out yeah i mean if you've ever had like a petty like dental floss whatever it's a journey coming out the other end uh let's let's just say it coughs it up in the next scene

let's say that i know well i guess too it's just a loose mountain lion walking around the mall from then on and right after that there's one more deleted scene of a scalper outside of the dance recital that homer buys 300 tickets from yeah even though he has his own tickets uh well we don't see him buy them the scene ends with him pulling out money, like thousands of dollars. Yeah, Homer has like a rich man's wad of cash he's pulling out too. Like the kind that a rich guy in a movie has. Like, well, I have too much money to have a wallet.

And the scalper guy is the same scalper from the Super Bowl as well. Okay. But yes, we return backstage. Everybody's getting ready for the big dance. Little Vicky, I figured out how to dance. I can be in the show now. I'm sorry, Lisa. People go to a children's dance recital expecting a certain

level of professionalism. But you don't understand. I ate too much plastic candy. Heavens to Betsy, the star of the show is sick. Whatever will we do? There's only one person who can get us out of this pickle. Lisa?

Yes? Help me into Ralph's costume. Showtime, children. Let's go. Okay, curtain puller, this is your moment to shine. Oh, it's too important. I'll do it for you. Lean, muscular children of Mars, we bring you candy. Let's walk over to them. Why walk when you can dance? Where's Lisa? Shh. where's lisa blood is hard enough to follow as it is so season season one brought us where's

that bart we finally have where's lisa oh yeah uh those are the kind of exclamations made for marge what about the quickie mark uh yeah like this reminds me for whatever reason i know it's like vicky is like stuck in the past so this is like a like an atomic age side of kind of like setting going to mars reminds me of santa claus conquers the martians where the martians are standing for communists and the american children go there to teach them about like candy and chocolate cake and they eat pills for dinner and everything right yeah like they know nothing of christmas in on mars now the children want chocolate cake for dinner oh drop oh yeah the laziest man on mars i've seen that movie 40 times with with riffing

yeah with every every version of riffing that's happened i've seen the movie alongside it let's see did riff tracks do it too i did it too titanic did yeah so it's like there's like three versions of it you can watch rift uh i i just have the mst3k one so memorized i and i i watched the cinematic titanic one once but yeah you're right bob it is so the art is there life on mars 50s kind of thing i i definitely think she's been doing the same making kids do the same tap dancing thing since 1953 like i think it's just been the same for over 50 years now and and the costumes are all the same too i mean i also love just like vicky can't imagine that lisa would do it since he's like oh it's gonna be me like that was her plan playing uh fallout. Actually, it's the same joke.

I can play that. Yeah. I'm killing hers. Yeah. Well, also the dimpling machine. I love that and how cruel it is. But also, she got hit with the dimpling machine, too, growing up. You can tell she's like, what am I saying, might. And yeah, too, that she's very insist like that a children's dance recital is expecting

a certain level of professionalism god love that also ralph knows the candy is plastic like he doesn't he doesn't say i ate too much candy he says i ate too much plastic you can handle a little plastic in your digestive system not this much and uh yeah i and i love the descriptor of lean muscular muscular children of Mars. And they sing and tap to Spaceship Lollipop. And that is from the, well, the Good Ship Lollipop is from the 1934 movie Bright Eyes with Shirley Temple. We saw a parody of that in Homer Kong. Yeah, I never, until preparing for this, I never actually watched the shirley temple version i i just

think the good ship lollipop has two and a half lines that are then interrupted by being eaten like that's that's how i only know it as the simpsons version where the bears stand ah that's how it goes not eaten by homer in the real movie sadly yeah she just like walks it's kind of boring she's like walking down a train she's just like singing to a bunch of dads in a train i don't understand why though the version i saw on youtube was also like annoyingly colorized so it was damaging to my eyes to watch uh the parody version of the good ship lollipop is kind of funny i guess that's gingerbread men like to do hip-hop on the spaceship lollipop gingerbread men like to do hip hop. On the spaceship, lollipop gingerbread men like to do hip hop and chocolate chips. And from the super rocket ship, we just love to dance on Mars with everything.

There she is. Hi, honey. Wow, look at her go. Yeah, that pressure we put on her really paid off. What are you doing? I can't help it. It's the shoes. Nobody upstages little Vicky. Shh.

Oh, please stop. I'm just getting started yeah you don't really hear enough lyrics maybe like if you listen very closely, there's funny stuff, but it's not really devoted too much to being a parody. But as Lisa is sadly standing offstage, her feet find the power to dance. And as more and more percussion is made, she dances on the stage. And I love Marge and Homer celebrating like,

wow, that pressure we put on her really paid off but uh this this animation is so good i watched it a few times and uh like kudos to the director and her team just for being asked to do this and not quitting yeah so it's gonna be an extended like matching up with the animation of dancing like these incredibly complicated dance moves in an old-timey style i think some of the posing really reminded me of like the gene kelly dancing with jerry the mouse uh cartoon yeah and she even does the make him laugh like matrix wall run you're right yeah man he was you're right danny k was wall running way before it was uh kung fu premier edge uh hell yeah uh and uh and in my first viewing of this as lisa starts dancing

better and better and challenging little vicky i i recall in 2000 when i first saw this i was sure little vicky was going to dance herself to death me too i think i thought like that seemed like the obvious and mean place to go. And especially like, obviously, if Shirley Temple just played this character, you wouldn't kill her because you'd be respectful to the guest star to an extent. But when you make up little Vicky and you're not going to bring her back. I kept thinking, especially with how mean this season has been, that they just kill little Vicky. Like she's an old woman being pushed to dance as hard as she can to keep up with a robot thing.

And also it kind of has the feeling of like a... John Henry. John Henry, yes. Thank you. Yeah, that's true. How did I forget the last... How could I forget the last name that is my name? What's the name?

Oh, me. Yeah, yeah. They killed Maude, but they let little Vicky live. Yeah, I don't understand that. Maude died so little Vicky could live. Don't be naive. It's true. It's all part of the ionon.

Also, with this tap dancing freakout, I think for a moment I conflated it with the one that happens to Butters in South Park. Oh, I don't recall that one. Oh, Butters was in the You Got Served parody episode. Yeah, I was watching that late. Or 20 years ago. Yeah, only 15 years ago, I think. Yeah, that one, Butters had an accident on stage tap dancing, which killed dozens of people. But that's Lisa here.

She only threatens to kill everybody. And that is really just a cute drawing of Homer tripping her. And then she's just flat on her back with her legs. Yeah. Just a very gentle trip that Homer lays out. Very sweet. Right before that, I love that Marge goes, Lisa's gone berserk. Oh, yes.

Like really loud. I love that exclamation. She'll kill us all. And so the episode ends with the truth revealed. I guess actually the truth revealed twice. Self-tapping shoes? I'm ever so pissed. I'm sorry, Vicky.

I just wanted to be a dancer so badly. I understand. We all do crazy things when we're desperate. I once destroyed Buddy Epson's credit rating. Why? He knows why. Jesus, Mary and Glavin. all do crazy things when we're desperate i once destroyed buddy epson's credit rating why he knows why jesus mary and glaven these shoes are in the off position you mean i danced all by myself see honey all you needed was to believe what are you talking about professor frank they're clearly in the on position see on i was merely trying to spare the girl's feelings, you insensitive clod. Oh. Oh!

Well, now that I look even closer. Forget it, Dad. Oh, I guess I'm never going to be your Broadway baby. That's not true, honey. You can always write a depressing Broadway play of some kind. You think so? Sure. It could be a story about people coming to terms with things.

Hey, yeah. You could load it up with lots of swears. That's what David Mamet does. Oh, I love you guys. Uh-oh. It's out of its matrix. Nobody move. Why, it's just a cute little weasel.

Hello there, Mr. Weasel. Ah! Ah! Ah! I'm down! I like his, I'm down there. Yeah. Though this is seriously the fifth time this season homer screamed over the credit yeah i don't like this ending the episode episode's funny but it's like what it's unclear what's even happening to homer there's so many strange sounds happening maybe

that's the joke but i'm just like what is this weasel ball doing uh well frank said he was planning to turn it into a weapon we just don't know what kind no i mean i feel like the joke i i kind of uh i've complained that this is too mean of a season so here i am being a hypocrite but i think it would be funnier if little vicky danced herself to death and they're like saying like boy it's pretty awkward after i guess i killed little vicky or whatever i guess they didn't they'll put the blood on homer's hands but they don't want lisa to accidentally kill someone i guess and and yardley smith is on the commentary and she's like can't lisa ever win anything uh you can tell that really drives her crazy like she's getting pretty sick of having lisa always lose i gotta say you know that that joke of homer forgetting to pretend that the dance shoes were off is funny and yet again a futurama joke beat him to the punch on this like several months

earlier and it's funnier yeah so and i second that emotion they're like oh bender your motion chip wasn't working this whole time it's like no way it was actually working at double capacity and i still barely felt anything yeah it was a better version of that, of this sort of, like, it was your blank all along, your heart, your brain, your own skills. Dumbo's feather. Yeah, though I do like Homer's overcompensating. Like, now that I look even closer. Oh, that really made me laugh. And, well, Betty Epson was a straw man was he or no

he almost was a tin man he was he was he was almost a tin man but he was famously jed clampett ah right right right that's right man what did he do to poor little vicky i wonder she's been holding a good thing he found that oil reserve after his credit was that's how he became a hillbilly uh like beverly hillbilly. Like Beverly Hillbillies origins. I also wonder if they were joking about the, if they were joking about rent there with the, the depressing play that makes you feel things. Oh, we're going to get a rent joke in next episode or two episodes from now.

Yeah. I love that rent joke too. That's going to be up. I watched it recently. Let's pay the rent. And yeah, I think they, they liked that music and the dancing so much they just put it over the credits like it was uh they just bring it back like i mean this is the type of music we don't talk enough about alf clausen he's really is so underappreciated

even in these you know these later seasons and by later i mean 19 ago uh but like he if you ask him hey do a shirley temple like 30s musical kind of flourish boom he just has got it like it sounds perfect yeah they do old-timey credits too and uh then we get the gracie cat sorry gracie films logo get interrupted by the cat rubbing its eyes i thought this was just a really funny episode with great little vicky like cruelty i think that's why i feel like it's only incomplete and that she doesn't die because she's just so awful the whole episode i i guess it's nice she learns her lesson or she barely even learns a lesson she's like you know what i was right lisa's a fake like fuck you but uh but yeah i think the b plot is fine too there's some good little just like

cartoony comedy and bark never comes back from the mall either so it's it's very light and uh again it's just a nice refreshing episode after a dark cloud a bunch of polarizing ones the episode the season ends fairly like light and breezy and enjoyable especially the finale well it's a thing too where like i'm sure you've made this observation a bunch of times, but there's the fulcrum on which Simpsons tips from quote-unquote good to bad that everyone talks about is more complicated

than people give it credit for. And I think that we had a long stretch of these where it's like, this is lots of funny jokes, but it doesn't really have a coherent ending, and there's not a great emotional core. And I feel like that period lasted a little bit longer than people like to think it's like this is still a funny show like i like this episode a lot lots of really good jokes it just doesn't have that kind of weird transcendent special touch of having a really interesting

coherent and like perfectly fitting fitting together plot or any kind of real heart to it yeah they're very close to real heart with lisa wanting to please her parents and all that but then it just turns into like robot shoes that go crazy to pat ourselves on the back i feel like we've done a good job of dispelling the conventional wisdom it's like okay now here's where the show is bad no no here's where the show was ruined and this is after what many consider to be like the darkest moment of the show and they recover so quickly and uh again on the record uh the showrunner was like yeah killing mod was a mistake and we can't you can't go back and fix that although aljean still could i could i think it'd be very like we haven't gotten to reincarnation plots yet but it's true

although i think after seeing mod in heaven with Edna, is that correct? I don't think we can go back after actually seeing the angel. That's a little harder than just having Marvin Monroe show up and say like, I was sick. So Gary, thanks for being on the show.

Please plug all of your stuff, everything on duckfeed.tv and how our people out there can listen to your shows and support you. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for having me on. Really, I really do appreciate it. Yeah.

You can find me over at duckfeed.tv where I do a host of podcast. Primarily the flagship show is called Watch Out for Fireballs. It is a games club podcast of a special interest to listeners of this show. By the time this episode drops, we will be a couple months into our new show Orb, which is looking at the venture brothers horning in on your steez uh of the uh podcast commentary show that is four or five times longer than the episode nice i i saw that as soon as you announced your podcast they canceled the show i think there's a good chance that the venture brothers will wrap up with a movie or something if they want to you know like futurama Futurama came back or Family Guy or something.

I think so. But yeah, I'm really excited about that. And that'll be well underway by the time this episode drops. And if you want to get episodes early or get bonus content and such, you can always support us at patreon.com slash duckfeedTV. I'm a proud patron and I love all your shows and you make so much content. It's amazing. Yeah, you put us to shame a little bit even i think with your your output oh no it's it's uh you know family religion you know the things you must slay

yeah you guys are doing great like right now and i'm really happy to be a patron as well oh thank you really good work well thank you so much gary and we'd love to have you back definitely love to yeah anytime so thanks so much to gary butterfield for being on our show check out all of his stuff at duckfeed.tv and as for us if you want to check out more of our stuff and get all of our podcasts one week ahead of time and at free please go to patreon.com slash talking simpson sign up there you'll get just that but also access to everything behind the five dollar paywall that includes over 100 bonus podcasts that also includes all of our limited mini series the most recent of which that's rolling out right now is talking futurama season two part two we're doing oh yeah we're doing the

back half of talking futurama season two uh nine new episodes for patreon and of course all of the older talking futuramas are there as well at patreon.com slash talking simpsons there's so much going on there behind that paywall and you get it all immediately. Everything we've done for the past three plus years, you'll get as soon as you sign up at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. And Henry, what is happening at the $10 level? You get all the $5 stuff plus access to one mega long podcast once a month that is just for patrons of that level or higher.

That's right, Bob. You're talking about the What a Cartoon movie. On our What a Cartoon podcast, we cover a different animated series each week. But once a month, we cover an animated feature film in the same style and often for over four hours. And you can only hear that full podcast if you are a premium level Patreon subscriber,

10 bucks a month at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. You'll get a back catalog that's over two years of exclusive podcasts, over 100 hours. Our most recent one, Wallace and Gromit, Curse of the Were-Rabbit. What a bunch of fun that was. The Aardman classic. The month before that, Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island.

And a huge back catalog. Please check that out. You get that and all of the five dollar stuff bob just talked about if you're a ten dollar subscriber at patreon.com slash talking simpsons so as for me i've been one of your hosts bob mackie you can find me on twitter as bob servo and my other podcast is retronauts that'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 to get access to two exclusive episodes once a month that are just for patrons. So again, that is patreon.com slash retronauts for the RetroNuts podcast.

Henry, how about you? You can follow me, Henry Gilbert, on Twitter at H-E-N-E-R-E-Y-G. I'm sure I'm tweeting up a storm right now in december of 2020 also really how are you not yet a follower on twitter of at talk simpsons pod at talk simpsons

pod is the official twitter account of this podcast and its network of shows you can stay up to date whenever new stuff is live on the free feed or on the patreon or we've got a poll going on or other news you will stay in the loop if you follow at talk simpsons pod on twitter that's at talk simpsons pod thank you so much for joining us folks we'll see you next time for it's a mad mad mad mad marge and we'll see you then Shh. Tapa, tapa, tapa. Lisa's gone berserk. Do something, Homer.

Do something. Oh, thanks, Dad. I didn't think. I just acted.