Talking Simpsons - Talking Simpsons - Radio Bart With Matt McMuscles

Episode Date: November 9, 2022

Once more we're joined by the amazing Matt McMuscles (check out his YouTube channel and his Patreon!), this time for a tale of fraud and '90s birthdays. After Bart has a disappointing birthday party, he decides to fool the town in a lengthy parody to a Billy Wilder classic. We dig deep into all the timely references, the gameplay of Larry The Looter, the charm of local animatronics, the dangers of Mr. Microphone, if you can freeze a child in a well, and so much more in this week's Lincoln Squirrel of a podcast! Support this podcast and get dozens of bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! And please follow the official Twitter, @TalkSimpsonsPod!

This podcast is brought to you by patreon.com slash talking Simpsons. Head there to check out exclusive podcasts like Talking Futurama, Talking of the Hill, the What a Cartoon Movie podcast, and tons more. I heartily endorse this event or product. Ahoy, ahoy, everybody, and welcome to Talking Simpsons, the podcast that will be back to pick you up later. I'm your host, Senor Beaverati Stan Bob Mackie, and this is our chronological exploration of The Simpsons, who is here with me today, as always. Why, it's an old-fashioned podcast!

My car, it's been a while. And I'm Henry Gilbert. And who do we have on the line? I am the content creator that is not slender enough to fit down a well, Matt McMuscles. And this week's episode is Radio Bart. That's very righteous. Funky C, Funky D will be back to lip sync another one of their hits right after this. This week's episode originally aired on January 9th, 1992.

And as always, Henry will tell us what happened on this mythical day in real world history. Oh my god! Happy 1992, Bobby! George H.W. Bush vomits into the lap of Prime Minister Kichimi Yazawa in Japan. Hand That Rocks the Cradle is number one in the box office. And in a real sea change in American music scene, Nirvana's Nevermind is number one on the Billboard charts. Wow, the 90s have arrived. The grunge era is here.

You know, we went, everybody went, i've said this 800 times on the podcast but i must say it again they went into christmas time thinking that the big record was going to be michael jackson's black or white the that album dangerous but the story is that the kids got that for christmas then they traded it in at the at the record store on jan the start first week of january and they got nevermind instead and it rocketed to the store on the first week of January. And they got Nevermind instead. And it rocketed to the top of the box of the Billboard charts. And Sting's days are numbered, you know.

It wouldn't be soon before people just knew how he had sex. They wouldn't know about any of his movies or anything or his music. Just like, oh, yeah, it's a guy who has sex for a long period of time, right? He mainstreamed the idea of tantric sex. Yeah, that's all he was known for then, yeah. When I was a kid, I was so confused between Sting the wrestler and Sting the singer, I thought he was moonlighting both jobs. Yeah, I knew Sting the wrestler far better

than I knew Sting the singer. I think this was how I became, this episode is how I became aware of Sting the singer. Me too. We did not really have memes in 1992 as we know them now we had snl sketches but i just could imagine all of the vomiting bush memes we would have today it would be a golden era man like biden's just tripping downstairs he's not puking into people's laps yeah same you know trump will struggle like he'll shake on it he'll shake on the stairs or he'll

joke like i can lift a glass of water see but yeah we just don't get puke you know like literally puking on screen on an on the prime minister of japan of all people too not just anybody i believe it's because it was the 90s puke was in it was it was the slime decade ralphing. Puke is a form of slime, and 90s were the slime decade. Yeah, I believe the story was that Bush was, he had a cold, but he refused to not go to state dinner in Japan while visiting there. And as part of his cold, he passed out and puked on the prime minister. And man, that has to be the worst projectile ever appointed at a Japanese prime minister, right? Oh, no. Topical. Sorry, that's dark.

This is going live in three months. I think the world will have moved on. And yeah, Hand That Rocks the Cradle, the sexy nanny wants to kill the mom movie that the Simpsons would then parody a decade later. Right. It was as timely as their Indecent Proposal parody. That's right. Yes. Quite a start to the year of 1992 as this, the first Simpsons of 1992 aired. And joining us again is Matt McMuscles. I believe Matt was last here with us for Behind the Laughter.

Is that correct? Yes. Though you were on a lot of cartoon about the horrible Mortal Kombat cartoon. And Beavis and Butthead not too long ago as well. Yeah, I'll write for notes about Beavis and Butthead. That's right. Oh, yeah. Slightly different.

Frequent guest Matt McMuscles is back. No one can hear me, but I'm kissing my muscles and everyone's booing me as I do it. Boo, look at him kissing his muscles. Thinks he's so big uh you know of course we we all know you're your simpsons bona fides but do you recall watching this one back in the day not like how how close to 10 years old were you when bart turned 10 officially in the show in this episode i was two years off i think i was 10 in 1990 so um somewhere around there uh this episode i i have pretty distinct memories of and one or two bits like i still from this episode in particular i still quote today i think i was playing a game not too long ago where you're

literally on a convoy and i and i just start going into the song about convoys so um this and just you know everything in season three is has a lot more like real world like you know not consequences i say but the story is a little bit more grounded in families dealing with issues and stuff and this is one of those like bart's gone too far with like not like a crazy dumb fantasy escapade or something over the top it's like something that could very well happen a hoax about a child down the well but but i'm sure we'll get into it but this is one of those ones that taught me as a kid like don't do this stuff you're gonna the the entire town is gonna

want to cut you up with rusty razors so watch out out. Yeah, I mean, I was going into my 10th year on this planet. I would turn 10 that May, and I had been to Chuck E. Cheese-style birthday parties, so a lot of this episode spoke to me. And I remember as a kid watching it and thinking, okay, how can I help get Bart out of trouble? I can think of, like, three solutions to get Bart out of this mess. And I'm still thinking of those to this very day, 30 years later.

Me too. You know, and every day now, we talk into our own superstar celebrity microphone via podcasts or videos. Yes. We use it to liven up parties, harass women on the streets. It's many uses. Fire people at board meetings.

Yeah. No, watching this episode, I was was gonna turn 10 nine months afterwards and i was like oh is this what my 10th birthday is gonna be like oh boy like it it really excited me and to know that i was gonna turn 10 the same year bart was turning 10 though of course bart had been 10 every episode before this one yeah it's it's a real cheat in the in the show here. Well, and yes, we all we all enjoyed a pizza party at an arcade at one time or another, whether it was our pizza party or a friend's. I think this is much deeper influences than just than just Chuck E. Cheese or showbiz pizza. It has some pretty highfalutin influences because this is kind of based on the 1951 movie ace in the hole starring chester j lampwick himself kirk douglas yeah billy wilder movie

he made it the year after sunset boulevard and it's even darker which is why it was a major flop and even critics didn't like it but now it's a classic it's still kind of obscure but it has been preserved by our government because it's that important. To hear John Vitti, the writer of the episode, tell it on the commentary, it's that this was a pitch by Matt Groening, which I think is why it's like rooted in just Bart playing a prank. Like it does feel like the seed of a classic kind of season one or shorts kind of story. But then Vitti brought in more of, I think, the media commentary that's in this. this but yeah but it was graining is like graining told him based on ace in the hole and vd said he hadn't seen the movie before and it was actually in hollywood difficult to rent it like he had to like really search around for a copy of it because it was not widely available

now you can just get a criterion version of it pretty easily you can just get a Criterion version of it pretty easily. You can easily get a streaming version of it too. Yeah, yeah. You can watch it on Pluto TV with commercials. But I really recommend it. It's great. I watched it maybe in 2007 because of this episode. And I think this episode really made it more known to the public. I think it's just like, oh, this is the one Radio Bart's based off of.

But it's so good. And I really loved it this time because I've lived a lot more of my life since the last time I saw it. And it's this great movie about like how capitalism is this corrupting force. And the main character is the conduit through which it flows. And any truly good person is either corrupted or just railroaded. And what it has to do in common with this episode is that there is a man stuck in a cave. And it's all about the media circus. And it becomes like a literal carnival

around this event and how everyone is trying to become a celebrity and make money based on this tragedy and how one man the main character is trying to prolong it for his own means so it's really good and it has like some of the best stylized dialogue i've ever heard like everyone talks like they're out of a like a pulp fiction novel like a detective novel like kirk douglas there are people who are like come on we're in the same boat and he goes i'm in the boat you're in the water now let's see you swim henry you stomped on my quote i wanted to say the whole thing i'm sorry i was laughing already at it it was just so fun i remembered the line it was so good sorry it's okay please hold your laughter until my quote is over no i yeah i i hadn't watched it in full in so long

bob watching it led me to uh watch it as well it's really good yeah it's so good i saw the criterion edition uh has a essay in it called noir in the daylight uh and it really is like it's mainly the movie is set in daytime and outdoors too and in this giant you know spectacle of a carnival like it's not cheap either and yeah and douglas is just so like i'll tell you what like you give me i'm a 250 dollar a day guy and you give me for 50 uh you know what i give it to you for 40 yeah he's this is my way back on top i i just love i i and the way he plays himself like getting worse and worse but also knowing he's evil and feeling guilty about it like yeah yeah i guess the one non-cynical thing about the movie is that the the main character has some shred of decency and i feel like a lot of people wouldn't

in that situation i think we've seen that quite a lot yes yeah but yeah please watch it you don't need to see it to understand radio bart or its influences because again it's very very loosely based on that movie but i think it's a great movie more people should see and it's very it's still relevant today i think you know i when i watched with my husband he then pulled up the wiki page on it and he's like one of the main things mentioned on its wiki page is that it influenced this episode of simpsons like that yes that's uh the ace of all's main thing yeah uh so another notable thing about this episode is that it was nominated for an emmy but lost and they're very

bitter about it because it lost to a claymation easter uh which is a will vinton special that no one ever talks about people really know the christmas special they know the creepy uh mark twain special with the devil in it they They don't really talk about this one. But the other nominees were The Ren and Stimpy Show. No specific episode, just the show. I think that should have won, honestly, as much as I love Radio Bart. Very influential show. The other nominees were Shelley Duvall's Bedtime Stories.

Just the series, not one episode. This is not Shelley Duvall's Fairytale Theater, but she does go, hi, I'm Shelley Duvall. So you can find that super cut online. But yeah, that lasted 12 episodes. I don't know why it was nominated. Not notable at all. But for some reason, Claymation Easter was the winner. I agree with David Silverman's guess is that Ren and Stimpy and Simpson split the vote

between the cool crowd. And then everybody else was like i don't know i know claymation i guess that guy should be the claymation easter let's just give it to that i feel like all the voters are also over 60 like easter sounds wholesome i'm like that filth simpsons and ren and stimpy though it's it's funny on this commentary that was probably recorded like oh two uh they're all still bitter a decade later about not winning one Emmy when they'd won the previous two years, by the way, too. And they said they were very loud, poor losers at the events as well. It was funny to me, though, looking at the history to come of like they wouldn't even be nominated the next two years.

Then they'd win with Lisa's wedding and then they'd win with lisa's wedding and then they'd win every other year so there was about a decade where it was like either them or south park pretty much won it all i feel like they were so bitter after this they didn't submit the next two years like we've got our emmys though honestly then when i think about them winning and are not winning and thinking they they should have it makes me think of like they had episodes that beat other things that i was like well wait a minute like for example three gays of the condo which is a funny episode i i disagree it's not good but uh i'm trying to be nice listen to the gayest episode ever about it they're not very happy with it okay it's not a good

episode there you go thank you but uh and and it beat jurassic bark uh from futurama and the spongebob episode about clam fishing where it was like jaws on the water like a a classic uh early era spongebob then later the simpsons episode eternal moonshine of the simpson mind that's one where homer wants to kill himself and jumps into like a boat jumps off a bridge and lands on a boat that'd be king of the hills death picks cotton the yeah but the one that really bugs me is the one from just a few years ago where mad about the toy which is the one where we find out about abe's possible gay affair in world war ii it defeated the friggin adventure time series finale right and the bojack episode free churro which is

like the most like give me an emmy episode bojack ever made they wanted it too much which one is that oh sorry free churro was the one where bojack gives a eulogy and it's only him for the entire episode oh okay wow yeah that is that is definitely emmy bait right there yeah and a good episode but absolutely there give us an award episode for sure yeah and this is one of the rare episodes that has the storyboards on the disc. And you can see a few cut scenes. I guess, do you want to talk about them now? They're just very brief. I'm not going to like, it's very, very hard to make out the dialogue because the storyboards

don't even take up the full screen and the DVDs are built for like your 480i SDTV. So they're really doing us a disservice, but I'm glad they're available. So some deleted scenes that didn't make it to the final cut are after the scene where homer tries out the mr microphone for marge she says there's a lot of feedback he calls the customer service number and it basically connects to a payphone in the desert and a drifter picks up the phone and that's that's the joke of that one i think he goes i just fell off a turnip truck or something like that and so that's why homer is sad yes another deleted scene is during the montage of people explaining their hypotheses for how to

free bart one of them is an old-timey rainmaker who shows up in a covered wagon very john swartzwelder joke and character and they say uh won't that just drown the boy and he leaves he passes another rainmaker on the way in and they say you know they're not biting today man that's i wish they kept that in that rainmaker also looks so funny. Yes. And Matt's storyboard notes, which are all over the storyboard, say, I bet we'll cut this. And that was true. And then before the itchy and scratchy cartoon, we see that Bart has Skinner read Timmy bedtime stories. And that's what is able to sell the idea that Timmy is being quiet now so Bart can go on with his life. So they're building in,

I mean, there's a lot in the final episode, but they build in a lot of justifications for how this could work. I really noticed it this time, and that's one of them. And the last deleted bit from the storyboards is Lovejoy shows up to perform church services for Bart. He throws a hymnal down the well

and leads him in song, and then he lowers the collection plate down. And Bart puts money on it and he's like yeah he takes it back yeah because in another deleted part uh homer throws down bart's coin collection and that's where bart gets the quarter from to put in the in the dish you know at least legible was mac gratings like big red marks on it and i love i love his note of one word simplify like he he was really on that and and also it's helpful to know the dates of it like that these full storyboards were uh dated july 20th 1991 just to give you a time frame of when all this was made and there's one very funny

note on the storyboards where this is the time when your storyboards did not have to be as finished as they do today because there was an entire layout stage that was a lot more that would finalize the artwork a lot more so some of the some of the designs are not finished the sting design is very funny he's got like a bowl cut does that look like sting at all yes yeah but uh they did not really design any of senor bivarati's band and there's a note from the storyboard artist i think steven dean moore and it says uh we need designs for these. If you want to submit them, let the designers and directors know. Matt just has rights. Call me, Matt. So Matt is like, I will design the Chuck E. Cheese band for you. He wanted to do it. So maybe the entire band was designed by Matt. Who knows?

But it shows you how hands-on he was. A lot of people think he really wasn't in these early stages no i wish the i wish more of his his noted versions of the storyboards were included on on every episode really i feel like it's the only ones that it's only on the ones that like i think it's all from david silverman's collection to be honest i think that's that's where they're all dug out from but uh but all right why don't we get the episode proper? So we start with Lisa inventing twerking on TV in a classic meme. In the very memed, I've seen that meme every now and then. It's like a celebratory meme. Like waving her fingers in the air and dancing?

Yeah. But of course, Homer is quite offended by that until he sees the sexy ladies dancing on TV in a Soul Train parody. The hip shake on the girl and homer's eyes and drool i was like wow that really just is twerky she's just jamming her ass right in the camera lens yeah and and homer becomes like sexual harassment like venus de milo homer here just for like one second it's pretty creepy behavior from him all of a sudden this this is not the soul mass transit system which would be in Rosebud. They didn't name this parody yet.

But it is pretty fun. I wish we got to hear more about Funky C, Funky Do. I wish they were a regular appear in The Simpsons. That's a great band parody name, Funky C, Funky Do. And yeah, this is a parody of Soul Train, which you probably don't know about. I assume a lot of people don't. It started in 71, ended in 2006. And the guy they're parodying here, Don Cornelius, hosted until 1993.

He's the show's creator. So he hosted it for over 20 years, and he was the host at this time. I love he's like right after this. Like he really holds on that S at the end of the day. He's a very, very low energyenergy host, Don Cornelius. That's because he's so cool. He's not all in your face like Casey Kasem. Or that awful Dick Clark.

Yeah. And then we also get one of the first gags about Homer just handing a nondescript pile of money to his children. Like, it's the start of, I need $900. Okay, wait. What's it for? You know, on the commentary they bring up a good point uh he gives lisa over 110 we don't see her presence that's true i think the bigger crime is lisa stealing from her father in this episode you know lisa told him do a good

thing for my birthday and he did like a day later and actually ruined her birthday with the michael jackson thing so if she's doing it to get revenge and just pocketed all the money for herself i think i'm gonna say turnabout's fair play i guess we do have two child birthdays in this not production season but air season i agree but uh but yes that leads to one of the funniest commercial parodies in the series history and i i got it all right here it's the superstar celebrity microphone hey kids why sit in front of the tv when you can be on the radio we're gonna roll this truck in convoy cross the usa convoy that could be burned throw away your bulky transmitters and broadcasting towers. The superstar celebrity microphone lets you hear your voice through any AM radio.

Hey, good-looking, we'll be back to pick you up later. He's in for some lovin'. It's the perfect gift for birthdays, graduations, board meetings. You're fired. Mmm, Bart's birthday's coming up. But order now, Supply is limited. Limited! Do you have any of those microphones left?

Yeah, a couple. You know, Marge, Bart's really gonna like my birthday present this year. It won't be like those shoe trees I got him last year. Or the shelf paper I bought him for Christmas. I'll buy his love yet. That sequence there is... They just reused animation from Saturdayurdays of thunder yeah i thought so it's one of the like let's check in in the bedroom and see what the what the story is yeah yeah it's like slightly the lip sync is slightly off to them a

little bit i find but i do love that he bought bart shelf paper for christmas yeah that's that's a great what a great horrible gift but yes uh mr microphone this is what the parody is uh before our time 1978 i was thinking yeah this is 14 years before this episode so it would be like if they made a new episode now where homer buys bart like a slap chop or something or like flex seal or something something from the late aughts so oxy clean original version yeah but uh yeah this basically turned any fm radio to like a shitty pa system uh within a very limited range because you can't break fcc rules so bart cannot broadcast from home no that's that's one of the biggest

cheats of this but yes yeah and and now i was thinking you know this was sold to kids back then with like the dream of i can be my own radio disc jockey i can thinking you know this was sold to kids back then with like the dream of i can be my own radio disc jockey i can finally have all this power and like now the kids are living that dream they really can just broadcast like if you are a child with even just a phone you can even just stream of game to your to youtube off of your phone now now every kid is mr microphone and they're all a competition they are yeah we gotta stamp them out i was at a family function there's like two like i don't know 10 year olds 11 year olds and they're just like you have a youtube channel and i was like yeah and

they're like wow and it's the the kids are in on and they're like i want a youtube channel too and i was like you can't have one i have it yeah that's i'm the only one here that's allowed to have one sort of but you know they're they're in on it and they know the power that that can potentially wield with this type of technology yeah it's now any kid can broadcast but it's just uh how do you i guess how does any kid like get out of the the find the forest for the trees of thing? Like how do you get to be famous when literally every kid can stream something? You have to be part of a prank family. You have to be actively being abused. The horrible prank families will bring you up.

Yeah. But yes, I do have the original commercial here that this almost like moment for moment parody is. This Christmas party is getting a little too quiet i think it's time we liven it up with my favorite christmas gift mr microphone hey what's that well you set the dial on your fm radio and testing testing these kids are having a fabulous time with mr microphone the cordless microphone that actually puts your voice on the radio there are no attaching wires so you're free to move around broadcast over any fm car radio hey good looking we'll be back to

pick you up later yes and that was the line that was cemented in all of these boomers heads because they were all like in their teenage years and saw it on TV a ton. And Al Jean questions, why would this make a woman attracted to you? Like, wow, he could talk through his radio. It's just a perfect line of like, hey, good looking. We'll be back to pick you up later. Like, yeah, it's just cemented in the brains of Gen X comedy writers forever. And I'm so thankful that the real one was uploaded. Because, yeah, as a a kid this made no sense

to me i was like yeah mr microphone like it sounds cool though it's also great like you can hear it in that commercial too when they say kids will love the this commercial too is said like hey kids and the great joke is that homer instantly loves it he's like wow wow like homer this children's commercial has already pulled homer in to purchase this thing and the voice you hear in the commercial is ron popeil uh who would later be a guest star on futurama that's right and who recently passed away that's right yeah man that's it's a ronco thing so ronco's doing his own thing yeah and also yeah the song convoy first time i ever heard it it prepared me to hear it in that uh futurama episode uh the oh yeah sights lost speaking if you yeah it was good they wanted it to be the wreck of the edmund

fitzgerald if you look at the storyboards that's what uh they're singing in the commercial that's what homer sings to marge but apparently the uh the rights of that song go to like the family of the victims and it's hard to clear so that's why no one's ever heard of that song if that song had appeared in the Simpsons, people would know about the wreck of the engine in Fitzgerald for decades to come, but instead it's a forgotten song. Gordon Lightfoot was too generous. It's also funny.

They drew Quimby into that board meeting. Like, boy, it's not his voice, but that's Quimby firing the guy. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I love the intensity of Homer's phone call. Like, limited! Like, every trick works on homer perfectly we cut to it's uh now bart's birthday he's wearing a kiss me it's my birthday crusty button which is adorable as is him being measured each year by his height by the spikes on

his head i i like that too and he and he grows like two feet in like three years. It's amazing. Kids have growth spurts, I guess, pretty quick. I mean, it would stop here. Yes, yeah, he'll never grow taller. But even though it'll, and that lack of growth will cost him the part of Fall Out Boy, unfortunately. But yes, we get a quick shot of Krusty torturing Sideshow Mel, which is even funnier that, you know, in of crusty gets busted he almost kills sideshow bob to celebrate a girl's birthday but this is even funnier like that mel drops the cake but he doesn't pratfall into the cake and he just

smiles of like okay and that's what crusty's like nope i got it he kicks his butt right into the cake and then he has to clean up yeah i love that line like while sideshow mel cleans up like he's just on fire just a classic gag exactly and i also love uh the posing when uh crusty goes crusty's birthday pals for today this reminds me of whenever anyone has to show their kickstarter backers though friends which i've had to do yes yeah now you know you're all loved i i think our our mutual pal uh super eyepatch wolf does a great job of that when it's when you get to the end of an eyepatch wolf video and he goes friends and it's like all right now it's time when he says friends it's time for the patreon credits roll this is the first time i looked at these names too of crusty's birthday pals and i want to assume they're all from like the harvard yearbook because the only ones i recognized were uh ken keeler future

simpsons writer and patrick ferone future futurama writer who went to harvard they're both harvard boys and i googled a bunch at random they were none of them had imDb credits. I assume they could have been Harvard classmates or just random names. But Ken Keeler, yeah, three years from now he'll be writing on the show. Stars Burns will be his first one, yeah. Best eight bucks I ever spent. I hope you listeners think that this is the best five to ten dollars you've ever spent, too. The Simpsons will be right back. Bart's in deep trouble when he gets trapped in a well.

Don't make me come down there. I can see a fish. Why you let up? The Simpsons. Next on Boxing. When you really care about someone, you shout it from the mountaintops. So on behalf of Desjardins Insurance, I'm standing 20,000 feet above sea level to tell our clients that we really care about you. Home and auto insurance personalized to your needs. Weird, I don't remember saying that part. Visit Desjardins.com slash care and get insurance that's really big on care.

Did I mention that we care? And get insurance that's really big on care. Did I mention that we care? Whether or not you're the birthday boy or girl, thank you for listening to this week's episode. And a big thank you to our guests this week, Matt McMuscles. It's so great to have him back on the show. Everybody be checking out what he does at the flop house uh both the wah hopping videos and all the other great stuff he does in the flop house plays and his podcast about fighting games triple ko he does so many cool things follow matt mcmussels on twitter to learn more about it and of

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at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. so then bart decides uh after that that he's he's to go get all of his birthday freebies and also ignore Grandpa's phone call, which is a great joke, too. A boy would rather get a greeting on TV very quickly than talk to his grandpa on the phone. I would have done the same thing. If the TV wished me a happy birthday, I wouldn't give a shit about my grandpa on the phone. Same. But, yes, first Bart gets his free birthday sunday at phineas q butterfats which i love the posing of that giant birthday sunday poster in the

background little thimble of ice cream in front we're not doing these birthday uh treats anymore for uh businesses i find that that has disappeared maybe it's just for children but uh i feel like you can't really get any good deals on your birthday you'll get an embarrassing song that's it oh yeah basically you can you can also humiliate the staff by making them sing to you that's true yeah that's true yeah you know i'm trying to think of like anything that offers me a birthday thing i think as a nintendo online member and they know your birthday they give you like a hundred platinum points or some crap i think they give you something like that 10 off but it has to be physical merchandise you buy have shipped to you no thanks but yeah i mean everybody can just fake their birthday in games

you know in though animal crossing i don't fake it and i feel like every time i've gotten an animal crossing game well except for the pandemic one, was usually my of a September birthday and then I get the game in like November and then I'm like, well, I'm going to be playing this game for another 11 months to finally get my birthday present in this game. I had a very sad first pandemic birthday in Animal Crossing.

My sad animal party. Then Bart gets his free birthday shave where he complains about digital audio tapes replacing CDs. And, you know, I could go for his free birthday shave where he complains about digital audio tapes replacing cds and uh you know i could go for a free birthday shave i'd uh i'd take up a fancy shave on that day and then then bart gets his free uh tango lesson with rosarita and then i feel like the anime has really got away with something here his face is at an interesting level i i'm like i have i watched every single later uh season episode of the simpsons now but of all the ones i've seen all the ones i remember this has to be the sexiest

character that's ever been drawn on the simpsons like there's been lots of bikini babes and like girls and like ion springfield but rosarita i was i was fanning myself well you just wait until earlene lumpkin shows up yeah okay okay the rosarita, I was fanning myself. Well, you just wait until Lurleen Lumpkin shows up. Yeah. Oh, okay, okay. Rosarita, yeah, she has a lot of leg, and yeah, the part, it's just so crazy. I love how they draw Bart just his,

the weird look on his face where his head is when she's doing some of her moves there. He doesn't understand. He's befuddled. All right, now it's time for uh chucky cheese birthday memories any anybody got ones of going to them i mean i went to them and i feel like this this really captures chucky cheese at a transition point where this is the end of the child bar era of chucky cheese where it was dark inside and the mascots were kind of seedy uh it would later turn into like a kind of a discovery zone. Cheese where it was dark inside and the mascots were kind of seedy. It would later turn into like a kind of a discovery

zone style experience where it was more about like moving around and climbing and going down slides and it was bright inside and when I saw that in my like early teen years I was like Chuck E. Cheese has changed. It's not about the darkness anymore. It's not dark. Well yeah man in your neck of the woods did they

have Chuck E. Cheese's? Chuck E. Cheese was not a thing. There wasn't even like, you know, a Canadian parallel like Quebec McBeaver or something, you know. So the closest thing we had is just, you know, we had Pizza Hut. So Pizza Hut would, you know, have the ice cream bar and all of that. And you can go get your maybe go in for your X-Men 92 animated videotape if you took your comic book cutout for the free one. So we would have a few birthday parties there at McDonald's, but we did not have an actual Chuck E. Cheese, at least in Quebec. But I don't think there were any in like Ontario or Toronto either.

So it was a pleasure. I was kind of mystified at whenever Simpsons or other shows referenced. I was like, what is this? Why is there so many weird, like, electronic animals wishing children happy birthdays? It was a foreign thing to me. I feel like writers were going to the birthday parties of their friends' new children or something like that around this time, which is why this is so true to life especially the robot band the few memories i have of this era of chucky cheese are of the robots being creepy which is what five nights at freddy's captures perfectly where they were creepy when they were playing music but then chucky cheese goes we gotta take a break now kids we'll be back in 20 minutes and

then the robots just shut their eyes and the lights kind of turn off there's no curtain that closes or anything it's just like you're looking at dead robots in front of you and there was a separate room with a singular robot performance i think it was like an elvis impersonator um kind of like panther or some kind of large cat and that's the uh what the uh the guy who bart is talking to the robot bart is uh talking back to later in this episode i feel like they're they're parodying that you know chucky cheese back then it was the treat of like you know you can't even if you you know have an upper middle class family you can't just go to disneyland or disney world or even six flags whenever you feel like it and or on a birthday trip and see you know the animatronic country bears for example but in your neighborhood you probably could go to

or at least in your like county you could go to a chuck e cheese and see some of those animatronics performing in a similar enough style and uh but i will say you know i it's a regional thing for me because i grew up in the south and that had showbiz pizza not chucky cheese your chucky cheese have confederate flags inside no no i think they all did up to a point actually yes you're right they did actually until someone had to point out to the creator you know what this means and he's like oh god get him out of here but so but showbiz pizza was the competitor of chucky cheese it had you know the bear the showbiz bear i think that's the thing they ripped off the most for five nights at freddy's because it was also inspired by the rock and fire explosion

documentary which was the band of that movie i was so sad when chucky cheese took over and of course i was like 11 by that time when chucky cheese took bought all the showbiz's and re-skinned the showbiz characters with the Chuck E. Cheese and his munch friends. Like on the showbiz Rockafire documentary, you can see the training videos of like, here's how you skin the Rockafire explosion and turn them into the munch band and put munch skin on them. It's sickened me to see. I wish they wouldn't scream like that. I mostly know the showbiz pizza bear from the Dick the Birthday Boy photo of young Rich Evans. That's right. That's the only time I've seen in my life. Red Letter Media's own Rich Evans and Dick the Birthday Boy, yes.

It's the same. Look, was it the same shitty pizza and the same games and all the same soda? Yes, but technically the robots were different, and I have a childhood affection for those different robots than the chuck e cheese i think my dad brought me there because he could drink ah yes yeah uh that's and i guess the the wally the weasel stuff is an adult's vision of children this children thing like if you're an adult who doesn't care about the games or the ball pit and everything you just see like the disgusting sadness of it all and the creepiness of it.

And Wally Weasel sadly never really returned in the show. It does appear in the video game Hit and Run though. I was, I was just going to say. Cause Matt, you've done many, many a video about Hit and Run. Uh, yeah. Still haven't completed the game and completed that series yet. It's coming any year now. I'll finish it. But yeah, it was just as you said this while wally weasel doesn't come back i was like but i swear i've seen it before so i'm like yeah that then you filled in the blank

so so hit and run what a pull since hit and run was like 2003 2004 so they reached back into any you know viable like locations that you could visit in the game yeah they were really smart with uh the hit and run i i said it before but i guess i guess road rage really the one right before it was you'd say is the first but that real start of the era of simpsons games being made by simpsons fans not just like work a day programmer shoving out a game a game that stars bart yeah there was one other big change here in the from the storyboards is that it showed Lisa like riding a pony at Wally's but they they cut that out I think because they realized like Wally weasels is too cheap to have pony rides I think it was like a mechanical pony because she was like

vibrating on it or something like that okay and one one new joke that I noticed in this uh in this watch through it's very subtle but when Wally comes out with the pizza, he gets swarmed by kids and they walk past the Whack-A-Weasel game and it's like the kids are being trained to attack Wally. Oh, yeah. The joke is like they're being trained from a young age.

When you see the weasel, you go for him. I love the guy's reaction. I'll do something later. Go bug your parents. Maybe later, okay okay they're more excited over him than uh coco beanie himself that's right yeah and bob you also spotted the miscolored sherry and or terry in this yes uh a rare appearance of black sherry slash terry so uh they changed

her race briefly and then comes a true classic of video game moments in The Simpsons here with Bart playing Larry the Looter, which, you know, pretty much is Grand Theft Auto. And it's satire just got passed by Grand Theft Auto, I'd say, just 10 years later. I think a decade later would be State of Emergency, that bad game. Oh, yeah. That was trying to cash in on the GTA fame. Yeah. State of Emergency was technically a rock star game. Yeah.

Like, it's Rockstar. They paid to publish it. State of Emergency was made by the developers of Earthworm Gym 3D. So yeah, that kind of explains some things. Oof. I forgot about that. And some Tom and Jerry game, I think? I think so. Maybe? Okay, sorry. All of

that's in one of Matt's many very well-researched and great What Happened videos you can find on the Flophouse. Yeah, I guess if you are younger, the joke here is like, wouldn't it be funny if a game was this violent and antisocial? Yes. And now this is like in a decade, it would be like every Flash game on Newgrounds, Larry the Looter. Pretty much. I guess at first I thought it was kind of just like a slightly meaner double dragon or

final fight i mean technically if you you know if you were just an adult who never played those games and you saw a kid playing double dragon where you like smash a trash can and eat a eat a chicken out of it like you might think like oh i see so that's what games are like now i was gonna say that there was this game that briefly existed on steam for like a week and it's from the developers of sleeping dogs it was called smash and grab and it was you you and a gang just smash windows to get um loot and that powers up your gang so that you can fight the other gang and that's the culmination of a round of play so it's like loot everything get powerful then fight and yeah that was like their last ditch we got to release something before we close hopefully this will be a hit and it wasn't so then they they

they closed their doors like a week after the game got released oh that's sad i i remember that from from your sleeping dogs what happened as well i've learned so much in those videos thank you i'm not i'm not just saying that just because you're here, Matt. I love too when Bart is smashing the windows. He says, ha ha, stick it to the man. That's such a great line. I think instead of, in the storyboards I remember, instead of being shot by the storekeeper, which reminds me of Spelunky, by the way, he is eaten alive by dogs, like wild dogs. Which is certainly funny yeah yeah but though you know that ending is more like uh in

donkey kong 3 when stanley the bug man gets hit by bugs just the bugs cover him and all that's left is his uh is his spray bottle gruesome the way that shotgun blasts his head off is like it's great it's great so yes then we get another like truly classic uh simpsons moment here i got the clip if a friend's birthday goes by this is one of there's only like five different birthday videos you share with a friend on social media and this is one of them hey there i hear it's your birthday how old are you well that's great would you like us to sing you a special song? Hell no. You got it. Ready, Signor Biberati? I'm a ready and a one and a two. You're the birthday, you're the birthday, you're the birthday boy or girl.

Oh, love that. I love that. Bart's hell no is this great surly childhood reply like i know you're not listening the illusion is shattered for bart the second he gets interrupted well that's great so now he's just getting surly with hell though and the cheapness of birthday boy or girl they won't they won't even have two versions of it that they could play and have to input they're just like nope it is just the one you press it's birthday play this one we see senor b verati's real fire hazard too yes and also the the crap they they make a great point on the commentary that kind of crappy animation for bad animatronics is harder to animate because uh their overseas production company in this case acom the uh the

studio in seoul korea you know they're told all the time get the lip sync better the lip sync needs to you know they get dot they get you know uh charged extra money or they it costs them more if they get the lip sync wrong but in this case the lip sync has to be wrong for it to be crappy animatronics so they said they had to be overly emphatic to a com of like no guys this one you to do it wrong is to do it right and i think it took took them a lot of tries it's supposed to be bad yes yeah but uh man i wish be variety and wally weasel i wish i wish they appeared more i feel like just a few years later they would have done it just be the itchy and scratchy place done it just be the itchy and scratchy

place like it would just be itchy and scratchy ones though uh though actually uh just a couple years ago on the simpsons they did a uh homer at a chucky cheese style place but they just made up like new bears and stuff for it it was not it was not wally not the grand return because i mean chucky cheese is still out there doing it yeah Yeah, yeah. Our friends at Podcast Ride, they just went to a concert for children, they called it, where just people in Chuck E. Cheese costumes danced to lip synced things about like, it's summertime, yay! Chuck E. Cheese is now a streamer.

I'm sad he's not a VTuber though. I really want the VTuber version of Chuck E. Cheese. You know, I feel like that'd be cheaper than having just a puppet play a game. Just yeah, VTube. It's's apparently according to our podcast right pals they define it as full munch meaning the entire band uh of animatronics getting rarer and rarer you go to a chuck e cheese just because you go to your lucky local chuck e cheese doesn't mean you get the full band or even one animatronic they're they're getting phased out

i mean they are expensive and hard to maintain so i i understand it uh all right so then after after a fire is put out by wally weasel in a costume uh we get to the present time uh i really love that cheese stretch on homer with the pizza that's good that's good delicious that's one of the one time i mean if you look at the storyboard on the on the DVD, there's a lot of macaroning notes. They don't listen to him all the time. That big pan across the table. He just like scribbles over in red marker like we don't need this cut this

but they still keep the long pan across the table. So I'm glad they didn't listen to him that time. It's much better. Yeah. And so Bart is given a bunch of crappy gifts. What? It's a label maker. We have one at And so Bart is given a bunch of crappy gifts. What the? It's a label maker. Mm-hmm.

We have one at home. Before we got it, I was always finding Patty's stubble in my leg razor. Ew. Bart, I'll bet you think nothing's going to top that cactus. Well, check out my present. Next. Bart, be polite. Next, please.

Bart, I've noticed your birthday presents are a poor crop at best. I hope this turns the tide. Oh, just gorgeous. now we can be twins i love i love that patty and selma love that that outfit that the barn god and also i mean i uh in in childhood i can i can identify a little with martin wanting to buy matching clothes for a male friend and not realizing how gay that is. It's like, no, we're twins. Hey, we're dressed the same. Pretty nice.

I will say when I watched this episode for the first time, it did blow my mind because unasked for, I did get a label maker for that Christmas. And I enjoyed my label maker. As a very fastidious kid, I enjoyed labeling the outside of all of my Nintendo cartridge cases so I can see them on the shelf. I can one out at will i was labeling everything it was a good time to be alive and uh christmas of 91 it was good for me no i think uh after this episode i wanted a label maker the one i got was just like bart has a ka-chunk ka-chunk ka-chunk ka-chunk i mean it's a set it's a real satisfying ka-chunk too now i've got a fancy one i think i've used it maybe three times the one that like actually prints out like laser prints out that's not as fun as the kachunk and

you're shoving a letter through plastic i keep noting more times where jokes are meaner to patty or selma than i understood them is the joke okay obviously it could just be the joke is selma saying that patty stubble like they just both have the same leg razor but is the joke that patty shaves her face and it's her facial stubble stubble and selma is using that because they already did the gag that patty has like mustache facial hair uh i don't think so i think the joke is she's particular and she can actually identify her sister stubble as opposed to her own stubble i see she knows her that well it's like this this is your stubble it's not mine yeah i got it to be that like uh she's just reaching for any razor and she just she just picks out her sisters so she just uses it and doesn't really care which no i've been i've been kind of accused of doing that with with my wife's razor i'll just be like oh

this one's good and then i'll get yelled at as i should be you should be careful it's pink for god's sake i should know the difference yeah i mean it's it's a it's a weird joke to be grossed out at women's leg hair because like well no they're shaving their legs isn't that what you want yeah yeah i guess you you should do it but not tell people about yeah i don't want to see it and and i also love homer's like nothing's gonna top that cactus like over thinks the cactus was great but his is even better this did teach me a lesson as a kid because i i was a greedy little kid who just wanted all his presents but when i saw homer's sadness there i was like oh presents are from people like you'll hurt a person's feelings if you don't like a

present or whatever like and it you feel bad for homer there homer actually i mean homer actually tried to buy something he thought bart would want like this is not a normal thing for homer to do it's a rare instance of good parenting misguided maybe to think bart would be into this but uh still good parenting i think but in the next scene bart is already loving his label maker, putting it on everything. And Homer is just upset that Bart isn't enjoying his present. He's just using it to prop up his window. Is this the rumpus room?

Yeah, yeah, I think you're right. Yeah, this is when Homer tries to show Bart how good the microphone could be. Oh, there's only one can of beer left and it's Bart's. Hey, boy, how's the microphone working? Fine. Bart! I would love to get a present like that! Here you go. Enjoy! Listen boy, this is a great invention! Watch!

We got a great big convoy, rocking through the night! We got a great big convoy. Ain't she a beautiful sight? Convoy. Come on, Ben. Hey, good looking. We'll be back for some dinner later. What did you say? I can't understand you with all that distortion.

Oh. And she is right. He is talking too loud, which is why it's coming back in through the microphone. But it's great that Homer imitates exactly what he saw in the commercial yeah it's so great he has no new bits to do and just him screaming convoy into it that's that's so great and that and and great sound design on that distortion too like it's a very good realistic uh sound distortion but this is when marge feels sorry for homer and and convinces bart to give it a try which i also just love marge's reaction to hearing her own voice like do i sound like that

like uh great great guy as people who are on videos and podcasts we have gotten used to that when i first started editing myself that's when i was like oh i guess that's what i sound like i better better get used to it yeah podcast doing the podcast. Yeah. Yep. But you know what? Eventually you can just pay some other people to edit things for you. You don't have to hear yourself as much. I mean, you still have to. But so next, this is when Bart actually sees that there is some quality to this microphone.

You know, Bart, I don't think this is such a bad present. Maybe you just shouldn't talk into it as loud as your father does. Testing. quality to this microphone. Hmm. Mmm, chocolate. Oh! Mmm, chocolate. Oh! Marge, we need some more vanilla chocolate and strawberry ice cream. I'll get some at the store tomorrow, Homer. Mmm, chocolate. People of Earth, this is Bartron, commander of the Martian invasion force. Your planet is in our hands.

Resistance is useless. We have captured your president. He was delicious. Why, you little... Wait a minute. Does this mean you like my present? Uh-huh. Oh.

Just promise me you won't play any more practical jokes. I promise. The strangled, uh-huh, uh-huh. Yeah, see, Homer won't stop strangling him to ask.

He has to know, like, wait a minute, does this mean you liked it? I was going to ask, are we still buying ice cream like this? The last time I saw Neapolitan ice cream

in this form was at my grandma's house 20 years ago and everyone favored every flavor but strawberry uh vanilla and chocolate were the first to go and you said like gross freezer burn strawberry until that i mean it was done strawberry is the crappiest of them all and then of the three i would say but it also gets worse over time with this freezer i normally I normally like strawberry ice cream, but not like that. I've seen flavors like Neapolitan flavors in other products. Like there's Neapolitan Oreos, for example,

like a few years ago. And I can't remember the last time I've actually seen one in a freezer. I think we as a society have all moved on. That's good because I think as a dessert, you're supposed to be served a small square of it with all three flavors present. It's not supposed to be you get a giant bucket of it

and choose which one you want to scoop out. And now I think we all just do like the little pints because I was looking through my, there's like one drawer in my kitchen with implements I never use so they're put in there. I was like, oh I do have an ice cream scoop. When was the last time I ever scooped ice cream with this? Yeah.

Because I just eat out of a pint thing and then put it back in the freezer when i'm done yeah well and also like who who gets ice cream that's one flavor or even just a stripe of three flavors like every ice cream i mean if i were to get a ben and jerry's like or i would get a ben and jerry's or a haagen dazs that is a flavor that's a mix of things not just like vanilla or chocolate i like halo top sure sure hey if we're counting our calories halo tops the best and they have some good flavors that's just one flavor yeah okay well i still would get like mint chocolate chip or something i want to mix it yeah me too i'm a simple man now i associate that neapolitan ice cream with i feel like if you went to a

grocery outlet and you were like say say you were chaperoning like a class you're a teacher chaperoning a class for the day you're like i need a giant bucket of ice cream that i can just give to all the kids i think you will get a five dollar bucket in neapolitan yeah yeah you will it's good in bulk i guess yeah yeah uh such a brilliant joke that homer just only is a chocolate out of it won't buy chocolate ice cream and just has two empty boxes and will soon have a third empty box in there like that's such a great joke and that it was in the bergstrom episode originally and they cut it and they actually kept it and brought it back it's a good time eater a lot of repeated lines and also homer

new level of stupidity that he instantly believes aliens have invaded and grabs a shotgun and is just going to run off into the night with it. I guess the original joke, it's not in the storyboards either, I think it was just in the initial draft, is that Homer was mixing like strychnine and flavor aid like Jim Jones. Right, right. So he was going to make his family drink poison because of the invading aliens. That's darker darker that's even darker than him strangling his son until bart says he likes it uh and uh and if you pull out your dvds during the bart strangling scene if you press enter you will see the uh original david silverman layout drawing of the strangulation and it looks great oh nice this is when they should have taken

that uh microphone away from bart because what's worse than bart not liking it is him liking it and using it for mischief first he pranks marge that maggie's talked which i think it's great to do that one first because since it's at the start of the act like you might forget that bart was pulling pranks so just for a second the viewer might actually think oh my god maggie's first word right here i love bart's reply like sorry lady show's over we get the return of non-threatening boys magazine as lisa is talking with janie about cory and her love of cory three corys and a rare keifer are on the cover of this by 92 keifer was aging out of the boy of the the boy craze scene, I think.

I guess he had recently been a lost boy, but that was five years ago, I think, at this point. Plus, the scariest bully in Stand By Me. Oh, right. Yeah, yeah. Wow. Bart uses it for a fart joke, which I have the clip here. I love that he uses a fart joke, and then he gets high-minded compliments from Nelson for it. And then it leads to one of the funniest scenes.

Again, another like true classic scene here. This is Krabappel. That was uncalled for. Bravo. Well done, old man. Hmm. Rod, Todd, this is God. Done, old man. Hmm. Rod. Todd.

This is God. How did you get on the radio? What do you mean, how did I get on the radio? I created the universe, stupid kids. Forgive my brother. Will you believe you? Talk is cheap. Perhaps a test of thy faith.

Walk through the wall. I will remove it for you. Later. What do you want from us? I will remove it for you. Later. What do you want from us? I got a job for thee. Bring forth all the cookies from your kitchen and leave them on the Simpsons porch. But those cookies belong to our parents. Look, do you want a happy God or a vengeful God?

Happy God. Then quit flapping your lip and make with the cookies. Yes, sir. Boy, yeah, amazing. boy uh yeah amazing and they really figure out rod and todd because before they were just normal good kids now they are just like cowardly pious weirdos who are easily misled because they're so sheltered and this is where they figure out rod and todd it's great yes yeah you're right this the comedy with them is that they are such true believers that they can be fooled with any silly thing and and honestly tortured to an extent uh but but they're so innocent that you

they don't even get mad at bart and they don't ever believe it's not god they're like well it must be god we have to do it though they're they're also such good boys that they even disagree with god for a second because they know it's stealing from their parents and they have to bart has to tell them like i'm god i say it's okay you do what i tell you piss me off happy god happy that's such a great line but i also love bart getting all those these and those in there like uh thou shall bring me these that's good i have a job for thee and then and uh cartwright's on the commentary to nancy cartwright and she mentions that this is one of her favorites to like perform live at you know if she's uh giving a speech somewhere she loves to if james lipton is talking to her yes yeah this is when bart decides he's going to take it to another level this is after playing god bart

bart's hubris reaches a whole new level you know i think in the storyboards it's more clear that the old well is on school property yeah it's supposed to be near the elementary and on the storyboards like matt graining drew like a little roof over the well that they don't end up actually putting in the show so i think he wanted like a traditional well with like the bucket and everything it'd be harder to animate around that roof i think they were right to not keep it in there i think but but yes this is when bart lowers his uh radio and he sees how far down it goes which uh is a warning for later for him he tricks groundskeeper willie just for a second uh that's uh willie's like i'll get you in trouble and the fact that he like has to take a long sip from his flask for a second uh that's uh willie's like i'll get you in trouble and the fact that

he like has to take a long sip from his flask for a nip of courage a wee nip wee nip yeah uh i mean john vd very smartly he's building in all of these like justifications and mechanics to the prank where well bart was going to lower the radio and he wasn't just going to drop it and he was going to lower it in and he doesn't bring enough rope so he can't get it back right so that's why it's still functioning but also uh he cannot obtain it again and then later we find out oh it's actually too dark to see the bottom which is why that could that could never happen honestly in real life but they build that justification in like why can't they see timmy it's too dark yeah we have to believe what timmy says timmy says he has no parents so we can't find his parents to ask them like yeah

bart is pretty good at working on the fly with that stuff too this is when they jasper it's so perfect that jasper is like the honestly like a character out of ace in the hole the old man going like bygar well i'll say bygar later he was like some boy fell down the well like that's a perfect line for jasper to say and uh right at the well we see uh dave shutton is there which i think him being the closest to the well and one of the first asking questions that feels like a reference to ace in the holes chuck tatum yeah that's right and uh this is his real last big appearance before lg brings him back once and i think season 14 oh you know what no his oh why is it part two of uh who shot mr burton yeah do your job shutton or whatever

kent says to him no yeah yeah he says like who are you what are you doing here do you do your research oh do your research but his hair isn't blue at this point we have to talk about uh little baby jessica all right let's do it uh because part of this is also based on that real life event which at this time was maybe not even five years old so this 18 month old baby fell into a well in her aunt's backyard in october of 87 it was a huge media event they rescued her after 56 hours i think they had to amputate a toe and she got like a scar on her head otherwise she was fine and it was i was uh barely five at the time it was the first like current news event i remember like the first like big news event that was being covered and family members were talking about it.

It was only two or three days. But yeah, it was a big deal in 1987. And there were lots of parodies and it was still fresh in the cultural memory. And this is what is the episode drawing on that as well. Yeah. And in 1989, they did a TV movie of it. Like it was a huge. I remember it being a huge event too on the first things like you turn on tv and and my exposure to 24-hour news media coverage of something i'm just like well we're gonna stick with this thing like it's yeah i i don't know did did the baby jessica news uh get

up to your side of the border matt it did and i remember the tv movie like you know i have vague memories of of watching it or my parents watching it so i think at the time this episode uh aired or around then i was like oh yeah there's some some baby jennifer you know i couldn't remember the exact uh lady girl j name but i was like oh yeah there's this baby that fell down a well that's that's what this is like lampooning at the time so um the the the other source you were saying the uh the older movie i was like i had no idea about that but this was all baby jessica's show to me yeah and uh people getting stuck in things is always big news this is mentioned in

ace in the hole the story of floyd collins in 1925 he got stuck in a cave and it was because the radio was new it was one of the first big worldwide news events that could be covered live he was not rescued in time and of course this is new since we last covered the episode there was a northern Thailand incident in which like a football team got caught into

a cave system and of course that's where we all learned about Elon Musk was truly about calling heroes pedophiles and I read he actually won the defamation case he's like oh pedo That's where we all learned what Elon Musk was truly about, calling him pedophiles. He actually won the defamation case. He's like, oh, pedo guy is just a slang in South Africa. Don't worry about it. I wasn't calling him a pedophile.

But yeah, all 12 boys and their coach survived. I believe a rescue worker did drown in that attempt. But it was big news. People like hearing about people stuck in things. Remember Balloon Boy? The hoax? Yeah, the hoax got us all. That was Timmy O'toole that was the truly timmy o'toole yeah that's you know an ace in the hole yeah he explains that factory's like a thousand people who cares nobody the more the

bigger the group of people people don't care but if it's one person it's a human interest story and i love that his in ace in the hole his boss the editor-in-chief who's supposed to be the good journalist like he's the moral compass he's like i hate that style of journalism like it's not really you know it's it's just tugging on heartstrings for attention like it's not real journalism well i don't want to spoil ace in the hole but yeah in the real world the jessica uh story like at least it had a happy ending and they and they got her out pretty quick actually when they explain how the how they discover later in the episode they say like oh we found this machine that'll do this thing from what i read

like jessica was saved uh so fast by a water jet system that was relatively new for cutting into the ground faster they were like we'll save her using technology yes and she she had to meet hw the vice president at the time she didn't even get to meet reagan which i if i were her parents i'd be like hey come on what a give us reagan and uh i i read a 2017 to 30 years later story with her where she is you know like in her early 30s then i guess she'd be in her mid-30s now uh that who she lives still in the same town i'd have moved out of that town if i was her but and and then everybody knows her as baby jessica like oh it's baby jessica but she's you know married and all that but the saddest part of the story from 2017 was that so a bunch of people gave donations and money to her which was put into a trust fund so

her family couldn't get it and when she uh turned i believe 25 the trust fund unlocked and it was 1.2 million which pretty good though you know not truly rich but unfortunately well she says a good chunk of that she did buy a house in texas with it but she said a good chunk of that uh went away in the 2008 recession thanks to the the market crash she lost a lot of it i thought she tripped and it fell down a well she apparently lives within like two miles of that well still like they could strike again i would not go near that thing you know if she honestly i think though the ted turner cnn at the very least should have just paid her $5 million for all the programming her whale falling into gave them. Like, $1.2 million, that's low.

Think of all the Noid commercials that aired during that event. Yeah, so you're right, Bob. It is also a parody of that. Though there wasn't a recent hoax. The Balloon Boy was, like it is also a parody of that but though there wasn't a a recent hoax the balloon boy was like the biggest hoax of that nature we hear why they as the town meets timmy we hear why he can't so easily be saved my name is timmy o'toole i just turned 10 years old tell me why are your parents uh i have family. I tried to enroll in school, but your principal Skinner turned me away

because of my shabby clothes. Diesel wire! The circumference of the well is 34 inches, so unfortunately, not one member of our city's police force is slender enough to rescue the boy. By God, man, you're a bunch of marshmallows. Why don't you go, Chief? Well, I'm too important.

Although the well is too dark to see the boy, Timmy has told us his foot is trapped under a rock. Thus, any attempt to pull him up would snap him like a twig. In desperation, the city is considering more unorthodox solutions. Grasping the child firmly in his talons, Socrates here will fly him to safety. Just watch.

I don't think he's coming back. With this hook and this hunk of chocolate, I'll land your boy, and I'll clean him for free. Although we can't reach the boy, we can freeze him with liquid nitrogen so that future generations can rescue him. Yeah, Frank

replaced the Rainmaker guy. I love the, it's like a plunger pulls him out there. That pulls out the little toy boy. I don't think he's coming back. That's such a great delivery. I enjoy how sedate he is. Credit to Dan Castaneda for making up that weird voice for

this falconer you would figure a falconer is probably a weird guy who speaks also very quietly to his falcon that's i i would bet that and also yeah wiggum's got black hair this entire episode it's a little distracting i love that bart one of bart's first moves is to like use it to attack skinner like the whole town turns on skinner. Yeah, like I said, we see more Skinner torture in the storyboard, in the first draft of the episode. I love that Skinner's move is the worst. Already Bart gets them to turn on him, and then he makes the worst choice of saying,

he's a liar, calling the boy every person in town loves a liar. But Skinner is later a big part of the rescue efforts, which surprised me. He's like, I must save Bart. And, oh yeah, also distracting in the scene on top of Wiggum's black hair. Normally Kent Brockman is front facing, but in this one they have his lip turned to the side a little bit in his front facing. It's not typical. They get it a little wrong. And of course the guy saying, I'll catch boy that is a jaws reference he's he's even wearing the cable knit sweater that uh went went thank you bob yeah quince it wears

famous mallrats character oh that's right uh and uh so then uh after all all this uh we get another very deep reference uh which uh it's it's not just a we are the world parody oh this yeah this goes extremely uh deep so we're on to we're sending our love down the well which yes it is uh a parody of the usa for africa song we are the world especially certain segments of the song but more specifically it is based on Voices That Care which I assume no one has ever heard of. This was a pro troop song by a super group

of the same name. So Voices That Care, bye Voices That Care. It was for the Gulf War. So this was a very embarrassing thing because the Fox special airing the making of the song and the song aired on February 28th, 1991. And that was the day President Bush announced the ceasefire declaring Kuwait free and Iraqi forces defeated. And the single did not release until March 13th.

And you can watch this online. And it is very embarrassing because celebrities are very proud of themselves for we all got together on a Sunday can you believe it all of us we cleared we cleared our schedules and we all came together to tell the troops come home safely and if you look I mean yes there was loss of life in the Gulf War but compared to other life in the gulf war but compared to other uh wars in the middle east especially later ones that we would uh you know be responsible for uh like 96 people died i think in combat yeah yeah i mean it's certainly people were well i it was just celebrities trying to say voices that care is such a great name for it because they're like yes we care it's about them yeah it's about them

we the voices that care it's like we are the world as a message is just like hey we're all together so let's feed these people who are starving in another country because we are the world but instead in this one it's like you guys are doing what you're doing over there and we're the voices that care like the voices that care does center the song on them it's not not about you yeah it's not as good as we are the world and even though mcbain or rainier wolf castle is in we're sending our love down the well arnold schwarzenegger is conspicuously absent from voices that care my theory is he was on the brink of getting into politics and he did not want to seem anti-war

for being a Republican candidate. I think you're onto something. I agree. But Voices That Care, I will give them credit. They have a bigger selection of superstars than We Are The World. The chorus has like John Lovitz, Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan, Meryl Streep, Kevin Costner, and like 50 other people, the most famous people in 1991, are part of the chorus of Voices That Care. And, you know, despite the, you know, Operation Desert Storm being mainly an American operation, the song also does bring in a lot of like some Canadian stars.

Celine Dion sings in this. And, you know, man, this is 1991 when Celine Dion was, I mean, she was known on american airwaves but she was not yet i'd say famous in the u.s uh compared to uh canada she's not at titanic uh levels yet i was i was just talking about this with my wife we're just talking about uh celine dion because we're watching something i think buffy an episode of buffy where they they drop a celine dion reference and uh we were just saying like was she really big at that point i was like well i i think in america she only really blew up like after titanic so yeah she was known but like she wasn't like a mega star yet i don't think she was not on the beauty and the beast soundtrack yet right yes that was later that year that was her yeah yeah you're right yeah

i and so the fact that the simpsons are so savage to voices that care is also because it aired the same night as simpsons that february 28th 1991 when it aired it was right after a repeat of bart to the daredevil so the simpsons fox got the deal to show it and well there's little bits missing from it uh from the upload but basically the entire special uh promoting it uh that aired on fox is on youtube and you can watch it it's it's hosted by james woods what a great great thing to see proud american i i have a i have a quick clip here of uh this is kenny rogers meryl streep and jane seymour in order talking about uh in the special why they're doing voices that care i had a brother that was in vietnam and i know

what happens after the war if you don't feel the public support because in effect they're fighting our war for us and if we don't appreciate it it doesn't make risking their lives worthwhile well i'm here because steve's there and i want to send him our love and tell him we're thinking about him every day and i'm hoping i can find the kids to send you their love too. Uncle Steve, he's somewhere near Riyadh. They're doing a great job for our country, for the world. And we're standing there behind them, and I personally am. I think they're very brave, and I'm thankful to them for what they're doing.

Yeah, the phrase sending our love happens a lot. That's no coincidence. And one last thing, there's a very funny bit with one of Caitlyn Jenner's former wives where she says, oh, I see the soldiers on TV, and then I look at my kids' faces, and I think that could be them over there in a few years. It's like, A, no, B, look how rich you are. That's not going to happen. It will never happen. Yeah, and also the war's over yeah i yes it's also great like kenny g plays like a great sax solo into the chorus of singers and like uh and i wanted to play that

one too because it's an interesting dichotomy you have kenny rogers who explains why a lot of the celebs are doing it is because they feel guilty that they in their youths weren't positive enough about vietnam which is like come on you guys didn't need to be nice about that we shouldn't have been there but then meryl streep i think she actually is good because she's like i'm not just doing this because of any rando like he she says steve she has a brother-in-law who actually is there like she says is in riyadh in in a station in riyadh in saudi arabia then at least she actually has like skin in the game too but uh but yeah this entire well song it's so them attacking the stupid thing of just celebrities

making it all about them or oh no wait sorry i have one last thought about voices of care which was maybe the tackiest thing they did at it because they filmed all the celebrities as a group singing together they filmed it on the warner brothers lot they make it very clear like oh we're at the warner lot we're the warner lock is definitely it felt like warner brothers wanted to make clear like that's right we support the troops warner brothers made this happen And the tackiest thing that some Warner PR person did was there is a full mascot costume of Bugs Bunny standing there with the other people. I must have missed that. Yeah. That's pretty embarrassing.

But yeah, I think the first time we did this, they were like, yeah, we are the world. Yeah, we know. But it's like, no, it's actually voices that care. Yes. Something that no one actually cares about. Though, of course, the way Kr crusty sings in it is directly mocking bruce springsteen's way of singing we are the world who they wanted for this episode and they still have never gotten bruce on the show yes yeah this this is already matt this is already

our second story uh this season about they tried to get bruce springsteen and he wouldn't do it like because the aerosmith in flaming mose they wanted that to be bruce he said no and they even say they like they send him expensive gift baskets and he's like hey thanks guys see you later is there is there is there any like like reason cromulent reason why he he doesn't bruce has ever given as to why he doesn't want to be on the show or i think he only does other media projects with former presidents yeah he really he's just very choosy he just doesn't do he doesn't do comedy appearances of himself that much i think it's really just that it also sounds like uh their second choice was stevie wonder to the point where one of the lines thing says sounds like it was written for stevie wonder because sting says you know for Krusty in 69 as I recall he fired me well Sting was 18 years old in 69 he might be playing music as an

amateur he wasn't opening for clowns no and Stevie Wonder had a number one song in 1963 so I feel like they forgot to change it or they didn't care enough to change it if they just changed it to 79 the joke would work fine or yeah just 85 but as a kid i did actually know the police song i'll be watching you i didn't know that song but it was later in life i may put it together that sting was that guy from the police but uh yeah i i appreciate that on the commentary cartwright calls out they call sting the second choice and then she's like but wait i've got my original script here and stevie wonders in it and now she goes um he was a middle choice uh yeah he's also in we are the world i think they didn't want to do it because they're like you're making fun of what we did uh in the 80s right i would think at

least stevie wonder turned that down for that reason yeah i and uh and john vini went to new york to record with sting and i think sting's funny he's i mean he doesn't have to do too much but he's he's all right and he actually does sing uh and i like that sting is the only other celebrity there that was real it's all just springfieldians uh around him at that and a capital city the weather lady yeah the capital city goofball sing along and yeah bob that's the first visible appearance of stephanie the weather lady yeah oh oh and it's the first time sideshow mel talks just for that joke so that has to be his voice for the rest of the show just for that one joke of him being a great singer they're like well i guess this is just how sideshow mel sounds from now on and there's a big note in the storyboard it's like make sure rainier has like one uh hand up to the to the headphones or whatever just that's

what they were doing on We Are the World. And I'll just drop in the full Well song right here. When you really care about someone, you shout it from the mountaintops. So on behalf of Desjardins Insurance, I'm standing 20,000 feet above sea level to tell our clients

that we really care about you. Home and auto insurance personalized to your needs. Weird, I don't remember saying that part. Visit Desjardins.com slash care and get insurance that's really big on care. Did I mention that we care? There's a hole in my heart as deep as the well For that poor little boy Who's stuck halfway to hell Though we can't get him out

We'll do the next best thing We'll go on TV and sing Sing, sing And we're sending our love down the well All the way down We're sending our love down the well. All the way down. We're sending our love down the well. Down that well.

Grusty, what are your plans for the royalties? Well, we gotta pay for promotion, shipping, distribution. You know, those limos out back, they aren't free. Whatever's left, we throw down the well. But I also love that the it also works as a great parody of voices that care because the way they say it is like so we're

sending our love down the well and we can't get them out we'll do the next next best thing we'll get on tv and sing sing sing which is like that is not the next best thing it is actually incredibly useless and is just to show off that you care and also that crusty even reveals on tv that it's just like a giant uh money laundering scheme pretty much he's like yeah you know this limo is out back they ain't free they just throw the rest of the money into the well yeah this big shot of the carnival around it like that's the closest to the ace in the hole parody like i think the big rise up shot is pretty much just straight from the movie and ace in the hole is pre uh we are the world obviously but the the victim in that movie does get a song written about him that plays like incessantly in the back half of the movie

because there's just like a big band constantly playing it good old leo yeah he's my favorite shots in the movie some of them are when they they keep bringing leo cigars to show him how much they love him and then you see him later and he's just covered in these cigars he's not smoking because he's like can you just save me i don't want any more cigars i love i love bags of timmy o'toole baby teeth and i survived timmy o'toole getting trapped in a well shirt that's so great this is when they started moving comic book guy out of the comic book store and he's like well i guess he sells bootleg t-shirts at like the spinal tap concert and at timmy o'toole events he had he had more hustle back in those days to sell bootleg t-shirts now you can't get comic book guy to leave his stool for much i think it was

because matt grating was just amused at all the simpsons bootlegs like he collected them when they were a big deal uh when they were more popular simpsons bootleg merchandise so i think he just wanted to work that into the show. Yeah, I bet. Yeah, yeah. You're right. You're right. We then see a itchy and scratchy cartoon, which is great. Just like old cartoons, there's a lot of suicide jokes in it.

And the gator chewing on Scratchy and then sucking his tail down like a noodle. Like, that's some great animation. That was a Matt Groening note. Suck his tail in like spaghetti. Oh, that's awesome great animation that was a matt graining note uh suck his tail in like spaghetti oh that's awesome yeah yeah i i remember that the bullet hole in crust in scratchy's head is also was a graining note which is so much funnier in this in the storyboard it's just that scratchy like he explodes like a bomb is handed to his his ghost and the ghost explodes it's way funnier to shoot a bullet through the head of a ghost that leaves the hole

and the tribute to timmy o'toole at the end even touches lisa there's a yellow ribbon yes just like voices of care yeah yeah and uh then uh frank welker earned some money here as uh he does i i didn't check that he's in the credits or not he's not credited i think it could be dan doing this i don't know these growls and the howls well well why don't we give a listen it's very simple cat the child is reverting to a feral or wolf-like state here's an honest conception i was trying to gnaw my foot off, but I couldn't get through my sock. Good night, everybody. Bart Simpson, the thought of a boy trapped in a well

brought out the kindness and love of the entire community. When they find out you've been fooling them, they're going to want to cut you up with rusty razors. Oh, yeah? How are they going to find out? The police will catch you sooner or later. The police? They couldn't catch a cold. Maybe not. But I bet you're stupid enough to have left

a property of Bart Simpson label on that radio. That's a great super pan there. So at the start of that, that snarling really sounds like welker to me i think you're right uh i just don't think he's credited they probably had him there for other things they're like can you growl a few times you know this would be a few years maybe it took a few more years for welker to put his foot down like you got to give me credit guys i need yeah i need some simpsons credits on my resume i mean he doesn't need them but he should want them

and another storyboard thing i remembered is on the storyboards for the pan into the well the note is like oh just like in birth the murderer when when they pan across town to uh see that the the permission slip is still on the bed oh that's great yeah wow i you know uh well this also knowing the storyboards and how they cut that skinner reading the book scene. This is where I realized the shot of live from the well, they must have animated that Skinner scene, but they just don't have the deleted scenes out there. Yeah, it's weird because this is maybe too in detail for our show.

So please, my apologies. But the establishing shot is daytime. And then when there's the shot of people looking at the well at the snarling boy, they have these weird outlines around them. That's because it was a night scene that they digitally colored blue around them and they couldn't get all the lines very tight but then in the same scene behind the tv it's night outside so they forgot about like with it within the same scene you can see outside in its nighttime so yes very weird it's very chopped up and everybody's wearing well hats which are not

invisible in any other shots at the well like a hat with a well on top of it so yeah they it's very chopped up and everybody's wearing well hats which are not invisible in any other shots at the well like a hat with a well on top of it so yeah they it's just too bad everything from season four on where they're able to dig up their actual animation they did of deleted scenes but for one through three on the dvds there's very rare actual deleted animation that they uh that they bring back out but uh yeah i i also just love marvin monroe is right there to be like well clearly he's turned into a wolf boy and he's got a drawing right there for it that's so great he's ready for this my favorite uh and and also this is the first time i caught that uh lisa's lisa it's another joke where she says this brought

out the kindness and love of the town and once they learn the truth they'll cut you up with rusty razors like that shows the kindness of the town is so shallow they're gonna rip a boy to shreds when they find out who he is you know this feels like a better version of telltale head or like a version made by a staff that really knows what they're doing now oh yeah yeah you're right this is very similar to Telltale Head, except better. And they know what they're doing. Yeah. Bart realizes he's got to get that radio back or else he's going to get caught eventually, even by cops as stupid as the ones in Springfield, which is great.

I love that it's about cops are stupid. And also, most of them are too fat to do anything, too. It's just... Eddie and Lou may be too cowardly. I think Lou might be able to slip down there but 34 inches that's not a big circumference for a well no way yeah i think it's also cute that of all the things they the cops could be reading to timmy o'toole it's cinderella and describing petticoats to the boy out of all things as they walk away this is when

bart uh travels down the well we get to hear the for the first time their axle f parody theme the uh from beverly hills cop that's the it's called the theme from afro steam for axle f that's the name of the song uh bart unfortunately he gets trapped down in the well because his rope is just kicked off by the cops he goes like oh what's this yeah and kicks it away and for some reason uh he's trapped under a rock just like the guy in ace in the hole even though it's like well how did that happen he just fell down a well yeah well and also it's exactly how bart described timmy as oh yeah yeah so that makes it even funnier that bart says like what did i do to deserve you deserve this his what did i do to deserve this? What did I do to deserve this? The perfect poetic justice.

But this is when Bart is forced to come clean. What did I do to deserve this? Help! Help! I fell down the well! Tell us something we don't know. No! My name is Bart Simpson!

What are you doing down there? Look, I'll level with you. There is no Timmy O'Toole. It was just a prank I was playing on everybody. Well, you sure fooled us, kid. Hey, I got an idea for a prank. Let's go home and go to sleep. Good one, Eddie.

Great joke guys guys yeah love when i love when that wolf howl comes in bart i like how that he uh prefaces with i'll level with you guys because bart is deciding i guess truth is his better gamble here because he could just keep pretending like uh yeah that's right i am timmy o'toole better save me but he decides to try the truth with the cops he's like you know at all level with you guys and and they reuse animation to show the cops didn't go home they use a scene from bart versus thanksgiving to uh have like a eddie and lou talking to homer and marge situation which is not obviously not in the storyboards because it's an additional scene from uh season two but that tells me i would bet that it was james l brooks that said you need to see homer and marge learn about it like you can't

just have homer and marge show up at the next day i i do love his reply of like you must think we're the worst appearances in the world yeah it's pretty much feeling down the station yeah uh but the carnival is already over as uh well how is it the kirk douglas puts his like this cut this circus is over but every everybody's gone home uh and that uh homer i love that homer still gets so pissed at Bart that he's like, I like to see a fit. Yeah. Homer's squeezing and like trying to shove his way down the well. He's basically arrested for this. Yes.

The other storyboard thing I remember is Homer, like he tosses more things down to Bart, including the aquarium that he's holding. And Matt Groening is like, no, no, he's not tossing an aquarium down into the well. Crosses that out. I bet it was Matt didn't want to see uh the fish die yeah I think so it's funny enough just to see Homer holding a bag with his goldfish in it to be like Homer intends to kill these fish but he doesn't get away with it also noticeable in the background is Wes Archer's caricature he's raking leaves in the background. Very, very obvious. The man with the beret. Yes, yeah. Big hair and a beret, which is not how Wes Archer dresses these days.

No. Or probably ever. Yes, Marge is very distraught asking for help from Wiggum, but the town has turned on Bart. I brought you your crusty dough. Ow! Knock it off, you bald boob! Hey! Don't make me come down there! I'd like to see you fit.

Why you let him! Put a mane on him. I like the other boy. So polite. What are you doing to save my baby boy? Well, ma'am, we've located a piece of machinery in Shreveport, Louisiana that could pop him out lickety-split. Well, why don't you get it? Well, I'm afraid we've got a budget problem, Mrs. Simpson. Your boy picked a bad time to fall down a well.

Had he done it at the start of the fiscal year, no problemo. You're telling me that the city won't pay to get a boy out of a well? Well, they would have for Timmy. People love that little guy. But your son, well, he kind of played us off for a bunch of saps. So it seems we've all been the victims of a cruel hoax perpetrated by a ten-year-old hooligan. The time has come for finger-pointing, and most of them are squarely aimed at the boy's parents. It's not our fault. We didn't want the boy. He was an accident.

Homer! Uh, could you edit that last part out? Mr. Simpson, we're live coast to coast and uh you know if you watch just the uh episode before this one i'm mary marge that's how you learn how bart was an accident so it's canon yeah but then when he says it's cute right yes yeah so matt i also could not think of uh your wall hopping videos hearing the fiscal year joke because it's that fiscal year has damned many a release that can't miss a fiscal year deadline it really has i've like it's not an ironclad rule but if any game is trying to release

in the last few weeks of march like just be just be a little bit more wary about its quality because most likely it's being shoved out the door to to make that fiscal year oh i was shoved out the door to meet a fiscal year i think you were too henry yes yeah oh yeah yeah that wasn't a fiscal year yeah the bloodbath start in february folks no i yeah with the game the most recent uh time i noticed that was the strangers uh strangers the Night Final Fantasy game or Strangers of Paradise, not Strangers. Strangers on the Train. But in that one it was like, it comes out

weeks after Elden Ring, which is terrible timing for a Souls-like game to come out, but I was certain of it. I got some off-the-record confirmation of that of just like, yeah, it literally, it has to come out in March. Square Enix will not release it outside of the fiscal year it's got to be before march 31st that sounds about right which uh you know hey uh the reviews were good for that game i think it did all right

uh but i i still haven't touched it because you know after 120 hours elden ring i i'm i'm good on souls for a little it'll be'll be $20 this Christmas, folks. Or maybe even just shove down to Game Pass, you know. You Game Pass elitist. Hey, Game Pass is great, Bob. It's the way of the future. Way of the future. Too much content.

Give me fewer games, I say. Fewer. I also love that Kent, as the media, says, like, and it's time for finger pointing and of course the media takes no blame themselves in in failing to catch that this was a hoax and just puts it all on their parents like that's such a great gag too it again reminds me of i brought it up before but that that britney spears doc uh about save britney that the new york times did uh for hulu it's about how like oh we were so the

tabloid media was so cruel to britney back when she was you know a teenager we we really regret that and it's like oh great you know 20 years later the media finds themselves you know now not guilty of being horrible they're just like oh in the past we were pretty bad to start with certainly not now no no no i also just love i do believe we're naked by funky see funky do like that's such a great delivery and it's like a mix of kid and play and vanilla ice these two guys yeah yeah oh and i meant a little millie vanillie oh sure sure yeah oh did i say vanilla ice i meant millie vanillie oh yeah yes too many vanilla based rap groups and also just drop it all the way down to number 97 like that's such

a great delivery too and i also love quimby just being forthright of like so i am flip-flopping like everybody loves it he officially says he's flip-flopping as a as a uh political as a politician i i think that would be refreshing if politicians just announce it like it's coming and like any second now i am flip-flopping if you just say that you are you don't have to be caught out for it later yeah get in front of it yeah yeah exactly you know it's a good strategy yeah like so i yes the next time some senator or governor just needs to say like so i am flip-flopping though and talk about also perfect parody of the media there would be newspaper opinion

pieces now says that's a town too well boy no more free food like it's just it's such a great like uh parody of like just the cruelty of just like you know what fuck this guy fuck this kid you know no more free food for you but this is when bart finally learns his lesson and Homer, well, he can't stands no more. Bart, honey, I made you an extra warm sweater you can wear while you're down in the well. Mom, it's too big. Don't worry, you'll grow into it. Homer! You know, I've done a lot of bad stuff through the years.

I guess now I'm paying the price. But there's so many things I'll never get a chance to do. Smoke a cigarette. use a fake id shave a swear word in my hair that's all i can stands i can't stands no more i'm gonna get you out of there myself uh so i like the popeye reference it's clearly an adr line uh i like the Popeye reference. It's clearly an ADR line. I like the original line in the storyboards where Bart says all the things he wishes he could have done. And they're all like bad kid things. And Homer's response is, son, you're going to do all those things and more. That is a great line.

It's funny to hear Homer say Popeye stuff, but that actually is a pretty great line. Yeah. Though, you know what? It would be Milhouse who shaves a swear word in his hair what is it with you children in that word and there's some great animation on Homer digging while Marge then instantly brings up a wheelbarrow off screen to tell some random man just shows up I love that he just has a pixar pickaxe in his hand and stands there but of course you know we already talked about that we get the big reveal that sideshow mel that's what his voice sounds like here's another detail that they stuck with from then on groundskeeper willie is like cut he is uh a hot he has a sexy

beach bod it's all that groundskeeping yeah it works and they admit he they draw him with a punch when he has clothes on when his clothes come come off, he is Mr. Olympia. It's just like Ned Flanders would be next year. I just love it. Just the clothes fly off. I mean, they up it even better when he's the Grease Scotsman. That's even better. And we learn his shovel's name is Agnes, not to be confused with his tractor, which is

named Duchess. Yes, the digging begins. And what a great misdirect that it cuts to kent brockman and you think he's about to say the hole is digging at the well this is kent brockman with a special bulletin the lincoln squirrel has been assassinated we'll stay with the story all night we have to what's going on it's an old-fashioned hole digging by gar it's been a while by gar what a great jasper's there to announce whatever the mob is doing next

stage the same way too it's great yeah it's just just like an ace in the hole i feel like there's multiple old men in the movie who kirk doug what's going on? Like, why is this happening, sir? It's over there. Lots more. There were many more coots back then, I think. Including, we said this on a different podcast, but the shop owner from Green Acres is one of the lead coots who's using it himself to sell his insurance policy. Mr. Verderber. Yes.

His claim to fame is like actually i was the first tourist here we like acing the whole folks it's great uh but uh there's a cute gag that they're digging misses a ton of valuable stuff which including an alien spacecraft and the skeleton and it looks like a kodos and kang style alien too so we can't get mad they made the aliens real and canon it It's true. That is a canonical alien right there. Yeah. Here I've been complaining about canonical Kang and Kodos for so long,

and yet here's the proof right in my face. It was always there. There's a quick little gag with a canary, which I guess because it dies for natural causes, I can't play the bird violence jingle then. It's great how they run screaming out of the hole, and then violence jingle then uh it's great how they run screaming out of the hole and then when they find out it's okay they run screaming back into it back in the hole and by the way the police have a song called canary in a coal mine oh wow i think it's

a coincidence and i was also looking this up the reason sting did this episode i'm gonna guess is because in 10 days his new album would be out the soul cages there you go yeah there you go he just wants to sell his record man it's just like the the aerosmith same deal they had their ep they had a greatest hits album coming out if you uh within a month of their episode of flaming mo it doesn't sound fun i was looking it up and apparently it's a concept album about the death of his father you just grown to concept album all right yes concept album about the death of his father. You just groaned a concept album. All right. Yes. Concept album.

I mean, come on. Once you're doing the concept album, you've put out too many albums. Entertainment Weekly says, see, you're dead, dead boring. Get back to me when your mom croaks. Come on, Sting. Get some real material. Yeah. Boo-hoo.

But yes, in our final clip here, we do get to hear a little more Sting, which this is a great joke here. It is. Sting, you look tired. Maybe you should take a rest. Not while one of my fans needs me. Actually, I don't know if I've ever heard

Bart play one of your albums. Shh. Marge, he's a good digger. Thanks, Mom! Dad! Bart, I've missed you so much! Man, I was so scared. Don't worry, son. They're gonna make sure no one ever falls down this well again. That should do it.

Bart, a very impressed thing, is rescuing him. But he's just shoved out of the way in like two frames. I just, just, just, Bart, she's a good digger yes yeah like don't stop him i don't want to dig anymore he's good at it and i know why he goes by sting uh his real name is gordon ah man and he but he's not from canada right despite his name being gordon uh no he's from he's from england okay yeah yeah not all gordon's from canada i mean he's got a great body in this go to uh david lynch's dune and look at look at stinging that oh my god yes yeah he it seemed like he he had the perfect body a human could have pretty much yes yeah it's uh it's quite impressive in that speedo there which uh but i like to think that

marge is right that she never knew bart did any uh listen to any of his albums and that he only knows him because of him being in the crusty music video earlier that bart saw well we all know bart is a big michael jackson fan number one in his heart loves him so much loves them yeah i you know that gordon thing it clicked a thing for me i uh this is something i will get to the bottom of later but this episode is one of three episodes this season that had a production company i did not recognize it's gordon stanfield animation uh and they apparently did they assisted with character layout and gordon stanfield his company he is a canadian and it's based in Vancouver. Interesting. So I was like, yep, okay, another Canadian Gordon right there.

Is that in the credits? Yes, Gordon Stanfield Animation. Unfortunately, though, maybe I'm going to have to look up Gordon Stanfield in Vancouver and just randomly call him because just a bunch of dead websites. The Gordon Stanfield Animation Company, no real footprint online. Just call random numbers and say did you draw sting 31 years ago what did you draw on radio bar they they worked on a lot of other more important stuff or well they worked more on other stuff but simpsons is probably their biggest credit but

i don't know if uh i don't know if they really worked out well for simpsons because it seems like they only were used on three episodes in season three and then not again but uh but yeah see uh so when we were talking about gordon's and canada i was like oh wait a minute yeah gordon in canada did lay out on this thing it's so homer violently shoving sting out of the way uh probably hurting sting somewhat like so funny but it's also so sweet how marge like hugs bard and he's just like i was so scared that triumphant music over a tiny sign that says caution well what a great joke great ending and i can see i mean season three is so good and i looked at the list of episodes just really quickly and i was like well there are lots of other episodes that are very good but i can't

decide like which one would be the best one to submit for an emmy it's a shame this didn't win but i mean they won two years in a row but this is so this one's so good and i understand why they uh they submitted it the one thing i think it's missing is there's no mr burns that's true not one mr burns but hey i'll take it it's fine but uh maybe maybe like bart the lover or like um homer alone maybe yeah bart the lover gets a little more more emotional yeah but uh yeah take that i hate you uh claymation easter still haven't seen you maybe i saw it when i was a kid i really don't think so but i want when i pulled up clips of it i was like no i don't remember this at all it's like it's about pigs trying to steal easter from rabbits and a pig pretends to be the easter bunny

it's it's very complicated and it doesn't feature the california raisins which was my main drawing point for watching the claymation christmas special which is much better and memorable i i know my final thoughts on this is it's it has also just some great animation all over the place and this is the the two sides of simpsons which you know by season four they get more and more away from the family aspect and the, you know, real childhood kind of memories. But this is great because it's got you've got Bart turning 10 and it's just observations about having like a lackluster birthday when you're super excited for your birthday. And then it also is a long film parody that also is kind of a satire of the media as a

whole. So it's got small ideas and big ideas. It's a really really great episode yeah one big solid story any final thoughts on this one matt like you guys said it's it's a nice mix of like the heavier like season one and season two family aspects and you know lampooning other things obviously so uh it's one that stands out as as in season three for me specifically and like i said i still I still have that long sustained convoy I'll use every so often. So, uh, for that, it lives in my heart for a long while still. So

yeah, it's, um, you can't fault almost anything in season three. So always glad to go back to this particular era. Yeah. Well, thanks for joining us once again, Matt, please let us know where to find you online and what you're up to lately. You can find me online in almost any platform except for like TikTok and Instagram and all the kid ones. So, yeah, you can find me on YouTube and Twitter at Matt McMuscles. Just type that in. You'll find me. And right now, by the time November rolls around, I'm probably going to be playing sonic frontiers and see how bad that that that that really is uh because unless unless they delay it unless they delay it from between now in august to november it's possible i should be playing that on my gameplay channel flop house

plays with my friend liam and overall matman muscles i'll probably still be continuing a mix of what happened videos on on video games and movies and the trouble productions and probably a mix of uh the mediocre spider-man where i view spider-man games and the worst fighting game where i see if i can find something that's worse than the playstation's criticom i don't think i will you know when we were listing other things we've done with you i forgot to mention the great your spider-man one reminded me me and you uh had like oh we have to talk about no way home right now and we just recorded an hour-long chat about it right after we saw the movie and that was that was also a ton of fun yeah just any any spider-man stuff specifically 90s spider-man so when people tell me like oh this has been

happening lately i'm like i can't i'm old i can't i can't keep up with with everything especially not in comics because everything moves at like a breakneck pace. So yeah, like, you know, I love this sort of thing we're getting into. I hope there's a Spider-Man equivalent of this, but that new X-Men 92 show that's coming to Disney Plus that's just like, no, it's just X-Men from the 90s. Like, I want that for Spider-Man so bad. I want something dumb and simple again, you know? Christopher Daniel Barnes, I'm sure would be up for it.'s still still at it still he'll be spidey uh sorry last compliment i want to say on the on the podcast studio matt that your use of shocker over and over is so good i couldn't even do that half as crazy as christopher still hurt me yeah sorry yeah i saw my waveforms on there it's like like, oh, I think I got too hard for shocker there. Leave it to the pros. I'd love to have been a fly on the wall

for that particular reading of that line and be like, no, bigger, bigger, angrier. It's the subiote, man. And he just goes nuts. What a national treasure he is. The way he said, I'll chase you to the ends of the earth with such intensity. Yes, yeah. But yes.

No, thank you so much, Matt. This was so much fun. Thank you, Matt. Thanks so much for having me, guys. Always a pleasure. Thanks again to Matt McMuscles for being on the show. Please check out everything he does. But if you want to check out more of what we do and get all these episodes one week

ahead of time and ad free, please go to Patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. Go there and sign up for five bucks a month. You get just that, but also access to everything behind that $5 paywall that includes over 100 bonus podcasts we've done in the past. Over five years of content is waiting for you behind the $5 paywall. Currently, that guides you access to everything we've done so far, and also

monthly access to regular episodes of Talking Futurama and Talking of the Hill. So check it out at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons, and there is a $10 level as well. When you sign up for that, you get access to all of the hill so check it out at patreon.com talking simpsons and there is a 10 level as well when you sign up for that you get access to all of the five dollar stuff naturally but you can also access one extremely long podcast once a month only for patrons of that level or higher and what is that henry bob is talking about the what a cartoon movie podcast where we talk about an animated

feature film just as in depth as we talk about an episode of simpsons which often means talking for over five hours sometimes even over six hours about a classic cartoon movie recent ones uh while we just did transformers the movie the 1986 version of course which actually has some surprising connections to the simpsons before that we did beavis and butthead do the universe a super awesome film uh that also has some connections to simpsons and futurama and before that our summer of disney renaissance and we have so many classics out there we cover everything from akira to a goofy movie and i always want to point people to our longest one ever our six and a half hour long podcast about who framed roger rabbit it's worth

the money folks at the ten dollar level check it all out at patreon.com slash TalkingSimpsons. So as for me, I've been one of your hosts, Bob Mackie. You can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo, and my other podcast is Retronauts. You can 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 to stay up to date with all of Henry Gilbert's stuff. And if you're following me and Bob on Twitter,

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And of course, if you would like an easy-to-follow list of all the free podcasts we've ever released for What a Cartoon and Talking Simpsons, check it all out at TalkingSimpsonsPodcast.com. Thanks so much for joining us, folks. We'll see you again next time for Season 13's Tales from the Public Domain, and we'll see you then. I'm on I'm on I'm on

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I'm on I'm on I'm on I'm on I'm on I'm on I'm on I'm on I'm on I'm on I'm on I'm on I'm on I'm on Well, listen, good buddy, uh, keep the clothes off your glass and the feathers off your ass. We'll catch you on the flip-flop. There's a rubber duck on the side, so I'm down and out. Here we go. Bye-bye. Sorry, Rosarita. I gotta get to my birthday party.

Farewell, Senor Bart.