Talking Simpsons - Talking Simpsons - Some Enchanted Evening With Thad Komorowski

Episode Date: May 20, 2020

This week we welcome on Thad Komorowski of the Cartoon Logic podcast, as we dig into the messy production of Some Enchanted Evening! Originally conceived as the pilot, the first director was fired, and then it was heavily reanimated to serve as the season one finale. Learn all the dirty details on how much it changed, and even major changes from the first table read draft of the script, all in this week's final re-exploration of season one! Support this podcast and get dozens of bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! And please follow the new official Twitter, @TalkSimpsonsPod!

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That is patreon.com slash talking simpsons. Now, please enjoy the rest of this podcast. I heartily endorse this event or product ahoy everybody and welcome to talking simpsons the podcast that's full of brutal slow motion killing i'm your host yellow bellied rat jackass bob mackie and this is our chronological Ahoy, ahoy everybody and welcome to Talking Simpsons, the podcast that's full of brutal slow-motion killing. I'm your host, yellow-bellied rat jackass Bob Mackie, and this is our chronological exploration of The Simpsons. Who else is here with me today? Hey, it's Henry Gilbert and I am made of 70% retake footage today. And who do we have on the line?

This is Thad Komorowski and maybe Scrape is shit. And today's episode is Some Enchanted Evening. I'd like some flowers. What kind of flowers? You know, pretty ones, not dead. Well, we have some beautiful long-stem roses. They're $55 a dozen. One piece.

R.I.P. Howard. Today's episode aired on May 13, 1990, and as always, Henry will tell us what happened on this mythical day in real world history. Oh my God! Oh boy, Bobby! Nora Dunn and Sinead O'Connor choose to boycott Saturday Night Live

because it's hosted by Andrew Dice Clay. Mel Gibson and Goldie Hawn have fun in Bird on a Wire and in theaters now, and in an important moment for me as a wrestling fan, Robocop shows up to save Sting, the wrestler Sting, at WCW's Capital Combat. Was that the one where he shot his dick off? No. No, it isn't.

He only did that once. And it's a good trick i gotta say so uh the story behind that is wcw was owned by warner well it was owned by turner which releasing new line cinema i believe was releasing a robocop movie and they just said look we own this wrestling show it's stupid we own robocop how about robocop come in and save a character in your show, and it makes people go see RoboCop 3 in theaters. And so Sting, or RoboCop 2, Sting is kept in a cage, and out comes RoboCop, and he rips the cage door off and frees him. And he's like, citizens, you must see RoboCop 2 in theaters now. It's one of the stupidest moments in wrestling history.

Was he promoting RoboCop 2? I believe it was. If it was 1990, then I think 2 is the one in theaters. Okay. Yeah. And so there was a boycott because Andrew Dice Clay hosted SNL. A much worse person would host decades later. Did anyone boycott then?

Anyone walk off? I don't recall this. No. That show's awful, isn't it? And in fact, they're all waving at the good nights, like Larry David and Sia right there with our future president because they're all rich yeah but uh i understand though i know in the book live from new york they portray nora dunn is doing it for political reasons to get like uh newspaper

headlines and uh the the other folks who worked on the show looked down on it. But I don't know. He is gross. He's gross. And he mangles all those nursery rhymes? Yes. Come on, man. And Burn on a Wire I saw on VHS as a kid.

Didn't see it in theaters. I remember it as I think the first time I saw a butt in a movie. Whose butt was it? Mel Gibson's, or at least a stunt butt but i think it was his real butt he his character in bird on a wire gets shot in the butt and uh they have to take out the bullet but it's like a grazing of it and they show a butt in it you know i think i remember that mel gibson's butt in the next episode you can't keep pushing it off forever we we finally will people uh this is not our plan to push that episode down the line. I mean, there are much worse people than Mel Gibson.

Yes, yeah. I mean, he's no saint, though, but as much as he loves the Catholic Church. He's no angel. But anyway, hey, Thad, welcome. This is your first Simpsons, I think, isn't it? Yes, it is. Thad was previously on our What a Cartoon episodes about Daffy Duck and two about Ren and Stimpy that we did. But, I mean, folks should know a little bit about you, Thad.

Well, I'm an animation historian, I guess, of sorts. I wrote a book, oh, my God, seven years ago called Sick Little Monkeys, the unauthorized Ren and Stimpy story. It's the whole back story behind the acrimony of that TV show and its importance in animation history. You were way ahead of the curve on publicly hating John Kay or airing that dirty laundry. Yeah, I would say so. I think I definitely got the ball rolling on the true know, the true story behind the truth story behind

Ren and Stimpy behind the laughter there. But it's weird, people seem to think I don't like The Simpsons because of my book, but I sort of what I wrote in there was what The Simpsons achieved was not what Ren and Stimpy was trying to achieve. And, you know, I wasn't putting it down or anything. they just had different artistic aims but no i i love the simpsons you know it's a staple of my childhood i mean god i was watching it when you weren't supposed to be because like i'm 10 years i was born in 89 so i'm a little behind you guys so uh i i went to catholic school most of my life all my uh great school life and for Lent one year

we had to draw something like what we're giving up for Lent and I drew I'm giving up The Simpsons watching The Simpsons for Lent I had a picture of a hand turning off a TV and I like a comic balloon coming out of it saying I got in so much trouble

for that they should have applauded you for turning off that filth. In a way, it's like, well, you know, it's not a very good show for young children to be watching, but we don't want to hang this in the hall. So, you know, it's how I communicate with my dad and everything. We just like, we'll just quote it to each other. You know, of course, all preseason 11 stuff.

One is you like grew as an animation historian that probably led you to look at the simpsons differently than you did as a as a youngster um i did try to think of what made try to look at it why is this funnier than you know it is and then it's been for the past 10 years oh my god i can't it's just hard to think of a that we're in a time where there's more simpsons i haven't seen than i have i mean it's just unreal they'll outlive us all yeah it will no now that now that disney owns it i i always thought that if like say uh castlonetta or uh cartwright died you know they'd they'd end the show on just out of respect, but not now. Disney would never stop.

They're casting the new Homer right now. We just don't know about it. I bet they have a long list of like, oh, this is who it would be. The day we get the news about one cast member, we know who to call. Someone is slotted immediately. But I did want to ask that.

He could do it all. I did want to ask that about the animation on the show. What is your favorite era of animation on The Simpsons? And who are your guys on the show, or ladies? Well, it's funny that you said, Bob, a while ago. I forget which episode. But you called David Silverman the Ben Franklin of The Simpsons. That's actually a very good title for him because as you may know,

Ben Franklin was famous for all his inventing and innovations and how to make America work. And he liked the party too, like David Silverman. And Silverman is like that with the Simpsons. He's the one who had to figure out what is Matt Groening going to accept and how am I going to actually make it work and visually engaging you know we're uh into you guys are into that era where silverman isn't at the on the show anymore and it's my it's my uh

thinking that the second silverman left they uh figured out how to sap all the life out of the animation and art you know even david himself bless him couldn't bring it back i i think it goes a bit on just cruise control after david like well we know how to make this and it just moves forward i i do think i revisited a like season 12 or 13 episode that lauren mcmullen directed and she really does bring it back to life it's like oh look at these kind of shots like there's she's trying some stuff so i i think for a bit after silverman left if a strong director could go on and make bold choices there were still good moments of animation on the show but yeah this i i love jim reardon i think he's one of the best directors they had too but but when he became supervising director there there definitely was a little something lost uh from compared to the silverman time i mean it's hard i mean like look at what you're looking at like season 12 or 13 of anything

i mean how are you gonna get any life out of it it does become a machine at some point exactly it's and it's not you know it's not disparaging anybody from when you say that because it is i mean i was talking with bob jakes my the co-host of my show uh cartoon logic and great podcast yes who was if you don't know the animation director of the best friend and stimpies he was i forget which of the directors he was talking to it would have been 93 or so because that was when he was doing the new baby huey show and i think it might have been reared in i'm not sure but he was like saying oh yeah i'm expecting the simpsons to wrap now you know wow that's i guess i thought it'd be over after everyone left in season four well who the hell think that any animated show at that point would go past a fourth season, you know?

Yeah. I mean, like, the Flintstones didn't even. They were early. Since it was season six. Yeah. That's, yeah. But so, yeah, we wanted you on this episode, especially because you've interviewed the co-director of this episode yes i did uh not not too in-depth as some of my other interviews but uh yeah i talked to him a little bit about this

one yeah and uh that is kent butterworth and this is a uh a messy episode i think bob we've been talking about it all season this is like the moby dick has finally appeared this was intended to air first in the fall of 89 and it was the first one animated and it was a disaster yeah in terms of production yeah and i think uh you know we've been dissecting this crime scene as on this podcast for a long time of like every everybody blames everybody else on on this episode kind of we've also rarely heard uh a different side of it than the the side of the victors i guess yeah history is written by the winners exactly whoever gets to do the audio commentary pretty much yeah and uh i think when we first did this podcast about this episode we were just going by the dvd but we've learned a

lot more since then i think and yeah i think i've become a bigger uh claskey chupo defender over the course of doing this show because i think people just use claskey chupo as a pejorative like oh that's so claskey chupo just like man season three is such a they figured it out completely if they would have kept on the show from there it would have looked really really good well there was there was a bit of what was called we'll call an air quotes john k type of situation there with uh what was it they wanted uh they wanted the supervising producer there and he refused uh gabor shupo refused i think that was the story sounds like gabor was supposed to be the supervising director and didn't do it. Well, that's what they did with Ren and Stimpy to try

and get it under control. They put a supervising producer at Spumco in the second season. I think they wanted to do something similar with Chupo on The Simpsons, and he didn't want that, period. Not a lot of good came out of that unauthorized oral history of The Simpsons book from

2009, but one of the good things was them actually talking about this dispute and uh i didn't have time to reread that section but i remember a lot of it being that gracie films wanted claskey chupo to pay for any retakes or new animation yeah i think that might have been it too and a lot of it was them asking for new animation after uh it came back Oh, that's so typical in primetime animation. I don't get how, God bless anyone who can survive in that environment as a director. Yeah, well, I mean, the change, I guess that's the, in general, what the problem I think was with this is that prime time producers like aka writers or executive producers on live action they're used to a certain level of control and when they meet what is the 1989 even the

machinery of producing animation that everybody on the animation side is used to and how they do it the producers on the writer's side who are used to so much control they don't understand it they're told to give up this control and trust somebody else and they can't or it when they do it causes a lot of friction and they then i mean there's a lot there there's feels like there's a lack of respect of the animators from a lot of the writers too absolutely yeah even in the film roman days when they took over in season four there was still some friction you can hear about it on the commentaries but around season five like david silverman had to put his foot down and say

this is when this is the last time you can request new changes like after the animatic no we need to move on and they listened to him like he had to put his foot down i don't think they listened to other people who aren't david silverman in the same way i i think that's what causes problems too i think he found i wanted to save this on the show though uh it's funny you brought up around season five um that whole sequence with homer uh it's in treehouse of horror four where he's in hell is that the one where he goes to hell yeah okay that whole sequence where he's strapped and he's getting the donuts force fed that's in direct response to an edict of matt graining's where homer cannot eat anything bigger than his head that's a direct response to it i know some people might dispute that but um or say

i'm full of shit but i know that is true that edict is absolutely true and that that was the response i still say treehouse four is the best animated episode of the whole series it might be it's gorgeous yeah i mean as we do this podcast we see little things that are put into annoying matt graining yes like oh that hitler joke definitely pissed off matt he was on futurama he would have turned this down but yeah i guess why before we get to the production exactly on this, why don't we talk about Kent Butterworth a little bit in our director corner? So Kent is like an animation lifer. He's still active to this day.

Like he's- He still is. He's doing sheet timing. You know, he's, this is how animation works. You're supposed to be retired at, oh God, Kent's got to be getting up there. He must be close to 70 or he's at least 68 now i think so yeah and uh on imdb his earliest credits are late 70s you know junk like fat albert and that's where he started he was uh classically trained uh all over the business he crossed paths

with everyone and he's kind of got a reputation i don't like i don't want to say he sometimes gets a reputation for taking easy way outs which kind of sucks well because he's a very talented guy and a great historian what what's funny is this happens in his career after simpsons but the he is the credited director on every all 65 episodes of the adventures of sonic and uh that is a messy show but uh i our previous guest ian jones cordy loves it yeah i love it too it's it's junk but you know we don't see stuff where you know you just get off the wall semi well-drawn cartoony cartoons anymore i've come down to say it's better than the Saturday morning one because it knew it was trash and it had fun with the idea. I'll give it another shot.

I mean, it's still not worth watching. Oh, no, it's not. It's terrible. But Ian had a great quote. Like he said, Kent had the saying on that show of, if you recognize the character, it's on model. That's what Kent told me as well. You can see that in practice in this episode.

And Ian repeats that on ok ko he was like yeah they took that to heart on that show that's one of their favorite things to do is just draw them off model in funny ways like so but i think that is kent's ethos a lot it is yeah that's uh yeah well that's kent's style uh right before this he got the simpsons job he was a director on the ralph baxi mighty mouse show a lot of people came from that to the simpsons so yeah i was charting his career i see like he did he did fat albert and he worked on the new adventures of mighty mouse and heckle and jackal and the really shitty tom and jerry from the 70s yeah and then in the 80s he worked on like all the big boys, like He-Man, G.I. Joe, Smurfs, Denver, The Last Dinosaur.

Pandemonium! But then when Ralph Bakshi, you know, and the John Kay stuff, like he worked on Beanie and Cecil and Mighty Mouse, I believe. I think he just did some sheet timing on Beanie and Cecil because the Beanie and Ceccil show was running concurrently with uh the second season of mighty mouse which john k was not on okay it's butterworth was the uh director of the he was the series director on the second season it seems like actually more coherent and better than the first season of the show huh because it was they've had as ken had told me they had figured out first season of the show because it was they've as ken had told me

they had figured out a lot of the issues and they made it it's more of uh it's more cohesive than the first season um if you compare them oh i was gonna say it seems like with that mighty mouse show everyone who worked on it either went to tiny tunes the simpsons or ren and stimpy exactly yeah it was like the pipeline. Yeah, Kent has some time. Based on the timeline, I think he must have directed at least some Tiny Toons before going to Simpsons. No, Simpsons was before Tiny Toons. Oh, okay.

All right. Kent wasn't a day one-er on Tiny Toons. Tiny Toons production started in 89. Okay, all right. Because then he gets to Tiny Toons in time for the movie. He's one of the directors on the vacation film. Yeah. The two that he directed that are the most famous on Tiny Toons, he did the Who Bopped Bugs Bunny with Sidney the Elephant, that Gene Deitch classic character. I love that one. Yeah.

He had the one that Jonathan Winters did the voice for. And he also did the Duck Dodgers Jr. one. That's good. That Maurice Noble worked on and got fired off of because, oh, there's a lot of dirty history behind that because the supervising director over in Taiwan got told to do not use anything Maurice sends over. Oh, geez. told to uh do not use anything maurice sends over oh geez well because you know you you do one cartoon that by maurice noble who was one of the architects of the 50s look of animation against all this other shit you're doing you know it's gonna be one episode that looks beautiful against

all this other hack work uh well so okay then so yes kent then before tiny tunes he gets hired on simpsons as uh you know they they hired a couple so silverman and archer who animated on the shorts they were going to direct episodes that neither had directed for tv before so they hire uh several folks who had uh directed on saturday morning stuff before and uh milton gray along with kent butterworth we talked about milt uh earlier but no milt's an interesting dude i mean he lasted forever he came back he was a timer forever and he's got he's attached he obviously knows the style if he can make the jokes work as a timer oh well so so kent comes on They've written this script, and the script is on the DVD. I read the original, like, April 25th, 1989 table draft script for this episode. That is the only episode on that disc.

That's crazy. There's a lot of good extras on it, including the original animation. But so reading that. Yeah, they were very selective with what they showed of that. I wanted to see all of it. I want to see all of it. I want to see all of it, too, because as we'll get into it, there's a couple of reasons I think they didn't show all of it. One is because, you know, they all hate it.

Two, they didn't really want to reveal how much of that original footage is in the actual episode. Yeah, yeah. Three, who was the guy who was originally voicing mo uh chris collins yeah that they his track was probably there oh yeah i bet they couldn't like put that on there yeah uh well so there's the original table draft and i will diagnose that table draft as a live action sitcom pilot that was written like it's graining and simon and it's written to be live action like this is taking the shorts characters and lisa and bart and maggie they have kind of short styles adventures but marge and homer just have like a couple sitcom story yeah and it's so claustrophobic they're writing it as if they can only build three

sets like we've got a home set we've got a restaurant set in this hotel room and it's so claustrophobic, they're writing it as if they can only build three sets. Like, we've got a home set, we've got a restaurant set, and this hotel room, and that's it. And, shockingly, not much is cut from that script. And I think that also shows you how much I don't want to blame Kent Butterworth and his team, because he was given the script, and they say on the commentary, like, oh, they added jokes to it. It's like, they stayed real close to the script from what i've seen like honestly too much they should have changed more things like and in our interview with jay kogan even he's like oh that script sucks like we yeah lucky we could rewrite it it's a bad pilot too because it's like i mean i love the christmas episode as a pilot even though it was not written to be that because it's like here's a bunch of

characters here's the world and this one it's like uh here's mo and that's all you get yeah i and there was this big intro where marge explains the whole family and how much she loves the morning and they they that was the biggest like hack away from the original this is like the seventh episode in season one that starts with like it's morning time everyone's getting ready to do things yeah and and the way i see it is like kent and his team got that script with like weak voice acting a weak storyline and just like a bad introduction to all these characters and he does what he does with an anime like he did the same stuff on this he did on a million Smurfs episodes. Well, you know, you hire the guy who just worked on that Mighty Mouse show.

What the hell are you expecting he's going to do with that? Yeah, well, especially on a script-driven show. They're just like, well, all right, let's go to town. This is our script. Let's make it work. I'm sure he was used to dealing with writers who didn't care. Oh, yeah. On those old shows.

I doubt Bill Hanna really gave a bunch of shit about an added joke though I could be wrong there no they actually were pretty fierce about that stuff I'm just thinking about like you know the 62 year old alcoholics writing like Fat Alberts they're like I don't care what you draw in the background

I got alimony to pay oh no no no no they were fierce about that really especially the networks this drawing I got alimony to pay. Oh, no, no, no, no. They were fierce about that. Really? Especially the networks like this. This was not this drawing. You didn't imply that this drawing would be in the final episode in the script. It's actually funny. I actually have a good story about Kent in the filmmation days. Google Mighty Mouse handcuffs on a snake. You'll get the scene I'm talking about. It's the shitty Mighty Mouse.

Eddie Fitzgerald, that boy wonder, he boarded this insane take on the Mighty Mouse villain, Oil Can Harry, and they wanted to fire Eddie for it. And it's like, you cannot put, and it's like just a typical

Tex Avery type of take. Nothing dirty or anything. And Kent said, you know, let me handle this. I'll animate it. It'll take me most of the week because this is filmation and we can't. We're not built to do this. I'll handle it. But this is just a one-off thing.

But it's a funny take. But they wanted to lynch Eddie for it. And it's just stupid. stupid wow just for having any fun at all having any fun yeah exactly uh so as they tell it on the commentary this was their memories of it in 2000 or 2001 whenever it was recorded james l brooks who is the villain of this story now to me uh but so they say that like they write all the scripts they ship them off and then they say six months later the animation comes back which like even matt graining admits later on in the commentary well we were getting animatics we just weren't

looking that closely at him we didn't know how to judge this stuff and so the animation comes back they say six months later and they can't believe it they are shocked at everything they see like it is it's uh it's matt it's brooks probably kent is in there i would think gabor chupo definitely is in the room and they watch the footage back and the story is it's just you know tension in the room. And James L. Brooks says, this is shit. Gabor Chupo replies, what do you mean shit? Brooks replies, a foul substance that spreads disease. And then Gabor replies, well, maybe this shit isn't funny.

Maybe script is shit. Yeah, maybe script is shit. And of course, Brooks then says the very peddly at the emmys that year when gabor is uh taking photos with them he's like oh maybe the writing is shit huh yeah like uh but yeah they did not like what they got back at all they say for a whole week as they're waiting for the color to come back on bart the Genius, they all think their show's dead. And they send an excuse to Fox to not even show them the episode. Don't come. Don't come to the lot, please.

And then they said when they got Bart the Genius back that it was workable. They're not even that effusive with praise with David on the commentary. But at least they did like the Bart the Genius footage much more than they like this i think that was more to do with david had been there yeah he's their friend i think i mean it's not knocking david he's been their friend for a while so wes archers as i commented uh homer's odyssey that's oh well what the fuck that that is that that's the kind of stuff that usually sinks a series.

The footage in that... Oh, those crowds. There's way worse stuff in that than what we see of the Kent footage in here. That's because it's not ambitious. It's just like, here's characters in a room, which was fine. Like, they're asking a guy to draw crowds when there's not enough characters to fill the crowds with. Chupo, I'm going to quote a little bit from Kent about this. So Kent says, Chupo had his studio in to quote a little bit from Kent about this. So Kent says Chupo had his studio in the building that Bob Clampett had owned. He'd met Chupo at one of Bob's parties

and they got to be friends that way. Gabor had never done series work, so he wanted me to come over and help him set up. It actually had just shut down and I hired a lot of the crew to come over and start up. In the beginning, it was great. Yavor's studio expanded to take over the whole second floor of the Clampett building. It felt special to be making cartoons in Bob's building. I was making a very cartoony Simpsons show, but as the production evolved, Matt Groening and Sam Simon wanted less and less cartooniness. I pretty much got blamed for all the problems and I got the sack. Yeah, that's sad. Well, see, that's the thing.

He didn't they didn't really explain to Kent. We want a three camera sitcom. Well, that's really different than a lot of animation production. Well, I mean, the cartooniness thing in the scripts like they they out the cartoony takes. I was shocked. For example, in this script, they call out that Homer's beard line pops back in with a broink. That's in the script. So that wasn't a cartoony liberty. Marge getting her lips stuck to the door when it slams in her face, that is a cartoony liberty that they took. It's funny, with how messy this episode is, it contains the best 15 seconds of animation in the entire series yes yeah out of nowhere but honestly

too much but yeah it is too much but just like this is a different show but but poor butterworth had to be like the martyr on this one and uh you know thanks union rules, he keeps his name on this and also No Disgrace Like Home, which Greg Manza took over. He was directing on Telltale Head, but I don't know the whole story behind that. I see little touches of him in there, but yeah, it's just, it's really too bad for Kent. Again, I think the, if I could just put blame there it's that these were writers who had never worked on animation before they gave it to a person who did his job as he's done it before and and ably so but then when it comes back the producers are not used to that and I think I think anything that would be the first thing they got back they'd hate

honestly like oh yeah absolutely and and so Kent was just kind of set up to fail and then on top I think anything that would be the first thing they got back, they'd hate, honestly. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And so Kent was just kind of set up to fail. And then on top of that, it comes when they probably already were having early problems with Gabor Chupo and just the friction between those two guys. And it's like, yeah, it was the first thing that came back. So it's like we had an idea of what the show looked like in our minds, and you didn't match that. You didn't read our minds. Yeah, and so Silverman can get a little closer to what they wanted and i bet they're so positive about barthagenius just because it was better than what they got on enchanted evening and they forgave it they're like oh thank god this is

we're saved like but delaying this redoing it like it pushed the release of the show it was going to be a september 89 show and it became a uh december 89 slash january 90 show and this this ep actually like it's weird there's like a two-week break too like they needed every second to work on this uh to finish in time and then klaski chupa would go on to just rule the 90, be way bigger than the Simpsons ever was with Rugrats, arguably. You know, well, now Simpsons is bigger than Rugrats. Yeah, it's true. But yeah, I mean, well, there was a moment where I was like, oh, these are the new guys. There was a moment they could pitch any piece of shit to Nickelodeon and they'd buy it.

Nickelodeon was 70% Klasky Chupo shows for a few years. Duckman is excellent. I love Duckman. One day you scoundrels will vote for talking duck man mrs botts is a duck man character uh mrs botts is that like the wild thornberrys or something yeah those those insane breasts i don't i can't deal with them i think this chokes on dick oh yeah from yeah, from South Park. She really is Miss Makes Me Sick. So Silverman takes it over. They do extensive retakes. He says it's 70%.

By my count from re-watching it just now, I think it's more like 60-40 or even 50-50 because every bot scene looks like it's the original. Maybe her design is just so crazy, they're like, we can't do shit with this. Yeah, like how does she move? Any shot without the family, you could barter that it probably

is from the original take. Yeah, well, and Silverman also says, even when it's the original take, they redid backgrounds a lot because I think there's only like two shots in this that have the early season one like gradient backgrounds that that was their choice in those first episodes like like in the Marvin Monroe phone call there's a gradient background but right and so yeah Silverman took it over that's why like

there's some moments that look like a season two episode and then the very next shot it's like the the first animation they ever did for Simpson that shot with Bart and Lisa on shot, it's like the first animation they ever did for Simpson. That shot with Bart and Lisa on the couch, it's like it's cobbled together from the different takes. Yeah, they go from being squeezed together and looking very, you know, Butterworth. And then when they get in that screen pose like that is a very sharp silverman drawing. They look so insane when they're tied up. And when they're watching that America's Most Armed and Dangerous show, there's some insane

drawings. They were featured on our live show if you happen to be there in January. The Simpsons will be right back. Hey dudes, welcome to Fox 32's afternoon of fun and prizes. Between now and 5 o'clock, we're giving away 20 Simpsons T-shirts. Here's how it works. When you see Bart Simpson's face on your TV,

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and kent butterworth he'd go on like you said to work on tiny tunes he would also direct the only kennedy episode of batman the animated series christmas with the joker oh man the the worst looking episode of that show i think i mean kennedy just they're not a good fit for doing an action show like batman that was that was a mistake on warner's part and uh and then you go on to work on uh the first years around stimpy i think just the spumco years right um kent was a freelance timer it's actually funny he got blamed for something else there too a poor guy he uh there's an episode it's commander hoek and cadet stimpy episode uh marooned it's like the most bloated worst timed of all the episodes and

everyone says that kent did it and i asked i directly asked kent is like is this your work and he's like because it's really bad and everything's timed like it's underwater and it's like i wouldn't do something like that unless I was instructed. I think I did little as giant, but that was it. But what's funny is with Kent, he was he was he was a friend of john case for years and add when he was at deacon Sonic the Hedgehog. That was when john got fired. And he took all his loyalists with them saying, Hi, we're gonna sell all these series. And he calls up Kenny's like, I got no fucking sell all these series. And then he calls up Kenny and he's like,

I got no fucking work for these guys. You got to hire them. And so they're all working on Sonic. So that definitely helped the attitude and resentment. To go from the critically lauded Ren and Stimpy to the Deke 65 episodes of junk

Adventures of Sonic. That explains a lot about that show. Yeah. A lot of the craziest ass drawings that uh the cells from that show are great gifts and very affordable gifts robotnik's butts yeah his big butts any any shots of robotnik uh well robotnik is actually milton knight's creation who wasn't really involved with ren and stimpypy. And so yeah, Kent, he oversaw those adventures of Sonic. I think around the late 90s, he transitioned to Warner, and he's been a timer on basically every Batman or Scooby-Doo movie

Warner has put out in the last 10 years at least. He's been working hard in the movie division of uh of warner animation these days or the direct-to-video one i should say yeah i he sort of fell off the radar with me i just haven't well we were never really closer like internet pals or anything but we just like knew each other through the classic cartoon stuff so um no he's a good guy he's very talented but he's he said that his best experience was working for Ralph Bakshi. And the late Chris Riccardi christened him Ralph's bitch. But, you know, well, there's stories like he would, like, Ralph would send him out to the dumpster to find stuff and he would go.

Well, I mean, Ralph sounds like an abusive guy who needs codependence. So that's true. But he just wasn't a good fit for the simpsons i mean it's just i think ian was the guy who said uh you know it's just miscommunication yeah yeah no one was doing bad work i mean some of the stuff in the original cut of enchanted evening is objectively bad but it's no more objectively bad than in what aired on i mean in homer's genius or homer's odyssey in homer's odyssey that shot of him dancing on the drawings i've ever seen when he falls down into the crowd that's like that's your final shot that's your final shot and this is it's it's fucking

terrible it's like this is what ends shows uh but yeah so that's that's the story of kent this i guess i think our chat about the actual episode will go pretty fast because this is a light on details yeah not a lot happens and uh what little drama there is immediately resolved yeah this season one dvds though you gotta if you don't have them or haven't opened them up in a while, the script view of this one is really worth it. Like, there's some big, there's a couple big changes I'll bring up. Are there any, like, macaroning doodles in them? So many doodles.

Oh, shit, I got to check this out again. You can, you see him, like, if it's a Bart bart page he drew a like five uh hair spike bart on there or or a marge one of my favorite is i believe it's on the page that ends act two he just drew popeye it's just popeye's head he just drew him in there for some reason but also it's interesting like it's dated there's even notes from man on there of like, okay, 10 a.m. tomorrow, Rosewood, that's where we're recording the script. Like, it's... I love seeing that stuff. And also, I saw it in previous ones.

You know, in the scripts, they give the credits of who at the table read his reading stuff. But they've been redacted in the other ones I've read. Not on this one. Cool. Though they are written in light pencil, so there's a couple that I can't fully get but um there's no harry shearer at this like he i think he was hired after this or he hadn't started yet because he's not credited as anybody you hear him once at the end as a reporter and that's it well he is marvin but oh yeah duh sorry but that's the most okay actually for the second most interesting thing chris collins he's

on the credits there the late chris collins original mo but he's also on this table read barney he's barney dan actually only has like one non-homer charactery voices in this this is maybe this table read is when they're like dan should be doing like five other characters so but chris collins is barney and the craziest one to me is marvin monroe and it's written down that it makes me think he was there for the table read shock jock tom likus no he is freaking way it's he's it's marvin monroe dot dot dot in pencil tom likus and it's spelled the Tom Likas's name is spelled their voices are identical yeah yeah I mostly know him through the comedy bang bang version of him oh the disgusting I in

90 was he as gross as he was now like I would have to assume so so so it was stud casting it was originally going to be Tom Likas that's crazy that's never come out I love finding new stuff and uh also in the credits miriam flynn was the voice actress who was doing most of the women in there she she read for bots but in parentheses next to her name graining wrote penny marshall's gonna be her so penny marshall just wasn't there for the table read it was miriam flynn doing it but they always intended to be her but it all clicked into place for marvin monroe specifically in this episode seeing that it was just supposed to be tom likus like his smoking and eating in this one it makes so much more sense

but uh but yes that that is the huge revelation i couldn't believe that's nuts uh but uh yes the the episode begins uh in the original animation it is a long sequence of marge talking to maggie about how much she loves starting the day and you can see how it was originally supposed to be like you get a man you got like a close-up of bart you got a close-up elisa homer it introduces every character and to see that in the new animation it was just replaced with like a static shot of everyone sitting at the table it's uh it's definitely less dynamic yeah i loved how that original opening was staged really emphasized marge's state of mind being utter chaos due to her family yeah and i love the like the pull apart of the donut box and how it flies into the air and and bart looking for

the frosted crusty flakes and and the joke is in both ones but you barely even register it in the broadcast version of bart pouring a whole sugar bowl into his cereal he does that in the broadcast version but it's it's all just played in a single shot that you can't really see it. And instead of Marge talking to Maggie a ton, she is just silent watching the family. It's very sad. I wanted to mention something too, but I had a note about the first season couch gags. Oh yeah.

But a bunch of them repeat because something originally was supposed to happen to each member of the family. And Marge and Lisa each had a respective gag. If I got told what they were, I'd forget. So they never used it. I have to hazard a guess it was decided. It wasn't funny if the two female characters were singled out for a pratfall. I mean, Maggie's opening is still there because she gets caught by Marge.

That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. pratt fall i mean eddie's opening is still there because she gets caught by marge but that makes sense that makes a lot of sense yeah and there were only five uh couch gags in this season so one for each member of the family presumably boy that makes a lot of sense the joke so all of the original couch gags were just this is too small of a couch for five people and one character is gonna fall out but who will it be i'm glad in season two they're like you know we could do more with these couch cakes than just that what if they were all the best one because nothing happens yeah i always knew oh it's gonna be the babysitter bandit one maybe i can go do something else what if a family sat on a couch together i think it would go something like this oh and by the way

some enchanted evening from the musicals out pac ah yes i'd never bother to look that up until now so there you go thank you i actually forgot that too uh but yes let's hear the the new opening and now to our own pie in the sky bill pie in the kbbl traffic copter so come on in bill bad news drivers there's an overturned melon truck on the interstate oh it's a mess there's lots of rubbernecking and melon rustling going on, so expect to let... Hey, don't! All right, there's one left, and it's mine. Ooh.

Aw, Ted! Uh-oh, scuba! Hey, cool your jets, man. We're coming. You forgot the special lunches I made. That's okay, Mom. We got money. Now just a darn.

Ah! Well, Maggie, it's just you and me again. So they're kicking off the season one trend of like a TV has to be playing in the background or a radio. Like Dan Castaneda is just going on with his broadcast under all this. And I thought it was sacrilegious or sacrilicious that Bart was the one who wanted a donut. Yeah. And Homer just fell in his place like, oh, I guess I'll eat this. Yeah. If I will, sure. I'll eat a donut. Yeah. And Homer just fell in his place like, oh, I guess I'll eat this.

Yeah. If I will, sure. I'll eat a donut. Yeah, man. The whole, again, it's played so static. Like, it feels like an overreaction. Like, Silverman heard how much they hate it, especially that just, like, mega cartoony opening with so much squash and stretch. He's like, everyone is locked into place.

They don't move like uh like their their joints feel like they're on um metal rods or something oh you know he wanted to do something more with that scream of homer's too oh yeah yeah the and even the i forgot they kept in the joke of marge wanting a kiss and homer ignoring it but it's it's played so weird in this it's so subtle i mean the original version and that's when uh he kind of slams the door in her face or opens and Homer ignoring it, but it's played so weird in this. It's so subtle. I mean, in the original version, and that's when he kind of slams the door in her face or opens the door in her face and she like kisses the door.

Yeah, it's like olive oil. Yeah. And then later in this episode in the finished product, you can see the lip print on the door from that cut animation. Yeah, it's still there. You're right. You're right.

It's a callback to a joke they cut out. That's amazing. I love Marge's long walk down the hallway in that original footage. Yeah. It's good. And there's like a first person run by Bart through the hallway. Like there's really ambitious stuff there. As in this one, it's just like so locked into place.

And yeah, I guess that's got to be Arnie's twin brother Bill, perhaps. But that's Bill Pie with Pie in the Sky. They just went for the obvious joke it's so much better arnie arnie arnie in the sky yeah and also like nancy cartwright doing a random voice another thing they'd only do in season one like so wait in in the production history of the show is is bill pie the first character we hear guess he is wow yeah i guess in you know marge talks first and the radio's on then during that scene i think in the original that's true but uh but i i get so when i see it from a pilot writing standpoint i get that they see this as in all the shorts it's all about the kids and

really just part so now to show how different things are we're gonna have a like a monologue by the mother who has been nobody up to this point in the series and it's an ambitious thing to do but it i'm really glad they cut it it just doesn't work like this feels like two episodes like two 11 minute shorts where the first short is marge's met at home or the second short is like home alone they go out and there's like a home alone event although Although Home Alone would come a year later. So this came first. So they really ripped off, Home Alone ripped them off, I'd say.

The Homer screen, I do like getting a wormy tongue on Homer. I always love the worm tongue when they scream. Another lost piece of Simpsons art over time. And yeah, so Marvin Monroe, then we hear him on uh the radio with his show starting he's much more like us in here and he's uh they'll also like his the guy we talked about before the the inspiration for frazier crane as well as a radio psychologist uh and now it's

even crazier if you think of him as tom likus him telling marge like your husband's a pig it's even crazier. If you think of him as Tom Likas, him telling Marge, like, your husband's a pig, it's like you're the most piggish man on the radio. But, yes, the turn from Marge on the phone to inside the radio station is just jarring in the animation change there. But here's the clip. This is KBBL K-Battle, all talk 24 hours a day. If you'd like to share your embarrassing problem with our listening audience, we invite you to call our therapist of the airwaves, Dr. Marvin Monroe. Our number is 555-PAID.

Don't be afraid. Call now. Hello? I'd like to talk to Dr. Monroe. First name, age, problem? I'm Marge, 34. And my problem is my husband. He doesn't listen to me. He doesn't appreciate me. I don't know how much more of this I could... Hey, lady, save your whining for when you're on the air, okay? Yeah, it just takes a long time to get to stuff in this. It's like first Marge has to... First she has to hear the announcement, then she has to call,

then she has to be put on hold. There like so much like uh shoe leather to get to these uh important scenes and i wonder because she says it off screen i wonder if in the original recording march said 33 because she turns 34 in uh wait um yeah and life on the fast lane there you go yeah actually i do recall in the script she says 34 too so that's out of order then yeah she's or maybe she was just rounding up on the phone call though i would never round up my age like no one in their 30s would i don't think there's some okay comedy with the guy going like hey tell it to the save it for the air like don't don't tell me this this episode we have 555 pain and 1-800 you squeal oh yeah. Lots of phone number jokes.

The idea of calling it a phone number with a funny name was very novel. Have you heard about these phones, folks? They're crazy. So then we cut to the nuclear power plant. In production order, since this was going to be the first time we see him at the plant, and this is the answer. What does Homer do for a job? He works at the power plant.

And in the script, there's a job he works at the power plant and in the script there's a lot more lingering on the idea of like oh a scary sign that says call this or seven days without an accident or whatever and the sign gags are in the background but they're so underplayed like you can't see and this looks like better worth footage too to me and all these yeah most of this is and all the weird homer friends that we don't see anymore, like the pre-Lenny and Carl friends. That's like Lenny's dad, the guy telling him, like, that sounds like your wife. Class after class of ugly, ugly adults.

And Marge should know who Marvin Monroe is because he's the guy that made her family electrocute each other. Yeah, you're right. This guy's a hack. This guy's a quack, rather. You're right. i'm not gonna call him uh maybe she forgot it all i mean marge has written quite ditzy in season one yeah yeah i you know uh the cant footage too i feel like an inside joke they were doing was homer especially

in the cut footage but there's even still some shots in this like homer is fred flintstone like they they are following the fred rules of like his feet pointing out his like just general posture it's a very they're they're going to fred flintstone there like i've seen the character design art like the model sheets silverman did for homer of just like here are the rules of homer and a lot of them are just broken every single shot that that kent did of homer in this uh but yeah we get to see the interior the power plant is homer wants to listen in on this funny phone call when we were dating he was sweeter and more romantic and 40 pounds thinner and he had hair. And he ate with utensils. What was that last thing you said? That's funny.

Hey, isn't that your wife, Homer? Don't be ridiculous. My wife worships the ground I walk on. Marge, it's what I call harsh reality time. Your husband sees you as nothing. Oh, okay. Well, thank you. No, no, no. Don't hang up.

The pig has made you into his mother. You are not the hot love object you deserve to be. Really? I'm as sure of it as I'm sure my voice is annoying. Tonight, the second he comes through that front door, you've got to tell him you're fed up, and if he doesn't start loving,

you will be leaving. Leave Homer? Please, don't use his real name leave pedro can you be that honest marge yeah you'll tell him right when he comes home from work yeah say it like you mean it yeah that's uh that's a funny scene i mean in the writing i love her like once he says he views you as nothing, she's like, oh, okay. That's all I needed to know. Well, I understand now. But Marge has some very like silver mini posing on her sobbing too.

I like that. Yeah, Marvin, it's weird. He's like acting like a pig, calling out Homer being a pig. I feel like that's the joke there. That Marge is just taking advice from another pig about what a pig calling out homer being a pig i feel like that's the joke there that marge is just taking advice from another pig about what a pigger husband is and so like the leave pedro thing that was pretty funny and i forgot like i'm sure my voice is annoying that's in the script too even like so maybe it was them dunking on tom likus to his face like yeah your voice sucks tom like yes and i guess this

character didn't come back a lot because matt graining didn't like characters with gruff voices like that and also i don't think harry sure liked doing it i mean plus his design is crazy yeah that like the scribble beard yeah it's like a blue no not a bluto beard like maybe a brutus beard i guess but this whole sequence then like it's homer gets inside information like he knows marge can leave him so in a way this is subterfuge like he tricks her and like the the scene ends with homer going goop like that like they would like make a joke about doing that kind of a joke like two years later oh yeah then it comes to they love the two Bart tapes so much. They're like, we got to do this twice. Not just once, twice in this episode.

And we cut to Moe's bar as Bart gives our first prank phone call. Oh, come on, Bart. Not again. Oh, where's your sense of humor? Oh, it's tapping. Hello, is Al there? Al? Yeah, Al.

Last name, Caholic. Let me check. Phone call for Al. Al Caholic. Is there an alcoholic here? Wait a minute. Listen, you little yellow-bellied rat jackass. If I ever find out who you are, I'll kill you.

I hope you do find that punk someday, Moe. Yeah, that's definitely, that's taken right from the two bar tapes. I can just hear it go, alcoholic. Yeah. Alcoholic. They just did it straight. I've got to say that I have always loved the prank calls. I know it's completely juvenile and stupid and pointless,

but, you know, it's just a good break. You know, it shows Bart is still a kid. Well, I'm an ugly moron and my butt smells. I like to kiss my own butt. The way they tried to find new stuff to do with it, I think, led to some my faith. I'm Hugh Jazz. He's like, hey, man, i i gotta get off the phone okay

like that that'll exchange rules uh and but yeah once they pinned it on jimbo that pretty much was the end oh yeah yeah they wanted to end it yeah i mean they were i mike reese one of the showrunners when they ended it he was very clear like these are hard to write nobody laughs at him at the table reads i don't want to do them anymore yeah you're right straight off of the tapes in the so you laugh at the rat jackass thing in the script he did say rat bastard oh so it must have been a the jackass was a censor note yeah bastard little hersher for uh 1989 bastard bastard bastard oh yeah season two we had the bastard song maybe they even did that song because like here's how he finally got away with bastard they cut it in season one because he was using it literally yeah man mo is just like okay so bart on the one end of the phone he is very

david silverman the other end of the phone every scene in mo's is kent butterworth and also uh mo is retaining his missing tooth it's on the model sheet on the original model sheet for moe so you see that gross missing tooth he's hideous he's i don't think he's ever looked worse than when he does a front-facing speech to homer i'm so glad they didn't go with this uh characterization of moe too you know as a wisely bartender it's just way too cliche he's a scumbag who steals he's ugly he needs to be that for the character to work especially since he's threatening to kill a prank caller yeah yeah he's you're right he kind of turns into like wilson from home improvements uh for a part of this and he also like mo and his speech here he's he knows more about women than

he ever will at any other time yeah yeah uh it just doesn't work i mean maybe it worked for the mo that collins did because this is all fully re-recorded like mo's lip sync is terrible in this but it's it's because azaria redid it it ain't good though not as much as you think the dialogue is pretty similar but there are some big changes that all were for the better especially there's he has a line where right before he gives his big speech about pigs that i'll play in a sec he says like i'm gonna give you a shot of truth with a side uh honesty and a button and i'm just like oh this is terrible i wasn't marked for cutting in the original script so i'm guessing when azaria was reading it back they're like you know don't do that i'm gonna give you a shot of truth with an honesty chase at home

but it's like five more lines than that it's really bad like uh, like, Homer looks very Fred in some of these shots. It's funny, too, when he gets handed a glass. He's handing the glass to Mo to get refilled. It's a giant glass. It's all wrong. But then when it gets given back to him and he gets the pickled egg jar, that's when it's a Silverman shot and the glass has shrank considerably. And all of the advice that Mo gives Homer,

Homer later repeats to Mr. Burns in Homer's Night Out. Oh, you're right. All the basic, like, how to, like, win over a woman, like, you know, buy her flowers, take her out, you know, have dinner with her. Yeah, that's true. Was he supposed to be recalling what Mo told him in episode one? I could see that.

Yeah. I could see that. Again, Mo has never had sex to this point i i choose to believe that but this element of the plot i always forget about because it's just so nothing so yeah marge is mad at homer homer buys her flowers marge stops being mad at homer the end there's nothing clever about it there's no subversion of anything it's just i don't even know if the writers are aware this is a terrible relationship and this is just an empty gesture by a terrible man but it's just like it's so flat and then like like the exciting in quotes part starts after this we're just like well now there's antics

and dancing and sex well uh first why don't we learn a thing or two about love from mo hey you can love with me you got a a domestic situation. You might say that. My wife's gonna leave me because she thinks I'm a pig. Homer. What? Marge is right. You are a pig. You can ask anyone in this bar.

What? Hey, Barney, am I a pig? You're no more of a pig than I am. Oh, no. See? You're a pig. Barney's a pig. Larry's a pig. Larry's a pig. We're all pigs.

Except for one difference. Once in a while, we can crawl out of the slop, hose ourselves off, and act like human beings. Homer, buy your wife some flowers and take her out for a night on the town. Candles, tablecloth, the whole nine yards. Gee, a romantic evening. Nah, she's too smart to fall for that i'm not done after dinner the two of you are going to check into the fanciest motel in town and not check out until the next morning if you get my drift i read you loud and clear

yeah i feel like a later script would have had him say i hear you loud and clear you mean sex right yes exactly actually that's the joke in uh new kid on the block when he's talking we are talking about sex aren't we yes loud and clear wow well this is the first scene ever in Moe's, right? Yeah. For Dr. Noir, yeah. I wanted to mention, just give a shout out to Dan Haskett, since we're here. He was the designer of Moe and Barney. Nice. He's one of the greatest draftsmen of all time.

Hard to find people that classically trained still around. I mean, the way he draws just demands to be animated and a lot of character designers today do not draw that way he started out in new york uh he was working on sesame street right out of high school wow then he was working for richard williams he did a lot of assistant and cleanup work on raggedy ann and andy which is a terrible film but a lot of important people did work on it. There's some great animation in that. I can't believe that movie.

I just can't believe it. Well, Eric Goldberg started out there too, and Haskett did a lot of work on the best part of the movie, The Greedy. The Greedy is the greatest thing. That's by Emery Hawkins, which is the only good part of the film really i'm mesmerized by the greedy yes emory was the main designer and animator of the best woody woodpecker

and then he did a lot of work for warner brothers in the 40s but dan's really one of those unsung guys i mean if you enjoyed something or thought a cartoon was really well drawn in the last 40 years, chances are Dan's name is somewhere in the credits. I think you mentioned Henry. He did a lot of design work on Ariel and Belle for Disney as well. Yeah, looking at the timeline, it's just funny that he was like fresh off of Little Mermaid and going to Simpsons after that. And did he do the animation that's cut of Marge and Homer dancing very well? The super fluid? Yeah, that looks like his bot scene later.

Just how fluid and unearthly it looks. His most recent gig is he was the main designer and layout on the new Looney Tunes cartoons. Easily the best thing in their favor. He's maybe one or two people who should actually have that job. New Looney Tunes cartoons. Easily the best thing in their favor. That's cool. He's maybe one or two people who should actually have that job. But I think he's on Space Jam 2 now. Oh, no. To my knowledge.

Yeah. Let's talk about Howard. Yeah. Okay. Here it is. It's Howard Flower. Oh, wait. Wait.

Before. No. I want to talk about Howard. But no. I got to quote something from Dan Haskett. I want to quote because I found something of him. I don't know him personally, but I found an interview of his. Quoting Dan Haskett back in 2010, he said,

One of the biggest challenges in my career was preparing Matt Groening's original character designs for the Simpsons TV series. I think Matt was once quoted as saying he draws the same now as he did in eighth grade. So I had to work backwards and forget nearly everything i'd learned to get to that level but still be able to put it in three dimensions it was a real challenge it's ironic that the one thing i earned an emmy for and it's also the one project that drove me crazy wow i so he really is unsung there. These all work. The designs, even the family work in the series a big reason because of Dan Haskett's ability. Yeah, to take the flat, almost cubist macarooning drawings and turn them into things you can move around and rotate with dimensions.

I mean, even the shorts like the shorts i have loved the shorts more now than i did when we started this podcast but it's a different model every shot sometimes yeah it is very inconsistent it's more like here's my take on a matte drawing now yeah in this moment boy i gotta interview this guy gotta just only simpsons i only like ignore the rest of his career all his amazing work at disney just just simpsons but before we leave mo's bar i did just want to say there was one cut scene with barney fireworks factories coming uh barney barney uh gives drunken advice where it's just the gag that he keeps saying like bell or your blubber like what tell her i love her no tell her i love her like that i though i do like the

animation on his uh more pit you're more of a pig than i am and the bar flies are there they're there in shot he mentions larry that's why he's called yeah there's i can't tell what song it is but it is another song in the room too i wanted to mention that like at this time they're mixing shows like at the end of the season. They realize every time we're in Moe's, a different song with lyrics plays. That's too distracting. Soon that will go away forever,

but the joke was you're in Moe's, there's going to be a bar-style song, a Bumopi song. Yeah, that too obviously tells you the emotion of a scene. Yeah. Okay, let's talk about it. let's talk about howard all right baby howard it was dead uh the character is dead yes yeah well here i play the opening sound why i play him real quick yeah sure i'd like some flowers what kind of flowers uh you know pretty

ones not dead well we have some beautiful long stem roses they're 55 a dozen one piece so he has two lines in the entire series uh voiced by paul wilson his only time ever on the simpsons he is a super character actory kind of guy we might know him best people from our generation as one of the two bobs in office space oh okay yeah he's sort of like a a plump gentleman with glasses and he's bald if you're older he played paul on cheers sort of like a kirk finnhout character yeah i loved him as well he i don't remember paul at all one of my favorite cheers episodes was where carla realized one night when they all got drunk she had sex with somebody at the bar, and she feared it was Cliff or Norm. But then she finds out it's that guy, and she wants to kill herself.

He's more of a loser than the bar flies. He can't fit in with them. Also, he was on a ton of It's Gary Shandling Show as a recurring character. But I think the real connection was he played the same character three times on Laverne and Shirley, and we'll get to laverne and shirley soon because of penny marshall but yeah in a season 20 episode called wedding for disaster we found out that howard passed away 10 years before that and his son howard jr now owns the store oh wow yeah so they returned to howard's flowers yeah just. Just once like 10 years ago.

It's funny on the commentary. Grady is apologetic of like, we thought it was funny to have rhyming store names. We stopped thinking that pretty soon. Yes, we've at least made it to Howard's Flowers. So we've been waiting all season for it. Now I can retire. Another change from the script is that as you see, Homer arrives with a flower and a box of chocolates. He, in the script, goes to Candy Most Dandy.

We have a scene with Mr. Dandy? Yeah. It's a scene of Homer not knowing what candy to buy for his box of chocolates and driving Mr. Dandy crazy. We only see him once in the final version of season one, but I was like, what were the plans driving Mr. Dandy crazy. We only see him once in the final version of season one, but I was like, what were the plans for Mr. Dandy? These are two proprietors that presumably would be throughout the entire series, right? Yeah, Dandy and Howard. We would have seen them as often as we see Apu and Lionel Hutz.

We would have seen these guys. It was cut at the table read. On the table read draft it's just marked through like mr dandy was murdered that day at the table read james l brooks here is like we just went to howard and now we're hearing from mr dandy no we're not doing two of these also in the script there's too many scenes of marge getting madder and madder there's already like three in here but there's like one extra. We talked about our now growing contempt for Richard Gibbs, the composer for season one.

And his one maneuver he does to add dramatic tension to a scene is what I call the Gibbs sting. And we've heard it several times. It pops up like 30 times in this episode, just like the whenever something shocking happens. It is all over this one i was like i didn't realize i disliked this guy so much until we did this super deep dive into season one i'm sure he did good work on olman i'm sure he's a yeah good composer bad fit for this there's also i can't tell if it's a choice or a mistake but after marge growls at the kids which that's a funny drawing i I like those drawings.

But then they show her, the act ends with her just glaring at the door, which is a weird choice for an act break. It's the weakest act break. There's a better act break in this. I think, well, like, Bot's appearing as an act break, right? Yeah, that's an act break. But what I think is either a mistake or a weird choice is that when Marge is glaring at it she blinks every time the clock ticks like if you you hear the second hand tick here her eyes blink as well which i i can't tell if it's a fuck up or uh an intentional choice and uh yeah it just ends with marge murmuring is the end of that one uh and then yes homer comes in after marge is having like swirling angry audio of

equipment yell at her there's a scene of him in the rain going i love you baby or whatever he's practicing it i gotta tell you i was watching this and homer you know on the tv saying i love you my bird heard him my bird told homer i love you back so it was very sweet that's that is sweet yeah he was he meant it too uh and you would think that i would have if somebody asked me oh i bet you they changed that like no that's in the script too like marge in the script is like marge stand still previous lines from marvin monroe repeat in her mind like so that was all there even in their pilot script and yeah homer's arrival homer also after we just watched busted he's back to walter math out just fully in this episode yeah he's walked to the door at the very least when march opens the door on him trying to open it that kind of

like angled down shot that looks like a season two or even three shot to me like uh it's it's much more in in the silverman style but uh it's pretty crap that marge just instantly for all homer that's basically what it is yeah i don't know if they're aware of how uh bad this uh relationship is an attempt at irony about how bad it was but just doesn't play out yeah it's not extreme enough like it's just it's just so subtle and it like just deflates like well i guess that's over yeah just like oh the he these characters are gonna get divorced now after seeing his pathetic arrival she's just like oh and also that the the way she just gives it all up after we've had to watch for like seriously two minutes of her

grinding her teeth and it's her eyes like literally turning red yeah that's pretty extreme too she's seeing all those demons in her head yeah the phone demon the radio demon and and instantly she forgives him it makes her look really stupid honestly yeah and then homer gets away with something like he should have if he had said i heard you on the radio i'm so sorry like but instead he's like i tricked her i tricked her out of divorcing me and it's uh yeah it's just bad i don't like it yes the the kiss in the doorway shot where marge embraces homer like that does look very butterworth too like they're kind of melty like just kind of like

shift around a lot it's a weird shot too maybe it's even like framed to look like the doorway kiss from the cut opening like i i can't tell uh but yes they then the next scene begins with another prank phone call like two two in one episode we just never seen that on TV. Most haven't. Is Oliver there? Who? Oliver, close off. Hold on, I'll check. Oliver, close off.

Oliver, close off. And I made reservations at the Chesperie. But Homer, it's so expensive. It matters not, mon frere. And after desserts, we'll adjourn to our second floor room at the off rampage i feel giddy wait what about a babysitter oops not to worry listen you're lousy bottom if i ever get a hold of you i swear i'll cut your belly open goodness must be a crossed wire homer should really recognize Moe's voice there, I think.

But maybe that's a joke. But I really like one of my favorite posings in the episode is when Marge kind of pushes away from him and goes like, Oh, Homer, I feel giddy. Like, it's a cute drawing. We've heard about Chez Pierre, but not Chez Paris. Maybe that's him mispronouncing it then? I don't think so. But he calls Marge like my brother instead of you know my love i didn't get that yeah mon frere he learned not bart should have

taught him more french these are the homer says words wrongs words wrong jokes of the first season always funny it's hilarious uh no it's not it's not funny yeah the maybe they just wanted to make it clear that this is going to be a runner that Bart does prank calls by doing it twice in the first episode. So then we get the rubber baby buggy bumper babysitting service. What are we doing with this? So long. Yeah. It's all in the script, not changed like this.

I think they were a little too cute, I'd say. I mean, it's cool they got June Foray. That's big like i love that it's june foray because i sort of viewed this as a passing of the torch and approval you've got this with the main stay of what was up to that point the best tv cartoon uh rocky and bullwinkle passing it on to the next great cartoon and tv history oh Oh, yeah. I mean, it was fully intended to be that, too. Like, graining on the commentary is like, we got June 4-A, I'm so happy we did.

And, like, it was an intentional torch passing. Like, they wrote themselves a torch passing and hired the torch passer to pass them a torch. But it ends up, looking back in history, it was a torch passing to the next Rocky and Bullwinkle. And you got to hit that death jingle, Henry. Keep that button handy because we got another one. Yeah, so first use of the death jingle here.

Death stalks you at every turn. There it is, death. Yeah, so she passed away in July of 2017 at age 99. My goodness. Two of the people on this episode, they were alive the first time we did it, like five years ago. Yeah, with June. Yeah, they were all kind of hoping

she'd live to be 100, but then, you know. Yeah, just a few months shy of her 100th birthday. Yeah. And she was doing acting like up into her last years. Like she appears for an interview in that John Di dimaggio voice actor documentary like she's she's uh i mean what can you say just a legend like one of the all-time legends of voice acting like not i mean rocket j squirrel alone and natasha like they're those are

iconic characters to be remembered forever and her voice acting does a lot for that but but also like she's she's witch hazel she's she's in a million things magica dispel magica dispel like yeah she's granny did we say granny uh yeah of course granny oh yeah i don't know why i said witch hazel first before granny is more famous we all know witch hazel with her famous bobby pins i love her laugh as witch hazel. She's so funny. And that's that. And you've also got to give her credit. She was a very big early advocate of recognizing, you know, the artists and the writers and everybody involved in the production of animation.

Very much so. Through a SIFA, the Animation Society. Because she had worked with Tex Avery and Jones and Freeling. And she wanted to see these guys recognized for, you know, who, you know, the artists they were. You just can't say enough about her. Yeah, she her is like a proponent in that way for the celebration of animation. Like it's that also is is just legendary like she also you know i think she was a big like part of the labor movement too and in acting like she's she was

on nixon's enemies list as well that rules and i remember in her like obituaries i was reading like people remarked like who who else could say that they you know worked with walt disney chuck jones jay ward and orson wells like who who else could say that uh not like that's uh just an amazing life for for uh for june foray like she's i i remember like her and alan young they recorded new dialogue for that remake of duck tales and they yeah i mean yes they sound very old in it but they they did it and they they were still at it that was that was great so getting her in this is is great especially like she does three characters in it she's not just this uh crappy old lady on the at the baby giant

phone that phone that's uh that's a Kit Butterworth phone if I ever seen one oh yeah the shot at the babysitting company is all kent yeah it's funny because homer on his side of the phone is david silverman and then he's talking to uh the this kit butterworth woman he's calling a different universe well i mean okay a babysitting service like that doesn't even make sense either but I don't know. Do these businesses exist? They did. Yeah. It just feels fake to me.

I think it's just like so they can vet people who watch your kids, you know. Clearly they did a bad job. Exactly. Well, Botts is a master schemester. That's true. Still hasn't been found. And I mean, this was a runner for a time of like babysitters are terrified of Bart Simpson. Like they stuck with that for like the next five years of the show.

Put it down, Bart. Put it down. A woman who had like a full mental collapse from it. But, you know, June Foray, at least in this with the stupid tongue twister she's told to give, she's earning her payday in this next clip. Booba baby buggy bumper babysitting service This is Marge Simpson I'd like a babysitter for the evening Wait a minute, the Simpsons? Lady, you've gotta be kidding

Rubber baby buggy bumper babysitting service Hello, this is Mr. Samson. Did your wife just call a second ago? No, I said Samson, not Simpson. Thank God. Those Simpsons, what a bunch of savages. Especially that big ape father. No!

Actually, the Simpsons are neighbors of ours, and we found them to be a quite misunderstood and underrated family. It sounds like Homer's defending himself from the bad reviews the show might have gotten. I think so. of ours and we found them to be a quite misunderstood and underrated family it sounds like homer's defending himself from the bad reviews the show i think so i think so it feels like them pre-imagining the reviews are going to get in that they're like well this season will obviously fail and it'll be reflected upon as underrated which like instead season one was a giant success that made a billion dollars no one would call it underrated that's for darn sure my mom had a good laugh and i said samson not simpson

like that's a good joke that's good there's funny writing in this it's not like an overall bad episode but uh so yeah they do lie to the babysitting service and get a babysitter in the room you can see bots on the couch so she's off model even there and what is on model for bots i guess that's a good question yeah like later they have to draw her for like you know things like tapped out just like well here's a character they refine her so much even though she never appears again yeah really well i mean she's just she has a long worm neck and a giant head and then this just like brick house of a body. And there's these pendulous sagging breasts that like hang over her belt buckle.

Yeah. Her like waistline. That fully break any rule about drawing Simpsons characters. And she walks with like this weird gait to her. I don't know what's up with that. Is it like is she like injured or? It kind of reminds me like barney's like swaying arm yeah it's uh there's a shot of her uh there's two shots of

her walking in this episode that are just like incredible like how's she getting around what's going on here uh and also uh the the old lady who i said had like earthworm gym head like she's she's on the couch as well uh but yes, so they get a babysitter. Then it then cuts to the characters getting ready for a court. And the Marge and Lisa, this feels a little too cute. But I do like, you know, Lisa's watching her mom for how to be a grown woman. Bart's watching Homer about how to be a man. It's like Norman Rockwell.

No, I love that Bart Not if I can help it. No, yeah. No, I love that Bart is resisting every second of it. And then, like you said, that was Haskett, this bit with Marge and Lisa here. Yes. Which I think they just love the comedy of thinking, well, how does Marge do her hair? She must put 8,000 curlers in her hair every day. We learned a little bit about

Mambo. Mom, you look so glamorous. Well, tonight is a very special night. Your father is taking me out for dinner and dancing. Dad dances? Like an angel. Ba-ba.

Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. Ba-ba-ba. Ba-ba. Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. Work that body, Homer You know, one day you'll learn to move like your old man Not if I can help it Son, there's not a woman alive who can resist a man who knows how to mumbo You don't have a clue, do you, Dad? Out, boy Ouch!

What a grump so mambo it's funny graining on the commentary again in 2001 in the post mambo number five world they're like oh mambo is actually popular now there's five of them but but graining is like oh no i wholeheartedly like unironically, he loved Mambo. Yeah. The family was supposed to listen to KMBO or something like that. Yeah. Yep. Mambo in the morning. Yeah, there's they're listening to a Mambo radio in the drive to the off ramp in as well. Like we talked a bit about the Mambo in our live show, but just seeing Homer dance to it. And and as i said

then i'll say it again that song is patricia by presprado uh famously for used for millennials as the intro theme to hbo's real sex which uh yes many many a youngster uh enjoyed that special though uh real sex see cinemax was just they were like oh we have soft core we just show this like hbo they wanted to get like artsy like these are documentaries about people having sex and so you'd eventually just have to watch like hippie circle jerk in some yeah yeah or like nudist camps with very unattractive people i was more into watching just like it was like a rejected simpsons bit almost the one time i saw it as it was just all these elderly people trying to give each other an orgasm you know and like in this pure white room it's like what what is this i was

more into watching uh dream on for like the 10 seconds of breasts you would see they could easily cut out for syndication but again youngsters you know in your in the pre-internet days you have to understand that if if you could see a naked person on tv you could get the job done it was a big deal it was it was an important memory all hands on deck so to speak for that yeah uh but uh yeah the the homer scene seems very Silverman too. Because Homer, I would love to see what the original footage there was. Because I bet Homer danced really well in the original footage of him there. Yeah, the shaving scene, that's all in the script.

And I think it really was just them answering the question of like, what if Fred Flintstone shaved his five o'clock shadow? Those shaving faces are so silver mini. Yeah. Oh, yeah. The little faces he's making as he's shaving his beard. Yeah. I love every bit of it when it gets down to just the sides he does and the way he wipes off his lips.

It's really good. And yes, then pop right back in. That's why Homer always has a five o'clock shadow. Then we get another runner. I forgot that was a runner for season one that bart slides down the banister then smashes into the ground off the camera they did that like five times this season i forgot about that uh and uh then bots enters the scene the late penny marshall i guess i should just play the death jingle sure yes I am his box well

just don't stand there boy help miss bots with her suitcases I can handle my own luggage thank you for coming on such short notice miss bots here are the phone numbers of the restaurant

where we'll be dining and the motel where we'll be spending the night. You'll have to put Maggie to bed now, but Bart and Lisa can stay up for another hour. Until then, they can watch a tape from our video library. Oh, boy! The happy little elves meet the curious bear cow. Oh, the elves, the elves.

Bye, kids. Watch out for the boy. Bye now. Be good. Gotta go. Come, children. Let's go watch the happy little elves. Look, lady, we've seen the crappy little elves about 14 billion times. Maybe we can watch some real TV. I said we're gonna watch the tape. That's merely suggested viewing matter, lady.

Mom lets us watch whatever the hell we want. I said you're gonna watch this tape and you're gonna do what I say or I'm gonna do something to you. And I don't know what that is because everybody has always done what I say. That's the best animation on The Simpsons ever made. I think so.

I like Art's walk back better. Oh, that's great. Like the stiff walk back better if he's an oh that's great like the the the stiff walk back to the tv just eyes locked on her and how crazy his arm looks when he shoves the tape in like the no look uh vcr also like we didn't need to see marge kiss every child that really takes too long yeah there's a lot of cuts to make and when they leave you see the kiss mark on the door that's where it is yeah yeah let's talk about penny marshall real quick so she died at age 75 in december of 2018 again alive when we covered this uh her brother gary would appear later in the series as larry kidkill i love that name of that character so um at this point she had just

directed the movie big she was about to start directing the movie Awakenings and was a few years away from A League of Their Own. Like, some big hits for her. She was transitioning out of acting. Though she'd still, like, you'd see her in stuff every now and then. So, where her career went, she was really cast in a go-nowhere sitcom called Friends and Lovers by James L. Brooks in the mid-70s. That was canceled mid-season. And Brooks was so impressed by Marshall that he cast her on the Mary Tyler Moore show

as one of Mary's neighbors. Oh, really? Yes, I didn't know that. I watched every Mary Tyler Moore, but I did not recall that. I watched it a long time ago before I knew who Penny Marshall was. But the big deal was

she appeared as the character Laverne, a one-off character with Shirley, in the 1975 Happy Days episode a quote-unquote a date with Fonzie. And then those characters were so popular that the next year they were in a sitcom, Laverne and Shirley. One of seven spinoffs of Happy Days.

I can't explain how huge Happy Days was. I was not around for it. Frankly, I'm glad. But Happy Days had seven spinoffs. I mean, people like remembering the 50s without the bad stuff. No black characters. Does Laverne and Shirley in the Army count as one of them? I'm not sure.

Oh, no. That'd be eight then. If you count the cartoons, there's like 10 Happy Days spinoffs. Fonzie and his time machine all the wonderful things when i was a kid i would watch every old show just because i was like oh these are fun but this one always confused me because i'm like it's an old show that's also pretending to be an older thing yeah that's really confusing i think when i first saw it i thought it was a show from the 50s me too yeah yeah and and of course i first watched it because

i loved the buddy holly music video and that was such a weird time where like that music video that just that music video was so popular that like mtv got the rights to broadcast episodes of happy days on their channel sometimes just for that i completely forgot about that though so the the weezer music video for buddy holly is like taking place within the world of happy days there's really cool effects in that in that video but also that was on the windows 95 disc they threw that on there to be like here's a music video you can watch too man what a time to be alive yeah not so good al like that yeah that was the mid 90s celebration of a retro 70s show that was about the 50s too much ironies involved in that product you were choking on it then man but yeah penny

marshall she was she was a great comedic actress like she probably uh i would bet in her career she got shit of like you just got hired because your brother makes these shows but she's really good like uh and yeah then became quite a director and i remember one of the last things i probably joked about it when we first did this that uh the rumor was going around that her and carrie fisher were uh were a couple and i wanted that to be true i wish it was just them as a couple old ladies like yeah fuck it we're we're old let's just be together ourselves uh but yeah no she was a great hire for this like a huge star to get for your first episode i she's is she credited or uncredited

she is credited i checked so like it's she's not an a brooks all right i'm like sam a medic perhaps even which like you know she's braver than dustin hoffman then like she she put her name on it i prepared a little bot's corner for this episode to tell you where botch is up again because she's so freakish they can't really trot her out anymore as a character so but everybody remembers her like everybody remember if you were watching simpsons during bartmania you remember the babysitter band there's like an action figure of her in that huge line of them. It's hideous. But so she mostly appeared on like wanted posters in the background, like only a few times. And like she actually appeared in person in Hurricane Nettie in the mental hospital.

Like when you pan across the rooms, the last joke, it's John Swartzwelder, it's bots. And then it's Jay Sherman. Right. That's right. Those are the jokes. It's where they locked away their old characters you'll never see again we're like well why won't we see these characters bot's probably because she just looks so freakish and jay sherman's there because they i i felt like a score settling from uh the writers who were mad that they even did a critic crossover episode i

think so and also she is in the family guy episode the simpsons guy uh in line for the car wash with uh hank scorpio no lines but they're like in their cars in line to get their car washed by peter and homer i don't recognize that as a real episode no it's not so okay so she is because they had to scrape season one not canon it's not canon i agree and it's a horrible episode so in uh for video games at the time they had to scrape season one like down to the electrons to find content to put in these games so she is in bart versus the space mutants as the boss of the mall level and i i just i copied this matter of fact description from the wiki about this uh bots also appeared as the boss of the springfield mall in the simpsons bart versus the space mutants where she frequently tried to drop luggage onto

bart the main protagonist of the game and the player. Depending on whether Marge's name was spelled earlier, she will either deflect any luggage away from Bart or Bart will have to dodge the luggage. Bart defeated her by throwing the luggage back at her. So she's a luggage-based opponent. That's what they took from her. Like, oh, she's got luggage.

That's what she does. What's she going to throw at them? She should be tying up Bart. Like, do don't that requires new sprites to draw yeah yes so but wow i forgot you well obviously i didn't get to that level one beat level two i got to level two and i consider the game over but i i'm not i'm surprised she didn't show up as a boss and other things just because there's so few enemies to give Bart in those video games. He lacks a lot of boss battles. Yeah, the bosses in that were like Nelson, Adil, Jimbo, Sideshow Bob, and Bots.

That's right. And Skinner appears in backgrounds and stuff, but he's not like a final boss battle. Man, Bots a what an interesting character she is like i like that they at least kept the runner that she was on on the run for the rest of the series for for a few years they're like oh how do we fill in space in the police station for this shot well i want a poster for bots let's just have that there and to close the circle if they ever end the show the final episode should just be all about bots like finding bots the hunt for bots yeah

uh and uh yes let's talk about those happy little elves too i mean we covered them a bit in the christmas episode but graining really wanted to take a swipe at smurfs and all those terrible shows which deservedly so those are not not good shows. We pointed it out. Smurfs ended a few weeks before the series started. That's right. So they were already dead. And I don't know. We see this tape.

I don't know if these jokes were added by the artist or if they're in the script, but the publisher of the tape is Raskin Bobbins. Oh, wow. That's not in the script. It's a joke on Baskin Robbins, but it's not really a joke or funny. It's also a Rankin Bass joke, but no, you're right. Raskin Bobbins, that's just in the script. It's a joke on Baskin Robbins, but it's not really a joke or funny. It's also a Rankin Bass joke, but no, you're right. Raskin Bobbins, that's just a lame joke. And then it's rated triple G, which seems like it could be a joke in the script. No, I didn't see that in the script either.

It being called the only additional elf scene in the script is they watch one extra scene of them being chased by the bear of the the curious bear cub of the title matt craning says on the commentary uh he confirmed it it's not on the dvd but like there was a scene that that was sent back to them that was of like one of the elves getting its head ripped off and like blood gushing everywhere like that like somebody added as a joke it sounds like that sounds like a butterworth move well i was I would think, you know, Butterworth worked on a shitload of Smurfs, so I wonder if he was also enjoying this. Yeah. The only time this ever made me laugh was the guy saying, the happy little elves meet fuzzy snuggle duck.

And the, oh yeah. And the erotic awakening of S. That's the name of it. Yes. Thank you. I think it's also not unlike the June 4th thing. It's them saying like, this isn't your dad. This isn't your kids cartoons.

This is an adult cartoon where they watch kid cartoons and hate them. And I also love when Marge, any character on the show, and they use a term from a commercial, like her using like from our video library, like that, that's very funny to me. It's like straight from a commercial for like Pinocchio on VHS. Add it to your video library. And it even looks like one of the giant white clamshells you'd get a Disney classic in back then.

You could tell that it's been used a lot because of the cardboard sleeve is all frayed at the bottoms too. Again, this is now a very dated joke. The idea of like the child that watches a VHS 800 times in a row and the same tape over and over and over again i think kids still watch the same stuff over and over it's just not vhs tapes i think they tell their mom like play baby shark for me again you've watched it 10 times no no another i think psychologically it's because children have so little mastery over the world so they like um like knowing every line of a movie or knowing what's going to happen it gives them a sense of like accomplishment or a sense of power so that's why kids like for me it

was space balls i watched space balls like a thousand times bart's hatred of the happy little elves again a runner that like i think once they we said it before but once they have fun with itchy and scratchy they're like oh these elves are boring itchy and scratchy is where we do cartoon jokes yeah drawing two frames of an elf jumping up and down it's like yeah we get it the animation is bad like this is a joke you could have made once and uh yeah i mean god that that that is simpson sakuga right there that that bots versus bart scene thank you dan haskett for that i'm glad i could see silverman going like we're not reanimating this one i don't care that it all looks wrong this is staying and it would be sacrilege to delete that i there's also great animation later that

they did cut but i know why yeah so they they head off to the place they go to it really just feels like a red lobster not a fancy french restaurant yeah which uh the red lobster i still think it works as a reference of like, what is the suburban fancy meal you take your girlfriend to? I'm just like, you know, this is third date town. Wink, wink is the Red Lobster. And that, I believe that waiter is Chris Collins. It sounds like it.

Yeah. Yeah. And also like that waiter's telling Homer not to pick the Dead Lobster. They should have fished that out anyway. Don't leave a dead lobster in your tank. That's on them. But yes, June Foray then even plays the elves in this, which is great casting. She just sounds entirely correct to be in this scene. Help! Help! Faster! Faster! We gotta save Bubbles!

Oh, man, I can't take it anymore. But I wanna see what happens. You know what happens. They find Captain Cook's treasure. All the elves dance around like little green idiots. I puke the end. Bart, you're just like Chewie, the elf who cannot love. Now for some real TV.

All right! America's most armed and dangerous! Oh, no, Bart! We'll have nightmares! Relax. This is cinema verite. When the brutal slow-motion killing starts, I'll tell you to shut your eyes.

The cubo killer should be considered extremely armed and dangerous. If you think you've seen him, call 1-800-U-SQUEAL. So yeah, parody of America's Most Dangerous. Yeah, they wanted to give it a Fox vibe. Oh, sorry, sorry. America's Most Wanted.

I don't know why I said that. Because that's a joke. I apologize. Yeah, they wanted to give it the Fox vibe because it's a Fox show. Yeah, it's kind of a sideways glance at their compatriot on the channel. I mean, America's Most Wanted it was a a real trashy show that that it got away with all this trash by being like no we're helping people this is about catching people brutal slow motion killings is what bart says uh and they probably did capture like they probably

helped find some people sure that john walsh guy uh not in part of this world the way he's drawn but i love just the constant dangling cigarettes oh that character yeah the drawing it's crazy and that's gotta be christopher collins too right i believe so yeah i again star scream and that guy the same voice uh and well i like bart turning off the tape and when he says captain kook there's there's a crappy drawing of a pirate behind him too that's a good gag but also that like lisa says i want like lisa's being played dumber than bart in this like at least to this point she's like i want to see what happens you know what happens she's a bit more sensitive but just as stupid yeah she's like you're just like chili the elf who cannot love i do love that uh which again very smurfy

of just like chili the elf, Blankie the elf. But there's no Brainy in there. The funniest of the Smurfs. Easily the best Smurfs. You know, with Disenchantment in this, he's got a real axe to grind against the Smurfs. He's in today. I love in Disenchantment. They're all the happy little elves. I like that on Netflix, the art for Disenchantment, like the logo or whatever, or the promo art, is Shaco.

Oh, you're right. At least on my TV. It is. That's what the algorithm knows. You like shock. Like this dork, like shock. Oh,

there's also in the, one of the best jokes in the Simpsons ride is where you go to the kids ride and it's the elves. Like you, it's a, yeah, well actually no, the best joke in that is when they go through the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. That's, it's, you know, the Simpsons ride, I miss Back to the Future.

But I like that at least is like a Simpsons jokes about theme park rides, at least. But yeah, they turn to the America's Most Wanted. As a kid, those did give me nightmares. Oh, yeah, this Unsolved Mysteries. Unsolved Mysteries more than this, yeah. They just, they did terrify me because they they did seem so real like bart says cinema verite which is way too smart for him but as a seven year old the six year old like i just took it as real i'm like no this is just real i'm watching birder right now actually i forgot that we did it but uh john walsh did an america's most wanted

thing for the simpsons remember for the Who Shot Mr. Burns two-parter? We did a commentary on that on the Patreon. $10 and up folks can watch it or still at patreon.com slash TalkingSimpsons. Now it's funny because the credits are all non-union names because Gracie couldn't work on it. But also in that, it's so funny how they are doing basically a clip show package about every person they've named as a potential shooter of mr burns and then near the very end they have to have a scene where john walsh says like you know we've had a lot of fun yeah but on the real show we actually do great work it's uh i believe it's a season seven dvds with part two is on the same dvd sets that one yeah okay so uh as they're watching this

in the table read draft there's a dumb scene of homer asking the waiter for a giant pepper mill that i'm really glad they cut that what was the joke uh that they they say like do you want pepper and homer says yes and they go to a lot of trouble to pull out a giant pepper meal mill they turn it once and then homer says enough and then they leave i see and uh though they do keep in the champagne bit it's it's in the same scene of him asking for more champagne second least expensive yes yeah well that's uh that's another weird pacing moment where they just go like you look like a child why because you have on a bib silence and they just kind of stare at each other.

And then Homer asks for more champagne. Maybe it's supposed to be a reference like, no, their marriage is dead. This is loveless. They got nothing to talk about. I think we're supposed to believe they're having a really good time at this dinner. Okay. It's just the pacing is very strange. You know, Marge, this is just like when we were dating.

Except for one thing. No chaperone you know what let's talk about that mambo first actually okay that mambo dance in the original animation is great it's just really well done uh that you you figure it's ask it it is ask it yeah absolutely he id'd it as his oh great okay well that makes it a real tragedy they cut it but on the commentary it's pretty clear why like yeah matt graining wanted them to look like bad dancers because they haven't danced in a decade what was the script direction or the stage direction it's one sentence of the larry dance yeah it's like's like the Larry Davis experience is playing and they are dancing. Yeah.

You didn't tell the animators how to make them dance. Yeah, exactly. Like they're dancing poorly. I had one adjective. It's just like, you should have read my mind, idiots. Obviously, Homer and Marge wouldn't dance well. And when you know Homer and Marge and what Matt Groening says he wants, yes, that makes sense. But if the sentence in the script is Homer and Marge dance, then they draw them dancing well because it's fun to watch good animation.

You know? They must have never even seen the animatic or anything if they're like, this was all new to them when it came back. Right? Yeah. Yeah. They fell asleep at the switch here. There's all these check-ins they can do but uh but their dance scene is great and i also love that that in the original animation

their dance scene which is so fluid and great moving then it immediately goes to them like in kind of a rocky and bullwinkle type thing where they're just locked in position and only their mouths move it's very odd yeah uh but in the broadcast version they are very stilted and bad at dancing and like march just kind of like moves up in her arms up and down in place it's really they're having fun that's that's the important thing uh but yes the while they're having fun bart and lisa are watching uh the show babysitter Bandit has left a trail of her daring nighttime robberies across the continental United States. She could be lurking anywhere,

about to descend upon another house full of unsuspecting doofus. In a moment, we will show you a picture of the real Babysitter Bandit, Miss Lucille Botsukowski. Remember, she may be using a clever alias, and should be considered armed and dangerous.

There you go. There's another one. There's three. It's like laying on the fucking horn of your car. It's the musical equivalent of that. God, I hate it. That scene goes on too long, too. But yeah.

But it's a good scream drawing of Bart and Lisa. We talked about it before. Them hugging each other on the couch. Wacky drawing. But I love their scream drawing. I think that's a mistake by the television show to show you show the picture of the person up front but but don't save it till the very end to show what they're they really look like uh but yes that's the act break at least more dramatic than the previous

yeah then that's an act break bam and uh when it comes back they're still screaming yeah and that's when they run off and bot starts to chase them uh meanwhile homer and marge are i guess the the cut to them is that homer and marge they're really relaxed while their kids are being terrorized i guess that's the joke and then homer misses the exit and the next one's 34 miles which i guess is a joke too that's one of those gags you keep pointing out that forces you to read i think that actually works here because it's establishing homer and march you know they're out of the picture they're not helping these kids at all yeah at least the exit sign is legible and clear it could be better though yeah i don't think there's enough made of the point that i mean i think it's the it's the this is the joke but

there's not a ton of attention called to it that lisa's calling a tv show instead of the police yeah that's like it's a good joke but doesn't isn't played enough yeah i guess the the commentary on our society is that she should be calling 9-1-1 but she loves the tv show more than our our institution she wants that free t-shirt uh so they split up lisa goes to the phone bart runs into the basement which is where bots uh she chases him first uh they even say on the commentary like yeah this is supposed to be night of the hunter this this night of the hunter yeah which is great i mean i love night of the hunter a film classic a true noir classic it's awesome but that's where she finds an empty thing of pickled beets invisible beets uh they i like we got beats we got beets to pickle the the way bart misses her it's funny i like his what he says in the

broadcast version in the script he says i wish i could convey how truly sorry i am but it's better when he's like well neither of us got hurt so uh let's not do anything crazy that was the homer bowling ball right you're right yeah it was the homer bowling ball but maybe that retake was the later one i'm guessing if they knew about the homer bowling ball that one looks straight out of season two like something silverman would have done done just the staging of it yeah the staging and the bard up top and you don't bots is kind of off screen so they don't have to draw her too much uh in the redrawing uh and uh then she also catches lisa there's a funny i like the drawing of lisa under the table like her hair is kind of like squished down it's june who's on

the phone too talking to her so she's three voices in this june foray is then there's even the joke of them getting to the off ramp in which i think it's meant to be a joke that mo told him like go to the fanciest place in town and yield off ramp in is the fanciest place in springfield and we'll see it again later with homer's night out yes that's where he sees the cabaret show later in production earlier in broadcast yeah uh and he then also when she says like oh you smashed my head 11 years over the threshold in lisa's first words we see that it's really eight years earlier that they they got into that house so i guess she could be referring to the apartment they lived in when though bart was born 10 years ago, so that's not 11. A threshold's a threshold is what I say.

Do people still do that? Do the straights still do that when they get married? By the time you have enough money to get married, your back is just shot. So we're not lifting anything anymore. Oh, I finally bought a house. My knee doesn't work. My hip has been replaced at this point. Yes, the kids are caught, and the babysitter bandit is tying them up. We know who you are, Ms. Botts. Or should I say, Ms. Bottsukowski.

You're the babysitter bandit. You're a smart young man, Bart. I hope you're smart enough to keep your mouth shut. He isn't. You're crazy to think you're going to get away with this, lady. You can't... I'm really not a bad person. Here, while I finish up, you guys can watch the rest of your favorite

videocassette. Quiet, Bart. Let's make the best of this. Maybe I'll go slip into something a little more comfortable. Oh, your blue thing with the things you'll see well shake a leg mama so such a jackie gleason delivery you're right yeah uh her uh i guess

she must have packed it in her purse or something yeah well it's very it's very slinky i guess but then what it's wadded up or like super folded. I don't know, they stay in the night. They have a change of clothes. Oh, yeah, it must be in the trunk, actually. You could fit like a nightie into like a ring box. They're just like such like sleek material. I forgot they drove there, too. So they could just have stuff packed in the car.

I take it back. Yeah, Bart being tortured by having to watch the elves again is cute i i also like lisa is much smarter in act three than she is in act one and two like she she knows by saying bart's not smart enough to keep his mouth shut that she'll tape up bart's mouth and shut him up like that's that's pretty funny and they're also saying like uh no we have to let's make the best of the situation and just watch my tape again oh by the way bots was named after a babysitter that matt graining liked oh yes yeah though based on uh the name was the babysitter he liked but he had the bad babysitter he mentioned too he says something else but i think it's dianetics he's oh it's not i looked it up so there oh it's something

different it's like a different self-help thing that's not a cult it's like psycho it's not psychotonomy. Okay. But it wasn't Dianetics. I just wanted to make sure. I looked up the title of the book, and it was like a different self-help thing that like was Tony Robbins. Is that one of those guys? Oh, okay. Yeah.

He was one of the guys inspired by that original 1960 self-help book. Okay. Yeah. It sounded to me, I guess, that it just sounded like a ripoff of Dianetics. Like, in the commentary, my first thought was like, oh, he doesn't want to be sued by Scientology. So he just makes up a name for Dianetics. That's what I thought. But I Googled the name of the book.

All right. And it's real. It's real. All too real. So yes, Bart is being tortured. Maggie then gets freed. And in the script, it's like a full like two giant paragraphs of just stage direction of maggie doing stuff which you know it reads slow but this is just a short like maggie did these things in

like eight five different shorts during the the allman years so it fits it fits for what they were doing and like silverman loves maggie like he's he came back to direct the the two maggie theatrical shorts that have been released like he's the director on both those i do like that bots is is remarking that these are barely worth robbing like the simpsons just have a bunch of shit uh maggie like unties them which is very uh good for a baby to be able to do on command yeah i i think even if a baby had the intelligence to untie knots i think in a knots tied by an adult woman cannot be untied by a baby they have like the motor control to like do such fine actions with their fingers or like the finger strength like to just uncouple them that's why

they cut away from that yeah can't question the logic of the scene but i do like bart bashing his head against the couch because he's being forced to to watch more of it uh and they also they look so wacky in their tied up forms like those are some crazy drawings oh yeah bart's head is melting at one point and uh then we come back to the hotel room marge comes out in her blue thing and the thing's a very sexy shot of marge which i think is the way the show also saying like hey marge isn't just a mother she's a woman and what a woman and homer's a pig yes yeah as as a seven-year-old i didn't understand that sex was about to happen in this shot either oh yeah right before marge comes out in the table draft there is a joke that i'm so glad they cut okay because it is so dated homer thinks he is

watching porn on television he's like oh wow the hotel has some amazing things marge you should see it uh oh wait a minute this is just la law oh it's a joke about how la law had like dirty scenes in bedrooms in it and it's so dated by 90 it was dated god that what a good choice to remove that entirely it's x'd out in the table draft yeah so there will be no la law references gentlemen a big show for the time now completely forgotten no not one person dan castellaneta is on an la law episode in a homer suit that's true yes uh the clips are on youtube look it up it's fascinating uh but yes uh the kids get freed in a very short sequence maggie draws bots to chase her and she's hearing the pacifier sucking and the pacifier sucking finally pays off for a plot purpose that bart

is tricking her with it and then bashes her head in with a bat. Like, just gives her brain horrible brain damage, I think. I think Bats has CTE after this. But it's a fun, like, again, home alone moment. Like, if you're a little kid who's watching this for the Bart adventures, you're like, yay, Bart saved the day. And then it goes from that very childish scene to a post-coital scene. Like immediately sex has just ended.

Just ended. Yeah, the waterbed is still moving. Homer just rolled off of Marge. Oh, God. Thank you for that image. Well, I mean, the context is there. Yeah. You know, I got to think Homer and his weight and age.

I think Marge is rolling off of him. I think Homer's not putting much work in. homer homer at his weight and age i think marge is rolling off of him i think oh yeah i think homer's not putting much work in from when from when we see the blue thing with the things to when they cut back to the the sex having happened it's just like i think it's intended to like you know imply homer didn't last very long yes yeah i think you're right well again he said he was gonna last 10 minutes in the back of his car so it was like it's like 30 seconds between the reveal of the lingerie and the finishing of the sex. If these things are happening, if they're cross-cutting in real time, then it's implied that... I mean, again, it's just too subtle to read.

I think they also were just enjoying the shocker in 1989 of saying, we just showed you that two cartoon characters had sex. You've never seen that on television before. It's a good thing to put in your first episode of a show if you're trying to go out there, you know. Yeah, and shocking people. The mood is spoiled, though, right after. Homer, would it spoil the mood if I called home? You know, just to check on the kids.

And the kids are escaping through the magic treehouse. It's everywhere they need. Homer, wake up. There's no answer at home. So? So I'm worried. I think we should go home. All right.

I suppose my work here is done. Hello, vigilant viewer. How may we help you? We caught her. We caught the babysitter Bennett. She's tied up at our house right now ask if there's a reward is there a reward if she's convicted we get t-shirts that's a good joke that's a good joke that's all they want i love the genuine enthusiasm from bart

too because they're getting rose and he's like enthused about it that feels like a joke about how cheap the america's most wanted is they're just like it's the first fox's cheap joke for the simpsons that's you're right yeah i uh though the exchange is a little weird because you first hear june foray and then you don't hear her yeah within the same shot it kind of breaks a rule there but the uh you know march come on just you you just had some fun just relax you know what you got to call the kids right after i think just because homer is now like like a minute after having an orgasm he's just like whatever you say honey yeah homer's done for yeah like he's like i'm i'm finished don't need nothing more for me uh which that also is like homer you were bad did you get a treat at the end i mean it was a treat for both

of them yeah i think more for homer though perhaps i mean hey marge likes sex with homer i that's an important distinction uh she is correct to be worried about having no answer at home that's uh and then homer just goes like why that's a good exchange but yes they also we get a space we mentioned the space mutants there's a little space mutants poster by the phone there nice a nice little reference and uh yeah so they marge and homer get home uh they see that bots has been tortured by the happy little elves the entire time that's a great drawing. Yeah, for like chin on the floor. Yeah, with their eyes, just the eyes.

Yeah. Well, and when they take the tape off of it, like her lips move just all the way to the end of her mouth. It's such a silly drawing of her too. I love that. And yes, the next scene is Homer lets her go. How come all the lights are on? I don't like the looks of this

Miss Potts Miss Potts good lord what have those little hellions done now we're so sorry we're so sorry please turn off the TV I can't tell you how chagrined we are about all of this

these things are heavy off the TV. I can't tell you how chagrined we are about all of this. These things are heavy. Just so there's no hard feelings, here's double your pay. No, no, triple. Thank you. Mr. Samson, can I give you a bit of advice? Sure. Don't turn your back on that boy for a second. Ain't that the truth. You know

one time he... Huh? And yeah, that's, I don't know, maybe it's not hasket but i really love the animation of homer going no no triple it like the way his head bounces around the trumpet mouth yeah i love a trumpet mouth even though again totally breaks the rules there you'll never see a trumpet mouth in season two and she's got a uh binky keychain from life and hell oh i missed a nice little nod yeah probably cut off on disney plus if you're watching it that keychain oh god i i gotta say one rant about the disney plus things i you're doing a disservice when you tell people to re-watch it on there it's oh i look it's a last resort yeah

we don't encourage it but uh yeah okay no it's i i actually got i i'm using someone else's disney plus right now uh to watch stuff and i saw a couple of the episodes and i'm like even not getting into the aspect ratio issue they look like shit i mean well the cleaning up is too aggressive but i mean that's you you as an animation fan you've seen what they've done to like pretty much every short they have on there yeah the classic era well these were done by lori um the simpsons um they just uh they do a lot of the material for fox and well now disney but you know it's all going to the same shithole now the sd transfers on the dvds were fine why why must we do this i i have all 19 seasons that are available on dvds so uh when we hit the end

of that hopefully there'll be more on dvd but if not i will have to resort to whatever is on disney at that point well at that point isn't it didn't it go to hd at that point, didn't it go to HD at that point anyway? By 20? Yeah. Yeah. I think 20 is the HD season. So we'll be safe anyway. I've said it before, but I think this was a monkey paw for me as an annoying video store clerk who told people, you have to see it in widescreen. I don't care if there's black bars on the top of your TV. Watch it in widescreen.

It's now the monkey's paw moved its finger down. And now everybody's like, yeah, everything has to be widescreen. Fill the screen. I think I, but you know, what's funny is they already got all this flack when Simpsons world, uh,

standard version, but you know, Disney actively wants the bad versions out there that's of everything in their library it just seems like is it just that one of bob eiger's kids told him like i don't like these black bars on the side no it's it's this predated eiger this mentality so it's just it's really too bad especially like i was hoping they'd at least have it done within six months to just shift back to the old version when they said they would they couldn't it just launched in the uk at the time of this recording and all the british people

too were just like what the fuck this doesn't look like simpsons i we got to see the the british react in the same way like six months after how americans reacted to seeing it on disney plus it's a bummer it's a bummer but fortunately i still got my season one dvds like on amazon right now i was shocked to see like they're being sold at a big premium right now the original dvds uh but yes bots drives away uh not to be seen again in person until season seven eight with hurricane netty after she was institutionalized i guess yeah maybe she was fed maybe she pled insanity and that's how she she's probably going to escape that place at some point i think uh but yes then the cops show up for a very long ending here that kind of just fizzles out.

I'm going to play the whole thing. This way to the scene of the crime, man. I got her tied up in the den. Just a minute, young man. I don't know what kind of shenanigans you've been pulling this time, but I just had to untie your babysitter and pay her off so that... Excuse me, sir. Are you saying to the world that you just aided and abetted

the escape of the notorious babysitter bandit? The what? The babysitter bandit. Oh, uh, are you sure this microphone works? Oh, well, uh, I wouldn't say I aided her. This is on, right? Because actually it was quite a struggle. Oh, honey.

Have you ever seen a kung fu movie? It was just like that. But now I know her moves. So if you're listening to me, lady, you'd better think long and hard before trying something like this on Homer Simpson again. Lord help me, I'm just not that bright. Oh, Homer, don't say that. The way I see it, if you raise three children who can knock out and hogtie a perfect stranger,

you must be doing something, right? Yeah. Huh. Yeah. Honey, can we make up again? Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. I mean, twice in one night.

That's probably a lot for homer i think this ends just like uh call the simpsons where homer is humiliated on a national tv program and then uh she's just like i still love you i think the staging is exactly the same i well so that really confused me because i would have before i read the script i would have thought they took their setup from call of the simpsons and like you know what just repeat that to add a new ending to this to have a sweet ending just use the same posing like the way marge looks at homer with her shadowed there that's the exact shot from call oh you're right yeah no wonder like it looked like so advanced for this first production episode but but in the script it ends in the bedroom too like

the exact scene is there and that definitely sounds more like early season one writing of lord help me i'm just not that bright and early season one acting yeah terrible i had to cut that but uh i i mean homer thinking he's fooling the reporters and then it cutting to like local boob on tv that's kind of funny though they definitely take a shortcut of having the uh all the reporters just be hands holding microphones off screen yeah yeah i mean there's a few budget say like i forgot to mention when bots arrives uh there's like two shots that are the same but it's just so zoomed out of just her entering the house that that also just felt like a real budget saver too but yes homer let her go the world knows he did he's he's

humiliated but marge gives him one little speech and that like the like two second pause before he goes yeah and then one last bit of terrible gib music at the end there. His reign is over. But I will say last bit of change from the original script is the joke about wanting to go again after the lights are turned off. That was added after color like that is not in the table read script. So I think that was the right choice of like, let's how about one more joke? Instead of ending with, yeah. The last word of the episode for the whole season one shouldn't be. of like, let's, how about one more joke? Instead of ending with, yeah. You're right. The last word of the episode for the whole season one shouldn't be, yeah. And you're right.

It's so funny on the timing of this that this was supposed to be the pilot, completely reworked to be the season finale. But when it aired in mid-May, it was the height of Bartmania. Like you said there two weeks ago, that was their highest rated episode yeah life on the fast lane right and they're still pretty high at this point and

like this is the last simpsons you're seeing for three whole months and there's only going to be reruns of these 13 all through summer and it's just funny to remember a time when there's just like well yeah it's a season one repeat the only simpsons that exists just such a come down after crusty gets busted though it's like holy shit that should have been was the delivery date that late where they couldn't have changed the order so busted would be the finale i think it was intended i think so with this being two weeks after crusty gets busted i think they needed those two weeks for the last maybe yeah it sounds like they were working on it until like the 11th hour yeah yes but yes I mean if I could go back in time and tell Fox programming I'd tell them please just save Krusty for May 20th 21st or something that is just oh i i was i was watching all of season one again in preparation

for this and that's just solid television they're just a solid classic all-time favorite yeah just so much of it works uh but you know in the time when i watched this i love this episode because it was bart adventures and then me too and then sex jokes i didn't get that just flew right over my head. But they cut back to Bart so quickly. Yes. Yeah. So as a seven-year-old, I liked this. But now it's hard to even judge as a story.

I just see all I look is at the seams on Frankenstein. Yeah. And it doesn't help that there really is no story. Kind of, yeah. Things are a problem until they're not, and then it's over. Such is life. The seams on Frankenstein. Yeah. And it doesn't help that there really is no story. Kinda. Yeah. Things are a problem until they're not. And then it's over. Such is life.

Any, any last thoughts that, you know, it's an episode. I mean, it's, you know, I think you've been, I think you've been shitting on it so much as you've come to get to it. But then you're us. Oh, this, this isn't that shitty it's shitty but it's not that shitty they salvaged it and they started the series with the right episodes

so in the end they made the right choices it all worked out and I just want to say thank you for all this insight into the animation folks who worked on this like especially you know Butterworth and Haskett. Oh, absolutely.

Yeah, they're definitely unsung heroes of a lot of late 80s, early 90s animation. Absolutely. So thanks again to Thad Kamarowski. Thad, please let us know where we can find you and support you online and your podcast as well. So like I said at the beginning, I co-host the podcast Cartoon Logic with animation legend Bob Jakes,

and we do bi-weekly deep dives into classic cartoons from the golden age of animation. You know, Warner Brothers' Looney Tunes stuff and Fletcher Brothers' stuff. And you can find it wherever podcasts are streaming. And we do have a Patreon, patreon.com slash cartoonlogic. And right now, you can find a nice assortment of high-quality downloads of rare cartoons and our video commentaries on specific shorts.

We're going to be starting a patrons-only monthly podcast, Spinach Scrutiny, where we look at a season of Fleischer Popeye cartoons in depth, in chronological order, and these are going to be very long podcasts. The first episode on the 1933 Popeye cartoon should be available in mid-May. And by the time this episode of Talking Simpsons airs, I should have posted Bob Jakes' video commentary for Stimpy's Invention, the Ren and Stimpy classic he animation directed. And it's definitely the commentary John Kay doesn't want you to hear.

So do subscribe. And thanks, Bob and Henry, for your own support and for having me on. And I wish you guys continued success. You truly deserve it. buddy this is almost a month later since that recording uh do we sound older we've lived through another month of all of this so i probably sound like i'm 53 years old but uh we had a little uh issue with the recording as soon as uh thad was doing his plugs like everything froze we thought we lost the recording but we didn't so that was a crisis averted but we never did an outro yeah and so thad uh did his own outro that we're

going to play before this or after this? Yeah, you just heard it. You just heard it. Okay, yes. I'm not the one editing this, but we didn't do an outro, so you don't even know who we are or where to find us or anything like that. We couldn't let that happen. No, but I can let everybody know, yeah, this is Talking Simpsons. You know that,

of course. And if you want to support the show and get all kinds of bonus extras on top of that please go to patreon.com slash talking simpsons and when you sign up for the five dollar level you'll get access to all of our podcasts one week ahead of time and ad free and then like i said access to all the bonus stuff everything behind the five dollar paywall that we've been doing for almost the past three years you'll instantly have access to all of that. Over 100 bonus podcasts. Most recent miniseries that's Patreon exclusive is Talking Mission Hill,

which goes through the entire only season of Mission Hill with the Talking Simpsons slash What a Cartoon format. There's so much stuff going on at that level. Way too much to mention here. But once you sign up, you'll have far too many podcasts to listen to. But now's the perfect time to binge on podcasts. And Henry can tell everybody out there

what's happening at the $10 level. One extra long podcast every month for subscribers at patreon.com talking simpsons that's right that is our monthly what a cartoon movie podcast only for our premium subscribers who for 10 bucks a month they get all that five dollar stuff and a monthly exclusive podcast about a different animated feature film we've done so many awesome ones in the past. Our most recent one is Lupin the Third, The Castle of Cagliostro. And this month, you're going to hear Toy Story 2. And you'll get a huge back catalog of other awesome ones that you can listen to only if you're a $10 and up subscriber at patreon.com slash TalkingSimpsons.

So I've been one of your hosts, Bob Mackey. You can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. My other podcast is Retronauts. That is a classic gaming podcast. Find it wherever you find podcasts or go to patreon.com slash retronauts and sign up there and you'll get access to a week ahead of time in an advanced podcast and also two exclusive podcasts every month just for patrons at that level. Again, that is patreon.com slash retronauts. And you can follow me, Henry Gilbert, on Twitter, as always, at H-E-N-E-R-E-Y-G. If you want to see my thoughts on what's going on in the world or just reflecting on us finishing our first season re-exploration, follow me there, H-E-N-E-R-E-Y-G. And if you want to stay in the loop about when new podcasts go up of Talking Simpsons or What a Cartoon or any of our extras, be sure to follow on Twitter at TalkSimpsonsPod.

At TalkSimpsonsPod keeps you up to date about all our cool podcasts. So you gotta follow it already. Thanks for listening, everybody. We will see you next week as we are in deep, deep trouble while we do the Bartman. And we'll see you then. Come on, Marge. Let me carry you over the threshold. Okay, but watch out.

Don't slam my head like last time. Sheesh, 11 years ago, and you'd never forgotten it. Don't mess my hair. This is fun!