Talking Simpsons - Talking Simpsons - New Kid On The Block With Steve Yurko

Episode Date: November 22, 2023

To celebrate Conan O'Brien's first Simpsons ep, we're welcoming on another tall funny man, Steve Yurko from the One Piece Podcast and ProZD Plays Games YouTube channel! As we dig into a tale of boyhood crushes, a sea captain replacing Don Rickles, and secretly rewritten scripts, Steve also gives us insight on director Wes Archer from working with him! Fairly warned be ye for this week's podcast! Support this podcast and get over 150 bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! And please follow the official Twitter, @TalkSimpsonsPod!

This podcast is brought to you by patreon.com slash talking Simpsons head there to check out exclusive podcasts like talking Futurama talking of the hill the what a cartoon movie podcast and tons more I hardly endorse this event or product Our product. Ahoy, hoy, everybody, and welcome to Talking Simpsons, where a knife-wielding maniac shows us the way. I'm your host, Nature's Cruelest Mistake, Bob Mackie, and this is our chronological exploration of The Simpsons. Who is here with me today, as always? Fairly warned, be be ye says I. It's Henry Gilbert. And who is our special guest on the line today? Steve Yerko and I'm about six feet tall 300 pounds and I make ice. And this week's episode is New Kid on the Block. Okay

Homer stay calm just quietly get this stuff inside your house. Homer, you're not listening. This episode originally aired on November 12th, 1992, and as always, Henry will tell us what happened on this mythical day in real world history. Oh my god! Bobby, absolutely fabulous debuts on the BBC. Nick's Kids Choice Awards airs live for the first time. And Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula tops the box office. That should have been the full title of the movie. Yes. Or was it?

Is that what was on posters? I think it was Francis Ford Coppola presents Bram Stoker's Dracula. I am always careful now. Like, I've said Stroker instead of Stoker. Yeah, people always say Bram Stroker and Rod Sterling. And Roy Schneider instead of Roy Scheider. It's all these little changes that get people up in arms. But that Dracula is so memorable that they'll parody it by the next year's Treehouse of Horror.

So they were very fast with that. It'd be the season five tree house of horror finale was a lengthy parody of the coppola version of dracula which i watched later on vhs because the simpsons parody did and uh i remember being one of the hornier dracula movies as i recall so i haven't seen this in full as an adult i think i will this halloween but i know it's the movie in which they make poor keanu reeves do an accent and he's focusing so much on that he forgets to actually uh act that was lambasted in the press but still made a lot of money and still i think is a classic these days and has a lot of bad license games uh attached to it oh yeah pretty much so and well now as an adult

i should re-watch it in these we're recording this in the in the spooky season of halloween i should be watching it just to appreciate all the in-camera lighting effects and everything. That's the main, that's supposed to be the main draw of it of just like, wow, look at all these like real effects they did in this right as you know, digital and Jurassic Park's about to come along and destroy all of these classic techniques. Yes. Absolutely. Fabulous was a, uh, it would be a few more years before it would come over to the United States on Comedy Central. But it was a big hit, Ab-Fab. And, you know, now we just talked about Medina's actress in Corpse Bride.

She's the grib mother in Corpse Bride. Yeah, Ab-Fab people always show up in animated movies with British people in them. And I think this is one of those British series they really wanted to bring over to America. Not in terms of, you know, showing the episodes here, but in terms of making our own version of it. But they tried it with Red Dwarf and they tried it with this and it never really worked.

But this had some big boosters in Hollywood who really wanted to show this mean on mid to late 90s American TV. It was an early hit on Comic Central. And of course, then there's the Knicks Kids Choice Awards, which aired live for the first time. Previous podcast guest Pop Arena. They did a really good knick knacks history on the entire

Kids Choice Awards like all of them. Like the 20 year history. I think it was close to an hour long. This was a major first year for them where they got the hosts are Holly Robinson who was on Hanging with Mr. Cooper and then Brian Austin Green and Tori Spelling. Wow, wow.

90210 energy. I was just reading about Brian Austin Green's battle with colitis and vertigo. Oh, my. For some reason, Twitter, or X as people call it, sent me the article thinking I would be into it, and I didn't know. I think the 90210 folks, they're all cursed. Oh, dear.

They're dropping like flies, people. We need to protect them. Well, and also the big winners that year for movie, Adam's Family and TV, 90210. A coincidence, I wonder. Kids shouldn't be watching that filth. Yeah. That's the thing about the Kids' Choice Awards.

I remember I was just like, oh what's like the best cartoon of the year and it was rugrats and i'm like i'm like hmm i smell bullshit it's like nickelodeon giving it to one of their shows i don't know and uh terminator 2 also won pretty good on it too which is also crazy yeah yeah r r rating i mean i i saw that's one of the first r-rated movies actually was allowed to watch in full and And boy, inappropriate, but I actually approve. Though in the video of Arnold accepting it, to let you know when they filmed it, he's fully dressed as this last action hero guy. So it was mainly just to promote last action hero was why he got the award on the show.

Magic ticket my ass. But joining us today is first timetime guest Steve Yurko. Welcome to the show, Steve. Hey, guys. Thanks for having me. Really excited to be on this show. You know, longtime listener, acquaintance, buddy, pal. We met in person.

Yeah. Everyone was a perfect gentleman. There was no foul play involved. We all enjoyed some pizza together in beautiful Burbank. I thought it was sushi. Was I burbank i thought it was sushi was i confused oh it was sushi you're right oh yeah yeah and you guys did get to go to the the now deceased the burbank fudruckers uh as seen that's right yeah we ate at the burbank fudruckers and at a sushi place that's right man we've had so much fun with you now i but

and well yeah and steve you're one of the many things you do your big time podcast or your co-host of the one piece podcast and also you're doing a bunch of let's plays these days with sungwon show that's right yeah i can't stop giving myself projects to do i'm like the bus that couldn't slow down yeah i i've been doing podcasts for so long you would think i'm a professional. I wouldn't consider it though. It's just something I just do. And the One Piece podcast, we've been going since 2009, which for me feels like a long time. I know Bob has been doing Retro Knots for way longer. But the fact that One Piece is a show that just keeps giving, you know, new chapter just about every week. Yeah, I've been doing that for a long time and it's very rewarding to do it with like a crew of my own if you uh had a podcast before 2010 let's say there

should be a walk of fame slab for you i think we need to branch out the podcasting so it'll be me steve jeremy parish uh henry of course uh mark maron so uh we need to find some kind of side street to put these podcasting sidewalk slabs down okay i can't wait for like that high school reunion-esque party they're gonna throw all of us i personally think that spotify owes us all pensions if we've been doing it that long i feel like yeah the funniest thing is like my co-host zach who you know it's like pretty much his you know brainchild when he was like posting about it like trying to get attention on it just trying to recruit people to be on it i had no idea what a podcast was so now everyone does one everyone

has one now i mean like when henry and i first started doing them uh the the bosses we worked for hated them and it wasn't until the writer of this episode invented podcast that they became popular and successful that's right uh every every five years someone invents podcasts and you see a lot of articles about it conan o'brien's the latest inventor of the podcast hasn't he been through enough let him have this one steve you also chose uh the subject that's the the only show longer than the simpsons to cover as your episodic podcast as well absolutely yeah i think we we all picked a good one here we got some we got like a lifelong series here to cover at least i i always i always wonder what's gonna end first

simpsons or one piece and i joke but when i think about it i don't know a simpsons i don't think they have any interest in slowing down yeah i guess one piece is tied to a creator but i can easily see like what if it was you know the boruto of one piece that follows after he retires or like one piece junior or whatever with simpsons it's just like rotating staff members and you know we'll see what happens when voice actors are gone but i feel like one piece does it seems more tied to the one creator oda can stop nobody else no one on simpsons is allowed to stop but also yeah that's i think that's just the difference with you know manga and you know there's like an editorial staff and

editors and all that but the fact that for the most part comes down to one person's vision and the fact that this vision is you know spanning over a thousand chapters is insane well i mean there's a lot closer to creator ownership in japanese comic publishing compared to american public comic publishing at least in that way but uh one yes and also steve you're you're an animation professional in your own right like i mean the the simpsons must have been a real you know inspiration to you when getting into the world of professional cartooning absolutely i i think i was, it's funny, I'm as old as the Simpsons series is.

I think we're almost, we're in the womb together. But I think I was the weeknight reruns, the syndication, like Simpsons generation, I think. Because I remember, I think, maybe these were like Burger King dolls. Did they do like dolls of like the family? There were like the flat dolls you could buy and they're also the Burger King dolls. Did they do like dolls of like the family? There were like the flat dolls you could buy. And they're also the Burger King kids club,

little plastic figurines, basically, of all the characters camping. Because I remember our family, we had these plush dolls of Bart and Lisa. And they're like plush, but they had like the rubber heads. I don't like, maybe that wasn't Burger King or something. No, no, it was a Burger King one. I remember that because you had to like buy muffins

with it or something. Mini muffins. It was the so do you remember like the toy story ones wow i people that know me if they're listening that's like of course steve's talking about freaking burger king toys but that that's why i'm thinking it was probably those but i remember having those and knowing who those characters were but my brother and I were latchkey kids and basically babysat by different families, different households. And I unfortunately just grew up in front of a television and getting two episodes of Simpsons a night, it was such a treat. And that's how I became familiar with the series and fell in love. And definitely, I would say I was watching it at an age where I shouldn't have. Learned a lot of words I shouldn't have that early. Got in a lot of trouble because of that. But it was all worth it because I think Simpsons really shaped my humor

to this day. And definitely, I would say it has a huge influence on my career choice for sure. I was drawing all my life, but I would say I was a little directionless. I just always liked drawing. And I didn't even go to school for for animation i went to school to learn how to do comics but i had a lot of friends that had moved out to la and were working animation as board artists and they're saying you got to come out here and you should try doing this and i think it makes sense i think you know i i do love comics but i think i was always an animation kid i watched anything and everything at least once on tv so like you know growing up when like cartoon network and nickelodeon were playing

just such a variety of things you know i've i've seen too much but well you know you you remind me of so many of my favorite like artists of our generation let's say a millennial like american artists that they have this great fusion of people who grew up watching both the simpsons and anime at the same time and you end up with this weird fun synthesis of like you know like all the people who worked on i'd say this you know applies to all the people who like worked on adventure time and steven universe and those types of shows too like people who loved the simpsons in anime in equal regard yeah it's it's almost like you know because all those shows come out in the 90s when i think about

like all like the spielberg shows like all those writers and they're making references to like you know golden age hollywood and all those movies and now it's like i guess my generation we're making references to anime and other stuff and it's amazing how many weebs there are in the industry, no matter the show you're working on. I was going to say, Steve, that if people might not know your name, they probably have seen things you've done, images you've drawn. Could you name a few of them? Oh, wow.

I totally, I didn't even think this would get brought up. But I guess my biggest claim to fame is if you've ever seen the cast of king of the hill the alley guys more specifically i was the one who drew them as the sailor scouts from sailor moon i was gonna say because my wife and artist for the show nina matsumoto a lot of her images get circulated and i see them pop up in the rotation every now and then she's done a few uh big famous things that have become memes and so have you steve yeah i i remember nina drawing the the simpsons death note image yeah yeah and i think like the seinfeld characters as akira toriyama drawings basically i i remember yeah nina's like anime manga style futurama and simpsons stuff yeah it's yeah cut from the same cloth in a way but this is probably gonna be like

my biggest stage to ever talk about what went behind my image. I think I was just in a, I was at a con in Chicago and just sitting in a hotel room with friends. And I think I just like blurted out the idea and a friend said, you should draw that. And then that's it. I get so many people come up. It's like, how did you think of this and all that?

I'm like, I don't know. I just thought it was funny. You know, it's, it's juxtaposition. Allow me to rant here because I think it's the main four it's hank dale boom hour and bill you know they're always in the alley and i threw in bobby as uh chibiusa and then i was like well it's like it's almost the entire lineup there like and it's like just got to put one more in there and it's the complete set so i was like well you know like lucky becomes more of like a prominent character you know in the

later seasons i'll put in lucky also because i'm a fan of the show but it's amazing how many people don't know who lucky is and i'll get sometimes i'll get people saying like it should have been con and maybe you guys could back me up here con is not their friend no no con hates them he would be some sort of evil jewel person from outer space. Exactly. Khan probably hates the fact that we hang out in the alley. He's probably like if they hung out. He's a clean barrel, man. Yeah.

And also people are like, does that make Peggy tuxedo mask? And that's why I say you're thinking way too hard. Now they're just making requests for things that you should draw, I think, at this point. But Simpsons, yeah, I haven't done too many Simpsons crossover stuff that really kind of blew up i it's funny like i'm still getting notifications on my tumblr because i drew homer and bart as joseph and jotaro from jojo's bizarre adventure oh i haven't i think i probably have seen this one but i'm not remembering i think the joke is like you could change your name to joseph jr the kids could call you joju but i i think like people still like the king of the hills stuff so like every now and then i'll like here's a new sticker it's this like i did i did like like just a spy family design of

just hank hank bobby and peggy as the the main three and just that blew up. So I think it's like, well, when I need a little attention or money, I'll go to the crossover factory again. And also, Steve, professionally in your life, you've even worked with the director of this episode, Wes Archer, who defined the look of King of the Hill as well. Yeah, good old Wes. It was crazy to finally kind of work under him for a bit on Rick and Morty. And I was probably, it's probably one of the first people in a while to

actually kind of just talk to him about some of those old shows. I think it's a little bit different when like you've worked on stuff, like you're not as obsessed about it. You don't think about it, you don't talk about it anymore. And for me being like the freshest person there for a while, just saying like, hey, I was watching this episode the other day i was thinking of this i remember talking about itchy and scratchy land and just i i can't remember if he worked on that episode no this is his first episode because that because it's in scratchy land season four right that's season six and i think i think he directed that i'm pretty sure he directed that it's a great looking episode that makes sense because i think i was just talking about that and i remember i

wish i could remember the specifics but this but I think I was just talking about that. And I remember, I wish I could remember the specifics, but this, but I just remember him just talking about a few things that like went into a shot. I think it's not the same episode where grandpa is like, I'm young again. And then he trips and he's like flailing through the air. No,

that's a Malibu Stacy one, but he, I think he directed that one too. But like this extent of my brilliant conversation room was just like, I just saw this bit of animation i thought it was funny and then i don't know i remember though he uh he i think he had a photocopy of all the boards from an episode of king of the hill laying around they just gave to me wow and unfortunately i did not dig those up in time for this episode but i got him somewhere

but you know i i appreciated that i wondered how many nerds working with him would have been started asking him about like the twister mouth that he invented because i remember a few years ago he's like randomly started to do some original bart animation where he did twister mouths in it and i was like oh did somebody remind it was he asked enough by nerds like uh me online about the twister mouth that he's like all right time to time to draw a new twister mouth on old bart here i don't know for sure it's i mean the fight i just remember like the funniest thing is like my first run-in with wes was not even working for him was just because

through a friend who was working on rick and wario time found out that wes was watching one piece with his son and then we're like you think you'd want to do our podcast and he did oh cool and then yeah i know he's uh he's an anime fan because of his son i saw he was also watching kaiji at some point yeah or like yeah i think kaiji or tonagawa tonagawa yeah uh-huh and i west liking tonagawa makes perfect sense i think that is uh that is an older man's older man show where you've had to deal with a lot of people working under you it fit for him and wes was very instrumental in hiring me because i think he was like the final word like he had to because i had to scrounge up a quick portfolio to

show when they were hiring and i think he was the last person to take a look at it and just knowing that you know wes archer had to look at my stuff and i don't think it was the last person to take a look at it. And just knowing that Wes Archer had to look at my stuff. And I don't think it was that big of a body of work yet. I would say I was still pretty fresh in the industry. And for him to just be like, hey, this is good enough. This is good. That meant a lot to me. That's awesome.

Yeah. I hear him mention every once in a while on the commentaries, you'll hear directors mention Japanese animation that I'm like, wow, I didn't know the Simpsons guys knew this stuff back then. Like they'll mention, I remember one time they talk about like some smoke billowing out of the ground. I think it was Mike B.

Anderson who said like, oh yeah, that's from Ninja Scroll. Like I liked how they did smoke. And I was like, wow, I like that. Like,

but unfortunately on this commentary. Yeah. Yeah. Wes is in, Wes is not in this one, but I think Wes mentioned like, I don't know if it was from Cartridge Family. No, no, it's not Cartridge Family. But no, I think it's from Who Shot Mr. Burns, maybe part two with Wiggum's gun or just the

gun with the bullet chamber. Didn't Wes say, like, I got that from like Golgo 13 or something? Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. So those guys must have been going to like those bootleg anime stores back in the day and getting those grainy vhs fan subs well you know we've talked a lot about artists and it's time to talk about writers more importantly one writer a little guy actually

is kind of big uh conan o'brien he's both big in stature and in uh fame and this is his first credited episode of the show and we're not going to do a writer's corner for Conan O'Brien because he's Conan O'Brien. If you watch TV in the last 30 years, you understand who he is and where he came from. And we've talked about him a lot in the past. And Lookwell especially, we covered that for this podcast, his pilot with Adam West. And we talk a lot about his career there. And he goes from Lookwell to The Simpsons. So we've basically done a writer's corner on him.

But I did want to mention up front here how he was not the first choice for Algin and Mike Reese. He was the third choice for Algin and Mike Reese. And I can talk about the people they almost hired instead of him. So their number one choice was It's Gary Shandling Show writer and future Martin co-creator John Bowman. I assume that he could not write for The Simpsons because he was developing Martin with Martin Lawrence and one other guy. So that was their number one pick. They didn't get him. Their number two pick was future news radio creator Paul Sims, but he went to work for the Larry Sanders show instead. So Conan, obviously hilarious guy, one of the funniest writers of all time, but the people they wanted instead of him were also guys that were high of stature in the comedy world, but more importantly, all went to Harvard, all wrote for the Lampoon.

So that was the qualification you really needed to get onto the Simpsons. That Bowman one you mentioned is extra interesting because it was last year John Bowman passed away. Mike Reese shared the eulogy he did at the memorial service for him for John Bowman. It was very funny. Mike Reese uh is is utilizing a man he's known since he was 20 and he even has funny jokes in there about just like oh John Bowman was in great shape and my wife said I'm a fat loser and should be more like John and

let this be a lesson to you don't get in good shape eat garbage all the time but then while he's selling these funny jokes then his wife who I'm assuming is filming it turns the camera to the people reacting like conan o'brien is sitting right next to jeff martin at this memorial for it so yeah they they're all buddies i mean they are great writers but yes it is a lot of harvard lampoon guys hiring each other and on the commentary conan is on it he's very funny uh because of that they don't really talk about the episode much which is is a shame. But you learn just how mistreated Conan O'Brien was and just how taken for granted he was because he came in when everyone was leaving. I think only recently I realized, at least, Henry, that about a third of the way through

season four, a lot of people were gone. I like at some point in my doing this podcast, I thought like, oh, yeah, season four, the bell rang and everyone went home. But no, as season four is going on they're just bleeding out staff so conan comes in and you know conan great guy to be around really hilarious guy in the writer's room for the first three weeks of being on the show he is put in a room by himself to rewrite scripts for writers who had left the show so we we joke about how some people assume conan o'brien wrote every episode of the simpsons uh i think secretly he wrote more than what he's credited for and it seems like they're they're tapped they're tiptoeing around that on the commentary i mean like legally for guild purposes

they joke about like yeah conan don't say the episode you did because legally like the guild's gonna be pissed that you say he wrote this thing that you're not the named guy on but i mean he will dig into it more when we get to the episode but i definitely think the the union episode is the one uh rewritten by him very heavily because but because well uh jay and wally were gone they they left like they definitely were gone they leave when mr plow is written like so they definitely just like tossed out a script and ran away and and left it to Conan to clean up. Yeah. And apparently John Schwarzwalder was his savior because John Schwarzwalder saw how just beaten down Conan looked working by himself on scripts that weren't his.

And he told Algin and Mike Reese, we need to invite him up to the writer's room to be with us. He looks terrible. And that's where he really got to shine. That's when he was, you know, pitching all of these episodes that would immediately get picked up. And just in the, in like, I guess the, the 16 to 18 months he was on the simpsons just doing an outstanding job they tell a funny story too on a different commentary about how like a dead bird like smashed through his window in his office early on his thing there and it just set set the tone for i feel they i mean i was waiting for these commentaries it was

the main reason i brought the season four commentary because i was like i'm finally gonna know how conan o'brien worked on the show and that they and that they get him like though you could tell he's on delay and and they don't have as good technology as we back then in 2003 that we have today for doing this remote podcast but so there's some weird delay and issues with conan talking but i do feel bad that like they it's much better on the monorail one where they basically have two commentaries they have the conan commentary and the no code and commentary so they can not dominate everything not not so with this one but it is funny uh and tragic how he was given every shit job and then just as he was shining on the show that's when late night came a calling and conan got his late

night gig that lasted for a very very long time i i often have to remind myself he no longer is on tv i always forget like oh yeah he no longer has a show and it's been that way since i guess covet i forget when the tbs show ended like 21 i think it was yeah it's been two years now it's yeah and uh we we met conan o'brien we did because uh Because he was paid handsomely to talk with us for 10 minutes. But hey, it was great. We did pay. We bought tickets at an auction. Yes. Yeah. I must ask you to like, you know, because you're saying like there's a huge exodus of writers and other people working on the show. Do you think like season four is a huge generational or just tonal shifts? Because I think of like season one through three is very

kind of still like i don't want to say wholesome but very sitcommy whereas there's the feel-good episodes or you know there's something to take away and do you feel like you know conan coming in this is the start of something totally different for the show yeah you know actually i think this is when like chaos is really starting to rain because we mentioned before that john vd uh and others have said they figured this would just be like alf a show that you know it's done in four years it was one one big explosion then contracts and then they're done a lot of them were feeling like oh season four that's the end of the simpsons surely and then so everybody's leaving they're not

gonna staff back up other people are leaving for the critic as well. And so there's also this feeling of like, I think this season starts with, okay, back to basics with the family. But just to get the season done, they can't protest when they're like, well, we just want to do some crazy shit with like a giant monorail disaster movie or a full episode long parody of Cape Fear. They're not in the position to be turned down. Yeah. episode long parody of cape fear yeah they're not in the position to be turned down yeah i feel that season four for the longest time it was viewed as the best season of the show and i think some people still view that as you know conventional wisdom i think i did think that at one point but

upon revisiting it before and doing it now i feel like it's still like amazing television some of the best ever written but you can sense uh the the the weariness and the tired uh staff and just when you learn about how much things are in flux behind the scenes you can see that they were just kind of trying anything because they needed episodes and that trying anything led to some great ideas and then when david merkin steps in in season five as showrunner and they staff up again the weirdness of season four gives him permission to go even further in season five and that's when i think like those are my favorite years five six and seven but this but also this is some of the best animation in the show too i'd say

yeah the sentence will be right back they said it was impossible amora your new neighbor she's beautiful but tomorrow the unthinkable happens why laura what if wasn't surprised bart simpson falls in love as his father i think you should have a frank discussion about you know we're talking about sex right rose? Roseanne Sarah Gilbert guest stars. Meet me at the treehouse and come alone. On an all-new Simpsons tomorrow on Fox.

When you really care about someone, you shout it from the mountaintops. So on behalf of Desjardins Insurance, I'm standing 20,000 feet above sea level to tell our clients that we really care about you. 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 friends friends hello it's henry gilbert big thank you to our guest this week steve yurko it was so great to finally have him on the podcast for big fans of steve his art his great work in the animation field his awesome work on the one piece podcast as well as all of his

cool co-hosting of the pro zd plays games channel and stuff there's so many cool things out there that steve yorko does we're so happy to have him on our show with just the small amount of free time he had so thanks again steve and if you enjoy the talking simpsons podcast you should know we're only able to have cool guests like steve on because this is our full-time job which is only possible thanks to the support at patreon.com slash talking simpsons listeners there not only get every episode a week ahead of time and without ads like this one but they also get tons of exclusive bonus content monthly episodes of talking futurama and talking of the hill us covering those shows super in-depth just like we do an episode of the simpsons there's over 150 exclusive podcasts

right there at your fingertips in addition to the new ones each month us do an episode of The Simpsons, there's over 150 exclusive podcasts right there at your fingertips. In addition to the new ones each month, us covering every episode of The Critic, of Mission Hill, and many of our favorite episodes of Batman the Animated Series. Check it all out for yourself at patreon.com slash talking simpsons for just $5 a month. But if you want something nicer than even all-you-can-eat seafood, you should head over to the $10 level at patreon.com slash talking simpsons because the premium podcast you get there every month is the What a Cartoon movie podcast. Me and Bob covering an animated feature film crazy in depth just like The Simpsons, often over four, five, or even six hours long. If you're in the holiday spirit, you're going to like the one you've got coming this month

because we are covering The Muppet Christmas Carol. It is so much fun. We love that movie so much, and we are going to love talking about it. The month before that, we covered the 1986 anime classic Project Aco. The month before that, we got in the Halloween spirit with Tim Burton's Corpse Bride. And there is a huge back catalog, five years of what a cartoon movies. I'd say over 250 hours, us covering everything from Akira to a goofy movie, Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse to Beavis and Butthead to the universe, many of our favorite Pixar films, tons, tons, tons of stuff,

including our longest podcast ever, six and a half hours about who framed Roger Rabbit. Please check it all out for yourself at the premium level patreon.com slash talking simpsons to see everything you are missing out on and should we mention the don rickles thing up front oh yeah there's yeah that's a very long preamble yeah sorry yes so conan uh again not being treated very well a lot of his ideas are being thrown out at some point in his history with the show he is asked to write the prince script and check out our stark raving dead episode i think we talk about it in that episode though i do have a couple extra bits on that Prince script thing, just because right after Prince died,

Al Jean shared some pages from the original script that Conan had to rewrite. And this is where Jean did credit, who I did not know for the longest time, who were the writers of that episode that Conan was rewriting. And it was a two-writer writer a writer combo of ian deachman and kristin rusk and then them together they were very new employees at gracie that it sounds like jim brooks was like uh you know what let's give these two writers i like let's give them the shot on the print script and then they and then it gets handed back over to conan though

deachman and rust would go on to write multiple like big movies they're actually very successful writers now, so don't feel too bad for them. So yeah, this episode was going to have not the all-you-can-eat-restaurant B-plot, but a B-plot involving the comedian Don Rickles, where the plot would go, Homer goes to see Don Rickles perform. He thinks it's very funny until Don Rickles insults him personally. And when that happens, Homer knocks him out or something. They have an altercation, and there's a trial following that apparently there was some big miscommunication when they asked don rickles to be on the show and communicated you know what would be happening i

believe showed him the script he not only said no but he also said something like screw the simpsons or to hell with the simpsons and then much later uh rupert murdoch great guy just retired he introduces matt graining to don rickles at a party in New York at an event. And this is when Don Rickles gets in Matt Groening's face, accuses Matt Groening of spying on one of his acts and like transcribing the jokes. I think Don Rickles didn't understand. They were just writing Don Rickles humor. And apparently they spent a long time listening to his albums and studying his formula for, you know, set up some punchlines. And they thought they made the best Don Rickles homage.

But he thought like, oh, you're just stealing my material and asking me to perform it on your show. So that was a big upset for Conan. And then to replace that B plot, he wrote one where Homer discovers he's a master barber. But then Sam Simon shut that down. He didn't like it. So instead we have what i view as like one of the most obvious uh plots for homer in that he goes to an all-you-can-eat restaurant and they had to close the restaurant because he ate all the food in the restaurant as rob would

say later it seems to break the rule that you hear matt granting had of like no food monster homer because this is just pure food monster hom in its place. And that also feels like another of those, like, well, we're at the deadline, guys, so we either have nothing, or Homer's a food monster who can just eat, like, 10-pound bags of flour and then order a pizza. Like, that's who Homer is. Yeah, the Don Rickles, I'm also on Gene's side,

and he's explaining it, that it's just like, yeah, it's jokes he would do, and we asked him to do them like we're not stealing his material yeah it's kind of like when they had rodney dangerfield on the show to play uh larry burns they they wrote material they wrote rodney material for him and he even punched it up he'd say oh i'd say it like this instead but he was not insulted he's like oh you're you're doing my bits but also rodney dangerfield was not writing all of his own jokes to begin with maybe don rickles was maybe if only don rickles was still with us he could have saved that

aggression for ai and all the other problems we face these days hey you can hear him in toy story four i think mr potato head goes hey hey that's basically it yeah that's all of his words from beyond the grave yeah they they joke on the commentary all the problems with this that they're just like wow like conan why'd you quit the show it wasn't so much fun and but also i i like too that there's some bits on here where because conan o'brien is big enough that he doesn't have to perhaps be concerned about saying an idea james l brooks had wasn't good that he can actually like clown on the ending of this episode after they say that like, oh yeah, Jim had this pitch. And then he's like, there's any, I mean, I'll get to it, but it's just very funny. But yes. So the episode begins though

with one of these things where I always think of it as it's the thing it's parodying. I always want to say like, no, that's not hunks. It's studs. And, like, nobody remembers studs. I'm raising my hand. I remember studs. Yes, studs. Studs was the sexy fox version of the dating game where basically a trio, no, two studs would go on a date with three different women. And they get a little raunchier than on the dating game. I mean, it was like 1992 raunchy.

But it was still airing into 1993 when they made this parody here. If you look at pictures of the sets of Studs, it's exactly like Wes and his team parodied it perfectly. Yeah, it's a great caricature of Studs host Mark DiCarlo, future voice of Jimmy Neutron's dad, by the way. Oh, wow. I didn't know that. And I wasn't a, boy, I wonder how many episodes I watched, but I was a regular Studs viewer at the age of like 10 or 11 because my mentality is there's this thing called sex. People are talking about it.

It's in our rated movies. I need to know more about it. And I'm sure Studs gave me all the wrong ideas, but I do remember watching a ton of Studs. And yeah, the set is the perfect parody of the set and just the way people are sad but it is so lost to time this show didn't even last for three years but they still made 600 episodes ah that's funny man though you see you didn't have homer to teach you how uh about

sex via beer metaphors so you had to watch studs to learn and but i was watching clips of it on youtube obviously they're playing up just how vacant the people on the show are and just how salacious the content is so the back and forth wasn't you know he was so sexy i hoped we would have sex one of them was just like he was so cute he could be on the cover of cosmo so they weren't all this salacious okay yeah but studs is famous because on one episode future murder victim ron goldman would be one of the contestants that's right when the oj trial was going on a lot of footage of him was like from that show right yeah man i totally forgot about that but yeah i also like the making

bacon on the beach makes homer just imagining literally making bacon on the beach in a speedo i love the design of him in the thought balloon like it's so they they were so into thought balloons at this time it's perfect perfect thought balloon comedy and steve in the in the world of cartoons today how much thought balloon comedy is there these days god like i feel like you guys would probably be able to answer that easier than i could i don't think i've ever done that professionally on a show that's like aired on anything it's like stuff like that i'm like i'm trying to what are some other archaic things that are just gone thought balloons are because i i think because i think i did draw like a thought balloon and something and i realized i'm

like oh yeah no one draws these cloud balloons anymore like even because you know i read a lot of manga too like manga doesn't do that stuff. It almost, God, it's almost like putting a character on a penny farther. That's how outdated it looks. Yeah, I think by the end

of the season, they will just fade to a fantasy sequence. But I remember we just covered some episode where Homer is imagining being retired and there's a thought balloon

of him on the couch above him on the couch. So it was a real thought balloon heavy era for the Sim simpsons then they realized like oh we could just fade to a fantasy and people will understand it's not actually happening i think like newspaper comic scripts are keeping that motif alive it's whatever garfield sang we need those thought balloons and so now though it's time for a major moment in the show as we say goodbye to some beloved characters there since the the second episode of the series that was directed and the first written one that was directed by wes archer himself that yes they go back all the way to

homer's odyssey in his first clip here let's say goodbye to the wind field mr simpson my husband and i've decided to move gonna run out to Clack in Florida, eh? Yes. Well, there's a few things you could do to help us sell our home. First, whenever you walk in front of your window, could you please wear pants? No. Second, could you please take in your jack-o'-lanterns from past Halloweens? No. And please cover your garbage it's attracting wildlife

yeah so yeah mrs winfield oh sorry i stole your fire henry no no yeah that's mrs winfield of the winfields who there was a time when they were more important than Ned Flanders as Homer and Marge's neighbors. I think young Simpson is going to kill himself. That's the first Mrs. Winfield line. I think she's voiced by a different person in all three appearances. I forget who voices her in the first in Homer's Odyssey, but then it's Tracy Ullman in Bart's Dog Gets an F. And then this is Pamela Hayden. Yeah, they are the mysterious neighbors

on the other side of the Simpsons. Yeah, they just liked having an old couple next door, which you figure they would have been used more because they're so old. But I think the last time she even had a line was when she called to say that Santa's little helper was tearing up her backyard in that episode where he's about to get sold.

But yeah, here, I just love how Homer just has to be like, gonna run out the clock in Florida, eh? Like like what a great brutal line to say to an old person and she agrees yeah i didn't realize like retiring to florida you know went back this far because i you know i remember you know i know that as a joke but i'm like oh wow so it was always a thing i guess that's what florida was known then. It's known for many different things today. Unfortunately. This reset definitely feels like a Jim Brooks kind of idea because it feels like how he's thinking in old or regular sitcom terms of we're not doing anything with their neighbors

on the other side. Let's get rid of them and replace them with somebody like hip and cool and 90s, a single mom. You know, it is more of like a live action sitcom kind of way of thinking which is what simpsons outgrows which is why this this also almost doesn't feel right for the simpsons that they're like well we got to ride out their old next door neighbors and instead of just deciding the simpsons neighbors who are whoever they need to be for one episode and then they get new neighbors in the next episode i didn't realize yeah the

winfields like i think i didn't realize that oh wow they were in other episodes too like they're like the mark brendanawix of the simpsons i used to confuse her with mrs glick uh and now i'm much less ignorant as a as an eight-year simpsons podcaster at this point eight and a half i think by now speaking of references lost the time northern exposure everybody that's what this moose is that's what the music is because the opening of that cbs show was just a moose wandering the streets of the alaska town it takes place in and i will say this great show but it's one of those shows that like came and went in about five years and won a ton of emmys like seven emmys all these other awards but it's kind of lost because it used a ton of licensed music most specifically because one of the characters on the show,

he worked at a radio station. So that's why there is so much licensed music in this show. But it is a great show, and there is a big DVD box set for pretty cheap, but I imagine every song has changed. Man, I totally missed out on this show. I thought of it as like It and Picket Fences is like the same CBS kind of show. That's for mommies and daddies, not for me. Well, now that you've become daddy age,

I think it's time to give Northern Exposure a chance. Accurate depiction of a moose, too. Those are some aggressive motherfuckers. It's great animation on how it smashes into the wall. I would assume that after it leaves the screen, it tramples Miss Winfield, and that's why we never see her again but yeah it's also like again this is the the heightening of homer into crazy town he is the

world's worst neighbor not just like a gross guy but like he has all the garbage everywhere he also walks around naked all the time and is the disgusting pig yeah uh and he also is the type of person who would love to get old newspapers coat hangers and medicine and when i was a little kid this was when my mom used it as a learning moment to say why it's bad to take other people's medicine just not all medicines are good for you though me as a kid i love getting old newspapers because then i could go through the comic pages that's why i'd be like i'd instantly just like tear them apart to be like all right what was on this comic page what was on that one this was before the internet children

this is also you know online i've seen several funny trans ladies on twitter use good jokes about homer discovering his estrogen and wanting to take more estrogen maybe he's not getting enough yeah but then we have another actual big debut like i know we're making're making fun of the Winfields not being particularly big characters, but here's one you would not have thought would end up being one of the biggest characters in the series. That medicine's not for you. Come on, Marge. Maybe I'm not getting enough estrogen. Give me that.

Ahoy, mateys. How do you feel of tacos? Would ye sooner eat a bilge rat than another burger? Then come for all ye can eat seafood at the Fryin' Dutchman. Is it more iced tea ye be needin'? Okay. Set sail for the Fryin' Dutchman. Aye, aye, Captain.

Marge, we're going to that restaurant. But I think I'm allergic to seafood. The last time I ate shrimp, my throat closed up, and I went into convulsions. Mmm. Shrimp. So the debut of, now known as the Sea Captain, but it's very

strange that in this episode they give him a name that they immediately forget. Usually it's the other way around where eventually, like, Comic Book Guy will get a name, or, you know, Lenny and Carl willl will get last names but here he's given a first and last name up front uh horatio mccallister but then it's just the sea captain that's all he's referred to in the future it's so wonderful like this is such a conan thing that he's basically told well okay you can't use don rickles and they're like all right then we're gonna make up a guy who just is he says all the things like popeye and old pirates and sailors and in tv shows and movies he says he's just gonna be such an

extreme caricature of a of a sea captain like we're just gonna have to say i think really they worked backwards from what would be funny on the stand later well a sea captain having to like basically give a rhyme of the ancient mariner and i think i did say this in the future or i have said it this is the last accent hank azaria is allowed to do uh it's true god he's so fucking good and i mean too it feels like such a conan thing or at the very least of the conan era on saturday night live and also the sketches that would be written on conan like especially a guy saying more iced tea sure okay yeah and just cackling as he pours iced tea that feels like such a conan joke like that you would have seen in his era like it's i don't know if it that was literally his pitch but it's it's perfect i can envision a young conan o'brien after

finally being allowed into the writer's room just doing doing this voice all day it yeah it does it feels like a late night pit and the sea captain kind of does everything and has every boat and sea related job he rarely is ever a restaurant manager after this i think the frying dutchman comes back one more time for uh guess who's coming to criticize dinner and maybe it makes a few like token appearances in the background but this is kind of it for his stint as a restaurant manager he just has every seafaring job after this i uh you may be selling the sea shanties on tape in a few weeks right oh no the next episode yeah next episode yeah that's right yeah and yeah also in the uh that reminds me i did find a good conan

quote from mike reese's book about how he felt working in there and doing all of his act outs in the room uh which they are constantly asking him about on the commentary but he said in mike reese's book he wrote when you're in the simpsons writing room for 15 hours subsisting on fried food you just look for ways to make your comedy elders laugh so and they always say that like yeah conan was pretty much just doing the conan o'brien show in the writer's room all the time and and he jokes about like yes i was a very meaty man for attention is what he says and you know as the time that we're recording this a recent story came out or someone wrote an article based on something he said on his podcast where just uh about two paragraphs of how awful the writing room was for the Simpsons. And of course, yes, the caramel came up. I'm happy

that was name checked in the title of the article itself. Oh, that's great. I missed this article. I got to see this. Actually, I retweeted it saying, I'm so glad the famous caramel was mentioned because we ask every writer that. Al Jean replied to me saying, i took a bite out of it once you know steve by the way you're almost conan tall do you feel you feel uh in touch with him in in that height and being a tall man uh yeah there's the it's tough i hate it flying sucks clothes shopping sucks i'm and i'm not making conan money so i'm sure he could just get everything custom made. How tall is he? Is he like six? Like six, I think?

I believe he's six four. He is six four. Okay. I'm also six four. I thought he was actually taller than me. He seems taller in person because I'm six two. And there's a photo of me, him, and my wife where he seems like at least seven feet tall. But I think it's the hair and just the like explosive personality

that gives him a higher stature i forget you know if conan's like talked about his what conan's talked about his childhood so much but i'm sure people insisted that he must have played basketball and all that and you know any kind of sports and like i'm i'm just a tall dork i just wanted to draw on my life and i'm like yeah i guess i'll play sports okay but i just want to go home and watch toonami but i don't know uh it's like i think it's when you're tall you gotta you gotta factor in more things it's like the car you buy you have to make sure that you know your knees aren't driving the steering wheel instead of your hands it's a curse people expect you to be like like a like a caricature like a bully or something like that i'm like i just want to be left alone

proportionally conan also has very long legs i don't know if you are a long leg tall man if you're more like uh evenly distributed but he has very long yeah i got like frankenstein proportions i don't know i'm just like i'm i'm broad and then also yeah i got like frankenstein proportions i don't know i'm just like i'm i'm broad and then also yeah i got like long arms long torso yeah it's and conan's not the first person to make fun of himself either so you have a very funny video of your several occurrences you had in japan as a as a tall man uh which i like because when i visited tokyo like i felt kind of tall and i'm only six feet tall but like i i couldn't imagine how tall you must feel in in tokyo there is yeah there is a series of pictures of me it didn't actually happen like that but walking up to doorways where it's like the cap

was at my eyebrows the trains there because they have all the the handles you hold on to always walking into those it's never not the case great country yeah but not made for someone my size for sure by the way uh a bouncer at a bar or a door guy at a bar once gaslit me into thinking i wasn't six two so i gave him my id and he's like you're not six two and i just thought like what the fuck well i'm coming into your place to spend money and then it like it got in head and I was like, what if I'm not 6'2"? I've been telling people this. And basically, as soon as I got home, I measured myself and I was 6'2".

And I felt good. But every time I say it now, I second guess myself. It's all because of that guy who got in my head. Yeah, I got to say, like kind of bouncers or like security. It's almost like, oh, that's where the people from high school went. Because it's that it's once again, those people are intimidated by other tall people like i remember going to a karaoke place in new york and one guy's like but you're not used to looking up at somebody and i'm like dude i just want to go in there and sing songs i'm like i don't care all right and then like i will say look ahead steve and like

recently another another karaoke place too i was just getting like my my parking validated and it's like and i'm just like and i was literally like looking through my wallet and then i'm like kind of squinting because i'm thinking too hard trying to find where my ticket is and this guy just says like you know you could smile right and i just want to be like and i and i wound up joking with them but i was like oh shut the fuck up come on and i'm like i mean i mean to be fair i know a lot of guys lie about their height which is very weird and we're in the era in which all of these weird politicians are just wearing lifts to make them seem much larger but i knew a guy once who i swear to god every time he described his height he would grow an inch so i think it is a

problem with men to to lie about one's height yeah it's like some men are just the chicken hawk from looney tunes it's never goes away also this is an economic episode in reused animation including when homer is drooling at the sound of all the shrimp it is a mirrored shot from him reacting to the rich creamery butter from bart's friend falls in love so they reuse the shot from there and also in a very like new lows for homer marge describing nearly dying eating shrimp homer just reacts to that with shrimp also this joke hit home when i was a kid because we had just found out that my brother was allergic to shellfish then uh not to that extreme and i think he's gotten better with it now but i was like oh wow marge is allergic just like my brother well no i'm not telling you to don't go

after him his enemies out there i think he's he's over the shellfish allergy were you a big shellfish family henry not really no i mean now i kind of like shrimp i did not like shrimp as a kid but also it was not in the home because my brother's allergy to it so we wouldn't go out to places where i could i mean i guess i could order like crab or lobster anyway but we know we pretty we're pretty light on shellfish anyway. I like Henry bragging about his lobster ordering. Oh, I guess I could have ordered a lobster every now and then. But I'll take it.

I'll take a hot dog. Well, yes, Bob, I was curious what they in the next scene where it's time for haggling. Did you take any of these lessons to heart when you guys were shopping for condos of not wanting to haggle and just going with whatever they said? I mean, we had a real estate agent to help us. And honestly, you're just told like, oh, you were outbid.

And then we have to like guess what number we want to bid ourselves. So there's no real haggling. And it's like where we were outbid, we don't know what number we have to surpass to get the bid on the property. So it wasn't like face-to- real haggling. And it's like where we were out there, we don't know what number we have to surpass to to get the bid on the property. So it wasn't like face to face haggling. Did your real estate agent ever dramatically sigh? No, no.

He was not this Faye either. He was like a 50 year old guy who is, I guess, the opposite of this guy, actually. OK. I also again, there's so many funny drawings of Homer in this one. Like, Wes and his team are drawing Homer seemingly nude in a kiddie pool, fishing around for a hot dog in between his legs, and then pulling it out and eating it, and then passing out, like, one of my all-time favorite drawings of Homer.

And the needless hat is nice, too. I like, this is before he got his Tom Landry hat, but he has a similar one in the kiddie pool. It's such a great design. Like, there you are. I thought you could get away. It's just like, oh, so disgusting. So yes, then in the next scene,

this is a rather short first act because Bart and Lisa come in here. They've not been seen in the whole episode, but now it's time for the kids to come in despite homer being next door in the next shot you have the sold sign up so clearly they they must have sold it i would assume that the powers ruth powers is desperate wasn't disgusted away from homer i like that this feels like the fun kids having an adventure thing of like you know bart gets down there and he's just kind of being creative as it goes and he sees a sock lying on the ground he's like oh you know what this sock was and he just instantly has a story to bully lisa with it and it's like it's an amazing

creativity that bart has it's some good improv but this is when we get the guest star of the episode or well let's say the biggest guest star of the episode hello lisa here in the dark you won't need those eyes let me have them but that's not funny there are some who say the monster is still here friend friend hey kid wake up who are you i'm laura your new neighbor you're right she's beautiful say something clever i fell on my bottom so welcome to the show uh sarah gilbert as laura powers so obviously she's on the simpsons uh because she plays a very similar character on roseanne or she did and kind of still does we

can talk about that in a second though because she played darlene connor the sardonic uh tween and then teen on roseanne a great show i'm not saying that sarcastically roseanne really was a really good show she's played darlene again on about 100 episodes of The Conners, which just got renewed for a sixth season. To me, it's still a new show, but now there's like 100 episodes and she's been on it from the beginning. Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, yeah, the show, she is an incredibly successful Gilbert. She's one of the most successful Gilberts out there. Oh, yeah, yeah.

No, no birthday cards from Sarah Gilbert. But no, I mean, she's extremely successful. I mean, the Connors is like her night job and her day job is a daytime talk show host and of the chew, I think, still. And, yeah, she's one of those powerful lesbians in Hollywood as well, which I wish her well with that. But, yeah, it's funny that at the time, like, it's perfect casting. At the time, I was a Roseanne viewer as well and seeing like oh bart would have a crush on darlene

like he thinks she's a cool girl but i mean you guys i i would assume you had your your share of crushes on tomboys like laura i would assume in your days uh yeah yeah i don't know if i would i would paint her with the tomboy brush because she puts on a nice dress later so sure i i don't know if i would i would paint her with the tomboy brush because she puts on a nice dress later so sure i really don't view her as that she just is like uh kind of like a 90 like a good 90s teen archetype well i i use the term tomboy because she is wearing the army jacket and and she knows all the pranks that bart does like that's the right right yeah yeah yeah i mean yeah i guess i could see her a little bit like that. And then they do.

I like this episode, but I think Bart's girlfriend is so much better. And I like the twist there where the girl is actually much worse than him. But here she's just a little bit more heightened because she's been around the block a little more than Bart. So she's she's got she's ahead of Bart on these like abusive memes that he knows. I would say it's it's a case of me i i don't even know if this is appropriate to say it's just you know out of bart's league i guess and i think just in terms of you know she's older she's more mature but she's super cool i could get that i think it's just like why not go for a 10 you know even though you're you're way down on the scale you know i i could relate to

those kinds of crushes i think maybe just seeing that in someone older than you and there's just there's the coolness the prettiness the respect i think this is uh this was on the money for a young boy even if laura is i don't know 12 or 13 when bart is 10 uh when you're 10 you're like oh a 12 year old they they are basically adults to me like someone if you're in fourth grade someone in seventh grade they're ready. They could fight in the army for all you know. Yeah. And I just, I like the feel of like, it feels like a cool alternative girl, like wearing her dad's army jacket. Like that's fun to me as well. It was a lot.

It was the same look. I liked Linda Cardellini's character in Freaks and Geeks, like always walking around with like a, you know, a Salvation Army purchase, like hand me down army jacket. It just looks, it looks kind of cool in general. And I like that... Yeah, I think she's fun. It's like she is as sarcastic as Bart and she knows all the tricks.

And also they bring back... It feels like Conan is... If he was the one who pitched this bit, he's a writer who observed, like, oh, older episodes of the show have a thing of Bart bringing back childhood pranks and basically teaching the pranks of their childhood to us as kids and so now she even knows more than him of like she does the wet willy that bart did to millhouse in uh in season three like now she

even knows that he can get part on it yeah this really informed me of what to say no to as a child like no i don't want this or that i've seen the simpsons i think i think actually doug uh informed me of the hertz donut uh thing first oh roger gets it with a dozen e yeah yeah that's right wanna hertz donut funny that's what i remember i think what i learned eventually is that no schoolyard friend would offer you anything for free. And it's all an invitation to punch you in the genitals. There's going to be spit in your ear and your hand. Who knows? Did you guys ever get got with What's the Capital of Thailand? No, no.

Definitely saw that on TV, though. I got that. I got it once. Sorry you didn't brush up on your world history. Yeah, I didn't know. I forget what show I saw that that in first but that was definitely thank god i i i grew up in front of a tv set so i was well prepared maybe not for other things but at least for those schoolyard pranks but i will say as a boy i thought the design of laura powers was very cute i think it's a i don't know like the best way

to say this now that i'm 41 but she's an attractive female character and you can see how bart would have a crush on her there's a there's a bit of an edge to her that i like i guess it's like the the bangs and the army jacket and everything there's just like a little bit of like oh the mysterious dangerous that that bart you know falling in love for the first time would would be into yeah i i think it's a really good i also love trying to say something clever and saying i fell on my bottom like what a great stupid line to say and i always find it adorable when the simpsons children carry on the i can only this must be genetic just saying doe at this point i i really like when uh bart and lisa say it is it nature or nurture why they say

so so yes in the next scene this is when marge meets up with her and she puts on a good act i like her even saying my upbringing was painfully strict ma'am and then marge is like that's sweet like she just lets it go but then uh we get a very 90s new character introduced to the show. Let's meet Ruth Powers. And finally, Moe's Tavern has contributed a coupon as their way of saying welcome to Springfield. Thank you. This is all so nice. I actually had some doubts about moving to Springfield, especially after that time cover story, America's Worst City.

You could see our house in that photo. Oh. And this is for the man of the house, which I guess is you. I guess I should explain. Laura's father and I divorced two years ago. They're so sweet when you marry them, but soon it's just career, career, career. My hammock. Do you understand? Mine mine don't look that way

oh boy i love that just homer even in the scenes it's not really about him even then with it's it's some of the best like crazy homer like him just arguing with the dog that it's his habit my that is the most accurate like just hearing it again that is so accurate of how you're talking to a dog because yeah half the time they will look away but this is uh pamela reed as ruth powers a great character they didn't use enough in my opinion and i still only kind of know who pamela reed is because of the simpsons i was looking at her imdb and she never had a recurring role on anything outside of the sitcom uh i believe grand in the late 80s so she just is like a character actor but she is so good as ruth a very 90s character like brassy single mom and after

watching this and uh strong arms of the ma it made me think boy i wish ruth would have stuck around as a voice character for Marge to pal around with because the dynamic between them is very funny and even funnier in Marge on the Lamb. But we talked about that on Strong Arms, but she's great here. I realize, you know, revisiting this episode, I had an anecdote about Pamela Reed that I forgot about for so long. On a family vacation in Disney World, my grandmother recognized her while we're in queue for food rocks at epcot wow but my grandmother recognized her probably from tv art i remember kindergarten cop

maybe might have been mentioned and that's awesome yeah i think this was this was before i truly became a simpsons aficionado or truly before i could say oh yeah you're the projectionist from the critic yes yeah i was gonna say she played one of many of Al Jean and Mike Reese's unnamed female characters. She was in the Misery parody on The Critic. She was the stalker lady or whatever her name was. She was unnamed. I just want to say about Ruth Powers, though. Yeah, like Ruth, this and Marge on the Land.

But besides this, I don't remember any other speaking roles. But she's always in the background. I distinctly't remember any other speaking roles but she's always in the background i distinctly remember in the simpsons movie she's in that like she's always around i'm like damn like why can't they get her back like she's she was great yeah i think i didn't check out the wikipedia or the simpsons wiki page but i think laura is one of those characters they they retire after this episode but then ruth will show up in the background constantly uh sort of like um uh lisa's rival that that character allison taylor she just is in every episode after that but laura does go away yeah it's uh i feel like they got pamela reed because she was just at i think they

had big plans for her of like oh pamela reed will do three episodes a season of this like she's just famous enough and is based in la she'll record she can be like a new like phil hartman for us kind of thing of just like she'll be a recurring character and i'm sure they saw her especially for you know i definitely feel like james o brooks loves divorced moms to as as a starting point for character i mean ruth powers is basically helen hunt it as good as it gets like she's also a harried single mom who's just trying to make it work. And I think that Brooks thought there was a lot to do with that. But of course, the show is, I feel like the writers would be the first to admit that they

don't always write good women for the show, as they even joked about later in the series. But they're not going to write too many episodes about marge having female friends and so ruth powers kind of just falls to the background even though she's such a striking design too with her red kerchief and then yellow skin and then blue shirt like that is just like strong primary colors in in the character design and she's wearing sandals right so she's she'd be on the foot fetish websites too oh boy they weren't they weren't ahead of that be on the foot fetish websites too. Oh boy. They weren't ahead of that trend on The Simpsons. But I mean, I also like the joke about the expected heteronormativity of it, that they're like, well, if you're the new family in town,

you must be a man and a woman. So here's a porno tape for the husband, which is a crazy, crazy thing. I did see the most I'd know her for, because I was not a big kindergarten cop or bob roberts viewer as a kid would be she was on multiple episodes of parks and rec though also for a character that she was written that kind of then wasn't used in the way basically in the first or second season of parks and rec they thought they wanted leslie nope's character to be like a nepo baby and her mom is a high level employee in the government who got her the job but then by the end of the second season they're like no no leslie nope is

supposed to be extremely capable so her mother can't be an a domineering force in her life like they wrote her for so pamela reed playing her mom kind of becomes secondary to the show of of parks and rec as well yeah i forgot she was in parks and rec same i like that she's saying career career now in season five we learn she has a much more bitter divorce than she's letting on here and that the guy is way behind on alimony and she steals his car this army guy who seemingly was in afghanistan in the 80s which that says to be he's like some high-level operative or something it'sbo. It's like a Rambo. Yeah, hey.

He was helping Rambo fund the Taliban. Honestly, her dad probably did work with the brave Mujahideen fighters like Osama bin Laden. He probably hung out with them. So, yes. Meanwhile, Bart is paddling around with her. This is when Laura shows off that she knows every trick Bart knows and then some. And then also, though, she knows how to punch back at Dolphin Kearney with homophobia, which is age-less good.

It's just like that line in the first Spider-Man movie. I complain that Spider-Man in the Tobey Spider-Man movies doesn't say enough jokes because I like Spider-Man as a jokester. But one of the few jokes he does in the movie is a homophobic joke where he's fighting bone saw not randy savage but bone saw and bone saw is yelling at him to get down and then spider-man says oh nice outfit did your husband make that for you and i was like oh man what a me who else would have yeah i guess uh the homophobic line is immediately overwritten by, this chick's messing with our minds.

Let's get out of here. They're just afraid at the very just idea. They've never had that thrown back at them. Yeah. And then another just great design thing of Wes and his team, the spit in the hand looks so gross on its own, and then the time cut to it being covered in grime and and gum and like oh it's hideous it's such a great gross design steve i was curious like have you seen many touches in here that remind you of like wes archer's like

style or sensibility wes is like on a whole nother level i think some of the later scenes might come up more but what's interesting working as animation is always finding a balance of when to push things and when to dial it back. And I think that comes down to also just what the networks would allow. This episode's not too crazy. Like if this was like a zanier one, as I think once this era begins, I'd probably be able to point out more stuff. I would just say there's a a i would say like for the most part this episode is very tight i think there are some like this sounds so boring but i'll say there are some like abrupt cuts from like one scene to another of like way characters like enter the scene but i think something i remember you know i think wes like one of his criticisms for me was like just try to push make characters like entering

more interesting and I think you have that throughout this episode I think you know the way Laura comes in in the basement later with Moe there's I think there's a lot of that in this episode that's great I well I also talk about darkness in the show they they pivot from Bart uh being taunting Lisa to they are bringing back more of their like season one bit of the simpsons kids can't be babysat and that bart's the nightmare they show that abby has had a full mind break that bart drove her literally insane and that she is like has uneven blinking as she cannot focus any longer basically a catatonic it's uh it's very sad what happens to Abby.

Yeah, Bart has destroyed her. But this is when Bart suggests that they should be babysat by Laura, which is fun that Lisa gets to clown on Bart for actually liking a girl for a change. And also I love the animation on Bart then being dragged around by Santa's little helper while he's stuck to him.

That's really good animation too. Yeah, I remember noticing there's a really good design choice here, just drawing of when Santa's little helper gets on the couch. And it helped because it helped me acknowledge that Santa's little helper's on the couch so that Bart can then leap

and then get stuck to him. Just the way Santa's little helper just gets on there and crosses his two front legs, it's adorable. And it reminds me of one of my friend's dogs that does that all the time i think they call that the princess pose uh but uh i think really good choice there because it my eye went to that dog so it sets up that action there and so this is then when homer and ruth interact uh which is uh again i think the drawing of homer at the end of this scene where he growls uh after finally

realizing what she's talking about that feels like a very wes archer drawing to me of the way his his mouth mouth charts like wes is is a king of mouth charts i feel i or at least i know that i think of his rules on all the simpsons mouth charts and the king of the hill mouth charts in the stuff that gets spread around online anyway and so the way homer's mouth gets in a weird new expression for his growl at ruth when he realizes she's talking about sex such a funny drawing uh but yeah i like that she's trying to have like a fun adult conversation with homer i'm just like i have the same appetites and he just can't get it he just can't get it it's it's she's trying to you could tell that she is a bit desperate and a bit uh it's been a dry spell for ruth so she's just like

as soon as you can set me up with whoever you want yes and i say the the the posing too on ruth feels a bit i don't want to say seductive because uh she's not hitting on homer but it's really getting that point across and just makes it funnier because homer has to clarify that they're not talking about i was gonna say the way it's framed like it's homer's torso is right in the center of the other side of the frame when she's saying like i have the same appetites like it does feel slightly it feels framed seductively i agree i agree and one thing i noticed a lot in this episode and it's been so long since i've seen this extra feature and i forget what the term is or what director went over it but there's like the in terms of staging there's the use of like a triangle maybe you guys remember this more than i do but just the way that it's framed so for eye direction because i'm i'm looking at the shot

right now with ruth and homer and it's like you have like the clothes drawer there. It's on an angle. And that, like, if you follow that line, it like, it leads from Ruth to Homer. It's just, I know. Everything is like pointing.

Yeah. It's, I forget what episode it might've been. I think it was one where like Barton, Barton grandpa visit Roger Myers Jr. And like, yeah, this is,

yeah. This is like like on their animated commentaries right yeah where they draw the screen which i always like which i found was you know was so cool when i was younger but now it's just like this is such a great source as someone working in animation i gotta go back and watch some of those it might have been pete michaels doing it but i will always think of that and then every time i watch the simpsons i see that and everything especially in these episodes then we cut to bart cleaning up for laura coming over and this is one of the rare times where the simpsons refer to themselves as yellow instead of white rare clowning on the like because normally they just say like i'm a white

male age 18 to 49 everyone listens to me but instead here it's skin what you want your skin to look it's yellowish then she comes over this is when bart's dressed up as again my mom had to explain this hugh hafner reference and also don't be making hugh hafner references anymore guys look it up he's a bad guy anyway well hey he's gonna be the star of the season finale right yep yeah he's we're gonna have to talk a lot about him if Rusty gets canceled did Hugh Hefner got canceled boy did he also probably as a kid I thought Afghanistan and Kabul were made up places I probably had no clue what they were two guys from Kabul meant nothing to me oh hopefully you believed in Yom Kippur I'm like uh it sounds made up yeah actually i probably

did think it was fake but um i i'm ashamed to say but i i think it's kind of sweet too that laura like it shows how lisa could also like laura because she has such you know thanks to being an army brat before the divorce that she has a more international like wider sense so like lisa gets to eat this food she never would have eaten before like this afghani food but also like they have to to make it believable that there would be an afghanistan style restaurant in springfield it would be almost going out of business and no one would eat there well because of this episode uh was coming up this weekend i did eat it at an afghan restaurant it's uh it's in vancouver i think it's the oldest one

in vancouver it's called the afghan horseman and it was really good i didn't have anything they mentioned because one of the food items is full of like meat patties and i'm i don't eat meat but yeah i i'd say if it's been a while or if you've never had afghan food give it a try we had a very nice like vegetarian platter in the room that we were sat in you had to take your shoes off and sit at these very low tables talk about being tall my legs were just like tangled mess underneath and it was very hard to like extricate myself from the the the floor table to like get up to use the bathroom so very comical but great food no lobna no lobna but we were dipping fried potatoes in a similar yogurt-y sauce that was not called Bob No. Man, that sounds good.

Boy, yeah. Well, speaking of food, they then cut to the frying Dutchman. And Steve, I know you're a big Parks guy. Have you been to the Orlando Springfield that does have a perfect recreation of the frying Dutchman neon sign? I know I'll be walking through it as of this recording tomorrow afternoon um yeah of course wow it's yeah it's almost like yeah it's is it like it's almost like a birthright trip like if you're that big of a simpsons fan you gotta go to the springfield either in in hollywood or in orlando but both if possible yeah i yeah i haven't been to i haven't

been to orlando in almost like 20 years so those parks have changed so much but yeah i'm a big park head and um is the frying is the frying dutchman there now i'm like it's one of those yes it is yeah so uh this is the big difference between the hollywood and i've been to both and i would say hollywood springfield is slightly better because it has more features like it has the the power plant and it has the aztec theater uh front you can't go into any of these and also the police station none of those are at the orlando one but the difference in the orlando one is as a slightly expanded food court which doesn't just have crusty burger and cletus's chicken shack and oh and Luigi's pizza, but it also has its own Duff's-style stand,

and basically it just sells you recently fried fish and chips. It's nothing good, but it's called the Frying Dutchman for it, and it has the neon sign doing the exact joke from this episode. Oh, that's so cool. You know, I was doing some research, and I think the biggest downside of the Orlando one is that it's in Florida. I'm surprised to hear that it's not as big as, cause the Hollywood universal is so strange to me. Cause I had been to the Orlando one so much and then you go to the one in Hollywood and it's on a mountainside and it's,

it feels like there's no space for it. So the fact that Springfield in Hollywood is bigger than Orlando is surprising. Well, I'll say Orlando is more spread out. Like technically it's more real estate, but they have to pack in more detail. I believe in the Hollywood Springfield because especially for the cooling towers on it because they got to hide Hogwarts. They don't want you to see hogwarts on the other side they don't have as much to hide in orlando springfield and i was i was just in tokyo disneyland earlier this year and you know because i haven't been in orlando so long and i forgot i'm like oh yeah like outside of outside of california these these parks are so spread out

like you like the the other side of a walkway just feels so far off in the distance. That's how much space you have there. I'm curious, Henry, since you've been to both, do they play the same compilation of clips in the restaurants that they do in Hollywood? I'm curious how many of those you sit through because it's not a very long video clip. I would say it's about an eight minute long loop yeah well i think it works perfect because once they've cycled through you're like i've probably been here long enough eating this crusty burger i should probably go to the next place exactly yeah i definitely think that's intentional i'm watching marge drink her long island iced teas for the third time now

so better go but well and also yes sorry last thing about this that they are land sorry the hollywood springfield has the secret crusty burger room orlando springfield does not have that room and that is the best room full of simpson secrets in the entire springfield area in hollywood you say okay yeah it's only in hollywood because i think there's like a two there's two stories for the crusty yeah the crusty burger have you not been in there in the the secret crusty burger room no where's it at oh my god steve you gotta just drop what you're doing well you i can i universal is literally 10 minutes from my place i could so i got a platinum pass i could be there now

when you go upstairs in the crusty burger there's a sort of closed off side room that looks like it's crusty's private room and it's full of original drawings by many of the directors on the show and a bunch of specialized merchandise including a life-size gabbo doll for instance i did not know this i gotta i gotta peek in there when i'm not too busy trying to get all the achievements in Nintendo Land. In between those. But okay. But so anyway, so this is when Homer starts ordering some fish while Bart learns to dance.

I'm sorry, man, but everything on the menu has fish in it. What about the bread? Does that have much fish in it? Yes. Oh, I have some Tic Tacs in my purse. Excellent choice. And for the gentleman? All you can eat.

All you can eat. All right. When you're ready, take this plate over. Please, don't take the steam tray, sir. Come on, Bart. If I can teach Maggie to waltz, I can teach you. Just follow me. Put your hand on my hip.

Okay. Bart's excitement of getting permission to put a hand on my hip okay bart's excitement of being of getting permission to put a hand on her hip is is so great i mean it's an accurate depiction of what it's like to slow dance for the first time uh i guess that for me i was maybe 14 it just was like what am i allowed to touch what how does this work also yeah the homer is such a food monster here he takes the entire steam tray with a fish in his mouth. And I also do love that I've had friends who, vegetarian friends who like go with their partner to House of Prime Rib. And they say like, so is there anything that doesn't have meat in this?

They're told like, go out back. Maybe you'll find something. Like basically treat it very unfriendly if you go to the House of Prime Rib and don't want to eat meat. I will say those vegetarians have poor partners they need to check these things ahead of time there are menus online the timing to i it's a great example of just timing of when to know to cut away and i just like it ends on the sir you know instead of just falling through like oh and then like what the chef takes the tray away from him that's not as funny as just leaving up to your imagination of like how much worse this is gonna get it's a really funny cut i also like the exchange of is there

much fish in the bread yes like just he's not helpful at all like yes i love that she's subjecting herself to just eating tic tacs that she brought herself in the ways excellent not cared very similar to this house a prime rib place it's perfect that homer doesn't give a shit about marge sitting there for like six hours starving while he she just shovels food in his mouth also yeah i kind of this was one of the big moments where i wish one that wes archer was there and the two that silverman's there and there's a couple times he comments on animation as he was you know the supervising director then but i wish somebody had said who did the dance animation in this because it's like it's really good somebody worked really hard to get to have

it be bart's imagination of perfectly dancing with her and they're like i mean steve these are two characters of very different heights and bart has to like still look like bart but be able to dance in a way that his legs aren't normally able to do it looks very complicated one thing i thought about is like oh it's a far cry from the babysitter bandit episode oh god yes oh yeah this is i don't know what other animators process what their process is but i know for me if i if i have to board something that i i would consider this almost like an action sequence in a way i'm getting up and i'm i'm posing out a lot of this stuff where i have to reenact i think like just like a fight scene it's like blow for blow i have to do it myself so i know okay what comes next and it you know it's interesting you brought up the height

too i remember working on episode of rick and Morty with the dinosaurs and an extreme difference in height compared to Laura and Bart here. But that made it I just thought of the difficulty staging a lot of those scenes. I can only imagine doing a dance up between these two isn't as simple as it would seem. And it's a great dance number two. It's easy to write down, you know, oh, it's basically a Gene Kelly dance routine. So also they have to completely change the look. Like the background design is entirely different. And then it's a Gene Kelly dance sequence that ends with a wedgie.

Like it's such a, it ends on a good joke too. Then we cut back to Homer. And yes, he has eaten all the food in the restaurant, as Bob said. And then it closed the restaurant. That man ate all our shrimp and two plastic lobsters. Tis no man. Tis a remorseless eating machine. Six bells.

Time for closing. Can't talk. Eating. Fairly warned, BD, says I. Hey! Hey! Hey! But the sign said all you can eat. I'm going to fight this thing.

Oh, please don't. For me? Sorry, Marge. This is my quest. I'm like that guy, that Spanish guy. You know, he fought the windmills. Don Quixote? No, that's not it. What's his name? The man of La Mancha.

Don Quixote? No! I really think that was the character's name. Don Quixote. Fine, now look it up. Who was it? Never mind. Being on either side of those arguments of don quixote i'll say also uh you shouldn't compare yourself to don quixote it's uh generally not a good thing

even if you don't know his name and i just love the fact that bedside in their bedroom they have a book on don quixote or the very least an encyclopedia now these arguments are settled much faster just like fine i'll look it on my phone and then yeah your phone and then i've been on that side of just like all right fine i'll look it up oh all right the movie did come out in 2003 you're right okay or or something like that i but okay well speaking of you being a parks guy steve this moment of him saying fairly worn be says i never really like got me as a reference and then years later i didn't go to disneyland until 2018 that was my first visit to disneyland and i ride a certain ride and hear this properly warned ye be I. Who knows when that evil curse will strike the greedy beholders of this bewitched treasure.

Men, tell. Now, tell. Wow, so Pirates of the Caribbean. You know, I think I wrote it when they still were doing that bit uh pre i had a few ride-throughs of that pre pirates of the caribbean movies when they changed everything though you still hear i think you still hear properly warned be ye says i yes you know i do you because i i remember i i like whenever i go which has not been for like three years i i'm listening for it but does it happen steve yes it does i okay i now i can't remember because now like the the davy jones fog effect is like so far removed i can't

remember the pacing of it but yeah that's there and thanks guys it's not not like i quote simpsons enough already but now i'm gonna think of captain mcallister now every time i get through that part it's towards the end of because i'm so used to the one in anaheim at this point now it's when you're getting out of like the cave it's one of the last because now also there's a new animatronic of of a guy like holding a chest and it's mirrored so then the other side of him is a skeleton and there's like an octopus right around that time i'm pretty sure that's when you hear that clip and then you go out into the naval port so i just love i love hearing that clip but yeah it was the first time i wrote it with my husband and heard it that was when i was like wait that's what captain mcallister says and

not i mean he says fairly warned b says i instead of properly warned so but they're they're big park guys in the writer's room so i'm sure they were just like yeah let's just have them say the funny thing that they say on the pirates right i think a lot of them were uh child having guys in the writer's room i would yeah that makes a lot of sense you know you're you know you're a parent in uh los angeles you're probably making a lot of trips to disneyland but i just i think of like this era of Simpsons are so like anti-Disney that I couldn't see these guys proudly admitting that they love these parks, but it makes sense. Well, they love, hate them. We just did a whole episode with Scott Gairdner

from Podcast Right talking about their hatred of Epcot that came through like 40% of an episode. I'm sure you talked about it to death in this episode, of course. But when I saw that episode, because I think I was still keeping up with newer Simpsons at that time, and I'd been to Disney World plenty at that point, I didn't get the hate. I'm like, Epcot's not like that anymore. They got Test Track. Why are you being mean? I mean, they write that Homer is the kind of shameless fat guy who would sue over this. I do think this is also the kind of like, know we've we've said it many times on here but this definitely feels like it's pulled from the hot coffee era of mcdonald's you know lawsuit of just saying like oh i bet people are suing over coffee being too hot i bet they'll be mad that they didn't eat all they could eat at a restaurant and homer's just

the kind of idiot who would do that yeah the coffee thing hadn't quite happened yet but 90s were a big anti-lawsuit anti-lawyer decade and yes that homer homer's gonna sue over it and then they then cut to the a video game joke of them playing escape from death row which you know i feel like the second by not even gta3 like gta2 would have had a escape from death row sequence in it so the the satire caught up pretty quickly with this video game uh though also it's all about how you know the the death penalty especially after it's always been a big political topic in america but especially after the 1988 election where it was used to attack the democratic candidate for being you know too light getting rid of the death penalty in his state and being given very horrible

questions about like hey what if this happened to kitty dukakis would uh would you then do the death penalty then like these death penalty gags feel pulled from that era i do like because i'm a sicko i do like to read about crimes and murders and whenever i hear about a change of venue i think someone hit the change of venue button and by the way i believe that's done in order to get a jury who is uh will be more fair to you a change of venue well yeah when everybody knows you in the area you're there's no way to get a jury that would get you like yeah though often change of venue is used to help the bigger like i think of change of venue related to pro wrestling as well, because WWE often tries to get a change of venue to a Connecticut courthouse because they know like they're basically one of the biggest employers in Connecticut. And they they always have a good favorable judges in Connecticut courtrooms.

It seems that's it's way more cynical than what I thought. I thought you were just making reference to the the WrestleMania 7 location, but it's a lot darker than that. No, you're right. And yes, also for WrestleMania 7, they did have to change the venue literally and perform in a different place. Yeah. And the Yellow Rose of Texas is the unofficial state song of Texas.

The actual state song is Texas, our Texas. And yes, if you guess that the original lyrics are slightly more racially tinged let's say you're right about the yellow rose of texas and i'll leave the rest to you to look up listener but yeah this about the conservative judge who's definitely going to put you to death like i mean it was it was big then and even and by the end of the the decade you know george w bush be making headlines killing killing all the inmates he could with uh to prove how tough he was in texas but uh and then it even ends the game over screen is perfect like it's like proto rich texan doing his hopping and shooting i just love it yeah the enemy the enemy

doing a little taunt when they win is very uh very punch out it's it's it's nice it's so good yeah some somebody was a gamer animating this one, which I don't know. You know, it didn't used to be, Steve, you could count on everybody who worked in animation to play video games. I can assume now everybody who works in animation must know what video games are. Oh, yeah. You guys could attest this, too. It's no longer a niche thing.

That was so funny. I was watching a video revisiting all those. Remember the Spike TV Video Game Awards? niche thing that was so funny i was like just i was watching a video revisiting all those remember the spike tv video game awards and it's like wow we've really come a long way from you know hollywood talking shit about this industry to now it's just like maybe it's finally being viewed as art or it's it's definitely a common hobby yeah they will make you appreciate the keelys a lot more if you watch the original spike video game oh yeah not to not to compliment the keelys too much but uh they look better by comparison also yeah then apu uh has a fun line this was another where i was like oh i really appreciate the layout where where he can tell that bart has a crush and he says like you know the mirrors and security cameras

see more than just who's going to shoot me and he's framed by a security camera in the the curved mirror yeah good i also really love this shot here upward shot out poo too like it's it's not too extreme but it's changed enough where it clearly looks like it's from the perspective of bart i don't know if we mentioned this though what this episode title is referencing did we mention that at all oh no he didn't know because speaking of things that are lost to time like northern exposure and studs uh this is a dated for the time new kids on the block uh reference which i feel like they would do better i mean i guess bart's girlfriend is not an inspired title either but the word bart rhymes with heart and they've done a million different versions of that yeah new kid on the

block does uh it's completely i mean even by 92 the new kids were not as big as they had been at that point even. I will admit when this was the episode chosen, I had to double check and make sure it was not the boy band episode. New kids on the floor. Oh, yeah. That's true. Yeah, I forgot. Man, they hit that one a lot. Well, also a sign that an episode maybe has some trouble is that they have to have a they have Lionel

Hutz in there, which is them going like, all right, we need we need Phil Hartman in here for it. And it's just though for this one to work. This is the most successful Lionel Hutz has ever been. He wins this case. And actually, he like defeats the blue haired lawyer. I think this is the only time he really actually like does a better job in court than blue haired lawyer does.

Well, with the with the jury, Homer got he's lucky he didn't get a change of venue i also another fun animation thing after he calls homer the greatest hero in american history the way he goes woohoo and like grabs his head i was like what a funny that's just such a funny reaction shot i love that one then this also feels like kind of a Brooks idea of like, okay, what do you do to fill time before, you know, Bart learns that she has a boyfriend? Well, Bart needs to ask. It doesn't sound like something James L. Brooks would say. Bart asks for love advice from multiple people.

And like first he, he sort of gets it from Apu and then he goes to Abe for it. And also to kill some time, we get old Jewish man dancing. And I love that. It's like, it's set up that like, oh boy, it's going to be fun time we get old jewish man dancing and i love that it's like it's set up that like oh boy it's gonna be fun he gets to do a fun dance and like nope he's carted away by an orderly no fun bart doesn't get to have fun with this guy has to go like sleep i'm not sure uh how big of fans you guys are of simpsons memes or simpsons shit postings i was watching this episode i forgot i'm like oh wow this episode's a treasure trove of these i was like this one has the the old jewish man dancing and march at the table later just covering

half of her face i think there there's there's the minimal edit like amount of edit uh simpson shitposting i like and then there's the ones that like really go far in terms of editing where sometimes i feel like i'm like if you do too much editing it kind of takes the fun out of it but i remember some edits with this old guy dancing like i think it's the the lisa malibu stacy episode when you know the lisa lionheart episode and instead of playing with malibu stacy she's playing with the doll of the sky and every time she pulls the string i think formally he's known as old jewish man so yeah i don't know if that's the appropriate name for him anymore but well i think mike reese jokes that like oh and now we're all old jewish men talking about it now but also i noted in the background i don't know who put it in there but

like you can see a plaque to b simmons in there so somebody remembered that uh abe spent her for her inheritance on improving the retirement castle. But yes, the little twinkle in his eye as he says, you remember my birthday? That's a great bit. And Bart just hands him a bus schedule. He goes, wow, fits right in my pocket too. He's convinced. And this is when he says he fell in love with the oldest woman, which she was 120 in 1992,

which would make her old enough to have delivered a man born in 1887 which is jazz pianist yubi blake so it technically it's true and that's the best kind of correction yeah and he's the writer of i'm just wild about harry a song you might have heard daffy duck sing a few times to this don't act like you haven't right now the oldest living woman is currently 116 and in a few months she'll be 117 god willing so say almost at the 120 of the uh the world's oldest woman but i love that in this world that if you're the world's oldest woman you just befriend everybody else who's in the guinness book of world records for every other world record like they're just like a crew that hangs out like such a what a great comedic idea that uh that abe tried to put on a 15 pound beard of bees but it

couldn't satisfy that woman uh so then we cut to bart asking homer homer doesn't want to and this is when we see how he learned what sex was which you know the zoo is full of life lessons like that i feel bad for parents taking their kids to the zoo just have to see like some like i don't know animal take a shit or whatever too as well not just the sex things hey the kids love it they're having the time of their lives watching animals have sex and shit it's great yeah i remember one time i saw two tortoises getting it on and i thought it was such i was like running to grab my friends like, you gotta come check this out. I was 22. We've all heard about Henry's anti-zoo agenda on this podcast. Hey, no, I'm pro-zoo.

I just went to the zoo. Oh, you just went to the zoo? Yeah. Or did you go to a party that was held at a zoo? It was a party at a zoo, sure. There we go. See, you gotta go to the zoo without free alcohol on the premises i'll give it a shot one of these days yeah hey you know you know who wrestles henry not just these cm punks of the world uh red pandas they love to wrestle

oh that's true okay and it's real and it's real wrestling. They were pretty sleepy when I went there. I didn't go. I should have asked for the tip from you on the best times to see the Red Pandas. Talk to me and Nina about Red Pandas. We'll fill you in. I also like how audibly the whisper is like they're having sex. Like it's not you're not guessing what the guy is whispering. He just says they're having sex.

Oh. But again, another of my favorite like Homer during the i i gotta get the whole speech here because homer's every action he has in this is perfect not if you excuse us this is a sacred moment between a boy and his father son a woman is a lot like um a. They're about six feet tall, 300 pounds. They make ice and... Oh, wait a minute. Actually, a woman is more like a beer. They smell good. They look good. You would step over your own mother just to get one. But you can't stop at one. Do you want to drink another woman? So I says, yeah. If you want that money, come and find it.

Because I don't know where it is, you baloney. You make me want to rat. The Homer poses are great, but I love how we just have the frozen, bart not reacting to anything just kind of staring into the middle distance perfect recreation of what it's like sitting next to your dad and they're just talking at you not with you yeah and the part's like the reaction on his face says like why did i think homer would give me any good information why did i even get excited for this and that it basically bart has that same facial expression when it fades to the next scene of him in bed like that he's he's basically been stuck in that disappointment again when you like when you really think about what

this scene is it's bart watches homer get like blackout drunk in front of him like that's actually really scarring to a kid but they're they're going so far with it. Like Homer isn't just bottomless abyss of food, but also he gets blackout drunk in front of his child. Like Homer is such, they're getting so excessive with Homer here. Scenes like this and the fuzzy bunnies guy, do you know what made me think, when are my parents going to talk to me about this?

And I hope it doesn't happen. And I think they understood that like, well, you've seen enough episodes of studs and watched enough reruns of Married with Children. You can piece it together. And then the Internet came around a few years later, and I filled in all the gaps, basically. So there was never the talk with me. Lachkey kid.

Same thing. Yeah. The Internet covers it a lot. Certainly, yes. And, Bob, you didn't use the term fill in the gaps in any kind of double entendre meaning, did you? Oh, yeah, I really did i was but so yes after bart gets all these bad lessons uh this is when laura calls him into the uh the treehouse and this basically on the commentary it allows conan to set up one of the jokes like what jeff martin told us in our interview with him was his favorite room bit that

conan ever did which is playing the insane boss from sitcoms who says oh so do you like it do you really like it well so do i just kidding and jeff martin would say conan would get bigger and bigger and bigger of just sounding like the insane boss who for no reason would act mad when he's like because i agree with you and he said it was similar of just laura going like and come alone it's like what what else is somebody to expect when you ask to meet in the treehouse alone and bart also has a very cute reply like i pleased to aim but yes you know we we talked about that in that freakazoid episode we did many years ago on uh what a cartoon but definitely there was a 90s thing and and I guess it still happens today,

but this is comedy of friend zone comedy, of nice guys losing to the bad boys. And this is more of that writing here. When Bart finds out that Laura is dating Jimbo Jones, I mean, the vision of her in his dream world, and it's more like season two rules on a dream sequence in Simpsons with just like two tone color

but like that's how i know how that can feel when you're a dumb kid with a crush and somebody who doesn't know they're supposed to be your dream partner tells you that they live their own life and have and are detracted to you it can feel that way but i boy all this bad boy comedy it's like i don't know it definitely feels dated by today's standards yeah i mean it feels especially ugly sometimes when uh this kind of thinking radicalizes a lot of young men you know in unfortunate ways i guess the downside is the downside of not having women writers is you don't get laura's perspective like no it's annoying to have this little kid have a crush on me i don't i'm not obligated to be romantic with this little boy I have my own thoughts and feelings and desires, but it's really Bart's perspective on this one. And it's identifiable if you're a little boy

or just a guy like, yes, my heart has been broken. It is a very singular male perspective, a straight male perspective. I'll also say, I think I saw this, you know, Bart's imagination here. I think I saw this in another Simpsons clip show before I ever saw this episode. So I had very little context to who Laura was until much later. play classics like MGM Grand Millions or popular games like Blackjack, Baccarat and Roulette.

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intentionally make it a bad clip show but i think they end with that scene like they don't show that things went good for him and laura later they just ended at the heartbreak no yeah yeah it would be years later i'm like oh that wasn't as bad as it seemed shame that bart is holding on to it like that and of course this is before i guess you could almost say that when we're talking about modern simpsons that laura is kind of the proto shana chalmers his daughter who is the regular girlfriend of jimbo in the show yeah and then she did become a regular that character although she was never voiced by a celebrity guest it was always trust mcneil i'm pretty sure yeah yeah there was a good

episode last season of uh her befriending lisa and lisa getting like actually having like an older sister figure in her life it was kind of sweet but uh but yeah in this case uh we learned that yes she is she breaks bart's heart rips it out and then we see that it's jimbo jones and just in case you don't know who jimbo is we get a flashback of bart in a in a random green shirt it's like he's advertising a video game here he's advertising the toilet i always took this as like a flashback to maybe like like a third grade bart or maybe second grade because jimbo he doesn't have the skull and he's got a skull shirt i mean i'm not because even like jimbo looks a little younger here yeah i can see that aren't as long so i always took this as oh this

is like early on not so much like you know jimbo's outgrown his bunny shirt or whatever he had in that uh another episode oh right right the kindergarten uh leases sacks yeah yeah well i You know, Jimbo's outgrown his bunny shirt or whatever he had in that other episode. Oh, right, right. The kindergarten. Lisa Sacks. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I also like that he's drowning Bart for a while and that how just Skinner says,

you've been flushing that for a long time. He's like, very well, I'll continue to wait. And he just like sits there clearly hearing a child drowning. I mean, technically it's called a swirly, not a drowning. I consider it waterboarding you want you want to keep the child alive to prolong the swirly experience otherwise what's in it for you yeah it's got like a frankenstein monster kind of shaped forehead probably like none of that is reaching his mouth he's probably breathing fine you know that's true i wasn't thinking with the size of barts with bart's soup can head it's not even getting to

his ears in the swirly and you know what it's all clean water after a certain point so yes then also Bart hears the painful you know leave him alone he's just a kid he's told to put on his jammy jams that's also an adorable bit I like that but uh but so then in the next scene there's another just great line that shows how like out of touch Homer is like, Dad, if there's a really special girl and she likes some clod who's beneath her, what should you do? I married her. But it's such a great, great line. I love how Homer just cackles at that. And even Marge laughs at that.

Because I am on a substance podcast, I noted that they're eating breakfast at the dinner table and it threw my brain out of whack. It's the same table. No, that line always kind of threw me off too i'm like they don't know yeah yeah no they they eat breakfast in the kitchen and they eat dinner in the dining room yeah you're right bob it always threw me off too that i never it is supposed to be the next morning and they have orange juice in the cups and stuff but yeah i mean wes and his team really blundered here having to eat breakfast at the dinner table we'll talk about them going to night court later hear me out i

maybe lauren jimbo they're they're young and hip they're going out on a friday night this is saturday and maybe saturday mornings weekends we eat breakfast at the dining room table okay okay but yes like you said bob they have a night court i mean it's especially like the sitcom night court because the case takes place over the course of like 40 minutes maybe while or two hours tops while laura is babysitting them in a single night but yes homer heads off to his trumped up lawsuit uh which he takes that as a compliment and then we have a very male joke about how even lisa like yeah I just want a bad boy. Like every, all girls want bad boys who play by their own rules.

I think it's important to let people know that, you know, women can just be, can be as superficial and horny as men. Sure. I agree. And then, you know, later Laura realizes like, well, yeah, these qualities I saw in you, like didn't matter at all. So, you know, I don't need any man. So then we get a sea captain on the stand

he basically is giving his rhyme of the ancient mariner testimony here this is when lionel hutz gives us a shocking reveal it was a moonless night dark as pitch when out the mist came a beast more stomach than man hey so i says to me bosun's batting down the mizzenmast mateys captain mccallister isn't it a fact that you're not a real captain i your honor i would like to show the court just how much shrimp mr simpson ate bring it in boys it is a giant pile of letters to santa claus so i wonder i wish i could have found the original script, but it's not out there unlike some of these classics. But I like that they just literally say it's letters to Santa Claus

to make it clear it's Miracle on 34th Street. But I feel like the mouth movements are so off that I think it was something else in there instead. Like the joke was a different thing up until Air Date. Well, we have west archer himself along with david silverman and rich moore carrying in the letters yes yeah is that i thought john swartzwalder would be here but he's in a later trial uh sequence i think it's the boy who knew too much maybe yes yeah he's well and he's the uh the statue in front of the building too for

swartzwalder county yeah now steve uh what do you feel about drawing yourself or or or animator cameos in animation i was gonna say i just like it's news to me that like west is in this lineup here i'm going back and looking myself um he's he's the character with the beret for whatever reason when they were doing his character on the show he could have been wearing a beret at the time who knows but that's just what he looks like i can say neverons. I can say, never seen Wes in a beret. Maybe that was... Yeah, he also doesn't have a very poofy hair these days either, I'd say. No. His caricature on King of the Hill where he plays a murderer is much better.

Oh, yes. Yeah. It really depends on the show. If you're looking for me in a background of Rick and Morty, stop looking. I'm not drawn into that show. I can say I was drawn as a background character in harman quest and i remember the design i don't know if it was because dominic pulcino was directing on that i forget if he was the one to ask me one of the designers but they're like hey

there's this one villager that gets killed we were thinking of maybe having to be you know your villager is that they actually asked me if it was if i was okay with that and i thought yeah why the hell not you know it was so weird because i used to think of as a kid with the strangest mindset i had is and i think i think it was maybe the movie mars attacks made me think this i'm like why would you sign on to act in a movie if they were going to kill your character and then years later i'm thinking like oh if you kill me that'll be memorable yeah let's do it wow but i think because the design was based off me, they decided not to. They just did it with like a background character

that was just came up for the show. But I like seeing it. I'm not against it. I think it's very hard in my stage in terms of storyboards, it's not the final design. So sometimes you can have some influence on there, but normally then it comes down to

like a lot of shows we'll take from, all right, here's our like our pool of like reusable designs. We'll just assign this here and there, or it comes down to design. From my past experience, it's very rare to be drawn into a show, but it is, it is cool. It's nice. You could change your, you could change your social media profile picture to it. So it doesn't have to be a picture of yourself. You got to get a life debt from somebody in the design department and they'll, they'll put you in the show. have to be a picture of yourself you gotta get a life debt from somebody in the design department and they'll they'll put you in the show you'll be a major

character yeah well yeah so then here's a bigger thought i had on this scene that basically this trial to me feels like them interrogating how they've turned homer into a food monster and they're like okay let's literally go to court and say on the record isn't it ridiculous how much food we have homer eat on this show and what a pig we've turned him into to like actually have to say on the stand he ate a 10 pound bag of flour just raw with no other food like that's that's a huge amount of food it won't be until i don't know season 10 or 11 where homer has his flower bag and a sugar bag yes yeah was that kill the alligator and run maybe i think it was yeah yeah his oh man his flower bag yeah yeah that he's he just no no wait that's uh that's the thomas edison one where he's sitting in his bag of flour yeah i know i

know one episode he was despondent and just dipping his hand in a in a sack and licking it off i have that one saved on my phone because that's when Homer is told you're 39. And I always want to, I have that in my cycle through of wallpapers, wake up wallpaper on my phone just to see, like, to be reminded, like, I'm older than Homer now. Never forget. Oh, I almost was going to ask, like, oh, do you do the thing I do sometimes? If you find, like, there's a really good quote or just something that says an age and that is an upcoming birthday for you.

You just like save that. So age and that is an upcoming birthday for you you just like save that so you post that on your birthday i did that with hans molman when i was uh oh god was it 31 was he 31 years old yes yeah yeah yeah only 31 years old i made sure to tweet on the day lisa got married in the future which is in august of 2010 that's right you had a good time in there. But yes, here is when the court case is decided. Mrs. Simpson, what did you and your husband do after you were ejected from the restaurant? We pretty much went straight home. Mrs. Simpson, you're under oath. We drove around until 3 a.m. looking for another all-you-can-eat fish restaurant. And when you couldn't find one?

We went fishing. Did these sound like the actions of a man who had all he could eat? No! That could have been me. Homer, I've a proposition for ye, fair and true. Come on, Marge. Let the people see your pretty face. Come see bottomless peat, nature's cruelest mistake.

Come for the freak. Stay for the food. Oh, he's hideous. I heard they shaved a gorilla. By the way, that ADR, they did this twice in a row, and Marge gets a job when Bart says, cue ball, the man with no hair. A woman says, oh, he's hideous. So this is them reusing that for ADR a second time here.

You know, I have used that, that could have been me image when someone obviously has a self-serving interest in an issue and they shouldn't. They shouldn't benefit from it, but they're commenting on the outcome of something. I love that line i love the delivery of like the very heavy voice of the man saying it as he stands up and that he has also homer ended up with a very favorable jury which is a good joke too which yeah that that's the only way huts would win yeah also the way marge breaks down on the stand it's like oh huts is actually like good at this uh law talking guy job of his for once i think maybe this being a courtroom setting really helps with something i've picked up on keeping track of the acting and the visual acting this episode i don't know if this is a west

thing specifically or maybe this is just something that's been passed down through animation animation over years the frowned upon empty hand acting uh which you know you could catch yourself doing a lot of the characters talk and it's just maybe raising one hand it looks like they're holding an invisible glass or something and is it like the clone high yeah it was kind of like that and i know that's a lot of shows i've worked on you know funny enough because i've worked with a lot of uh former simpsons directors really frowned upon and just seeing a lot of great alternatives in this episode especially with lionel hutz and i think like i said the courtroom setting helps but him like with his arms crossed

talking with marge and turning to the jury and you know kind of having his hands close to his chest and then you know raising his arms outward it's phenomenal alternatives than just doing the empty hand that's a great insight into the posing and staging of all that. That's great. Yeah. I recall that in his, uh, King of the Hill guide that is online now, just like his principles for animation acting. And that's one of them just like empty hand acting. Yeah.

It might very well be a West thing. It's, and I think it's something I've seen before working with West, but I, like I said, you know, worked with people that worked with him. So I wouldn't be surprised if it was just handed down there,

but I think I remember seeing some sort of Simpsons design sheet or just some, you know, worked with people that worked with him. So I wouldn't be surprised if it was just handed down there. But I think I remember seeing some sort of Simpsons design sheet or just some, you know, animation do's and don'ts. And I could swear I'd seen a Simpsons hand doing that with like maybe an X next to it. So yes, that is settled with basically Homer is given all you can eat all the time as an advertisement for the place. I guess from then on in the show, Homer can just go there and eat all he wants whenever he feels like it and he just does that every episode but then it's time to resolve the uh the mar oh and yes as you said bob i have seen that memed so many times of marge with her head down like that is that has become

a meme unto itself it's such a great great yeah i forgot it was from this episode until the the scene came on again i was like oh right and poor why does march have to be there let homer eat garbage all by himself all the time so yes then it's the resolution of this story with bart and it again doesn't feel like how they would do this anymore well also because i note so many times that like in TV now, characters don't, your hero can't actually win by lying and get away with a lie. Like that's a bad thing. But Bart succeeds with his lie here. But this also is another major moment because it is the end of the Mo prank call era.

Formal, formally, not to say they never do it again, but basically if you look at the history of the Mo prank calls, this is the last time they just straightforward Bart does it, they say the thing, and then Mo reacts. Other times, it's either in a different context, like in the PTA disbands, where

it's a roll call that Bart fakes for Mo of fake names, or it's Homer or Lisa will call and pretend to do the Bart act, but it's not Bart on the phone with Moe. Yeah, or it'll be in Homer the Smithers when Burns is using the telephone for this first time. He types in Smithers on his phone and gets Moe's. See, that's great.

Yeah, I was saying this. I was wondering, I'm like, was this the end? Because it's the perfect end. Just reminds me of Brother from another series. I'm like, oh, what a perfect Because it's the perfect end. Just reminds me of Brother from Another Series. I'm like, oh, what a perfect end for Bob. Like, that's the note you go on. And then, you know, of course, little did I know. Well, yeah.

It kills a running joke that was really hard for them to come up with that they said they were never funny. No one ever thought these were funny. It was just it became a bit. And then it also advances Moe from, from you know unsavory character to potential child murderer mo is is taken to a new dark level in this episode and the bart prank calls feel so early simpsons that you know this is truly ushering in like a new era where we're closing the book on this yeah and then of course how could they ever do prank calls again after uh the wonderful one stewie does in this the crossover episode remember that unfortunately never be topped after them they brought it back just for that yep but i also i love how mo the

way mo sways back and forth when he says why can't i find a man to hug and kiss but yes this is when bart finally screws up but it says good for one free beer at moe's this is moe's tavern isn't it no this is bo's cabin give me my beer stupid welcome mobile i knew it would ruin me hey just a sec i'll check check. Uh, Amanda Hug and Kiss? Hey, I'm looking for Amanda Hug and Kiss. Why can't I find Amanda Hug and Kiss? Maybe your standards are too high. Little esophage. If I ever find out who you are,

I'm gonna shove a sausage down your throat and stick starving dogs in your butt. My name is Jimbo Jones, and I live at 1094 Evergreen Terrace. Ah-ha! Big mistake, pal! Ha-ha! I knew he'd slip up sooner or later. Ah, yes. Rusty and dull. Barney, don't steal any beer while I'm gone. What kind of pathetic drunk do you take me for?

Somebody spilled beer in this ashtray boy that's gross that's him drinking beer out of an ashtray pretty bad under you were you were miming every word of that line the satisfaction he feels that it is so funny also note there bart says their address incorrectly of what we know the address to be but that's because they haven't truly settled on it yet yeah yeah i mean it'll be evergreen terrace for a while but they it takes them a while to land on 742 if you remember in the cops parody later in this season 742 evergreen terrace is where the cops go to for the wrong address to bust down the crack house to bust out somebody so that still wasn't it the real jims has a great history of when it officially became the address of the simpsons and

in season five really is more formally at bso but yeah i love that mo also takes it as like you finally messed up by telling me your exact name and address i you finally goofed up there kid i mean we'll get to it but uh when he goes who's jimbo jones and jim was like i am you just made your second mistake pal it's so good but the uh yeah hank's acting is phenomenal here like the the the aha is just i there's so there's so much texture to it the read you might expect would have been serviceable but just you could hear the years of frustration behind that when bart gives away the name and address like ah he's he's delighted and uh so they say that that brooks pitched the ending and because conan uh isn't afraid to be

not hired by jim brooks afterwards he's he is clear of like he dunks on this ending of saying like this ending's stupid like why the ending is like oh you're not the man I thought you were because you you cried when somebody threatened to murder you like oh yeah what a wuss like it really makes Laura seem shitty I will say yeah yeah looking back I'm disappointed with this ending too I don't I know I'm like here's how i would write it but i definitely think there's ways i'm like you could have turned this around to make jimbo shitty you know and uh because you know he could have said kill the kids instead of me or it's her she'd get it not me yeah i thought like yeah like no instead he just cries and says please don't kill me man

i'm so scared like that's it yeah Yeah, they don't make Jimbo crappy. Instead, they make him horny, but then they're like, oh, but she's also horny, so it's fine. Yeah, I thought like, I mean, this might be too much for characters this age or even at the time, but it's like, you know,

Jimbo can be coming on to her and she's like, no, no. And, you know, none of that. It's just, no, someone threatened him with a rusty and dull knife and he panicked the way anyone would. Also, he was about to take his pants off, so that's uncomfortable for me as well. But yeah, so this is when Jimbo is a coward.

All right, who's Jimbo Jones? I am. You just made your second mistake, buddy boy. Please, dude, don't hurt me. Oh, man. That's your outlaw? I wasn't really going to kill you. I was just going to cut you.

Ah, forget it. Ouch. I better go check on Bonnie. Uh-oh. My heart just stopped ah there it goes they really kill some time there with that five seconds just pause on barry i mean also they were they pause on bow running around and then mirror it later just like that'll buy him another like 10 seconds of footage a nice joke about a wishing well yeah i also they they go so

far with mo the like okay you saw the mo like when he gets up to the window he's in a slasher film and he's the killer like he is in an 80s slasher film about to murder the the teens making out and they have to step it back like i wasn't really gonna kill you it's just gonna cut you it's just like what what it's still insane he was also gyrating a bit at the window a little too much for my comfort but yeah yeah hinting at a little bit of uh the the pervert that the most his lack would grow into in later seasons not around kids not around kids there's a sexual edge to it that's also unfortunate yes yeah it's most most murdered people on screen later in the show.

So, and any depravity is believable from our old pal Mo. But this is before he's as suicidal as he'll become, though. I would assume if they did this joke just three, four seasons later, Mo would then say, after I kill Jimbo, then I'm going to kill myself. That would be the next thing. He'd jump into that wishing well. So, yes, this is when there's a happy ending for everyone involved here. And even Bart's line here is definitely ADR.

I don't know what it originally was, but I think it is great as a way of them saying, yeah, this moral is stupid, isn't it? Well, Bart, you were right about him. As usual, a knife-wielding maniac has shown us the way. You know, if you were only old enough to grow a bad teenage mustache, I'd go out with you in a second. Wow. Hello, I'd like to speak to Ms. Tinkle.

First name... Ivana. Ivana Tinkle. Just a sec. Ivana Tinkle. Ivana Tinkle. All right, everybody, put down your glasses. Ivana Tinko Ivana Tinko alright everybody put down your glasses Ivana Tinko yeah I guess it is

a very strange ending because Bart didn't do anything to get that comment out of Laura she probably would have thought the same of him before Jimbo yeah and I'm like oh you were right about jimbo it's like i guess i i mean bart did say like oh he's not so special or you like him but he never said actually jimbo's a coward or he's a bully like i also feel like if bart just said no jimbo actually is a horrible bully you shouldn't date him like maybe that would have worked but this wasn't that reveal it was just that you know what jimbo cries when somebody's gonna kill him it isn't that like bart saying a knife wielding maniac has shown us the way is just i'm saying like yeah this ending's

dumb we know we know it's dumb but the episode's over so there's no other time can't help but wonder if it's just a victim of just run time because yeah we're like we're really close to the end here when moe's running in yeah i think i mean i do like it they don't say this out loud but the implication is that now him and laura can work together on the prank calls because moe now knows bart's voice as jimbo so if he calls again moe's gonna kill jimbo because he seemingly bart can't call again because then he'll think it's jimbo and he'll murder jimbo because he seemingly bart can't call again because then he'll think it's jimbo and he'll murder jimbo so bart won't do it so laura has to do it instead and that'll trick moe but instead it isn't entirely clear that that's why it's a bonding moment for them

but i i get it it works on a certain level yeah they're not going to have a romantic love but they can share this this uh torturing of an old man together yeah yeah and the last bit i have here well also i love i do love the shot of the homer and mcallister sharing a beer together so just to let you know even their pals just to remind you of the b story really quickly here also on the commentary conan o'brien has a funny bit they all just have this basically a moment of writers and directors complaining of like how people at parties or social gatherings would say, oh, well, which character do you write for? Which character do you animate?

Who do you draw? And they're saying like, I wish people understood how cartoons were made. I wish they knew better. Me and Bob listen to you, Conan. That's why we do our podcast. We're trying to educate the ignorant public. Thank you for listening i i hope conan understands that we did what he said years later and started up a podcast just for that and it's

why we tell everybody yes he did write the first eight years of the simpsons they're correct in thinking that and it got way worse after he stopped writing it in 1998 yep yeah no he still jokes that like oh they keep saying i'll come back someday but even now i wonder if he didn't have a podcast would he have written just an episode of the simpsons just for the fun of it just like give it give them a script i wonder i do want to say i'm looking at the wiki simpsons right now and there are like three or four appearances actually it's more like seven or eight appearances of laura but i have to want like i know like in one episode she's mentioned there's like a picture of her

or something um she might have been a background character in a few episodes but never sarah gilbert never returns to the show which you would think they'd want her when she's still such a big star like also in between this she also is like a recurring regular on Big Bang Theory, so she gets a ton of money that way too. She's very successful. I think pretty much the Connors only happens because she wants to do it. Even more, she's a bigger deal on the show, at least producer-wise, than I think even John Goodman.

You think so? Wow, okay. I think they share the same stature on the Connors. And Laurie Metcalf. They're all pretty big deal. No one's stumping for dj in the comments they wrote him out didn't they even write him out of later seasons of connor's like he's not even on the show after the first couple years i don't know the fate of michael fishman i'm sorry yeah i'm sorry but uh but yeah i mean anyway this was a fun first episode

for conan even though it feels like a classic style story that got assigned to conan as opposed to one that feels purely conan like the marge versus the monorail like that is the most conany conan episode that ever conan this still feels a lot like him and i i still appreciate his legacy on the show but also i want to appreciate even more the animators who made his work really good like wes archer yeah it's a classic and and I love Ruth Powers. Laura Powers is great, too. And I wish they found more uses for this duo. But yeah, classic episode, no notes on this one,

except for the last two and a half hours of the podcast. Consult those. Steve, any final thoughts? Yeah, this one, it's a great episode. I don't know if this is like a all-time classic but as soon as i was like oh new kind of book i'm like oh yeah the you know the powers episode where they move in but it's always the b plot that surprised me i'm like oh yeah this is the frying dutchman episode great jokes great character moments here great animation great

direction yeah my only problem is just oh yeah the ending you know kind of it needed to be stronger but i think it's just like i said it's it's a matter of just runtime because it is it is a race to the finish in those last couple minutes oh and steve sorry you mentioned the beforehand were there any other names you recognized in the credits from your time in the animation world yeah i know i've worked with a lot of people that have been in the business for a long time, but after this episode, I didn't realize how many, of course,

Wes Archer, worked with him on Rick and Morty. Martin Archer, too, a fellow board artist. Dominic Pulcino, a former director of mine. He was assistant director on this episode. Wow. Scott Alberts. I forget what Scott did on this episode of The Simpsons, but Rick and Morty as well.

Pete Michaels, a former director of mine, a multiple series. He was doing the animation timing on this. And Carol Wyatt did color design this episode. She's on Rick and Morty as well. I was like, oh, it really makes sense. And I think it goes to show, you know, you make friends with your fellow artists in the trenches because I think these are the people that gotta look out for you down the line and these are all people that are still working today they're so good they're not allowed to stop man that's incredible 30 years later they're all still doing it yeah it's amazing and i not to mention mike mendel who you know unfortunately passed away

right before i started on rick and mort, but who I met just through association with designing merchandise for the show back in the day. I remember going back and rewatching the first episode of The Simpsons, of course, the Christmas episode. And when I saw his name pop up, I was just like, no shit. And I just realized, I'm like, oh, God, well, but it's a positive thing. Like if you do great work and you could be directed or you're, you're not a douchebag, there's work for you. Steve Yurko, thank you for coming on the show, being a great first time guest. Please let us know where to find you online. And maybe you

could talk about what you're up to now, if it's legal. Sure. I'm going to sound like a madman when I go through this whole list, but I assure you, all of these are real. You could go to my website, steveyurko.com. I'm not creative with my username, so any social media you could probably find me at steveyurko. Of course, I am on the One Piece podcast as a co-host. We talk about the long-running manga and anime One Piece every week. And I just recently have started a brand new podcast called 4Kids Flashback. And that is all about talking about the infamous company for kids entertainment and their long history of producing content animation wise,

both original and anime dubs. It's been quite a journey so far talking with a lot of people who have worked there and just trying to get some more answers to long running questions out there. Because I think for as big as they were at one point, there's not a lot of accurate information out there, just a lot of guessing. So that's been a lot of fun to do. I'm doing that alongside voice actress, Tara Sands, and it's been great. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. And then, sorry, I got to keep going. I assure you, these are all legit things. And of course, Henry mentioned- I guarantee our plugs are much longer, Steve, so don't worry. And thanks to Henry for mentioning at the top of the show as well. I am a co-host on the Let's and of course uh henry i guarantee our plugs are much longer steve so don't worry yeah and thanks

to henry for mentioning at the top of show as well i am a co-host on the let's play channel pro cd plays games alongside pro cd himself uh sungwon cho and that's over on youtube and i think that's it oh i guess i don't know you could you could watch this show rick and morty you know this uh you know maybe yeah i think they could use the plug your day job as well oh yes definitely news promotion that's so funny that yeah now you're a superstar online I would say I'm like a Troy McClure

level where it's like you may remember me from the King of the Hills Sailor Moon meeting exactly that's the kind of level of fame I've attained well we're so happy to finally have had you on the show steve we love to have you back thank you thank you steve love it so thanks again to steve yurko for being on the show please check out what steve is up to but as

for us we'll check out more of what we're doing and get these episodes one week ahead of time and ad free please go to patreon.com slash talking simpsons and sign up for five bucks a month you'll get just that uh what i mentioned and also 150 plus full-length bonus episodes covering things like The Critic and Mission Hill, Batman the Animated Series, Futurama, and King of the Hill. And that five bucks a month also gets you regular monthly access to new episodes of Talking Futurama and Talking of the Hill. And the second you sign up at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons, you can access everything we've created at that level for the past six plus years. There's a lot waiting for you if you like this podcast at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons.

And Henry, there is a $10 level as well. What do people get for that outside of the $5 stuff? Bob is talking about our What a Cartoon Movie podcast, where we go over an animated feature film, crazy in depth, just like an episode of The Simpsons, which often means talking for four, five, or even six hours long about movies like last month's subject, Project Echo, the 1986 anime classic. The month before that, we covered Tim Burton's Corpse Bride. And this month, as we start to get into the holiday season, it's time to meet our favorite felt friends as we talk about The Muppets Christmas Carol. Yes, we're getting a little live action again but with our favorite muppety pals you can hear five whole years of what a

cartoon movies i would say over 200 hours of exclusive bonus podcasts including our longest podcast ever six and a half hours about who framed roger rabbit if you sign up at that ten dollar level and you get all the five dollar things too please check it all out for yourself one more time at patreon.com slash talking simpsons. And as for me, I've been one of your hosts, Bob Mackie. You can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. And my other podcast is Retronauts, the classic gaming podcast all about old video games. You can find that wherever you find podcasts or go to patreon.com slash retronauts and sign up there for two full-length bonus episodes every month.

And I have a book out, by the way. It is the Boss Fight Books volume, all about Day of the Tentacle. I put together a very in-depth oral history on the classic LucasArts point-and-click adventure game for its 30th birthday. You can find that wherever you find books or at Boss Fight Books. It makes the perfect Christmas gift. And Henry, how about you? You can follow me on Twitter at H-E-N-E-R-E-Y-G-N

and most other social medias as well. I'm always posting it up on the old post box. And if you're following me and Bob on social media, you should also be following at Talk Simpsons Pod because at Talk Simpsons Pod keeps you in the loop whenever we have new episodes, new Patreon exclusives, or new live shows that we're doing all over these great United States of ours ours please follow at talk simpsons pod to keep informed and if you need an easy to follow list of all of our previously released free podcasts and other info head on over to talking simpsons podcast.com thanks so

much for listening folks we'll see you again next time for season 14's pray anything and we'll see you then. Hello, I was wondering if you'd like to babysit my little angels. Sorry, this isn't Abby. This is her sister. I look after her now. No, Bart, put it down. Put it down, Bart. Bart, put it down.

Oh, know all you can eat seafood. I wore my extra loose pants for nothing. Nothing!