Talking Simpsons - Talking Simpsons - Lisa The Beauty Queen With Merritt K

Episode Date: August 30, 2023

A Duff Blimp-sized welcome back to the great Merritt K (check out her new Patreon) as we dig into this Lisa-centric episode! After feeling "ugly" thanks to a cartoon, Lisa gets unexpected help from Homer after putting her in the Little Miss Springfield Pageant. And after a strange series of events, Lisa becomes a powerful political figure in this memorable ep. So grab your extra-long version of MacArthur Park and listen now! Support this podcast and get over 150 bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! And please follow the official Twitter, @TalkSimpsonsPod!

This podcast is brought to you by patreon.com slash talking Simpsons head there to check out exclusive podcasts like talking Futurama talking of the hill the what a cartoon movie podcast and tons more I hardly endorse this event or product Our product. Ahoy, hoy, everybody, and welcome to Talking Simpsons, the podcast that's illegal in Paraguay. I'm your host, the Pork Princess, Bob Mackie, and this is our chronological exploration of the Simpsons. Who is here with me today, as always? It's Henry Gilbert, a.k.a. Blimpy Boy! And who is our special guest on the line?

I'm Mary Kay, and I heartily endorse this event or product. And this week's episode is Lisa, the Beauty Queen. Well, if I could gouge out somebody else's eyes and shove them into my sockets, I would. But to me, she's beautiful. That is so sweet. This week's episode originally aired on October 15th, 1992. And as always, Henry will tell us what happened on this mythical day in real world history. Oh my God.

Oh boy, Bobby. Night Trap, the most controversial video game ever, is released for the Sega CD. Candyman is released into theaters and Scotty returns on Star Trek The Next Generation. I'm more a fan of Welshie. This is before Welshie had to replace the aging Scotty. That felt like an event to me.

I didn't watch every episode of The Next Generation show live with my mom, but this one we did because it was like an anniversary let's say the 25th anniversary or something of star trek that makes sense so they had on uh they's had on scotty for it and basically he got frozen in time inside a dyson sphere and uh there's one scene i remember from it that uh that i took with me and wish i learned more of in adulthood it was scotty is working with jordy and they're both kind of comparing notes on how they work. And Jordy says to Picard when Picard asked him to do something, oh, that'll take an hour.

And then Scotty says, oh, how long will it really take? And then Jordy's like an hour. And then Scotty says, what? You're supposed to say it's an hour when it takes 20 minutes. And then he's impressed. And I was like, oh, that's Scotty. He's a genius. These are like George Costanza tips he's giving us yeah this is when he comes back and he wants to drink right but they only have synthahol that's right only synthahol these i think he gets

a little secret romulan ale from gynon yes romulan ale yep she's got the good stuff yeah the the night trap scandal shows how out of touch old politicians have always been because this night trap game was uh spoken about on the floor of the senate as just like pornography it was a snuff film that you got to play but then if you investigate what it really was it was a video game in big quotes made for a vhs video game machine that was never released they took that footage made it into a Sega CD game. And if you watch the footage, it is so tame.

It could not even play on USA up all night. They would say, where's the blood? Where are the boobs that we cut away from? Yeah. And it's also funny because nobody owned a Sega CD. So like no one even played this. Mortal Kombat was one thing,

but Night Trap, like, come on. Yeah. It was not played by anybody, but, and yet it made Senator Lieberman very upset and uh it's also from the same time on but that would be the next year but

yeah it would be on C-SPAN the next year uh of him holding the the uh the menacer the menacer that's right yes that was the name of it yeah god could you be any more menacing man and yes candy man in theaters though of course i didn't see that until vhs uh years later i think and uh i thought i remember it being a good movie of uh virginia madsen is the the scream queen of it i believe and now the candy man's hotter than ever or the the voice actor for the candy man is voicing venom in the upcoming spider-man 2 the video game you're right about that yeah now i never got into him until my 30s but i like clive barker way more than steven king i think steven king is uh having a renaissance every five years because he just doesn't stop writing and i also think people like him because he's like a turbo lib online he is always talking

about mango mussolini oh sure yeah all that all that fun stuff. But Clive Barker, worth looking into. I think people aren't giving him enough attention. Absolutely. Also, Tony Todd in this movie, just unbelievable. And I think they really messed that up in the remake when they didn't actually put a bunch of bees in someone's mouth. They did CG, which Tony Todd is the kind of guy who would really commit to it and just commit to getting stung all up on his tongue and mouth parts for his art. You know, I've been hearing a lot of these conversations. Well, this happens a lot these days, but also because an Indiana Jones movie just came out, which used to be a lot about special effect, practical effects or practical effects. And now everything's digital.

And it and yeah, same with same with Candyman. It's just like, i mean i get it you know i i get why you want to when you're filming something on the day you want to make things as easy as possible to get the job done i understand but and this is probably just because we're uh senior millennials but it's like it doesn't feel as special and you know it's fake you know did this start an entire candy verse uh is this where willie wonka reboot is coming from the candy man verse is that why it's gonna be creepy yeah well that movie is actually a prequel to uh that train movie um there was the whole theory about this

yeah you know snowpiercer okay yeah so he's making candy out of bugs in this new wonka movie something like that yeah that's what was going on when this episode of the simpsons aired and of course i remember this as well because i moved that very my family we're recording this right before i make a big move to seattle and when this episode aired it was the first simpsons we watched in the florida home i would spend from ages 10 to 24 the very first simpsons watch there this is important henry lore yes i so i remember the excitement like we got the vcr set up we are taping this i can still taste the pizza hut pizza in my mouth when watching this episode

because it was a very special night i don't remember too many specific nights of watching episodes but this one i do and were you still having that sweet pizza in your mouth while watching martin following this episode this broadcast uh i think we probably went to do something else then unfortunately now too ribald yeah too ribald that martin yes uh but joining us once again is a writer mered k who was last with us for Treehouse of Horror 10. Welcome back to the show, Merit. Yeah, thanks for having me back. God, it's been so long. Is that pre-COVID?

We were, I think we were deep in it. Boy. 10? Maybe it was. Season 10, I feel like that was 2019. I feel like you're 2018. Well, old Mr. Internet will let us know the answer to this one. But yeah, I mean, I guess because of COVID, it feels like it was just yesterday we had merit on

and yet uh yeah it's january of 2021 so yeah okay oh very beginning damn but yeah uh merit how's how's everything been going oh you know um things are okay things are you know up and down like the uh the industry that i've been working in for the last few years has kind of collapsed, which isn't great. Media is not in a fantastic place right now. But, you know, I've got a book coming out later this year. So that's cool. Hey, that's awesome. And yeah, yeah, the LAN party book is finally coming out.

Oh, those previews you put out look amazing. Yeah, it's a really fun project it's a coffee table book of uh photos from land parties mainly from the 2000s so it's it's cool and that hopefully will come out this fall i think um but yeah you know i'm just uh hanging out and i've been doing some work for uh sean baby's site 1-900 hot dog which has been fun. Sean Baby and Robert Brockway have a cool site over there. Just talking about 90s stuff. So this is appropriate. I'm kind of in my 90s era right now.

So yeah, ready to talk about a 90s Simpsons episode. And yeah, do you recall seeing this one when it was brand new or in syndication later? So it must have been in syndication because I think I would have been too young to watch The Simpsons when this one came out. But throughout the latter half of the 90s, definitely we were, you know, catching episodes in syndication. And yeah, I don't remember the moment that it shifted

because there was a time when my parents were like, The Simpsons is for adults. That's not, I know it looks like a cartoon, but it's not for kids. So you can't watch it. When my sister and I finally got to start watching The Simpsons, it was like a cartoon but it's not for kids so you can't watch it when my sister and i finally got to start watching simpsons it was like a huge deal in our house it was like a rite of passage and i do remember seeing this one sometime in the 90s i think i've probably

seen this episode a few times and it was funny re-watching it now because i haven't seen it in years and years but i was like i can remember basically every joke in this episode so i guess it must have made some kind of impression on me. I was curious then if you saw it in syndication, if there were jokes that were new to you or not in this one. But it sounds like you remember it all. Pretty much, yeah. From the MacArthur Park shout out, which I did not understand as a kid.

Yeah, I mean, I was familiar with the Weird Al song Jurassic Park as a child, but not the original until until much much later and you know this is an episode too about the the beauty standards women have to grow up with as well and just it written by all men uh but it's written by the father of a daughter though so you know it's fathers of daughters yeah that's just as important as the viewpoint of a woman hashtag girl dad yeah we've all seen it we've all seen it for sure yeah you can you couldn't make this one today you just and we'll get to that later but you simply couldn't make this today according to the guy who wrote it uh jeff martin the the writer of it he was a father of a couple daughters who one of them is daughter jenna was there for the commentary recording 20 years ago now she is a high level executive producer on a kid cartoon and also gay as well

so that's that's fun information uh i think martin you know he one of his points on why he doesn't think it could be made today is that this was like before the john benet Ramsey thing. So there was less tragedy involved. This really is just them doing jokes about adult or teen girl beauty pageants, but they have to make it little kids because Lisa is eight. Yeah, this is before the JonBenet stuff, toddler and tiaras. Toddlers and tiaras? Oh, yeah. Was Honey Boo Boo?

Right. Was she the candy made of that universe? Yeah. She was always covered in bees. You stare in the mirror and you say her name three times yeah um also the cigarette stuff too i guess like at this point cigarette smoking wasn't like nearly universally scorned uh by by most people like you know i feel like a lot of restaurants still when i was growing up around this time still had smoking sections like you would go into a burger king and there'd be a glassed off area where you could just go to smoke and that even that was a concession from just like being able to smoke literally wherever yeah it's uh cigarettes were more prevalent back then as i

recall too as a kid which now it does feel like you really can't smoke anywhere now which uh i as a non-smoker i think is great make them suffer make them not have to smoke anywhere we know all about your breaks yeah everybody yeah those smokers should have uh were too judgy of me taking my like candy bowl break it's uh it's not it's no different in the office than the cigarette breaks. But yes, also this episode is rather connected to the cult classic, I'll call it, Drop Dead Gorgeous from 1999, which I rewatched. I hadn't watched that movie in full. So I did see it in theaters, but I didn't see it again in full until now. I would check it out every time it aired on Comedy Central, but the movie's an R-rated movie,

so it got cut down a teeny bit for Comedy Central. But I think the movie holds up, except for the jokes around Will Sasso's character, and they say the R word quite a lot in it, but it was 1990. But other than that, other than that, great that great movie great cast oh my god the cast i totally forgot amy adams like it's one of her first movies and she fucking rules in it she is i uh i love a sam mcmurray he's he's so good gulliver dark himself simpsons character did we say what the connection was though oh well yes it's that lana williams who uh was the writer's assistant on the simpsons when this episode was being written and is the voice of amber damsey she wrote drop dead gorgeous

and it is the story of her life and so if you were to say watch lisa beauty queen and then immediately drop dead gorgeous you will see many things that are the same in it and that i'm just wondering like how she had been working on that script for a long time and i do wonder like did she give them ideas that she's like for instance the petroleum jelly smile i i uh jeff martin on the commentary mentions that she was runner up at the miss Teen USA and he was given a tape of the of the pageant uh and and I think she gave him some background on it for jokes but it's then weird if you watch Drop Dead Gorgeous of like oh there's a few things in this like Amber Adkins the Kirsten Dunn's character in it she is second place to the perfect girl who's denise richard right yeah yeah a horrible thing happens

to the girl who wins and so second place to gets to take over petroleum jelly and there's a few other bits in it too that i was like oh that's that's a joke from drop dead gorgeous so it's it was it's interesting to to compare them yeah we actually talked about her in uh c for season three sorry production season three but this air season uh streetcar named marge because they start the episode with a beauty pageant parody and uh she also helped them with that and she is the voice of deborah dell smallwood who apologizes for her unfortunate remarks at the united nation and and if you're a real drop-ditch gorgeous head lana williams is also in the movie uh in a silent role she is the third judge the one who works for sam mcmurray and kirstie alley's characters the miserable third

judge uh and i i want to compliment lewis pitesman friend of the show for his 2014 piece in buzzfeed on the making of the movie because this is the only place I've seen Lana Williams get interviewed to like on the production of the movie at all. And there's a ton of interesting backstory in there. So everybody should look it up. It's despite being published on BuzzFeed in 2014, it still is online and readable. They better fix that. Now every image on it is broken, but. Okay.

Yeah. I was going to say, wait, is Gulliver Dark the Homer learns a lesson about sexism episode? Yes, yeah. He is the lounge singer who sings the song at the end, but he's also a Tracy Ullman show character. It's a weird Tracy Ullman show character appearing in The Simpsons just once. Huh. I learned from this article, too, that Lana uh did not have a good time on the set she felt like her movie got taken away from her by the director a bit and then on top of that new

line cinema was like they thought they were getting clueless when they were getting a film about the girls who hate clueless and they they just hated how dark it is it is such a mean dark movie which i love about it and then the next movie she writes is called sugar and spice which um thanks to columbine happening had to be heavily re-edited and she took her name off of the movie too so if you know that mina suvari film seems like she left hollywood after that but the other interesting thing about the connection between drop dead gorgeous and this at least in credits is the executive producer of drop dead gorgeous is gavin polone and this was the first movie he ep'd and he's now a very powerful uh producer in hollywood but at the time in 1992 he was an agent for conan o'brien and to quote him I represented most of the guys on the Simpsons so it is the agent of

the Simpsons writing staff producing Drop Dead Gorgeous he believed in it so much and I do wonder if some Simpsons writers had like uncredited like joke pitching sessions on it or whatever but I can neither confirm nor deny that but I'm Pallone last bit about him and this is that after working on drop dead gorgeous he says that he was like man the daughter that kirsten dunst plays who's very close to her kind of messy mother who's like only 18 years older than her that's a really good idea that could be a tv show and he would then take that idea to a writer and they would make that into gilmore girls oh okay wow yes there'd be no gilmore girls without drop dead gorgeous or dairy queens as it was called during the entire

writing process and the dairy queen company uh refused to let them do they they uh i think it was a cease and desist letter so you know i i haven't seen either one of these movies but i always confuse this film with Jawbreaker. I understand it. They're very, very similar. Similar vibes. Jawbreaker, though, Jawbreaker is a bit more of like a Heathers reboot, sort of.

It's closer to Heathers, I would say. Not as good, but it has its moments. I mean, watching Drop Dead Gorgeous, I was just like, wow, every great white actress of our youths is in this movie. Well, also like Brittany Murphy is so good in it. She plays the giggly, constantly, seemingly stoned, honestly, contestant who is very proud

of her drag queen brother who moved to the big city, is basically doing all of his performances. She's like, well, I'm going to do Liza on stage just like my brother did it, but my legs aren't as good as his. It's very sweet. She's fantastic in it, yeah. I would say stream it, but currently in America, there's no legal way to stream it.

It's not on any streamers. You can get the Blu-ray warner archive edition of it for like five bucks or whatever on amazon which is what i did to watch it but the way they save money is they didn't even pay to use the old posters like it's literally like getty images are the two are the the cover and the menu for it oh yeah i bought a few warner archives this just because there was no way to legally rent or buy a thing digitally and it's just uh it's basically they send you a dvdr if you look at the back of the dvd it's blue i'm not even making a joke wow oh my god and they write on it with magic marker but no that's legitimate they should do that i i have heard

defenders of warner archives saying like hey these are good they're they're good transfers of the footage and they wouldn't be re-released any other way and probably discovery is going to kill the warner archive brand as it is so i should honestly enjoy this cheap looking re-release otherwise but but yeah it sounds like lana williams left uh left hollywood and would be in her early 50s now but she's uh i think she got she had a raw deal though it is hard to say like oh she got a raw deal also her first script ever in hollywood got made into a movie uh so it's like i don't know you give it it sounds like she was lucky and then very unlucky buddy it's directed by one of the guys from the states one of the uh the non

actory people from the only person from the state nobody's heard of yeah he's there was a guy with like the longer hair yes yeah that michael patrick jan yeah it's and it's his only film directing that's that was also in lewis's piece of talking about how he he basically blew his shot on it it was a huge flop new line cinema didn't support it at all and that he then went on to direct commercials and pitesman uh in his piece kind of puts it like he's not at all ashamed of his commercial work he's like you know it's where his job took him you know i'm seeing a lot of movies he's direct or these are these are tv series but there are some movies too post post drop dead gorgeous yeah all right well they're

tv movies so they don't count of course we should make fun of him but uh but anyway that's uh that's the that's the end of my drop dead gorgeous thing there's tons of fun trivia in lewis's piece so folks folks should definitely still read it he's still very proud of it uh to this day just that he tracked down lana williams even i think he was uh impressed with but but all right so the episode itself uh it begins first with an amazing couch gag rough draft korea doing great work on the family running off of the film strip and running back into the couch love that i can hear macarooning tossing his cowboy hat into the ground and stomping on it too expressive one tear we start with a joke about the evil disney core isn't this like the fifth time they've done a joke about them suing that daycare center?

The last time it was in Brother Can You Spare Two Dimes, and I saved the entire story for this episode. It's not very long. So this is a joke about how in 1989, Disney threatened to take legal action against three daycares in Hallandale, Florida, because they featured five-foot-high likenesses of classic Disney characters on their walls. But it never went to court because Hanna-Barbera came in in a great PR move and said, we'll let you use our classic Hanna-Barbera characters for free. So Hanna-Barbera were the clear winners here.

And I hate to side with Disney on this, folks, but these were for-profit daycare centers. It wasn't like an orphanage or something you know they were charged they were charging uh parents money and uh they have the right to protect their copyright but i'm saying what we're doing here on this podcast fair use if you look at our logo that could be anybody's mouth so uh please don't tell them about this is what i'm saying we'll put mickey's pants back on that's what we'll do as we know they're very very happy with disney and this this broken arm was a bokeh accident yeah i have to go now i want to uh i want to shout out a piece that i edited back at fanbyte years ago by a writer named carmela morella a

piece is called mascots of an evil corporation and it's basically about this. It's about like how there were so many Star Wars and Disney like illusions and gags in the early episodes. And there are a couple of Star Wars gags in this episode too. And at the time, you know, they felt like little like kind of winks or like edgy kind of like, oh, can they do that? You know, obviously now when they just have Darth Vader walk in and be like, hey, what's up, Bart? It's completely toothless because they're just owned by Disney. But yeah, the piece is called Mascots of an Evil Corporation. And it's like one of the best analyses of how the Simpsons changed from being this kind of cultural outsider to this mainstream force where they can just have, yeah, you know, like a Thanos couch snap as like the opening. And it's endorsed by

by Marvel and Disney that I've ever read so well we all have watched Plusiversary and what vertical integration it's amazing and you know what if Disney's putting out an album with a great singer why shouldn't the Simpsons meet them and have a whole adventure with them just kind of stand around while he sings uh-huh look at him and say like one adventure with him. Just kind of stand around while he sings. Look at him and say like one joke about him and his kids who insisted on being in the movie too. They also deserve careers. It's so true. Also, this is right after Camp Krusty

where they also did the misdirect of Happiest Place on Earth. That's where it's Tijuana. This is also the last time skinner would look like a badass uh it's all to tie into his vietnam background though because he was a green beret which was when the writers were children or teens like that was the most heavily propagandized to americans of like oh the coolest guys the green berets that's like that time period's equivalent of like a navy seal which in all cases like come on like you're you're falling for them that's like people who think crab maga is like the greatest like fighting no systema that's the

real one where you kind of just slowly turn around and a guy falls off i think it's gun kata folks oh of course now that's real that's cool like but skinner beats the shit out of these guys like throat punch like just boom and this is the only time i can think of the blue-haired lawyer being like injured being like physically hurt yeah i like his little tie adjustment to punctuate his catch his little tagline copyright expired then it's basically the simpsons go to the local fair uh series of sketches they're all fun this is season four pacing it's back-to-back 10 second gags you know at most they're 10 seconds yeah first we get water guns shot in the face of martin bart i gotta say bart's all over the place in this episode is about what his character is like.

Is he gay? Is he a grifter? Right. Help me out here. Is he horribly beaten by bullies? Like, what is this kid? But I love a good smoke bomb exit. That's always funny.

This is when I learned about Haggis as a kid because I feel like Ren and Stimpy did their joke like months after this. So this was definitely where I learned what Haggis was and and then became a running gag on earthworm jim as well about three four years later on the earthworm jim cartoon show oh starring dan casalina yes yeah yeah right yeah and is this the first time that uh homer's age has been defined at least for this era i think so we know marge is 36 from her birthday episode in season one that was 34

oh that's right right so yeah then this would i think this is the first time homer said his age out loud as 36 which you know i'm four years older than homer but i'm also you know five pounds lighter than him currently so i'm feeling better about that and then they bumped him up to 39 towards the end of the 90s because the writers were getting older and feeling bad. They didn't like that Homer was in his mid-30s. Right. But yeah, I also love that Homer is happy he beat the guy, that he looks fatter and heavier, or fatter and older than the guy guessed. He's like, I beat you. Then we have a quick thing, auto, destroying something,

launching a rocket, exploding the school, and then running off. I wonder if this is Jeff Martin's reaction to, he wrote the auto show that was about, when they finished, they're like, oh, we're not going to do an auto spinoff. In fact, we hate auto. Let's get rid of him. Get him out of the country. I did notice that when this ride goes in overdrive and a car flies off of it the car does like rotate towards the camera to show

you no child is inside i feel like that was a sensor note if they had their way i bet ralph would be in there or wendell or something like that also this is the start of a recurring bit in this season well actually no cam crusty was it before characters running away to mexico like there's there's going to tijuana him saying, I'll be down in Mexico. And then it's down to Mexico, Willie, and freedom, freedom. Then we see Milhouse beating up in Jimbo's spook house. I think it is made funnier because he's dressed as a Boy Scout, which has never been like Milhouse.

Inexplicable. Yeah. Well, yeah, it feels like there was some cut scene or something to explain that but we don't have those right access to those it makes it more adorably cute i i will say that i found one teeny deleted scene from a uh a vintage ad that i'll mention when we get to it we've learned that if a character is wearing a new outfit or a hat for some reason and it's never explained it's usually connected to something they cut out of the episode okay that makes sense well i kept thinking like shouldn't bart walks in with an ice cream cone shouldn't we hear the

ice cream cone fall or like he's covered in ice cream or something like it all these extra all these extra props thrown around here the sentence will be right back. Thursday, Lisa's having a crisis. I'm ugly. No one looks good in a school. And Homer's got the solution. That could be Lisa.

Have you seen the girls they have in those contests? Hubba hubba. So with a makeover, dance lessons, and a few tips from Bart. Do you really think I can win? Hey, I'm starting to think I can win. She'll be ready for the most important night of her life. Little Miss Springfield, which one will it be? The Simpsons, an all-new episode, Thursday.

Oh, that brisket's not sitting right. When you really care about someone, you shout it from the mountaintops. So on behalf of Desjardins Insurance, I'm standing 20,000 feet above sea level to tell our clients that we really care about you. Home and auto insurance personalized to your needs. Weird, I don't remember saying that part. Visit Desjardins.com slash care and get insurance that's really big on care. Did I mention that we care? Hey, it's Henry Gilbert greeting you with a frictionless smile

and a big thank you to our guest this week, Merit Kay. She is the best. We loved having her back on to talk about lisa the beauty queen and you should be following her on all your social medias check out her recent book on a land party culture of the 90s knots and just follow her wherever you follow people on the internet because she has tons of fun thoughts to share thank you so much again merit for coming on the podcast and if you enjoy talking simpsons you should know for five bucks a month you get every episode of this show a week at a time and without ads like this one andy support me and bob doing this is our full-time jobs and you get access to a monthly episode of talking futurama and a monthly episode

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slash talking simpsons because you can get all of our previous ones covering everything from akira to a goofy movie spider-man into the spider-verse to beavis and butthead do the universe and tons and tons more i'm sure there's something there you will love including our six and a half hour long podcast about who framed roger rabbit our longest episode ever see it all for yourself one more time at patreon.com slash talking simpsons they then go to a caricaturist which is inspired by jeff martin uh who is was a professional caricaturist before he be uh went to harvard yeah and uh which was his way of becoming a professional comedy writer was going to Harvard.

He did it as a teen at this theme park called Astroworld in Houston. And it was open at the time of the commentary, but it closed forever in October of 2005. This was an extra joke I really love now is that the artist's signage shows that he hasn't come up with a new idea in like 15 years

because it's it's farrah faucet darth vader and fonzie like it shows yeah he never adjusted with the times and and also i just love his everybody loves roller skating like he he already drew the roller skate so he's just like everybody loves roller skating so uh but in our first clip here this is when lisa faces public humiliation so girly you like roller skating no yeah everybody loves roller skating okay you can turn around now oh my god i'm ugly oh poor lisa it's i i do feel bad for lisa in this episode i think they lose track of her emotions at about the middle of the episode later she's like i like when boys whistle at me yeah it's fun it's true you're right she learned the lesson is that she should

get approval from uh from outsiders and it makes her yeah i mean jeff martin admits that they lose the emotional story in the third act and aljean admits up front that if your daughter is feeling insecure about her looks don't enter her in a beauty pageant it's not a good idea but i think in general this episode does outline i mean lisa hits these milestones a lot younger than most people do because they need to they need stories about young women and she's really not old enough for a lot of those stories but it does underline a time in people's lives where you start to become aware of your own self-image and start to feel bad about it sometimes especially because you start thinking well i need to start attracting people this is how life works what's wrong with me no and i will also like the way she feels so bad, everybody laughs at her. Like, the caricaturist was just, you know, having fun, and he's like, uh, you're boy crazy.

That's what I draw for a girl. Right. But Lisa takes it as, like, everybody thinks, like, I mean, I was a very sensitive kid then, and so this would have destroyed me for a long time. Yeah, absolutely. And I guess this was martin's drawing he handed to the end oh that's great right and uh we then cut to the contest and we get the i love that in the background there's a smoking crater in the school and everybody is just going on like normal

and uh we it's it's time for the contest and uh this was also from jeff martin's youth as well because they uh the raffle prize at his local school events would be a trip in the good year blimp back then so in homer's dreams like he he's he is more happy to learn about central pivot irrigation than seeing the this also reminded me that uh we had these school carnivals uh every now and then in grade school and the parents would be running the booth and they were not as skilled as carnie so the games were always very easy to win and i remember a parent asking me to leave the table because they were doing the you know a cup uh sorry ball under the cup thing where they move the cups around and stuff and it's just like well you're doing this so slow i win every time and eventually they're

like you can't have any more prizes cut off yeah it's like at the casino when they think you're cheating they drag you off my head was put in a vice yeah the uh you know well yeah i think uh i think my mom did that one year too of running one of those booths that i think i think after that she was like i'm not doing any more of this PTA junk. My mom was a very busy woman, so I don't blame her. But yes, if you wonder what central pivot irrigation is, it's still used today. And it's also called water wheel or circle irrigation. And that's how you get crop circles because basically there's wasted space in it because you have a circle inside of a square kind of where you're growing crops. But it's apparently still predominantly used today and i also feel really bad a mark this

on your bingo card i feel bad for the animators they were told oh a bunch of little squares turn over and say like this is very hard to do in television oh god yeah especially with this old technology you can really tell there's vhs editing on it like they the timing of it was probably just all wrong and they it feels like it's moving at like three frames a second as they turn it all over but i don't blame them at all they didn't cut back to homer they started with the when he was covered in gold a dream but they're really enjoying the cutting back to homer having his visions and looking crazier in real life uh but uh but homer loses the shoe buffer to ned and i love homer childish

i wanted that one but this is when he wins he wins and he goes oh my god now in a moment we'll be raffling off our grand prize A ride on the famous Duff Beer Blimp A ride on the Duff Blimp You see the circular pattern on those fields? That's from central pivot irrigation Wow Now let's see what's happening at the Super Bowl Homer! Homer! Homer! Homer! Oops, sorry Homer! Homer! Homer! Homer! Oops, sorry.

Homer! Homer! Homer! Homer! Homer! Homer! But first, our second prize winner and the recipient of this handsome shoe buffer... Ned Flanders! Oh, it's no fair. We'll never have a buffer we have one at home you never use it well i want that one and the winner of the blimp ride is homer simpson oh my god i i want to say too the way homer like has his big bulging eyes like it's such a fun cartoony reaction and like you said bob i feel like they had too many rules on them of like that hey this is too wild and too cartoony and i'm just like just have fun have some fun with the characters though i i was also thinking this because i saw

bill and josh's um mission hill live show which if they come to your town go and see them it's a whole lot of fun um but they they show old episodes of mission hill and then tell you about it uh bill oakley and josh weinstein so bill and josh they they had a funny thing about how they said one of their goals on mission hill was to have cartoony or acting because they did feel sometimes it could be too rigid on simpsons so they wanted like cartoony or wild takes on characters. And I think it works really great for that show. It makes me wish The Simpsons got to break the rules a little more often. So then Homer wins his thing, and he's on Cloud 9.

But he also actually feels bad for Lisa. This Homer is the most caring father he is in this episode, I think. He's really actually very nice. But yes, in this next clip here, Homer tries to comfort Lisa. Hey there, blimpy boy. Flying through the sky so fancy free.

Honey, what's wrong? Dad, do you think I'm ugly? What are you talking about? Oh, Lisa, this isn't real. It's just how you might look if you were a cartoon character. I'm an ugmo.

Now that's not true. You're cute as a bug's ear. Fathers have to say that stuff. Dad, am I cute as a bug's ear? No, you're homely as a mule's butt. There, see? And then Homer takes the cruelness of his father to be like, there, see? It just rolls right off his back.

This is also the time when Grambot could just teleport in. Right. Never seen again in the episode. By the way, to give you one of those time frame things homer is singing a a parody version of the the 1966 song georgie girl for a song that's uh it was 26 years old then which makes it the equivalent of if homer were to sing hansen's bop right now

in an episode of the show it's terrifying just let you know how time flies yeah and but homer's trying to comfort lisa but you know it's uh she's she's still pretty broken up about it and uh later in the episode lisa will guess that homer is drunk and he does seem to have drank a lot of beer at moe's when we cut back to him at at moe's bar we also find out that moe and barney have never questioned their attractiveness. Not even once. Not even Moe. I love that.

I love that. Because it's like, well, it's not even like, doesn't even fit with Moe's later character. But just the line, Moe, have you ever felt unattractive? The immediate just, no. Perfect. They give nothing to Homer.

But then in classic Simpsons fashion, when the plot needs to move forward, the television gives them their next idea. I had to put in the whole thing because this commercial is the greatest. I love this whole commercial here. I need help. Wee! Wee!

Wee! Wee! Wee! Ie! Wee! I guess every father thinks his daughter is the cutest. Well, now there's a way to prove it. Wow, President of Laramie Cigarettes, Jack Larson. This year, Laramie is sponsoring the Little Miss Springfield pageant. You see, government regulations prohibit us from advertising on TV.

Ah, that sweet Carolina smoke. But they can't prohibit us from holding a beauty pageant for little girls age 7 to 9. Lisa's age 7 to 9? Your daughter could be crowned Little Miss Springfield by our host, the maitre d' of glee, Krusty the Clown. I heartily endorse this event or product. What a feeling.

I'm as happy as a smoker taking that first puff in the morning. That could be Lisa. The Little Miss Springfield pageant, only $250 to enter. Oh, one of the best. There's a lot to unpack there. Is Talking Simpsons starting? I heard that line. Here's some Talking Simpsons history here, folks.

When we covered this the first time and i was putting together the clips and editing the episode that was when i heard this clip and i was like man i think it'd be funny if that started this episode of the show and made it sound like crusty the clown is endorsing our illegitimate podcast again don't tell anybody about this podcast and except if they want to give us money yes oh yes tell tell everybody then but uh and so and after the first time i was like oh i think i think we all agreed me and you bob that it was like it's funny if it just stays this way and and always is there for for now and so it started when we did this podcast the first time

and as it remained because it is just it is so perfect that it i mean it's a crusty recorded at once it's a heavily used up like piece of film that's been replayed a million times so you see the wear and tear of it on screen and it's just i heartily endorse this event or product like he wouldn't even record two versions of it it's either for an event or product it's it goes back to uh one of my favorite crusty gags uh which is for the it's for the the barbie episode when he's he goes into the booth to record the the lines for the talking crusty hey hey i'm crusty the clown sorry i got that hey hey i'm crusty the clown and then runs out and the guy is like all right crusty we're ready and uh that's actually that's another lisa crusty uh bit yeah i love uh crusty

as the guy who's cashing every check he can it just shows up as late as possible to to finish something like it's so great and and uh he says the story on the commentary but i prefer to use the quote jeff martin gave us himself so we interviewed him and i think something that made him want to do our thing was that he really liked that we used the heartily endorsed clip uh this was in his email to us the heartily endorsed line was cribbed from early tv star art link letters weirdly enthusiastic endorsement of the life board game which if you look up the it's it's not in a commercial it was on the life board game box that says i hardly endorse this board game yeah and he it's a picture of him playing it and around him in a circle is the text i hardly

endorse this game wow jeff martin continued unlike the music man this was an obscure and dated reference when i wrote it though mike reese recognized it immediately that's so great i mean that's also that that's the energy of the dorks on the simpsons writing staff that we all vibe with of just like that other nerds trying to out reference the other of just like oh i'm the only no one remembers this and then another nerd going like no no i remember that uh and this is the second appearance of jack larson and his last one died of cancer presumably he was first seen in barth the murderer he's the one who warns the uh tells people that the stolen cigarettes are going to be restocked soon in the city and yeah it's really too bad he did he could have been

a dr nick riviera type but i guess he's like he's too evil there's not there's not really an extra game to him he's just like a horrible death dealer that's all he is and i'm not sure if this is a reference or a nod to radio bart but in radio bart homer sees the superstar celebrity microphone commercial and says that could be bart in this one he says that could be lisa i feel like they're on their way to a running joke but they didn't do another one after this you're right i think you're totally right i think this is like there's there's multiple attempted running jokes in this there's another one that's attempts to be the first of a running gag and its second one then got killed later on but yeah it's uh but but the stealth way of advertising cigarettes on tv is so great too like just that happy as a smoker taking that first puff

in the morning now i think we are too anti-smoking in media in terms of depicting characters smoking in in some cases it's not allowed at all i just saw the new the new spider-man film uh something the spider-verse there's a lot of words is it into the spider-verse no that was the first one this is across across the spider-verse yeah how about we just get a number on these movies folks yeah numbers scare away people from seeing a movie uh because i'm a good person i stay through the entire credits and there's a big disclaimer like there you know the characters smoking in this movie we were not paid any money by cigarette companies this was a creative decision etc and i think like

there was a big story about netflix saying no more smoking characters guess what smoking is really cool i don't want to do it the problem is that listen this is the problem that people don't want to face is that smoking is extremely cool and you shouldn't do it but it is very cool and vaping will never be as cool as smoking you know it's just how else are you going to signify in shorthand that a character is really cool it's like saving a cat except for you know being like wow this guy kicks ass how do you know somebody's old and grizzled if they don't have like a cigar in their mouth you know yeah yeah or like it's an amazing prop for acting too it's you can't do the same thing with you can do so many little gestures yeah yeah you can light that you can light someone

else's cigarette you can't do that with a vape if someone is vaping in media it is a shorthand for them being an idiot sort of like them writing a segue they're sucking on a giant thing attached to a huge usb battery blowing purple fog now you know now i want a now i want a scene in a comedy of a instead of somebody offering to light the a person's cigarette they're like want to share my usbc charger to get your vape going uh what i'm saying is i want spider-man to smoke spider-man should smoke why doesn't spider gwen smoke she's she's the type that would she's yeah i know she's a cool band chick but yeah she's a drummer but yeah no nobody gets to smoke unless it's you're in uh like a tarantino movie or something or like uh you know the the auteurs still get because

because auteur directors like tarantino or wes anderson they all worship the movies of the 60s and 70s where everybody smoked in them. So in their movies, everybody smokes in them all the time, which I'm totally cool with. It makes characters cool. In Asteroid City, there's a lot of smoking in it. And I'm like, yeah, that lets me know this character is a cool character. But yeah, they say that they could make fun of cigarettes back then because they didn't advertise on television and the censors would if you complained about beer they told you like you'd get in trouble uh because the beer advertisers wouldn't want to

advertise on that but yeah i think later for that joke where homer watches a beer commercial and the announcer says danger this may cause cancer of the rectum and homer goes mmm beer they had to tell fox we look this up and that's that's this up, and that could cause cancer in your ass. Wow. So then in a great little bit of visual storytelling, Homer opens up his wallet and sees he has no money, but a picture of Lisa next to the blimp ticket, and he's got to make his choice. Mark Kirkland's team did great work animating this one. This is such a good looking episode

i get this joke mixed up because they did this joke twice uh they did this joke eight years later yes and aren't the electrodes on his stomach or something or he has ears on his chest okay ears on his chest yeah basically the same deal is that barney gives homer a bunch of money uh because he's a science experiment too. No, he tells Homer he can make money by being a science experiment. And then he says, there's just some side effects

and his chest is covered in ears. And they go like, oh my God. He's like, that's allowed. That is in the brain crayon episode. I still do not like. I've softened up on it a little. I hate his brain crayon, though. And I'll keep saying it is crayon.

I don't care. I know crayon is the right way to say it. Well, one thing I wanted to point out, Henry, if our listeners are savvy, you may have noticed Henry refers to this episode as Lisa Beauty Queen. Yeah, I am. And there's a the in there. And you never avoid the thes in any other title. And I'm confused.

I have mental problem. You have a crayon in your brain i i think i wrote it down in my notes finally is lisa the beauty queen i think i'm unlearning it but yes i i think in all of our messaging to set this up with merit i kept calling it lisa beauty queen i mean it could be a comma it could could be Lisa comma beauty queen. That works. I feel bad too, because it definitely is a, it's them doing the format of Bart,

the murderer for Lisa, the beauty queen. The, the is part of the thing. Wow. That's just so typical too, isn't it? You know,

like little, little girls get to, you know, have to be a beauty queen. Little boys get to be murderers. That's just. They can also be iconoclasts, right? Oh yeah's not the an iconoclast who are the icon that's true but so yes we then uh cut to home lisa's sad this is where there's the one different joke in the vintage edge with ad which listeners heard in the break i dropped it in there but what marge says in the entrance in

that scene is oh honey no one looks good in a spoon oh that's great yeah it's uh i think that's funnier but i do love when marge uses a thing from her childhood that totally whiffs with a kid today the ugly duckling story like it's them saying like oh wait these it was stupid to teach kids like hey there once was an ugly duckling meaning you are ugly now but eventually you won't be soon you'll be pretty and mean yes i just love barge's like to laugh at the ugly one no no lisa i know a song that will cheer you up. There once was an ugly duckling. So you think I'm ugly? No, no.

I meant you were one of the good-looking ducks that makes fun of the ugly one. Lisa, if you could have one wish, what would it be? To shut myself off from the world and never be seen by human eyes again. Uh, was your second wish to be entered in the Little Miss Springfield pageant? What are you talking about? I sent in an application for you.

I couldn't find a big enough photo, so I sent in that funny drawing of you on roller skates. How could you? I won't do it! Homer, Lisa's already sensitive about her looks. is the last thing she needs but I think she'll win dad have you seen the girls they have in those contests hubba hubba Homer comes in and lets Lisa know that he entered her in her beauty pageant the last thing she wants and I also love he's like I couldn't find a big enough photo, so I sent in a funny drawing of you on roller skates. And here's another great joke about how they do. This is a joke about the show's rigid rules on character acting, because they wanted to write Bart having Tex Avery-style wolf whistle reactions,

but he has to act it out in a grounded way, and it leads to really great animation. I think they just wrote down whatever Conan was doing in the room for this little bit. Oh yeah, you're right. He must have acted out every single one of this. The shoe hitting the head is pretty great. By the way, I learned recently that apparently his kid goes to college around

here. I should have been trying to stalk around in Berkeley, California to see conan o'brien walking around for an eight foot tall 21 year old uh i that's translucent i've seen photos of her she seems to be of normal height uh his daughter but not oh not harvard i know that's if i saw him walking his kid around berkeley i'd be like a state school for your kid couldn't get into carver's the deal Conan hey it's still like $36,000 a semester yes come on now I UC Berkeley is quite a prestigious school but it's not Ivy League hey the unibot taught here actually

that's true one of one of Berkeley's greatest alums I'm sorry I stumbled on that because I'm really broken up about his death we're still very sad about it yes yeah but but yeah so lisa runs off crying this is when homer has this very sweet story about that he'd uh want to gouge out someone else's eyes and put him in his head to see if he could see it differently i do feel like bart's cartoony reaction is that them being trying to get ahead of their barty's gay jokes by showing that bart thinks these girls are attractive i wonder i maybe it evens out i guess bart is all over the place in this episode like you said here's another thing you shouldn't do to a kid if she doesn't want to do it don't guilt her into doing it then but but that's what marge does in this uh sad little scene here

honey no one's going to force you to do anything. But do you know how your father got the money to enter you in this pageant? Nope. He sold his ride on the Duff Blimp. But that ride meant everything to him. Hey there, blimpy boy. Flying through the sky so fancy pretty i'll do it i mean homer's sadness is pretty funny i do like that but yeah that you know they it's just i feel bad for lisa that it's just like

marge says you don't have to do it if you don't want to but you should know what your father did to do this and it's just like oh damn that's that's harsh uh so we cut to the pageant this is when lisa's hanging out with the bitchy girls i love these two girls i want more of them i want more of these hardened veterans of the pageant scene oh by the way this is the last appearance of the actor joanne harris she did incidental female voices on the show for the first four years but i think they realized we have pamelaela Hayden, we have Maggie Roswell, and we have Tress McNeil. I don't know if we needed to bring in a fourth every now and then. So she is the one who says, did you see Tina Epstein?

And then later, she's the boy with the list saying, love that chewing gum walk. Man, poor Joan Harris. Yeah, that's too bad. I liked her voice. Well, it's especially because we're doing 14 at the same time now and i just get a little and i love tress mcneil but every incidental woman voice is her and it's like if you just mixed it up just a little bit here and so in walks amber dempsey uh their kid version of breast implants is eyelash implants uh which which are a real

thing uh that you don't have to go to paraguay for though i think i don't know how legal they are to be put on a minor as they're done in this uh the internet tells me though it can be about six thousand dollars to get it done in a couple places uh for for eyelash implants yeah the uh ambrademce is basically Denise Richards' character from Drop Dead Gorgeous, too. The perfect, definite winner. Though Denise Richards, again, perfectly cast in that movie, just like in Starship Troopers.

Like, you're empty-headed and mean. You're perfect for this lead character. I don't want to take i look that makes it sound like i'm saying she's not a good actress when and that she was just like cast well as a bad actress but i i love denise richards in both of those films so now she's uh what she's a real housewife yeah or she quit she was a real housewife i think she like very publicly quit the show or something but yeah we then get to hear about Marge doesn't believe that Amber is doing

this well. There's no way I can beat this girl. She's the Jack Nicklaus of the pageant circuit. Oh, I don't know that she's as attractive as Jack Nicklaus. I meant because they both win all the time, Mom. Oh, well, yes. That's what I meant, too. Well, tell you what. This afternoon, I'll take you to the beauty parlor and show you just how lovely you can be.

And later, I'll teach you the tricks of the trade. Taping your swimsuit to your butt, petroleum jelly on your teeth for that frictionless smile, and the ancient art of padding. So, yeah, what are they doing with bart here i don't know it's so weird but i love that march generates the sound for the sort of imagination by like rubbing the edge of the wine glass that she's drinking from that's a nice touch it's a nice little touch yeah it's such a great like i mean it is certainly suggestive a woman circling her wine glass with her finger while having a sexy fantasy it shows you marge's taste in men that i feel like is uh you know also with lee majors like a similar similar crop of guys that that marge is really into but the check the way

he bends over to is just so funny like that's when she's been checking out his butt every time he plays golf is this the beginning of marge's love affair with wine but she can only she can't drink that much more than one one and a half yeah i know doctors say you should drink more but uh but yeah all these facts that bart knows i mean yes it's the joke is it is strange for a 10 year old boy to know them they like he i yeah i have a feeling at the time it was meant to play as is bart gay or also like planning to be a drag queen in the future like right there's like there's more of this throughout right like what's the episode where where bart and uh and millhouse are wearing wigs and like jumping up and down on a bed

oh that's in the uh the christmas special season 10 where bart breaks his butt uh on uh afterwards unrelated to it but yeah when homer uh they he they challenge each other to dress up as women in case like, what, are you scared? And then when Homer breaks in on them and he says, what's going on here? And I want the non-gay excuse. Which when he said it, then Mila says, oh, we're drunk, really drunk. Oh, thank God. Yeah, I feel like this is sort of a running thing with with bar to some extent the kind of like evolution of this is like in gene belcher and bob's burgers when they just go full-on like

oh gene just dresses up like constantly as a woman or like as whatever and it's just like not really a thing and you can i feel like you can kind of see like how it that gag sort of evolved there you know i was thinking similar in drop dead gorgeous where the joke the joke with britney murphy's character is is that she loves her gay brother who moved to the big city and that's supposed to be like how silly or whatever and then that nobody else realizes uh he's gay and i like well that's not really like there's also a joke in wet hot american summer i re-watched recently too where the running gag with the gay characters is like what if everybody like really approved of them and thought that they were great and didn't hate

them i was like that because that would be silly back then right yeah nobody would approve of these things they would think it's horrible and disgusting this definitely seems like the joke is bart is showing that as he's getting older he has these queer sensibilities and the family doesn't know his straight family doesn't know what to do with that information i think they're having fun too because uh making it more eccentric because in the first three seasons it's like bart is this bad boy every little boy boy wants to be like him. He's skateboarding. He's pulling pranks. He's got a potty mouth. But now he knows all about padding and how to walk in heels.

And he poses like Betty Grable. So I feel like they're playing against type with Bart here. So then we head over to Turn Your Head in Coif, a cute little sign gag and uh we get a parody of uh jose ebear the beverly hills stylist to the stars back then who was very i think he's still alive but a very eccentric man he always i mean you can tell who he is because he's got that hat yes yeah in the braids too i think very is very famous hat he appeared on duck man and entourage uh playing himself he uh probably so people could get free haircuts at his place uh that but and then lisa is given a series of very 90s hairstyles until she gets a slightly wavier version of her normal hair i like the

first one yeah oh yeah the side thing yeah well i mean I mean, hey, you like a 90s alternative girl. That's true. Yeah. And if you don't, you're wrong. Yeah. And then they come home. This is when Homer teaches Bart a horrible lesson that women are ravenous blood sucking monsters always want more, more, more.

If you give it to them, you'll get plenty back in return. Of course, Homer means lawn mowing i think that's the third or fourth joke they've done like this where homer is not talking about sex right yeah though at least this time he's not positioned like he is receiving uh sexual uh pleasure it's instead a very silly drawing of him in a hammock watching marge um lawnmower yeah also bart just saying like she'll see through me like grandma's underpants is a very odd line yeah disturbing uh so then i also feel like this scene of them doing obvious compliments plays out so slowly like as to be a parody of a bad sitcom of like wait a minute that's mom oh you boys uh and but i love how homer just gives a blank nope i don't

know anything else about women no other tip that's it yeah and a fun little clip of bart using that to get free ice cream out of doris grau's character yeah for some reason this lady is later a judge at the uh beauty pageants that is strange i my only reasoning for that is i think that it's like it feels like a call back to the talent show where doris grouse lunch lady doris was also a judge in the same position but this time she doesn't have a line which maybe they also cut a line of that too because it feels weird that she's just there to not say something as one of the judges uh we then also uh cut to the bob fossy guy yelling at them which there's also a joke pretty similar to this and dropped dead gorgeous of the the mean very fussy choreographer screaming at young girls to get a dance right i i didn't

know until the blank check podcast series about bob fossy bobossey was not gay he was a horrible womanizer i had no idea zero it's such a fun uh well fun uh it's it's a it's a whimsical yeah it's whimsical yeah i mean i wonder like how you know to be to be a heterosexual man in that broadway world i mean like he's the competition is low for him in that world and I would think. That was a good series they did on that one. The Cabaret one, another classic. Also, maybe I just have Liza on the brain because that's a big part of Drop Dead Gorgeous is specifically the Liza from that era of Cabaret and Liza with a Z that Bob Fosse especially did. They then show at home them practicing how to be a good winner this is when uh lisa falls over great animation of her falling over in heels i mean yeah i i do feel like maybe once after seeing this episode i tried to wear mother's shoes i said that creepily

on purpose this is how i mean this is the beginning of every serial killer i put on mommy's shoes mother's shoes i did think i tried to wear them once just to be like how do you all and i believe i was off balance because they were just bigger shoes than my feet were but my i mean the story's idea for my mom my mom hated wearing heels they her feet were not made for them and they squished her toes into heels she was my mom was not a fan of walking in heels i and i also just have a phobia look nobody likes breaking their ankles uh because i stand corrected it's me i'm the guy but i can't wait but there's something about seeing somebody twist their ankles in movies it just makes me go like so seeing lisa like walk and have her like feet almost her ankle almost turn, it messes me up.

I hate seeing it. It's a real phobia of mine. But Merit, what are your feelings on high heels? I mean, they're fine. I'm lazy, so I just rarely wear them. I'm a flats person, typically speaking. Yeah, no, I don't know. i don't think about it very much i know it's like it feels like um i guess it still is sort of a thing but it feels like when i was growing up especially it was like one of those relics that like like a weird older

dude would be it feels to me like a lot of heels are in the same category as like those paintings by that guy who drew all the women carrying groceries with their underwear falling off like it's like such like a like the kind of guy who's like oh coeds like yeah um this retro horniness which obviously that's not entirely true because a lot of people are still really into them yeah i don't know does seem kind of old timey to me like my my mom didn't really you know wear heels when i was growing up and um feels very like 50s to me like the casual heel yeah i i uh i don't think they're as in fashion whenever i think of heels i think of like a woman in a deaf leopard video or whatever with like one of those bikinis where it's kind of like under your rib cage yes it's showing it's giving you a very long butt yeah the long butt underpants ladies wore in the

videos back then that i also was thinking that because in the drop dead gorgeous movie amy adams's character wears that kind of underwear too in a scene and i was like wow that's that's that was the sexy girl underwear of the time of having these very like long long underpants the heels yeah i wonder well also too i think about that uh well this was a plot on six feet under i don't know if when this stopped in offices in america but on six feet under i remember the the young lady character on the show she had to work in an office and had to wear uh pantyhose in the office like that was a rule women have to wear pantyhose and i was just like man that's fucked up why do they have to and she complains about it the whole time but i just remember like in schools and offices these weren't like the the very high

heels but they were still high-heeled shoes they would be incredibly loud so if if a teacher would be walking down an empty hallway it would sound like who opened the stable what animal got loose and then actually henry and i worked in an office and the the the women who worked in like the front desk and stuff they would wear heels and this is a terrible office and i had to record audio and of course it was recorded in a glass room where all the all the outside audio was just leaking in so like i had to wait for someone to like walk through the entire office to record anything if they were wearing heels because it would just you'd hear every footstep. It's taking me back.

But but Bart, he's a master of the high heels. He not only walks perfectly in them, but also then poses like Betty Grable, which the the writers say when that animation came back over from overseas, they were they were disturbed by it. I'm glad they kept it in the episode i think it's funny i think and if bart wants to walk in high heels and pose like betty grable like uh who are we to judge him like he's he's just having fun there's a good gag of bart as a sibling he has to put down his weapons in sibling rivalry to just be like it's hard for me to say because you're vulnerable and i could be like making fun of you right now and make you feel bad but you're not ugly and then

they meet that means so much to lisa to hear that to just hear you're not ugly geez she just hugs and so then we have a big old song and this was a reason gene and reese gave this script to jeff martin which by the way it does sound like the pitching deal on this was a reason gene and reese gave this script to my uh jeff martin which by the way it does sound like the pitching deal on this was a weird time where like they didn't know who they could get back for season four and it sounded like it was somewhat temporary who they could get back for season four so they pitched out ideas for episodes and they're like oh yeah if this was a beauty pageant and jeff martin comes back he can write all the funny songs in it just like he did in air order like two three episodes earlier in uh streetcar named marge and this this

opening song is great i love it yeah yeah back to that uh the weird transition i mean with season five they lose 80 of the staff but here so a lot of people were halfway out the door i know like uh jay kogan and wally waldarski were some of the first to leave and that's why where i bill oakley and josh weinstein were able to come in at the end of the season and it feels like john vd was kind of on his way out too because he had to later come back and write clip shows to fulfill his contract and same with george meyer too like he yeah there's there's a lot of guys with one foot out the door and it's because working on the simpsons was incredibly hard and they're all being offered very lucrative deals to write new shows somewhere else.

So I don't blame them for leaving. And then what did they do? They got to make shows that either aired three episodes or never aired at all. But back then, if you never released a a tv show you could still be a television millionaire because of the development process that's uh that's that's the past the wga is trying to get back in their currently ongoing strike i don't know hopefully the the writers guild uh got everything they wanted by the time you're listening to this. My name is Amber Dempsey.

When I grow up, I want to be a sweetie pie. I am Pahasatira Mahasapina Petulon, and tonight I will be playing MacArthur Park on the tabla. No, I'm serious. Yes! Judges, there's your queen! Who's watching the quickie mart? My name is Lisa Simpson, and I want to be Little Miss Springfield so I can make our town a better place.

Yeah, clean up this stink hole. Frosty, what time you got here? Yeah, yeah, what is this, the Republican fundraiser? Checking it out, making a house, making a wish, dreaming a dream. Little Miss Springfield, which one will it be? Me! Oh, that brisket's not sitting right. So fun.

I love the girls just saying, like, having it all, dreaming a dream. Gasping for air. Gasping for air gasping for air uh and uh kirkland said he was not very excited to draw the dancing in this one though it's it's actually very difficult to ask uh animators to have 30 little girls all do a secret a synchronized dance routine yeah rough episode for animation between this and the squares like god you know when they filmed drop dead gorgeous that's the one thing where i felt like the the small budget was noticeable because in my memory i was like oh there's a lot of people in the pageant and then i'm watching the actual pageant and there's like eight contestants in the entire pageant and very tight shots of the

audience yes four people at a time well to, to learn from Lewis Pitesman's piece that Ellen Barkin barely was around to film it, I was like, oh, that's why every shot of her is very close up or she's in a hospital

for half the movie. And we get to see our first appearance of Sanjay's daughter, Puhasachita Petalon, Nahasapipa Petalon. And their only other speaking line is in the grade school confidential when she

spots skinner and enda having sex uh well not making out not having s-e-x in front of the c-h-i-l-d-r-e-s sex cauldron i thought they closed that place down but and i didn't know what macarthur park was until weird al released his parody of it the following year. And as a precocious kid, I loved reading Dave Barry. I'll tell you that, folks. And I think annually he had listeners, sorry, listeners, readers used to read things. He would have them vote on the worst songs of all time. And one year it was, I think MacArthur Park was the all-time winner. And I just had to read a guy describe why his song is bad.

And it wasn't until the Weird Al parody that I fully understand what macarthur park was and then later i heard on the radio but weird al's parody is four and a half minutes this song the full song is almost eight minutes so weird al at least knew i'm not gonna do the whole thing i'm not gonna commit that much to this bit i would hear macarthur park on the later, but I hear the radio version, which is not the full eight minute version. I think I think it does get cut down for radio. So but this joke had to be explained to me by my mom who laughed at it very hard. Like she thought it was very funny for boomers. They were scarred by having to hear MacArthur Park a million times in the 60s when they were in high school. But the idea of having, I mean, it is such a funny idea of not only is it a very slow,

tedious song, but also that it will be played solo on the drums, the tabla drums, at a much slower pace, meaning it will be much longer. I don't think I believed Daveave barry when i read the lyric someone left the cake out in the rain i simply didn't believe him and then no i mean now jurassic park is fully replaced it in people's memories if they if they think of this song at all and this is where there is an attempt at starting a runner which is this is what Marge asked who's watching the quickie mart yes and cut to the kids robbing it so in Marge

and Chains they wrote a similar joke in the script where after Marge is arrested and being sent to jail she goes by Apu and Sanjay and says who's watching the quickie mart and then it's going to cut to the joke that's in the episode of snake stealing the entire building but but when they were recording it

julie cabner said who's watching the quickie mart and who the fuck cares and so they decided to cut it then with mar they they altered the line uh to set it up in a different way but so this was their attempt at having Marge's catchphrase be, who's watching the quickie? She's concerned about this local business. So we see Lisa give her speech. And I think of Lisa's make our town a better place. I feel like that was reused in a million syndicated ads for Simpsons,

like of just showing like, and it would then cut to just a random riot from an episode of a different episode. As a way of saying like, Springfield, it's a crazy place. And then they have this clip of Lisa. They then show Krusty barely showing up in time with a silent appearance by Miss Penny Candy. He thinks it's a Republican fundraiser, which is pretty great. It also feels like a little bit of a joke at Bob Hope coming up. Basically, Krusty is a less professional Bob Hope who went to his fair share of Republican fundraisers. You know, Krusty makes it in on time, finishes the line, and then says the brisket's not sitting right because i would

assume because he just came from like a deli or the the fryer's club having having had a very heavily smoked brisket i have a memory of watching this episode when it aired for the first time with my sister and i laughed at the brisket line and she was like you don't even know what that is and i just knew it was food so i understood joke, but she was mad that I laughed at something and she thought I didn't understand what it was. Oh, man. See, I was having happy memories of my mom explaining MacArthur Park to me. No one was there to explain MacArthur Park to Bob Mackie.

Wow. Cut to the end of the song and the entire fully bored audience. And this is a line I've said many times in real life. And I'll never have that recipe again. Oh, no! Oh, that just kept going, huh? And now here's Lisa Simpson. They'll love you just as much as I do.

Thanks, Dad. That just kept going, huh? Lisa Simpson they'll love you just as much as I do thanks dad that just kept going huh anytime something feels like it went too long in real life I go like that just kept going huh I also noticed that for Sanjay's daughter speaking it's Charlie Smith but singing it's Nancy Cartwright

and we are holding them both accountable you guys need to apologize you need to apologize this is not normal uh yeah i just noticed that yeah i only noticed it for the first time here i mean uh at least smith refused to sing macarthur park i mean it might it definitely would be distracting to to hear yardardley singing MacArthur Park as this character and then immediately hear Lisa talk and that feels like the reason yeah yeah but but yeah that just kept going on and it's also so sweet though that Apu and Sanjay are very supportive uh father and uncle just like yay yay like they they i wonder if that is their taste making her do

macarthur park like that's one of their favorite songs it feels like it it was it was the song that was popular when they came to america in season three a big note that we saw in the storyboards that are on the dvds was don't turn homer into a food monster well those days are over because now homer eats petroleum jelly by the bucket full i mean just eats uh apparently some people would eat petroleum jelly uh josh weinstein there's a line in the simpsons i think it's lisa's date with the density where bart says millhouse likes you and lisa says millhouse likes vaseline on toast. And that's because Josh Weinstein as a kid, every morning there'd be a kid on the bus eating Vaseline on toast.

Disgusting. And of course, the famous song, She Don't Use Jelly. We all know it. Yes. Yeah, that's right. My only contact with like that Vaseline stuff as a kid was when I had a i had a compulsion to lick my lips all the time and i had uh a few times especially when it got cold and uh one attempt done to try to get me to stop licking my lips was to put vaseline on them so it would taste bad and it just sucked i

hate i your mom should have stopped cooling all those pies on the windowsill. Now, it really was just like, you know, everybody licks their lips in life, but I would just do it compulsively. I just couldn't stop. And eventually I kicked that habit. Now, I lick my lips the appropriate amount of doing it. But, yeah, the petroleum jelly tea thing, that is a big plot point in the Drop Dead Gorgeous film as well. Like Kirsten Dunst's character says, like, I can't put any more on my teeth. I'm sick of tasting it. I have found someone who blogged about eating Vaseline on toast to, you know, one of these people who like recreates Simpsons episode food.

It sounds horrifying. I don't, I mean, is it to, is it for regularity? Is it that I would think it goes through you pretty fast. I don't, apparently it looks like butter. It melts really quickly and looks like butter.

So she says you could prank someone into eating disgusting toast, but that would be wrong. Yeah. We're doing an episode following this. We're recording an episode following this where there's a joke about castor oil. And it does feel like one of those old-timey things to keep you regular

because you're just eating beef, basically. Yes. And the vegetables you ate were all canned and disgusting. So you needed some way to push all of that out of your guts. You send in the troops. So Homer must have been very regular in this after this episode because he eats the entire jar it's uh it is so gross and i couldn't i couldn't believe it as a kid even today i've seen a lot of gross comedy ever since that's definitely much grosser than this we live through jackass you know but this but this still is uniquely gross to

me that homer just his reaction to it is like and then cutting back to it later where he's kind of upset there's no more left and he's he's holding the the tub of it up to his eyes scraping it uh so yes we then cut to lisa and this is when uh lisa has a little song. Some people say that to love your country is old-fashioned, uncool, real Melvin. Well, to them I say, Oh, beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain. One, two, three, four. That's a good job in the city. Working for the man every night and day.

This is my favorite part of the pageant because, what does that say? Oh, it gives me a chance to visit with a girl's personality. Uh, personally. Amber, do you think the Bill of Rights is a good thing or a bad thing? Take your time, dear. Good thing. Aww. I think, again, this is great.

Jeff Martin kind of right. He says it's a Donny and Marie type deal, but just that it's such a great medley of like, oh, here's something here's classic americana and then time for something hip but something that's like 10 years old and not hip anymore i think it was inspired by their a little bit country a little bit rock and roll but i think i think south park repopularized that with the episode they did 20 plus years ago or 20 years ago when the ir war was new yes I just love also the like Tina Turner animation of her like little hair pose like she's down and then up and then back like it

you know the the Tina Turner just passed away so we've all been reminded of her her greatness it feels like a precursor to the talk to the audience bit it was just like a personality personally you know i i don't like the third act i don't think the writers like it much either i feel like we should have spent the rest of the episode at this pageant and there should have been more characters because we only meet amber dempsey we don't know a lot about her uh we meet sanjay's daughter and lisa i feel like they could do a lot more and have a lot more fun but they really speed through it you're right if they could have spent the pageant could be most of act two and act three and then you end it at the war like at the winner thing but they wanted to i guess have lisa technically be the queen by the end of

act two but yeah they there's this pacing issue too and the biggest negative'd say on Drop Dead Gorgeous is that they end the pageant with like 20 minutes left in the movie. And you're like, what's going on here? This thing keeps going. No, both of these, that movie, because I saw that not too long ago for the first time. And that movie and this episode both have this weird like, yeah, third act or just sort of end bit where it's like because i remembered this episode really well but then when i we you know when you get to the point where the pageant ends i was like oh

that's you know we're about halfway through the episode it's like no we're like two thirds of the way there's just this kind of awkward last bit tacked on to the end and this is when we have crusty refer back to the vanessa williams incident uh which i think we've talked about in the podcast before but we can go over it again i did a little more research on this because vanessa williams she was the first black women to win the crown for miss america in 1983 and in 1984 horror uh her title was revoked because penthouse announced they'd be publishing nude pictures of her i looked more into that the pictures were published uh were taken in 1982 when she was 19 years old and it sounds like from her account she was kind of tricked into thinking it was like artistic photography in which she and

another woman were posing to basically make shapes with their silhouettes and the photographer is like well they won't actually see your body they're going to see the silhouettes and she was 19 and she believed him and she did sign a release when she was very young so they could legally publish these and i and i think uh like hugh hefner said like oh playboy wouldn't publish these uh mostly because we don't feature lesbian content when you really care about someone you shouted from the mountaintops so on behalf of insurance i'm standing 20000 feet above sea level to tell our clients that we really care about you. We care about you.

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all with multiple financing options tailored to you. These savings won't last. Make an appointment online at BigOTires.com or stop by one of your locally owned and operated greater colorado springs bigotires today bigo black friday savings going on now bigotires the team you trust man yeah yeah i learned a new fucked up thing about that guy everything's like yeah we don't do lesbo stuff anyways uh but it's dyking out in my magazine but but yeah penthouse did run the photos and uh the cover i mean uh i'm gonna use this word in quotes it's

very funny because yeah it is uh vanessa williams standing with george burns i assume they bought a photograph of this or pay for the rights of the like publicity photograph. And it says, Miss America, oh God, she's nude. So it ties into the oh God, you devil. Oh, man. Yeah. By the way, George Burns was in movies. They were called oh God. And I think the second one is oh God, you devil.

Do not confuse them. This is like the Spider-Verse. Right. I can't keep all these oh God movies straight. I forgot that's there. Instead of calling it oh God 2, they called it Oh God comma you devil and I think what he plays both parts in it the God and the devil I'm basing this on VHS

boxes I remember seeing not actually seeing the film yes we have Oh God oh sorry Henry this is a trilogy this is just like the spider verse and that's very confusing Oh God 1977 Oh God book 2 1980 and finally we finish the fight with oh god you devil in 1984 so they i give them credit for holding back on bringing the devil into it as a major character

until the third entry in the trilogy you know that's got something back yeah that's like waiting to use the joker in the third batman movie instead of the second one, like most Batman movies do now. I can't wait. Man, isn't that silly in the Batman that they're like, who's this guy? Bet you'll see the Joker in the next movie. They're just being very coy about it. That should have been after the credit set scene. Get it out of there.

Honestly, it should have just not been there. Oh, that's even better. Yeah. But yes, this is when, as a kid, I didn't know the Vanessa Williams thing. it out of there honestly it should just not been there oh that that's even better yeah but uh but yes this is when as a kid i didn't know the vanessa williams thing i just took this as a line of like it was their wink to the audience of look lisa's gonna have to be become the actual queen so here's us winking to you of like hey this is what the runner-up rules are we have to officially say it so it's not completely out

of left field but it was it was a blah blah blah and don't say it'll never happen i hate describing a pose on a podcast but crusty leaning back from the camera and sticking his hand in front saying you know and like kind of rotating it back and forth like doing the iffy motion yes i love that i love that there's so many funny crusty poses poses. I wonder how Kirkland, I wish, got to talk more in this commentary. Some Krusty poses in this feel very either Silverman or Brad Bird. Both of them were very possessive of drawing funny Krusty scenes. Yeah, and the song he sings, I forget because I've seen this 40 or 50 times, it's a mislead. And you only really know that if you're watching it for the first time because we know that it eventually goes away from crusty once he gets to the fourth letter but when

he starts singing there's like oh my god he's gonna sing a four minute song about every letter in this entire title uh and that'd be an amazing bit i think family guy would do that yes 15 years later but i forgot the joke is a mislead that you see each lit up each time and that's like it's kind of a parody or it's a play on like the nat king cole song l is for the way you look tonight but that that also that the writer of the song in universe is such a bad writer that didn't even think of a second thing for tea like tooth filled mouth that's one of my favorite bits from this episode it says it back to back uh tea is for tooth filled mouth salsa no it's uh it's all amazing and then but lisa loses as often she does comes in second uh so then we cut to the uh the home we first learn about

wasting food which every time i throw away food i haven't finished i think of wasting food well mered i know you're familiar with canada and i'm moving there very soon and they they do a lot of composting and my wife has this little fun box that when you don't eat food you put it in the fun box and that box goes in the freezer and then later it turns into compost so yeah i'm learning these things for the first time my mom has a box that's underneath the sink but i feel like the freezer makes more sense because it's not gonna smell you know here in america i'd uh you know i do set aside recycling but composting i I'm not.

By set aside, what do you mean? You know, I put it, well, I have, when I get Amazon boxes, I put them aside, and then in the morning, I walk them down to the cardboard box tray thing in my garage, or, sorry, in the apartment building. I need pictures. I'm not buying this. I do this, for real. Okay, do I do it every single time with cardboard no but i mean 80 of the time i do it fair enough uh we then have a quick ikea joke about oh actually this is a

joke about uh store stor which is a is a knockoff of ikea and later in eight misbehaving they'll go inside and it's a parody of those kind of danish super chains but i don't know if store stor is still around but it was an ikea knockoff and there's a few other ikea knockoffs in the world it's like a real thing it's absolutely real yeah i thought it was ikea until we did eight misbehaving that's right thank you man i yeah you know and as a name shop with the o through it makes more sense as a parody of store than in a parody of ikea i mean i didn't go to an ikea until i moved here 17 years ago into california like where i grew up in florida there was there were not ikeas anywhere near me i think i think there might have been one down in orlando but we you

know we're just gonna buy cheap presswood uh furniture from uh from target or whatever we're not gonna drive down there for there's a really good japanese ikea knockoff called muji muji i haven't heard of this is that is it only in japan or is it is not exactly an ikea knockoff it's like there's stuff i don't know they do like actually pretty nice stuff especially like stationary and things like that like housewares yeah i meant that it's one of those stores where you go in and you you buy things you don't need because you're just shocked oh yeah absolutely yeah yeah we then cut to kent brockman from scott christian another a rare scott christian appearance and here's the start of another runner that they kind of let go We then cut to Kent Brockman from Scott Christian, another rare Scott Christian appearance.

And here's the start of another runner that they kind of let go of, of just saying, like, the mayor's illegitimate son is here, which then in a couple episodes for Treehouse, they say the mayor's beer-swilling brother Clovis, or beer-swilling half-brother, I should say. So they kind of let go of building up the quimby family uh but this this is one of the uh the little times of using that and we then see seemingly barney gumbel die in a horrible explosion he hindenburgs that thing yeah

anyway i just love the like anyway and there were so many jokes about severe tire damage spikes I did not encounter those until I actually moved to California where parking is precious in Ohio almost everything was a parking lot because they weren't building new things I didn't realize like oh there are some places that they don't want you to park there and if you try to leave you're going to destroy your car yeah no I when I first moved to California I think that's when I noticed them too like I there's there's one set of severe tire damage spikes I walk by every day in my morning walk. And I think of the many times Simpsons did jokes about it every time I see it. Yeah, the weird thing about severe tire damage spikes to me is like they kind of seem to imply the existence of like moderate or minor tire damage spikes like like they're not just oh

like tire damage spikes severe tire damage spikes like is there a type of spike i could roll over and it would make a minor impression on my tires it would disfigure them in some way but they'd still be okay rough up your tires don't yeah kill them yeah so then they show that a horrible thing happens to amber off screen which uh not to give away drop dead gorgeous is ending but a horrible thing happens to denise richard's character and that's how kirsten dunn's character becomes the queen and there even is a joke about a melted tiara being passed down to somebody so i'm just like boy where where did this start like i definitely like this is based on lana williams life i and i'm not saying she stole jokes from this episode but it's like did she have this script in her head and then they kind of workshop

this together i'm just curious where it came from well looking at publicity images of drop dead gorgeous i saw one of denise richards wearing the mount rushmore uh head head with what her head is being one of the heads and that's a joke in streetcar named marge yeah yeah that's the same deal yeah so i i wonder where and again this is from this is from lana williams's real life she was the runner-up and i i would think that if i were her with a kind of deep deeply dark comedic sensibility she has I would probably had after winning after coming in second imagined horrible things happening to the winner and then I become the new queen I would I would imagine a lot of those things too maybe maybe that's where her journey as a writer began but thoughts of murder yes that's where most creativity begins i find oh yeah uh but yes this is when um basically they watch a child nearly die on screen

oh the humanity anyway to turn on the store's severe tire damage spikes here's little miss springfield oh dear it would be a shame if that pretty dress got wet. I'd say the greater danger is her scepter acting as a lightning rod. Unless it's made out of plastic. Nope. Metal. Ladies and gentlemen, Little Miss Springfield has been struck by lightning. Doctor, what is Amber's condition? Oh, she'll be fine.

In fact, she's already won the Little Miss Intensive Care pageant. Congratulations, Lisa. You're the new Little Miss Springfield. Here's your scepter. Just kidding. Here you go. Just kidding. Here you go. Just kidding. I deserve that. His reaction shot, so good.

This is also an aborted running joke where we had in, what was it? Oh, Radio Bart. Edna's saying, you know, if the tables have turned, what would you do? And Edna's very small and he's he's rolling the yo-yo up and down like here you go just kidding here you go just i feel like that was the start of another runner but oh yeah oh wait that was part the lover part the lover yes sorry yeah another blank the blank yeah they didn't i don't think they did a here you go just kidding over and over again i think they make fun of jeff martin doing that for that was his art of

padding not uh not are we there yet yes yeah similar similar just repetition gag but uh and speaking of dark sensibilities which by the way drop dead gorgeous is part of the fun of it is that it is a a bleak comedy much more bleak than you're used to in america but this is a pretty dark joke for boomers to write into their tv show which is like we're uh the jfk shot in this it's not even 30 years old at this point yeah it's 29 yeah you're right yeah they's in case you don't know the when lisa is being sworn in it is a parody of the iconic shot of the day he was killed, the JFK was killed, LBJ, his vice president, being sworn in on a Bible to the fact that Marge is posed and dressed like Jackie O in the shot. She wasn't O yet. Oh, sorry.

Yes. Jacqueline Kennedy. And Homer is dressed with glasses on for no other reason than to look like Representative Albert Thomas. I looked that guy up, too. What a goober. He's only recognizable because, like, what's this guy in his giant glasses? Huge bow tie. Oh, it's the bow tie.

It's still in the show. Come on. A man is dead. Well, you know, he was dressed up for a parade, so it makes sense. That is true. This is happening on Air Force One, right? Yes. Yeah.

But, yes, I also think they 80-yard in a good little different line for Hibbert. makes sense that is true this is happening on air force one right yes yeah uh but yes the uh i also think uh they 80 yard in a good a different line for hibbert i bet i bet he did not say amber was um i think she had a sadder fate in the original line i think well now we have four minutes left in act in this episode act three is very very short and by the way if you like how lisa looks in her cape and melted scepter and crown uh for about 50 bucks you can get a uh stuffed lisa that looks just like that on ebay there's the it's a relatively rare bit of simpsons memorabilia but you know 50 bucks not not too bad don't there's somebody trying to sell it to you for 100 keep shopping you'll find it cheaper on ebay and i say i did not buy it this sounds like i bought it

i just shopped around for it but but yeah so they got to kill a lot of time here of like well okay what does a beauty queen do and they started the wax museum which looks just like the exterior looks exactly like the one on hollywood boulevard which again it's one of those like only when you visit los angeles for the first time do you realize how many times the simpsons put in la landmarks in it uh that includes madame tussauds wax museum that's that's on hollywood boulevard uh which i have since uh last year i went to the madame tussauds in las vegas i'd say it's good for about 10 minutes and then you're like, oh, another wax statue. But the first one I saw was The Rock wearing clothes that The Rock had worn. And it is kind

of eerie of like, wow, I do feel like I'm standing next to a human being. And then by the end of it, I'm just like yeah there's katie perry from her fireworks video whatever stop being creepy three rooms ago uh it's it's a fine little don't only get the super saver package that's 20 bucks i don't spend more than that it's it was also funny because um it was clearly being run very cheaply that it's only like teens were working there and then one woman in her 60s who seemed like she was like kind of the den mother of all the teens who were running the place it seemed like it was being run very cheaply the uh the madam tussauds in vegas that's

my other thought on it and did you know that dr ruth is still alive by the way this podcast goes live in six weeks she's 95 years old oh yeah real gamble there i look I assume she was dead I didn't even look yeah I look this up because the other old lady sex expert Sue Johansson just passed away in June you might remember her most for a scene where Conan O'Brien is wearing a dildo on his chin oh yes yeah that's her she would come on the show a lot and goof around with him but yeah Dr. Ruth is still alive and I also look this up because Dr dr ruth's head is now in the house of horrors i guess with mr t and ronald reagan's and when another show did this with another former president they got in big trouble because game of thrones in their first season in 2012 uh they

needed a lot of props they just got like a random assortment of heads. And one of those heads was the head of George W. Bush. Of course, this is not a good reality, so it's not his real head. It's a fake head. And they use it in many scenes because like, hey, we got this head. Someone sent it to us. Let's use it because it's a budget issue.

And someone actually notices like, you never see a good shot of it, but people notice, oh, like that's his nose. That's his cheekbones. HBO offers a profuse apology and they promise to edit it out of the reruns and the the uh dvd releases so uh i'm gonna say that was a wuss move and uh don't do that losers man that is so like that's cancel culture i tells you yeah and then uh Yeah, and then Kathy Griffin was canceled in a minor way for a dumb edgelord photo of her holding up Trump's head, whatever, bloody or whatever. Yeah, which was also like just a boring-ass photo shoot.

Like, if I was working on her team, I'd be like, we can think of something more creative than that, can't we? But not in a good taste way of just like, all right you cut off yo you're hardcore i get to take a line from the brilliant felix biederman of of choppa trap house that's let's beheading barney comedy there right yeah it just it feels like it's a show about sexual assaults and uh horrific murders but that was crossing the line our barely visible uh recreation of a president's head on a pike i don't get it uh i mean now that you say that this reagan's head on a pike thing i'm kind of surprised they got away with it then that this feels subversive for 92 for sure and it feels

like by 92 they hadn't fully admitted it but i feel like in 92 there was the feeling like look we all know reagan has alzheimer's it's mean to make fun of him now kind of spirit was in the world which is also like fuck that fuck that guy current president sharp as a tech sharp before 4 30 yes now there was a new there's a new story about how agitated he gets in the afternoon just today when we're recording this and that's because he's a normal guy of normal intelligence and he's he's fine uh hey speaking of somebody who aged gracefully oh yes yeah uh so so after a quick joke about ralph wiggum being oh the last joke about him being witty and womanizing lisa with chewing gum walk very wrinkly which is gross for eight-year-olds to say at least it does not object to this objectification she loves it yeah yeah it feels

very off for lisa and also she's helping deport immigrants too that also is a little off for lisa we come to our big guest of the episode bob hope and i we have a quick little clip here and now let's give a big fort Springfield welcome to Mr. Bob Hope. What's the mayor's name? Quinby. Beautiful. Hello, this is Bob. What the hell am I doing in Springfield Hope?

Hey, how about that Mayor Quinby? He's some golfer. His golf ball spends more time underwater than Greg Louganis. And now I want to show you what you're fighting for, if there was a war on. Little Miss Springfield. Isn't she beautiful? Little Miss Springfield. First Tony Randall cancels, now this.

What gives here? Hey, where do you think you're going? We want Miss Springfield! Hey, set me down at that boat show so bob hope 89 years fun at this point in his life right yes yeah recorded in his uh home with jeff martin and conan o'brien were there uh barely could see or or hear them but he was still performing he was still uh we've i learned a lot about this from the dana gould podcast the the horrible state of his life uh in his later year i mean i learned about a lot about this through his podcast and uh the late great gilbert godfrey he did not get to live as long as bob hope did but uh gilbert that's sad yeah it made me sad but he got to uh he often

would repeat stories because he's an old man and one of them was uh this bob hope christmas special from 1993 called bob hope's bag full of christmas memories and gilbert's uh his interpretation of this uh you know and he's been informed by many comedians who have worked with hope is that bob hope was a notorious womanizer he should have been kept canceled and put in jail frankly for all the crimes he's done in the past and his wife was fully aware of this although all the philandering all of the cheating and they had been married since like the 30s so he had the same wife for a very long time until he died and to uh because he faded quicker than she did to get revenge on him in his later years she would sign him up for everything and put him in the most humiliating things possible and one of these sketches is one that gilbert always brought up and it was a sketch where he

is jack frost with just a bunch of children dancing around him and he is ready for the grave he's just like put me in there uh he is pre-dead in this sketch uh and it's worth looking up if you just type in bob hope jack frost you will both get the actual sketch from the year after this from 1993 december and you'll also get an excerpt of the gilbert godfrey podcast where he describes the bob hope story and how he came to be in this state well like you said his lack of hearing meant that he has like a he has an earpiece in that's just telling him the words to say yes it's just a blind deaf deaf old man being shoved around as revenge. I like the revenge angle to it as well,

which, you know, it's at the very least a funny story, whether how true it is or not. Yeah, I mean, there's some not-so-funny stuff on there. Gilbert was telling stories about how other comedians would say that Bob Hope threatened to leave women stranded during the USO shows if they didn't sleep with him like i'll leave you in vietnam oh yeah so yes bob hope is in hell right now if anyone is man and george burns is the devil we've learned that so i got the dana gould thing mixed up because

i remembered him at a stand-up show i went to told a very funny story that dana gould was on like a young comedian showcase that, uh, Bob Hope was hosting on TV. And he tells the story of having to the arduous day of trying to film commercials for it with Bob Hope. And the Bob Hope was very lost and needed a lot of, and he said that he kept saying the light of like,

didn't you used to be my caddy, but he keeps saying it wrong. I'm like, he used to be my khaki. He's like, yes, Bob, I used to be your khaki he's like yes bob i used to be your khaki and and he also i remember he described feeling his arm as uh touching a

a sock full of coins uh i thought it was a sock full of light bulbs that's it so i pull the light bulbs thank you yes yeah and yeah in 1998 conan o'brien wrote for the New York Times about going to his Toluca Lake mansion to record it. And he basically says that he had no time with him and that they waited around for 30 minutes, recorded with him for 15 minutes. And then after he got every line like three times, Bob Hope just stood up and like, well, see you guys and leaves leaves and just gets rid of himself. It's kind of like those late-in-life Jerry Lewis interviews where he's just destroying his legacy and being cruel to everyone around him. Yes, that's true. Oh, man. And I feel like they are having fun at his expense. Those cuts to the crowd laughing huge at a corny old golf ball joke.

Like, that's them saying, this shit sucks. Like, this is, Bob Hope's not funny. Like, that's their way. I also like all of these Army Hicks. Oh, I love their designs. It's distracting one of them has Snake's voice. Yeah. And that they would have preferred Tony Ranzel to Bob Hope, too.

Actually, now you mentioned the Bob hope uh thing with the uso tours also that their escape reminds me of the apocalypse now yeah yeah i was wondering if that was a reference because i could remember if that scene was in the uh director's cut that came out in 2001 or if it was in the original the uso show scene i feel like i saw it in the original but the most recent version i watched was the extended edition the director's cut why am i using like the the lord of the rings term for it the director's cut but uh yeah i forget if it's in if it's not in one version or the other but also you know what drop dead gorgeous also has a joke about greg luganis though it's more about him being uh recent more recently he'd come out of the closet so it's more of a joke about Greg Louganis, though. It's more about him being more recently he'd come out of the closet. So it's more of a joke, a gay joke about Greg Louganis and Drop Date Gorgeous.

Yeah, he came out as HIV positive in like 95. So this joke was about just him being a swimmer in this one. I remember watching that. There was a 2020 on him, him coming out as HIV positive about how like he they had to have a whole investigation on it like and of course famously at the olympics he cut his head on the diving board and bled into the water did he contaminate other people they had to have a long thing about like well there's chlorine in the water and it got sealed up really fast so no he didn't give other people aids like it was like god damn that's that's that's how it was back then it was a rough time rough time uh and you know when he

says that boat show thing you can see a boat show in the shot the animators drew in a visible boat show from the shot bob hope can hang from a helicopter he's that strong when you say things that could have been done more with i do feel like lisa discovering that she could actually be like political in this position. That could have been something like they could start this earlier and get rid of the boat show stuff and the chewing gum walk line and just get straight to Lisa seeing the political possibilities of it. This all happens in one scene. It's all this is all on fast forward. Honestly, this this last three minutes feels like one episode condensed into a three minute version.

Yeah, absolutely. But yes, Lisa is told she is going to be a spokesperson. I'm going to be riding on a pack of cigarettes? Mm-hmm. Well, you think you're the perfect spokesmodel for Laramie's. It's part of our new campaign. Mm, classy. model for Laramie's. It's part of our new campaign. Classy. You see, Lisa,

it's been an unlucky year for Laramie. A lot of the people who smoke our product have been well, dying. And we need young smokers to take their place. I don't want to be a spokesperson for a cigarette company. But you're a role model to young people. And we're thinking of retiring Menthol Moose. And now we get to see some disgusting hacking and sp of retiring menthol moose and now we get to see

some disgusting hacking and spitting by menthol moose say a joke about joe camel who was quite powerful back in 1992 though definitely people were already complaining then about like that i mean he is a cartoon character to sell things to kids i thought he was cool yeah i thought joe camel was so cool i uh when i later when he was gone i still had friends who smoked camels and i was like i i would tell them oh i i consider that camel on the front of that uh to still be joe camel just he now looks like a regular he lost the shades my parents had a lot of matchbooks with joe camel on it always doing something cool like playing pool hanging out with the ladies what's he up to now uh it's sad it's uh and i don't know if i heard

this story before but at that mission hill show i learned that bill and josh one of their early jobs out of college they got a freelance copywriting job to write text for a fake joe camel mini magazine that was put as inserts in newspapers in the late 80s. Whoa. So you know I went straight to eBay to try to find it or Etsy too. I couldn't find it. And please, listeners out there, if you find a fake Joe Camel mini magazine that advertises the cigarettes and how cool Joe Camel is. Tell me about it because Bill and Josh uncredited wrote for those ad campaigns. So I'm curious to see if there's jokes in there that would be recognizably a Bill and

Josh line in these fake Joe Camel mini magazines. But yes, Lisa learned she's going to be a cigarette advertising person. Homer saluting the ice cream man again is another like all-timer joke to me. Just the way Homer says like, I know. Just the tears with I know. God, such a good joke. It makes it 10 times better. If he said dough, that's not funny.

But him knowing that they're ice cream men that he's treating as better than our soldiers, that's great. This also is at a time when you can make fun of soldiers because, as Bob Hope says, if there was a war on, we're supposed to look down on our soldiers because they're not killing enough people these days in the 90s. We'll find a way. Don't worry. It takes a little while. They were caught flat-footed after the ussr fell and then the saddam thing doesn't really work as well so but give them 10 years they'll figure it

out they'll they'll get together commission and figure it out uh but yeah so lisa can't take it anymore and uh as a kid i did get this joke because i knew parades ended with Santa. So the Santa joke totally worked. Oh, is that true? At the very least, I loved the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade so much. I watched it every year on TV. It's just commercials. I know that. But it wasn't over until Santa showed up. If you watch, even today, the Macy's Parade, if it's an hour until the end, they tell the kids on it like, and a certain somebody might just be showing up at the end.

He needs to get back to work. He's there to tell people to follow him to Macy's because then you're going to get to see him at Macy's and get your photo taken with him. And so then at the end, around when this aired, right before the previous Christmas was when they did a Macy's parade in Atlanta that was basically like a repeat of the New York one they do on Thanksgiving Day. And yeah, I begged my parents to take me to it. And we did. And I got to see that Spider-Man balloon. But an hour of it was all my parents could take.

We then walked back and laughed so i didn't get to see santa in person sadly but even if you go to the disneyland i've been to the disneyland parade at christmas time too santa is at the end of it too they always put santa at the end i never knew this parade facts for all of us out there it's it's parade practice in a christian nation like ours at least a classic parade practice in a Christian nation like ours, at least. A classic parade practice. I don't know, Merit, if you've had any excitement about seeing Santa Claus in a parade.

No, definitely. Like there was a, well, because Canadian Thanksgiving isn't really as big a deal and it's earlier in the year too. So it wouldn't really make sense to have Santa be there. But we had something called

a Santa Claus parade when I was a kid. I don't know if that's a Canadian thing or just was a local thing but it was in November so it would have been around the same time I was like a Thanksgiving day parade and yeah there was no drama in that

because you know it's named after him so you know he's gonna show up at some point Katie Couric doesn't need to tease it to you right right yeah and this is when Lisa can take no more when she sees Maggie start smoking a cigarette. Stop this gloom! What's the holdup? Go!

I'm tired of being a corporate shill. From now on, I will speak out against the evils in society from dog napping to cigarettes dog napping a big problem yeah the i think there is unin or intended extra weight that's kind of lost now nah it actually still works lisa's saying i'm tired of being a corporate chill back then it was about bart mania and how you know the Simpsons are and everything actually the joke as I say it out loud I'm like wait no that work that joke works way

better now when Lisa stars in all of these Disney Plus ads she loves Billie Eilish they're friends oh and by the way you can watch her concert on Disney Plus she loves being a Disney princess instead of being tired of being a corporate chill she loves being a Disney princess princess instead of being tired of being a corporate chill she loves being a disney princess yeah they have a quick series of lisa being politicized though in a way that does not um upset anybody who if she if she actually say was being mad about

apartheid states or uh or even pollution like that's another thing but instead she just complains about cigarettes and how public funding of schools goes which i also love how the nerds say let's get them i feel like though they undo this gag like because i love that that bit of just like the nerds jumping onto the field and chasing the football players out of the stadium they're like let's get out of here um but then they do the spitting newspaper thing later and uh there's a a subhead that just says uh nerds pummeled in football melee or something which like okay fine but like the gag of the football players being afraid of the nerds to me is like very funny they they realized they were uh stronger. Yeah, that's true. Once they follow them through the tunnel,

I think that's when the jocks go like, hey, wait a minute. Wait, hold on. This Lisa line reminds me of my pathetic state university because within the past decade, they just made the football coach the president of the university. Just cut out the middlemen there.

This guy runs the place anyway. Let's just make him the president that's funny can we make him our god uh also speaking about things that are dated for the time uh or very much of its time 1991 one of the biggest films of 1991 was jfk uh the oliver stone film which is full of tons of smoky backroom deals. And I mean, having the LBJ swearing in thing definitely feels like a JFK movie reference. And this, also this backroom of like, we gotta get her out of here. I mean, that a Kennedy parody is even saying it. This feels entirely to me like a JFK reference.

It also feels like a uh they're doing the same thing they did in homer alone where quimby and wiggum are having an argument about what to do with the simpson character except at this point it's season four wiggum is already too stupid to participate in the argument right right yeah this we're talking about uh brief runners the next one will be margin chains where they uh they're in the steam room together but yeah the the backroom dealings between oh and then also in the monorail episode the they they have their backroom dealings but they admit on the commentary that they had real trouble figuring out this ending they said they weren't they didn't say what the original ending was but they definitely

say that they were pitching and pitching on it and they said that it was the recently hired writer for frank mula who was the one who came up with like okay how does lisa not become the beauty uh be disqualified he's the one who came up with the resolution and they say they were very thankful for it so when i heard that on the commentary i realized that frank mula had recently passed away and I wanted to remind myself of when that was. So I looked up his name. I went to his obituary and I read it. And I was like, oh, that's very nice. At the bottom of the obituary, there was a YouTube link to watch the funeral service.

And I thought, okay, I can, you know, listen to a few of his family and friends talk about him. Maybe there'll be some fun stories to tell on the podcast. As soon as I click on that link, dead center in the frame on the youtube video is frank mula's corpse yes i know how funerals work everybody a corpse is usually on display at a funeral but if you want to see the writer of that joke's corpse you can just go on youtube and it's there oh man that's heavy i was not prepared for that but it's like yes i know at a funeral sometimes the casket is open and sometimes the person who's being buried is just there.

But after hearing the commentary fact, I didn't expect to immediately see that guy's dead body. Because I just, there was another Simpsons writer who passed away or a friend of Simpsons writers who passed away recently who I watched some of the memorial videos because writers like Mike Reese and Jeff Martin spoke at it and they they were sharing it they wanted people to see it i wasn't like finding it secretly right so i watched that but but that was a proper memorial service that was it was a memorial service without the casket like there's the funeral with the body in the room and then there's a memorial service after the burial usually

so when you said the funeral service i was like well they wouldn't film the body i'm like wow yes one more thing this is a privately listed youtube video but the link is available on his obituary page but i feel like it's it's the it's the funeral homes youtube site and i feel like upon request i'll just record whatever service you're putting on there i mean it's done legally with permission i assume but it's an hour-long video in 40 minutes of it are people just setting up and having small talk so it feels like i shouldn't be seeing this that does feel wrong yeah but but they link to it on his obituaries yeah that yeah the boy that's weird man we and what we learned about mule is passing because

it was like the it wasn't even a news story first. It was that the Simpsons writers learned about it and put on a dedicated to at the end of an episode in the most recent season. He wrote I Love Lisa. He wrote Last Temptation of Homer, and then he came back much later to write Faith Off. But he was a staff writer on seasons four and five. Yeah, again, that's wild.

But if you guys want to see a dead body, DM me. I'm not sure. I'm not sure i'm not sure i'll get back to you uh but but yeah so when you think about like i love this as an example of bad writing it bad bad that's not what i mean it is going against what anyone would tell you what a script should have you should see lisa be disqualified you should see the drama of this moment you should have the resolution be in a place with high stakes this is so intentionally written to be the opposite of that you just hear it happen in the past they intentionally don't show you it and then the characters who would

have had all of their big emotions earlier are now just bored on a couch. And it's such a weird... It is kind of an FU gag to what is the accepted form of a sitcom plot telling. And in that way, I actually kind of love it. Here's our final ending as Kent Brockman explains it all. Lisa Simpson is no longer Little Miss Springfield. She was stripped of her crown in a ceremony earlier today. Well, that's obviously

the wrong footage. But it does seem the father of the deposed beauty queen, Homer Simpson, filled out the pageant application incorrectly. In the area under Do Not Write in This Space, he wrote OK. If it wasn't for me, you'd still be queen. incorrectly. In the area under Do Not Write in This Space, he wrote Okay. If it wasn't for me, I'd still be queen.

You must hate me. Dad, do you remember why you entered me in that pageant? I don't know. Was I drunk? Possibly. But the point is, you wanted me to feel better about myself. And I do. Really? Uh-huh. Will you remember this the next time I wreck your life? It's a deal.

And now, my exclusive interview with His Holiness, Pope John Paul II. That's it. I cannot work under these conditions. If anybody wants me, I'll be downstairs at McDougal's. Call the weekend guy. I don't care. McDougal's is a great name for the bar that all the reporters get drunk at. I like that.

Okay, here's my other imagination of why they did this ending. It's because they knew that this ending, if they did it the sweet way or the more dramatic way, it would be so similar to Lisa the Greek's ending that they're like, why repeat ourselves we just did this ending so instead it's just bored people on a couch and then the main joke is that kent brockman is just pissed off that people are fucking up at his job and homer doesn't remember the first two acts right yeah right uh though the way he says you know the next time i ruin your life that that debt gets paid back pretty quickly between lisa and homer so it's really in like four episodes pretty much that

happens again so lisa is has the right to be mad at him after two more times of that even though he did he did he was a good dad in this episode as far i mean he shouldn't have entered her into a contest without even telling her about it like that's a bad parent sure fine and he guilted her into doing it or marge did but other than that he's a good father ralph cat called lisa and she felt better about herself she finally got the confidence that cat calling gives a woman there is like a there is kind of a through length of this episode we're like oh okay what makes lisa feel better isn't like the validation of the beauty pageant or whatever but like learning that she can take stands and like affect things

but like that's already kind of been established for the character it kind of like ends up being like sort of ambivalent about the whole central conceit like i like the episode overall but like i feel like the the way that it's structured does kind of a disservice to it rushing the last third yeah it ends on like a weird note about like oh no i feel i feel better about myself like i can see sort of a generous reading of how that might be but like also textually it's just right, weird. As a parody of sitcom writing, it works really great. As far as satisfying emotionally or dramatically, like, no, it's intentionally not that. Yeah, it actually is kind of, it doesn't really track that well because Lisa finds that using her platform to be political is way more validating than feeling better about her appearance so i feel like this should be heartbreaking for her to learn that she no longer has this ability

to speak out uh at these ceremonies and you know give begin these opportunities where she can spread her message but then it goes back to her feeling better about herself yeah when you think about the the jokes with or the the plot with modern eyes that a girl empowering herself to speak truth to power uh to then completely lose that because of the political mass machinations of her enemies behind the scenes to bring like make things more conservative she should actually be kind of heartbroken by that and comment on it in any way but instead she just drops it she doesn't even care that she lost that position she's like they don't even actually the the fact that quimby is out to destroy her that's only covered by a headline like one headline says queen to mayor you're next like that's that's

it just because it has got a wacky third act that doesn't know what to do with Lisa once she's a beauty queen, the beauty queen, I don't hold that against this really great episode. I don't either. It's full of fun. I don't either because we're covering something else today in which Marge and Lisa murder someone in the third act, and it's not a Halloween special. It's true. They kill a man.

They kill a man. Let's call it manslaughter. No, it's true they kill a man they kill a man let's call it manslaughter no it's it's first degree maybe Lisa's an accomplice but yeah like it is fun to see the flaws in these classic episodes because you know most of the time we forget about them because the jokes are so

good but yeah the third act is a little weak and that's a common Simpsons problem even in this era they just don't know how to end a story but God there's so many good jokes and it's a great looking episode so I can't dislike it. Merit any final thoughts? I read that the Church of England produced

a book called Mixing It Up with the Simpsons which encourages children to reflect on life issues and they used this episode to explore self-image. Thank you Church of England. I feel like every hack out there is written like, the Simpsons in science, the Simpsons in math,

the Simpsons in philosophy. And it's just because they can't use any characters, the cover is just like clouds on a blue background. Well, hey, if it's endorsed by the church of england then it must be good they're not the catholic church uh yeah i guess that's no i mean that's that's their that's their slogan we're not the catholic church yeah but that's uh last story about drop dead gorgeous i love that there are many jokes in it about lutherans hating catholics there's a lot of good good comedy in that yeah oh i i think the that

uh lana williams is from minnesota so that's a very lutheran area oh yeah it's uh it's very accurately she she talks about how much she wanted it to feel like a minnesota movie and and cast cat they you know they had she said she wanted all unknowns which new line cinema is like no you have to have some stars in this. She was like, oh, we want all the girls to actually look like Minnesota girls. And one of her things was like, all these women, all the girls from Hollywood have perfectly done eyebrows. But she's like, look, in 1998, girls living in Minnesota did not know how to perfectly sculpt their eyebrows. Like even the popular girl.

She thought the eyebrow technique was too good on even the popular girl she she thought the eyebrow technique was too was too good on even the regular girls well ai can change that in future releases if discovery has their way if lg rhythm can get working on that right now space jam warned us i mean drop the gorgeous is part of the server verse of course yeah yeah space jam 2 weren't warned us and we were too busy laughing it was yeah it's not a comedy it was a morning but but yes this uh this was a great episode thanks again for joining us america can you tell us where to find you online and what you're up to lately yeah so like i said i have that book coming out i think pre-orders are closed the book is just called land party

hopefully it will be up for retail once it comes out. But yeah, you can find me on Instagram at MeritK9, everywhere else at MeritK. I'm not doing threads. I'm drawing a line in the sand and saying this far, no further. Mark, that's it for me. I refuse, I refuse. But I am on Twitter still somehow for some reason. I'm on blue sky. Yeah. I've, I've been posting a lot of fiction on my blog because it's 2003 apparently. And that is that other strangeness.com. So if you want to read some stuff that I'm writing, you can head over there.

Some of those photos from your land party book, like I can smell them. Like I didn't even do that many LAN parties at, you know, strip mall PC stores, but I've been to enough that I was like, wow, I know what these photographs smell like. Yeah, yeah. It's wild.

I'm so excited for that book to finally come out. It's just CRT radiation and Pepsi. Yep, absolutely. But yeah, Mary, it was so book to finally come out. It's just CRT radiation and Pepsi. Yep, absolutely. But yeah, Merit, it was so great to have you back. Thanks so much for coming back. Yeah, thanks for having me. Happy to come back anytime. Thanks again to Merit for being on the show.

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uh but bad franchises all of those things in pixar we are going to have a lot to say and you guys are going to love hearing it check out the entire back catalog that's almost five years old of us covering so many varied things including our longest podcast ever six and a half hours about who framed roger rabbit and tons of others i love to say that we do everything from a kira to a goofy movie dig into all of it for yourself at patreon.com slash talking simpsons to see what you've been missing out on that's patreon.com slash talking simpsons 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 it's a classic gaming podcast all about old video games you can find

that wherever you find podcasts or go to patreon.com slash retronauts and sign up there for two full length bonus episodes every month and i think probably by the time this podcast comes out my boss fight books edition about day of the tentacle will probably be available so check that out wherever you find books but i think amazon might be your best bets uh but yeah henry how about you you can follow me on twitter at h-e-n-e-r-e-y-g which is also my name on blue sky if we're still doing that and of course if you're following me and bob on social media please follow the official account at talk simpsons pod that on twitter or Instagram will keep you up to date whenever there's new stuff coming out on the Patreon, on the free feeds, whenever we have live shows,

tons of cool stuff. Hey, and I guess, you know, this is nearing the end of August. If you're going to PAX West in Seattle, we're going to be doing a live show there too on Saturday, September 2nd. So you can see it on Twitch as well so check all that out and you'll know about all those things if you follow at talk simpsons pod on twitter or instagram and of course head on over to the official website talking simpsons podcast.com thanks so much for joining us folks we'll see you again next time for the next episode of our community podcast talk to the audience and we'll see you then. Pick the red, get ahead.

Pick the black, set you back. I don't recall authorizing this booth. Goodbye, gentlemen.