Talking Simpsons - Talking Simpsons - Little Girl in the Big Ten With Brendan James

Episode Date: March 29, 2023

We're once more joined again by great journalist/podcaster Brendan James, cohost of the brilliant Blowback series as we dig into a tale of college and germs! We talk a lot about Lisa finding a new lease on life posing as a college student, while Bart learns to love a normal life inside a bubble. We explain all the references and context like a class of Passive Analysis of Visual Iconography, all in one podcast! Support this podcast and get over 100 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 heartily endorse this event or product. Ahoy, hoy, everybody, and welcome to Talking Simpsons, where we proudly celebrate Force Your Daughter to Work Day. I'm your host, the Tony Danza of the A.B. Stanza, Bob Mackey, and this is our chronological exploration of The Simpsons. Who is here with me today, as always?

Henry Gilbert, and that's what we call the gay guy who lives with us. And who is our special guest on the line? This is Brendan James, and I've been taken down a peg. A whole peg! And this week's episode is Little Girl in the Big Ten. So what does this cartoon mean? It shows how the depletion of our natural resources has pitted our small farmers against each other. Yes. And birds go tweet. What else? Hey, that's our podcast. This week's episode originally aired on May 12, 2002.

And as always, Henry will tell us what happened on this mythical day in real world history. Oh, my God. Oh, boy, Bobby. Jimmy Carter is the first former U.S. president to visit Cuba since the Revolution. The WWF becomes the WWE. And Attack of the Clones is released in a movie theater. Jimmy Carter is smarter. It's true.

Homer was right. If only we had an expert in Cuba and Cuba's history here with us to talk about that. Of all the luck. Too bad. Yeah, that's a good one. Jimmy Carter, he features in season three of Blowback as well because he made peace between the U.S. and North Korea in a very important moment as well. So I know we're all thinking about him recently because he's ill and there's a lot of debate

about the legacy and all that. And I, let's just say it's persuasive to me that the post-presidency is uh has you have much more to point to than the actual presidency itself but hey you got to give him credit for something i've i've seen a few oh he's about to die type apology articles coming out lately including oh i'm sorry i got mad about peace not apartheid book i guess he was right as people were so mad about that book when that came out. Yeah. Which was, as I recall, honestly, a pretty like kind of centrist take on. Oh, sure. Yeah. He's never, he's never, you know, really dropping anything too spicy. He just represents that kind of mainstream or formerly mainstream figure who can just admit now that a lot of stuff

isn't the way it should be. But in season four, actually, not to jump into a plug already, but we're going to talk about we're going to talk about his presidency. That's very, it's very different. It's very different track record there. You know, and if the news about Jimmy Carter is depressing you, all you need to do is look up that photo from a few years ago of Joe Biden towering over them as him and his wife are just shriveled up in little chairs behind him it's very adorable and uh joe bison joe biden looks terrifying in that photo actually yes it looks like a still from an ari aster uh movie to me it's just everything's

something's not right you know it's uncanny it's like weird force perspective and uh yes the big news uh i don't bring wrestling stuff into it too much, but this was a big moment. Oh, you don't, do you? Oh, actually, I do. This reminds me of the Vancouver Screwjob. But so it had always been known as the World Wrestling Federation, but they had a deal with the World Wildlife Foundation that they would never advertise themselves as the WWF outside of America. And then they just decided, nah are gonna do that and so they just did and then the world wildlife federation actually did sue them and they lost so uh they got the f out was their uh campaign where they're like you know what actually we like not being the

wwf anymore and we're really more the wwe world wrestling entertainment anyway and we like it so yes the the world Wildlife Federation defeated Vince McMahon and forced it to change their name to what they still are to this day. The only and last time he would ever be defeated in his life. It seemed like he was defeated, but he's back now. I guess it's not even a joke. He came back. We'll see if he sells to the saudis uh to get the big that that

big big paycheck and then they're not gonna fire him for uh alleged sexual abuse i don't think well then it'll be the wwe the world wahhabist uh entertainment this this never felt right to me until recently actually i don't really think of a lot about wwe but i it just i would stumble over that every time because f sounds so much better it's what's encoded in my brain it does it sounds cooler it sounds harsher I remember when I was a kid you know there's adults in your life where they offer explanations with authority because they're adults but you kind of get the sense that that's bullshit and it's the first time you really begin to think maybe grown-ups don't always know what they're talking about WWF became the WWE and the person told me that's because

legally they weren't a real federation. So they had to change the name. And I was like, what the fuck does that even, does that even mean? They weren't a real federation, like a government? How does that work? So I- Nothing like those guys on Star Trek at all. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So I didn't really get the true story till so much later. And yes, Attack of the Clones. It was a big deal as the battle of Spider-Man and Star Wars. And Spider-Man proved more culturally dominant and critically praised than Star Wars. That's setting up for the current world we live in, where superhero movies are bigger than Star Wars now.

I really dodged a bullet. I almost saw this movie. A friend I was working with got me tickets. We were going to go together at midnight and he got some for my girlfriend at the time too and I told her about it and she said do you really want to see that movie and I had to admit to myself no so to date I have not seen it outside of it uh as a riff tracks I've not seen it I think I saw it in theaters I think I was there for the first two in theaters because I was like eight years old. It was I think it's generally the consensus now that it's the worst of the three prequels, although I would argue they get progressively worse.

But a lot of people think clones is really just it was a new low for everybody. Yeah, I think clones is now the decided upon worst one also because people don't want to be mean to Jake Lloyd anymore. So you can't wait, which he was a child actor and everybody was too awful to him. So I get that too. But I'd say Attack of the Clones is, I did like the space shootout fight with Jango Fett chasing after Obi-Wan.

I thought that was cool. But I'll admit in the theaters, at the very start of the Yoda fight, I did like it. I was, cause I always, I i was 20 i wasn't eight like like brandon your brain was still developing but but you know it was one of those moments of i had had yoda toys as a kid and i always thought man what if i put a lightsaber in his hand that would be pretty cool and so when he starts doing it in the movie i'm like yeah yeah and then it uh it all becomes very fake and ugly

looking henry that is almost there's a non-zero chance that's exactly how george lucas came to his own decision to put it in the film i mean i think there's a clip of him like talking to the special effects guy who looks mortified about what he's been asked to do and george lucas is like now we're gonna see that little green guy really just just wave that lightsaber around and really just go to town and you gotta be you're just looking at the effects guy's face and he's like oh no oh i don't want to do this but i i don't know i i having re-watched them recently i genuinely think phantom menace at the very least looks better because they are actually shooting on location for a little bit like they're actually in a desert for a big part of that movie you got the pod racing scene those two sequels after that everything is a fucking green screen every shot is this like lifeless

screensaver background with no art to it and no sort of you know concern for lighting or dramatic blocking or anything so i kind of i kind of think phantom menace is the best of the three at this point and clones is yeah i don't even think that boba fett dad boba fett's dad could save could save that one it must be said though this was the birth of the advertising tagline huda man yoda man which was used to sell the dvd and they would just show clips of him flipping around like a little monkey oh yeah you don't i miss that no i if i purged it from my memory maybe but yeah it was endlessly mocked by me and my college chums at the time Spider-Man was a better film let's just let's just all agree there that it's

a fun movie but but let it not be said that George Lucas isn't a pioneer because now that's how every movie is filmed with very lifeless green screen and empty backgrounds including Spider-Man movies yep themselves uh so he yeah he always wins at the end. I've grown to love him, actually, as he's become less responsible for making films. Because he's actually got some insightful things to say. He built that low-income housing when all the rich people got mad at him. He's an interesting and likable eccentric billionaire, I think. So joining us again is Brendan James of the Blowback Podcast.

Welcome back to the show, Brendan. Hey, guys. Thanks for having me. It's great to be back. I think last time I was here, it was an old school episode. It was a golden era, right? Yeah, it was the first Fat Tony episode. All right, by the murderer. With Joe Mantegna, and that was a lot of fun. And now we're back in the later zone. But I promise I won't be as cranky as I was the first time that I was made to watch a non-Golden Era Simpsons. I can assure you Henry and I will be cranky. We were cranky about this episode before the recording.

I liked this one better than the one we did the first time I came on. Oh, the NSYNC one? Yeah, there'll be a spirited debate maybe and I'll end up defending. I'll be defending the later era. I think it is better, at least in terms of animation direction,

and maybe it's funnier, but I guess we'll get into it. Brandon, you're currently prepping for the fourth season of your eight-podcast blowback, which I believe is dedicated to the gallant people of Afghanistan. Yes, it always has been. But yeah, we're doing the saga, the long saga of Afghanistan. So if people don't know, my show Blowback, we talk about stuff like the Iraq war in our first season, the secret war on Cuba that becomes the missile crisis. In the second season,

our third season we did last year was about the Korean War and trying to, you know, kind of turn that into as accessible and significant a war as are many, many other great wars because it's overlooked. And then this year we're going to be doing Afghanistan. It's a bigger season. It's a longer stretch of time and a more sort of epic scope than we've ever done before. So not to sound like George Lucas talking about the prequels, but it does feel fresh in a way for us and a little challenging in that regard. But I think it'll pay off. It's going to be, it's gonna be a lot of characters, you know, a lot of characters you didn't know you knew. And of course, yeah, the Mujahideen, the, the shadowy Bush family, you know, going all the way up through Obama years and into the Biden years right now, because obviously Afghanistan

has been in, in the damn news after we withdrew. And we'll take a look at kind of how all this came together for, for the withdrawal. So it should be interesting. To fit this episode into the timeline of America with Afghanistan, this is Brandon's first post 9-11 episode. And when this aired, George W. Bush had just announced a $38 billion plan to reconstruct the country of Afghanistan after the invasion. And I'm sure that all went great, right, Brandon? Yes, that's the conclusion we reached in the show, which, you know, you just you just spoiled it. But yeah, that's the problem. Everything went fine. We have nothing to talk about. Yeah. And I think the last one I watched was the Navy recruitment episode, right, where it was right before 9-11. I should have been quicker on my toes that episode. But, you know, we were basically

talking then about how the Simpsons were like probably a lot of at least liberal entertainment were like, do we really have to have a military anymore? I mean, what's the big deal? And I forgot to mention, you know, the salient points. We were we did just go to war in Kosovo at that point. I mean, we were still doing lots of lots of imperialism and stuff like that. But then the Iraq war happens and it's all very much in the front burner again. And I guess we're here now in the Simpsons world. Well, you know, all of our listeners have 9-11 on their Talking Simpsons bingo card. And I'll tell you what, there is a whopper of a 9-11 story because this is basically the last episode table read before 9-11. And that ties into the guest

and how he almost died on a fateful plane trip. Yeah's crazy it's crazy i i had forgotten this story bob reminded me like this commentary has a crazy story on it unfortunately though this is one of the problems with this dvd set aljean got a bunch of guests uh for commentaries which is a good idea because they can talk about like oh that was like recording it but they spend so much time talking to the guests. We saw this with Delroy Lindo. We saw this with Stan Lee. We saw this with James Lipton.

And now we're seeing it with Robert Pinsky. They spend so much time in the DVD commentary talking to the guests. They barely talk about the episode or how it was written or any of the historical stuff we kind of want from listening to a commentary. I mean, at least Delroy Lindo left the Skype calls. It sounds like it almost became a podcast, which sounds awful. I mean, at least Delroy Lindo left the Skype calls. It sounds like it almost became a podcast, which sounds awful. I mean, not into that. Because don't they do that with commentaries sometimes where they basically take interviews

and they're like, we didn't really get the director in for a commentary. So we're just sprinkling in like throughout the film, a totally distinct track that kind of situates you in a commentary. And I guess this is the opposite of that, where they are supposed to be doing a commentary, but they're instead basically doing an interview.

I remember Goodfellas has that, where it's just like, Scorsese would not sit down for a commentary. I don't know if he does them now, but he, nobody does them now, but he didn't sit down for it then. And it was just like, well, here's a bunch of interviews we've had.

And then we'll also splice in like Henry Hill interviews and stuff too. I never listened to the Goodfellas one. I guess if he's an old man now maybe he would like to sit back and watch his films and talk and not have to do lines of blow in preparation

for his next project. If his influencer daughter tells him to do it, he'll do it. Yes. So maybe Wolf of Wall Street. By the way, you know um friend of the show will menaker wrote the um essay for the wolf of wall street uh release that's going to come out the 4k of the blu-ray so i don't know if it's out in the states yet but i remember seeing his name when i was gonna buy it and i was like oh shit that's fun that's fun for him maybe there's

a scorsese commentary on it the only good part of the commentary though is that uh matt selman is a little stinker on the commentary asking lots of funny questions because he didn't go to harvard he went to an ivy league university lower on the vine he went to uh university of pennsylvania so he asked some funny questions and robert pinsky mostly has a sense of humor about them but i did like when matt selman asked like the poor laureates for the bush administration were they a bunch of dummies that's right he's like well were they stupid they're stupid right and he's the only one with the guts to make a lewinsky joke to to the pinsky as well but my i had a friend in college who um studied under pinsky and when that came up in the episode i was like oh that's interesting yeah yeah i won't i won't call him out by name but he he was

poet and he studied with pinsky was it sounded cool one uh this as you said bob this is a highly harvard episode because you've got john vd is the credited writer uh who obviously a harvard chum of of aljean and an original classic writer one of the best writers really in the series and director lauren mcmullen president of the harvard lampoon right after conan o'brien so who also wanted and i i said it before i'll try not to repeat this too much on it but i do think that mcmullen's harvard status which is actually above al jean because al jean was not president of the lampoon he was just uh on staff with it i forgot absolute scum so i think that mcmullen when she comes with him with ideas that other directors might get shot down and she's like, hey, can I embellish this or do this thing?

Gene has to follow the Harvard rule of like, well, he's like Mr. Burns in the Stonecutters, basically. And we should point out, in case you don't know, we interviewed him for our Patreon, Laura McMullen, and she is an Oscar winner. Yes. At this point. For the episode with you guys yes yes the special podcast category oh congrats uh yeah that is a category probably now at the oscars uh only on the technical oscars that sounds more like a basta to me you're right you're right no uh but but yeah this uh i mean this also john viti wrote like four or five episodes this season

that i think really he just like did freelance wasn't in the rewrite room for and this definitely feels like a good script that got rewritten into a worse script i not as good script i still think there's good stuff in it but i think they got especially the third act i think yes a lot of rewrites on they're dancing the old third act rewrite shuffle in this episode and yes uh a another history thing for it i just i watched the film the boy in the plastic bubble for this though the riff tracks version i did not watch the the regular version but you get you get the gist yeah yeah yeah seems like a lot of um film experiences you mediate through through riff tracks just as a just a hedge you know

it helps it really helps and well miss you can see why every gen xer remembers this because it was such a mega event movie is like his welcome back hotter debut the year before so travolta is the breakout star of it but everybody but he does a stupid accent in it and he's just a comedy guy so this was supposed to be the tv movie the proof he can do dramatic stuff too like this is going to be his big moment and he's got mike brady mr brady in it as well uh oh um oh yeah robert reed yeah and and it was a big tv movie event and it's directed by the guy who would then direct him in greece two years later uh for travolta it's also interesting because you know you've got mr brady in there who was

uh living a life as a closeted gay man uh back then and of course john travolta. It's also interesting because you know you've got Mr. Brady in there who was living a life as a closeted gay man back then and of course John Travolta would have no reason to identify with that at all. No similarities to his life. You know it is fun to see the impact these 70s made for tv movies had on people of this generation because we have this. We have The Loneliest Runner. We have Brian's Song. We have the Trilogy of Terror. So many of these made for TV movies were parodied endlessly in our childhoods. I think also it was sort of not to bring it back to politics again, but I think William Sapphire, who was this former Nixon guy who became a conservative bon vivant on the pages of the New York Times, I think he called Clinton in some way like in the bubble or the boy in the bubble. And then it started to have this kind of cultural resurgence as people were like,

what the fuck is the boy in the bubble? What are you talking about? And so because the movie was the 70s, right? It was before. 76, yeah. Grease, yeah. So it might have had a second life as a cultural meme or whatever, as a weird put down from a conservative columnist at bill clinton's expense well and soon after that in the clinton administration in september of 1992 is the seinfeld episode parodying it yeah they're a little late to the uh the party here and i mean the name of the movie is very misleading because he's in a bubble but it's more of like a a bubble in terms of his state of being in that he's not walking around in a hamster ball. He's usually in a room that's sealed off or like being carted around in like a tent, basically.

Like a walled-in tent. Or a terraria. And he gets like a space suit in the movie too that like NASA, Buzz Aldrin gives it to him. It's not like Jake Gyllenhaal's Bubble Boy. No, see, that's also why I think I was a little eye-rolling when this episode first aired too because I was like, Bubble Boy came out six months before this.

I mean, we all saw it. Yeah. It was great. I didn't see it. You know, it's a better movie than The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. It's a very cheesy, right before 9-11 type, Adam Sandler-esque movie with Jake Gyllenhaal in the lead, being very, very silly. One other fun uh sad behind the

scenes story of it is that the woman who played travolta's mother diana highland she dated him while working on the movie like they dated she was 40 and he was 22 it's weird to date the woman playing your mom in the movie uh but sadly though within a year of that she dies from breast cancer she gets a posthumous emmy for this tv movie and yeah it's feel so i you know for all the beard jokes one could make about this with ultravolta now it's just it takes some of the fun out of it you know well you didn't have to bring it up henry you know well then also don't google what happened to the real kids who had autoimmune deficiencies who they unauthorized biography of this. Let's just say they didn't see Bubble Boy.

Or this episode. Too busy is what I heard. Boy. Okay, there are going to be two big landmines in this episode just to warn everybody. And I gave a cliffhanger for one, but another one might surprise you, although we have talked about it before but uh but all right why don't we get into the episode uh itself uh enough making fun of john travolta okay so this opening uh with uh pommel horse this is another thing that i think i'm holding against this episode that too many plot lines remind me of other episodes this thing this is the setup of lisa on ice lisa is failing

gym and has to take an extracurricular thing to not fail gym like it's in this case it sends her to gymnastics before it sent her to hockey so it's like i don't know it's it's such a similar setup and then and there's a there's a foreign um hard-nosed instructor right doesn't susan sarandon play the... Isn't she foreign in the... Oh, she's the ballet teacher for Bart. Oh, ballet. Well, there's another for Bart.

But that said... Yeah, Bart's going to fail too. Yeah, as someone who failed Jim multiple times in my life, I found it realistic that they were back at this same problem. It happens all the time. It is a rare appearance of Mrs. Pommelhorst, a character probably named in season one. She's got one of those on-the-nose season one names

because a pommelhorst is a gym equipment piece and then pommelhorst is a German name, but no one hits that T hard enough, so the pun is lost. Until looking at the wikis later in life, I realized, oh, her name isn't just Pommelhorst, the thing. Yeah, I triple-checked this on the wikis later in life, I realized like, oh, her name isn't just Pummel Horse, the thing. I, yeah, I, you know, I triple check this on the wikis that list all the character appearances. I could still be wrong, but I think this is actually her first spoken line.

Well, there's some debate if the teacher who gets mad at Lisa and moaning Lisa is or isn't Pummel Horse, because it is a similar design and everybody looks the same in season one but uh it's not the same voice but then in pta disbands she is she is referred to but she doesn't speak in it like miss pommelhorst i'd like to get down now i can think of one thing what about the teacher who swallowed her favorite whistle is that her yes okay i think that okay that one is her yeah uh okay so that's her thank you bob yeah it popped into my head yeah but i think i know why they don't have her back because it's just easy butch lesbian jokes is is what you do with her like

that's the bit and in season 17 there's actually a rather transphobic joke uh thrown in her direction uh that they say that uh she's going to come back as mr pommel horse after the summer uh and then uh and then they don't even follow through with that she's she's just mrs pommel horse the next time you see her maybe that was a mr garrison didn't south park make mr garrison transition and then for like actually yeah they're probably just ripping that off yeah yeah it might have been or maybe then that happened and they were like oh we can't do this now i don't know it's a it's a terrible loss for the show i'm sure uh but yes as as they're about to do the uh the gymnastics i also note like oh mcmullen

i'm gonna think it was her intentionally had francine the bully from her bye-bye nerdy episode in the group with all the other girls uh though also i mean it's there's only so many girls like they say this is second grade gym but clearly sherry and terry are participating in it they're fourth graders yeah there aren't a lot of second grade students uh that lisa or bart hang out with like ralph and janie i guess and that's it yeah does that happen a lot i was watching an episode with a friend of mine the other day and i I'd never noticed this. I think it was the Twisted World of Marge Simpson pretzel episode. And on the way to the pretzel or pita van, you can see Mindy, who's the woman Homer almost has an affair with. She's just in the crowd and they're at the nuclear plant. And I'm like, oh, yeah, she just still works there. And her and Homer just don't talk, I guess. But it's definitely her. And I'm like, oh, they're putting in characters. Uh, I don't know if that happens a lot on the show, but it stuck out to me that they took the time to actually include an old character in a, just a visual reference. But yeah, it used to happen a bunch in which a guest character, if they weren't like drawn to be a character of a celebrity, they would often work their way into,

uh, the extras, uh, just because they just need to fill a scene with people. How about Mindy Simmons? How about, uh, Allison Taylor from Lisa's Rival like you see these people a lot they never speak again of course but yeah well and in these teen seasons we definitely notice a lot more economical character design where the they're like why are we going to design a new nurse like we just have this old nurse from season seven we'll just put her there but yes uh millhouse is strangling himself uh and i like willie's supportiveness but i'm like big smile big smile uh and so lisa there's a fun bit of animation of lisa failing at the springboard and bouncing back into all the other girls and they all fall over like dominoes. This is when Lisa turn that minus into a plus.

Skinner, I took an oath. And by Xena, this girl's failing Jim. Perhaps we could get her a private coach. Well, I know a coach, but he's tough. He defected into East Germany. The sword clash and the defected into East Germany line, I thought those were fun. Now, the by Xena line, that's just a joke about lesbians. Yeah. the sword clash and the defected into east germany line i thought those were fun now the

byzina line that's just a joke about lesbians like uh but yeah it's and you know what brunella that's a good new first name for her yeah it's one of those we're finally giving this person a first name jokes and yeah i mean the sword fight is well animated too like it actually feels like an actiony sword fight and so yes they're talking about lugosh we talked about him before with children of a lesser clod but this is his bigger return i think i bet it's another of those things of like when like when they heard dan first do willie they're like oh this is great we got to bring willie back so a season ago they heard him do lugosh and they're like man this guy's actually this guy's pretty funny let's have him come back let's have his catchphrase be i am lugosh and then he's just kind of never seen again he just becomes a background extra basically so i

guess he was being this character feels like he was being auditioned for it could this be like a sideshow mel guy who could yell things out from a crowd perhaps but there wasn't a lot of uh material really with lugosh and we went over in children of a Claude, but he is based on the real life gymnastics coast, Bela Karolyi. And he's notable these days because this is not funny, but the recent women's gymnastics sex scandal with all the sexual assault cases, a lot of them took place at his gym. And that's not funny, but that's just what happened. So there you have it. That's why his name might have been thrown around a lot lately.

I didn't realize that he was a character who had shown up because know sorry i haven't seen any of these seasons so i didn't know he was already in the show i thought he was just a one one episode gag guy which i guess he's a two episode gag instead i i think he does have a line here or there in the future but this this is the most feature he gets to do to do the thing that's obvious that he would do which is teach gymnastics to lisa who is a young girl i mean the joke in his first appearance was him calling lisa grandma for being eight years old because uh they start young which that's a darker joke now um but but yeah i mean this was because at the at the time uh baila was famous for i believe it was nadia komani shui carries off of the, or it was,

it was one of his, his students. And of course they, they liked the bit. It was funny to comedy writers of like, here's this giant Eastern European guy with a mustache screaming at little girls and they makes them gold medalists. It's very like Boomer Boris Badenoff style humor and very dated even 20 years ago. Yeah. Not only an accessory to horrific sexual abuse, but also that he numerous of his students came out later and said like, well, no, it wasn't tough love.

He just was like one said, quote, brutal. He was brutal. And it was it also the way he treated the girls made it so they were scared to speak up about their sexual abuse from the team doctor as well. Yeah, it's not very funny. You know what? But Lugash, he's all right as a character. I like the repetition of I am Lugash. Does it work for like six more episodes?

Probably not. No, no. I had a dog. It's cat now. I got a chuckle out of that. Oh, yeah dog it's cat now i got a chuckle out of that oh yeah it's cat now this uh and mcmullen does a really good job with all the gymnastics action in this too way better than she needed to do like absolutely yeah and uh he lugash uh tells the girl how best to jump out of a window and then i love that marge's reaction to that is like look there's an opening now spider

man expert henry gilbert does spider-man like being screamed at hmm you know i think homer's incorrect yeah it's also incorrect about sex workers i don't think they like being screamed at unless that's what they're being paid to do in both cases it's the client it's the client who likes being screamed at if anything is in some cases you know yeah i mean i i would suppose there are sex workers who get hired to be like yelled at and that's part of the job i suppose but yeah doesn't mean they like it but I definitely don't spider-man likes mocking them back he doesn't when dr octopus says you know get out of here you accursed arachnid spider-man doesn't like that but he does like saying back to him like uh shut up you four

four-eyed four-armed loser right we well there could be secret kink going on when he's getting a fight you know maybe he's fucking loving it maybe he's he's just totally up for that that's why that's why he does the whole thing it's not uncle ben it's that he's got a he's got a little fetish he likes getting beat up uh yeah and being called a scummy scummy bug i mean that's why he's got a tuck when he gets into that uniform otherwise it's going to show how excited he is i wasn't i wasn't going to go there i was gonna say yeah like look real close to the frames in that book and you'll see an important an important skill every spider-man artist has to learn is how to draw spider-man with his legs splayed at all times

while not indicating genitals i i drew spider-man as a kid, and it was an interesting thing to do at age 12 and 11 when you're like, huh, I'm drawing this incredibly ripped guy and all these different insane poses, and I'm having to sort of confront my ideas about the human body. But can I just also say, totally out of nowhere, but I just finally got a PS5 and I played that Spider-Man game. Very solid game.

I pretty much like clocked two days to just beat it. It was very fun. Less Spider-Man movies, more Spider-Man games. That's my request. No, it's a great game, though. What did you think of Spider-Man being the best friend of the New York Police Department? Well, I mean, I was thinking about that when I was watching it because they try to do some stuff in that game where it's like oh defense contractors are bad like they that's kind of the assigned liberal villain is like private companies but i think it's unavoidable i

mean unless you're batman i guess but like any superhero it's just one of those facts of the genre that i guess if people want this stuff to be progressive a superhero helps out the police that's just unless you're the punisher or whatever and you're just a complete psycho the punisher now really yeah i know which is also funny like no one can have it really the way they want it you know what i mean and so i was watching and i'm like what what else are they going to do i mean his job is to get criminals he should really be putting them into like treatment centers but instead he's just clobbering their heads by the way i love how also he doesn't kill anyone but like you throw people off of buildings in that game i don't really understand the logic there but anyway well if you look really closely where spider-man threw somebody a web uh yeah

magically appeared and they did not they got webbed to the side of the building which is obviously not life-threatening at all and didn didn't kill them. Yeah, your neck wouldn't snap as soon as the momentum pulled you back up, which I think happens to one of his girlfriends in the comics, right? Doesn't her neck snap? That's what kills Wednesday, yes. Yeah, but all those criminals, they're fine. Anyway, just shouting out that game was actually quite fun, and I enjoyed it. And then if you unlock some DLC, you find out he does have a kink

about being called a scummy bug by his villains. And it's a whole campaign. Well, I mean, that's why his top daddy is J. Jonah Jameson. Why is he listening to that guy's show if he doesn't love it? It's, you know, turn it off. The Simpsons will be right back. Then you'll flip. There's your giant hat.

For The Simpsons on a special night. And on American Idol, another contestant was eliminated from the competition. 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?

Welcome to the break from inside the Talking Simpsons bubble. It's Henry Gilbert and a big thank you to our guest this week, Brendan James from the podcast Blowback. You guys should check that out. It's one of our favorites. Follow him as DeepBage on Twitter. We're always so excited to have back on, Brendan, to talk about Simpsons and also the historical political context of the episode, which is fitting for an episode

all about college-level discussion of cartoons. Thanks so much again, Brendan. And if you enjoy Talking Simpsons, you should know that this podcast is brought to you by patreon.com slash talking simpsons where me and bob do this as our full-time jobs thanks to five dollar and up subscribers there and for that five bucks a month you get a ton of extras including a monthly new episode of talking futurama and talk king of the hill us covering both of those series in depth we're in season four futurama season three of king of the hill and you get a giant back catalog of over a hundred exclusive mini

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The month before that we covered Batman, Superman, World's Finest, the first team up of those two characters in the Bruce Timm animated universe. Sign up today, there's over 50 at your fingertips. Us covering things like Akira, a Goofy movie, Beavis and Butt-Head do the universe Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse, Tokyo Godfathers, kiki's delivery service even junk like cool world and shrek you will hear all of that over 50 episodes at your disposal and a new one each month if you go to the ten dollar level at patreon.com slash talking simpsons so check it all out for yourself today but so yes lisa doesn't want to do this she smacks her head and this is going to have a dream sequence that feels i mean it would fit in like season four simpsons but it's hard

to me feels like a family guy thing this bit here. I actually like this a lot because it's so mean to President Kennedy. Sure. Yeah, it feels it feels like 50s Republican mean to JFK. It is it is very family guy, just like a famous figure showing up for no reason. And it's also kind of odd whenever you see JFKk in the simpsons because he is just quimby and it's like they exist in the same universe in a way that you know doesn't totally like one has to go i i don't notice uh well here i'll play the clip see if you can find the little ways the dan castellaneta has to make this not joe quimpy yeah faster lift your knees look lisa there's an opening.

Who wants to put on a leotard and get screamed at? Well, hookers and Spider-Man. Forget it. I'm going home. Whoa! Ugh! Get up, Lisa. President Kennedy! That's right, Lisa.

Academics are important, but you must also train your body with vigor. That's why I created the President's Council on Physical Fitness. Uh, yes. Well, I can't argue with the man who wrote Profiles in Courage. Yes, uh, wrote it. Well, uh, good luck, Lisa. Thanks. I'll see you in heaven. Yes.

Heaven. Heaven. My little munchkin bumped her pumpkin. Are you okay, Lisa? I'm more than okay. Ich bin ein gymnast. Oh, she must have dreamt about Hitler again.

I noticed, like, it's 5% different than Quimby. And I got a cheap laugh out of Lisa. Lisa is a cheap laugh, but I got, I mean, it got me rather. That was the big difference. I was like, okay, how would Joe Quimby say this line? And he would say Lisa. He wouldn't say Lisa. That, I feel like, is the big difference. I was like, okay, how would Joe Quimby say this line? And he would say Lisa. He wouldn't say Lee, sir. That I feel like is the big one. We had to listen to a lot of clips in season two with him saying Cuba instead of Cuba.

Right, right. Just calling it, President of the United States calling it Cuba every day he had to talk about it. I'm also a big fan of any joke that implies a beloved figure is in hell. We talked about Family Guy. It's either Family Guy or American Dad. They made a joke about jim henson being in hell i thought it was very funny oh yes just because it came out of nowhere henry i would say that if there's if there's a difference it's there's less quimby uh well uh uh like that kind of halting thing and he i guess they make him say er instead so otherwise he's a little deeper voice is a little deeper and that's about it it also

feels like who other than harvard nerds remembers the ghost writing profiles and courage scandal of 1957 like it's that's the thing i had to google i didn't know this thing uh but yes it was ted ted sorensen was uh apparently and he speech writer like a jfk got a pulitzer prize for it that oh yeah and eisenhower created the President's Council on Physical Fitness. Believe it or not. If you look, if you look, I'm sure you've seen Kennedy's like college, college essay to get into the colleges he was going to get into no matter what, because his dad was a member of the elite.

And it's just, I don't know. It's, it's, it's like second grade level essay material people have made fun of it a lot so it's possible that yes he did not write profiles encourage you know this meanness towards jfk is fun to see uh and i like to say that i like that they actually was like oh yeah he's in hell too like he's not just uh he's not just a plagiarist liar but he's also in hell but also that uh but on this commentary they even mention and gene said it many times before after 9-11 they were scared to do any jokes of not scared but they were reticent to do jokes about george w bush because and gene would say things

like well the public opinion on him changes so much that by the time the episode comes out we'll we'll be out of date or whatever and i guess i guess sure and hey if we saw, if we saw what they did with Trump, it probably wouldn't have been funny anyway, the stuff they would have done. And frankly, everyone was doing, most people were doing it, you know, so it didn't, it's not like it would have been terribly fresh anyway. You know, I, it's kind of like lose, lose. And how many times has Lisa dreamed about Hitler? Well, I guess the joke is that she's saying she's speaking german and so

homer just concludes that if she's speaking german she must have been dreaming about adolf hitler specifically but but he says again which to me like this homer misunderstood that previous time she dreamed of a german person he thought it was hitler or did she previously have a hitler dream and homer's like oh you dream about hitler but but he have a Hitler dream and Homer's like oh you dream about Hitler but but he's also happy about it he's like oh the implications are dark no matter what because if she has had a previous dream and where Hitler was encouraging her that's dark and if and the fact that he's happy about it whether or not that even happened is also dark yeah this is this is a this is a heady episode five minutes in we're discussing whether

the simpsons family um loves hitler or not that's that's a it's a weird place to be we then head to the crusty burger and i have a little clip here of uh did the simpsons predict adult happy meals there you go a laughy meal for you and a nostalgia meal for me. Oh, boy, this takes me back. Two ration stamps and an artillery shell full of oleo. What's your nostalgia prize, Grandpa? Liberace action figure. Party tonight at Roddy McDowell's.

Woo-hoo. I got a plastic crusty-saurus. Hmm. A mosquito? How'd that get in there? This also is kind of like their Osaka flu joke, which is, honestly, if people wanted to COVID conspiracy theory the Simpsons, they should be pulling this scene. It's not the Osaka virus.

And I say this to myself, too, in the past. I was like, oh, wait, no, this would have been a good scene to show at our live show with Matt Christmas. Everyone forgot about this, including us. Yeah. It's the correct country for one thing but now we're learning it's a tanuki not a mosquito that caused covid that's what i wanted to believe it hates that's not believe the lab leak theory right no but i that's kind of it's a great visual gag is is force your daughter to work day and uh

i like the crusty uh propaganda uh coming out of the speaker that's a great it's a great design on a propaganda poster yeah i now as a kid i knew about ration stamps because of bugs bunny i did not know oleo was what people called margarine back in the day uh and then the third joke definitely feels like a joke written by a guy who's in the writer's room at this point right yes dana gould because he would eventually live in roddy mcdowell's old house yeah so so when he's saying party tonight at roddy mcdowell's they're saying dana gould's home is what they're saying this feels like dana gould wrote the entire scene because at this point in time he is on the verge of adopting uh children from china too yeah interesting right i didn't know

that at all the only dana gould trivia i know is that he was gex the gecko uh i didn't realize that he so he adopted kids from china they did a whole episode about it later in the series when selma adopts a daughter from china yeah it's a uh yeah he has uh two children he adopted uh him and his wife at the time adopted from china he uh he had a funny story He adopted him and his wife at the time, adopted from China. He had a funny story when we interviewed him live at SF Sketch Fest, where he mentions to his daughter whether the episode's replaying on, or no, it's a new episode of Simpsons. And the character that is literally the name of his first daughter they adopted is on screen.

Is it Lulu? I think, yeah, yeah. And he's pointing, this is the story he told he's pointing at her and saying like hey look you're on tv like you're on the simpsons she's like yeah yeah whatever dad and he's like no that's that's you remember and she's like yeah i don't care i want to watch bob's burgers yeah you're right this all this china stuff it feels like dana gould has only one episode writing credit this season it's on the last episode but this scene in particular feels very dana gould rewritten as i mean also it makes me think he had the idea for the boy in the plastic bubble thing too because he's a very 70s man uh he's he's very into this

the kitsch of the 70s i mean he has a kickstarter where he basically does uh space ghost but as dr zeus he loves this shit yeah i i was at one of the sketch fest shows where he debuted that costume uh as as a performed piece uh and yes uh obviously if you didn't know roddy mcdowell he died in 1998 so now they are safe from libel of uh talking about how he was very gay but not out at the time he was in laser blast he was in uh shakma the um you know if you know that one the the killer baboon movie no oh it's it's a good one you should check that one out it's really actually don't check out the trailer to shakma don't watch the actual film it is one of the funniest trailers you'll see uh but roddy mcdowell is in the film is you know just professor british

guy in it when he died david warner was uh rubbing his hands together like all right all the roles are mine now fuck yeah no i and now he's gone but also mcdowell he was the mad hatter on uh batman the animated series right yeah which but this scene with the mosquito coming from china biting somebody i mean this this is why people are instantly ready to believe conspiracy theories like the lab leak theory that that they're like oh we've always thought this was going to happen uh some some evil thing from yellow china is a red china is going to destroy us all i don't know lab leak there's uh convincing evidence okay that's a true one sure probably but i mean there's nothing determined for sure but But now, I don't know.

Honestly, I won't care unless someone pays me a handsome settlement for COVID. Well, that's how you end up caring, is you need to have a paycheck on the mail one way or the other. Yeah, but based on the economic agreement that we made them sign in the 1980s to make sure that we could get cheap goods. Now we're mad that they did it. And that there's mosquitoes in our toys or whatever. Yeah, this whole yeah, this whole scene is about how it's like, well, do you want cheap stuff or not? Like we we make fun of these China's forced labor wet shops. But like, what would the U.S. economy be if we couldn't buy all of these things on Amazon

that are called the craziest names in the world to get the first entry on the page i i wouldn't have been able to get a ps5 only a couple months ago you know bart is asked to be taken to the hospital he's not feeling well uh this is the most he feels any uh symptoms of the panda virus like it i don't really see the problems with the panda virus here they say it's highly contagious but it's like but what would it do you just gotta keep the episode moving just gotta keep it going he's sick we got it and you know what abe should have died from it because he was very exposed to bart for hours yeah we learned that the hard way a few years ago i like abe's response so finally we're gonna do something i want to do that's fine

so then we see lisa's performance her she's really good she is really good as a gymnast as we find out it's because her head is like beach ball made of bone and gives her perfect balance amazing animation of her flying through the air and landing back around on her feet but this is not a like a secret talent episode at all which it seems like that's the direction it's heading in so so kind of weird because isn't she there because she was terrible at gymnastics five minutes before and that's why she's she's a natural then it's kind of weird that she would flunk that's when you usually discover that they're naturally good and they didn't even know it but uh episodes got to keep moving let's just keep it going she needed a man to yell at her to

find her yeah sure yeah that is. Yeah. That is true. No, I mean, it's only, honestly, in Act 3, I am shocked there's a scene where they remember she's good at gymnastics. I know. I was like, wow, they paid it off. That's fun. And of course, they end the scene with, I am Lugash. His trademark catchphrase.

I've got the t-shirt at home. And Lisa has given back her snowball, too. I gotta say, we're seeing when jokes are similar, it's a slightly less funny version of here's your turtle alive and well, also from Lisa. I agree, I agree. That was a little, they should have been paying attention. But this is when Lisa makes some new friends, though are they just phonies?

You're reading Gravity's Rainbow? Rereading. Sorry, what are you guys talking about? I was making fractals. These girls are brilliant. I finally? I was making fractals. These girls are brilliant! I finally found kids I can relate to! You guys are so cool! I can't believe I never met you before! Well, I'm Tina, and this is Carrie. Maybe we could hang out together.

Oh, I'd love to! You girls were all great! Cat's back for everyone! I had a dog! He's cat now! Need a ride back to campus? Campus? You guys are college students. Yeah, but with our small gymnast bodies,

everyone always thinks we're way younger. Aren't you in college? Um, of course. Where do you think I go? Baby school? See you tomorrow, Lisa! We find out what five minus three is! Um, I'm a teacher's aide in a very special class. No, Lisa, we're both in school!

Go, go, go! Why do people run from me he pisses himself the first active on-screen urination in a simpsons i think so i think you're right yeah we i mean that like homer goes up to the world trade center to pee but we're not in the room with him and we don't even hear a tinkling sound it felt um it felt a little wrong i i i saw you you guys DM me, you said, you know, we'll talk about this moment. I actually didn't look into it because I've never seen I've never said if this is a gif or is this like a well-known moment? I've never seen it. So it was a fresh I had fresh eyes and I don't I laughed, but I also don't know if I enjoyed it. Yeah, I mean, they're deep into the short bus humor with Ralph now, as was the style at the time, living in the era of Timmy on South Park.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, this gif is semi-notable in terms of meme potential. And also later in the episode where Ralph blankly stares at Lisa and then rolls down the hill. That's another one I see a lot. Yeah, I see that one a lot. They credit the joke to david murkin i mean the bit obviously of him peeing himself like that that's just like pure

scatological i do like that he then smiles that he enjoys it that's what made me laugh that that it it just brings you back into somewhere a little less sad um it's like well ralph's fine with it he's okay he peed his pants on purpose to enjoy it yeah i guess so oh god my issue like i just realized upon this uh listening to the clip that the female characters are given names but this is an issue with a lot of uh aljean's stuff at this point he's a showrunner the women guests are often not characters at all they're like plot devices and these women especially are and i feel like this had the potential to be a story similar to Summer of Four Foot Two in that Lisa kind of has a new alter ego that she uses to blend in with cooler kids who she can identify with.

But that is forgotten. And these characters are forgotten after the end of this act. And then it's about something different in Act Three. And I felt like there could have been a more emotional story, but they lose that entirely after the end of this act it's scavenging scavenging from old episodes to put the frankenstein together you know and and lisa could actually have like an emotional journey with this and also her friends if her friends were treated as people there'd be an act three where tina uh other one, I only wrote to her a few years ago. Carrie?

Carrie, yes. Tina and Carrie, they try to make up to Lisa like, oh, hey, we're sorry. You're still cool. I mean, that is the end of summer of 4'2 as well. So it's not like it would be inventive. And maybe it really just was them saying, if act three is emotional, we don't want that. We want to go where people aren't expecting but yeah it's like it's so sad that like this is about lisa connecting with other people and she should find another connection like one thing this is definitely not about is how lisa is

popular or unpopular like her popularity in acts one and two are meaningless like that is not anything in this you're just supposed to know at this point from the show being on 20 years or whatever get getting up to that that lisa's brainy she wants to be around other smart people no one else is in her zone except for martin i guess but you know you know who cares well those guys are the ones tearing her down yes yes yes exactly she doesn't really connect with these girls outside of this scene there's no scenes scenes with them. I mean, imagine writing a scene with all women. Yuck. Not in my show.

But yeah, I feel like that was the issue. Like, what are these women going to talk to each other about books and math? They kind of just drop Lisa off at school and there's nothing more to be said until they discover that she's a child later in this act. It does pass the best child test, though, when she meets them. They're talking about fractals. Yeah, the fractals. Though I guess talking about that book is talking about a man's book so it's well no come on it's a book it's they're not talking about a man yeah this though is it shows

that tina is actually a toxic phony because she's clearly pretending to have read gravity's rainbow which is like as we all learn from twitter is it's what only awful people do. Yes. No, look, I have not read Gravity's Rainbow. But I only know it. I never, other than this joke, I've rarely ever heard about it ever as a book to read. And then it became a thing on Twitter that people talk about of like, if somebody lists Gravity's Rainbow as their favorite book in a dating profile, run away. Like that kind of

that book changes every two or three years the to get big online numbers you throw out a book that people need to know is a red flag it's for a while it was infinite jest big a big book written by a man you know it needs to be you know a red flag so i guess now it's i didn't know that it's now great gravity's rainbow um well i did turn on it a little bit so i guess now it's i didn't know that it's now gravity's rainbow um well i did turn on it a little bit uh i was reminded of like oh yeah that the i do not like the video game the witness or the creator of it jonathan blow uh and he said about the game i want to make games for people who like to read gravity's rainbow i was like oh that is like well i'm gonna get some you're gonna get some uh of the grain of truth in it as well, I guess.

Love the band, hate the fans kind of thing. You know, Thomas Pynchon, he will appear in season 15 of the show, making one of his very few appearances in the series anywhere really. He's designed with a bag on his head, so they did not draw what his face looks like. They joke that he looks just like Lenny. Another compliment this episode. I like that the building things in the car that includes college strength Tylenol instead of child strength.

I like that it ends with a fourth. It could end with three on the rule of three, but they have like, no, let's have a fourth of, yes, we're college students. It's a nice escalation. So then to put us in time, we hear all-star and tub thumping back to back uh as a college song to hear people playing as they drive around like all-star is a pretty good uh bad song to hear would these college girls be listening to all-star in 2002 it's like a 1998 song right yep you know what yeah and the girls who care about fractals and Gravity's Rainbow would not have... Hey, let's not essentialize them as non-All-Star fans, but I'm certainly

in agreement with Bob there. That song came out in 98, yeah, or like 99 or maybe even earlier. And I don't know when Tup Tupin came out, but I think it's the writers maybe showing their age a little bit that they thought that was still all the rage I don't know look if you ask me to pick a popular song to put in something that a kid would be listening to at best I would pull out a song from 2013 I think

for me it'd be Baby Shark as you guys probably know I swear to god I still don't know what that is just talking about my age I still don't know what Baby Shark is don't know what that is. Talk about my age. I still don't know what Baby Shark is. Don't know what it is. Have no clue. Is it a song? Yes.

And you don't ever search it out, please. I won't. I guess I'm just realizing though, Shrek came out in 2001, right? And then it begins with All-Star. Maybe it's accurate that he was kind of back in the mix, so to speak. Yeah, unfairly, Shrek borrowed it from a less popular movie,

and that was Mystery Men. Because if you dig up the All-Star video uh this is not an obscure trip everyone knows this but it's it's a video for mystery man yep dane cook is in it yes they'd only i believe as we talked about in our shrek uh podcast five hours of shrek talk part of the deal to for all-star to be in the movie is that Smash Mouth got to record a new song or, well, a cover to I'm a Believer that would be in it so they could make more money off of it being on the soundtrack. Right. I recently watched a documentary about Leonard Cohen and the Hallelujah being in the film is a cover by John Cale, but on the soundtrack due to licensed shenanigans is by Rufus Wainwright in a very, very similar style. Really what people think of as the popular idea of the song Hallelujah did not exist until that.

That was what really threw it into the, maybe this is not obscure trivia either, but until that moment it was from a very neglected Leonard Cohen album that the studio didn't even release. You know, I only knew the song is the Jeff Buckley song, his cover of it. Yeah, the Buckley song was big, too. That was the bigger one in my in my youth of the early 90s, though. Honestly, I only I didn't hear it on the radio. I heard it in like some PSA that they used. When I when I saw it in Shrek when I was 18, I thought it was an original song and made me feel sad for Shrek.

They cut it and they cut out the naughty parts. They cut out the part about sex and stuff from the Shrek version. Oh, yeah. Because when you're intercutting between a donkey and a large ogre, you don't necessarily want to hear sexual lyrics. No, honestly, in 2001, when I saw it in the theaters, I stupidly thought, they're ripping off Jeff Buckley here. Can they pay the

jeff buckley estate to use this song sir please quiet down my children are here anyway sorry i didn't mean to throw us into the shrek zone but i guess all-star maybe would have been you know what these college kids were into at the time sure sure uh well then again in a i just watched spider-man 2002 again recently for another podcast. And in that one, the girls are driving around listening to The Strokes. And I was like, the popular seniors in high school are listening to that. I was like, I mean, The Strokes are definitely brand new in 2002. But would the cool girls in school be listening to it in their top-down mini convertible?

That soundtrack's an interesting one, that Spider-Man 2002 soundtrack. Do you think they'd be listening to Chad Krieger instead? I think more likely. Probably, yeah. Hey, if you guys want to hear three hours of me talking about Spider-Man and its soundtrack, listen to the episode of Soundtracker that just came out.

Oh, cool, cool. Yeah, it's a good one. That's a fun... We've had Eric on our podcast, too, for the Stand By Me episode. But okay, so anyway, Lisa is trying to explain to her friends how she isn't a typical college student. Actually, I'm off campus.

I share a house with a couple of girls, a couple of guys. Guys, huh? Are they cute? Well, Bart's kind of... No. I get knocked down! I get knocked down again! You're never gonna knock me down!

Whoa, party house! Hey, where's my keg? Hmm, Mom's not gonna like that. Who's Mom? Uh, that's what we call the gay guy who lives with us. Hey, you doing anything tomorrow night? Robert Pinsky's reading at Cafe Kafka. Oh! Robert Pinsky?

The former poet laureate? It's gonna be great. The three of us could split a scone. None, Derry. Duh! I take a whiskey drink. I take a chocolate drink. And when I have to pee, I use the kitchen sink. I sing the song that reminds me I'm a urinating guy. I'll see you tomorrow.

See ya. You know, Weird Al does make it look easy, doesn't he? Yes. This is so the season. I've said this is the fist-shaking season, and it is, but this also is the season where, like, three times already this season, Dan has missed sung a song as Homer. Like, they're really into that this season where like three times already this season dan has missed sung a song as homer like they're they're really into that this season you got to come up with new homer things to do you

know and this uh tough thumbing by chumbawamba here's the thing that happens every time where i have to look up a famous person or a band that i haven't looked up in a while are they hateful now or like are they uh and what's the especially. Are they hateful now? Or like, are they? What's the verdict? Especially when they're British. I'm like, okay, are they transphobic now? We should have like litmuspedia. Just you type in a name,

it tells you who the last hateful thing they said publicly. But from my research, and please correct me if I'm wrong on this, like Jumbo Wumba is still good. And actually they were pretty left wing at the time. They had a great general distaste for new labor in Tony Blair in English back then. And they have a whole song about how much they hate homophobia called Homophobia. And well, in parentheses, we hate it. Not good.

You know what? They still need to apologize for the violence they did to tubs you know they thumped him too much yeah no so yes uh the i can at least say the chumbawamba i don't believe they've performed too much together again but it seemed like as far as like rich bands from england go they've they seem like they're all right but uh you know i i promise to take this back if i oh don't worry henry you're fine you do do research giving information about a person means you do endorse everything they say that's right and if you and if you haven't done four hours of wikipedia detective work you're uh you're complicit in their crime so i love the joke about the gay guy who lives with us like that's funny i mean

that shows you how different times are changing in simpsons world that they accept the like oh yeah in a college dorm there's probably one token gay guy like it almost feels like a joke about the tv show the real world of like well there's always a gay guy right in in the house in real world and as for this kafka joke back then i loved it because i was a dork who loved franz kauf i wasn't reading Gravity's Rainbow. I was reading the trial. I was reading the collected short stories. Don't tell anyone that in a year because he'll be the one that is a red flag if you read it.

Because we'll have switched to a new guy. This guy loves waking up as a bug. It's a Spider-Man again yeah yeah uh no i actually uh i forgot to bring it in here i in the bedroom i was just flipping through this got me to take off the shelf i don't save too many books from when i was a teen but i did save my complete short stories kafka paperback i've had since then i was paging through it again and yeah the metamorphosis is perfection but actually my favorite is probably short stories is probably the judgment uh which is about a guy being yelled at by his dad until he kills himself oh interesting yeah i don't know why i like that

well hey if you don't want to read check out the orson welles version of uh the trial it's really good anthony perkins never seen that anthony perkins is in it it rules it's one of his best roles um yeah and hagel's bagels just fun fun little morsel there i left i hate i hate to keep like pausing the uh the episode here but like these these these characters like are just so frustrating because they're supposed to be young adult lisas but they're also kind of also like flighty girls and i wish they had figured out like oh these are characters we need to be keep them consistent but i they they're just plot devices and that's it like we don't really learn anything about but to be honest and i i you know you guys are obviously more steeped in these seasons but i i sort of feel as though that's what lisa herself as a

character became and and not exclusively lisa i'm sure all of them became flanderized, you know, as the seasons went on, because I think in the original seasons, Lisa is genuinely sort of subversive in her intellectualism, where she undermines people's easy ideas about what, you know, American life is and this and that and societal norms and all that. I think eventually she just becomes a scold. She's just like a snobby, brainy scold, which is kind of what she is in this episode, where she's just impressed that girls have pretended or actively reading Gravity's Rainbow. And, you know, just like that's what I've seen from clips of Lisa later on, is that she's actually a very conforming, brainy person.

And that if that's a result of seasons going on and having less and less to do with a finely drawn character and more just having to resort to broader stereotypes so i almost feel as though it's a function of lisa not really being as interesting or as as finally sketched a character now that her friends are not that either yeah i think you're correct as time goes on especially in this era lisa is their outlet for south park style humor where i'm gonna play that jingle later in this episode a lot of left punching yeah exactly she's a latte sipping hippie tree hugger blah blah blah you know yeah a non-dairy scone no well also too you know if they wrote them with depth then they couldn't write jokes about how they're vapid college girls which are horrible things to be right right they have to

get that in there too they don't have a valley girl they don't have a they don't have a vocal fry i guess you know they didn't check every box but i think i agree with you on the general uh portrayal of college kids here and whiskey and chocolate together that homer's doing is pretty that's uh that sounds tasty to me it's good pairing it is uh and of course nobody knows who the poetet Laureates are. Like they never, when I looked at a list of them, I'm like, I never heard any. Like Ada Limon is the current one. And I'm sure she is a great writer. But yes, people don't know who these people, most people don't know who these people are. I didn't realize Pinsky was in the episode going into it.

So for a second, I was like, oh, you know, I think in the earlier seasons, they wouldn't have said, oh, you mean the Poet Laureate? But then I realized they kind of have to say it because he's the guest. And you need to prepare people to know that whoever they're about to hear is a guest voice. How we use electricity can be smarter, cleaner and greener. At Electric Ireland, we can help guide you there. You see, our new net zero hub has all you need to know about smart meter plans, EV tariffs, solar panels, and much more.

Making your usage clearer, your trips greener, your home cozier, and your world brighter. Find our Net Zero Hub at electricireland.ie. It is important. It's actually a big deal and not just a name they made up. It's not hank azaria playing somebody yeah meanwhile bart uh is learning about his uh i think homer's wiling out here because marge is at the hospital with part so that's that's right he's home alone i do like the line of like i knew there was something wrong when he didn't want ice cream i do want ice cream

that's fine and so yes bart has the panda virus uh and i do like this bit about being upset how much somebody keeps saying normal and it's really uh putting putting you off it can't be mange i just had him dept your son is exhibiting classic symptoms of panda virus here take a look i knew it was serious when he said he didn't want ice cream. I did want ice cream. Well, your father ate it all. Now, don't worry. These pills will take care of everything.

But for a week, Bart will be highly infectious to others. Contagious? Outrageous. I got me some teachers to lick. Well, I don't know about that. But don't worry. While you're infectious, you will lead a normal life full of normal social interaction. I don't like how many times you said normal.

You'll be living in this bubble. It's clear plastic, so the world can see how normal you are. The world can see how normal you are. That's great i also i should say in the bubble boy film they came up with a clever twist to make it have not a tragic ending uh in the jake jelen hall one yes yeah that one no and so he doesn't suffer from autoimmune disorders in the jake jelen hall one or he does all right hey skip ahead if you don't want the film spoiled for you. It's on Criterion now, I hear. Just like in the movie, he falls in love with the girl next door.

He goes to her wedding to try to prevent it from happening, but she thinks she can never marry him because he's going to die anyway. He says, well, if I'm going to die, I want to kiss you first. He tears his way out of the bubble and kisses her, and then nothing happens to him he's like wait what's wrong and his mother reveals his who has been highly overprotective of him the entire movie that at age four he did develop an immune system but she was wanting to protect him and lied to him this entire time that he didn't have one is that woman arrested at the end of the movie for child abuse uh jake

jill and hall forgives her immediately oh great uh and then she also ends up danny trejo is in the movie playing a biker and he keeps saying that he had wait i can't get over this danny trejo playing a biker he's playing a yes yeah it's unpredictable but he in the whole movie he's saying that he got heartbroken by a woman that left him, and it is revealed that Jake Gyllenhaal's mom is that woman. So she and her husband go on the road with that guy, and it seems like they're a throuple at the end. So the mother does not go to jail. Instead, she lets loose and becomes a biker, babe.

So yeah. becomes a biker babe so yeah well that that all tracks that scans for a early 2000s um wannabe out at adam sandler yuck him up no it's uh jake jill halls he has man he's he won an oscar yet i forget is he i don't know i like him a lot actually i weirdly i haven't seen bubble boy but um i think he's quite good um i like him and lots of stuff he's good though now it's weird he okay this is another i'm sorry this is gonna be an eight hour long episode there's a weird thing he's in this uh he's in the roadhouse remake they're making right now and for some uh related to that i believe his character is supposed to be a former ufc champion so at the most recent u recent UFC show he comes out in character for the start

of a fight and it's just like here's Jake Gyllenhaal ready to fight in the UFC just so they could film it for the movie and it's really oh they said that's the actual filming they they use the actual tournament or whatever yeah at at this one UFC that just happened in between fights Jake Gyllenhaal does a full entrance like he's going to be in a fight so they can film it for the roadhouse movie to to that's weird i wonder if their budget isn't up to snuff because why would you why would you have to do that why wouldn't you just use movie magic and money to make a fake well uh well you know then you can't use the ufc branding in your movie so oh you're right it was probably a dirty deal that's missing the point of roadhouse it's about

a guy who's so strong he doesn't want to fight i'm not even going to think about the roadhouse remake aspect of any of that but yeah that that's weird uh it's known as shooting the rodeo if there's a rodeo in town you uh you use it to up your production value and you don't have to make it yourself oh yeah riff tracks pals talk about that all the time with like carnivals like like roller gator the classic carnival film well that's just all stolen shots no one knew they were filming roller gator it's a hair away from from stock footage you know it's technically a crime you're watching right yeah uh but yeah so bart learns he's normal and then it's a good cutaway gag to bart just screaming and he's rolling away just because there was a strong breeze which is a good joke too and there's

a great joke that in the background nelson ha ha's him then has to like run around the block to do it a second time i thought that was fun i fun. I think that's a genuinely new use of Nelson, which is good. So then we cut to Lisa arriving at the college, which McMullen and her team definitely designed to look like the Harvard quad in the entrance to Harvard. Yeah, they also joke that Lisa names two things that she's interested in. And they go like, hey, there should be a third thing. I think it's Selman who goes like, hey, isn't there a third thing she should say and then gene says there was it wasn't funny so we could and uh it evened out because they had four the rule of four earlier and now they only did two you're right they're making up the remainder yeah yeah so lisa says she's in

heaven and then uh tina and car Carrie get another line about saying like, well, I live in a place without a DSL line, which, you know, it's early, early internet days there. What did a girl say in 2002? Freaky. Freaky. Yeah. Though the mouth movements are off.

I fear there's a darker joke unsaid there about something that a bad thing that happens to girls in college. They then have Bart. Okay. Can you keep opening up this bubble and put soup in there and close it again like it's got this weird door that somehow materializes in it i don't know how this bubble uh the physics of the bubble i don't know how it's a magical very tough bubble yes yeah and this is uh when homer also gives bart a bath which is funny he just pours water in there shakes it up and rolls him down the whole way as bart is partially drowning also there's probablys water in there, shakes it up, and rolls them down the hallway as Bart is partially drowning.

Also, there's probably some soup in there as well. I thought that was unfortunate for him. Yeah, didn't empty it out. That'll help exfoliate, I think. Yeah. So this is where the only deleted scene that's on the DVD is, and I kind of wish they kept it

just because it would help me in one of my season theories. Homer gets mad at Bart for slurping soup and instead he says don't make me put bees in your ball and then homer said then bart says to him like everything you do is an idle threat and homer goes i'll idle threat you and shakes his fist again and then uh and then maggie makes a noise he's like oh you want some of this but then he goes i'll play peekaboo with you right now and then he starts playing peekaboo and is enjoying it but they actually go to the point of homer even shakes

his fist at maggie this would it really is the fish shaking era i'm surprised they cut that because if he didn't yeah but unfortunately by cutting it it takes away a little more from my fist shaken season uh content so okay let's talk about Robert Pinsky. Okay, let's start with the 9-11 story. Yes. Because we always, like, again, it's on the bingo card for all the podcasts we do because everything we're doing is around the time of 9-11 at this point in our history. Robert Pinsky is going to record for The Simpsons.

He flies out on a little day known as September 10th 2001 but it is American Airlines flight 11 that is the same flight hijacked the next morning Boston to Los Angeles so if they told Robert Monday's not good coming on Tuesday he'd be dead he would be

like we had to in recording this episode of this podcast we might have saved your life or i could be dead and later this this this day this afternoon it's gonna make posting this tough a plane is heading for both of our locations uh but yes and this story has been told a lot but the next day 9 11 seth mcfarland was supposed to be on that flight he was in boston wanted to go to la he missed it uh and pounding on the door to get in like come on

let me in yeah it's it's not we would what what we would have lost if seth mcfarland what we'd have no american dad cleveland show no um no test no tat oh no tat a million ways to die in the west not that would be gone in all of his all of his many cds of him singing uh jazz standards all seven of them yeah uh and then because of this robert pinsky was kind of adopted by the writers for a few days because he couldn't go anywhere wow i mean that yeah like nobody could fly anywhere for days in case you don't remember after 9-11 guys i had totally forgot that it was this whole story and i mean it is as tina would say freaky but not just that it was the totally forgot that it was this whole story. And I mean, it is, as Tina would say, freaky, but not just that it was the day before, but it was the flight. It was the flight that hit

the North Tower. That's insane. Yeah. I mean, obviously post-production had caught up with 9-11 at this point, but now we're at the point where production has. So we've crossed the Rubicon, people. It's finally... We're in 9-11 town one of the fraser um we don't have to go through every single showbiz relation but i think one of the fraser producers or executive producers died in 9-11 but yeah definitely there was a a fraser producer who died on 9-11 and then and then mcfarland didn't and then i guess pinsky uh as the simpsons guest almost did as well and as as we all know, if only Mark Wahlberg was on all those flights, it would have gone down very differently.

If Clinton found out that Pinsky was on the plane that was hijacked, he would have used all of his powers to just take that plane back. He would have made a secret call back to Bin Laden and say like, turn it around, turn it around guys, from the plane we all made together. It's also funny on the commentary because they throw at pinsky impeachment jokes they're like did clint never ask you to write a poem for an intern

but also because they recorded the commentary in 2009 they also say like were you involved in clinton loosening bank regulation wait wait really do they yeah that's cute that's a good question this all stems from a september 20th 1998 blurb in the new york times that pinsky wrote where uh new york times asked a bunch of you know famous guys like him literati the literati if you will that's me that's too smart you're one of them no uh that and so inb, it's like, what's your favorite TV show? And he says, it's The Simpsons. And it's kind of written, and this is 1998, it's kind of written with the thing of like, I know, crazy to think, right? A cartoon show.

But it's actually quite, like, you know, it's 1998, I get it. Like, that would, nobody would give a shit if you wrote that now. If the poet laureate who did it now, who's basically our or you know i believe in her 40s no one would care they wouldn't be like wow the poet laureates likes the simpsons but though i must again take issue with it because i read it it's a it's a fine little bit of writing who cares but it's the same thing that happened in that new yorker piece i read where it is framed as and here's the quote from his thing brilliantly written for masterful voice actors he never talks about an artist at all in it and it is framed as and here's a quote from his thing brilliantly written for masterful voice actors he never talks about an artist at all in it and it is it was very much the uh liberal

writer elite thing and to say like you know obviously it's a dumb cartoon but the writing oh the right right right yeah not surprised i know writers like the writers like yeah it makes it makes sense i think uh the earlier version of that was Vonnegut said he would rather have written Cheers than anything he's written in his life. Oh, I never heard that. You know, I mean, on the one hand, I agree it is a bit exclusive, but he is a writer. I guess that's what would attract him to it. Also, in addition to his poetry, he's apparently known for his localization skills that he has a famous uh translation of dante's inferno among among other classics and uh and

what i i guess he was a teacher of a friend of yours too yeah uh and i i didn't know this is my friend's brother uh so i i didn't really get to ask him too much about pinsky but i thought oh that's uh it's a neat guy to have as a mentor probably probably be able to write words much better after you study with them and believe it or not for my research i read all 54 stanzas of this uh of this poem impossible to tell this is a very truncated version of it in the episode but uh but here uh here's robert pinsky's poem now open your minds for the coal train to the quatrain, the toned danza of the A.B. stanza. I give you the former poet laureate of the United States,

Mr. Robert Pinsky. Tonight, I'll be reading from a copy of my book I just checked out at Atherton Library. I studied it! Say it on your building. That's it, Pinsky. You've got him right where you want him. Slow Dulcimer,

Gavatant Bow in Autumn. He's reading Impossible to Tell. Basho and his friends go out to view the moon. In summer, Gasoline Rainbow in the gutter. The secret courtesy that courses like Icor through the old form of the rude, full-scale joke. I'm in a coffeehouse listening to poetry.

There's a cat on a table and no one seems to care. This is the single greatest day of my life. Impossible to tell in writing. Basho, he named himself. Banana tree. Basho! Banana tree! basho he named himself banana tree banana tree uh see it's impossible to tell is it is a good pick for a poem because it is a poem about telling jokes uh it's it's about two it's about old

friends kind of reconnecting like uh basho and banana tree is like it's kind of about in jokes like that's an in joke in a group and it's like, you know, if you read, telling a joke is complicated in what it can mean. Like, so two jokes are told within the poem. I bet they're real knee-slappers. You know, I think they, for as much as we're criticizing this episode, I think they are capturing with Lisa your first thoughts upon being in that adult world. Like, I had the same thought when i first attended college even though it was a commuter college 10 miles from my house i was walking around saying well here i am and just oh i can i i have such freedom oh i'm i'm in a coffee

shop this is amazing like these are all new experiences to me and then i had like nine more years of college it got pretty old it would have been nice if this was the beginning of the episode more and the episode is about her really inhabiting college and then it gets taken away at the end but she can look forward to it in the future or something. But you are more like on a journey with Lisa

feeling intellectually fulfilled and even though she can't quite go there yet, that's a classic little TV cutesy experience for her to have. Instead, it's like wedged in the middle of, you know, all these different, you know, kind of through lines. And I agree this this scene is kind of nice just on a character level. If I could pitch a cynical third act twist, they could do instead. Like Lisa could go through the thing like all college students go through. When you get there you're

you're like wow how novel this is all these amazing things and then over time you go like oh college is so predictable or like oh the new freshmen are in they suck or whatever they could they could deal with some of the angst of it too and and then she realized like you know what I'd rather still be a kid yeah the problem is this that essentially i guess it would be lisa goes to college instead of homer goes to college and they've done that you know you know the one the the the specific line that got me that reminded me of like one of my first when i first moved here to a college town of berkeley california the realization of like oh my god i'm not i'm not in my hometown my closed-minded hometown anymore it was when i went to a nearby used bookstore and there was just like the store cat walking around like no place had a store cat and just saying like does nobody else notice this cat here

is it they're not asking what's the deal with this cat oh my god it's like the bookstore went crazy yeah so so yeah they uh i also do like the framing of the poet laureate as like he is you know ozzy osbourne or something he's killing he's got a captive audience yeah and he's like atherton library for the the local reference that uh you got to get him there and also mcmullin and her artists they were tasked with were tasked with making a guy reading a poem interesting on screen. And they did it. I think they did a great job. We then see a fun little gag of Homer ignoring all of his children.

You can see why in a couple episodes Maggie keeps a gun in her bed. Because these raccoons are attacking her. This actually felt like a classic Simpsons joke, honestly. This little stretch here. I thought that was just a very nice build. There's the unexpected line at the end, you know, and obviously, like, it's plugging into the plot a little bit because Lisa's not even there.

It was good. It was very old-school Simpsons. Yeah, and McMullen, she really does a lot with silhouettes and shadows, letting things play out like that in a very expressive way, and I love how the shadow of Maggie fighting the raccoon cast on the wall is just very effective you don't need to actually see the battle happen yeah her use of silhouettes in this one like every time you get inside lisa's head and she's having her internal monologue they had a extra shadowy thing around her like and and it's not that is a budget thing if you ask for that it

costs more to animate than if you don't have it and it's more complicated there's room for mistakes like it's it's a risky thing to do it's why especially by season 13 fewer are doing it but that it again feels like one of those times where mcmullen just goes like well maybe that is the rule but i would like something i'd like to go a little farther artistically than we normally do there's even some great reaction shots of and squashing and stretching that really that happens here that looks great and that's that's her taking taking chances others would not we see afterwards everybody's hanging out with him eating pizza or just the the close-knit kids and And I love him telling his insider story.

He's about writing a poem. I do think Bill Clinton couldn't tell if a poem was good or bad if it was handed to him by the Poet Laureate. He'd be like, you've done it again. This reminds me of being in grad school, and it did seem amazing at first. The professors would invite the class over for dinners, but also I was thinking,

they're probably trying to sleep with at least one person here this is just the cover yeah you had to be like yeah you think like well oh i had to be invited because if he just invited like this one man or woman then then it would be suspicious but if it's like six kids there and hey if you get a free meal out of it it was free yeah now i i also do love that when lisa runs off gasping uh he goes like did she put him for the pizza like that's a great he's kind of cheap he's mad that lisa didn't kick in like five bucks for the pizza it's a good it's a good vocal performance from from pinsky he's a good actor he actually is pretty good this pinsky like again i didn't know he was going to be the guest so when he gets up there and he has that line of you've got him now pinsky i i thought this could be

one of the main cast it's got enough like because the problem with sometimes a guest voice is even if they sound distinctive their delivery is kind of flat and they're not an actor and they're not really throwing themselves into the lines but he he's he's good cut to lisa making a matchstick uh white house uh which that was a joke on joel's last episode of mystery science theater on mitchell of uh yeah building things out of matchstick was that two toothpicks but yeah yeah oh right yeah yeah was that like a boomer craft project just like build things out of flammable objects must be it must have been like they all had to do it in school we i i i recall making things with popsicle sticks or tongue depressors but not uh not matches or toothpicks oh and definitely with pipe cleaners they had a lot a lot of pipe cleaner stuff i never cleaned a pipe with one of those i only just made projects

i should give it a shot someday i've never done it either yeah i bet they clean they clean pipes real good and this is when lisa has a glue hallucination where the glue cell says the elmer's glue mascot says you won't eat our meat but you glue with our feet which is a good time to play the jingle take that l Lisa's beliefs. Oh, yes. This is classic take that, vegetarians. And I've had these comments because I don't eat meat. And then if that comes out and someone is upset by that, they'll say, what's your belt made out of? What are your shoes made out of?

Et cetera, et cetera. It's very, very boring. But this is just par for the course, really. And also most glues especially but especially elmers they have not used animal products in their glue in a very long time like there's not uh this is i googled this and there were multiple articles like no they don't send old horses to the glue factory anymore guys it's not what they do but that cow was still on the uh the uh the label yeah they're really they're really sabotaging themselves by having it be a cow, you know, because it's just going to remind people of the glue factory idea, you know.

Someday the woke mind virus will take away the Elmer's glue cow. I think they should become woke and have the Elmer's glue cow get together with Elsie the cow from Borden. I like that yeah oh maybe i could be in a thruple with the uh the the little wax cheese cow the oh yeah the laughing cow yeah the laughing she'll enjoy that uh so good natured uh but yeah so lisa lisa freaks out we cut to her snoring again this is one of those little like animation things i love her mcmullen does on her episodes like lisa has such a funny mouth when she's snoring like it's not this is not the typical snoring mouth movements from the uh official character charts for the characters like

it's it's a brand new drawing of it i really i really like it uh we get the return of marcia mittsman because i think they realized like oh crap we get the return of marcia mittsman because i think they realized like oh crap we wrote a scene that ends with mrs hoover but we fired the we fired the voice actress for mrs hoover all right well they they normally they haven't had miss hoover back in a speaking role in a long time uh and uh next year they'll they'll get back hoover's voice actress but uh or no it's a start no actually sorry it's over a year from now so right because with that the she was was she mrs van houten as well was she she was louis van houten she she was of course uh maude flanders okay yeah yeah and then she was gone for a bit

but then she came back i don't know all the lore uh i mean the short version is that she wanted uh as the main cast was getting major rages she said she only wanted an increase to cover the fees for her to fly from her home in denver to record it right and they would not do that and they didn't have uh long distance recording tech i guess is good back there i don't know it honestly felt like for some reason they did not want to agree to easy demands uh and but fortunately everybody made up i think it was one of those aljean things that he wanted like we made a mistake let's let's get her back as a voice so it's not her in this episode no no it's uh the marsha mitzman who who she voiced Maude a couple times before they murdered Maude. And we do hear about, not fully explored after this, but Sarah Wiggum's tragic alcoholism.

Yes. Oh, my God. So also a good drawing. It goes by so fast. I think it's Janie who has, or it's the white-haired girl in class, who has a drawing of a pyramid with a few matchsticks taped to it which seems like there i made it out of matchsticks like that's that's a good bad uh one too but why do all these kids suck at matchstick stuff like that i get that ralph's

is not good but i guess to highlight that lisa can get by is i don't remember every student in the school being this um inept but I guess that's what you need for the scene to work also in the last couple years they've done a real reboot on Sarah Wiggum's character she oh yeah it's not voiced how she used to be she's voiced by some moderately famous improv actress I forget the name but they just look up recent Sarah Wiggum episodes she's made to be like a fun gal pal of marge who has an interior life she's not just a a clone of wiggum himself yeah that's interesting she's not that meanwhile we cut to uh oh and then also lisa passes out just to get another time and so we cut to another

talk about rarely appearing characters here it's because it has to be because millhouse has to appear later in this scene that the third bullied kid can't be millhouse so they're like what about wendell so yes the the queasy kid wendell actually gets a spoken line very rare is he the is he data is he the kid with the glasses who goes, oh, look, a clue. Is that who we're talking about? Database is, no, Wendell is the kid with the curly hair. He's the one who says, but it's after lunch. And he's asking for lunch money.

Right, right. Okay, yeah, yeah. It's just an expression. I do like that. I'm like, kicking butt might not involve any kicking at all. Yep. But yes, Wendell, they're all about to be beat up. But then Bart makes a quick appearance here

when nerds are in trouble i am not slow it's spin spin spin and away i go now once he's gone they'll kill us i love database so much he's great he hates his voice and I think they're using him more because Matt Groening is busy watching Fox Mother Futurama in the crib right now so boy I it's just such a great voice it sounds a little bit like Dexter from Dexter's Lab a tiny bit but uh man it's great no he kind of looks like Dexter yes he has Yes, start every line with, meh. Let's go spy on her. Every cadence is different than you would expect.

Every word is in a different place. I feel just like Harriet the Spy. Yeah. They might over-egg the pudding in this one. There's a little bit more database than I even expected, but it is a fun character. And, you you know if you need a nerd in addition to making it for lost time with database yeah yeah and he's a distinct nerd from millhouse and martin like i i like that they they if they need a third nerd he's always there for it and uh all in this being

a good animation the ball bouncing around animation is very well done the except for a very obvious digital layer effect of bart bouncing into frame like that that one looks weird in hd i gotta say what's this mini handball court they have on their playground i have no idea what this is it's just it's just a a brick wall that's about like four feet wide and maybe six feet tall seems dangerous to have in the playground really yeah i don't know what game they're playing here uh but yeah bart gets them and and then of course he references the underdog saying which is when polly's in trouble i am not slow it's hip hip hip and away i go uh which obviously we only knew his underdog references because it we were the last generation

that that got replayed for as uh on television like we uh now no kid knows who underdog is like even they're not watching that jason lee movie god with the real dogs yeah with mouths put on it god terrible i do like how database correctly says like once he's gone they're gonna they're just gonna get up and get back to beating us up which is what happens they get they get mega wedgies off screen this next this next bit here it feels a bit like conservatives complaining about college it's like this is what they do at college your women's studies degree will get you far and um i had the same experience as lisa where i had an intro to film class and yes they did show us birth of a nation which i thought was uh absolutely necessary they couldn't have just

had clips or told us why it was important we had to watch the whole thing but in my intro to film class we did watch a duck dargers cartoon and i was like i'm in college and i'm watching cartoons hot diggity i could have done with more even laughing at that as like the you know maybe the self-importance of because like when the kids come in i thought there was gonna be a gag about like you know kids you know this is college we're watching cartoons you know like it's funny juxtaposition and also i just want to say i thought i did get a laugh out of lisa taking off her i'm in fourth grade sticker and replacing it with us out of everywhere um which is another it's another uh kind of pre-911-y kind of kind of thing that's yeah you know honestly that should be the subtitle

for your series it was originally the title it was just too long uh so it was something snappy but yeah uh there's some that's the second bumper sticker gag in the episode right that i guess that shows how uh how much he's transformed no i i feel like it almost could be used as a conservative facebook meme of like this is what college does to your children and the way at least it transforms into this i will tell you in my college education i probably wrote at least eight papers even in grad school about the simpsons uh which is why my degrees are useless that's why i'm doing this maybe it was ahead of its time in a way because of course it was true that you know there was this element of studying entertainment or or

art or you know like american filmmaking and media you would watch cartoons sometimes but now i think there's even more there's so much more in college probably where you you sit down and you watch literal children's entertainment with the idea that you're you're i don't know you probably are learning but you know what i mean it's it's a little counterintuitive well because more millennial uh teachers are now be showing things in class like that and there's more of it there just is more you know not to go on about the marvel verse again but it's just like that's what's out there you know the biggest stuff is kind of for kids so i guess i mean like i i did enjoy these classes these frivolous classes but i'm sure like now there is a uh eight thousand dollar course it's

like the psychology of blues clues you have to write a 30 page paper at the end of the term it is a solid itchy and scratchy ep i thought i i didn't know how uh itchy and scratchy went into the the kind of later seasons if if they even still did them or if they're good. I thought it felt pretty classic, you know, watching his body disintegrate in four different stomachs. I also, when Lisa drives away, I like how Milow says, that young adult looks like Lisa. That young adult is Lisa.

That's funny. And also good animation on him unhooking them from the, well, actually going the hard way of taking them out of their wick. Making them bite down on a stick or pencils or whatever. Oh, yeah, pencils, yeah. And now another, like I'm always rewriting this episode in my head, and another twist I think could have taken is that the nerds think it's cool that Lisa's in college.

They are, they're jealous. They're not angry that she sold out her second grade status they want to join her and maybe that's what uh you know the third act could be like lisa is trying to say i don't know they're little people or something i don't know some something like to get these other characters onto campus because they want to be part of this too i you know also the guys that they pass by the college guys who tell them where to tell lisa which class to go to they feel like they're a remix of me and yours body types together like right the bigger the the the heavier gentleman kind of has more like your hair and these thinner guy has the glasses but i feel like if you just uh you know remix how they look it's it's me and

you together also the line of i feel like just like harriet this i never read those books as a kid but i did see the movie when i was 14 because it had a hey arnold short before it and i always thought i thought that harriet the spy was like a you know just one of those like kid detective book series but it's actually about a girl who has like emotional problems that she needs to deal with and she the she thinks she's like a spy who's going to solve a mystery but actually the mystery is uh within herself and uh and not and she's a spy and that she uh is keep secrets on people too much and tries to use them against them and in revenge well we'll get the uh proper gritty reboot in probably about a year where you can't wonder if there's been more than one harriet the spy but but obviously harriet the spy is a girl's book

which thus makes it funny that uh database would reference that of all things and there is a reboot coming by the way for apple tv no you're fucking serious i am serious oh i was just kidding but okay it's not gritty but it is it is a reboot. Okay. The movie I saw that had Michelle Trachtenberg and Rosie O'Donnell. Rosie O'Donnell. Yeah. It was the first Nickelodeon movie, I think. So it got marketed very heavily on Nickelodeon. I think there was a Harriet's, but I could totally be clashing memories in my head from

that gummy period of six to eight years old. But I think there was a Pop-tart uh box that i i had that had harriet the spy on it telling me to go see the movie never saw you know what i also i did want to see it because uh tractenberg was on pete and pete uh the adventures of pete and pete which i was a big fan of so i think and and i'll be honest i also watch the rosie o'donnell show all the time uh as it was my favorite my favorite daytime talk show she i didn't have a favorite daytime talk show but maybe i was still a little younger than you guys but but rosie o'donnell was so huge that yeah it felt like this is a the first nickelodeon

movie and it's got like a really big celebrity in it it felt it felt legit yet i still did not see the film if you're a fan of giant beret she's wearing one in the movie that's all i remember which lisa is too in this that's interesting's all I remember. Oh, right. Which Lisa is, too, in this. That's interesting. Wow. That's what college students do, right? They wear berets. So, yes, this is when it's time to watch a Itchy and Scratchy, which is where we got

the opening clip from. This is Carl Wiedergott doing The Professor. It's why it doesn't sound like any of the other characters. In case you're new to the podcast, Carl Wiedergott, he at the time was coming in to help with table reads. And so he'd read for some characters. And their thank you to him was they'd give him random roles every now and again. Even though it'd be easy for this professor just to be Harry Shearer or Hank Azaria. But they give it to Wetergott.

And it was always fun to hear his voice. Because you're like, oh, that's a voice you don't normally hear. It's a new spice. And he says this cartoon cartoon is dab fo6 this that which is the episode code for this season this episode's code is dab f15 dab fo6 for simpsons was the bart wants what it wants the uh the canada episode they're there for 90 seconds yeah it counts. The Simpsons go to Toronto for 90 seconds. But I like how this does feel like going back to old

Itchy and Scratchy shorts and that's unsettlingly gory and Lauren McMullen is the one who came up with the idea of Scratchy being processed through all the stomachs and like disintegrated more and more and it looks great. It's also gross as hell. It is horrifying. Like it is like this pure dehumanization

of him like hair first then skin then organs and then it's just bones yeah then again that's the mcmullen difference i think that she really can bully al jean to going like hey i want to do this cool thing in the show well okay i guess you you were the president that's what he sounds like and you know don't play algeemist when we ask him. They hit on Bubble Boy a bit too late. I can't believe they did an I Can't Believe It's Not Butter joke in 2002. Oh, my God. I mean, Amish jokes, too, were pretty played out at the time.

But, yeah, an I Can't Believe It's Not Butter joke in 2002. You're right. And, you know, also with Itchy and Scratchy, in season 34, they did their know also with itchy and scratchy in season 34 they did their first uh itching scratching forever and it was really interesting because they overly animated it like they animated it in a totally different style than the show like there was extra movement to it it felt like somebody told them like no animate this like it's a disney short it's uh it's interesting i would i would actually enjoy if they had stopped making the simpsons after season eight or nine and then it was just itching

scratchy for the next 30 30 years i love i love the itching scratchy shows and this was a good one like i said i i thought it was actually pretty fun it needs to have the blood and guts though yeah yeah so yes uh just as we extrapolate so many things from cartoons, they try to extrapolate that this is that it's obvious that this is about how the ecological destruction is pitting farmers against each other. And I also love birds say tweet that Lisa writes down birds. Tweets. An arrow tweet. That's a good one. But then Milhouse rats are out for no other reason than he's a jerk.

OK, freeze there. So what does this cartoon mean? It shows how the depletion of our natural resources has pitted our small farmers against each other. Yes, and birds go tweet. What else? Hey, mister, put the cartoon back on. I'm sorry, boys. We don't allow children in this class.

What about Lisa? She's only eight. Lisa, did you lie to us? I just wanted to belong. For once, I felt I was with intellectual equals. I can't believe I cheated off an eight-year-old. I guess we won't be biking through Italy. She's worse than that 80-year-old who pretended to be a freshman.

I just wanted a place to sit down. That's a good act break joke. Yeah, that's not illegal for an 80-year-old to be a freshman. Non-traditional. Is that the first identification of Maulman's actual age?

I'm curious if it's ever been. You know, I think they're just guessing at that because we also heard that he's in his mid-30s. Yes, that's what

I was thinking of. I think they didn't want to end with the emotionality of Lisa here instead of like, let's get Mole Man in here. Let's have an old Mole Man joke. I'm always up for a Mole Man joke. It made me laugh. I like that the removing of the beret is when they realize,

like, wait, Lisa's a child. That was cute. That's a good joke. But yeah, like we've said so many times now, Tina and Carrie just completely turn on her and are just like, ah, fuck you. And they never return. They just are done with being Lisa's friends.

They're mad that they lied to her, that they cheated off an eight-year-old, which, I mean, it's like, I don't know. It just makes them very vapid characters, which not to say there aren't those people like that in college, but it's just a sadder ending, really. And then we go to Act three in which uh the plot

turns from lisa needs to find smart peers to hang out with and feel validated to lisa needs to become popular again and my question is uh was she ever popular at school it's like she's identified as not having friends and then when she comes back she's like nobody likes me oh no also it's three kids it's not like. It's three kids. It's not like there's three kids who didn't like that. She was going to college. It was Milhouse and the other two nerds. It's not like the whole school doesn't consider them friends.

No, no, she doesn't. So it's a, it's a little bit of a, of a desperate third act. When the episode already hinges on Lisa is lonely and she's happy to make new friends. meter plans, EV tariffs, solar panels, and much more. Making your usage clearer, your trips greener, your home cozier, and your world brighter. Find our net zero hub at electricireland.ie.

You can't then have a third, or it's tricky to have a third act that's about Lisa has to win her friends back. The ones we said in this episode, she doesn't have. Yep. My own thought, like I think you're totally right, Henry, this was a third act rewrite. I want to believe in BD's script and hey,

we have his email address. Let's ask him. I feel like Lisa's story was revolved. Sorry, Lisa's story was resolved with the girls and maybe it was Bart whose superhero thing backfired and he needed to get back

into the good graces of his friends with a prank. Right. i and and then they wanted like oh maybe they were running out of time and they're like uh you know the third act's not big enough for both of these things so what do we cut emotions or a big prank and uh they they went with cutting the emotions i do like this scene is kind of the scene that opens act three is kind of a parody of parents yelling at their kids of just like how many credits did you earn without our permission 16 and uh yeah i mean the march is like all these the reason she doesn't want lisa to be at a college is because of the syllabi like not not for real reasons of like you're an eight-year-old surrounded by adults

all the time like that's bad like bad things could happen she she instead lists silly reasons of why she would be upset which is funnier than uh dark reason we're also forgetting that al jean did go to harvard as a child that's right he's a ben shapiro type. I keep forgetting this. He was in Harvard at age 16. Yeah. Al Jean is a very smart man. He jokes that he did it just to get out of town. I mean, definitely these jokes about friendlessness come from a real place for Al Jean growing up, too. He was a big nerd who also, I believe he's told stories of having, at least for some part of his life, headgear for braces, teeth braces as well. Classic.

But yeah, he also got into Harvard at age 16, which is pretty nuts. You earned how many credits without our permission? 16. Oh! College is no place for a young girl with those quadrangles and study carols and syllabi. Doogie Howser went to college when he was my age. Against my wishes. But the atmosphere there was so stimulating.

It was a bustling marketplace of ideas. Oh, and this kitchen isn't? Well? I put those Cathys on the fridge fridge for you i don't even like them they've gotten so smutty oh sure when a man does it it's smutty but if a woman did it homer kathy is a woman oh come on you're right yeah also this bit here of like doogie house or went to college when he was my age against my wishes that's a good line too then we have a mean joke about kathy looking like a man i thought i thought um i wouldn't have found it particularly funny but i thought for sure

that homer was going to look at each one and then say act and then he he didn't he just he just he just he doesn't say doe he says oh or something like there's no more just a shudder of like yeah yeah just to make it really clear kathy is ugly folks yeah yeah i thought he was gonna say ak i thought that was was all why is it kathy if he doesn't he doesn't use the use the catchphrase i don't know say the line homer also what a lib thing for Lisa to call College a marketplace of ideas. Yeah, that's what I mean. It's all kind of like vague, you know, like she's not really totally ideologically defined, which is fine.

It's a cartoon. But you hear some stuff, you're like, that's not really what a lib would say in this scene. And then in the other scene, it's like, oh, I thought she was more, you know, of a progressive. And she says something about marketplace of ideas. You so it's it's kind of a little scattered she's ready for the opinion column of the new york times though that's what i mean is that she she goes from being like a genuine sort of like sort of lefty dissident in the early seasons to just yeah like a new york times reader you know she's like smug in all the correct ways and she flouts her progressivism on on that are relatively individualistic, you know, and then again, Robert Pinsky wouldn't be in this episode if the writers weren't New York Times readers, because that's how they found out is. And that's a OK. Not that worried about, you know, the ideological composition of a funny show. But it does kind of show itself sometimes, especially maybe people of uh and uh you know not as rich and a little more than the left but now that they're all have been working on the show for decades they're all very comfortable yeah and

they all have the rich white liberal politics we would expect them to have sure well and and not to you know make blanket statements about people we've some of we've never even talked to on the show i do think aljean is a little more rich and centrist than the showrunner before mike scully you know he could go to some concern his seasons did go to a couple conservative places but obviously he does come from a working class college dropout background uh and he was the guy who unionized the staff so he he had more progressive and and dave merkin is uh certainly has had more progressive and Dave Merkin is certainly has a more progressive, like anti-authoritarian streak in him that I mean, he it was his dream to do the Stonecutters episode for for instance.

So I think, you know, with within that general type, you see the little differentiations, but it's, you know, like the old the old truism is you know they're they're all coming from that kind of harvard lampoon if not literally from harvard that that general scene and you know so there's there are some differences and i remember we talked about the or the first one i was on you know who's the writer george meyer right george meyer yeah and he he came at it from like the kind of anti-war angle probably from his hippie days. You know, he hung on to that. So, you know, there's some variety in what they try to say. He's a Grateful Dead super fan, that George Meyer.

So, yes, Lisa, though, is finding that all the other kids don't like her, that she's too college for them. This is where the Ralph rolling away meme is from. I forgot. We're now in the area of like, oh, right. Now I'm saying, oh, yeah, that meme is from this episode in this time in The Simpsons. Though I also forgot this great joke of Willie tries to comfort her, then smashes his rake in anger when he feels like she's big timing him. And then rakes his rake.

And then cleans it up with a new rake. That's fine. That's a good joke. Yeah, that was good. We see in the next scene, Homer's trying to get Bart out of the tree by throwing his frisbee up at it, which that's a fun little kid thing. And also great animation of when his gun falls out of the tree and shoots a pellet at his buddy.

He's like, ah, the good G. Lisa needs to get up into the tree to join up with Bart. And this is where McMullen and her team remembered, hey, Lisa's good at gymnastics now. What if she used that to get up into the tree to join up with Bart. And this is where McMullen and her team remembered, hey, Lisa's good at gymnastics now. What if she used that to get up into the tree? All right. Forgetting that the tree. Wait, that's not the tree with the treehouse in it. It's just a random tree.

You know what? There should be a treehouse in there. Yeah. They don't have two trees in their backyard normally, but this is a treehouse free tree. It is. It is kind of. It feels like a different episode. And I know The Simpsons has the almost formula of starting with a completely unrelated, you know, catalyst and all that.

But I totally forgot this was the one I just, you know, 20 minutes earlier saw the gymnastics thing in it. I was like, oh, yeah. Yeah, even if the show has like the first act twist that leads you into a new story the character's needs will be the same they'll have started with a need and that will resolve but the need changes drastically between acts two and three yeah that's funny they've had so many times where they remind homer like didn't you do this because of that he's like what are you talking about though as as far as clever writing goes i do like that this scene starts with lisa doing the what would be good writing of like, you know what?

Both of us have these same problems. And then Bart goes like, no, I'm actually more popular than ever. But this is when Bart decides, not unlike in Lisa's rival, Bart is going to help Lisa with a prank. Poor Bart. I know just how you feel. Isolated, alone, cut off from everyone. Are you kidding? This little baby has made me more popular than ever.

Hey, Bubble Bart, looking good. Call me. The bubble makes everything shimmer and glow. You can't believe what that sunset looks like to me. That's not a sunset. That's a bird on fire. Tomato, tomato. I wish I had some place to call my own.

No one wants me around anymore. I know a way you can win back the kids at school. Really? That's wonderful, but how? All you gotta do is play a prank on the principal. Well, I can't do it tomorrow. There's an assembly in his honor. We've got a little planning to do. Step into my office.

Ew, Bart. It wasn't me. Got a fart joke on the show there. Yeah. And the bird on fire was once, that's a plane going down, but changed for obvious reasons. Yeah. Oh, okay. Because that's a better line, but there you have it.

Man, do you think they said that at the table read on september 11th and then they're like you know and they instantly pull out the right marker it was the 10th it was still safe to make a joke about that you're right yeah sorry no that's so funny if it was the 11th pinsky wouldn't be there but uh but of course the use of that line is uh another use for our jingle here. Everybody hates birds, right? Yep, it's safe to kill a bird on screen. Well, off screen, but a feather floats on the screen. That fiery feather lets you know of the suffering that's happening right off screen.

I gotta admit, I did not know you guys had a bird category. We do. There's a lot of bird violence in popular media. Once you're aware of it, you notice they kill birds a lot for humor. Yep. Some animal has to, you got to nominate somebody. You know, it can't be dogs, not usually cats. So yeah, it's birds. It used to be cats, but then the internet fell in love with cats. We can't see a cat get thrown out a window anymore. No, you're right sometimes a a dirty r-rated movie can have a a mean ugly dog and

maybe something back in it like in something about mary though even at that they didn't kill the dog at the end the dog is like in a body cast or something and one of the last shots of it right i remember in mars attacks they kill a dog they the martians vaporize a dog and it was uh it hit different when you see that absolutely now the episode has gone off the rails at this point uh our episode two but uh i can forgive that because this is a great i love skinner so much and this is a great show piece of skinner uh being hated and not completely aware of it but also it is fun when he becomes aware of it it's been a good while since there was a really

great skinner scene and this is like it's about skinner being boring it's about him being that everybody hates him and that also that it's uh the death date thing is pretty great too that now he's died 13 years ago but but yes the skinner has his big speech. Did they have to guess the date of my death? Can't you be a team player just once? When I was starting out, they said, you're good, but are you plaque good? Well, today I can say, yes, I am. Three, two, one.

Thank you. I will now take pre-approved questions from honor roll students. Yeah, I got a question. How dare you wear white? I hear what you do at night. Security. Get your hands off of me. Martin Prince, daily fourth gradient. How about a picture of you and the cake for our society page?

Now, normally I wouldn't go near a giant chocolate cake in my dress polyester, but with Bart Simpson safely encapsulated, I'd be delighted to pose. Look, up there! It's Lisaisa and she's winning us back they really uh very funny on the nose line yeah yes but i i like i like the reveal that skinner has been the interim principal for 20 years he wasn't supposed to be there that long but even on the commentary uh i mean we're giving this episode a lot of guff but i also like on the commentaries and they're like well this wasn't very good they do joke about how a 2001 parody at this point in history is very tacky yeah yeah Selman is one of them I mean well also to the needle earlier in the episode

they had the needle drop of Pink Panther and so yeah here's the other obvious one of also Sprock Zarathustra yeah which is like so obvious like you can't especially if it's after the year 2001 it's really too late to do a 2001 parody i do like the staging though uh when the bubble is being rolled it looks like bart is inside of it but then you pull back and it's lisa and that's a very tricky thing to stage to look effective and it does yeah that's it's an amazing like shot like mcmullen laid this out so well her and her team laid it out so well it was just her just her by herself yeah the reveal of you think bart is about to do it but then you see that he's outside of the bubble and lisa's in it like that's that's really great i also really love the the martin prince when he's there as

for the daily fourth grader and he's like well i'm an old time newsy from like 1937 and i love like for the society page he gives a little wink when he does it that's fun too he has one of those old cameras with the the telescoping box in the center yeah yeah it's again also talk about the animators being tasked with doing something and doing it great slow as we've said many times slow motion sequences and animation are way hard to do uh that for the reasons of animating something is movement in frames and if you do something in slow motion movements that you could pass over because you're only doing like two frames of animation a second now have to be

extra embellished and it takes a lot more art it's it's more than twice as hard to slow something down to half speed and animation to make it look good so again the slow motion move of Skinner as he realizes what's about to happen is such a great shot too and when all the cake hits him that's really I mean the level of detail on him being covered in chocolate cake is really well done yeah lisa smashes into it and now she's popular again question mark that that was the problem that the entire time they're all chanting lisa lisa it's like this doesn't get her back to where she was and but they don't treat it like now i'm finally popular or she says i don't know this could be even covered with just an internal monologue from Lisa of her

saying like, I don't need those college kids to feel accepted. I've got all my friends here, something like that. But I guess then there wouldn't be time for weird jokes with Bart on a roof, I guess. Uh, but it's,

uh, Skinner is taken down a whole peg in our final clip here. I've been taken down a peg. A whole peg! Lisa! Lisa! Lisa! Lisa! Lisa! Good going, Lisa. And it sure is great to be out of that bubble. Sure is sunny. Was the air always this fresh? I'm just gonna hang out in this vent. Does this thing suck or blow? Suck!

It sure does Bart Bart is evaluating the episode at the end Does this episode suck? Or does it blow? Oh it sucks Hey you know what Bob Now I like that line better It seems them commenting on this episode

Their feelings on the episode Yeah it's it's it's interesting to know when they they are themselves open about some quality issues and we talked about that last or again i keep saying last time uh the last time we talked about a newer episode or a later episode the trouble is is just that i think as we discussed then you you can't quite declare that this is all for the paycheck and we're just killing time without it eventually seeming like,

well, then why should I watch it? Like if the writers are saying, yeah, what are you going to do? Then the viewers might be like, yeah, you're right. I'm walking away, you know? Yeah. Well, if you don't care,

well, yeah, if you, it's dangerous to tell the audience too much. You don't care, which is why we care so much. We really do. i'm not just doing that for a joke you really do care sure sure yeah it surprised me the third act you guys told me like yeah it's got a very bizarre third act and so i i kind of went in thinking okay i'll be on the lookout and it still caught me off guard i still just thought wait wait what she's doing what why is she doing this and then it's over and skinner's covered in chocolate and I thought eh okay fine whatever

which again like the reason she went to college is because she does feel better than all of these kids like and so when they say like oh you think you're better than us she should be going like yes I am I liked it in college it needed some kind of James L. Brooks-y scene where she realizes she was wrong about that and blah blah blah

so then she's gonna make amends and then she can do the funny prank at the end. But it's missing that connective tissue. James L. Brooks was too busy working on a script for Spanglish at this time. Oh, thank God he did that. Saw that in Fear of Sip. Oh, really? You know that one?

I never seen. I never saw it either. I didn't get it. Yeah, this episode, I will say we're heading towards the end of season 13. I think season 14 is better and season 15 is even better. This is like such an uneven and rough season and again it's funny that a lot of fans who unfairly hated mike scully saw the return of algin is like finally back to normal and this has just been a crazy and uneven season so far and this episode in particular with just these wild these wild third acts uh you know 180 degree, I just don't like them.

And they really destroy any plot that's trying to be told here. And I really want to know, once again, what John Vitti was trying to do. Because he is one of the best Simpsons writers who has not named John Schwarzwalder. I would love to see John Vitti's first draft and see what choices led them to this instead. And I think that Vy yeah i mean not saying like he's great every single time he writes a script but i'd say is uh in the classic era and in other shows like king of the hill his written episodes are usually some of the strongest there are and i think that his i think that he handed them a script and then they kind of, you know, pearls before swine is a mean way to say it.

But I do feel like that they did not appreciate what they had and they overrode it too much in wanting to just have a wacky ending. And I mean, at least that McMullen, when tasked with at least a more visually interesting ending than than an emotional climax of lisa and and her old friends at least mcmullen did a great job with the crazy giant prank at the end i think that once something becomes an institution as the show had truly become at that point the individual writer matters less you know it's interesting to look at what might have happened or been cut or what an original draft might have been but they're all kind of they're all kind of slaves to the reputation of the show at that point so as corny as it is 2001 joke it's not great but it greases the runway to get to the end of the episode you know it just works like people don't laugh they go i get it like that works it checks

out in my mind as what would happen in this moment when everyone's looking up and seeing someone do something, you know, from high up. And that's what Lisa's doing. So we do that. We just and it's because it's got to run. It's a factory, you know, at this point. And so I think the individuality of any writer kind of from this point on is probably greatly, greatly reduced. And it's not it's not their fault, but it's an assembly line at that point you gotta just keep it rolling hey you know i think uh some funny stuff got through in this though there's still there are some good jokes there's some funny stuff two memes survived and two memes and that's really all that really matters and it shows longevity now what can become a meme are they are they talking about two of them are the ralph two ralph moments yes yeah the. The Ralph roll and the Ralph.

The Ralph roll. Yeah. It's weird. I've never seen, I've never seen either of them and I'm, I'm somewhat up on, on what gets gift in the Simpsons, but I guess, I guess maybe I haven't Ralph muted. I don't know. I haven't seen it. Well, if you're on Twitter, whoever the person of the day is on Twitter, look at their tweet where they're saying something hateful or stupid.

Just keep scrolling until you see the Ralph rolling down the hill bit. You know, unfortunately, I've been blocked by current target of that, Bethany Mandel. I got blocked by her a while ago, so I can't see all these funny. I need all these screenshots of her stupid tweets of the last 10 years to laugh at. Well, it's either the Ralph gif or the gif of Buzz Lightyear saying there are no signs of intelligent life anywhere got em

or the Spongebob chicken one you see that too all the hits but thank you so much Brendan for being on this long episode of Talking Simpsons please let us know where to find you online and more about your amazing podcast, Blowback, which I think our listeners will love if they haven't heard it yet.

Thank you. I'm sure that they will. Yes, the show is called Blowback. You can find seasons one through three on any place you get your podcasts. Season four will be coming this summer. We'll announce a start date at some point soon, and it'll be behind a paywall for a little bit. We'd love if you signed up.

And in the meantime, why not listen to seasons one through three the first season's on the iraq war second season's on the u.s war against cuba and the third season is about the korean war and in the meantime i've said about three times now i'm not on twitter that much but you can find uh some stuff of you know promoting the show and retweets of the Simpsons and King of the Hill screenshot accounts that I basically only follow now at deep underscore beige on Twitter. And that's where you can find me there. No, the second season three came out, I sped right through it. It's an old thing and it's such a great, if you sign up for the bonus stuff too, you get a real fun balance of like you get you you guys you guys are funny in the the the bigger history things but also when it's it's time to soberly talk about

like death count the body count or whatever it uh you guys aren't clowning around too much but but then on the bonus stuff sometimes you cover like you know the crazy propaganda movies yeah and then it can be a whole lot of fun yeah yeah we have we have guests uh i should you did a better plug than i did henry uh yeah the if you sign up if you sign up you get bonus stuff uh you get 10 bonus episodes so sometimes it's experts on the you know the issue of the season but also we like to have uh we like to have movie eps we've had bill corbett on we've had uh my old buddies uh matt and will and felix on from choppo so sometimes we yuck it up as well and uh if you if you like that kind of thing and you like history uh then you can go

to www.blowback.show and uh sign up this summer i can't wait i cannot wait thank you guys i feel like i'm gonna get mad all over again about a thing i thought i was too mad about and then i'll be like no i was not mad enough about it's a fun mix of being mad while enjoying something. Yes, yes. That's what everyone who knows me knows that I'm good at. Thank you so much, Brendan. Yes, thank you, Brendan. Thank you, guys.

Thanks again to Brendan and James for being on the show. Please check out Blowback. We love it. It's a fantastic podcast. But as for us, if you want to check out more of what we do and get these episodes one week ahead of time and ad-free, please go to patreon.com slash talking simpsons sign up for five bucks a month you'll get just that but also you'll get new monthly podcasts those are talking futurama and talking to the hill as well as access to the entire archives of those podcasts and basically

everything we've done on patreon for the past nearly six full years of having this patreon that includes full series about the critic and mission hill and also our previous mini series about batman the animated series over 20 episodes of that waiting for you at patreon.com slash talking simpsons and there is a $10 level as well when you sign up for that you can access all of the $5 stuff naturally but also you can access one mega long podcast once a month only for patrons of that level or higher and what is that henry bob is talking about the what a cartoon movie podcast where we cover an animated feature film very in depth just like we do an episode of the simpsons often for over five hours or six and a half hours in the case of who framed roger rabbit each month we do a new one this month

you'll hear us talking about chicken run the great ardman film from the year 2000 the month before that we talked about batman superman world's finest the first animated meeting in the dc bruce tim universe of those two classic characters and we have a gigantic back catalog over 50 episodes at your disposal all very long and super in-depth going into their history and scene by scene films as varied as akira to a goofy movie spider-man into the spider-verse to beavis and butthead do the universe so so many great ones you need to check out for yourself please head over to patreon.com slash talking simpsons today to see what you're missing 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 retro knots the classic

gaming podcast all about old video games you can find that wherever you find podcasts or go to patreon.com slash retro knots sign up there for access to two full-length bonus episodes every month and henry how about you follow me on twitter at h-e-n-e-r-e-y-g i'm always tweeting up a storm there and you can follow on twitter at talk simpsons pod to stay in the loop whenever new podcasts go live on the patreon the free feed if we have any big news going on. And the same goes for Instagram. Follow at TalkSimpsonsPod there as well. And if you want an easy-to-explore list of all the previously released free episodes

we've done of Talking Simpsons or What a Cartoon, please head over to TalkingSimpsonsPodcast.com. Thanks so much for listening, folks. We'll see you again next time for the latest episode of our community podcast, Talk to the Audience, and we'll see you again next time for the latest episode of our community podcast. Talk to the audience and we'll see you then. I don't feel so good. Can you take me to the hospital?

Finally, we're doing something I want to do.