Talking Simpsons - Talking Simpsons - New Kids On The Blecch With Brendan James

Episode Date: September 22, 2021

This week we're joined for the first time by journalist/podcaster Brendan James, cohost of the brilliant Blowback series, a perfect fit for an episode about American propaganda! Bart and his pals become a boy band to meet N*SYNC, but all that is secondary to a plot that involves the shocking moment of a skyscraper in Manhattan exploding. All that and so much more, so listen to this podcast and YVAN EHT NIOJ! Support this podcast and get hundreds of bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! Check out our new shirts on TeePublic! And please follow the new official Twitter, @TalkSimpsonsPod!

I heartily endorse this event or product. Ahoy, ahoy everybody and welcome to Talking Simpsons, the nation's largest mental illness themed podcast. I'm your host, the funky but not threatening Bob Mackie, and this is our chronological exploration of The Simpsons. Who is here with me today in the same room? I'm a regular Billy Crystal. It's Henry Gilbert. You sure are. And who do we have on the line?

My name is Brendan James, and I even came in early and made orange drinks. And today's episode is New Kids on the Blech. Who are you? Oh, you'll find out in due time. Well, it says here your name is LT Smash. The time has come. I'm LT Smash. Today's episode aired on February 25th, 2001.

And as always, Henry will tell us what happened on this mythical day in real world history. Oh my God. Oh boy, Bobby. The Legend of Zelda games Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages are released for the Game Boy Color. U2 wins big at the Grammys with their Beautiful Day album. And Secretary of State Colin Powell visits Kuwait to celebrate a decade since Desert Storm and hopes that others in the Arab world will join him in wanting to contain Saddam Hussein's plans to develop nuclear weapons. Seems likely. Outcome likely.

We're about like two, three, a month into the W administration at this point. Well, the most important news, of course, are the Zelda games. Don't sleep on those. Nintendo didn't make them, but they are still very, very good. And the guy who now runs the Zelda franchise for Nintendo, he started there. So if you like Breath of the Wild, maybe you like Skyward Sword. There's something wrong there, but see a a doctor play those games they're available on the 3ds and they're great maybe they'll be remade one day i hope they they were both really really good

games by uh those i played all of seasons and ages actually was like too much for my brain and i just didn't want to read a fact for the whole thing so i was like ah my my younger brother he beat the whole thing and unlocked the super duper dungeon that you need to have you know the two games talk to each other uh that was also part of like this wonderful consumer plan nintendo got after pokemon of like we can just sell two games at the same time and people will buy uh the kids gotta buy both and uh yeah that youtube album with beautiful day that was that was the theme of the year 2000 you know i think i think if we want to sum up pre-9-11 feelings that that song beautiful day i think really really gets it nothing could possibly go wrong you know i i actually

i might as well come out with this here i i like you too up until that album basically um because i i was gonna say this is a musical guest episode we're talking about today. And had they already been on The Simpsons by this point, U2? Oh, yeah. Yes. Yeah, they did the 200th episode in Trash of the Titans. Because I've never seen, we can talk about this more, I've never seen, you know, like a post- a post golden era episode but i had seen screenshots and i i noticed they were in their um pop sort of era outfits when they appeared on the simpsons

which i don't know if that was actually what they were doing at the time they were on an episode but they had their sort of like village um people like like pop get up on and i actually think pop is an underrated album even though a lot of people hate it, because they put on the most ridiculous and expensive and gaudy tours ever. Bono made up a bunch of characters. He actually had a Joker character that he played. What was it? Maleficent? No, not Maleficent.

I think his name was Mephisto. Did he channel that for his Green Goblin song in the Spider-Man musical? And, you know, in 96, they did the Batman soundtrack song, Hold Me, Throw Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me. So a lot of people don't know that, but Bono, way back in the mid-90s, said, I'm going to become the Joker, and he did. But this was the other side of the coin with him just singing about how beautiful days are and see the world in green and blue. That's when it it's just like that was heralded as their big return because people were like oh they're done with all the irony and they're done with the big you know

embarrassing strange tours where they have people in cages it's like no that was that was them being cool and evolving this back to basics mom rock thing was was their actual uh decline as far as the real heads like you know brendan you you are quite the expert on the uh invasion of iraq uh i i mean was that this uh visit to kuwait that was just pretty standard for for powell at the time in the in the pre-911 days of the bush administration right right? Yeah, they were doing a lot of stuff like this, even before 9-11. And actually, funnily enough, Saddam comes up in this episode as well,

because it was actually, even at this time, I believe February 2000, that propaganda was starting to circulate from American puppets like Ahmed Chalabi, that Saddam might be screwing around with WMD and other things. But specifically WMD wasn't just, you know, the kind of liberal humanitarian arguments at that point. There were already things being piped into certain outlets. Whether or not it was directly from the Bush administration sort of doesn't even matter. There were certainly American

elements who were encouraging it to happen. So you had both the kind of diplomatic overtures like Colin Powell going to Kuwait and visiting all 10 people in Kuwait, eight of whom were part of the royal family, and saying, we'll always defend this ancient culture. But then you also had the kind of nastier clandestine stuff going on in the background as well. It was wild to read this article on it from like cnn published at the time when i was looking up like well what was what was happening with like iraq war stuff when this episode aired and it was as cnn wrote it up they were like it was almost like a throwback like remember 10 years ago that thing well colin powell's reminding us that they're pretty they're

still pretty into it yeah yes yes and that was the problem is that saddam was still around we hadn't knocked him off and someone was eventually going to have to do that would it be a boy band i don't know in case you don't recognize his voice joining us today is brendan james of the blowback podcast he hosts with noah colwyn acclaimed podcaster brendan james welcome to talking simpsons we are honored to have you here it's an honor to be here uh you guys have actually recently become sounds very pretentious to say but I don't really listen to podcasts they're not really my my uh choice they're not my poison but for some reason listening to specifically the coverage of the decline of the Simpsons decline seems like you know decline of great empires

seems like something I'm drawn to. So I think that that's why I've really settled into a groove listening to the show. And as we'll discuss, it is actually listening to your show has forced me to actually watch an episode of post-Golden Era Simpsons,

which I had never done before. I stayed ignorant and happy in my cocoon until now. Me and bob are big fans of your podcast too oh yeah this caused me to re-listen to season one of blow back and again it's just like i i both love it and can only listen so much because it like it i'm like shaking with anger just like i wasn't mad enough about this my review is entertaining and infuriating but for all the right reasons well that's what i would be saying about uh this show if i had watched the simpsons as it was starting to get bad um but yeah we get that a lot we get a lot of um

i mean it's very flattering and thank you guys for listening i i'm not trying to be too glib but people love saying yeah no it's it's really great but i'm just angry all the time now and i'm in a horrible mood every time i listen to it you go go, well, are we doing something good or not? I don't know. No, you really are. I have pointed people to, especially at the time we're recording this, America just left Afghanistan. And so I think more people are thinking back to that era as well, especially if you are in our late 30s, early 40s age group. I think I'll just say for myself, like, to a degree, I took the feel-good pill of the Obama administration,

and I tried to forget. I was very closely watching the Bush administration angrily at the time, but I wanted, I know i wanted to forget because it fucking sucked and then to try to to be reminded again i was like i'm mad at myself too for trying so hard to forget at a time like it yeah it's a very interesting thing specifically right now with the afghanistan situation um i don't know what you want to call it, deteriorating further or mutating just in general, is the Iraq war. I was actually hesitant to do the first season at all because I thought, well, everyone knows Iraq's bad now. Everyone knows it's bad. WMD

weren't there. Why should we do this? And it was only until, honestly, as all good creations are, it came from pure spite. I just saw the rehabilitation of the Bush administration people from the time and to a degree, the Obama administration people, obviously, they didn't need as much of a recovery tour as the Bush people did. But under the Trump era, a lot of goofy stuff happened, including the whitewashing of that entire leadership that pretty much set the stage for most things people don't like about, you know, the way that the country has lurched into an even more grotesque form since. And so I thought, well, maybe it is worth going back and talking about Iraq. But Afghanistan, you know, is another, of course, important case. And honestly, at the time, you were liberal and good if you supported Afghanistan, the Afghanistan war. And honestly, at the time, you were liberal and good if you supported

the Afghanistan war. And I think even more so that that probably needs a I'm not saying every time I mention anything, people go, is that season three? I'm not saying that's season three. You know, maybe someday we'll cover Afghanistan. At first, it was almost, again, so obvious to me as like a, you know, an example. But now, now of course we've got a new chapter a distinct chapter being written about it and i i will say that uh it was it was even more rare to see anyone thinking thinking critically about afghanistan and it was often used as the good war opposed to the iraq being uh iraq being the bad war so there's a lot of uh reckoning going on there too i think well i think this is the perfect episode for brendan because it is dangling on the precipice of the end of history and it's at a time when you

can still like one of the last moments in history where at least the modern history where you could still make fun of the military yeah which the simpsons did a lot of in the 90s the idea was why are we still doing this who are these people fighting for what's the point of all of this yeah like think of that scene where you know they have skinner in the 100th episode skinner re-enlists and he's you know he's this vietnam vet and he's hanging out with a guy who's like oh i i saw combat defending a montgomery war yeah the the joke then was these these guys aren't fighting enough what what a bunch of army guys right and i will say that uh this episode it first of all the what's implicit though in that state in which everyone was sort of fine

making fun of the military it should really shouldn't be this big you know what what are we doing in a couple post-occupation countries but at the same time unless you were really willing to think that it was a full-on on institutional sort of criticism going on in your head. The flip side of that is that you were waiting for the next reason to support the military, because, as you say, you it was sort of like, well, they're not doing anything. We need to find something for them to do. And even, of course, among liberals or people that felt enlightened about these matters, a lot of them said, no, yeah, war on terror, it's clearly what we have a military for in the first place. And that's how the huge machine started to gear up again. As this episode goes, as a criticism of the military, I'll be interested to hear your guys' thoughts,

because I don't know exactly what it's trying to do other than that vague kind of, you know, like ribbing of how we're not invading enough places right now. So maybe we shouldn't do any more military interventions in the future or maybe we should. I'm curious what your read of the episode is later. Well, one more thing I want to say about blowback, though, too, that made me know that you were a real Simpsons head is the expert use of clips, clips from lots of stuff. But whenever just, you know,

a turn of phrase happens in just explaining the history of, of the invasion of Iraq or, or of Cuba, uh, that reaches a line that's sort of like the Simpsons, or it makes me think in my head, the Simpsons line, like then instantly the line is played in,

in the playback. And I really love that we respect masterful clip use on podcasts thank you it's it's part of the show of people um you know i should try to plug and pick up some people here while i'm here i guess it is part of the show that you know we we uh we are not pbs so i i like to kind of you know chop up a bunch of clips and audio drops along the way as we're talking about these these big sweeping forces of history and awful grotesque moments in history and the simpsons lends itself great uh in a lot of cases and i i will say actually it's not the simpsons per se but in season two which is about cuba there is a cia guy called his alias is called frank bender and noah and noah um found a piece of trivia about the guy in one of

the tomes that we went through and researching for these shows and it said that he liked to refer to himself in the third person i.e bender it says this or bender's got you know got a good idea and my head just flashed into that moment of the Futurama episode I believe it's in season two where they're all talking after he suggests something and he goes yeah Bender's right I have to find that clip but I didn't know exactly where it was so I'm like I'm looking on the Frankie act version of Futurama it's not coming up and I just threw basically like you know a shot in the dark I knew it was vaguely season two and early on in the season. And I somehow like opened in Hulu or whatever,

an episode and scrolled around and saw it. And I was like, there it is. Cause I was fixating on it. Good point, Bender. That's, that's the kind of, it's not the, it's not the archival work or the, you know, the reading of hundreds of books. It's those moments where you feel the work pay off.

And yeah, I mean, The Simpsons must have informed you a lot politically, too, I would assume growing up. Well, you know, that's I guess I should say maybe not because I have a bit of a... I'm sure you've heard this before with the many guests you've had on. But I actually was not only not allowed to watch it as a kid. My mom was pretty strict. Like I couldn't even watch Rugrats for a while because she had that approach that if kids talk, if kids watch kids talk back on TV, they will start talking back. And that was the that was the ultimate fear for her. And in fact, I never talked back. So her theory was correct. I was a complete shy, quiet angel. I was Bart Simpson was Bart Simpson was to her. She was pretty liberal in other regards, but she believed the kind of H.W. Bush family idea of the Simpsons as a corrupting influence, you know know only Angelica can talk to the adults. And then for a long time, as they say,

nothing happened. But then I was older and I actually started to watch South Park before I ever saw The Simpsons because I was in high school and the censorship had kind of disintegrated. But I just thought The Simpsons had had so many seasons at that point that there was like no point trying to go back. And so i put it off for a long time and then finally my good friend uh libby watson she's a reporter uh covers health care now you guys may know her um also a big simpsons head she said what are you doing this show is right up your alley there's this i you're gonna consume it in a weekend if i give you this flash drive and i said okay and she did give me a flash drive and I did consume it and

again only seasons I mean I kind of breezed through one and two but really seasons three through eight and I think once or twice I dipped into nine sensed a decline and then recoiled and didn't go any further so I didn't watch it as a kid I only watched it probably in my mid-20s yeah I guess there are two kinds of people in the world and Henry and I are the people who watched it with our parents. And as someone who looked at my parents for guidance, they laughed and said, everything the show says is correct. Yeah.

So I believe them. It's funny though. Cause my dad, a big fan of HW Bush, but still liked the Simpsons. My, my mom was the more liberal of the two, but we'll also,

yeah, I'm glad we had you on here too, Brandon, because this is a music episode and you were also a musician the two. But well, also, yeah, I'm glad we had you on here too, Brandon, because this is a music episode and you are also a musician as well. Thank you. Not exactly in the same genre as NSYNC, I'd say. But well, you know, this is the blowback season two soundtrack is out.

I need to plug that as well. If we're going to say I'm a musician, that's what I'm doing right now. But the boy band option, you know, that's what I'm doing right now. But the boy band option, there's a lot of American tragedies that could tap into that sound, I think. So we could very well get there next time. I don't know. But yeah, NSYNC too, I should say as well, I'm a little younger than you guys. I was born in 1990.

So the boy band phenomenon as well, well as iraq by the way like this was all and iraq the simpsons boy bands uh these were things i didn't really like scrutinize as for what they were until later i would kind of vaguely hear about you know boy bands iraq and the simpsons in my peripheral uh so i didn't really listen to any of that stuff either. Uh, but I, I knew how, how obviously they were taking over the scene at that exact moment. Well, I was in the online internet trenches in 2001 and I can tell you that every episode around this time was the end of the Simpsons. Like, okay, now they did this. It's the end. This was considered a new low because for some reason we were all just so mad about

NSYNC and boy bands in general. And that's, that uh the previous summer south park had the episode something you can do with your finger and it was a bring that up exactly it was a better episode about boy bands it was a little more vicious about them and told a better story yeah it's funny yeah that not long after this the south park would do their simpsons dated episode about how they feel like they couldn't write anything because the simpsons did it before them but this was the opposite of that, where the Matt and Trey, because of their speed, like they even the Simpsons was probably writing that episode, this episode before July of 2000. But the South Park got theirs up way sooner to jump on.

I mean, this episode felt that was another reason I didn't like this one at the time time too it just felt late i was like i lived through all of the year 2000 we've heard the boy band jokes on every other sitcom like now now the simpsons does it it's what happens when you write your episode nine months ahead of time exactly no and i i guess you guys could probably tell me is this the era in which they start to chase not only the, you know, renewed sense of relevance that South Park clearly has, but also the timeliness or the insta-commentary or an attempt at insta-commentary as well? Definitely. I mean, on commentaries, Matt Salmon, who's still with the show, has said they definitely felt the heat from South Park. South Park was the new hot thing. That's what they were a decade prior.

And they felt a lot of pressure to stay relevant with relevant topics. Unfortunately, South Park famously, you know, has a one week turnover. Simpsons, it's nine months, as we said previously on this podcast. Yeah, there's they don't have the speed of it. And plus, they were also feeling the burn of Family Guy being the new game in town and being allowed to be much edgier than they could be and these were uh you know edgy joke guys who tried to get in as many like dirty things as they could on simpsons but simpsons you know at its hardest in the tv series is like of a light pg-13 which

really is not close to what south park and family guy were doing in you know 2000 2001 yeah and to be fair yeah i think the expectations of the average Simpsons viewer in 2001 were a little skewed, especially if you're a young male, where it's like, oh, NSYNC is on. I hope they say they're dumb and gay. But it turns out they're fun superheroes who are funny and save the day and are embraced by the show. And I think, again, I'm like, why were we so mad at these? But at the time, you can see why people rebelled against this, because they wanted to see these

young, attractive men sent up or at least take torn down. And because also South Park. And I mean, I liked South Park, too, as a kid. And I would still say that shows pretty good through its first eight seasons, too, pretty much. And I I then think it completely falls off as well. And, you know, much like The Simpsons, it has also now gone into a just ridiculous undead state for the past several decades. It doesn't need to be around anymore. And it has also been left behind as far as, you know,

what it, it's trick, you know. But at the time, yeah, South Park, if they had a celebrity episode, it wasn't that the celebrity was guesting. It was that the celebrity would be ruthlessly skewered, whereas the Simpsons, even though they had always I mean, the golden years, they definitely would have celebrities on. But the point was not to see. It just felt so cheap after this point where it was just to kind of be a gimmick and have ratings, you know, stay. I imagine to have ratings stay where they were and with with any sitcom you know it

just became kind of an unfortunate crutch whereas south park didn't have in sync on and then have to treat them nice they could just ridicule the idea of them or the figures themselves well yeah like south park had corn on and that was cool oh right right now i well i was thinking real musicians but also but also that was a cute gag where they they were yeah or whatever yeah now i i was thinking about this too because you know woodstock 99 has been in a lot of the conversation lately uh and i haven't seen that documentary yet i kind of want to though it's uh it's it's interesting our our pals at choppo did a very good review of it that also uh captures a lot of the flaws of that documentary that it's kind of all over the place but it did really capture for

me reminding me of how trl total requests live was this battleground for young people who requested things because it was like if a thing for teen boys was number one you're like yeah like like eminem got to be number one this week and he'd do music videos making fun of the dumb boy band things that were number one half the time like it was either like blink 182 eminem or even tom green's bum bum song yeah those music videos were made to be saying like we're supposed to vote for us to be popular so it's not in sync or the backstreet boys yeah yeah negative mobilization i believe is the term and i guess a lot like older men like us might not realize it but we are in probably the biggest era for boy bands they're just not in america anymore like in sync and backstreet boys were huge did they have dipping

sauces at mcdonald's i ask you no they did not I think like BTS is a thousand times bigger than either of those bands ever were just because of the worldwide success they have yes and I suppose I really don't know too much about the history of the genre was that sort of the breakout period for boy bands in general in that way like well I mean you know you had earlier 90s and late 80s I imagine there was the template really right yeah i mean uh they're referenced in this episode title new kids on the block and then there's a joke about menudo so i guess kind of there's always been boy bands but they were in the 90s yeah sort of that decade was like the ups and downs by the late 90s it was coming back mainly uh a lot because of the orlando music scene uh which was based around you

know mega producer slash uh horrible monster lou perlman uh yeah and and jive records and all that stuff like it did it pulled it off and there's something like beautifully late 90s or our friends at podcasts or i call it 2000 core yeah just this like sheen to everything and this is gloss and the way all of them were sold and like it really does capture the film josie and the pussycats which is pretty much the plot of this movie or of this episode it also really captures that just perfectly like what this like right before 9-11 feel of culture was. And one of my ex-colleagues and still buddies, Felix, he is definitely an aficionado of what you might call, I don't know, pissed music is sort of the idea that, you know, stained a lot of groups that sort of encapsulated after 9-11, much as the slaughter we exported during the war on terror, this musical version of that where you wanted to be pissed, but you didn't quite know why or any really legitimate way to express it. And you're just kind of like posing in this way or, you know,

the like, what's that disturbed song down with the sickness, right? Yeah, he's like screaming at his mom and just calling her a whore. Like, he's not really talking about anything that makes you appreciate why he would be this pissed. But similarly, not to be too glib, you know, America in general was in one of those moods. And the music after 9-11, I think certainly a subsection of it addressed that. The Simpsons will be right back. Next Sunday is the ultimate explosion of the boy bands. Hello, Springfield.

Oh, hot, hot, hot. When Bart Simpson's party posse joins forces with NSYNC. Trust, spin, jiggy, do-si-do. And close with a matrix. NSYNC guest stars on an all-new Simpsons. How we use electricity can be smarter, cleaner and greener. At Electric Ireland, we can help guide you there. You see, our new Net Zero Hub has all you need to know about smart meter plans, EV tariffs, solar panels, and much more. Making your usage clearer, your trips

greener, your home cozier, and your world brighter. Find our Net Zero Hub at electricarland.ie. Welcome to the break. It's Lieutenant LT Gilbert here saying thank you to our big time guest this week, Brandon James. If you enjoy him, you should really be checking out his awesome podcast, Blowback. Me and Bob are big fans and it was such an honor to have Brendan on the show. Thank you so much. And you should know that this podcast only exists because of listeners like you who support me and Bob at patreon.com slash talking Simpsons. This is our full-time job thanks to supporters at patreon.com slash talking Simpsons,

where five bucks a month gets you not only knowing you're supporting us, but also access to dozens of exclusive podcasts like us covering shows, The Critic, Futurama, King of the Hill, Mission Hill, and coming very soon, Batman the Animated Series, all in our exclusive Patreon miniseries. Sign up at patreon.com slash TalkingSimpsons right now to check all those out, plus a ton of other exclusive podcasts like us interviewing some people who have worked on The Simpsons for decades. Hear all of that at patreon.com slash TalkingSimpsons.

But if you want something as nice as a muffin basket from NSYNC, then you need to sign up at the $10 level at patreon.com slash talking simpsons that premium level gets you all that five dollar stuff I just mentioned but it also gets you one monthly exclusive podcast that's often over five hours long you see we have our sister podcast what a cartoon movie and once a month on there we cover an animated feature film super in-depth in the same way we cover the simpsons reason exclusives have been lion king the hunchback of notre dame uh this month we're going to be doing the road to el dorado next month the batman beyond movie

return of the joker and a giant back catalog of films as diverse from akira to a goofy movie kiki's delivery service to beavis and Butthead to America. Three years worth of What a Cartoon movies, over 160 hours of exclusive premium podcasts, in addition to all of the other $5 stuff you heard about before. Check it all out at patreon.com slash TalkingSimpsons right now. wow and for in sync particularly this was an interesting time in their arc i'm not this is not going to be a 10 minute history on syncYNC, the band, but they got started in 96. They were formed by Pearlman and, uh, and they were like a, uh, a related act to Backstreet Boys. Like it was Backstreet Boys was the A team.

NSYNC was the B team. NSYNC then actually, unlike a lot of people, successfully sued Lou Pearlman and got free of their contracts from them. They said, buy, buy, buy, right? They did. Famously. successfully sued lou perlman and got free of their contracts from them they said bye bye bye right they did famously the the album no strings attached was named that because they want we're like oh we're out of that awful contract where he stole all our money yay and that got them ahead of backstreet boys they became the number one band in sync and and then when is there any kind of like like oral history or book that actually is kind of because I am sort of intrigued by all of this.

Is there like is this just all recollection that you're partial recollection? There is the I think it was on YouTube, like a YouTube original documentary on the Lou Pearlman crimes that that the Carter family aaron carter and nick carter that they were involved in in the making of it they interviewed a lot of the folks in it so that that's helping some with the timeline but also i i looked up like okay what album was about to come out or what was the nearest album release to their appearance on this episode and they were four months out from their third album celebrity and once. And once that tour was over, then Justin Timberlake quit the band. And that was the end of NSYNC as we know it. And they've been, whenever they get back together, other than a couple random appearances on big TV shows, NSYNC is a four-member band.

And Justin Timberlake is far, far, far away from them. Well, the only way this episode could have aged worse is if Lou Pearlman were also a guest star on the episode. Oh, jeez. It'd be funny, you know, when Aerosmith was on the show, their manager was like, put me in the cartoon too. Like, he gets in there. So they were lucky that Lou Pearlman wasn't there

to insist on a scene for herself. This is a long preamble, but watching this made me realize, I know all these guys' names, and I don't know how. Same with Backstreet Boys. And then I was doing some research and thinking, isn't one of these guys way older than the other ones? And yeah, Chris Kirkpatrick, born in 71, Timberlake born in 81. These guys are from different generations in this band.

I didn't know they spanned that great of a distance in ages. I always thought of Fatone as the oldest. He's not. Wow, man, Kirkpatrick, wow. they span like that great of a distance in ages i always thought of fatone is the oldest he's not man yeah patrick wow one of them one of them uh really sounds like billy west to my ear i think it might be timberlake when they when they were talking one of them i thought wait is this billy west doing doing a role and i was like no one of the in sync guys just really sounds like fly uh you know a lot of them they're pretty interchangeable the the NSYNC members other than Timberlake just because he became so much more famous well I remember Fatone is the fat one

Lance Lance Bass is the one who came out he's Sephiroth also he's also Sephiroth in the Kingdom Hearts games uh then uh then JC JC Shazay is the the other guy. And then Chris Kirkpatrick was on Fairly Oddparents. That's how I remember that. No, it's very simple. I mean, if you don't know any of that, every kid knows that when he was growing up. Yes, his episode was written by Tim Long. He had pitched it. He tells this funny story that Mike Scully was like, pitch something.

I need pitches. You guys aren't giving me no pitches. Though this absolutely sounds like he said, let's do a boy band episode and we could probably get some famous boy band in the show. And they didn't know where it was going or how to end it. And George Meyer stepped in and made it a crazy military fantasy episode at the end. And George Meyer is, you know, he reads pretty politically left to me comparatively. Sometimes he reads like a left libertarian with some of his complaints but he's uh he especially having the idea of like a

big military propaganda campaign yeah uh is is very much in his wheelhouse he seemed he i haven't uh read nearly as much as about the the writers and and the sort of uh ethos of the show as you guys have i'm sure but he he's obviously incredibly funny let's get that out of the show, as you guys have, I'm sure. But he he's obviously incredibly funny. Let's get that out of the way. I'm not I'm not judging anyone's politics on the Simpsons staff, but he seems probably more like a like like a left liberal sort of of a generation where, yeah, you you were vaguely against war, but you didn't necessarily, you know, I wouldn't think that he was deeply political beyond kind of those principles from the sixties. You know,

Meyer, I think from the stories we've heard, he seems to the left of that. Like, I think back to this great joke they did about him on a commentary. He wasn't on John VD, who's his brother-in-law. He joked about how in the separate vocations episode where bart becomes basically a cop i believe it was vd you

said if this episode got one kid to distrust the police then george meyer would be happy yeah it's it feels like the same kind of if you like hollywood uh leftism or hollywood marxism that's perfectly good as far as it goes like james cameron you know i remember i remember james cameron said when he was uh making and you could read a lot into many of his earlier films in that way but i remember he said something similar that he wanted the t1000 to be a police officer because he said you know to a lot of people it doesn't it doesn't evoke the same feelings of serve and protect that I think people where I come from feel. And he thought that would be an interesting thing to play with as a villain. And that's, you know, there's a performance in a lot of, you know, celebrity politics that I kind of just ignore. But I think

he's probably coming from a sincere place there. And and it's a it is a cool, interesting thing to have in in in that movie so maybe meyer is kind of of that of that school in in hollywood or he's pretty left of most people who are actually just liberals or ignoramuses they're not marxists like the uh like the newsletters my uh my nana gets say they are george meyer in terms of comedy writing he was known as like one of the funniest guys in the room if not the funniest guy in the room he would always pitch crazy things to make everyone laugh but previous showrunners would be like that's very funny George but we can't put that in the show

I think Mike Scully thinking the show would end soon would go yeah let's just do that as our third act so this era has a lot of very weird third acts they dispose of the plot entirely and it's this new crazy thing that's happening that kind of breaks the show. And I think George Meyer, we love him. He's funny, but he is responsible for a lot of this in this era. Yeah, I've definitely seen the phrase, quote, thinking the show would end soon, comma, explain a lot of, you know, things about why there was this decline starting in nine onward. Because even with Josh Weinstein and Bill Oakley they they seem to be under the impression in season eight that it would definitely that's why a lot of characters seemingly have their last episodes in their seasons like sideshow bob and you know uh they explain jebediah springfield

and they explain itchy and scratchy all of these deep lore things they dispose of homer's mother like they're just getting rid of all of these plot ideas because they assume the show will end because the show should have fucking ended i'm not gonna i'm not gonna be too much of a crank we all i think in our hearts we all know that i won't labor a point that everyone probably agrees with listening but i mean as watching this like i said it's my first one post good good times simpsons so much can be explained about what doesn't work by just the fact that it should be over there's nothing else you can do with a lot of these maneuvers and uh and devices anymore but anyway that it's that they all thought it was going to be ending soon well i i also think you know scully scully was one of

the more celeb centered uh eras of the show maybe the most because you know in the first years there were in the first four years there were definitely guests and they really struck on something opened pandora's box with that baseball episode or softball episode yeah they're just like oh all these stars and then i feel like in merkin's years like the only stars he really got were like uh attractive actresses he wanted to hang out with i think yeah it seems like uh fox and maybe james l brooks of course, that I don't think they really liked what Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein were doing. Because they wanted a bunch of old men. All of their guest stars were old, dying men.

And they were doing a lot of weird stuff with the show, like things that we love today, like the steamed ham sketch, things like that, experimental things. Scully and Gene were trying to ground the show a little more and get more famous people on after uh oakley and weinstein left i mean uh in in no previous era than scully's would they have the episode of homer befriends mel gibson you know like they wouldn't they wouldn't have done that one and hearing uh mike scully tell the story of how excited his daughters were to meet in sync at the recording day i was like well that's why they're on this episode like there you go i again mike scully nice guy cool dude we we like him but that that was one of those times i was like yeah okay that was the benefit of having instinct on you get to look like super dad to your your daughters who love and say of course and you know again anytime you know that i do

pipe up about my just you know ultimate horror at at seeing what the show would become, let alone a decade later, but even a couple years later, you know, I understand Scully and the rest, even the writers say they're trapped. I mean, they're just the custodians of something that it's like you can't blame the people necessarily who are in the writer's room or who are running the show even at that point. They've got a job to do. They're going to do it. I mean, what is there to say beyond that? And this commentary is interesting too because Chris Kirkpatrick is there for it. So I think they were a little nicer

than they might have been about having it sync on. At the end of the episode, there's also footage of them in the show, the whole band doing their vocal parts. Which I'm really glad they kept that in there because the gloss of advertising this needs to be saved forever like that that is part of the story look how much fun we had i it's really funny though that they they dump on timber like so much in this when he would become like mr comedy and like a member of the snl cast basically

and all that i he's funny enough i guess for a pop star. I don't know. I think we encouraged him too much. A little too much. Yeah. I like him in Southland Tales. Oh yes. Where the Rock's the president as he will be someday in

real life. Go back and watch it folks. There's a lot going on in there. Well speaking of presidents the chalkboard gag in this one i i don't think anyone accuses us of not working hard enough on the show but i started prep for the show and then i spent 20 minutes talking with henry about this chalkboard gag and figuring it out and we finally did because it's related to i mean every president is uh crooked and awful they pardon the worst people on the way out but this this is about Clinton pardoning Mark Rich and his partner, Pincus Green, one of the biggest scumbags in the history of tax fraud. But it was implied

that this pardon was bought off because Rich was a big donor to the Democratic Party, to Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign, and to the Clinton Library. So that's what this chalkboard gag is representing, that pardon in particular. Yeah. I mean, Clinton got flack for pardoning a ton of people basically on his last day. But Mark Rich was the standout case. You know, the reporting subsequently, you know, centered around the idea that it was it was a bribe, that he bribed his way into a pardon and i should mention he was also uh partially on the lam because he did a legal business with both iran and iraq uh that's right and his associates uh against sanctions that's a real businessman doing both sides yeah i mean yeah he he'll he'll talk to anybody uh so so that was uh actually part of why people were critical and in fact hunting down mark rich and uh one another one in there i

was shocked well i i i just i remembered it at the time it was the first time i paid attention enough in politics to be like oh people are mad at pardons at the end now i learned that like well that's every president at the end of their term like trump's were fucking crazy but even by those standards but but there was one i was like oh this guy mel reynolds who was a former democratic congressman slash like sex criminal i was like holy shit could i couldn't imagine even on his last day joe biden uh doing that for a guy of that caliber but that was shocking well you never know but we'll see i was about to say let's just stay tuned we'll figure it out yeah but so that's the that's why the chalkboard gag at the

start of the episode is i will not buy a presidential pardon old slick willie yeah always with the smooth talk there's there's a bit later in this episode where they say like the new administration i feel like this was written assuming al gore was president when this would air i think i i would figure most people in hollywood were writing jokes about an al gore presidency and you know he he was going to win because he did win yeah so there was a confidence there um nine months in advance or not there was a confidence there in general yeah i i think there's probably a whole a whole uh show to talk about you know how the entertainment industry uh had to rejigger everything once florida uh swung things for bush in general yeah and uh yes this episode begins

with some olympics comedy which is like eight months after the olympics happened in the year 2000 yeah but why why would you do it knowing the time why would you still put it in it feels like it was probably written around the time the olympics were airing yeah it was uh so far you know removed from uh the air date and and as you may know the olympics uh committee is very litigious so you can't actually uh they as fox would warn them you can't really draw the rings you have to make them a parody in some way and their way around it and this is their rings on the on the uh kitchen table yeah like condensation rings and i guess you can't color them but you can display no one owns like the

idea of rings hooked together but the certain colors are the trademark logo oh shit i i own that they owe you a lot of money you have to license what you just said with me at the end of the show you know what i should have made a sound effect for this by now but this was definitely one of those matt graining wasn't around things hitler jokes matt graining doesn't like hitler jokes he tried to stop him whenever he could but there's we got double hitler jokes here and but it is also the return of old hitler yes that simpsons had already done at this point i kind of i kind of enjoy those although i could have used a third hitler in 1984 i think that this string of jokes was missing and oh even older hitler like in a wheelchair about to die

that's why i didn't laugh is because well i don't know if it would have made me laugh necessarily but i was waiting for a third piece that would have kind of tied a bow on it and they just sort of give up uh but these are semi-accurate statements here bob beeman's record at the 1968 mexico olympics was uh world's breaking it was 8.90 meters which is close to 30 feet uh and it's still it is still the olympic men's record to this date. There have been guys who have done long jumps outside of the Olympics that have gone farther, but at the Olympics, Bob Beeman's is still the record. But I think really the reason they picked 1968 in Mexico is it is south of the border in the 60s when it is conceivable an aged Hitler would be in attendance. I think that's why.

And Carlos Lopez of Portugal was the first gold medalist to win and uh for that country and he set a marathon record for years uh but he was 37 and not 38 when it happened so well i guess homer is also roughly 37 even though he's 39 at this point i also looked up like oh who are the oldest gold medalists but there's there's like there's gun shooting things in the olympics that just fucks it up so it's like oh it's like multiple guys and uh people who were in their 60s but it's like yeah it's marksmanship things like oh it doesn't feel doesn't feel as special now no offense to those gold medalists who i'm sure they work very hard in marksmanship uh but yes homer gets as as often happens in the scully years they watch something on tv and get uh get inspiration in our first clip and in 1984 portugal's carlos lopez becomes the oldest

olympic marathon winner ever at age 38 38 that? That's roughly my age. Marge, after a lot of thought, I've decided to run the Springfield Marathon. Oh, please. You get exhausted watching the Twilight Zone Marathon. I'm a regular Billy Crystal.

You got that right. Well, Dad, I think running's good exercise. It adds years to your life. Stay out of this, Lisa. Marge, I think running's good exercise. It adds years to your life. Stay out of this, Lisa. Marge, I've made up my mind. I'll do your job for a day, and you do mine. Then we'll see who has it tougher. And Marge just shrugs.

She's like, I don't know. Homer has decided that's the plot of this episode. But I guess somebody put him back on track. They're like, no, no, no. The opening at first act gag is the marathon, not switching jobs. But that's an early tip off how little they care about the plot in this episode. Yeah. Yeah, because, I mean, in the old episodes, you'd get that completely dissociated first act.

And that was the way they did the show where it goes takes a different turn. But this just feels like rudderless rather than a format that subverts your expectations in the course for normal Simpsons episode. Because what is the switching? Is it just a joke? You're kind of expecting then a gag where marge is forced to do something that homer has to do and then it's just no scene just ends that's that's it uh i mean marge is confused as you are that's yeah i guess this is what we're doing within the show they're just like homer forgot his line like marge is like the actor forgot his line he's supposed to be in the marathon it is the animated equivalent of someone just going like

i i forget what you know but that shouldn't happen in animation and here we are i don't think it was theft but a lot of this early stuff in this episode reminds me of a critic episode because i mean there are only so many fat guy runs a marathon jokes but jay sherman basically goes for the same arc i i wonder if just to al jean running a marathon is like something he always wanted to do or something he always dreamed of doing or what but it it comes up a lot but this this has a lot of similarities to marathon mensch uh that episode of the critic except that was the a plot of the episode not the the opening gag though in his case he actually did finish a marathon after like a month yeah did the new york well at least there you could get jokes about the new york marathon instead of just like

simpson the just what happened in springfield marathon i i do like that you're i'm a regular billy crystal you've got that right meaning she's bad at telling jokes that that also feels like the writers mocking themselves of the just marge's joke of uh you barely finished the twilight zone marathon that feels like it was just in the script and then another writer said god that sucks like billy crystal would tell that shit they're like oh put that in but it's always nice when marge is tickled by her own jokes i like that i do like that and also this is when lisa can't win for trying you know normally lisa and she'll do it later in this episode, say, boy, this script sucks or whatever.

But here she's supportive of Homer's idea. But even then, Homer dumps on her for thinking. It's like, well, I'm still going to stay out of this, Lisa. I had it. And so, yes, then we head to the race. Ned is looking very buff. His correct buff design. So then a couple

times they mess it up and he's not he's not fit but ned needs if you're gonna see ned's body he's gotta be gotta be a hunk yeah uh we get a joke that homer put uh nipple tape on the third nipple which uh okay is that secretly crusty that's homer hey wait this is the homer is crusty conspiracy theory you're right yeah the superfluous third nipple. But, you know, nipple tape was all in the news back then. We were all like, oh, yeah, guys. We all worry about chafing our nipples running. And then they start the race.

The marathon begins. And we get a couple of OK Marathon jokes here. Attention, runners. On your mark, get set, now get out of here before I change my mind. I can't believe it. I'm actually running a marathon. Oh, I hit the wall. This is so painful.

Hey, I got my second wind. Oh, another wall. Third wind. Faster, rickshaw driver faster ow sir the whip isn't helping silence you call yourself chinese i did like the line you call yourself chinese that gave me a laugh but i guess to the marathon thing you know i've never uh i've never even thought i you know i don't think i could do a marathon now either but i've i can get up to like about six miles in my morning walk now if i really push myself but uh my mom ran a marathon once she worked toward it for a couple years and and she had gotten really good at you know long distance uh jogging but she said after the

marathon she was like i am dead like i worked to this for two years and it killed me i was watching uh some of the marathon at the recent olympics over the uh i was at a bar so you know perfect place to watch people you know straining themselves and pushing themselves to the limit and i was telling my wife like what i associate with marathons most are the the photos of them coming over the finish line just shitting themselves yes yeah just shitting and pissing themselves it's all i consider marathons in my head just like yeah that's the event where you poop yourself at the end right i wait until it's basically over and then i can just see that that's the show yeah they can air that on tv yeah you can't get highlight

footage on the olympics they they don't let it anywhere that's true yeah it burns burns whipping spinners but also i feel like the whip needless whipping feels like it's it's happened already They don't let it anywhere. That's true. Yeah, it burns whipping Smithers, but also I feel like the whip, needless whipping, feels like it's happened already before in The Simpsons. Like, is the whip really necessary? It's like, how many times have we seen Smithers do that? You know, just be carrying him or be driving him. I can just, I'm sure I'm probably multiplying the actual amount of times, but that's just how rote it feels at this point.

Not to drill down too deep on this joke, but I think it would have been funnier if Smithers enjoyed it and just say, you know, just call me Fu Manchu, sir, and he takes off faster or something. I don't know. Sure. He enjoys the abuse. Yeah, it just felt rote.

Smithers shouldn't be complaining. He should be accepting it. Yeah, that's more Smithers. I will compliment the accuracy of the flash costume that uh that's comic book guys wearing very good it's all very accurate it's accurate to especially if you look at the belt lining of the lightning on it it is accurate to the then wally west costume that was wearing it it it's lightning that points down if it was a circle around belt that would be the barry allen costume the silver age flash so

and again a very 2001 joke only nerds care about superheroes now these movies are mandatory yes you must uh is it feeling like it's it's uh i don't know there's been a couple superhero movies now that came out that didn't feel the same i i wonder if covet i'm wondering if covet killed the superhero movies i'm wondering well i i've always been waiting for the turn because they can do a lot of stuff, even if an IP or a genre where all force-fed is starting to get old. They can switch over to TV, which they've clearly done with a lot of the IPs. That may be some version of the future. I remember when Solo bombed that Star Wars spinoff, they were like,

well, we're not doing the Boba Fett movie. We're going to make it a Boba Fett TV show. And then that turned into the mandolin. And then the other sort of way you can think about it is that there's just diminishing returns. And I just don't think you can replicate another decade of the baseline charisma of Robert Downey Jr. plus then a stable of other actors. you can't just do that again.

Studios like to think you can just do that again, but you will have to change things. And it seems like so many things, a bubble where they fucking roll out those timetables, you know, those timelines, honestly, kind of like how Rumsfeld used to roll out the Iraq plans in Congress. And he's like, don't worry, we have a five year plan here. And, you know, everyone wants everyone, you know, as anti socialist as America is, everyone loves a five year plan when it because it makes you feel like you're being taken care of. It makes you feel like there is someone looking out for you. And since no one is doing that materially, you know, we everyone gets a psychic

wage from seeing like, oh, no, but they've planned at least 10 years ahead with these marvel movies like people are thinking of my needs and what what i'm gonna get it's all gonna be okay but of course none of its material and it's probably it's probably fictional too not fic not that planning is fictional but that the marvel plan is fictional because i it's all reliant on that movie magic you know on on that level of like charisma and risk and i've this i'm kind of waiting to see when when it implodes because it can't they can't just replicate it you know and so on the dvd there are three deleted scenes here uh after after homer's funny morph between looking like abe and himself i compliment steven dean more in his animation team

i think they did a good job with that joke. So there's three deleted scenes. I think almost all the deleted scenes are from the marathon part, which totally makes sense because you're not going to cut the boy band stuff as much. And these are all good cuts. One is Homer's internal organs talking to each other about how they're in horrible pain. Then there's a joke of Homer getting to the end of the race and being dragged off by hyenas. There's a joke about how there's a guy from Australia and a guy from Djibouti.

We see them later, right? Yes. And you may be thinking, like, boy, they just left Djibouti hanging there. Well, in the lead scenes, they didn't. They had the most obvious joke that they definitely rightly cut. Disco Stu shows up and he says, somebody say shake jabooty and uh at the very least lisa then says no they said jabooty a country oh okay sorry i have your inner ear damage and he walks away but i'm glad they cut that yeah sensible cuts all around this is making it worse i'm showing you the worst

so hey the fact that they cut it it shows some level of taste on their part like oh that joke sucks i'm trying to get that from it but i'm just getting more depressed anyway it's just sad but hey disparaging the italian race we're all for that right yes on this podcast so bart shows up at the end of the race basically in a Chico Marx costume and an Italian wins. Two weary warriors now burning with pain and exhaustion. But only one will win the grand prize. A walking tour of Springfield.

That tour is mine. Well, hold the phone, Dora. a new challenger has emerged out of nowhere he's running on sheer pluck moxie and grit all of which you'll be tested for after the race folks our winner seems to be from it. I love you all. I use up all of my English. Nancy's bad Italian accent made me laugh. I like that. I like that he has a giant, ridiculous mustache that is instantly

pulled off by a bird that reveals the lie. The most I laugh at these are them shoving in your face like, we don't care. This is a dumb plot yeah we're not interested in this i kind of forgot how they got to lt smash from here and then he just kind of shows up i i will tell you before watching this episode again i had forgotten everything about

the marathon me too i did not remember the marathon stuff as related to the NSYNC stuff i completely forgot it because it I mean it doesn't really work you know why does Bart cheating in the race qualify him to be in a boy band lieutenant or sorry LT smash says it's because he's a rep yeah says it's because he's a rebel but Bart doesn't do anything for the rest of the episode as a boy band rebel type when he's in the boy band. Really, he just does. They all do the same thing. It's just so clear that this is an excuse to get us to the boy band, to get us to NSYNC cameo, to get the episode done.

You know, cut print. It's just about a lot of handoffs from one point to another. Like, well, we got to. OK, we got to fill five minutes. Well, they can watch a minute of stuff of Olympics on the TV. And we gotta fill five minutes well they can watch a minute of stuff of olympics on the tv and we got about four minutes of the race we have to assume lt smash was at this marathon thinking if a boy sabotages this why is he at the marathon scouting at the marathon oh man i how we use electricity can be smarter, cleaner and greener.

At Electric Ireland, we can help guide you there. You see, our new Net Zero Hub has all you need to know about smart meter plans, EV tariffs, solar panels and much more. Making your usage clearer, your trips greener, your home cozier and your world brighter find our net zero hope at electricireland.ie also now to these jokes about they do a slight they do like one little stranger danger joke but the joke of a man uh picking up art in his car it feels it's not it's more uncomfortable now the more you know about the many um horrific actions done by music producers in the world which which were also like known at the time in

the 90s like there were tell-alls about the music producers of the 50s 60s and 70s who also did these things but i don't remember is it is it like a gag where there's a there's a joke about how he's getting picked up by a producer or is i don't even remember there being a joke it's like a stranger versus mob he picks a stranger yes yes yeah yeah i i do think it's accurate that mo would be the one to propose murdering a child like he would be the one like yeah let's kill this kid yeah which he knows is not just a kid he knows bart and he's like yeah kill bart we're gonna kill him right now beat him to death uh on on the steps of city hall we're gonna beat

the child to death with our shoes yeah with their shoes they're gonna trample him yeah it's but yes bart runs away he gets in a car that's where there's another just the the opening line bit i do like him says him saying well it says here you're lt smash the time has come i'm lt smash yeah that's not bad then some very corny jokes about 2000 core kind of like slang of chilling in cribs i didn't like that in general the episode we're jumping ahead a bit but writing it so that in sync are using slang like g money and kick it old school is just so obviously embarrassing it's like what old people old people in 2001 think that all young pop stars talk like it feels like a funky grandma humor where it's just like isn't it funny how these these characters are saying these things they

never say homer shouldn't say chill in the crib yeah but but also like in sync as a as a band that they're tapping into that people recognize as a as public figures they didn't say g money and i'm kicking it old school when they like showed up on mtv did they or did they did they talk like that i don't know no actually uh justin timber like protested about having to say word so they just put it in his character's mouth a bunch of times as a joke. It's just sort of, I don't know what it's trying to do other than, again, an old man idea of that young people all talk like the hippity hop. Though there's a couple of good lines in this propositioning of Bart to join a boy band saying like, there's a place in it for Bart. My Bart? Like, that's a good, saying like there's a place in it for bart my bart like that's a good i like

that line as like homer's like we're not signing anything unless it's a contract like that's good that's good there's these uh brendan you may have noticed when we talk about these uh late episodes we've like we we want we're panning for gold we're like oh that's a good lie there's a good lie and a lot of them that i noticed i i won good lie there's a good lie and a lot and a lot of them that i noticed i i won't lie and say i was i was really laughing through most of it but again this is you're dealing with you know a fresh fresh faced fan but but uh it tends to be i i think the throwaway lines that are funny it's it's not for me it was not usually anything related to the thing that's really supposed to be the main funny part of the show it's just their instinctual sort of vocabulary

in the simpsons of what homer might say off you know about one little detail you know that's a funny reaction or that's a funny thing to throw away but uh so you can get some something out of those moments i think i i also i i remember you, one feeling like I was kind of tired of the job. I had heard so many jokes about like, didn't you ever notice every boy band has to have guys in certain like types? I was like, yeah. How Bart's the rebel? I was like, yes, I heard. I heard that joke on South Park.

I heard it on multiple MTV sketches. There was an entire MTV movie about making a fake boy band. Right. It was a two-gether. Two-gether. And Chris Farley's brother was in it. Yeah, yes. Chris Farley's brother.

Yeah, they cast one actor because he was a sickly young man and he passed away during the making of the series. It was, there's a lot of, yeah. So, but the point is, I was very tired of jokes about like, Bart's the rebel and this guy's the, this guy. I was like, yeah, yeah, I get it. Boy band jokes. It's like, it's the same deal. It worked better. But when they did their behind the music episode, I was like, every show did behind the music.

SNL did 800 behind the musics before you were behind the music episode. It might have even been funnier if they just, again, just did the opposite. And they have, you know, Ralph is the and they have you know uh ralph is the bad boy you know whatever just like put the wrong people in the wrong role something new about it but they just go uh bart's the rebel nelson's the tough guy millhouse is the sensitive or whatever they do like it just conforms you've already finished the joke in your head because it's so predictable and then i think you know more disappointingly for the rest of the episode they they don't they don't use any of that like nelson is not yes he's out of character the

entire episode there are zero jokes using nelson's personality uh if he were in a boy band he could have been any student it could have been fucking peter griffin who cares like at that point it doesn't matter you know yeah i guess i guess the joke is that Nelson and Milhouse are way out of character, but then you lose the character that we love about them. I think the one Milhouse line that we get is no one said they'd be boasting. Yes.

But that's basically it. And yeah, you're totally right about that. Ralph does say Ralph-like things, but even he's muted a little bit. And that's just all he does at this point is a character. So, yeah. Though, yeah. So when it comes back from the break,

after they sign the contract, Bart meets the rest of the party posse. And my favorite stuff in this clip is Bart pointing out how badly this is written. Why would it be his classmates there? I want you to meet and greet the other members of the party posse. He's smart. He's soulful.

He's millhouse. What up G money next? He'll break your nose, your glasses, Boy Nudo makes I'm going to make you stars. Boy Nudo makes me uncomfortable, especially because it is then followed by a very gay stereotype telling boys to be hot and grab their crotches. And like the bit of him later of him being very turned on by the kids. I was like, I don't like this. Did you recognize him henry uh well yeah it's the he was already used before wasn't he in lisa the beauty queen that's right he was the guy uh very huffy about the dance steps like it's step pivot turn i i looked up uh reactions to the episode at the time just kind of cursory glance uh one critic called that the

funniest part of the episode was that character i was like that's like five seconds of the episode and it's not funny how what was wrong with people because these are people reviewing it at the time and there was like that was such a classic moment from that episode yeah i uh well i mean it was a lot more homophobic back then too you know yeah it's uh and the foxy bs bob you are also right in lisa beauty queen this exact same joke was in it except it was with the girls instead of the boys that was the one that they even just reused i i wonder if the animators are like hey this is the same joke let's just why did let's not design a new guy let's just get the same bob fossey guy we've got

a guy i mean homophobia was popular in 2001 and electric boogaloo jokes were still fresh still very fresh still fresh boogaloo colon electric yeah that's cute that's all right but uh but yes the kids are given their first song and uh this is when they have to deal with the fact that children can't sing okay toads a fly and your threads are dope. All that's left is the singing. Party Posse, we rule the earth. The greatest band since music's birth. Isn't this song a little boastful? No one told me there was gonna be boasting.

Just take it from the top. Party Posse, we rule the earth. The greatest band since music's birth. Mmm. Thank you, NASA. The greatest band since... Music's birth! Thank you, NASA. We love to sweat and we love to sing We're real funky but not threatening We're the best band in the world

But we'd give it all up for that special girl You're my special girl So, yeah, for a long time, I thought that was NSYNC doing the singing, but it's not. It's the defunct boy band Natural, who were also represented by Lou Pearlman at the time. And my major issue with this episode is that the songs aren't funny. They're not heightened enough. These could all just be boy band songs because so many of these boy band songs of the era are just like one tortured metaphor. And they're like 5% heightened. It's not funny enough.

I have one note here because you guys are like, yeah, I write stuff down if something comes to you. I have one note written down. It is the songs are not funny. Yeah, they take up a lot of space. Yeah, no, I completely agree with you that it's just verging on very, very light parody that, again, at the time there was a cheekiness about some of the self-awareness, you know, whether it be in videos or in the song lyrics themselves.

So if you're not even approaching the level of satire that the bands themselves are doing at the time, it's just it's just not going to work as a device. Yeah. NSYNC actually had more satiricalness in their own videos, making fun of how manufactured they were to a point. And yeah, the songs are written by uh tony bataglia uh who was hired because he did these sort of productions he wrote songs for like mandy moore apparently he was extremely prickly he was kind of an asshole to work with and on the commentary

tim long says he was just bossing around these natural guys he was like jerk one get in the booth except he didn't say jerk yeah i want to hope he said asshole and not the f slur i would hope but uh yeah he was a real uh prickly pair to work with but yeah i guess to hope he said asshole and not the f slur i would hope but uh yeah he was a real uh prickly pear to work with but yeah i guess they told him like write boy band songs with some instruction but he just wrote kind of straightforward songs that also feels like a dereliction of duty by the simpsons writers like you write the songs like you write the lyrics why aren't they funny yeah it felt i mean i i've never met tim long it felt a bit half-assed because he said at the table read, there were no songs.

So this was a bad table read because it was just like, all right, Nancy, make something up, make something up funny, and then we'll eventually hire a guy to write some songs. So all they knew was like, let's get NSYNC. And that was the driving force of this episode. There was no other intent there in the beginning. Yeah, and that sort of become, even though it's not NSYNC, I was wondering it didn't sound like in sync though i'm not an aficionado i've just some somehow sensed it wasn't probably them what you just described that's when it becomes clear in the episode and my like the grinch heart went down a size again as that happened i was just like i'm even more contemptuous of this now because as you're pointing, I agree with you guys that the parts that still are funny in the in this zone of the Simpsons are when they are telegraphing to you.

This is all pointless. We don't care. And we are aware of it. But at a certain point, you got to say, well, then I don't have to fucking have anything less than contempt for this either. If you just have contempt for this, then, you know, what is the audience supposed to do? Where does that leave the audience, you know? It's a dangerous thing to tell the audience you don't care. Like that. Yeah. It's a real gamble.

The Naturals' job was to sound like NSYNC. The Pearlman factory was to train boys to all sound the same way. And that Tony Battaglialia guy apparently he was doing bart the other four three kids were were the members of natural and bart was tony uh and yeah it sounds like he wasn't the nicest guy but i i like to go back what i said before drop the bomb that spelling bee song that enlists my heart those could all just be songs like how is that more ridiculous than britney spears like i am my heart or email my soul or whatever the hell she was running at the time like how are they any different yeah i guess i guess the visual is going along and we'll get

to it i suppose but the drop the bomb visuals are are gags you know yeah even if the song if the song itself is really not lyrically coming up with jokes but and uh the voice enhancer also teaches them choreography somehow but uh but yeah so uh this is a joke about autotune uh in 1998 shares believe uh mainstreamed it and made it famous and then it's just in everything now in ways often you don't notice i looked up because you know he says thank you nasa i was like well who did invent autotune and uh i really should have seen this coming but it's related to big oil really yes the cnn did an interview in 2015 with the creator of autotune the program uh and he was a scientist who worked for big oil companies at the time he was working for halliburton and halliburton was looking for a way to apparently if you can measure sound better you can tell the depth of a well for oil so he made

this this sound leveling program and then he found out as a side thing to helping halliburton make way more profits on oil he also is like oh this could like you know make voices sound different there was that is fascinating i did not know that you guys really i i realize you stumbled into that one but this could not have been a more perfect episode to uh cross cross pollinate i i couldn't believe that halliburton literally it came up organically in my research yeah it felt like there was like a two or three year period at the beginning of the last decade in the 2010s where everything it was like an auto-tune joke let's let's auto-tune this i think i think we're over that now aren't we yeah the what was it auto-tune the news the news right that's a very viral hit that was my favorite uh now we slow down then you slow jam it with uh

brian williams now we make it good news now the news is good bob we get some good news but yeah the the are they seeing so many songs that's also what i forgot it's like oh there's like five original songs in this episode which when you're thinking about it from a writer's standpoint of well that's some filler if you can just fill out like of the 50 pages you need 10 of them are and then this song and then that song like it yeah algin and mike reese said they love songs because they're never cut and they take up so much space that you don't have to write yep so they always are nice sure and and there's something to that you know they're they're working but but i didn't uh watch this episode but recently there

was one you guys talked about maybe it wasn't so recent where smithers has a little musical about malibu stacy right and i i you played the clip i i thought it was funny like it was it was in character for smithers it wasn't the funniest uh you know musical interlude they ever did but there was some there was something there that i thought okay yeah that that's cute and as you guys said i almost wanted more. I wanted more of that musical. Whereas in this episode, it's just, you're so primed to expect musical interludes in The Simpsons to be as clever as the jokes

and as the rest of the stuff. And they really were just filler here. This is not the Planet of the Apes musical. We only needed one song. It's not even I'm checking in. No. Also, you know, Skinner has a good joke of dealing with Are You Ready to Rock, and they do it a second time in the next act.

It's crazy. I was going to say. Oh, do they? Yeah. When LT Smash just alienates everyone by turning into a drill sergeant almost. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, you're so right.

He does that. I forgot as I was watching it that was going to be my little line in the beginning was i'm adequately prepared to rock which that's that's a classic skinnerism i i love the stuff with skinner i wish it came back the stuff where he's actually very supportive but everyone thinks he isn't he's like no this was my idea i made orange drink and you're the guy that was the that was the line i laughed hardest at in the episode i love skinner saying orange drink uh it's so good. Yes, Skinner, I have a quick clip here.

Skinner, very supportive of the group. And now, are you adequately prepared to rock? Silence. Here they are, the Party Posse. Hello, Springfield.

Now here's a song that your principal Skinner doesn't want us to play. That's not true. This assembly was my idea. I like your brand of inoffensive pop rock. Screw you, man. We're going to play it anyway. I love his little sad walk away too yeah it's it's approaching a fun little gag

I mean but I love Skinner's so good it's hard to go wrong with the Skinner being square scene so they they were getting there there I saw you last night at the spelling bee I knew right then that it was L-U-V

I gotta spell out what you mean to me Cause I can no longer be A silent G I've got a spell I've got a spell I've got a spell Of what you mean to me Man, they're gonna be big.

And you stood in their way. No, I didn't. I even came in early and made orange drink. Orange drink? What, do you live with your mama she lives with me and there's a rather corny joke they copped you on the commentary of like yes yeah the the ralph having a deep bass voice is a very standard joke and like oh you wouldn't expect that to be his voice kind of i say not deep enough yeah it's not funny enough it's probably as deep as that guy from natural could get but i i make

it crash the you know the sound barrier you know make it something a little bit more we need a little bit more it's the simpsons you got to go further i suppose as far as comedic lyrics go saying i saw you at the spelling bee and i knew it was luv misspelling the word love like that's you know that counts as a joke that's a joke sure but i could also see that in a real boy band song them being playful in their lyrics oh yeah yeah i'm doing i'm doing the rock gif where he's going you know like look get a load of this i mean i i i'm sorry maybe i'm the to use another phrase there i'm i'm the heel here because you guys are trying to find the good stuff i didn't necessarily know i was supposed to do

that so no it's fine no no it's fine i'm the negative nancy but i am i am trying here we like differing opinions i do love skinner's response of like if you live with your mother she lives with me that's funny that's that's a cute line uh and then we get our big old guest stars here and i actually really ended up liking so the simpsons the parody is gasp it's guest star and that's what millhouse says but he says it twice in this episode the exact same way when they show up the second time so i it works as a joke for me. Yeah, and in case you're wondering, the little musical sting that happens when they appear

is from their song Space Cowboy featuring Lisa Left Eye Lopez, R.I.P. So it's from their music. But yes, let's give a listen to our big-time guest stars. It's NSYNC! Word. What brings you to Springfield? We saw your band formation notice in the paper. Really? You saw our BFN?

I can't believe I'm eating Milhouse. Word. So anyway, we brought you this wicked gift basket. Stubble glitter, a crowd taser. Crowd taser? Yeah, it's perfect for getting through the fans to your limousine oh yo dudes we gotta go our clothes are getting a little out of date to the bandana republic word now we gotta send them a basket you know what, Brendan? You're not alone in groaning

because they had several visitors during this recording with NSYNC because everybody wanted to see them. And one of them was Tom Hanks. He was doing Looping for Castaway nearby and he groaned at the BFN joke. He's like, really, BFN? But they could not get him on mic for some reason.

Yeah, took him another seven years to get him in the Simpsons movie. Yeah. For some reason, Tom Hanks wanted to see NSYNC. Meet those boys. Yeah. When Tom Hanks is the arbiter of edge in comedy, bad boy Tom Hanks wants them to go further. Yeah.

That is funny. Okay. As a joke about how there's absolutely no reason in sync would ever want to meet them after their first show to have them say like yeah we saw your band formation notice in the newspaper that's why like sure and then yeah i i like how inside part is of just saying like oh i gotta send them a basket now like that's just hollywood hollywood stuff but i that's that's that that's funnier than again see that's what I meant before about that's the one moment in the episode maybe or one of a couple where you'd expect it to be

more about the boys dealing with being in a boy band uh and having to deal with fame or or quote unquote women and the press and all the things that would go along with parodying that genre and and what your characters and your sitcom would do if they were there but like so many episodes i guess when you hit this point because the show has already done stuff like that bart gets famous millhouse in radioactive man uh the homers barbershop quartet you know that's just been done so they're like well why would we do a bunch of jokes about what it's like for these characters to suddenly be in a band we've already done it and so you just have a bard and nelson and millhouse these great characters kind of just

become non-characters for the i guess george meyer inspired brainwashing plot to be the actual episode yes um and you know that, that leads to my constant refrain, which is, what's the point? What's the point of this? You know, if they're going to be a boy band, let me see them be a boy band. A lot of it feels inauthentic, especially their parody of MTV in this next scene,

where I feel like the last time you guys watched MTV was 1987 because they were not doing this in 2001. There was not a VJ throwing the videos at best there was total request live yeah and that should have been your parody that was like you said henry the battleground yeah of this era and like carson daly wouldn't say yes to it and if you couldn't get him you can get dave holmes like dave holmes would do it well on the word thing i do actually hearing all their behind the scenes stories about it i love every time timber lake says words because that's their middle finger to him yeah because in a very petty way they were

mad that he told them like they wrote this funny thing and he had uh he in the booth was like this isn't funny or i wouldn't say this and they're like then we're gonna make you say this seven times in the episode and then the funniest bit is that they on the commentary say he said this sounds like a thing i would never say then if you watch in the credits yes they edit his words to have him say this sounds like a thing i would say i was like simpson please stop that's that's amazingly petty and that's what i i love about yeah all the times word shows up in here they didn't know how how far a star would rise right they they picked the wrong member if they were going to pick on one member of them they they made a mistake if they want to keep

working in hollywood comedy to make fun of timberlake should have taken them swings at lance bass and just dude uh but they didn't know they if lance bass didn't have a character yet now he's the gay guy who wants to be an astronaut. Those are two comedy handles right there. Oh, sure. Well, if that was known then, this episode could have gone a lot differently. Yeah, I think gay astronaut could be 30 mad TV sketches, right? I'm sure it was.

It probably was. Now, I also... Without knowing about Lance Bass's ambitions whatsoever, they probably just did a sketch about a gay astronaut. Will Sasso was great as gay astronaut number three. Honestly, Will Sasso is the only reason to go back and watch that stuff. He is really funny as Steven Seagal. If you drop the soap in space, it floats, and that's the entire sketch.

You just cracked it. You cracked it. You know, now I feel extra. Obviously, all the endless homophobic jokes about boy bands back then uh age pretty poorly but especially for guys who actually were in the closet like lance bass i feel i feel extra bad for them having to put up with that shit but but hey they're very rich i it probably helped that to a degree and uh brendan is totally correct in that the songs aren't funny and the visuals are trying to lift the songs like with this drop the bomb song we have the entire video in this uh in this episode i feel like they add so many visual elements like i i feel like the

bouncing ralph head came in later because it's it's it's like just trying to sweeten it a little bit but it doesn't really fit the fiction of the song like in an n-sync video or a backstreet boys video they wouldn't have a follow the bouncing ball with a character's head yeah I mean they just want to really get in your face with it saying join the navy backwards on the screen too the uh well that vj also it's a returning vj scene in the kid rock spring break episode which is I'd say a worse episode than this that's Cienega the oh right That one is even more in your face about an annoying guest star. And it's about Homer acting incredibly out of character for the first act. I don't know.

Maybe this one's worse. But yes, there's a gag that's directed by Ang Lee. I will say this being seven months before 9-11 is pretty nuts. Or nine months. Nine months before 9-11. Well, here, I'll drop it in here. Mom, can't Bart get his massage somewhere else? Don't be selfish, Lisa.

Will you two shut up? I'm missing precious VJ prattle. Woo! That was the latest ad for Stridex Pats, medicated. Okay, coming at you, a world premiere video from Peace Squared. That's the parte passe. Woo! Yeah! All right! Rock! Woo!

Oh, say can you rock There's trouble in a far-off nation Time to get in love formation Your love's more deadly than Saddam That's why I gotta drop the bomb. Ponce, Ponce! Ponce, Ponce! I was watching this and I did chuckle a little bit at the drop the bomb thing because it is not totally unlike what would become the cultural messaging during the war on terror, where, you know, you have people from the place where bombing dancing and, and sort of saying, thank you for freeing me, basically. That's what the women dancing are doing. And that it would be filtered through into almost every genre. Obviously, country music is the gag everyone would go with. But whether or not it was in actual pop songs about going to war, there would be sort of like a nod at the end of the episode. There would be pop stars and celebrities of every stripe chiming in.

Someone on Twitter just uncovered these Disney Channel spots. Oh, yes. Yeah, I just saw that. I have not seen these. Of Lizzie McGuire and, well, Hilary Duff. Melissa Joan Hart. Yeah, of all saying, it's, you know, it's savvy propaganda. It's not unlike the sort of, let me start that over. It's savvy American propaganda. It's very warm and cuddly, and it's talking about your feelings and what it means.

But it's saying, we need to talk about 9-11 a lot. Everyone should still be talking about it. It's going to help you get through it. But there's an American flag plastered over everything as a way to say keep thinking about this and talking about it and saying we're all in it together against the 9-11 that maybe the people who did it maybe people who didn't even do it and it's on disney channel with these child stars so the drop the bomb music video in a way was it definitely taps into what's going to happen at 9-11 hadn't even happened yet so i kind of i kind of respected

some foresight there and thinking of where we were headed after 9-11 hearing them say like you're more dangerous than saddam it's like wow they yeah they're yeah yeah and also just the middle east area they're showing they're just this hodgepodge of cultures of just like yeah they're all the they're all the same in american eyes especially like when they blow up the guys and they uh then become like belly dancers it's like well now this is like indian like this isn't uh it's it's definitely i think probably self-aware in in that presentation of it and you know i don't subscribe to the idea like you know you have to constantly scream what you're trying to satirize or else you're playing into the people that, you know, you you're laughing at. I think that they clearly know this is what a propaganda music video would look like.

The whole point is that it's subliminally telling people to join the Navy. So it works in that regard. But the rest of the episode is rather toothless compared to that moment as far as a critique of the military industrial complex or whatever is being shoved in here, you know, to make the episode sing. I think that this was as sort of racy as they got in trying to say something provocative about American culture. How we use electricity can be smarter, cleaner, and greener. At Electric Ireland, we can help guide you there.

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world brighter. Find our Net Zero Hub at electricarland.ie. Well, and they're mocking Clinton's military, which is the wussy military that doesn't do enough. Yeah. And they thought Al Gore was probably going to be the president at this point as well. And even wussy or wuss. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. The Join the Navy singer, they don't name her, but they say she's also another of the uh of the orlando set it's so weird how they're just like you know orlando just like that is just their way of saying from the boy band factory it's a hotbed yes homer is loving the song yvonne etniage which uh if you were to play that backwards does not sound like join the navy like that's also it always kind of bugged me as a as a teen watching this like that's not what it sounds if you were to play join the navy backwards it doesn't sound like yvonne etniage that's what it would sound like if you tried to say the letters backwards if you read them on something it's all a big way to believe this is some kind of magical lisa does have a magical v8 vcr yeah that she actually does have reverse slow-mo with

audio yeah i'm okay with that now i'll defend this episode i don't i you know what they're trying to do it's okay by me it's a real zoom enhance of the simpsons world you know yes exactly another thing in this episode that i feel bad for the creatives on is that steven dean moore and his team were tasked with making like you know dance choreography is hard to animate and uh especially with more than one character having to do it so having to do it with four characters at once or when instinct dance is five like an entire audience doing the ball walk dance with the party posse they have to do this for like five different songs and a giant music video with huge war scenes like they were asked to do all this stuff pretty thanklessly even on the commentary they i feel like they steven dean moore's there but they're like ah chris kirkpatrick you're here

let's talk about in sync it's just like he's they worked really hard on this stuff i i feel bad for the animators yeah i do like the imagery of them erecting a tether ball of the Iwo Jima stand. That's fun. Sure. And yes, Lisa, though, doesn't trust it, and that's when she digs deep into this video. Eva, net, me, yes.

You gotta love that crazy chorus. What does it mean? It doesn't mean anything. It's like Ram-a-lam-a-ding-dong or give peace a chance. This party is happening It's no mirage So sing it again Even at the odds

Even at the odds Even at the odds Even if we are. Even if we are. Even if we are. There's something weird about this video. None of those girls has had three kids, I can tell you that. No, something else. That's what an adult says now about these things yeah that person's not yeah it's when you're old that's how you view any young person now but but yes lisa puts it in her vhs tape which uh she has a vcr tv in her room now i uh and she

plays it backwards hitting rewind plays the audio, which they totally copped to on the commentary. It's like, it's not how it works. Everybody with a VCR in their home knows it doesn't work this way. She would need like pro tools or something at this point in history. But Lisa learns the secret. Uncle Sam, let me play this backwards. Join the Navy. Join the Navy. they're recruiting people with subliminal messages otto what are you doing i don't know i just got an urge to join the navy you're being brainwashed

yeah probably he doesn't care uh so yeah auto that's a laugh yeah that's funny probably that's how you gotta live in america these days it's the only way you can like yeah probably i'm brainwashed what you gonna do and you know otto's dad famously an admiral he is not the admiral we see later that's true different character design completely but yes oh that's interesting when is his dad established to be an admiral i don't recall that in uh the auto early early season yeah season three uh they are like auto has to stay with the simpsons and uh they're asking why don't you stay with your parents he's like let's just say the admiral and i don't get along yes yeah okay and then he comes

back uh when auto gets married and we see him that's true yeah but in a deleted scene not not in the episode yeah lisa realizing it's you know navy the choice of the navy was interesting on their part i think because they were like oh that's not who you think of as being the most aggressive recruiters in america yeah not that they don't try to recruit but i well this at the time actually as a as a class of i was three months away from graduating high school when I saw this episode. And at that time, in a thing that should absolutely be illegal, in my advanced science classes, for real, Navy recruiters came to our class to say like, well, you know, science, we learn a lot of science in the Navy and we pay for it. I was like, at the time as a kid, I thought, well, that's weird. Or if I even thought it was weird i just let it go but now insane insane that they could do that i and i'm sure it's 10 times worse 20 years later yeah yeah i mean that's something that is um sort of interesting about the criticism or rather the the commentary the social commentary

that's being lodged here is the Navy. And again, yeah. Why the Navy in particular? I don't I don't really know. Maybe Meyer had some experience with the Navy was the the one he brushed up against or knew people that they're subliminally recruiting people. It's like, is it better when it's not subliminal? You know, like I don't know exactly what the message is. You know, obviously i i get it this is a show dedicated to overthinking these things oh yeah so if we're going to complain about the vhs going backwards which i still support i i i guess i i don't really understand if you think

about it for more than a second like other than it being a plot which is fine is there a criticism here really or is it just like kind of an action movie idea where they have a secret message we have to decode and that's kind of it because what the fuck is the difference if they do it subliminally or if they just come into your school it seems sort of worth they're directly telling you to do it which is exactly what happened you know if or through soft cultural influences like we discussed before to me like the message is the military is insecure about their place in the world and the lack of interest in what they do in recruitment. Because when I was, I graduated high school in the year 2000, and a lot of kids in my

school were like, oh, the army is the biggest scam. Boot camp sucks, but we're not doing anything anywhere. So after boot camp, which is awful, you're just set up for life. You get free college, you get all this money, all these benefits. They didn't know about 9-11, of course, all these kids who enlisted. But it was seen in the 90s like the army is the hugest scam. Yeah. Yeah, you're right.

You're right. I'm not appreciating enough how it is, I guess, maybe of that era where the perception was, I don't think it's totally rooted in reality, but the perception was all of this was going to get drawn down. And so they would need to resort. They're in a desperate position, which, you know, I mean, the American military being in a desperate position in 2000 is a little bit of a caricature itself, which is okay. But that makes more sense as to why this would be the evil plot.

You know, you play a great clip in one of the early episodes of season one a blowback of congressman bernie sanders saying like i'm sorry we've run out of enemies we can't there's nobody to fight we i'm so sorry like uh that that was the feel like that that was the far left feeling that i suppose or at least in far left in dc yeah yeah and and you know we were talking before colin powell he in an interview just said i'm running out of demons you know as america's chief chief military uh one of his one of america's chief military officers after the gulf war and he said i'm down to castro and north korea so he's being glib, of course,

but that is basically he's telegraphing the real thing, which is we need more monsters to go slay. We need something to demonize, even though it's almost every time it is a country that we've placed in a horrible position, obviously. And that was being felt definitely. So so Meyer, Meyer was probably savvy enough, actually, in saying that this is why they're resigning to this kind of thing and again I was pretty young at this point so even though I'm Mr. Smarty Pants doing my podcast about it I don't actually have a visceral memory or connection of being you know a military age male or near it at that time as he once designated the Iraqi boys yeah we covered this on our Talking

Futurama sister show, but there's an episode of Futurama that aired in the fall of 2000 where Bender and Fry enlist in the army to get a two cent discount on gum. And they have the same idea like there will never be a war. This is just a big scam to get discounts and benefits. War was declared. Yeah, war were declared for Bender

and Fry. The last reason I think on this is trying to get in like 2000 end of history brain here the joke is how you know how in the 70s and 80s they thought it was uh secret messages and music was devil worship well now the cut through the the satirization is no the secret message is the government is in your brain like this and this is real x files kind of territory yeah and for me the first two acts are not interesting but the third act is just like wasn't the first two acts weren't the first two acts boring and bad well here's a bunch of crazy bullshit and that's why my zoom background is the soldiers firing at the hippies

who are shooting evil daisies at them yes funny definitely a funny part yes now this uh the funniest scene in the episode is probably the incredibly long uh drawn out reveal of who lt smash really is like uh so lisa heads to classified records a great name for a navy front for a music company are they associated with star blitz productions i think it must be two different arms of okay maybe one's the marines and one's the navy i guess the uh man could you imagine if like the government had like fake corporations they used to set up stuff like that'd be pretty crazy i'm glad it's funny in this cartoon though though. But yes, Lisa confronts him. He says, do you have any idea how insane that sounds twice?

And then very slowly, his many Navy things are revealed. Lieutenant Smash. Yeah, that's right. Lieutenant LT Smash. A wig! But your pant legs! Oh, how could you soil the good name of Star Blitz

Promotions? Oh, come on, Lisa. We've always used pop stars to recruit people. Going back to Elvis. Then there was Sergeant Peppers, the Captain and Tennille, and the Kiss Army. But you have recruiting

ads on TV. Why do you need subliminal messages? It's a three-pronged attack. Subliminal, liminal, and superliminal. Superliminal? I'll show you. Hey, you! Join the Navy! Uh, yeah, alright. I'm in. Now that you know,

Lisa, I'm afraid i can't let you leave oh i don't know the superliminal joke might justify the entire episode for me because that's what stuck with me the word superliminal yeah and then it's just shouted it's just it's a little bit of a repeat of the auto moment you know window and he still looks out the window. But Lenny and Carl are naturally funny, and we have to laugh because they're the best. The Lenny and Carl moment also reminded me, like, oh, yeah, they didn't join the Naval Reserves with Homer, Barney, and Moe in that,

even though you think they would in that previous episode of joining the Navy. Also, isn't Lenny supposed to be a war hero in some reference? That right that's right maybe he's cross-pollinating in the military and he was a war hero somewhere else but yeah this is this is funny and uh the lt smash character i just sort of wish we had gotten more of him as this in the episode and less of him is like the stock boy band recruiter for so long it it makes sense now that his uh i his character design is weird in the first in the first and second act because you're like this

isn't what you would draw a manager of a boy band to look like like he's too buff oh you know he'd be more like the jeff goldblum uh character uh called uh selma you know sleazy entertainment guy but then when you find out that he is a naval officer a lieutenant you're like oh all right that and i my favorite line in the episode is the silliness already of removing the decal of a period that shows that he's actually a lieutenant not a man with the name lt and then he says that's right lieutenant lt smash so lt smash is his real name yes that's good uh that's great and also just to show how little they care about the plot lisa casually walks away from danger and but as far as plotting goes that also makes this very confused because the episode starts as homer does the marathon then it's bart joins a boy band then ever briefly it's lisa reveals a conspiracy and then after that it's like now lisa doesn't

care anymore people don't believe her and she walks away from it yeah it's a huge mess i will say though don't know why can't defend myself i laughed at the kiss army yeah i actually think it would have been funnier if it wasn't even the build-up of like elvis and then a joke and then it just should have been like the kiss army and then just that's the main time that they did propaganda with pop i don't know why kiss army just sounds funny to me it feels like that captain and tenille joke came in later because it sounds like hank forgot how to do the guy's voice yeah it's like a different room he's in and he's a different uh accent or something i don't know it just it struck me as like a later edition it's a punch-up but it should have been good that's that's that's the

worst one captain and to neil yeah yeah he's a captain it's like just do kiss army i did like sergeant peppers and uh john lennon has is not stabbing the the dummy with his bayonet he's got a little daisy on the end that is good that's good i didn't notice that uh so then in the next scene uh lisa after casually walking away the family is heading to the squid port mike scully love that squid port they they create the squid port in late season eight and then they keep going to the squid port in his years yeah and i'll tell you what i mean we we do uh we are obsessive we pay too much attention to the show but if you look at the squid port in the scene this is what happens when you don't give your background artist sign jokes because it's just like clay jars

and like just the most bland names for things one that says gifts one that says antiques yeah it's not yeah that again well but they didn't want to write lyrics they didn't want to write sign jokes they just let's get it out i i do like though l, Lisa. Homer trying to have fun with Lisa. We're like, gonna bite you. And she's like, you're a grown man. He's like, that hurt Homer's feelings in a realistic way. Even Marge is a jerk to Lisa. Yes. How dare Lisa have a problem with anything?

He's just like, fuck you, Lisa. Lisa doesn't even get the fun of saying, I told you so. She doesn't say another line after she says, an aircraft carrier, that subtle. Lisa never speaks again. Her investment in this story is over. That's sort of the treatment of Lisa in general around this period, too, from what I understand, right? Oh, yes. Actually, you know what?

I created the jingle for it here. May as well play it. May as well. Take that, Lisa's beliefs. Yeah. Actually, you know what? I created the jingle for it here. May as well play it. May as well. Take that, Lisa's beliefs. Right. Yes. Because because it's sort of it's an interesting evolution where she I'm sure this has been noted before. But in the in the 90s era, she she is not just a cosmic who just picks up vaguely liberal causes and is then insufferable about them you know there's a bit more heart to her character and why she does things and why she cares and then it feels as though she actually goes from being more i don't know of a free thinker or a radical for

for american standards to just being kind of an annoying liberal as well it seems as it goes on we've had at this point I don't know four years of South Park as a bad influence and of course you know all your end of history stuff where believing in anything is stupid you're just doing it to virtue signal I don't know if they used that term at the time but that's what they meant yeah it's cool not to care about anything

exactly although I will say I'm pretty much coming around the bend right right back to that now I'm planning on not caring maybe for the next couple years and then going back to caring. It's hard to care all the time. It's hard to care. It tires you out. At least you're a care lord, a lord of care.

And so, yes, the party posse sings another song. I'll drop in here. Good afternoon and welcome to the USSC, Spanker. Are you ready to tear it up? I can't hear you. Do you maggots want to see a show or not? I mean, here they are, the Party Posse! Party Posse!

Had a girl in every port From here to Barcelona But now I'm docked in Springfield And girl, I'm gonna phone ya I stormed a lot of beaches But you're the one that I missed. Let's get back together, girl. Let's reenlist.

Ow, hot, hot, hot. So sign me up for a hitch of love. Recruit my heart for sweet years of love. Everybody ball walk! Oh yeah! Looking good, guys. And double time! That's it.

Protect the country groovy dude burn down the barbershop i hate america uh all about signing back up and how they're to storm the beaches and let's re-enlist like it's you know it's not terrible of like it's a love song that also works is telling people to join the navy it's it's all right and and they take a lot of visuals out of the turn back time share video as well here which was all uh filmed on the uss missouri back in 1989 and it angered the navy they said no more music videos on our ships that's true yeah she was too sexy too sexy for the navy too damn sexy uh that's uh yeah there's i i do like uh my favorite bit in it is ralph uh parachuting in and then not moving from his baby seat and just it tips over and he just is singing all the same.

Is this where Lieutenant Smash is watching the fans do the militant dance and then he purrs, that's it, protect the country. That made me laugh. And then the vision he has, as you mentioned earlier, Bob, of the hippie attack that that that was that was that felt like like a a classic simpsons joke yeah it did feel very swartz weldery i don't know if you had any input on this script but the fact that the children morph into all like the same kind of soldier and they're fighting hippies but the hippies are on a giant mantis yes and not only are they firing daisies the daisies will kill you if they hit you

oh god and then they all and all the soldiers look like it reminded me of who's tommy like how how very arch all the uh army looks they look like you know 1940s uh marie uh army men yeah and they're the kill bot factory yeah and lt sm's comment on the fantasy is like they're getting less frequent sir oh god no i i just love well i love that his vision of hippies say like moon down the barber shops like oh you eat a minute that's great uh also that's like that's like the good part of an older left-leaning person on the staff you know coming up with jokes like the because it's a caricature and because they're you know they're also laughing at themselves of the counterculture that they were probably once a part of like that that that feels like a moment where it's singing a little bit it's less so it's so much more out of touch in the episode when you know in sync is saying um

that's radical man and you know we're supposed to believe that's like you know how people talk like that this is the the stronger side of uh of their instincts it does feel like a very george meyer scene oh 100 i mean this this there's that and the scene of lisa talking to him both feel like SNL sketches from his era. Like in a good way. I mean that complimentary not to be like SNL sucks. He wrote some funny sketches. I mean, this episode is not great.

The third act is very funny, and I love all the business with using a gun to push buttons and flip switches. That's all so good. I was going to say, that's a good gag repeatedly using a gun to do other things every time but yeah also if you want to look at an unnatural drawing of bart to do the ball walking dance bart's legs have to have joints that he never has like he has to have a clear knee distinction and and his legs are like twice as long as they're normally drawn i again felt for the animators

that like draw the four boys in the band and then a full crowd doing the ball walk together i think uh the director said they all had to like get on exercise balls to figure out how the dance works uh but yes this is when the plug is pulled on the party posse the hippie fantasy again? They're getting less frequent, sir. Excellent. Well, there's no easy way to say this. The new administration is shutting down Project Boy Band. Shutting it down? Permission to say that's crazy, sir.

You won't say it's crazy when you see next week's issue of Mad Magazine. Oh, dear God. When this satirical bombshell hits the stands tomorrow, your band will have as much recruiting power as a wax apple. I don't follow, sir. It's over, LT. Ha! Let's march all day and clean latrines all night.

Don't bust me down. Let's re-up tonight. Let's re-up tonight. Let's re-up tonight. Come on out of here. Why was Jimbo there in the first place? Yeah, that was confusing. But yeah, the idea of Mad Magazine being spoofed as such a threat is very funny especially because even in 2001 mad was very irrelevant i mean only in recent years did they shut down and just become a magazine that publishes old material

but nobody was talking about mad magazine and apparently it was going to be cracked but they felt that cracked was too obscure and i say you should have went with cracked even though i like the mad stuff in this it would have paid off i i i like the gags about Mad Magazine, although I have to say maybe little did they know, or perhaps they did, that is basically now kind of a joke about what the Simpsons are. Yeah. So actually I have a 10-second clip here. This Mad Magazine writer's room does feel like them clowning on themselves.

Yes. Yes. Why don't we call it everybody hates raymond well we stayed up all night but it was worth it we can't let lt blow up mad tina brown was just starting to turn it around yeah and in case you were wondering the actual parody they did was an issue 372 called everybody loathes raymond oh my a funnier title probably didn't land with everybody but uh the tina brown joke oh all right funny to me let's talk about it that joke was courtesy of mike reese by the way they called him out on the commentary that's good so uh yes tina brown uh at the time uh she was a big name editor in the world of new york publishing she had done a

very big stint on vanity fair then the new yorker and at this time she had very publicly left the new yorker and the joke here is that tina brown left the new yorker to run mad magazine like that once a new york institution right yeah yeah but but the actual real thing is even worse that she left to watch the publication talk with harvey weinstein it was miramax and i was like we're gonna get in the publishing world too we'll be just as dominant there in the in new york as we were uh with all of our films and uh yes so tina brown ran talk magazine the very first issue interview with hillary rodham clinton it's the axis of evil right there if you want one no but uh yeah yeah and also later on i mean you know i'm someone who i don't know what i am now i

don't know if i'm a full-time journalist now but i used to be in 2013. I briefly worked at the Daily Beast because the time. And then he went independent and left the Daily Beast. But at the time, Tina Brown was running that place into the grant was running Newsweek and the Daily Beast, which had merged into the ground. So this began at the time. This is a joke about how Tina Brown is known for steering these, you know, very prestigious and glossy examples of American media. But actually, it is actually still funny because it's a joke about how she's just about to turn this place around. She went on to found a bunch of bullshit that never worked and was actively, you know, just like trashy journalism that no one wanted. So, you know, so then as an intern, you were probably dusting a lot of calipers back then.

I, you know, I stole one for myself just as a little souvenir you have to have those memories but uh yeah i mean honestly i i don't have a ton i tweeted one time something spicy about something uh he said that if people want to go look up they can but mostly i mean it was a very normal job i wasn't like at his place give getting him coffee and helping him do his blog we saw him every now and again it was more just like working at a yet another website doing little blog posts i mean his hiring by tina brown is definitely a very tina brownie move which is just like a very expensive guy who mattered in the 90s and mattered less in the on the internet age though yeah he did great work in the 90s oh yes

yeah but yeah uh yeah no i mean it was just a club of her favorite people to bring on and if somehow it didn't work out but yeah that's that's a joke that's aged and then aged back into being kind of uh it makes sense so so when she was running talks she was working with all the greatest people she helped rudy giuliani and barry diller and madeline albright uh and and also the most recent times you'd see Tina Brown interviewed in the last couple of years are being asked about like, hey, you're in pictures with Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein or Harvey Weinstein. She's like, yeah, but I didn't like them at those parties or I like that. Mainly that's what she is known for these days, which I mean, I don't know if you were that high up in the world of New York publishing, you probably went to 800 parties with Jeffrey Epstein.

Like that was, he was, he was an important philanthropist then. So yeah, that's the, there's the Tina Brown explanation. I didn't know. Tina Brown corner. Yeah. I also, I do really love the line of the Admiral saying, excellent, to him saying, they're happening less frequently now. Excellent.

Also, the bit of the Mad Magazine, me and Bob did get to tour the latter day Mad Magazine area. When it moved to Burbank, we got to see their offices. When it was part of DC in 2018. Apparently, again, the magazine still exists uh they do have new covers but it's i think it's mostly old material they put out now but our but our pal ellie gertz she uh she gave us a tour there when she worked at that place that was very nice but yeah these these mad magazine jokes like that's it's good that the gag is mad magazine

which spoofs everything is treated as like the end of the world here. And it must be stopped. They have their own building in New York. Yes. I also like, jumping ahead a second maybe, but I like when it is hit that they're on the ground getting up and one of them goes, I actually feel better. Yes. In my notes I wrote, just like on 9-11, everyone lived. Everyone lived.

Everyone was fine. Well, I mean, that's another interesting thing about the end of this episode. It's insane. in my notes i wrote just like on 9-11 everyone lived everyone lived yeah it's fine well i mean that's another interesting thing about the end of this episode you know it's it's insane i mean okay so they go to new york city yeah there's a great joke of millhouse saying the statue of liberty where are we that's another good one and it's revealed homer was in the bathroom just so he can be around for maybe two jokes i guess yeah. Yeah, yeah. Why is he there? I was like actively, wait, why is Homer here? I guess it's because he needs to be. How we use electricity can be smarter, cleaner, and greener.

At Electric Ireland, we can help guide you there. You see, our new Net Zero Hub has all you need to know about smart meter plans, EV tariffs, solar panels, and much more. Making your usage clearer, your trips greener, your home cozier, and your world brighter. Find our Net Zero Hub at electricireland.ie. I mean, a lot of the tone of these episodes is nobody cares what's happening, ander is just like sunbathing by the end of this episode yeah i i love bart saying like he's gone crazy and homer looks up at lt smash like yeah that's the look i i laughed at that too yeah uh so then the episode also in a very george marie way teases that it's going to be about them writing the perfect slow jam that

will relax a crazy person and it's teasing that NSYNC is going to sing a song which they do not do in this episode I did laugh at the idea we heard your problem and they were on a speedboat far away yeah that's and how Justin Timberlake says can the chit-chat millhouse yes yeah and also kind of like jokes that like the gun one from before with the gun using being used to do everything but shoot somebody yeah you know those jokes and and then the boat the boat we heard you they were on a boat far away they feel almost like naked gun jokes to me oh yeah like zaz jokes well here this the second appearance of in sync i have in this clip note again that millhouse says the exact thing he says when they appear the first time. Radical! Awesome! I can't read! I can't sing without dancing!

Fine. Thrust, spin, turn. Pivot, pout, jiggy. Jiggy, robot, do-si-do. And close with a matrix. Oh! Nobody pouts going into a jiggy. Yeah, that's stupid.

I wanna twirl! Aw, come on, guys. we've only got a few minutes i remember uh watching this at the age of 18 and being genuinely shocked they actually blew up the building they actually bombed new york city in the episode i was shot that as a shock moment of park going like guys we have to focus and the missiles just fire as he's talking. If you're going to do a joke about how this plot is meaningless and doesn't matter, then that's a good way to do it. And then he's like escorted away by an Irish cop from the 30s. Sure you did.

It's Sergeant O'Hara from the Batman 1966 series. Like, yeah. But yes, in February of 2001, they explode a skyscraper in the middle of Manhattan and everyone's fine. They mentioned that it was taken out of syndication for a time right after. Was Homer vs. New York also taken out because of the Twin Towers? Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I remember when I got the DVDs, I thought, like, wow, I can finally see this episode on the DVDs again because they took it out of the rotation for the longest time. And you may have grown at the Matrix joke, but we were months away from the best Matrix reference in Shrek. Oh, yes. It was coming up. The exact same joke. Yeah. It's the same joke.

It's the same joke. Yeah. Writes itself. You know, I said you did shrek recently i don't know if i have it in me to re-watch that uh please don't please no yeah i won't i won't but this but i'm you're right i mean everyone was doing a matrix joke and it's just sad to see them also do a matrix joke and it's their second one in season 12 because they did it in lisa tree hugger as well bart does Matrix, the same hang in the air joke.

And there's a couch gag Matrix joke too. Oh, so it's a third. Like a couch gag, that's okay. It's, you know, the couch gags are very ephemeral and that's sort of their point, I guess. That's not as offensive to me, but it just kind of sums up what's coming, not just for the Simpsons, but for a lot of comedy in general is this is there's the joke about simpsons reference you know it's a show that's caked and all of that stuff but something about just pointing and going it's like that remember that you know that is that has been sort of um metastasized by by everything now and we were

talking about the marvel movies earlier and it earlier, and it's a similar strain. It's like a direct line of just, you know, probably from Shrek and whatever onward, where it's everyone's kind of doing this mild parody comedy. Everyone's doing a spoof, even in an action movie. That's just, it's the culture's becoming more and more homogenized, and there's more and more concentration of ownership. And so just seeing

this little gag in The Simpsons do it, it does kind of make me go, oh yeah, there's so much of that coming after 2000. And this is really nitpicky of me, but you know, here we are on this show. I had the same problem with the previous reference to The Matrix in that you have a TV budget. To ask a TV budget

to rotate five characters in the background is asking a lot which is why they rotate like 10 degrees before the little reference and so it doesn't really have communicate the matrix joke enough they don't have the money to do it there's no time in budget for it you could write matrix joke in your script but then someone actually has to draw it and it's very difficult and can you believe two decades later, Space Jam 2 just does this joke again, except with Granny from Looney Tunes. Have you seen it? Yes, I have.

I do it so Bob doesn't have to and others don't. I can just say, like, you don't need this. I mean, speaking of, like, funky grandma jokes, that movie is all like, Grandma's drinking martinis. Hachi machi. And also she just, she says when she wins some game or does a good thing, she goes like game blouses. It's like, yes,

we get it. The Chappelle show sketch. Is she going to hang a whole ass of Lollapalooza at the end of that movie or what? Yeah. Grandma's eating a Tide pod on Zoom. But, but yes,

as somehow after blowing up Mad Magazine magazine it's a happy ending for everyone in our final clip here everybody okay yeah i'm fine i actually feel better well boys the party posse is over but at least I saved you from a public spoofing. Oh, man, we could have been on the cover of Mad. They called me Smelson. Smelson, it's funny because you smell. Smelson, I could have thought of that. Sure you could have. Off you go now.

You know, we've had a lot of fun tonight at the expense of the U.S. Navy. But they're out there every day protecting us from Godzilla. And don't forget pirates. And jellyfish. Those whacking vertebrates will sting you old school. So check out the Navy for a two or a four year hitch. We signed JC up yesterday what no so uh the commentary on that little bit at the end mike scully says this came in late didn't it i take that for as him saying this sucks it's not very good how do you guys read that so well uh one i think jc Shazay did a good no.

I want to compliment first. Yeah. I think it is a parody of the, we had a lot of fun today, but kind of moral of the story things you'd see at the end, like G.I. Joe and He-Man. But Godzilla and pirates, I mean, it's just. No, it's easy. Yeah.

But what I think ends up being funny retroactively to me is that this was a joke that you'd have at the end of a show saying like, respect the troops, but that would be every show for like the next decade would actually be, Hey, we're having fun, but these guys do all these things. So we don't have to, whatever, like it, that was what TV, lots of comedies would do would actually do this like complimenting the troops at the end of the episode kind of thing yeah it it so when i was watching it i i couldn't tell i'm gonna rely on you guys and your judgment that it was not in february 2000 uh you know let's say george meyer is the one behind this the script and therefore the messaging

of of what's happening here it was not actually trying to do a little bit of a take back and not and not sincere at all, because I don't know if even in 2000, you know, we can talk about how there was a end of history vibe and all that. But it wasn't like, you know, you could be you could say whatever you wanted about the U.s military so i didn't i was wondering and i don't know if it was partially a hodgepodge of the criticism earlier in the episode of the or the the goofing on the navy and then sort of softening it at the end even though they say godzilla it's still saying don't actually hate the navy but then one of them gets dragged out because he's been enlisted in the navy so it sort of smooths it over a little bit.

And I don't know whether that is supposed to be further joking or a little bit sincere and earnest. Well, to me, it could have had more bite. But I think they are just underlining the idea that like, what does the Navy do? And the things they point out were protected from pirates, jellyfish and Godzilla, all kind of fictional dangers for Americans. So it could have been more savage but i think they're just underlining you think they're going to do the actually the navy's important thing you know what the simpsons would never do but they're they're doing the the parody of that but i don't think it's in savage enough which is why we're not really getting the message

up front yeah it's a little toothless i i could also see instincts handlers going like guys take it easy on the military you know know, we work out of Florida. It's a red state. They probably did some USO type bullshit at some point. I would bet. Speaking of which, Natural, the band that was doing all the singing in this episode, right after they did the singing for Party Posse, their next thing they were doing was a rally for George W. Bush in Florida in October of 2000. Nice. thing they were doing was a rally for george b bush in florida in october of 2000 nice well uh have you guys i know i know one of you is at least a rest a wrestling person did you ever see okay did you ever see noah and i showed it to some show we were on last year might have been

yeah but still they they brought up the wrestlemania in iraq uh it was like the wwf went to baghdad in 2003 yes and it is it is uh i mean the uso is one thing that was just like a quite an amazing spectacle of the you know you talk about trump and cheapening you know the the level of you know the gaudiness of our of our uh empire but i mean vince mcmahon dueling with santa claus who then takes off his hat and he's stone cold steve austin in baghdad as we're destroying it with people cheering there as well as back home i mean that's i don't think you can top that even with trump era stuff oh yeah hey look you're you're threatening to make me pitch a podcast to you right now but the the the military industrial complex meets wwe is one of the craziest post

9-11 things there is like they'd they definitely they always worked with jingoistic imagery like the hulk hogan defeated iraq via uh defeating sergeant slaughter in 1991. Right. He did that. But yes, the tribute to the troops era of shows where they'd either do them on active military bases in America or go to Baghdad or Afghanistan. They would do shows there for the troops and it was all just sucking off the troops kind of thing. And one of the interesting things behind the scenes was there were guys,

very short story, there's a pro wrestler named Rob Van Dam who is a very, like, hippified, smoke weed every day kind of dude who did not want to go. And they were told, you know, behind the scenes they said, hey, nobody has to go if they don't want to go. But he tells the story of, like, when he actually said, no, I'm not going to go, he was treated like crap the rest of the time like oh you hate america huh you don't want to get like that that's how it was just the force of it there like it's it also like

vince mcgann just is donald trump they're the same guy for sure like oh yeah oh definitely yeah i i just remember seeing that we we came across it somehow. And it's the most extreme version of that, like Nero or Caligula style sense of of of what our civilization is supposed to be. But but then, you know, to a lesser not to a lesser degree, probably to a more effective degree. There is a subtler but still pretty obvious role that pop stars and i'm sure in sync as well played post war on terror being declared i mean i was i was thinking of that with this music video with all this militaristic imagery in the episode i was thinking about how like michael bay got a start as a music video director and like the transformers films are just commercials for the army like they oh yeah yeah there's some're some of the most militaristic films in American history, which is really crazy.

I guess we talked about Marvel movies. We didn't actually talk about the military's involvement in them and how if you want to play with their toys, you have to be a pro-military movie. Even things like a nothing movie like Monster Hunter. The video game has nothing to do with the military at all. It's like a fictional fantasy world. But when you make you make the movie it's like what if the military fought these monsters well we can have these tanks and show you how cool the military is yeah yeah you you literally enter into a business relationship with the pentagon in order to get access to not only

tanks but even just information about what would make this a more accurate scene obviously the toys are the most enticing thing to the filmmakers. But, you know, I won't go on about it here. But if people are interested, we talk a bit about this in season one of Blowback with Matt Chrisman, actually. So we watch a bunch of Iraq war movies, stinkers, pretty much all of them. discuss a little bit of the system that goes on where it's a better version of censorship than waiting for something to come out and then banning it or trimming it because you just tell them, well, if you want to work on this, let's help you. And they do edit the scripts. They take stuff out. They alter stuff. Oftentimes they don't really need to because we're such a reflexively pro-military

country at this point. But that is the message. And it's usually not even pro-war. It doesn't have to be pro-war, just pro-military. And that's what made me think a little bit about that during the end of this episode. Yeah, I didn't know there was a Jarhead cinematic universe until that episode. Yeah, but anyway, it's a very, very...

There's plenty of information about it, actually, because it doesn't matter if we know about it. It happens anyway. There's something, you know, if's a very, very, there's plenty of information about it, actually, because it doesn't matter if we know about it. It happens anyway. There's something, you know, if you watch a Marvel movie, when you're waiting for the, you know, post-credits stinger and all that, watch those credits and look for where they think the Department of Defense, because it likely will show up. And now that it's been pointed out to me that every Marvel movie has a helicopter shot of at least six jeeps or hummer style vehicles driving somewhere i was like that is i watched black widow i was like ah there's the jeep shot there's the shot they have in every movie i i think uh every so often about after trump uh drone striked suleimani you know who was a obviously the whole conversation about him as a

figure in the middle east in general but in iran was you know, who was a obviously the whole conversation about him as a figure in the Middle East in general, but in Iran was, you know, close, close thing to get to a national hero. He's a general, much like we in America allowed our generals. Some political figure in Iran said, who would we hit? Who would we kill if we wanted to kill an American hero? Spongebob Squarepants. And then I think he listed some Marvel, I think he said Iron Man or SpongeBob as well. And that's the thing is that that is the outlet now to do this stuff. And if you're making Predator and you want to get some kind of, you know, cheeky relationship with the military so the guns are right, you know what? That's not, that is not going to be the deciding factor as

to whether or not all the evils of of this country are resolved i'll i'll take it but if you're making black widow after black widow after captain marvel after avengers and that's where all this stuff is going down it's uh it's it's pretty repulsive you know at the red carpet for captain marvel they didn't need to put it backwards or make it subliminal literal officersal officers of the Air Force were on the red carpet doing interviews like, hey, we're here for the Air Force. They're the real heroes, right?

Dragged to that by Will and Matt, because I had never seen a Marvel movie. I know I sound like a prick here, but I had never seen one. I didn't purposefully avoid them, but I saw that one, and you could see it coming like Christmas. They were doing a little

little pageant of, oh, are these the real villains or the are the people is this kind of like an Israel-Palestine thing in the or, you know, some kind of colonized people, the green that the Green Goblin people are actually turn out to be the good people that she needs to work with. But then just so it's clear, she dons the colors of the american flag and the like logo of the u.s air force to make it clear that we're always the ones on the side of those people and just don't i mean it's fine if you you know if that's what those movies are i guess but then you see people trying to turn them into documents of progressive blah blah blah and it's like just don't try to do that if you want to enjoy him

fine but don't try to turn that into something else you know uh but i mean we we could talk all day about i have one thing to say one non-intelligent thing to say not political commentary at all but this behind the scenes stuff i like how even on the dvds the the standard style of the fox credits from this era are preserved forever digitally yeah and uh the one thing i don't like about this behind the scenes thing where it's like about this behind the scenes thing where it's like we're all having fun together we're gonna make it look like justin timberlake was here i think half of this behind the scenes thing is chris kirkpatrick fucking around on this whistle and it's really annoying really annoying yeah oh yeah you don't get any good vibes off of

that that reel at the end really no it's i mean the point was to just show off again like that's right in sync was really here and this was really them. And now you can see live action NSYNC, all you NSYNC fans. They were here. Did they do this with U2 as well? I remember that the other behind the scenes was U2 maybe. Yes, they did do that. Yeah, though this was even weirder because they also at the bottom had to put a courtesy of the Fox Family Channel on there.

Because it seems like the Fox Family Channel did their own ad for it and then Simpsons had to ask for their footage like but yeah the trick of it is that Justin Timberlake was not there on the commentary first they say there was like a death in the family but then I think that sounded that so he couldn't schedule the same time as them but then Kirkpatrick makes a joke that Timberlake was already looking to get out of the band yeah wasn't doing stuff with them that day like so I think it's more likely the second there but yes they get one final just jab at him with the word word and making it sound like he said he would always say that word take that but yeah this episode my final thought is if you want to watch it just watch the third act it's a fun six. You don't need to know what happens before because it's kind of self-contained and a lot of funny jokes. But again, I wish the songs were funny.

It's not a great send up of boy bands or the culture. But the third act is just a fun series of ridiculous jokes that I do like and laugh a lot at. But yeah, that's my final thoughts on this one. You know, Josie and the Pussycats, the film came out two months after this. On the commentary, they talk about the funny similarities. But the writer, Tim Long, he says like, yeah, a couple years later was Josie. I was like, no, no, no. It was April 2001 and this was February 2001.

It was not, it was, you know, concurrent thinking and nobody ripped off the other. But that is a better execution of the artifice of pop music and the joke that it's a cover for just a government conspiracy like in that that movie i'm i'm serious it is actually good it is a really good movie and i i really enjoy that movie this episode as a vehicle for it couldn't be biting enough the songs aren't funny enough the best parts of this episode are when they don't give a single shit about the plot or any consistency and jokes of missiles being shot while bart is talking about the stakes lisa walking away from a dangerous thing all that stuff that's the best jokes in this episode any final thoughts brendan yeah i i would echo you bob that the third act is, I mean, I was sort of spoiled by the,

or rather I soured by the third act when I was watching it. So I didn't realize why my mood was slightly changing, but it actually was full of sort of older style gags, which again, to my purely academic education here of like what happened in seasons nine through 12 and onward is the Scully years were pretty heavy where people still would laugh at that aspect of the show. Whereas the plots and the character development all kind of takes a backseat and starts to fade and become less important or actively antagonizing the fans. And I definitely felt that watching this where just talking about it right now i'm like

yeah that's pretty funny the lieutenant smash character is funny when he actually reveals himself there's that fun uh george meyer uh vision that that that uh goes back into sort of um what if there were no lawyers joke it's kind of similar you know that that side of the episode was good and it's just it was an an interesting experience to, to take mostly my medicine, but with a little recognizable doses of sugar in there, you know, where you could tell that it's happening. And that's why I am finding myself listening to your guy's show.

Cause I am fascinated by the way the show changed. And I, I could say decline. I've probably already hinted that we all know that, but like, I'm interested in why, and I'm interested in the moments've probably already hinted that. We all know that. But like, I'm interested in why. And I'm interested in the moments you can detect certain things shifting.

So to finally watch one of these as a whole episode was an experience. Well, we will never stop because we can't. You can't stop. Yeah. Thank you, Brendan. That was very, we appreciate it. But yes, Brendan, thanks for being on the show.

We're honored to have you on. Please come back anytime you want. But until then, where can people listen to Blowback? And if there's anything else you're working on, like, or your Twitter account, please plug it here. Sure. People can listen to Blowback now wherever they get their podcasts, pretty much. It's no longer behind the Stitcher premium paywall. By the time you're listening to this, the second season is now totally free.

You can find it anywhere, just like the first season. There are some bonus episodes that will probably at this point still be behind the paywall, but they'll also come out. And the soundtrack has also just recently come out. I wrote and composed the music and it's somewhat of a big part of the show. So it's nice that people are interested in hearing it. And if you want to hear that, you can hear it on Spotify, Apple Music. If you want to go to band camp and pay a little bit for it, you can do that as well. But otherwise, you know, we're probably now going to go into hibernation again and see if we can come up with another season. Yeah, we're happy that everyone's still listening and the audience is getting a little bit bigger every time we come back. As MST3K fans, Bob and I really enjoyed your your bill corbett one oh yeah about cuba films that was that was a fun one i'm still a little starstruck when i'm with bill like he and

i are at this point i guess i can say we're friends but more than we had we've in my old show we have had bigger guests uh technically as far as the marquee you know uh prestige but no one has ever made me kind of double take that I'm actually talking to this voice that was pretty much the funniest thing to me in my childhood. And he's actually a guy on the other side of the room. Absolutely. But thank you again, Brendan. It's an honor. patron that includes our limited mini series the most recent one that we did was talking of the hill season two part one but coming very soon at the end of october is our new podcast mini series

blabbing about batman the animated series blabbing about btas but we're going to go over our 10 favorite episodes of that beloved animated series only for patrons of the five dollar level or higher at patreon.com slash talking simpsons and there is a ten dollar level as well when you sign up for that you get all the five dollar stuff but also access to one mega long podcast once a month only for patrons of that level or higher and what is that henry bob is talking about the what a cartoon movie podcast me and bob twice a month on the what a cartoon podcast cover a different animated series super in-depth for a whole lot of history and fun analysis then once a month we do that for an animated feature film sometimes over five hours long

about films as diverse as the disney renaissance classic hercules hunchback of notre dame or the lion king or more obscure stuff well you heard brendan mentioned our shrek one also we did the terrible film cool world coming soon road tell dorado and a jive back catalog over 160 hours of what a cartoon movies you get at that ten dollar level in addition to all of the five dollar stuff bob just talked about please consider checking out all the stuff we have at patreon.com slash talking simpsons so as for me i've been one of your hosts bob mackie check me out on twitter as at bob servo and my other podcast by the way is retronauts that is a classic gaming podcast about old video games find that wherever you find podcasts or go to patreon.com slash retronauts sign up there for

two full-length bonus episodes every month and henry how about you follow me on twitter at h-e-n-e-r-e-y-g at h-e-n-e-r-e-y-g keeps you up to date with all the things going on in the henry gilbert world you should also follow on twitter the official twitter account of this podcast at talk simpsons pod at talk simpsons pod following that we'll let you know whenever new podcasts go up on the Patreon, on the free feeds, and whenever we got a poll going on for upcoming stuff, news in our world. You stay up to date if you follow at TalkSimpsonsPod on Twitter. Thanks so much for joining us, folks. We'll see you next time for Season 2's Principal Charming, and we'll see you then.

Join the Navy. Join the Navy. Join the Navy. Join the Navy. It's NSYNC! I can't believe I'm eating Milhouse. Yeah, heard it old school. No! Bart was so cool.

A little short. He's about this tall. Don't print that. Word. That just sounds like something I would say.