Talking Simpsons - Talking Simpsons - Saddlesore Galactica With Chris Cabin

Episode Date: September 30, 2020

We're joined by Chris Cabin from the podcast We Hate Movies as we wonder "should the Simpsons get a horse?" This is one of the show's most random episodes ever, with bad boy horses, Clinton being gross, and jockeys who are secretly murderous trolls! Is this an episode worth getting mad over like Comic Book Guy, or is it funny in its zany disregard for reality? Listen now or the jockeys might just eat your brains! Support this podcast and get hundreds of bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! Check out our new shirts on TeePublic! And please follow the new official Twitter, @TalkSimpsonsPod!

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slash talking simpsons can hear every episode plus all of our previous miniseries about Futurama, King of the Hill, and The Critic. So don't be a beardsley, sign up for Talking Mission Hill today! Alright! I heartily endorse this event or product. Ahoy, hoy, everybody, and welcome to Talking Simpsons, the podcast with a pro-moth anti-horse agenda. I'm your host, fiberglass tree resident Bob Mackey, and this is our chronological exploration of The Simpsons. Who is here with me today?

It's Henry Gilbert, and I believe this family already had a horse. Very true. And who do we have on the line? Chris Cabin, pretty lousy president. And today's episode is Saddlesore Galactica. Anybody care what this guy thinks? No! That is the response to our podcast.

Today's episode aired on February 6, 2000. And as always, Henry will tell us what happened on this mythical day in real world history. Oh my God! Oh boy, Bobby. The final episode of Sliders airs. Scream 3 is released in theaters. And The Sims hits the PC. So quite a fun day in the year 2000.

Oh, The Sims is out. Yes, the game The Sims finally hit. Like, the original scene is like, oh, the SimCity spinoff. I'm sure it's cute and all, but actually far, far, far surpassed the popularity of SimCity. And there are still new Sims games today. And I always play those when I'm very depressed, because they're the perfect meritocracy simulator. If you work hard, you will succeed. That's the good news out of all, like,

remembering Slider's ending, that was a tragedy for me. Scream 3 was also a tragedy for me. And then Sims, I love. Was Slider's down to just one of the lesser O'Connells at that point? I believe John Rhys-Davies was unceremoniously killed. He was killed with a bullet through the portal that got to him at the next place. And then, yeah, I think I forget.

Is it like Jack O'Connell or something like that? Yeah, he's in there in season. I was a light watcher of Sliders. I didn't see every episode. And I definitely didn't watch the fifth season. That was only on SyFy Channel. Yeah, I only watched the Fox run of Sliders. But so I didn't know until looking this up about like,

one, the final episode of Sliders is an unresolved cliffhanger because they thought they... Which still I think Slider fans have gotten no closure on. But also I had forgotten that the season five begins with jerry o'connell's character merging with a fraternal twin version of himself from another universe which is how they recast him so it's like well technically quinn is still here but now he's mallory this other guy yeah yeah that's that's some actual putting some effort into it not just be like, uh, yeah,

it's the same guy. And just have somebody new in it. So Scream 3 is out too, correct, on this day in history? And I believe this is the movie that brought Jay and Silent Bob into the Screamiverse? It's true. I forgot they get killed in that. No, it's just a 19 second

scene. I looked it up on YouTube. Hey, Silent Bob, it's Jeffrey Weinstein. No, no's just a 19-second scene. I looked it up on YouTube. Hey, Silent Bob, it's Jeffrey Weinstein. No, no, no. They pass by Courtney Cox's character, and they say, Hey, look, Silent Bob, it's Mitch Young. Hey, how's Maury doing? And then Courtney Cox gives them the middle finger and walks away. I only watched that because I was a big kevin smith fan in 2000 he would pay them

back for this by doing the scream for joke in jay and tyler bob strike back the next year you know what i apologize i can buy the names of two perverts like jeffrey weinstein is like the ultra pervert we have not reached that part of uh our dark timeline yet so harvey weinstein and jeffrey ep, different people, but similarly huge monsters. I mean, they're in photographs together too. Getting those two in the Sliders universe and that they had come together,

that would have really been a nightmare universe. What if they did the Dragon Ball Z fusion dance and became one super pervert? That Jane Salababa appearance, I mean, it was because of the Weininsteins like the scream was made by dimension films which was bob weinstein's production side and then the mirror max did all of the kevin smith movies that was harvey's side so it's just been listening to the

audiobook version of disney war and i just have to groan like every chapter it's like man harvey weinstein is i have a god damn every monster is listed in this thing uh but but the movie scream 3 i barely remember it i just remember like i remember jamie kennedy's character gets to return because they find a videotape of him saying hey if a third thing ever happens these are the rules of a third movie it's it was just they they moved it to hollywood a lot of it was meta, and I just wanted to die. Which I think lines up a lot with the episode we're here to talk about. I recall it being about the filming of a movie based on the events of Scream. Yes.

Yep. That's right. I thought so. It's all flashing back to me now. It's all rushing in. Last thing about The Sims, though, I played that so much. Just the first one. Me, too.

The first one was the one I was obsessed with over a long, depressing summer of 2000. And, sorry, spring as well. It was a depressing year in general for me. What's the... Who's the goth girl everybody dates in their first playthrough of original Sims? Oh, I forget. I know they had, had like placeholder names for a lot of like the characters they drop into your neighborhood all my friends were like oh this is

the first neighbor you meet i'm gonna try to have sex with his wife like that's that was how many of my friends play that game though it was i mean it was a big deal for me and my uh my pals too because you could be gay in sims which in a 2000 video game you never could do yeah so it was a fun it was a fun little dollhouse i've i had several co-workers in the video game world who were like hardcore sims players who i had one friend who as a test she wanted to see what was the closest to incest you could get away with in the game? And they're like, well, she worked it out to like a fifth or sixth cousin. You could have that many generations of Sims. And like, well, they're fifth cousins.

The game will let them have sex. Yes, asking the hard-hitting questions in Sims. I had like the principal Skinner approach to playing Sims where my favorite part of the game is building the house. Yes, the kitchen is in the right place. I would be a real rule monger about those games with my friends because they would just do like the cheats to be like no i'm building every single thing i want in the house i'm like but you start with a certain amount of money that's not fair don't cheat uh but but anyway hey chris cabin welcome back joining us today Chris Cabin of We Hate Movies

so we're recording this way in advance so this is July 31st by the way and as of this recording you guys just finished the great mini series Melro 210 which I've really enjoyed over the past five months and you've also just recorded your 500th episode it's not out as of this recording

but it will have been out for a while when you're hearing this live yes indeed and thank you about the Mel 210 it was just kind of something we put together for this uh pandemic thing we're going through and we'll be going through for probably another year or so it's going to be coming back eventually on our patreon but it's it's been a blast i really enjoyed in particular your hatred of the character jim walsh the father of the walsh clan uh awful awful human being like just obsessed with his son in like the most creepy ways imaginable it's it drives me nuts

and in case our listeners don't know uh melro 210 is a series where uh in the beginning uh twice a week you'd go through one episode of 90210 one episode of melrose place and then starting in june you just do one a week. And there's quite a few episodes out there for people on the We Hate Movies free feed. I really recommend it. It's been a real treat. And at times, it reminded me of what day it was during the week when you guys were doing it twice a week. Oh, it's Thursday.

Okay. I guess that makes sense. It's good to have a basic service like that, just to remind you. Chris, yeah. What do you recall seeing this season 11 this controversial season 11 episode when it was new uh i actually don't i think the last one in season 11 because season 11 was definitely when i stopped watching weekly and i think the last one i remember very clearly watching uh on its premiere date was the food critic episode okay when he becomes the

food critic like i remember seeing the mel gibson episode a couple times but that's the last one where i remember i was like i remember very specifically sitting down with my mom to watch the food critic episode after that it's kind of a blur i'll be honest with you for me this one i did not like at the time i think i've come to like it more watching it now though i don't think this is like the best episode of season 11 even uh but yeah this i remember being mad about this episode back in 2000 i've grown to not hate it this is a weird period of the show and in my life because like the spring of 2000 is when a lot of notorious episodes there so there was the uh you know maude flanders dying there's this one there's the spring break one all like very notorious episodes in the simpsons fan community happening

in the spring of 2000 also in the spring of 2000 i went through my first serious breakup with a girlfriend so i was just like on the floor depressed and also playing the sims when i could sit upright so i just remember like everything bad, and now The Simpsons are disappointing me? Like, what is going on? So I recall this era very vividly in my life. And, yeah, like, this is one of the most hated episodes. And I feel like upon this 2020 rewatch, I don't think it's amazing, but I was laughing throughout. And I don't think it deserves reputation that it has.

It's just it's right next to one of the most notorious episodes ever. No, sorry. It's the most notorious episode ever. Alone again, naturally. Yeah. With next week's episode,

the maud death one. I think that this was like a one, two punch for a lot of viewers. And that, that is how I felt then. Uh, not that I like love this episode. I don't want to say like,

Oh, I've rediscovered like this is my new favorite episode but i at least go like you know what that was a funny joke they packed this with a lot of funny jokes i thought even though they literally spit in our faces directly in this episode well not literally i used that wrong but they they are directly attacking the fans in this episode like intentionally that's true so uh to make it even rougher i think probably probably didn't make them any friends on no homers i think either i i think that for me it was uh like because they had made fun of their fans before but this one felt a little bit more petty like i don't know if i had really like

and that this was me just coming back to it. Like, I barely remember this episode. Like, when coming back to it, I was like, I definitely have seen this one before. But I don't remember, like, the little, like, the whole musical number with the jockeys. Nothing. Could not remember. Didn't remember any of it. And even the Marker Cho joke, I thought I would remember that immediately.

But nope. I had no idea about it. And then, to me, this is an episode where I first felt the thing going from this felt like an episode written by a computer that had watched all the other episodes. That's where I landed with it last night. I think so. Like when I when the DVDs were coming out, this one's probably like around 2008, 2009. A lot of the episodes I would put on the commentary and i would just think in my head explain yourself like what were you thinking during this and this is a very interesting uh commentary because matt graining in the

beginning he's not on a lot of uh these latter commentaries but he sits down he's like you know what for whatever reason i've never seen this episode and they're like oh really wow so they're they're sitting with him and all the things you would think would make him mad are not making him mad. And then at the end, he's like, that was great. Yeah. So it's unexpected from him because all the things the animals are doing,

because he's not a fan of animals not acting like animals. It breaks a lot of graining rules in this one. Yeah. He says at the beginning, too, he acknowledges, like, I've been told I'd really hate this episode. So he knew the reputation of Saddlesore Galactica long before he did it. I really like Chris's observation that it feels like it's written by an AI because one of my notes is this feels like a burlesque version of John Schwarzwalder. He is not writing this script, but they're like, what would John Schwarzwalder do?

And they don't have his same brain or like mindset so they're doing similarly wacky things but not in the same spirit i think it's like somebody trying i i josh weinstein had said to us like he had described a one of these scripts uh a john schwartzwelder script as like a swiss watch and if you tinker with it too much you can't pull it back together again and this then in that that way i think it feels like a knockoff of a switch swiss watch like well i sort of know how all these watches come together and i'm an all right watchmaker myself it's a genuine roanex watch yeah i think to the this episode is just so punchy. It feels like late season, tired writer writing because of how inconsistent to most characters

act and how there's just a lot of just pure insanity and just like shrugged shoulders like, oh, stuff's crazy. What are you going to do? Like there's a lot of that. You mentioning that commentary too, Bob, that all these commentaries i think helped bring me into the simpsons fan i am now because we were all like we didn't know any of this behind the scenes stuff we didn't know any of this creative stuff and you had all these unanswered questions then once you go to the commentaries and get the answers you have new questions or you have to

recalibrate your whole brain about it and And that's, I think that's what maybe listening to this commentary is the changing point in my opinion on this episode, though, again, it's still, but I kill the alligator and run. I am looking forward to doing that one because that one really was. I'm like,

I just never liked that one when it aired and maybe I'll like it more now and just hate the kid rock moments. But I do find this to be symbolic of what happened to simpsons and the aughts because with season 10 is where i start like it starts faltering like i see a couple episodes and i'm like it's not quite punching at its weight again this is where i feel like you go from having a a uh you know depending on what kind of episode it is either a subtle subtle or a very strong emotional backbone to everything, to it being mostly about the jokes.

And I feel like that takes them, like, to one side. Like, it was a balancing act before in the 90s between having heart and having, like, a good emotional backstory to everything and just rapid-fire big jokes. This is where I feel like they go all the way only to big jokes and then they've been building themselves back to having heart and emotional backbone the since then like i feel like you only get that when during the obama years do they kind of become even sentimental again i think so yeah when al jean comes back to the show after this i

feel like they are working back towards becoming sentimental but around this time we said this a lot in these years like south park is the biggest animated show the movie had just come out and i think they're feeling a lot of heat like that is the new hot thing what are they doing oh there's no sentimentality it's all mean-spirited no one learns anything so i feel like the south park was a bad influence on the simpsons in a way just because it was such a big part of pop culture at the time well and and we know they were being told by fox execs like you know family guys cheaper and newer than you guys like they i don't think they i think some simpsons writers hate family guy but i don't want to say they all hate family guy but i definitely think the the competition was even

being stoked not just by fans but by fox executives in their lives and it was all about like not being like you know being too sensitive to like like i can see where people wouldn't like the margaret cho joke or like the jockeys elf thing like i can see where that's a little south park that's a little family guy e but like south park also you know for all of its flaws you know the friendship between at least stan and kyle they put some effort into that there was some there was some warmth to it uh even with kenny and stuff like that so like i see the family guy a lot more in this than i do see the south park i guess though they make there's a great point on the commentary too where they they kind of call out south park for stealing they're not

exactly stealing but they're just like the reveal of the elves is pretty much a crab people ending on south park just like oh you didn't see that coming kind of thing yeah but they but they did it like years before south park really did that kind of oh didn't see that coming kind of ending it is a real ass pull uh before we get into the show though i want to talk about the new director for talking simpsons or the simpsons rather uh lance kramer a very easy bio to go over because 90 of his bio is at the simpsons so uh he appears to have gotten his start as a storyboard artist on garfield and friends in 1992 made by phil roman so i assume it was very easy to go to the simpsons because his first role there was storyboard assistant on whacking day he went away for a bit came back as an assistant director on hurricane

netty and has been consistently employed since then as either an assistant director or a director so he's been doing a lot on the show for the past 26 years now based on all of his credits i i'm assuming the situation is that he is one of their like key directors. And when there is an opening for one episode a season, sometimes two, he'll come in and be the director. But he mostly seems to be more an assistant director, like storyboard revisionist. He does a lot of high-level jobs at Simpsons. Watching this episode, though, the animation does not fail this episode. It's really well animated for all the horse stuff. And also all like the character acting seems to be above par on this episode for whatever reason.

I felt that a lot with when they get to the fair. Like I like fair episodes in The Simpsons because they get it gives it so much diversity and the different colors they're going to use and the different setups they have in there. Like just having like the Omnigogs and all those guys yeah i mean like we'll talk about in a minute yeah i i did notice that but this is this isn't tim long's first episode right uh no it is not he's i think last season he is a season 10 higher i believe okay uh but he's a canadian he was mean to one of our friends oh that's right yeah he actually was he said he said a not nice thing on a commentary about simpsons comics yeah it's not nice first episode was a segment on simpsons bible stories last season i just have a general you know this is probably unfair but like you work with Bill Maher. Oh, yes. Generally.

He's insufferable, truly. He's, well, I mean, Bill Maher thinks by hating Republicans and smoking pot, he is the most left wing a person can be. And it's like, no, you're actually quite conservative and also awful. Oh, but yeah, about Lance Kramer, the other, yeah, the compliment on this, like if you talk to most animators, they would probably say animating a horse is one of the hardest things to do. Yes. And here they have to animate not just one horse, but many horses. Yeah, several horse races. And then on top of that, they have to do the also very difficult thing of a musical sequence.

Yeah. Like, that's, it's a ton of extra work. I did see that Kramer, he did a couple 2011 futuramas he was yeah like futurama but pretty much otherwise just a simpsons lifer all the people from the first decade most of them usually come in and out of the show you know like david silverman as a as a prime example or they end up going to king of the hill or some other similar show but you know kramer is one of those guys is like no 28 years i think i think his first production one whacking day aired 93 he probably started 92 so 28 years he's been working on the show you can start it in your career at

the simpsons it's that uh long running his linkedin is very boring too it's just it's three credits just simpsons simpsons and Simpsons, and Garfield. I think I empathize most with guys like that who just are like, this is going to be my career. Like, this is where I work now. And, like, unless some amazing thing comes my way, this is what I'll be doing with my life. I kind of like that. Yeah, jobs used to be like that. You could actually have a job for that long.

Yeah. And it just doesn't happen anymore. Well, in the animation world you know steady employment is not something you can really count on you know you work on your show until the show's over or or that it goes into hiatus and you're not paid during hiatus so you either wait or you get another job but you know this shows at least for for lance kramer it's a long-term recur like you can just stay there and stay. And it's a good paying deal for him.

The Simpsons will be right back. How we use electricity can be smarter, cleaner, and greener. At Electric Ireland, we can help guide you there. You see, our new Net Zero Hub has all you need to know about smart meter plans, EV tariffs, solar panels and much more. Making your usage clearer, your trips greener, your home cozier and your world brighter. Find our Net Zero Hub at electricireland.ie. I hope you're going the distance with us this week as we did with our guest, Chris Cabin of the We Hate Movies podcast. Always great to have him on.

Huge thank you to him follow him on twitter and check out the we hate movies podcast and if you'd like to be a supporter of us you should be checking out patreon.com slash talking simpsons in case you didn't know me and bob do this full-time as our real ass jobs and that's only because of the awesome support of listeners like you at patreon.com slash talking simpsons that support also gets you a bunch of extras on top of the two weekly podcasts what a cartoon and talking simpsons that me and bob do while you get to hear next week's episode of talking simpsons right now and without ads like this one same for what a cartoon plus you get access to dozens of original exclusive to patreon podcasts where me and bob

do the same talking simpson style discussions but about series like the critic king of the hill futurama and mission hill coming next month we're going to be doing more episodes of talking futurama that's only for our patreon subscribers please consider signing up for five bucks a month to support me and bob and to get a ton of exclusive content but if you want something as fancy as a bowl of pearls for breakfast then you need to sign up at the ten dollar level at patreon.com slash talking Simpsons for some incredible exclusives. Not only do you get all the $5 things I just talked about, but you also get each month our What a Cartoon Movie podcast. A podcast only for $10 and up subscribers where, for up to four hours, me and Bob talk about an animated feature film in the Talking Simpsons style.

This month we're doing the Aladdin sequel, Return of Jafar. That's a lot of fun the month before that we did 1995's ghost in the shell and we have a huge back catalog over 100 hours of previous podcast topics that include spider-man into the spider-verse kiki's delivery service aladdin a goofy movie beavis and butthead do america tons tons tons more so much great content you can only hear if you're at the premium level so please consider signing up for 10 bucks a month at patreon.com slash talking simpsons yeah i guess uh let's start with the episode then the the karate couch gag i just wanted to mention that because it does seem uh out of place in that homer isn't injured at the end of it like

homer actually just does a cool like karate move and pull out the remote control and start the tv it's very rare when homer is not injured uh or murdered in a couch gag i think on the commentary scully even calls out like boy homer just can't win in these couch gags always always gets hurt and then the episode begins with season one superstar mr largo getting a lot of lines most uh spoken lines since probably uh lisa's date with density i'm guessing yeah i think so and even then that was like a few he has way more lines in this than he did in uh nobody likes millhouse uh they also even give him an interesting character trait of like he just loves John Philip Sousa and only John Philip Sousa music.

But Lisa isn't as much of a fan. I hate to be a killjoy, but do you really think we can win playing Stars and Stripes forever? It's so beginner band. We're advanced beginner band. This is band? Very well, Lisa. What rousing Sousa March would you have us play? Well, I thought maybe for once

we could play a song that wasn't written by Sousa. You mean something just arranged by Sousa? No, something fresh and bold. Well, darling, you have lost me. How about something cool, like Camptown Races? Hey, Grandpa, the Civil War's over. How about

Little Brown Jug? Ha ha ha, he War's over. How about Little Brown Jug? Ya-ha-ha, hee-hee-hee, Little Brown Jug, how I love thee! Oh, stop with your devil music. Lisa, this is all your fault. Hey, the blind broad's got a point. We need something with a little ring-a-ding-ding. Take your arm off me. Oh, this kitten's got claws.

Okay, we'll do a different song. Who cares? They all end up sounding the same anyway. Oh, this kitten's got claws. Okay, we'll do a different song. Who cares? They all end up sounding the same anyway. What a fruit fly. So this sets up what you think. That's a little homophobic. It really is. It's shocking from that little Sinatra boy.

I guess Frank Sinatra was homophobic, so it's accurate. But these years are all about sticking it to Lisa. What a little whiner she is. And you think this is going to be a Lisa episode, but it ends up being an episode about how Lisa can't stop complaining about things. She really gets it right. Especially like her first line is like, I hate to be a killjoy. But it's like, I feel like that's them saying like, no, Lisa loves to be a killjoy.

All she does is complain. I feel like that was what I was missing is that it isn't really about anything. Like she complains a lot yeah that is kind of the episode and like you you would think like the whole it would structure around her like learning to like enjoy what you do just even if it isn't if it is suza every day or something like that but like it isn't it's just a bunch of like i don't like this i don't like this i don't like this well the the core lesson in this for lisa is supposed to be what march says to her but then it has this like ridiculous ending that is

where the president shows up at their home yeah god so it's uh this could be the start of an actual like you know real lesson that uh but a wholesome kind of lesson even about like hey you know sometimes life's not fair or whatever but instead this is just lisa whining until she gets what she wants because i mean i don't want to think there's too much sexism to it but it does seem like about how feminists complain too much about stuff until they get their way and i mean we are in the era reading on that this is the era of like the man show and stuff like that very much like pushing back against feminism in the 90s so i can see this being an echo of uh that kind of sentimentality or sentiment rather and also like largo has never been this effeminate before too they're really

playing come on you a bug i guess yeah that's true but especially like it's like oh well honey you've just lost me like that especially i was like boy that's a very gay reading for largo and then he's called a fruit fly at the end i'm like i had honestly i thought i had remembered at least much of this episode but the frank sinatra kid i was like what the hell i i think the frank sinatra kid was sent to the, was expelled in the same day that that Rex kid was, the acting boy, little acting boy. Someone's got you, you deceitful cow.

Yeah. Now that's Rex, not Stewie Griffin I was doing there. The fruit flag thing, it went into like, I got a yellow meter. I didn't go full red. I was like, wait a minute. What about that? But my thing with Largo is that I just always forget who he is because it usually is so

long in between his episodes where he gets something to do that I just blank out. Yeah. Again, he's one of those big season one characters they had big plans for, which is why he's embedded in the opening. But just they couldn't figure out who he was and what could make him funny. Yeah. When we did season one i noted that like lisa refers to miss hoover but you don't see her i think they originally thought

like bart's antagonist is miss krabappel and skinner and lisa's antagonist is going to be mr largo when they're they're not going to go to lisa's classroom they're going to go to lisa in the band because it's going to be all about her playing music and then by season two they're going to go to lisa in the band because it's going to be all about her playing music and then by season two they're like now lisa needs to be in the classroom we don't we've done every music playing joke we can think of with her it needs to be her about doing good in class i guess i also just didn't relate because all my music teachers were like they all looked like john oliver when he joined the daily show like they weren't old guys like they were young guys who were like into death cab for cutie and like knew what the new uh musicals going on were and like wanted to get talk to you about that

stuff and you were just like shut up and like i didn't have this older guy who was like really into like older music my my music teacher in grade school was an effeminate middle-aged man uh mine was i took band for two years so some of these band jokes uh remind me of it that experience and my music teacher was kind of a largo figure though he he had a wife and kids like kids who actually went to school with us which i felt really bad for those kids but he was a like mega dork who had control over his little fiefdom of the band room uh i remember one day when we had a substitute which substituted band is like you just can't do anything like so you just watch a video and we put on mr holland's opus we watched that in my uh music appreciation class I can't believe that shit.

And well, for us, there was a joke. So the Mr. Holmes opens, if you haven't seen it, is about a school band teacher played by Richard Dreyfuss. And there is a scene early in the movie where him and his wife, he's like, it's his first day. And he then has sex with her. And she has some line of like, oh, you ever imagine your band teacher getting lucky? And every, this is middle school, we're hearing this and we all just like out loud go bleh. Like we'd never had to think of our band teacher having sex until Mr. Holland's Opus had to have a joke about it.

But yeah, the Frank Sinatra kid. There's a couple times in this where i think they're critic jokes that we every time a joke comes up like this i like is this a season three critic joke that's being reused here because uh they they wrote multiple scripts for a season three of critic that was never produced and uh there's they've never released those scripts anywhere and i often have the sneaking suspicion that al jean you know goes like ah these jokes aren't being used let's just put them in simpsons they'd go to waste otherwise the audience will love sinatra boy sinatra boy and then well actually yes then the next scene at the state fair of homer pretending to be a vietnam veteran that also feels

like a critic joke to me who would be doing that though jay jay wouldn't do that man you don't think no i don't think so maybe it's bob no no no yeah i can't think of why yeah who would do it well this vietnam glory stealing does feel like a gene and reese three or four kind of simpsons yeah i can see that like the any vietnam jokes in general feel like they're from that era i just imagine them coming in look we got used jokes here you know they're fresh off let's just throw them anywhere they're still good i'm anywhere in this yeah come on still good still good dust them off well also the bringing up of like le choy and chung king

and margaret show the use of words you know that sound that could stand in for Vietnam villages. That also feels like a very critique-y kind of joke to me, too. Unfortunately, Chung King is defunct. Le Choy still going strong. Probably because of that Le Choy dragon, right? Yeah, the good old Le Choy dragon. I just bought, when I was buying new soy sauce, I seriously bought Le Choy soy sauce because I watched the old jim henson commercials

of le choy dragon those those are some of the funniest things jim henson ever did i'm not lying i predicted it and i was correct owned by conagra foods oh it's all man they own every i i'm shocked conagra has been bought by a bigger thing by now and then also to let you know this is uh a season 11 episode marge her entire story is buying household products like it is a woman shopping and not just shopping but for cleaning supplies though at least there's i think marge is really funny in this episode she's great yes i do like how uh how wacky they make her in a realistic way for her character yep the uh there's some good jokes these though these jokes also kind of feel like her hunt for her character yep the uh there's some good jokes these though these jokes also kind of feel like her hunt for a franchise at the franchise fair yeah these these fun products

i do like i do like all of them actually like especially it's like what what do the miracle shears do outside of uh damage they're like the mini jaws of life basically yeah they actually seem incredibly dangerous to own and and the beetle that eats clogs and turns into a butterfly i like that too uh well i i wish though then that the omni gogs were being sold by royce mccutcheon oh man he needs to come back it's it's like royce mccutcheon's brother you know that gog money is mine uh but yeah that's uh this also has another great little joke in it folks how often have you opened your morning paper only to have the rubber band fly off and hit you right in the eye? Never, but it's my number one concern.

Well, with the Omnigog system, those worries are a thing of the past. I'm all right, folks. Thanks to my Omnigogs. A little light for Lenny. Yeah. Man, and Lenny is like MVP of season 11 11 so far and this is the first of as many eye entry gags oh no the spring the spring came before this right did catch it from springy the springfield spring yeah and then it wasn't it was near his eye but the coin in his forehead

uh that was uh last season as well but they they have the love affair of lenny has truly begun here just the saying of like it's not just that seeing lenny is funny you have to say the name lenny in the live not lenny there's a lot of heat on lenny for the uh the springfield awards so much lenny and just seeing him with his like looking sad with his eye patch like that's it's a funny drawing i and also that that rubber band even though it protected his eye it makes him fall back like five feet like that's how powerful the rubber band is i i love that too then we have more of mike scully classic rock comedy here yes uh bachman turner overdrive known for uh what what song do they sing in here i completely escape my memory business and also you ain't seen nothing yet yeah all both used in like

car dealership commercials for the past 30 years it's made uh bachman and turner so much money and they they bought many overdrives with the with the cash i mean this is right up this is after the bachman turner split, correct? Yes. So I fell down a rabbit hole of Bachman-Turner overdrive history for this. But yeah, they had multiple breakups, and it was mainly between Randy Bachman and Fred Turner, who are the two voices you hear in this episode. And for a time, Randy Bachman would not work with the rest of the band he did solo stuff and fred turner got a replacement in the band whose name was also randy and put out a call for musical randy's and they toured as bto like just that was their name we're bto and and uh bachman actually randy bachman actually got

pretty pissed because he's like so you guys go to towns you say hey come and see pto you say fred turner in interviews you're like yeah me and randy still we're singing the song this is like a gallagher 2 situation happening here and and so in this episode they got these two if you were a bto super fan you're probably like whoa they're back together randy and fred but uh we find out on the commentary they were recorded separately and they had to like uh deal with this drama to make up a non-existent in 2000 dual appearance of fred turner and randy bachman on stage to sing bto song no i mean it was truly like the american mccartney lennon split except for we never really got to learn what turner was doing solo like i kind of wish that uh another famous simpson joke like when it's all the second

best uh musicians with lisa yeah like and i'm like i'm like what how did we not know if turner or bachman was the true genius between behind these two classic songs i kind of want to know that's for history to decide i guess uh after they pass away we can finally judge them in their work dig through the tapes find some information here but do you guys know where they go when they're done touring uh where back to winnipeg because they're because they're from winnipeg that's right yeah also uh i was looking at their discography not that prolific like 84 between 84 and 96 there was nothing and 96 was sort of just like a hastily assembled album from my research yeah i mean they homer's

insistence here in the in the clip i'll play is is the correct thing you're just like no don't play your new things i came here for two songs. I want to hear the thing I hear on the radio sung at me, and that's all I want. I feel like there was a lot of overlay between them and 38 Special, who do Hang On Loosely. I feel

everybody kind of mixed up all those songs at once. Yeah, I don't even know what genre of rock this is. I mean, dad rock. It is dad rock, but which variety? once yeah like i don't even know what genre of rock this is uh i don't know if there's rock it is dad rock but like which which variety but uh they they are the perfect band for a county or sorry a state fair yes yeah not a kid not some boring county fair a state fair it's kind of like a post skinnered southern rock like after the politics have been drained out of it it's just about like getting drunk and hanging out all day like that's kind of what it felt like to me it's about working overtime and then working

out like it's working class dads are into this uh well i mean it's perfect like it's five o'clock time it's five o'clock on friday let's hear the jam on your drive home and i'll be a dangarabin like it's just fun it's one well that's how music used to be in the 70s you get two songs you are famous forever and you will always be rich in touring like you can just you are in business for the rest of your life because you had two hits it's it's incredible like you can't somebody who got famous in the 2000s with just one hit song that a be able to be that rich or tour that much i i don't think so randy bachman and fred turner did make up and together in the in the 2010s uh one of them retired in 2018 and so they're just done but they they didn't play together for the american rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but for the Canadian Hall of Fame, they did reunite and sing together.

It's just as valid. Did they play the new stuff? Hopefully. No, I think they just did Taking Care of Business. But, yeah, here's Homer's views on BTO. Hello, Springfield! We're going to play all your old favorites. But first, we'd like to dip into our new CD.

Taking care of business! Don't worry, sir. We'll get to that one. No talking! No new crap! Taking care of business now! Get up in the morning from the alarm box For a thing to eat, eat, eat in your city Get to the working overtime part! Unbelievable. Wake up! I just kept the sound.

For the baby, it's 18-0 again! We ain't seen nothing yet! We just did. Whatever. Be sure to stick around for the battle of the elementary school bands. Homer, Lisa's in that. I stand by my disappointed groan. I forgot they played both songs. Yes, they paid for both of them. Season 11 probably had a bigger music budget than most adult swim shows have full budgets for seasons.

There's so many songs. This episode, they pay for two BTO songs. They pay for a cover of Living in America and Cake's biggest hit. They pay for all of those for broadcast. That's an insane amount of money to me they must add a huge but if we ever get scully again i'm asking like dude that budget was crazy for music and didn't they use bone thugs and harmonies crossroads for when maude dies i forget that was in the director's cut yeah they couldn't clear it they couldn't clear it the bones thought it was uh offensive the use of that song makes sense uh the in homer also like i have thought of this

line when i've gone to concerts and don't want to hear new songs i do think of no talking no new crap like when i do see my old man bands because i am of that age and my my dad rock is things like you know violent femmes and built to spill and they might be giants they know why i'm there they know why i'm there and they might be giants show in my experience they might play like look here's we got three new songs let us play them and then we'll get back to birdhouse in your soul we'll do it now at my when i went to see weezer over a year ago weezer and the pixies the pixies really were just like look we'll do one new song and also though it was uh i don't think frank

black or francis black was uh i don't think he was in a working mood that night i'll just say i think maybe it was a long tour for the pixies but uh when the we when weezer sang i i was just like you know what i'm gonna stand for every song I like. And then anything after the Green album, I'm just going to rest my legs. That'll be my way. I won't shout no new crap, but I will sit down. Ratitude is a, you know, let's visit the snack bar kind of song. It's kind of album.

Honestly, I would have preferred. They didn't even do Beverly Hills. I'm like, you know what? If you're going to go into the stuff I don't like, play at least the popular one i didn't like the one i heard 27 times i mean like i see elvis costello whenever i can he he still records a lot so a lot of he'll put out a lot of new stuff and you can just tell in the audience like there's just this murmur that goes around when like something from like when i was cruel is played and everybody's like i don't know if i get another beer uh then that and that's it but like yeah i i kind of i actually kind of like

that because i'm like oh so you're still doing stuff now okay that's good i uh i mean i always like when i hear a deep cut from a thing when i was young like i do like that or i should have checked it out but i didn't weird al did his like self and he called it the self-indulgent tour he's like i'm not playing the hits i'm playing the songs i like in smaller venues i wish i would have went to that uh well look we're remembering all the concerts we wish we could have gone to when concerts existed and we weren't thinking about being in a small enclosed space with other people shouting all the time does he play uh i lost a jeopardy baby often you know i don't i would bet not i would hope that's a big one for me i i want

to hear his uh one more minute that's my favorite deep cut though i guess it had a it had a music video so it's not that deep a cut the jeopardy one is extra deep because it's referencing a song no one remembers in an era of jeopardy no one one remembers, the pre-Trebek era. That's true, yeah. I love the original song because it is called Jeopardy. Yeah, he didn't parody too much of that. Yeah. Also, I like Homer.

I think Homer is reading his stage directions out loud when he says, like, disappointed groan. I think that's what was in the script. And so Lisa and her band plays they play living in america the rocky three rocky four classic and uh i i think it's weird that bart says like lisa is a sax machine and also way too blow those are weird lines to put in yeah i don't care for that yeah after their song we then get the triumphant return of Comptroller Atkins. heard third best for me well unless there's another band i think we have a winner oh wait there is another band from ogdenville uh please welcome the ogdenville band

stars and stripes forever oh man they're toast and uh yeah i also like living in america that's a good choice of a you know technically newer song but still was like 13 or 14 years old when they when they played it but it feels hip to uh to school students i guess they control our atkins also proudly canadian just like bto that's right you're right where he comes from canada i looked up that Atkins, according to the wiki, he could have been a recurring guy. I wish they'd used him more, but he apparently doesn't make another on-screen appearance until a 2006 episode where he's just in the background of school employee faculty stuff. It's just funny to see a comptroller sash. Yeah, it's so great.

He's that important. And it's such an obscure role in an administration, a comptroller sash yeah look he's that important and it's such a like an obscure role in like an administration a comptroller it's funny it's like a bursar it's a funny word that no one ever uses out loud uh though lisa if she had talked to the comptroller more on this episode the ruse would have been revealed that he did give the school the money that's right she thought he had gotten away with the my favorite thing about this is that i i i just couldn't stop thinking about like ogdenville elementary school kids listening to like the payback and like all these really radical james brown songs just to get the size of what living in america was going to be like uh i i also like that they choose ogdenville instead

of shelbyville like it's's that you would have just expected. Yeah, it's Shelbyville or maybe Capital City, but it's Ogdenville, baby. I assume the North Haverbrook bus broke down on the way here. They have all the bad luck in North Haverbrook. And I also like Comptroller actually forgetting like, oh, there is another band. That's a good line. But Lisa is a real brat in this episode but i will say i could identify with the child like feeling of that's

not fair that's against the rules like that it at least captures an accurate emotion that you go through as a kid when you realize life isn't fair yeah i totally agree with you because uh the school room is an inaccurate simulation of real life where when you're growing up as a kid like in preschool and kindergarten and in like in grade school and so on you're taught like we have to share and we have to be fair and play by the rules then you escape into reality you're like nothing is fair no one is sharing with me all the bad people were right yeah all the ones who took it for themselves were right. They did it right. Those selfish kids were ahead of the ball on me. Yeah.

And Lisa learns it because the Ogdenville students cheat. They use glow sticks, which are clearly not allowed in the rules. And yet the comptroller just gives them the award. My big issue with this episode is not the underground world of jockeys. It's glow sticks are not going to function in daylight. You know what? You're right. Those have to be very powerful glow sticks to work the way they do in the daytime.

They should have just made a real press to make it look like it was really overcast that day. Big thunderclouds. Nothing's happening, but they're big and heavy. What were they thinking? Or just have it be at nighttime. It's the got to the fair in the daytime it it's also weird they're doing all this fair stuff right after they just went to the fair for the faith healing episode like that episode wasn't that long ago i mean state fair jokes are always fun they uh now boy what i wouldn't give for a fried shirt

the best you can't fry you can't fry your own shirt at home it just doesn't taste as good it's all clumpy it just doesn't come out the same way you didn't get that crispness and it scalds you when you put it on it's really dangerous to work with all that fried stuff especially for a shirt you're gonna wear another thing i there's two things in this episode that i would like i want to nominate as the new simpsons meme but homer's smiling thumbs up to lisa is so funny especially because they hit it twice like that should be uh a twitter that should be all over it's a great drawing too just how big a smile is uh and that twice like first it's obvious lisa's not going to win so the joke is homer thumbs up smiling when he should

notice she's disappointed but then when they officially don't win, Homer still goes, like, God, that's a good joke. That feels like a joke found in the edit, too. Like it wasn't in their original thing and they just found it and like, oh, that's a funny drawing. Let's just show it again. Lisa then is very upset at the state's unfair. Well, it's not going to be easy to pick a winner, but Ogdenville! Ogdenville! But I think

one school read white and blew us all away. And the winner is Ogdenville! Yeah! I hope you enjoy your plaque, cheater. Well, I was going to give you the good sportsmanship award, but now I'm just going to be sick.

I can't believe those idiot judges were impressed by glowing plastic tubes. Look, Lisa, it glows. Let's forget about the band contest and just have fun at the state fair. You mean state unfair. Yeah, right. That's what I meant, Lisa. State unfair. That's a great margin line. It does remind me of being a little shitty kid and your parents are trying to like cheer you up or change the subject. And they're like, I can't deal with you right now. Oh, yeah. I was just like, I can't be satisfied.

Screw you, mom, for trying to make me feel better. I just remember having such a specific thrill from whenever my mom did break down and said something sarcastic to me. And I was like, oh, you can talk like that? Like, I was young. I was just like, oh, my God, you can do that? And, like, seeing Marge do it is humongous to me, and it always makes me laugh. I love, I just love how deadpan she me and it always makes me laugh. I love, I just love how dead pan.

She's like, yeah, that's what I meant. Lisa. Yeah. It's, it's really Marge has a lot of great stuff in here though. Also when she says, now let's forget,

I really, it's, it's the same inflection of that. Let's forget our troubles with a big bowl of strawberry ice cream. Yeah. There are so many great lines. Like, uh,

the thing about her greatest fear being the newspaper rubber band and then right after this i wish she says i wish people would stop telling me to step right up i love that i love there's so many great this is marge's best season 11 episode yeah i think she's just a nag or boring in every other episode or or the nice wife like there's nothing else she has but she's they give lines that would be i would normally expect out of homer they give them to her and she's so funny at saying them i i think that's the benefit of going more towards jokes like the the one good thing about that move that shift is that like she was usually part of the emotional backstory she

usually was the warm one and she didn't get enough lines. Whereas now, since we're all going to get lines, she gets more, and because of the vocal performance, it's incredible. I laugh my ass off at her in this. When they have too many jokes, and they're like, Homer can't say every joke. They're like, all right, let's give some to Marge.

We want him to, but they won't let us. Now, let's talk about diving horses, shall we? Yes. Were they just on a Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken kick or something around this time? That's the famous horse diving movie. Yes. Yeah, which I've never seen. And they did also have last season the episode called Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken. can't be broken uh but it was a 1991 movie apparently based on real life for a real woman's

life story about a woman who was the duncan dives by himself but apparently a lot of horse diving was done with a person riding the horse and in the wild hearts can't be broken a woman is riding the horse a dive goes wrong it detaches her retinas and she goes blind but she still continues to dive after losing her sight and uh yeah i think that then it's a film from 1991 i don't think anyone remembers other than just as a title yeah i don't remember that gabriel on war yeah i'm not remembering this yeah like i don't know people complain about video games but that used to be entertainment right like we should thank our lucky stars every day we have video games i i i think too they they mentioned on the commentary they were slightly inspired by just their love of old stock footage

and there's you can find old black and white stock footage of horses diving which i mean just straight up is animal abuse which they mentioned in this episode yeah and uh so a surprise guest star on this episode uh jim cummings is duncan i didn't know that he's in the credits and oh wow i missed that i have to assume that they couldn't get frank welker because whenever there was an animal heavy episode they would get frank welker in to do the animal sounds uh normally it's like dan castaneda doing a lot of the animal sounds but uh yeah so this is jim cummings his only role on the show in case you don't know he's like winnie the pooh and darkwing duck and bonkers every boy yeah he is like yeah tigger as well yeah and like he is disney's like number one voice guy for the past

30 years and he's this is the one time he's on the show that's wow and it's only probably because frank welker was uh unable to take the role that's my philosophy sorry that's my um theory yeah i i assume welker cummings probably got a very bitter phone call from welker the day after he recorded being like look i missed that one i you know i was doing other stuff i was gardening but if you take another one of the simpsons gags away from me i'm gonna get somebody and i'm gonna kill you stay in your lane jim don't think you're the horse guy now i'm the horse guy then he does like five great horse sounds over the night now i in this month we're also doing a scooby-doo podcast which uh got me into the world of frank welker and he really is like a singular talent

when he's gone 800 people are going to get jobs because he does every sound like he's it's insane how good he is with and he's like he got cast as freddy when he was 23 like that's why he has been a constant for 50 years of animation he isn't an economy unto himself it's amazing uh the cartoon historian and writer mark evanier had the saying of you call everybody for casting and then you hire frank welker because he just does everything but how we use electricity can be smarter cleaner and greener at electric ireland we can help guide you there you're looking up you see our new net zero hub has all you need to know about smart meter plans, EV tariffs, solar panels, and much more. Making your usage clearer, your trips greener, your home cozier, and your world brighter.

Find our Net Zero Hub at electricireland.ie. Yeah, you're right. Mostly, if they have a joke of just a dog's gonna bark twice they just say like ah dan can bark or he can do a bird sound but if you have a major role for one of the dog for a pet or for a horse they often just go to welker uh and uh but yes don't i did not thank you thanks for catching that yeah that surprised me when i saw his name at the end i i saw him like horse diving like what. I saw him horse diving. What's the most recent horse diving stuff?

Because apparently it fell out of favor in the 70s as people started- They discovered drugs? I think it was people finally realized, no, this is abuse. This just is, you're abusing a horse. A horse doesn't want to jump into a pool. Though apparently, according to Wikipedia, in 2012, an Atlantic City casino owner tried to do it again. He's like, I'm going to do a horse diving act. And the Humane Society shut it down.

He was not able to do it. It's not as easy to go like further under like cockfighting. You just go further underground when it falls out of favor. Horse diving, it's not so, you know, it's not so easy to go underground with it people are going to see the huge platform if i were you put it you can't just make a horse dive for nobody you gotta you you need an audience for that if you're gonna do it can't do it in a basement which really just limits you uh but yes the we get to see duncan diving great animation on just a terrified horse being forced to jump and how the boar just tilts to make him fall. It's not even jumping.

It's dropping a horse. And also like seeing him struggle to get out of the water and the way he's like swaying as he's held up. Like very good animation of horses in this. This is very unimportant information, but I've seen his name spelled duncan like the the proper spelling of duncan like the male name and also i've seen it spelled duncan like duncan donuts and that makes more sense to me like that's the pun like you're dunking a horse okay i yeah that's i always i always thought it was the d-u-n-c-a-n i but i duncan i mean that's the pun he's is that it's duncan the diving horse well that's you'll have to wait to see jim cummings resume one day and he'll have it there very clearly

uh that's uh i wonder how important you know it's his only simpsons credit and simpsons is a big credit but it's not a famous one so yeah i wonder on what level does he does he talk up this one in interviews i mean i guess when you're when you're winning the poo you don't really need to mention It's not a famous one. So yeah, I wonder on what level does he talk up this one in interviews? I mean, I guess when you're Winnie the Pooh, you don't really need to mention any other things. But I also feel like if you're any kind of voice actor, the pinnacle is being like, I was on Simpsons once. Even if it was only once. Yeah. Even with the later seasons, I feel like I would wear that badge with honor.

But yes, the simpsons are watching duncan get uh be put through his trials and uh finally the police show up this is clearly a case of animal cruelty uh do you have a permit for that no problem sir it's in my car you gotta stop being so trusting chief i'd rather let a thousand guilty men go free than chase after them. All right, show's over, folks. I'm afraid this horse is going to the dog food factory. Good luck getting a horse to eat dog food. Can't do that to Duncan.

It's not his fault that his owner was a sleaze. Look, I just want the horse to have a good home or be food. If you want to take him, fine with me. Should the Simpsons get a horse? Excuse me, but I believe this family already had a horse, and the expense forced Homer to work at the cookie mart with hilarious consequences. Anybody care what this guy thinks? No!

That should have been the act break, I think. Yeah, right? Not the joke about going in the tunnel. That tunnel joke, it takes it away. Like, start the next act with the tunnel joke. Like, just end it with, hmm. I will say the tunnel joke was the first big laugh I had in this episode. It's a great drawing of a horse on top of a car

having to like duck yeah yeah and very obediently just standing out of there like okay mr horse get on top of this car and stay standing while it moves the biggest laugh i had in that scene is marge is like so like her artificial line like should the simpsons get a horse one of those like trailer lines yeah yeah uh so yes this does anybody care what this guy thinks moment i is a big one for the show i think he gets the upper hand when he returns with his worst episode ever shirt on because i think it's the joke at the expense of the writers where he's watching them like yeah like they're falling back into like old plot lines and things they've done before and i think that's them admitting their own struggles with coming up with new ideas this

is just them being mean to people on the internet yes this joke comes from a self-consciousness of knowing they're repeating themselves like they know they are they're like well the simpsons get a horse and they're like well we did that like and as we learned in our interview with dan graney from about two and a half years ago this moment came up uh dan graney was on the staff writing at the time though he's not credited i mean he was in the writer's room so he knew he knows he brought up this moment to us saying that this scene was about like fans like me and bob directly addressing us he said it was pitched by writer george meyer who was executive producer then and to quote dan grainy he says guys we have to do a hundred episodes

it's really hard if we can do a second episode where they get a horse and it's funny is that such a crime so that's what it's about like it's just to be fully like so comic book guy has been a stand-in for bad simpsons fans before in the poochie episode where he says worst episode ever and bart says who are you to question this they've given you hours of free entertainment uh that absolutely is the simpsons talking to their fans but that more felt like them commenting on the fans things they've heard before this is a pre-emptive strike on fans like that that is so it's totally a little different to me it's i mean it's also it goes back to my ai thing it the thought i had when i first like thought of what they were setting up,

it wasn't really the pony episode. It was Bart gets the elephant episode. I felt like this was more because he's the one who's like, you can't kill this animal. You can't send him to Dog Food Factory. I like this animal. And I'm like, oh,

so he's going to have another... It feels kind of like a mesh of those two episodes ultimately. Yeah, you're totally right. Because Lisa doesn't care that they have a horse. She should be on board with this and wanting to interact with the horse and ride the horse. She does not care at all. It is pretty funny that Lisa, whose entire motivation for the first three years of the show is usually I want a pony. Every piece of merch, if they had to give a line to lisa

it was like a penny saved is a pony earned and all this pony stuff and then in this episode they're like lisa doesn't give one shit about this pony she is just caring about whining the entire episode uh which yeah i when you think of lisa as a person with consistent you know wants and desires she should care that there's a pony a pony that seemingly she could ride because the family owns a horse now uh but and and yet they don't she just doesn't care i think it is fair for them to be like oh come on just let us do another horse episode well is that so wrong like and also just the the way grady put it of just like we have to do 100 episodes of these things it's like well okay if you if you put it as the idea of you must do this then i guess yeah i guess you can i mean i don't even really care

like i'm not one of those people who like oh same plot here we go again i'm like i don't care what your plot is similar at all just make the jokes good and like the jokes here just weren't up to the pony episode to me well i did i will say when in the last couple years they did a marge goes to prison episode i i did go like you guys did this like that's a season four classic yeah and just because you can do orange is the new black jokes now doesn't mean uh that this is worth going back to perhaps but then again i haven't seen that episode maybe it's a great episode i don't know but yeah this i do i think it is a dangerous game the show is playing here

of preemptively getting mad at fans for the things they're going to say and that that defensiveness and being on their back foot you know that's it it feels like a struggle for the show that i think it it never properly dealt with like it i it kind of speaks to like a lack of confidence in your own work that you're just like oh but what if the fans will say this about it like i don't know they didn't used to think that way on the show there They were too online at this point, I think. Oh, yes. Yeah. Which, hey, aren't we all?

Yeah. I mean, they also couch all the other gags. The other gag like this is you're in the comic book store. You're in his world. You get some sense of him as a person in this small little store that he owns. And this, it's just, hey, I'm here and and i'm gonna make a joke against the fans and he knows he knows he knows a lot about the family too in their personal history yeah yeah comic book guy the person would not care about them at all because they're other people he doesn't care

about other people so yeah you're right him showing up out of nowhere in a place he wouldn't be to just complain about how this is another old story that is taking the comic book guy as fan to another level as well but all right so after that uh major moment in the series we come back from the break and not only is this kind of repeating both the stampy story in that way but like this scene is just the same yeah i wish they wouldn't have done this scene because it's just like yeah we're gonna have the horse who cares like the money doesn't matter and it really did in the uh in the first in the first version of this because homer had to get another job yeah that was back when you could believably think about the simpsons bank account and i mean

even the stampy episode throws it out the window they're just like boy it's expensive to keep an elephant well you better just steal a bunch of peanuts or eat all the lettuce at an arboretum they monetize that elephant though yeah see the elephant ride the elephant don't embarrass me in front of the money you could even get that texas businessman guy back and have him be like well i mean it's gonna be dog food how much a can of dog food costs oh can you give me like three dollars like something small like that would like mitigate that i feel they burn their bridge with blackheart though they can't get blackheart back yeah i guess yeah uh but yes uh there there is one little funny line in this i do like Oh, my. It's going to cost us $500 a week to keep Duncan.

But he'll bring us joy, Marge, unlike all your silly goo-gaws. At least you don't have to feed any of the stuff I bought at the fair. Well, except the mop. Marge, your pro-mop, anti-horse agenda has been clear for some time yeah good uh i don't know what a mop would sound like when it was eating but that's a good uh approximation of that i love that mop the mop eating crackers just like inhaling it and then kind of just like scrunching down like that is such a weird joke there's also something on the table that feels like it came from a cut scene there's like this like lightsaber looking thing and i wonder what it was because all the things she saw around

the table and then there's that this white like lightsaber handle kind of thing i mean i i watched the one secret deleted scene in this but i didn't watch the regular deleted scenes so i'll i'll make a mental note in that for when we do our season 11 deleted scenes uh sometime in early 2021 i think so sounds about right look forward to that but uh pro mop anti-horse agenda that's a good that's a good little line too i like that but but it really does feel like a throwback to have march sitting in front of a calculator going like oh man these bills are so bad but yes then we see the bart and homer trying to figure out what they're going to do uh there's it's a good little play on the nothing in the rule book says kind of gag of homer realizing

the rule book actually does say a horse can't play in the nfl every sports organization learned from everybody we need to update those rule books include uh clauses about animals uh they they all went from there forward no more animals yeah and this uh this pearl fantasy coming up this is what i was talking about when i feel when i said it feels like a burlesque version of swartzwalder it just feels like what would john swartzwalder write and it sort of reminds me i don't know if this is a swartzwalder episode i don't think it is but it reminds me of that dream sequence where homer is imagining what two wives can do for him and then one of us one is chopping something down one is digging a hole and then homer in the dream is stung by a bee and he wakes up screaming it reminds

me of that but even more bizarre like uh because bart's like oh the horse can die for pearls and homer imagines like a world where everything is pearls he is served a pearl cereal by a giant pearl and he eats the cereal and all of his teeth are broken and he laughs at his broken teeth uproariously and that is the entire point of the dream to laugh at his broken teeth in this pearl universe he imagines for himself i love this pearl butler this was like a image i remembered very clearly and i just love the look of him i i do love the design on the fancy pearl butler and and homer's bed made of pearls. And also I love, not that The Simpsons hadn't done this sort of joke before, but the cutaway to what a person is seeing while a cutaway happens.

Like Bart watching Homer rolling on the ground giggling. Like this is a borderline psychotic episode for Homer. Is that look at the mirror like a batman 89 reference whenever i see a hand mirror i just think it's a reference to batman because no one uses a hand mirror anymore well also this scene of the of bart saying what jobs duncan could do that feels like the live pitching of plots in the room of like well all right we got a horse uh what do we do with that what happened can can a horse play football can it die for pearls uh and we'll just race it's a horse it'll raise the pearl dream is interesting uh because bob you brought up the the dream thing

the other dream i think about and the one i went to with this one is the dream of uh homer when he's tired from working at the quickie mart in the pony episode when he's just remember like imagining a sleep land right yeah that was my first time like oh like that's where i kind of get like the you're retreading stuff is when you're at the actual joke structure of the episode is similar like if you're gonna have an episode like this you just don't have a dream sequence in it because that's exactly what happened in the last one. And Homer's lying in bed in both of those ones, too. Yeah.

But Homer convinces, Bart convinces Homer to let Duncan race. Then we cut to Lisa writing an angry letter to the president. What are you doing, Lisa? I'm writing a letter to President Clinton about that travesty of a band contest. As a fellow sax player, I'm sure he'll be outraged. Honey, don't get obsessed with that. Focus on the good things, like this fire extinguisher I got at the fair. Really? Hey, what are you doing? It's the only fire extinguisher endorsed by both linda carter and george foreman i wonder what would happen if they had a baby so marge has lost her mind in this i mean like that's what i this is

my favorite march scene that not only does she do what homer just did in the last scene of imagining something and then rolling on the floor laughing but she lights the drapes on fire as an excuse to use her fire extinguisher and even lisa's like what are you doing that's a great reaction from uh lisa great acting with yardley there yeah well because this is what lisa do. Like, when Homer does these things, no one says anything because they are very used to this from Homer. But Marge starting a kitchen fire intentionally. Just to put it out, just to use a new product. She is insane. And I love that. Like, Marge should be crazy.

Like, just forget it. Forget any consistently. Throw it out and have marge do crazy stuff and every time before this when she's gone like crazy or something there's been like an emotional again emotional backbone to what why she's like that i like seeing her just silly like this and like goofing around and like that's again the one thing i think is good about having all these jokes uh forward is because this like again yeah this would have been this probably I don't think this scene would even been shown in an episode back in the nineties.

That's very sweet. Like the things that tickle Marge, like the idea is a tickle Marge. And one thing I want to bring up on the commentary is when Lisa says she's going to call president Clinton, someone on the commentary says, Oh, she,

she means the first president Clinton. And I looked up when these DVDs came out, they came out in the fall of Oh eight. So I have to assume that was recorded before Obama was was the nominee i think in 08 and if you remember the simpsons movie uh the year before these dvds came out in 2007 hillary clinton was the president in that movie in the itchy and scratchy shorts so we were all stupid yeah there there was a lot of assumptions that hillary was gonna like obviously it's gonna be hillary you know wait it was that first until uh we you know the charismatic the charisma of barack obama was

impossible to ignore it is funny to listen to people and i would assume an early await recording going like the first president clinton though i think another person does say like and the only president clinton like somebody else on the commentary is like, ah, she's not going to win. I mean, it's funny because this is the year that she – isn't this when she gets elected as the Senator of New York? I'm glad you mentioned that, Chris, because actually the day that this aired, Hillary Clinton officially announced her candidacy for the Senate, the Senate seat in New York. Yes.

That's amazing. I was like, that just brings me right back. We only got to see it on a national stage. She was your senator, wasn't she? Yes, she was. And she was not good, as it turns out. So, Chris, all she accomplished was basically getting mad about video games too late. Is that her legacy in New York?

Yep. Secondhand Tipper Gore stuff. Yep. I thought so. Yeah. Real nanny state. Original stuff. She worked with Bush on some 9-11 something or other, I think.

Sure. Sure. But, yeah, that was what was shocking to me because when we got to the end of it, when I was making my notes for the end of the episode i should have looked up like okay what did anything happen for bill clinton on the day this aired since bill clinton appears on screen and just some private flights yeah he was just flying around you know to some fun places uh but but but when i looked up this date plus bill clinton the first result was a transcript from the uh by cnn from the event where hillary's like i'm not gonna this has been a listening tour but i'm not gonna listen

any longer i'm running for the senate and so uh yeah i think what she was like a term and a half right because uh she she resigned to be the secretary of state in the obama administration yep i don't think i don't think bill could have been at that speech when she announced because he was at a Fuck Stokely Carmichael convention. Oh, right. It's a very private event, but he has to go. He was giving the keynote speech there. Yeah. Oh, boy.

It's a good time. This was the right time to record this because it's very easy to hate bill clinton right now yeah on july on july 31st of 2020 who knows what's happening with bill clinton by the time you're hearing this but i mean i hope the worst happens because like to say fuck stokely carmichael at john lewis's funeral is like the most disgusting thing i've ever seen he also complained about cancel culture he's like you know he didn't try to cancel this person. Like it's... I think by October,

his new name is Miguel Sanchez and he's on the run from the Federales. I do wonder if these cutaway jokes are partially them commenting on how many cutaways Family Guy is doing because Family Guy is a year old by the time this airs. So maybe they're joking. The Simpsons didn't do as many cutaways Family Guy is doing. Because Family Guy is a year old by the time this airs. So maybe they're joking.

The Simpsons didn't do as many cutaways in this time. So maybe them showing cutaways as psychotic breaks is them commenting on how much Family Guy is doing it. It's possible. But yes, in the next scene, Homer takes his Tom Landry hat out of the closet. And he's ready to start training a horse. And we get a reference to a film again i don't think anybody thinks about it absolutely not dad if we're gonna race duncan shouldn't we hire a professional trainer son i learned everything i needed to know from the horse

whisperer step one seduce a lonely housewife ma'am now for the actual horse whispering when the race starts run really fast yeah that was uh i knew it was a i think the what came out of that was the dog whisperer which became much more famous than the horse whisperer movie but that was like a robert redford movie where he was like director and writer and star of that movie and it uh it definitely sounded like a uh housewife kind of book of a dude who i mean he does have sex with a lonely housewife like bridges of madison county it's very it sounds like in a similar vein yes the book is is a little bit more dark it's a cormac mccarthy book oh shit it's the it was like a first attempt to get him into the movie like

make a movie out of like they've been trying to make blood meridian for decades now it seems like but it's never gonna happen but this was it was a huge book and this was the first attempt it's a boring ass movie it's like one of the most boring movies i've ever seen redford is especially when he stars in it his films can be a bit boring like yes i think my favorite redford movie's quiz show and that but that's because it's just a fun a fun story and john taturo like he's so great in that movie oh man i love me and steve sadak from we we watch that like every like once a decade we will just get drunk and watch that movie together i love that movie uh though i did forget that horse whisperer was the first major role for Scarlett Johansson all right she's a daughter yeah yeah she's 15 in the in the filming I think apparently she has like a small

part in home alone 3 but this was her big breakout role she was the sister who was fed up with uh not Macaulay Culkin oh okay so whatever little kid they slotted in uh it's and i don't think it was i can see that kid on the box right now because he's like in front of french stewart in pain or something he's got he's got a little parrot i think too okay also uh worth noting homer's attempt to seduce maude is the final appearance by maude before her death so that that's one last joke about Maude and Homer wanting to have sex with her before they kill her off. And then we cut to the racetrack. We get some fun little racetrack humor of Moe discovering the woman. That feels like the start of another plot, but it is.

Yeah, like all these failed attempts to start a plot like is Homer a horse whisperer? Is Moe falling in love? Like all these things that are I do like the how the cartoon gag is actually a serious medical condition yes though you're right that also does feel like john swartzwalder get drag as well like john swartzwalder would have a joke about this cartoon thing i like to how mo says beautiful like he's like in a 1940s hobo or something i wonder if that is a reference to there's a uh a rare uh horse racing movie uh called let it ride by a space jam director joe pitka that's right oh wow with rich with richard dreyfus as like this gambling addict who like

makes it big one day but like i feel like he is like looking on the ground for old winners for like in a scene there i know that movie because uh my dad who hates all movies and doesn't find much enjoyment in them it was his favorite because it was about gambling and it was uh very well observed of what live it were if you spend a lot of time in racetracks actually very correct about what the types of folks you meet and the different uh feel of it and and yeah let it ride also has the voice actor from this episode in it too the bizarre guest star that's coming up yes yeah uh but uh oh also to the commentary they say about the joke of like, I sometimes want to run clockwise. They say on the commentary that the horses do run clockwise in Europe.

I found that is not exactly the case from my online research. Like, for example, apparently in Germany, it's like half and half. Some tracks will run clockwise. Some will run counterclockwise. But like in England, apparently, they run counterclockwise as well at their races. And that's how I found out that the wacky British people say anti-clockwise, not counterclockwise, anti-clockwise. That feels like you're making a political statement. Yeah. I don't like that.

It's running anti-clockwise. Like those wacky Brits with their weird ways of saying stuff. Counterclockwise makes way more. Now, either works. It's basically the same thing. I just imagine in Parliament a bunch of people, are you anti-clockwise, sir? Are you saying you are anti-clockwise?

I've been doing clockwise in me family for years. Behave, clockwise people behave uh but uh they as duncan arrives i do like how you know bart's wearing his pajamas they paint the number on duncan bart is brushing his hair with a toilet brush like funny funny stuff yeah yeah lots of like they don't have the money for the uh to be a real jockey here and then homer calls shoes dealies he just over and over again calls them dealies i like that horse dealies uh but yes the the racing is about to begin uh they also have a gag of homer saying like that horse better win or he's taking a trip to the trip to the glue factory and he won't get to and he won't get to come uh which they recognize on the commentary they're like yeah we had two selling

a horse to a factory joke so we kept it i like this one because you find out lenny's a big fan of the glue factory tour and carl's just like hey shut up i love that carl's catchphrase in this season is saying to lenny to shut up like she's hot so who cares like carl said that a lot this season uh but yes then we get the other big other than jim cummings the other big guest star of this episode oh and randy bachman and fred turner trevor denman he is the michael buffer of animal cruelty ah you know look those those horses i've been told they barely feel it when they get the when they get whipped as they run it feels nothing uh but yeah he is like a famous

horse race announcer like he's the i i didn't know this was the guy i thought it was just a good impression of what you think of when you think of a horse race announcer who just says i'm in this guy and they're like but they got the real guy who uh his other credits do include Let It Ride, and also the cursed HBO show Luck. Oh, man. That show killed so many horses. The horse death show. I love David Milch so much. The Deadwood is one of my all-time favorite shows.

I was so sad that he had what sounded like a good idea for a show about horse racing, and then it's just a show that constantly killed horses, and they're like like we can't keep doing this we keep killing horses i never listened to the commentary i watched most of luck because i'm a nut job uh michael mann fan but i would kill to hear michael mann just talk try to uh like make it logical sounding that he killed that many horses for his dustin hoffman show like because you know he doesn't really care that much because he's one of those guys who's like just get the take get the

take like i'll be very serious about it uh making his movies and i just imagine being like some a couple horses died yeah i'm sorry you know how many animals i killed in the 80s come on come on we killed like 17 horses on thief and we cut the scenes that we were in uh yeah it's uh i i would guess probably a lawyer would not let him do the commentary on that this this trevor denman guy though uh he does not have an iconic uh you know let's get ready to rumble kind of thing his big thing is and away they go yeah that's that's basically it's that's why he says in a way i go at the end when he leaves uh which i don't think he, unlike Michael Buffer, who had the smarts, he had the smarts to know, I got to copyright this and make it illegal for anyone else to say it.

Meanwhile, Bruce Buffer in the UFC, he got his iconic one like, it's time. Just, it's time. I think, I'll say it, Bruce Buffer is better than Michael Buffer. He's a better announcer, I think. Bruce Buffer, I feel much more passion than I think Michael Buffer. He's just going through the motions. That's what I think. That's a controversial opinion, but I'm with it 100%.

We're going to lose listeners now. I'm not comfortable with this. Get ready for tweets. But yes, the race starts in Duncan. He's not doing so hot. Get ready for tweets. But yes, the race starts, and Duncan, he's not doing so hot. That horse better win, or we're taking a trip to the glue factory, and he won't get to come. Yeah, that's a great tour. Well, you can't see it all in one day.

Hey, be quiet. And a winning off. Go, Duncan. Go, Double Five. Let's go, Double Five. It's chock full of drugs, followed closely by closely by stalker with old Levi's fading fast. What's this? Number five, Duncan.

The horse no one expected to do anything isn't doing anything. He hasn't even left the starting gate. Come on, boy. I know you're scared, but you can do this. I believe in you. Would you look do this i believe in you would you look at this the straggler duncan has exploded out of the gate and is making a big move he's showing more heart than any horse i've ever seen what a shame the race is already over that's good i do he delivers those lines like well i think especially the i only in this clip did i catch

like and stalker is close behind like that that's a joke about stalking oh okay yeah that is a joke and same very subtle levi's is fading fast oh faded levi i missed all of these jokes horse names are boring honestly by in my trips to the uh horse racing like every name is really just like an in-joke between the millionaires who own horses like they're not even there no one's trying to be clever i will say that i don't know what will come out about him uh in the following two months but trevor denman seems like an okay guy uh recent news story says he's not traveling to uh announce at this famous race because of the pandemic he's refusing to travel so he's been doing the announcing at something called del mar since 1984 and this year he's not doing it because

of the pandemic he could if he wanted to but he's not doing it so hey that's good you know it's uh it's dangerous to do these things i'm glad he's standing up for his health and not i don't know attending a rally without a without a mask on and and uh we're doing this right after herman kane died as well that's old news to you guys now but yes uh but yeah duncan i also i do like denman's deliveries of like the whole snow but he thought could do it is doing nothing he thinks he's in a movie but he then says like and obviously the thing that wouldn't happen does not happen uh also this second act is really short because after he loses says like and obviously the thing that wouldn't happen does not happen uh also this second act is really short because after he loses then it's just the end like homer's like

you know we're gonna get him new inspiration boom and it's over like uh i think it's like less than five minutes i mean we go right into the like am i wrong in assuming this was like i i took this as a dennis rodman joke you are completely correct because bart even says uh bad as you want to be or as bad as he wants to be which is the title of his uh 96 book so it's like the premise for the third act is what if a horse was dennis rodman i mean it really plugs it into the late 90s and uh and i mean dennis rodman was one of the most interesting figures in pop culture in the late 90s. Like he was one of the best players of his time. And also like a wild man who would party and just do whatever he felt like and date famous women.

And you just go like, and he'd dye his hair and do like nude photo shoots and go to events dressed in a wedding dress like all this crazy stuff but he also was like you know a multi-time nba champion like he was a big deal like the i think a lot of people were reminded of how interesting dennis rodman was after watching the michael jordan love fest to the last dance like the not a fan of the last dance i i hate that like as a fan of like 90s basketball and like basketball is the only sport i really watch the whole point of this is to get at what my who michael jordan was in total in total not just this like pageantry shit and like i can't tell you how angry that freaking thing made me and i watched it all because i had all those highlights.

But like, oh, God, I hate that thing. Well, you hear the stories that Michael Jordan had final cut on that. Yeah. Oh, I mean, what? Yeah. Well, and that's the thing that bugged me watching it. I was enraptured by the whole thing. And then the more I hear about like, oh, Scottie Pippen didn't like this or all these things.

But yeah, it was kind of unfair. But even when I watched it in the first airing, was like this dennis rodman episode is so cool dennis rodman is so interesting i can't wait to hear about him the whole rest of this and they barely talk about dennis rodman the rest of the thing until dennis rodman made news in the games by missing practice in the in the finals of the 98 uh until until that time dennis rodman kind of vanishes from the story i'm just like what what did dennis rodman think of this why is nobody asking dennis rodman don't you want to hear what michael jordan has to say in his big comfy chair and over but i mean it became a meme because all he would say is like and i took that personally

like uh or it's a cover for him like no i wasn't hung over it was a poison pizza fed to me delivered by bugs bunny himself but yeah dennis rodman in the last dance he has this interesting moment where he's like he tells uh early in his career he like went on a date with madonna and madonna told him like you got to own your persona like you have to invent a persona you can't let other people tell you who you are and that he was like yeah you know what i'm gonna do that and he he totally did he's how does he do weird stuff like say go to north korea and be just like be an ambassador to it sure he's a weird guy yeah i mean also that's how you keep you know people's eye on you yeah like even if the if

it's ire i mean who cares if you're a bad boy i mean who gives a shit and uh and also the i i know about him because not because i was really watching uh professional sports then but i was a professional wrestling watcher and dennis rodman made big waves in the NWO from 96 to 2000. So I was pretty well aware. So even then, I knew this was a whole Dennis Rodman thing with the character, especially like Furious D. He's mad about, they don't call him the worm or any kind of spin on that. But Furious D, like he also threatens pap paparazzi which is just like that was also a rodman famously like i think he kicked one in the balls when he ran into a guy on the court he was

known as the worm uh that was one of his nicknames okay interesting i know that from uh a pro wrestler made fun of him and uh by doing some some pun about the worm sounds like a penis pop could you and also of course calling him gay i mean carl malone's gonna call him gay in some on some level so uh what's it what you gonna do it was the 90s anyway uh yes furious d makes his debut is that duncan not anymore lady say hello to... Furious D? He's the bad boy of racing. He's got attitude and bad-itude, so show him some latitude and he'll win his gratitude.

Only in America. Ew, you used my bracelet for a nose ring. Possessions are fleeting. What? What? Look at that disgraceful beast. Good Lord, what has become of the sport of kings that's my third monocle this week i simply must stop being so horrifying

for as much as people hate this episode i think all the monocle popping jokes i've seen in the past 20 plus years have been from this episode might be speaking of who they're imitating there bart's only in america i mean that's don king yeah yeah yeah so bart bart also turns into the don king promoting furiously and that scene opens up with lisa on the phone with the white house and there's this weird line that could tell it's adr they changed the line she's like no i don't want to talk to al gore oh and i think it's because it's like well yeah al gore is going to be the next president obviously it's just what's like, well, yeah, Al Gore is going to be the next president, obviously. It's just what's going to happen. Sadly, too many people in 2000 were like Lisa saying,

no, I don't want Al Gore. Look, we got nine months. What could happen? Yeah, obviously what? Oh, the failed son, the drunken, coked up failed son of a one-term president is going to win? Now go vote in Florida and drink my morning coffee would republicans ever steal an election no way democrats wouldn't let them they'd fight they'd

fight it that's what they do the supreme court would uphold the constitution all those things would happen but of course uh but anyway yeah the then uh we get to see some more gambling bets i do like the wuss bet window that does remind me of skinner uh wanting a non-partisan political uh pin like may the best man win i love marge is so adorable like can i just bet that all the horses will have a good time i love that yeah and also she's like i don't know which horse to vote for vote for yeah uh though uh skinner and mole man are in the wuss bet line, which that fits. But Ned should not be gambling at all. Ned Flanders is in that line.

And he should just not. I know he's a wuss, but he should not be making bets. Well, God is going to punish him next week. You know, that's really why it happened. His punishment for gambling. And so the race is about to start. I do love bart repeating to him that he has a new persona just to lay down the plot even deeper and uh and i did find some

explanation of all the bets marge made which are real things she's like boxed with the three and the eight and uh wheel bet so marge said that she has furious D across the board, boxed with the three and the eight. A box bet is when you bet that three horses will be in places one, two, and three, but not the order. A trifecta is if you bet who's going to be one, two, and three. If you do a box bet, you're just saying, I know who the top three will be no matter what their place is. Meanwhile, a wheeled bet is, this one I had to just copy and paste because i could not figure it out when the better selects a single horse to win the race then a collection of horses to finish second third and fourth place depending on the type of wheel bet is bet now was your dad uh this into it or was he like uh that one uh he was more into it he wasn't this into it and i don't think i think he really

was just like pick a winner he didn't like all the uh the crazier wilder bets of trifecta or all those other things so uh yeah i think he was he was more straightforward as a gambler uh but uh yeah so and then also just to really bring it home comic book guy shows up wearing a worst episode ever t-shirt just let you know exactly how he feels uh but furious d he doesn't take any guff okay lisa i've got furious d across the board box with the three and eight and wheeled up and down um i think he might be developing a gambling problem hey i'm watching. They're tightly bunched as they round the far turn. Wait a minute. Hang on to your monocles,

because Furious D is closing like a horse possessed. That's it, D. Don't let anyone push you around. Be as bad as you want to be. And the winner, Furious D. Oh, man. That horse don't take no guff from nobody. Guff?

I mean, shit. Oh. So close to a PG-13 swear on broadcast TV. I couldn't believe how close he got to saying shit. Like, I was so shocked with that i had completely forgotten this was the episode where nelson almost says shit and gets beaten up for it that also feels like a direct uh like buck against south park oh yeah and them loving shit shit shit shit i think we're like a year uh and some change before their famous shit episode but i mean the you're right though the movie just

came out yeah yeah and all the and also like simpsons doesn't even get to say bleeped swears like south park at the time was getting to say uh and um though they make a good point on the commentary of like being this violent on the horse track will actually get you banned for life for racing it does not let you win you can't be that violent you're not supposed to have a horse like smash other horses this was followed by a uh a long musical montage set to a cake the cake song going the distance yeah apparently in the first airing it didn't have this it had to sound alike and the director knows the basis from cake and i guess there was an issue clearing it before the broadcast. But apparently that connection let them clear it for future broadcasts and the DVD. So there you have it.

That's good. This is one of those moments where I wish I had my old VHS tapes around me and also a VHS player. Because I definitely taped it on first airing. And I have this phantom memory of like hearing a thing that was sort of like going the distance and i knew it was meant to be that and then seeing it on the dvd i'm like oh that's there's the real song but i didn't i unfortunately couldn't find online any any helpful person who uploaded the original sounds maybe hey you know that guy or this day in simpsons history if you're listening check that daily simpsons history try to find your old tapes play the original version of this

on twitter somewhere i have to say i love this song and i love cake as a band this just doesn't feel like again this feels like a simulation of an older like uh the waiting is the hardest part when he's trying to get it when home is trying to get the gun. They have to get the gag of everybody walking in front of him. Like this just didn't feel like a gag. This just felt like they were like, see, he's winning a bunch. I'm like, yeah, I need that information this way. I understand you like this band, but like I just don't understand why this is happening other than giving me narrative information, which is something that they're not usually too worried about you getting. It's a cool song, but I think it was just chosen just chosen because like oh this would be cool if we did this there's no

like comedy behind the choice or what they're doing in the montage you're right just it's bart winning in violent ways and they're not the violence isn't even super cartoonish as compared to where this episode goes later i do like seeing the animators tasked with having a horse moonwalk like that. Oh my God, yeah. But no, I could see it just as, well, we have this montage of him winning. What do we set it to? And you're like, well, he's a modern tough guy athlete. Is there any modern song that's about running or racing? And so they find this song that I'm sure is not an allegory

for anything untoward. And like Chris, I'm a big cake fan and there's no shame in liking cake and if anything they give people who are bad at karaoke a leg up. Hell yeah. You can do a cake song. Can you talk your way sleepily through a song? Then you could be in cake. More than once I've

gotten I Will Survive Up but sing it the cake way because it's just it's a lot easier. How we use electricity can be smarter, cleaner and greener. At Electric Ireland, we can help guide you there. You see, our new net zero hub has all you need to know about smart meter plans, EV tariffs, solar panels, and much more. Making your usage clearer, your trips greener, your home cozier, and your world brighter. Find our Net Zero Hub at electricireland.ie. Also a good one for karaoke for people who hate karaoke like myself.

You don't have to hit the big notes, but Leonard can just you can mumble your way through it a little bit this whole sequence ends with homer winning a bunch of trophies more trophies than wayne gretzky and the pope combined and this then leads to quite a turn in this episode man i got more trophies than wayne Gretzky and the Pope combined. You're quite a trainer, Mr. Simpson. Care to join us for a beer in the jockey's lounge? I've been waiting all my life to hear that. Hey, where'd you go?

Little man! What? What happened? What is this place? Welcome to the secret land of the jockeys. Why are you talking like that? These are our real voices. We only talk like this on your surface world.

But you're respected athletes. You own car dealerships and marry beauty queens. alike what woman would marry us we're freaks and there's a song i forgot about the song yeah uh so i was racking my brain of like okay was there a crazier turn than this in this in a non-halloween like real episode of the simpsons before this was their crazier turn and i was like thinking like well let's say mo is kind of a weird out at the end and i do think it's pretty crazy that the end of the full crusties episode it's that 48 were owed to the mafia i think that this would work better if they had worked their way towards it if it was the point of the episode not a

complete ass pull for something zany like i'm thinking of things that are just as crazy like itchy and scratchy land one of the best episodes of the series so fun so funny they are fighting an army of evil robots at the end and no one is like wait a minute this is supposed to be about a normal family in america there's that and there's stuff like the stone cutters where there's literally an alien they're singing a song with them like there are crazy as crazy things but the episodes are about that this is just like all of a sudden there's an evil society of jockeys that will eat your brain yes you know in that itchy and scratchy landed example it obviously is ridiculous uh you know but it is science fiction you're like well okay there are animatronics we know those do exist and animatronics malfunction

we understand that could happen this is really just like no there's a fantasy world that exists yeah of magical elf jockeys and it's gonna be used for literally just a like a small plot turn like it's again like bob i think nails it right in the head my issue with this is that like this is too late in the game to be bringing this up guys like you you we've already gotten enough i you know i've been dealing with the meta shit i've been dealing with the horse race and stuff i just had furious d i don't need this evil jockey corporation going on down here yeah if there were like things in act one and two like you know furtive glances between the jockeys maybe some hints that it was leading to

this I mean I guess what they want the joke to be is like can you believe this is happening now and there was never any lead up to it I can see that being the joke but it's such a crazy turn that I wish they had done more to earn it I did laugh at the song I did laugh when Homer like joins in like I guess I have to sing too. And they're like,

what do jockeys do? I don't know. I guess they eat your brains. There's also a funny bit in the commentary. Well, here, I'll plug in the song here. We are the jockeys. Jockeys are we. We live underground in a fiberglass

tree. Between earth and hell In the fiberglass dream Ha! Ooh! Ha-ha! Between earth and hell We reign supreme On toadstool thrown By a chocolate stream But all is not well In Jockey Town

Your renegade horse Is making us frown What do you want me to do? Your horse must lose. My horse must lose? No whip. No show. No place.

Just lose the stinking race. And what if I refuse to lose? We'll eat your brain. My horse must lose. did that really happen or was it just a wonderful dream no dream lose the race fat boy and there's a funny bit in the commentary where i think it's tim long kind of jerkily brings up that uh one singer sounds exactly like bart yeah it's like oh there's the bart elf uh because it's Tim Long kind of jerkily brings up that one singer sounds exactly like Bart. Yeah, it's like, oh, there's the Bart elf because it's just Nancy doing one of the verses. Hey, let Nancy do a fucking verse, dude.

Give her a break. Like lots of actors sound like their other characters. I do think, though, maybe this is more memorable, too, because it's not even the crazy ass pull that's the exact ending it's more we were so used to like episodes that get to a dead end and they have to just go like uh then magic happens but this is more like five minutes before the end the jockeys show up like it's not just that the jockeys are going to threaten homer and that he has to you know that furious d is doing too well and he has to lose but it's also that they are revealing their elfin world to him and that that it exists that they've kept secret all this time but then they pretty much give up their secret too to intimidate homer which is also crazy i mean i do like the animation

look i like the the the back black light poster look of the uh elf world but like yeah i i just completely tuned out because i mean i laughed at the song the song's great but like once it as far as like coherence i was like nope i'm disconnected uh i i also like the feel of this sequence uh the way it's animated because it has the feel of a classic disney or warner brothers short where like a character gets trapped in like a scary wonderland of like you know sylvester ends up in the this upside down world and characters are going to sing to you about how weird it is or like pluto goes to hell kind of cartoons those those ones i i like the feel of it too and i love that when homer is rejected from that world and he's like was it all a dream now there's a race fat boy and he just sobs like his sobbing is very funny to me

but it is also insane and just like that's what i say when this is just a punchy script it feels like if you were i feel like on other days on the simpsons if they got a script that then has out of nowhere that the jockeys are evil elves, somebody would say, no, we're not doing that. Let's think of another reason the jockeys want Furious D to lose. But here they're like, sure. I guess there's elves. Why not? Yeah.

And also, it is a little bit of little people humor on the jockeys here because uh jockeys are uh smaller people because the rules of horse racing are a human must be riding it for it to you know be a horse but uh to you to be able to gamble on it so a way to do well in horse racing is a jockey has to be as light as possible while still being able to do their job as a jockey so not only are they smaller men but also those jockeys uh often have horrible eating disorders because they have to you know starve themselves or uh bulimia happens a lot in that industry it's like horse racing sounds bad for all involved it's uh yeah no the job i mean the jockeys are treated just as much as livestock as the poor horses are too it's uh pretty bad and yet greyhound racing even worse really with all those like conditions i do feel

like that that makes sense for like like connecting it with like beauty queens and you know like that makes sense to me i guess oh yeah he a celebrity in that sleazy world marrying a beauty queen and having a car dealership that does that does fit yeah uh but so the challenge is here at the end of we've get up it's also very random to just in the last two minutes have a story about like you've got to take a dive like that yeah story uh but but homer presents this information to bart son don't ask why but you have to lose the big race you want me to lose the springfield derby but you always taught me that winning was everything oh it is it is but we've been pushing that poor horse too hard maybe but if duncan wins the derby he can spend the rest of his days as a stud.

Well, it is a good life. Believe me. All right. Well, give it a shot. I'll deal with those murderous trolls. Huh? I mean, I'll deal with those murderous trolls. Welcome to the Springfield Derby, the fifth and penultimate duel of racing's triple crown.

Good luck today, Bill. bart is the audience yes what and i i love the doubling down of homer just repeating it like well oh i mean i'll do and he just says it again that is a good joke i like that too but but the but the reason i like it is because it again is, is just like, yeah, this is what we're doing. Like, you didn't just see things in the previous scene. Homer's going to say, murderous trolls. He's going to say, do it for the normals later. Another good little gag from the announcer, like, the fifth and penultimate duel of racing's triple crown, which would mean there are six races in the triple crown.

If it's the penultimate one is the fifth race. These horse jokes are too smart for me. And then the race begins and there's, I think it's only fair that the jockeys are hitting Bart back. He was beating the shit out of them. Like they should be hitting him. I mean, I know they're adults and he's a child, but we then had a joke about the mistreatment of little people, bringing up James Madison and linda hunt the good little people and apparently i like i don't know why

this information is online but i found out their heights online so james madison uh five foot four linda hunt four foot nine four foot nine if you're under five i think that counts is actually sure i i saw her picture when i looked it up like it was linda hunt but i it seems like she's like a small role actor i'm not trying to make a punch there are no small roles yes yes uh though that james madison being short thing like that feels like some classic harvard presidential fax jokes like they uh right straight from the mediocre president song uh but yeah i also do like though there's a little gag of Denman thinking that this is a horse uprising. And he says, and away I go.

That's fine. Bart wins the race. And I think Homer is honestly a little too close to that swimsuit model. I don't like that. Yeah, he's getting a little handsy. He needs the hover hand Keanu Reeves approach to being in the picture with a beautiful woman. Again, this goes to my previous complaint that Homer's too horny in the Mike Scully seasons. I don't like it.

He sticks around to get in some digs at the Hollywood leading our children into a moral sewer. And apparently those were things that Steve Allen said about TV, especially The Simpsons later in his life. And he had been on The Simpsons twice at this point. Yep. Yeah. Ay carumba. That he had barely literally said the moral sewer line. Yeah. i carumba that he had barely literally said the moral sewer line yeah that uh unfortunately again

i might have to reference pro wrestling because this i was well aware of steve allen doing this stuff because he did name the simpsons but the parent uh advisory group he was part of was really mad at the wwf at the time and, I really love Mick Foley and he wrote his entire second book. He takes like 90 pages to just refute to the claims of Steve Allen and his group against the WWF, which now, I mean, if I watch an old episode of raw, I can see where Steve Allen was coming from of like, I don't think 13 year olds should watch, should have watched this. I think the, probably he was right. The thing with this is that like I always kind of remember Homer as a horny character and then I would watch you know the classic seasons like three three to

ten and what it's not really there I mean it is there in little like blips but like I guess I got poisoned by these these letter episodes that he becomes so horny. Yeah, it should only be horny for Marge, right? Yes, exactly. These seasons have too many like Debbie Pinson jokes about Homer dreaming of cheating on Marge. I guess it's not that it's just horniness, but it's that Homer wants to have sex with women who aren't Marge. They do a lot of jokes like not only is homer you know with this swimsuit model but also he is intentionally like i'm going to have sex with maude flanders

like that this is my intention right now he's adulterous twice in this episode yeah it's uh and it's hardly his only adulterous turn in these seasons then as homer's giving his speech the jockey show up with a giant cannon uh which that i think too speaks to how much they didn't care about this jockey stuff that the jockeys just give up their secret world entirely and are walking around with their pointed ears uncovered to shoot a cannon at homer it's just uh you're right again on the swartz welder thing it just feels like swartz welder would probably do this right yeah and then they're just disposed of with spraying them with a hose. Yeah.

The chase after Bart and Homer, I will give credit, I guess, to Alf Clausen for he wrote a good action version of the jockey song playing under the horse chase. I do like that. At some point, we don't see it on screen, but Homer collaborated with Marge and Lisa for this jockey attack plan. That's right. He goes, now, Marge. And somehow, yes, the water, plain water hitting jockeys completely disables them. And they're just in a pile. And Homer seemingly leaves them for dead in a trash bag, which is another like very like kind of shove in your face and like, yeah, who cares? Come on. We put the jockey elves in a trash bag which is another like very uh like kind of shove in your face and like yeah who cares come

on we we put the jockey elves in a trash bag it's very dark for like homer to do that to me like just the thought of him just gathering them all up in a trash bag this is like a really yeah i guess it's just this darkness that's coming into this show now we don't see them getting crushed by a garbage truck so we're at least spared that thank god seemingly implied is them suffocating in that bag as well uh yeah i mean well also that it left me with so many questions on my first viewing i was like well wait okay that's like seven jockeys but isn't isn't every jockey like hundreds of jockeys are this tiny yeah i was let to believe there's a society right they should really come in waves uh off screen for the rest of the series homer is fighting off uh other jockeys

that are getting revenge i also like that homer turns down ned's help he's like no i'm good that's that's a cute little moment but yes then perhaps even crazier than a bunch of jockeys is the arrival of the then president of the united states go get me a trash bag we'll give you gold now that you're a champion You have your pick of the fillies. Yeah, she's the best. Can you imagine? Her face on her body. President Clinton? Yeah, hi.

I'm here to see Lisa Simpson. You read my letter? Much of it, yes. And those glow sticks were wrong. Very wrong. So I've personally overturned the results of that band contest. Congratulations. Thank you, Mr. President. No, thank you, Lisa, for teaching kids everywhere a valuable lesson.

If things don't go your way, just keep complaining until your dreams come true. That's a pretty lousy lesson. Hey, I'm a pretty lousy president. So what is this? Is this referencing anything recently in the news about something like Clinton complaining and getting his own way? Or like what's what's happening? I don't understand. I don't understand the ending outside of getting.

I mean, I feel like out of all the presidents clinton was on the simpsons the most like he just shows up so often like in mr burns's office walking down the street uh he's at that party when homer is max power like so many things he's in and as a sitting president too like when when they did the big hw bush episode that was it was about him being a one-termer boring old man this was these were them trying to do current jokes i mean you know a year before this aired was when the uh impeachment ended they're like i failed we didn't do it like that that was the last of that so i i mean i guess the feeling was this was yeah he sucks at being president or like he was embarrassing.

Definitely it was like, this is a national disgrace moment for that. They were looking at the, I guess, the tact that he had publicly and not like all of the horrible policies and things that were dismantled under his reign. So I think it was more about that. Just like, oh, he brought shame to the office. I think a little of that. Yeah. I don't know. Chris, what are your thoughts absolutely absolutely like the thing is that you don't like him in this

scene like it's not that like what he did to the country is terrible it's like he he is the problem i'll be honest the clinton thing did not strike me as much as the horse sex thing with like i'm like are you gonna make a joke is there gonna be like a hawaiian tropic carmen electra horse in there or something like i was just like why are you making this joke this is another thing where i'm like the darkness is creeping in i'm like i don't know what's going on here homer's even horny for the horses yeah bart is really excited for that horse to fuck also that yeah the library like the librarian horse I'm like, Jesus Christ, guys. Are you serious?

Yeah. That was what struck me more than, like, yeah, I was like, in general, they had always shown Clinton as, like, a horned dog idiot. So I was kind of like, that makes sense. I mean, the discreet, like, saying outright, I'm a pretty lousy president is something bigger, I guess. But, like, yeah, I was also mystified by exactly why this was here yeah and on the commentary uh it was recorded again at the tail end of the uh second term of george w bush when he says that they're like no he's not no he's not and now i know i think like 10 years ago i would have been like no he was a good president but now i'm just like i know too much about him now oh we

know far too much about billy not just personal life but what he did politically and uh yeah not great yeah you weren't paying attention i mean like i i definitely was not paying attention to congress at the time and like what was actually going on i just knew him from blowing the sacks on on arsenio and like being a horny comeback like that's all i knew about him like so he seemed like a you know just like another horny lunatic that you kind of like in the movies and tv yeah well and i mean the last decade has just been watching him like go on tour and do speaking engagements or or also getting mad if he's told like didn't you treat monica lewinsky poorly he's like how dare you or i mean the last

uh the last time a quote of his was in the news before uh the john lewis memorial was there was a new hillary documentary and when they talk about him his infidelity with monica lewinsky he goes like oh the pressures of this job like that he he's almost he's like oh you got to feel sorry for me for cheating on like how dare how dare you like the he's i mean is he worse than george w bush no i mean his body counts way lower for sure yeah that's a big thing i think i did laugh at his like i'm a bad little boy kind of like biting his lip at the end uh funny funny stuff but just like what a weird episode i mean it's so weird i mean i in some ways i am like my hat is off to this

episode just like you don't expect bill clinton to show up in their house yeah from where this episode starts this this again feels like when i say it's very punchy i mean it feels like a first draft where the writer tim long was like uh how do we and then the president shows up and he actually says lisa won that's crazy han it's just he's so big and crazy that definitely on south parker if you a family guy you wouldn't have questioned that but like that i do feel like would be the thing mac reigning would say well no bill clinton can't literally walk into their house and say it and to make it even crazier it's that bill clinton walks in and the horse is in their house too so you can get just a screenshot of like, here's Bill Clinton and here's a horse hanging

out over the couch. And they're all commenting on how hot or not other horses are. Like it's so extremely ridiculous. Like it's more in a couple episodes, we've got Missionary Impossible where it ends with Homer dead to rights about to fall into lava, and they just stop the episode and have a telethon happen. That is kind of crazy, but at least it's something that was set up earlier in the show. And it's not just the president shows up and gives Lisa an award like that.

Standing around with a horse like that is so crazy. It does kind of erase your memory of the jockeys being elves, that's less crazy than bill clinton showing up to give lisa her award i mean this goes to a theory like the my theory with a lot of uh episodes and movies that have a lot of clear touchstones either either sorry either in their own mythology or just like picking from what's popular in culture remember those candy mix things you used to be able to do at the movie theaters like you could put a little like licorice mix and gummy bears and starbursts all in the same bag sure imagine something like that except for you could also put like hard-boiled eggs and like and like dill pickle spears in there like it's

just such a weird melange that like people were just throwing all these ideas in the same thing that make no sense really yeah yeah and like yeah i mean like the ai thing also works too but like i i was just like why why would you do any of this yeah like elements that could be enjoyable on their own but they knowing like the content of this episode are so again we like there's a horse race there's jockeys there's president clinton there's so much stuff going on uh there's the pearl fantasy like all these all these things that don't quite fit together just a bunch of state fair before that yeah that's true what seems like it could be a lease episode then it goes off into crazy town yeah just uh i don't

think it's as notoriously bad as everyone remembers it as it's just like it's just so bizarre in most cases i'll take a bizarre grab bag over just a straight up boring episode or one that misses the mark and uh we've already recorded it so i can say i do like this one more than alone again natural diddly yeah but a better episode of the simpsons would have more control or more like a plan i think this is just so all over the place and first drafty to me that it's it's weird but i don't hate it as much as i used to i'll say that no and the the the ned one is one where i like you're not really breaking any rules here like this is mostly just stuff i find very strange and maybe not very funny ultimately maude dying is like a breaking a rule to me for the simpsons yeah that's an actual hit against it and like that's it will always be one of my least favorite i mean people give shit to that lisa

becomes president episode or like uh gets married episode and i think those are so much better than even either of these on any day so chris thank you so much for joining us for this long episode talking about a very famous episode of the simpsons or infamous rather uh but please talk about we hate movies what you're doing i mean you might not know what you're doing in october but you've got a patreon you're putting out so much content please talk about it we love the show oh yeah uh so we are now doing our halloween month stuff it's called spooktacular and we're doing uh all sequels uh number twos number twos mainly uh wish this was mostly for me to be able to talk about wish master too

and for us to have uh angelica j bastian on to talk about species too excellent so we're doing that and we'll also be doing a lot of stuff on our patreon patreon.com slash we hate movies but yeah it's a great month to be doing uh to be you know doing what i love here and yeah thanks for having me on guys no we always love having you back on chris and especially for a controversial episode like this one yeah and uh like we said we you just hit 500 and uh it might take a while but you might have more episodes of The Simpsons one day. Sorry, more episodes than The Simpsons one day. We're working towards it. We're working towards it.

And also, I really love the Raiders of the Lost Ark one you guys recently did. You guys are funny whether you hate the movie or you love the movie. Yeah, thank you so much, guys. So thanks again to Chris Cabin for being on the show. Please check out We Hate Movies and their Patreon as well. They offer a lot of great stuff there. We have a Patreon, too. If you want to support us and everything we do,

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Come on, come on. There's got to be a winner on his floor somewhere. Bingo. Hey, let go, you lousy, come on. There's got to be a winner on this floor somewhere. Bingo! Hey, let go, you lousy, stinking... What? You're beautiful. Uh-oh. This is a serious medical problem. I got to go.