Talking Simpsons - Talking Simpsons - Stark Raving Dad With Nathan Rabin

Episode Date: March 16, 2022

We welcome back the great writer and podcaster Nathan Rabin (check out his awesome Weird Al book and his Travolta/Cage podcast) to discuss the now-infamous season 3 premiere! We talk about the heavily advertised special appearance of a pop king, the fallout of allegations that led to the show not on streaming services, and so much more in this ep that makes us all question pink shirts and sanity. Listen now to wish Lisa a happy birthday! Support this podcast and get dozens of bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! And please follow the official Twitter, @TalkSimpsonsPod!

this podcast is brought to you by patreon.com slash talking simpsons head there to check out exclusive podcasts like talking futurama talk king of the hill the what a cartoon movie podcast and tons more i heartily endorse this event or product. Ahoy, ahoy, everybody, and welcome to Talking Simpsons, the podcast known to cause bladder hostility. I'm your host, the spirited hornpipe player, Bob Mackkey, and this is our chronological exploration of The Simpsons, who is here with me today, as always. Hey, it's Henry Gilbert, and there's probably a downside I don't see.

And who do we have on the line, our special guest today? My name is Nathan Raven, and I am not popular enough to be different. And this week's episode is Stark Raving Dead. Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday, overlooked middle child. Happy birthday to me. This week's episode originally aired on September 19th, 1991.

And as always, Henry will tell us what happened on this mythical day in real world history oh my god oh boy bobby right after this season premiere of the simpsons drexel's class debuts on fox meanwhile the super nintendo entertainment system is finally available to american consumers and guns and roses use your illusion one and two is released so that's a big day for pop culture well you heard him up front nathan rabin is here uh nathan have you visited the world of drexel's class have you entered the world of drexel's class as a flop documenter i'm more more about the Slap Maxwell story myself. This is a discriminating Daphne Coleman television show. Aficionados were all about.

It was called a dramedy. And it combined comedy and drama. Just like Frank's Place. Where is the Frank's Place podcast? That's what I want to know. And the Nights and Lives of Molly Dodd as well. Those are the holy trinity of shows that were too weird and good to stay on the air more than a couple of episodes. And also, I think, killed the dramedy as well.

They advertised Drexel's class so hard on simpsons like i think i still though when this aired i was just nine and i think i was not ready to i don't think i wanted to watch anything live action i saw that as grown-up stuff and not to watch but i think probably i saw a tiny bit of drexel's class just from keeping on the simpsons and watching it afterward well you had to stay tuned for herman's head i i watched more than i did Drexel's. Yeah. And man, that Super Nintendo Entertainment System, that was exciting though.

We already got the Genesis that year, so I'm going to sound like a spoiled kid who said, I had to wait a whole year to get the Super NES because we got the Genesis in 91, but that is what we did. I got mine in Xmas of 92, and I was a happy boy a lucky boy and use your illusion one and one and two one and two yes the the famous guns and roses album like the last one they did

like one of the highest selling albums ever of a rock band like so big that's the one that had the november rain right yes yeah that was the one and it it got so big like the tour killed the band and fractured what was already a splintered troubled band of guys with a lot of problems all trying to perform together in a very stressful situation but we got uh chinese democracy uh like what 20 years after this yeah and it was not worth it and what was it dr pepper or pepsi had to give everybody a free uh drink or something because they promised if chinese democracy ever came out they'd have to give it to people but they honored that apparently they did we had to like go to a website or something but yeah did you guys know that uh the musician

buckethead uh was a member of uh guns and roses for a number of years oh yes yeah i remember seeing him on stage for the big gnr comeback that happened on the mtv uh music awards thing jimmy fallon was like it's god's fucking rose weirdly enough i just heard about buckethead recently on a podcast about how he collaborated with john carpenter oh really so yeah he must be a cool guy as far as I know. I'm not looking him up right now. With a KFC bucket on top of his head, how can you not be a cool guy?

Or at least oily. In your travels, have you seen him perform live, this buckethead, Nathan? I have not seen Buckethead perform live. Unfortunately, it's a bucket list for me on yeah on my bucket head list it just says see bucket head so it's kind of confusing uh but joining us today uh nathan rabin of nathan rabin's happy place of the author of the weird accordion to al and you're also on the travolta cage podcast welcome back to the show nathan thank you thank. Thank you so much.

I'd like to thank that you invited me here due to my long history of mental illness and the fact that I am an ex-mental patient. So I am here to gauge the realism of this episode as well as its comedic and artistic qualities well nathan our artillery our ulterior motive is nathan is what we call an older boy in that you were uh i think you're around six or seven older than henry and myself but you were at least uh you know more aware of michael jackson in the world uh growing up by the time we became uh you know young people and into music he was a joke but you were around in the time period uh where he was at his biggest the first three albums that i ever owned were uh huey lewis and the news uh sports weird ldankovic in 3d and michael jackson's thriller uh and i remember as a child watching

motown 25 and him doing moonwalk for the first time and i remember my family just watching it over and over and over again i'd be like how on earth did he do this he invented this amazing new dance that had only been around for 30 or 40 years by a bunch of different people so yeah it was a very very very big deal for him to be on the simps i mean i even remember the debut of the black and white music video and that was a huge huge for children and then it ended with him grabbing his crotch uh and be acting out violent trauma for six and a half minutes yes see we like even if you are literally the biggest star in the world you probably should not be grabbing your crotch in front of children for six and a half minutes and destroying a limousine that represents i don't know your dad and the fact that he was literally the worst person in the world well you see we are mere

toddlers of 39 we need this perspective yes yeah no uh yeah the i mean it's something like this was once the most famous episode of simpsons or one of the most famous episodes and now it's one of the most infamous episodes that is you know technically i guess blacklisted is the core of our band i hate this band episode is such like a loaded term cancel culture striking again fucking hate that term a lot but but but i mean it is an episode that is not on disney plus and i believe they have said yeah be on streaming services i mean any official capacity yeah and i want to point out up front like i was talking about this online and people assumed a lot of people assume that disney pulled this episode but um the the pulling of

this episode happened as fox and disney were in negotiations for the buyout so this happened pre-disney uh acquisition of fox right henry yeah yeah i i see this i mean there's two ways of looking at it we did a whole podcast when it was new but i and i feel the same way there's you could look at as at it as disney was about to take full ownership of simpsons and told them, we will not have the Michael Jackson episode on here. So you guys take the bullet for it. But I do believe the high level producers reasoning for wanting it gone themselves. And it is their choice more than Disney's.

I think it's a choice Disney supports that is like, yeah, we don't want to host it either. Cause it's not like Disney is talking about how much they worked with him on like Captain EO or whatever. Like that also doesn't exist to them yeah but but yeah when i was nine when this happened i knew michael jackson this i guess told me michael jackson was a big deal like i already i guess i probably knew maybe i'd seen the thriller video on like just flipping through channels as kicks it was still on all the time for the rest of 80s or well actually nathan's favorite guy weird al is probably how i became aware of michael jackson because i loved the fat video all his videos but fat was the one i first saw me too me too so then once i saw bad speaking of things that have not aged terribly well. Yes. Yeah, yeah, it's true. It's true.

But, well, yeah, so, I mean, Nathan, just in your Weird Al experience, like, how strange is that now for, you know, Weird Al Yankovic fans to have a lot, several of his biggest hits are tied to Michael Jackson. Well, I remember when I first started sort of writing about him, he actually panned, chose me to write his coffee table book, Weird Al the Book, in 2012. That's when it came out. And I remember watching him in concert a couple of times and thinking very, very vividly how much he must absolutely despise to get a giant fat suit every single concert and do the song that again like it did what it had to do which was kind of bring him back after the the failure of various projects uh but it just seemed so uh exhausting and draining and also this is a song that came out 30 years ago like you've done it so many times so i think in in a very real sort of way he was very grateful to have an opportunity or an excuse to put the fat suit away uh for for eternity and actually that was i believe created by the same genius who gave

the world chucky and and Crypt Keeper. Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He had a very, very impressive design, creative costume for him. So yeah, it's interesting because for a long time, there was no downside to being associated with the most popular artist in the entire world and one of the greatest and most popular artists ever. And that is not the case now and there's a considerable downside but it's still weird to me because i i spend a lot of time

in lifts and i spend a lot of time spending at restaurants and you hear michael jackson's music all the time and it's always this weird advocated thing where i'm like this is bringing me back he's so talented he's literally you know one of the greatest singers of all time. And this is incredibly disturbing because there's so much darkness and there's so much... And like, yeah, part of me is like, is he canceled?

Is he not canceled? And I think what kind of happened is he sort of got canceled when Leaving Neverland came out. And then he got uncanceled because people loved his music so much and they selfishly did not want to stop listening to it just because there's a pretty good chance that he has done some he has

committed some unspeakable crimes yes yeah yeah i the most recent smoking gun of course is leaving neverland the two-part documentary from 2019 that's what caused all of this to happen uh and hearing the victims themselves talk sorry henry yeah no i mean that's the big and that was the difference maker for this episode like because i mean i'll go year by year in the history but it is like leaving neverland became a even harder to dispute thing like you could always there were multiple lawsuits there were multiple exposés but it just kind of like there were always lies you could tell yourself and then when he dies you go like ah well he's dead now we can just remember the good songs and yeah and so then when Leaving Neverland came out that was like the biggest

example of like well come on guys you can't you cannot ignore this like once you see and i avoided watching it for the longest time because i was like this will not make me happy and it's not and i already believe the accusers before so i don't need more information but i did finally watch it ahead of this episode because it was the key factor in the episode being taken off of circulation so i felt i needed to and yeah i mean once you watch it like there's no going back at that point in your opinion of michael jackson like there's just too much i mean he's dead there's no trial to be had you will have no satisfaction he wasn't put in jail in the one time he was tried in it in a criminal way and so all you have is just like well do you believe the people in this or not? And I believe them.

And I think it's a very believable thing, but yeah, but I guess, well, not to, I also, I don't want to, I probably some content warning for our listeners.

I don't want to be too much of a bummer. I'm not going to get too explicit in the things he was accused of, but you know, yeah, you probably, and I will say, and again, I feel like there's,

Oh, I feel like there's sort of the, halo effect when somebody dies sort of their sins are forgotten and we remember all of the wonderful things that they did and i think that happened with michael jackson for sure big and there were a lot of sins to forget you know i remember this is it coming out and again just a weird strange sad project was. I mean, you're literally watching, you know, a dying man, you know, in final days. It absolutely boggles the mind. But yeah, I think, you know, we all, again, tried to convince ourselves, like, it's okay to listen to this music. That was such a huge part of our childhood. It was such a big part of American culture.

And we don't have to let go of this forever. And I think we do. Yeah. You know, there's just stuff that, culture and we don't have to let go of this forever and i think we do yeah you know there's just stuff that like i don't know like like hugh hefner as somebody who i've always you know i once admired and and respected him and thought of him as like you know this important cultural figure and now it's like he was into bestiality and i'm like yeah that's cancellation i don't care how many John Updike stories he published. If you're trying to have sex with a dog, you're a bad person. And we don't need you.

We especially do not need to hold you in high esteem the way we did with Michael Jackson. And I think this episode is a great illustration of the fact that he wasn't just a like. He was considered a god. And a Piper and somebody who brought joy to children and people all over the world and it's uh yeah there's it's a very strange experience watching uh this episode in 2022 and and with the context of that that documentary leaving neverland it really makes you realize how this episode and so much of michael jackson's life was carefully managed pr to sort of gaslight America into thinking, in the world, and thinking, no, no, no, these are normal things that happen.

This man is normal. You know what? He's had trauma in his life, but he just likes, he's a carefree spirit. He likes to have fun. And then you see like, oh, everything, every part of his PR was so carefully managed. Like I was just looking at his albums and 93 is the big you know the huge scandal 95 is the double album history where it's like disc one all the hits you love him he is so important look how important he is you've loved all this music disc two new music and one of the songs is scream about how mad he is

and it's like that just feels like the most calculated release ever just and i do have a lot of weird anti-semitism thrown there that's that too yeah yeah that was a lyric that had like kick me kike me don't you black or white me i'm jewish so i can use that word uh and he said i'm not anti-semitic my best friend steven spielberg is jewish and steve was like i'm not michael jackson's best friend i would just like to throw that out in the world uh i met him at parties my son took a picture with him i am not michael jackson's best friend well and he does a duet with janet jackson who is much more you know had a better q rating than him at the time and he kind of like no see it's my sister and it's my friend i mean the relationship with his family like is a way of

of guide remind you of like oh the jackson five remember how nice it was in the past like don't think about these bad things and just well a little history on this here first off this episode is like aljean and mike reese it was a huge one to them career wise because they were already full-time writers in season two sam simon is the showrunner in season two but he's on his way out because one he's got a new job on sibs we we've talked about this but two uh but two he also is is clashing with mac reigning a ton and so it's just decided let's get sam simon's gotta go and so and and gene and reese get to take over they've never run a show before but they get handed i heard al gene joke on a different

commentary not this commentary where john vd is complaining about how he got handed lisa's substitute because he's like this is the hardest script i if i write it bad it'll piss off dustin hoffman and he won't do our show i the the pressure was immense and then al jean just chuckles and he's like yeah well i was handed the michael jackson script so don't don't tell me what like pressure is about a guest. And it was a real trial by fire for them to get to do this. Yeah. And seemingly this is in the works for a long time.

So, yeah, according to Mike Reese. So there are two commentaries on this DVD. One is a secret one where Reese is doing his own because he was not there for the first recording session, but he needed to tell his story. He tells a lot of things that aren't in the first commentary. And one of those things is there was a 15 month lag between the writing of this episode and the airing normally there's about eight or nine months but it feels like michael jackson contacted the show probably mid-season one as bart mania was exploding and bart was the reason he wanted to be on the show we described this in our simpson sing Sing the Blues podcast, so I'm not going to detail too much.

But as they tell it, both Brooks and Groening, in the summer of 1990, they get a call from Michael Jackson that says, I love Bart. I want to make him a number one song. And yes, yeah. And in this more innocent, I saw interview with Nancy Cartwright, she said the same thing. The clear point is that michael jackson did not like the show the simpsons that he liked bart simpson the character and in that regard it's very i mean and he writes the song do the barman to give bart a number one song and i believe the timing goes he writes do the bart man first and then they're like well since you're

here you want to do an episode also i mean again in this in the context of what we're talking about in the song is if you can do the part you're bad like michael jackson like that's a lyric yeah yeah uh but so yeah i well i i heard it was originally if you can do the part you're bad like tito jackson so like oh you're being too self-deprecating you're lowering the bar that's just confusing to me yeah i so yeah i think like reese said it must have been they they got to recording that as soon as they could and then of course fox is going to sit on it until like the season premiere because it's such a huge huge episode and uh they mentioned too that like james l brooks had a lot of this script like this is a lot of him reese actually kind of clowns on brooks a bit

on the commentary because like boy james l brooks thinks schizophrenia is so funny he goes like it's like he had lot to have multiple personalities on taxi he just thinks it's the most hilarious thing to dab mental illness i said to him too because i feel like one of the things that kind of makes this interesting is that it's a very gentle episode particularly for such an early like yeah i kind of expected something to be more fast-paced funnier sharper i feel like yeah and at the time i remember thinking like oh well it's the gentleness of michael jackson you know it's that he's like this very sweet you know man child and it's sort of honoring that and uh yeah it plays very differently now yes because we know so much more about him and there's not that innocence and

there's not that gentleness and again it feels like pr it feels like a trap it feels like he's burnishing his reputation at the simpsons expense definitely and i have to give uh al jean a lot of credit the co-writer of this episode and the uh co-executive producer of this season and that he said he believes michael was using this to groom children because this episode tacitly says it's okay to leave your son alone with michael jackson all night and that was actually one of his stipulations is like, I want this character to stay up all night with Bart. Yep.

That is something, one of his demands, which seems like the biggest smoking gun in retrospect. But it's, but again, you're all like glamor is a real thing. Like people, the fame of it. And also like you just figure there's so much of what Jackson preyed upon was that when you look at it all objectively you're like oh yeah how did we how did we not know he does all of these things that is what a rich child molester would do which but but you're in the moment of like but he's the

most famous person on earth and on top of that like in the 90s it was not very main i mean like i do believe you know child care professionals knew these terms but we didn't know it was not very main. I mean, like, I do believe, you know, child care professionals knew these terms, but we didn't know it was not very well known in the mainstream, that stuff. But yeah, so Jackson signs on. They get a script. He's actually apparently fine with it. They do two table readings, one in Michael Jackson's manager's mansion, which Dan Castle meant it was 30 minutes late to and everybody was incredibly uncomfortable because they made Michael Jackson jackson wait well you've got to sit around with michael jackson for 30 minutes

what do you talk about apparently just nothing it was just pure silence like uh and and uh and also part of it was that uh they were surprised to find out as they were doing the uh so apparently they say in the first table read jackson did do the singing of references to his stuff. But in the second table read, to the shock of some of the actors who didn't know ahead of time, there's a white guy just sitting next to him who then imitates his voice and sings for him. That man's name was Kip Lennon. And so apparently Jackson did do demo versions of the original songs in this. Like, Lisa, it's your birthday. But Kip Lennon and so apparently Jackson did do like demo versions of the original songs in this like Lisa it's your birthday but Kip Lennon sings it and it the old tale was that Michael Jackson wanted to do it as a joke to his brothers that is not the case it was that Epic Records had a very exclusive deal

on Michael Jackson music and he could not record a new song for the for the Simpsons same with he is even though he wrote or co-wrote with his team do the bartman that's not what it says on the album because geffen records did not have the rights to do a michael jackson album and they would have been sued by epic or sony so there was that complication to it as well and same deal was they could not say Michael Jackson is the guest, but the ads are so obvious, like listeners will hear it over the break. The ad is exactly like, there's a guy in town who thinks he's Michael Jackson. Wow, what a big guest star.

It's an unrelated character named Michael Jackson in this episode. Yes, yeah. Michael Jackson's interest in Bart aside, I think this was also part of the lead up to Black or White. I think that probably is a deal why they sat on it, because Black or White would debut weeks after this, about two months after this aired, though it debuted alongside the episode Saturdays of Thunder. So honestly, we're just going to save our Black or White conversation for that. And the Dangerous album is November of 91. Right. Yes.

Yeah. And that was a huge event music video. And Bart is in that music video. But this episode was huge. Giant event episode. One of the most famous Simpsons episodes. It's like, wow, Michael Jackson was in the Simpsons. They had Beatles on the show.

They had Paul McCartney on. I still wouldn't say that that was as famous as michael jackson on the episode at the height of his fame i i think this is the biggest star they ever had i don't know nathan if you agree on that one but oh no i mean it does not get any bigger than michael jackson and sort of there's been a slight revisionist take now where they're like oh was he really that great uh and the answer is yes yes he was he legitimately is one of the greatest entertainers in the history of the world there's a lot goes along with that however yeah no i don't definitely like growing growing up and you know being more 1976 grew up in the 80s like

it did not get any bigger than michael jackson yeah on the commentary recorded uh 20 years ago mike reese even back in 2002 when there was much more of a monoculture he's saying you cannot understand how big michael jackson was to people at that time yeah he brings up how like that song that is not really a michael jackson song but like somebody's watching me like that he just does like the rockwell song nobody get like reese says whoever fucking heard of rockwell like nobody like that but that song became huge because jackson says like he's the hook in the song like that's just how big weird al i think he's a he would have gotten over with his talent regardless but his his music videos that perfectly

parodied the most famous music videos of all time i think really added to his success there too like that's how big he was. Yeah. Yeah. For a while there on, uh, really, I think it's a Twitter bio said, you know, the eat it guy,

uh, which speaks to it. Cause again, yeah, that was his first big hit. That was his first, uh, you know,

monster hit that hit like the top 20. And then, yeah, because of that, he will forever be associated with, uh, Michael Jackson. He almost had a third Michael Jackson parody in Snack All Night.

And then Michael Jackson was like, I don't think that's the best idea you've ever had, Weird Al Yankovic. So he was like, I guess I'll do something by Nirvana. They seem pretty good. Maybe they're a little fresher than you know third that's the story of 1992 that jackson thought with the successor black or white he'd be you know he's going to own the 90s just like the 80s but the kids as the story goes the kids got a blacker dangerous for christmas and traded it out for never mind there was less morphing in the smells like teen spirit video but it was still a good video directed by the honorable john landis too just a great even less creepy

the simpsons will be right back. September 19th. Hi, Karamba. On their season premiere. What'd you say your name was? Michael Jackson. Doesn't ring a bell. The Simpsons meet a guy who thinks he's famous. If you're really Michael Jackson, who were your last four dates for the Grammys?

Brooke Shields, Diana Ross, Manu Lewis, and Bubba. Ah, everyone knows that. But can it be? Have you heard of the Victory Tour? No. Beat It? No. Motown? No. Thriller? What was their last one? Thriller? No. Find out on the season premiere of The Simpsons

September 19th. How we use electricity can be smarter, cleaner and greener. At Electric Ireland, we can help guide you there. You see, our new Net Zero Hub has all you need to know about smart meter plans, EV tariffs, solar panels and much more. Making your usage clearer, your trips greener, your home cozier and your world brighter.

Find our Net Zero Hub at electricarland.ie welcome to the break everybody it's henry gilbert wearing a pink shirt as always and a big thank you to our guest nathan rabin it's always awesome to have nathan on please check out his books like his most recent one the joy of trash all his great weird hour related stuff his travolta cage podcast as well and so many other cool things thanks so much again to nathan raven for coming on for this big episode and you know if you enjoyed this podcast talking simpsons is only possible thanks to patrons who are just like you they went to patreon.com slash talking simpsons and there they subscribe for five bucks a month to help me and bob do this as our full-time job and they get tons of exclusive extras for doing that each month they get a brand

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those premium subscribers get all that $5 stuff I just mentioned. And then they get one extra podcast a month. That's extra, extra long. I'm talking about the, what a cartoon movie podcast each month we do a different deep dive into an animated feature film recent ones have included this month you're going to hear us talk about south park bigger longer and uncut following that you'll get to

hear us talk about pinocchio the disney classic and of course in april we're going to be covering who framed roger rabbit and there's a giant back catalog over 220 hours of exclusive podcasts only for you at the ten dollar level us covering things like akira a goofy movie beavis and butthead to america spider-man into the spider-verse the castle of caliostro and so so much more check it all out for yourself at patreon.com slash talking simpsons all right so that was 91 two years after this you know there would be the first public allegations against Jackson and it would be the first of the dominoes to fall of like, and he'd be fighting against this the rest of his life of saying, no, it's all lies. It's people trying to get money out of me.

Everyone's a liar. I'm innocent. You're being ignorant, all these things. And over time, the glamour wore off more and more for most people and the plausible deniability started to go away more and more over time, the glamour wore off more and more for most people. And the plausible deniability started to go away more and more over time. But you still didn't have to. You could live in some lie. But all right. If you've seen the documentary Leaving Neverland, you know what's up.

I'm going to give a truncated version of it. But the film has two accusers who have a clearly and deeply documented history of relationships with Michael Jackson when they were young. Like he found them. He groomed them. He views them. accusers who have a clearly and deeply documented history of relationships with michael jackson when they were young like he found them he groomed them he views them in the context of do the bart man or also this episode one of the accusers especially was a big fan of michael jackson's who he imitated michael jackson michael jackson liked but both of these kids imitated him. And that's what Bart does in this as well. And as well, one of the accusers, James Safeguard, he mentions that, you know, a big thing for Michael was coming to stay over at his suburban home, which again, in the context of this

episode, it makes already an uncomfortable episode more uncomfortable and and as well as the timelines are presented by both of the the allegation accusers in the film when this episode was being produced they were being victimized by michael like that was part of the time frame like he so he was doing it while they were making this episode and they were hardly his only accusers there's a 1993 investigation from two two different accusers who are not the people leaving Neverland. There are investigations. Jackson pays off one of the families. He's then not indicted as before.

94, he marries Lisa Marie Presley. And there's a monetary settlement to try to get away from it. But it does cost him, you know, things. He didn't do Adam's family values. He didn't do Sonic the Hedgehog 3. Like, he had a lot of plans and things fell apart. And I think he became even more insulated in this world and in his denial of it. And yes, in this episode, the Simpsons even made fun of him on the show.

Like, in a 96 episode. Normally, they don't take swings at people who are guests, but Bart had a joke saying like, uh, that's just a lie. They tell you to scare kids like the boogeyman and Michael Jackson. Like that's how much they didn't, they weren't worried about offending Michael Jackson. But, and then 2003, there is another very exposing documentary of the then living Michael Jackson that makes you go like, boys, at the very least, even if you can't prove anything, this guy is weird.

And then he is arrested. There is a full trial. He is ultimately found not guilty in 2005. He dies in 2009 at the age of 50 prematurely. This feels very unjust to me of like the the doctor who prescribed him the medicine that he killed died with that guy was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and went to jail michael jackson never went to jail but anyway when jackson died in 2009 this episode and speaking of how we celebrated him again this episode and do the bart man were re-aired on fox primetime in june

and july of 2009 as a tribute to him as well disney which had for the reasons of all the trials i just mentioned they had of course closed the captain eo ride they brought it back as a tribute thing after his death it was back in the parks for a few years after jackson died it was a return to celebrating jackson up to even in the 2014 simpsons take the hollywood bowl concerts where they did a ton of the music live they sang with kip lennon on stage lisa it's your birthday and nancy did do the bart man and they were like yeah and we did it with michael jackson the michael jackson wow wasn't it great to have michael jackson on the show like and so that's how different things were even eight years ago so yes those two new accusers came out they had done they actually had sued Jackson um

or the Jackson estate in a civil suit after but they weren't fully profiled until the 2019 documentary produced in association with the BBC andc and hbo and that documentarian makes such a case that it's like this is the stuff michael jackson's family and the entire michael jackson industry didn't want you to see because it is insurmountable evidence just it's but there's technically no smoking gun that if you if you want to pretend that everybody has to be lying and that Michael Jackson's innocent, then I guess you can. But I don't think most could watch Sleeping Neverland and think that. I find that people who are Michael Jackson defenders, there tends to be a lot of crossover

between people who think that Johnny Depp is innocent of everything. And I think it's kind of a similar thing of these men children these magical man children that i grew up with loving i don't want to believe anything bad about them and i'd rather that these people are horrible monsters than to acknowledge the difficult fact that sometimes you love somebody and they're really talented and they turn out to be a horrible person who's done terrible things yeah we talked about uh people getting angry about this episode being pulled and we covered that like three years ago when leaving neverland came out and it's hard to recommend leaving neverland but if you want your

answer to why did they pull this it's unfair watch it because as we said before the things that michael has been accused of doing by his victims he's doing to the simpson family it happens in this it is part of his thing yeah it's also i i don't think you'll have a great opinion of macaulay if you watch leaving neverland i'll also say that but uh yeah so all right so leaving neverland it debuts in the u.s in march 2019 it uh but everybody knew it was coming because it aired first in england and in january hbo airs it and they actually i think we'll have to pay like a hundred million dollars to the jackson estate because hbo had aired a jackson concert once and they signed a no non-defamation rule with him for

that totally normal by the way yep yeah but so yes two weeks after leaving neverland they made it official that this would not be on the simpsons world streaming service anymore and that when it would go to disney plus it wouldn't be there and if they were to print any new dvds they wouldn't have it on there either and it wouldn't be in syndication there are still literally millions of dvds of this out there like you can't find it yeah and it aired like a hundred thousand times over the over what like almost 30 years yeah yeah yeah and uh yes to quote al jean of why he did it you watch that episode honestly it looks like the episode was used by michael jackson for something other than we intended it wasn't just a comedy to him it was something that was used as a tool i strongly

believe that i don't believe in going through and making judgments on every guest star and saying this one was bad that one was bad but the episode itself has a false purpose and that's what i object to about it now i think it was part of what he used to groom boys that's as clear as as gene can make it and and james l brooks said about it this was a treasured episode there are a lot of great memories we have wrapped up in that one and it's and this certainly doesn't allow them to remain i'm against book burning of any kind but this is our book and we're allowed to take out a chapter so that's that's what i think that's a good way of putting it yeah but uh i i mean i hate that it has to be part of a cancel culture thing where it's just like no no, this. And I mean, yes,

we all have happy memories related to watching this as well. But like, I'll admit me and Bob said beforehand to each other, this third act like is excruciating at times to watch after seeing. Yeah. Actually going back to this for the first time in, I don't know, five years or so. I thought like,

Oh, this is not as bad as I thought it would be. Act two ends. Act three is when you're in, in uh you're getting in over your head there i mean like oh these these two acts it's a fun story with homer but then act three it's like it's time to just hang out with bart and michael as they become best friends not fun to watch but uh there's there's one addendum to this uh that is interesting in history that with the character in this episode they did want to bring him back for a sequel episode where he would start thinking he is prince and he would be and it would be the same deal but it's prince i i don't know if you've heard about this nathan i have i have i i looked it up on

wikipedia uh and again sort of prince has a very interesting role in the career of riel yankovic and that he's the anti michael jackson and he always said no no you can't parody any of my songs there's a famous thing about uh they were the grammys uh and they're they like put out a letter that nobody was allowed to make eye contact with prince uh not only can you not parody my songs but you can't look at me but yeah the eye. But yeah, so then I thought that was kind of fascinating too because Prince did end up in Treehouse of Horror episode where they're killing, where Homer is killing all of these people

so they can be used in a commercial. So they can be exploited mercenarily. And this came out like two years before Prince died. And again, it's very rare to be prescient and satirical if you're a late period simpsons but it really really cuts much deeper than you would imagine because that's exactly what happened yeah was they just commercialized the holy living crap out of him and everything that he wouldn't want to do he was doing because he was dead and And yeah, such a fascinating human being.

And I love the fact that he apparently said yes to this sequel episode, as long as his chauffeur could write the script, as long as they used a script that his chauffeur had written. And the Simpsons obviously wanted Prince, but, you know, that's where they draw the line. So I have an extra layer to that, though, that I think I believe that story about a chauffeur, because that is a very typically Prince weird story. But there's another aspect to this that involves, well, to use Nathan Raven term, a fiasco of a film. The James L. Brooks film, I'll Do Anything. Oh, yeah, yeah, oh that's true that's true

featuring songs by prince that were no longer songs by prince yes uh in case you don't know there was the james l brooks probably his most unsuccessful film i'll do anything uh which was written as a musical that would include like julie kavner singing a prince song which apparently tested very poorly. And the thing never. And the great thing about it is that the movie is about test screening. Exactly. Yes. A movie about test screenings and the test screenings were like, yeah, we don't like the music and the dancing.

Please cut it out. He's like, OK, I'm only the most successful creator other than Steven Spielberg, I would be happy to gut my labor of love and turn a movie where the whole point is to be a friggin musical into a movie that is no longer a musical. And I've actually seen the musical version. Oh, really? It's a pretty damn interesting thing. Yeah, I did it for My World of Flops book. But yeah, you're never going to see that in any way.

Yeah. Despite the fact that, again, I'm sure i'm sure princess estate would let them do anything you know uh they'd let them do like a like a muppet babies version of that so so that is my theory that once brooks was cutting out all of his entire album worth of song from his movie he's like yeah i don't think i'm gonna do your simpsons episode buddy like i'm out of here there's there's a funny story that reese tells about that script on the commentary that involves conan o'brien so conan o'brien is hired to the show he's on the lowest rung of the writing ladder one of his first things that he does a year before he's about to host late night with conan o'brien is to rewrite the the print script submitted by freelancers so

that's the first thing he's doing working on a script that would be thrown out later that's so funny but all right let's get into the episode proper this is the season three premiere though again on disney plus you're seeing mr lisa goes to washington is first but this was was the big premiere episode of course you're going to lead with a giant guest star especially weeks ahead of of the black or white video though it's the end of production season two and also the couch gag that starts it is really interesting because it's the family falling through the wall which would then be the theming of the season three box set like right yeah so that's i think that's pretty clever they took that the episode begins with what will be a clever bookend for the episode of uh bart is woken up

by lisa in our first clip 6 Lisa, it's 6 a.m. Something's wrong. Dad died. No, no, he's fine. Oh, what do you know? I'm relieved. Bart, my birthday is in two days. I'm going to be eight years old.

It's a big number, almost double digits. Well, enjoy it while you can. Everything changes when you hit the big 1-0. Your legs start to go. Candy doesn't taste as good anymore. Bart, will you please let me pour my little heart out? Sorry. This old timer does ramble on sometimes, don't he? Bart, I do so much for you, and yet you have disappointed me on every one of my birthdays.

I've made things for you, which you've lost or broken within hours. Okay, okay. Okay, okay. It's done. I'm doing it. Birthday gift coming your way. Oh, thank you. I love that crosstalk.

I've said it so many times about these earlier episodes but like the actors are together they're talking over one another i i just love lisa's very passive aggressive like but okay we'll forget all that like that's so funny when i watch this as an adult now i do think lisa's being a little extra from the moment her birthday begins it gives me less sympathy for her now and then she sings a sad song to herself for an audience of no one a little dramatic yeah there's so many great lines uh i just love uh the delivery of what do you know i'm relieved that's a great line shock that you're not happy about your father being dead you know i thought

i'd be happy he was dead but you know what i'm not yeah i love that i i also great drawing like bart with his nose sticking out of the pillow at the opening shot is so great like a great just like very disheveled yeah and and also yeah i mean they're going to end the episode with bart waking lisa up in this same way so it's really good you know i think it's good writing too and also uh i i mentioned i was nine when i watched this i remember feeling like oh man what is it like to turn 10 double digits like i i was feeling a little uh of that though then also petted me as a kid was like so wait lisa's turning eight now was but she was eight in the last episode like i saw her in season one say she was eight so does this take like i saw her in season one say she was eight

so does this take place before those episodes you were lucky you didn't have internet access yet yeah i know you would have poured those complaints out for all to see though now as someone who's about to turn the big four oh this year uh bart's bart's comedy about uh getting old and candy not tasting as good anymore i'm like i don't like this now i don't also like you said on mike reese's commentary bob he jokes about being like 43 when he recorded it i'm like holy shit i'm almost as old as he is sorry nathan i'm sure you love hearing from people younger than you that they feel old oh no no no no. I'm a very youthful 45. You sure are. You sure are.

Also, I think Rich Moore and his team did an amazing job. Like the art in this animation wise, perfect episode. Like I think one of the best animated ones of production season two there is. Yeah, there's a reason he'd go on to be supervising director of The Critic and Futurama and then work at Disney. Exactly. He's really, really good. No, I was thinking the same deal with Gene and then work at disney exactly really good no i was thinking the same deal with gene and reese this was their big episode this was the episode that made them

showrunners i think they loved that that's why they went to rich more for the critic they're like you killed it with our michael jackson episode please can we take you to the critic yeah you know what bob i think you're right that lisa is demanding a present seems a bit much so she just think about too at thanksgiving bart ruined her thanksgiving like i think it's fair for her to ask for a little so we can't pull continuity into this yeah and again is is it giving a considerate considerate present really a bart simpson thing yeah melisa is pretty silly to to ask for that i think then we have what's basically just a shorts scene to kill some time where part is asked to watch over maggie which then he falls

for a 900 number which uh is just 30 seconds of crusty the clown laughing which i just love you know i tried to find this because i remember there were so many of these uh pay numbers back in the day that's what this is making fun of there was a number you can call just to hear people laughing the i found the commercial for the listen to people crying phone number but not the laughing one so this was right from the headlines the ones that i remember from when i was a child were the kid and play hotline uh we could call it every day and find out what kid and play had to say to you and then the fresh prince dj jazzy jeff and again i have them like memorized in my head and i think i might have called them when i was a kid just because like oh my god and i think it was a

similar sort of thing where it was just sort of throat clearing for like three and a half minutes because yeah will smith didn't have anything to say to you uh when he was 21 years old and somebody was like hey do this we'll give you a thousand dollars you know uh the ones i remember were wcw pro wrestlers they had one and then the one that actually seemed the most insidious to me because like okay celebrities are one thing one of them i saw was santa claus where it's like call santa cla Claus and tell him your gift list now. It's like that is really going below the belt in your marketing towards children. Like that's about as evil as it gets.

Well, they also have like Santa Claus is on Cameo. Oh, really? So there are lots and lots of different Santas. And yeah, that's, you know, it's a nice hustle if you can get it. And if you are a convincing Santa, I'm guessing you make the big bucks uh on cameo whereas i don't know if you're like skinny i have like a scraggly beard uh you're probably not going to the to the head of the class hey you know i got my mom a jonathan frakes cameo for her birthday and she loved it so i can't can't speak to you i've done the crypt keeper several Crypt Keeper several times. The Crypt Keeper's on there?

Oh, man. Not only is the Crypt Keeper on there, but boy, he knows what you want, and he gives it to you in spades. Oh, man. Boy, you've sold a few cameos from the Crypt Keeper now. I know I'm getting one for my birthday. But I also, I love that Krusty says, but Krusty forgives you. Because all those commercials said. And it's also very true to the character of Krusty says, but Krusty forgives you. Like, because all those commercials said. It's also very true to the character of Krusty.

Like, he 100% would do that. Yeah, he's like, oh, you know what? We have to legally say you have to ask your parents' permission. But, you know, I forgive you. I also love the number 1-909-OU-CLOWN. What a great one. Was that the first Krusty cereal? Or maybe the best rendered one? No, there's the only sugar has more sugar joke.

Yeah, that's in Some Enchanted Evening. So yeah, one of the first jokes was it. But this is a much better looking box of Krusty O's. It's the best rendered box to date. Krusty looks like the real Krusty. Yes, yeah. Now this green shirt Krusty BS here. Bart, watch Maggie while I get the laundry. Can do. Mmm, Krusty. Yes, yeah. This green shirt Krusty BS here. Bart, watch Maggie while I get the laundry.

Can do. Mmm, Krusty Hotline. Hi, kids. You've reached the Krusty Hotline. If you haven't asked your parents' permission, naughty, naughty. But Krusty forgives you. $2 for the first minute, 50 cents for each additional minute. Naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty,

naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty,

naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty,

naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, Thanks for calling, kids. A new message every day. Maggie! Bart, I asked you to watch your sister. I tried to stop her, but she overpowered me. Also, then as Marge comes in and sees that Maggie has nearly died or is getting into some shenanigans, Bart gets in trouble and he just lies. And then in comes Homer shirtless.

This is when Homer still has a hairy chest in his design instead of the bare-chested Homer, who I like to believe he shaves his chest because he puts a lollipop there that's we all know but yes as a kid i did not know that colors could run in uh in dryers like this taught me the lesson that i if you put something bright red in there it could turn white things pink it's the washer henry the washer yeah i i'm sorry it's a dryer i don't even think about that anymore like i've uh my mom when i was a kid she's like separate uh you know whites and colors for for washing and i did that

at first in our old place but once i had lived on my own and did my own laundry i just never have bothered with that and i've been i've never had a thing really run or anything. You know what? Your colors could be brighter, Henry. I didn't want to tell you. What, the white? This isn't white enough, the shirt I'm wearing? I have four separate hampers in my apartment. Sorry, Nathan.

But it is true that red is the culprit. And that, yeah, if you make the mistake of washing something on hot water with red, it will get into everything. And pink was like a verboten color for men and boys in 1991 i just thought like well people think i'm gay i don't know what that means but i'll be called that if i wear pink it's you know well there were there were a couple of moments that again which again like in 1993 obviously're not anything, but you look at it from 2022, like the song that they sing, that they write for Lisa, talks about your first kiss from a boy. And again, just my stupid reflexive 2022 brain is saying, why are we assuming she's a heterosexual? Why aren't we at least contemplating the idea that she might be a lesbian? Which again is not

something i think there was like one gay character on television at that point the world has changed tremendously since then but yeah there are certain things that you just you didn't think about at the time and now yeah there's definitely a question mark well and i do have to say that like it in with my 2022 eyes it feels like the story of of Homer as an outsider that everybody judges for wearing pink seems like a very intentional reference to how Michael Jackson felt judged by the world and how this is about how like, actually, I'm not weird. It's everybody else judging me for being weird, which I mean, that was always a stance like, well, yeah, I'm not. He's not a traditional person, but he's not a criminal. Like that was always the status. But I think that was the thing too, is like, he's a little bit nutty, but you know, he had a crazy upbringing.

So yeah, there's kind of that whole, like he had a nutty upbringing and leave your children, you know? So yeah, I think there's, there's definitely, this is the, the Michael Jackson as Michael Jackson wanted to be seen. You know, that's's also i've even gone through those mental gymnastics of like if i put on a jackson five song which those are also great songs and i can tell myself like well no this is before he committed the crimes and then then but then i but then i think more of like yeah it's when he was a victim himself and so like in that

case all music is off the table well sure well that's why i don't listen to music anymore this is the first time though that bart's lucky red hat is the catalyst actually it's the only time where it matters plot wise it's true the seldom seem lucky red hat uh but yes uh homer is distraught about his pink shirt issue in our next clip. Ah! Pink! Marge, I can't wear a pink shirt to work. Everybody wears white shirts. I'm not popular enough to be different. Oh, Homer, don't panic. You have plenty of white shirts. Oh, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme. Oh, no! Pink! Pink! Pink!

It's all over, Marge. It's all over. I don't know how this could have happened. Ah, my lucky red hat. Clean as a whistle. You! You stick your tape to me! I apologize! Please, no one's going to notice if you wear a pink shirt to work.

Wait a minute. Go back. Zoom in. Why is that man in pink? Oh, that's Homer Simpson, sir. He's one of your boobs from Sector 7G. Simpson, eh? Well, judging by his outlandish attire, he's some sort of free-thinking anarchist. I'll call security, sir. Excellent.

Yes, these color monitors have already paid for themselves. This is the part of the episode I think holds up the best, is the idea of, this is like 30 years ago, too. We only have fewer workers rights today that your employer could question you and hold you like basically falsely imprison you and then have you committed yes yeah x-ray you and give you a full body cavity search i think smithers says later we i think we x-rayed him 100 times yeah this is it's one of those uh so many things that happens in the world of simpsons predicted it that is just like, no, it's reality catching up with satire of a 30-year-old joke that says, boy, wouldn't it be crazy if society degraded to this point?

But that would never happen. And then 30 years later, haha, nope, society actually surpassed it. Yeah, I mean, yes, your jobs can commit people sometimes even or just say like oh this person's crazy like that it's uh it's effed up it's really effed up but i i also love that burns they're writing him very old at this point and that he views homer as you know not it's not a red scare joke he thinks he's like a 1910s anarchist of the anarchist movement who like shot uh ferdinand you know like he's a regular bomb-throwing anarchist yes homer simpson and i love the line uh i'm not popular enough to be different uh which again it's just it's

funny because it's true and it speaks to again you know kind of the the episodes overarching themes with conformity yes and that it's another thing too like if you're if you're if you're rich then you're eccentric if you're poor then you're just fucking crazy yep yeah oh so so yeah kind of kind of how how much money you make plays a huge role and that's one of the reasons why michael taxon was considered eccentric uh by a lot of people whereas if he was doing that and he made eight thousand dollars a year people would be like my god look at that freaking lunatic i mean he probably would be committed you know i don't think that's again that's part of the other thing too is that you know uh god i think too about uh some of this stacks up my mind uh of michael jackson complaining about how scene is like

they call me wacko jacko i'm not that i'm not wacko i'm not jacko yes yeah again like you like the whole idea is like why do people think i'm weird like i'm just hanging out with my llama buying the elephant man's bones and wearing one glove like i don't understand how people could think that like there's something off about me well i went at the very least he should acknowledge if you do all that stuff people are gonna think you're weird one like what he would admit to was well yes i did sleep in the same bed with children with no other adults like he would that he wouldn't even deny like but he would just then say and that was okay it's like a slumber party yeah it's the the general argument the best argument the that Jackson estate seems to have

is that Michael Jackson did every single thing that a sexual predator would do except for a criminal action. Like it's like he did every single thing except the actual crime. Like when we ask you to believe this, please let's just all agree to this lie together. But anyway, I do love Homer's like,

it's all over Marge. Like he's just sobbing in his hands and also just a great shot amazing shot of the whole crowd and just his one pink shirt among this like sea of people like i really love that shot too it could not have been easy to do on a television animation budget that's a lot of moving people i also think too that they had they pumped in the burns in here too they're like you know what act one needs some fun burn scenes we need a lot of burns here they even mentioned what would have been a continuity error to young me that like hey wait a minute doesn't burns always have black and white monitors that he's watching people with well he says that the color monitors are paying for themselves he just installed them so there So there you go. But yes, they offer Homer a pink donut, which I think he takes as their way of saying like,

oh, you're so gay or whatever. You want a pink donut. But he's just like some kind of pink donut eater. Like it goes over his head, the actual insult they're doing. But then he turns out to be a pink donut eater. Yeah, that's the iconic Simpsons donut is a big pink donut. Yeah. he turns out to be a pink donut eater yeah that's the iconic simpsons donut is a big pink donut yeah as homer can't even eat the donut he is taken away by guards uh and i also underrated joke the guard is covering his pink shirt with his jacket like it's very subtle but you can spot it that like

the guard is even going like people can't even see it he's treating him like like he's naked or something stop exposing yourself but homer is then interrogated by burns and i love his line like spare me the tiresome antics of the simpsons family i got such a great line a little bit meta uh that line there one of many times in which they kind of acknowledged oh yeah their own incredible popularity you don don't understand. My son just drew his red hat and with the white laundry. Spare me the tire semantics of the Simpson family. Take him away.

You know, Mr. Burns, his body cavity search revealed nothing and we must have x-rayed him a hundred times. Maybe he's telling the truth. Or perhaps you two are in cahoots. Smithers, I seem to recall you had a pension for bell-battom trousers back in 79. Sir, that was my costume from the plant production of HMS Pinafore. Smithers, I seem to recall you had a penchant for bell-battom trousers back in 79. Sir, that was my costume from the plant production of HMS Pinafore.

Oh, yes, of course. Your spirited hornpipe stole the show, as I recall. Now, Doctor, what shall we do about our freewheeling fop over here? Well, Monty, it used to be that establishing a patient's sanity took months. That's all changed thanks to the Marvin Monroe take-home personality test. 20 simple questions that will determine just how crazy or sugar someone is. Print name. Then Burns is distrusting even his great friend Smithers. He thinks Smithers is even an anarchist as well because he remembers him in

bell-bottom trousers in 79, which is obviously because he was a member of the HMS Pinafore, which that'll be later the full musical that Sideshow Bob and Bart sing together. These plant musicals must have really ended after 79. And so Hornpipe, though, I looked this up uh in pinafore hornpipe is not a character as a kid i always thought like oh you're spirited porn pipe was like oh as in you played some character named hornpipe no hornpipe is a dance that all the sailors do together and like uh the sailors are like say i bet you can't dance a hornpipe and then they dance it and so uh smithers is spirited hornpipe stole the show meaning he was that good

of a dancer uh then marvin monroe gives them a uh a test to see if homer is mishugana uh homer is challenged by the idea of printing his name it's it's very much uh he's he's really selling himself too because he's selling his own brand of uh personality test but it's true they had to basically arrest homer but then he could take the test home on his own free time yeah well because that way they can have a bunch of jokes at home thing yeah they shouldn't they shouldn't be letting this guy go but yes this personality quiz i mean also like when we had corporate jobs we did have to fill out like personal i had to do one when i applied to blockbuster i had to fill out one of those. I worked at Blockbuster as well, and I probably had to fill out a personality test.

You know, by 2003, it was automated. I had to do it on like a computer in their building right there. Yeah. First, we get a scene with Homer asking Marge, and we get the answer. How does Marge keep her hair up? Well, she has like basically uses more than one can of hairspray a day to hold it all up. Mars won't do it for him. So first he asks Lisa, which leads to this great Lisa poem about profile. I can't fill this out for you. All right, all right.

I'll get Lisa to do it. Lisa, you like homework. Could you fill out this form for me? Well, all right. If you listen to the poem I just wrote. Oh, well, okay. Meditations on Turning Eight by Lisa Simpson. I had a cat named Snowball.

She died, she died. Mom said she was sleeping. She lied, she lied. Why lied why oh why is my cat dead couldn't that chrysler hit me instead i had a hamster named snuffy he died no deal and yardley smith loves this poem so much that she performed it on the famous inside the actor's studio episode they set it up like james lifton was like oh and uh lisa i believe you have a poem don't you that episode's awful say the line cast members you know this was before every video on the internet was asking a simpsons person to do their characters so it was it was special for them

i'm just mad that we know now that julie cavner did not leave out of anger she had to move her car that's so funny at least that was her story yes yeah you know what they should do is they should bring back uh ted cruz uh did you all of his patented uh simpsons impersonations i hear they're really good uncanny it made him seem almost human that he had an interest in something i hated when he got in on a simpsons did it couldn't stand it every time he does that it's the worst but uh but yes the lisa for uh homer though cannot stand listening to even one minute of her stuff so instead uh he leaves gives it to bart we have a joke about absentee ballots which uh is now reads as a right-wing joke about like don't you see absentee ballots are all fake there it's it's a scam like which i don't think was the intention of the joke

then but it's one of those like oh yeah in 2022 a joke about absentee ballots being fake feels like a conservative canard these days then we get another joke that i was like oh i wasn't waiting for other jokes to make me go like oh i'm sad now but uh here's as part of answering questions for homer homer's entertained by a certain tv show which we all knew dad maybe you should do this son it's no different than the time i let you vote for me remember that absentee oh yeah our fifty thousand dollar home video finalists are Man Breaking Hip. Dog on Fire. Ruff, anybody order a hot dog?

Look at him. And finally, Baby with a Nail Gun. Okay, it's time to cast your votes now. Dog on Fire. Dog on Fire. Hey, Dad, do you hear voices? Yes, I'm hearing one right now while I'm trying to watch TV. Yes. Are you quick to anger? Bart! Shut up or I'll shut you up! Yes. Do you wet your pants?

Well, even the best of us has an occasional accident. So, did I pet? Yeah. Careful, man. He wets his pants. Yeah, so America's Funniest Home some videos still fairly new but extremely popular and i think reese even admits there was a lot of misguided hate for this kind of harmless show but comedy writers in the early 90s really hated it i remember on mr show there was a few jokes about it because i think they were filming right in uh where they used to film their show, America's Funny Some Videos,

because they said they found a bunch of index cards with names of videos, and one of them was Baby Loves Head Rub. Baby Loves Head Rub. That came up as a Mr. Show joke. But, yeah, Bob Saget's dead. Yes, Bob is dead. Yes, put it bluntly. But, yeah. And that's not actually a Bob Saget impersonation.

No. Somebody doing that show and the gags that you would do but not trying to emulate uh the the very distinctive cadences of bob saget but definitely his way of saying like anybody order a hot dog like that that is how bob saget did jokes on the show which like again i also love to the fact that it's still on the air yep like america's funniest home video like i think alfonso robero too the fact that it's still on the air yep like america's funniest film video like i think alfonso roberto is now it's it's been on the air for three decades uh and again it's one of the things where like you know the simpsons cynical as they might be are not cynical enough for real life yeah and one going and going and going and now we're like oh

the golden era when bob Saget was there. And now like at the time, it's like, yeah, this is the worst thing on television. And it's actually making our culture dumber. Yep. And the actual so Dog on Fire, that horrific video title. It's actually the name of the Daily Show theme written by Bob Mould. Dog on Fire. That's awesome.

Yeah. That's so cool. I didn't know that so back in 96 he was referencing this 1991 show that made that guy so much more money than husker do i bet and i i love bob mold he's great i but uh but yeah the bob saget thing too it's it's so mean about his like performance like what an unfunny guy just says like anybody order hot it's like part of growing up for us was seeing like oh bob said it's a dirty comedian because he was yeah yeah then you found out how

respected he was by stand of comics yes they all loved him he directed norm mcdonald's like best movie like yeah yeah and bob mold uh his drummer was a guest voice on The Simpsons a little while back. And Mr. John Worcester. Oh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They both were on. This is definitely how little I watch The Simpsons these days. That was not enough.

No. I think the last thing was when the Amy Club was on The Simpsons. I got to watch that. You have to watch that one, yeah. No, the Charlie Worcester one was good. You know what? I think it shows you what a comedy dork I am. on the simpsons i gotta i gotta watch that you have to watch that one yeah no the no charlotte lincoln was good you know what i think it shows you what a dork a comedy dork i am i think of like yes john worstu the very funny guy with tom sharpling not the incredible drummer who plays for mountain goats and and bob waltz band yeah yeah it's it's funny that we uh recently covered

on our network talking futurama episode insane in the mainframe uh that was uh 10 years after this every insane asylum set piece is the same up until the early 2000s it's like let's do our cuckoo's nest parodies let's do our rorschach test parodies elect electroshock therapy parodies they're all there well yeah nathan i i don't want to um i don't want to ask you too much about you you know, traumatic things. But, yeah, I mean, obviously these visions of, like, the way it's portrayed in TV, probably not too accurate, I would guess. No. Yeah, I spent a month in there when I was 14 years old. This is a composition I checked.

It was very depressing, and I don't think it helped me at all. Well, then. Which is kind of, but, you know, kind of Homer has kind of a positive experience in the mental hospital. How many pancakes did you? To make it work for him. At the best case scenario, you meet a guy who sings just like Michael Jackson, and you fill the people of Springfield with hope and love and music. You meet a Jack Nicholson-style figure who's in there, you know, as a gag yes well to avoid like pederasty charges that was that was the plot of the movie yeah yeah people forget that about it no uh well they they at least serve you a big pancake plates

every now and then or no no no big pan they didn't the food was very very bad i'm sorry i'm just hungry for pancakes now enough of this mental illness talk i want to eat but no i saw it but but no i mean brooks like i think reese is very funny kind of dunking on brooks for like his interest in mental illness is like a plot device not so much as i it doesn't seem as empathetic as it could be but you know as good as it gets then comes not like five years after this airs which is all about a cranky old guy who has some very comedic ptsd not ptsd ocd in the film yeah who like basically buys a girlfriend in it i don't like that movie i've watched it recently hey mental illness is money in the bank for james l brooks and oscar's on the shelf How we use electricity can be smarter, cleaner

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clearer, your trips greener, your home cozier and your world brighter find our net zero hub at electricireland.ie definitely yeah pure oscar gold i also like to they do a rorschach test joke which like reese is like it's been done more it's never administered in real life it's just a joke for tv show these rorschach tests uh but i do like the one is clearly barred and he just loses his mind or or also the doctor like just saying when he's like bunch of food on the floor their bugs are gonna eat it he's like right right they're all actual uh explanations to everything but there's a correct answer

uh but yes as homer is there he gets a stamp on his hand to let him know who's sane and who's insane and uh this is when homer has a fateful meeting who are you hi i'm michael jackson from the jacksons i'm homer simpson from the simpsons i can't believe you never heard of me i'm a very popular entertainer oh Oh, of course I've heard of you. I mean, you'd have to be living under a rock not to know what you say your name was. Michael Jackson. Doesn't ring a bell. Well, have you heard of MTV?

Nope. Motown? No. Beat it. You beat it. Thriller. What was that last one? Thriller.

Nope. Well, how about this? Billie Jean is not my lover. She's just a girl who says that I am the one. But the kid is not my son. Wow. How do you do that thing with your feet? The moonwalk? No!

That thing with your feet. Here, look. Just raise your heel a bit and put a little pressure on the ball of your foot. You seem like a nice guy. why'd they put you in here because i wore a pink shirt i understand people thought i was crazy for the way i dressed what'd you wear one white glove covered with rhinestones that's a fun noise from dan there i like that but yeah i mean i'm michael jackson from the jacksons i'm homer simpson from the simpsons like that is like pure like the jetsons meet the flintstones like this is the line you put in a special crossover thing like it's an event it's a scene

for a commercial like that i i kind of like that just writing there and it's obviousness as a crossover moment you know it feels like so this feels like it was written uh pretty early in the show's run earlier than this because in the way we was we see homer and marge in high school in the mid 70s they should know who at least the jackson five are and uh the idea before that was like oh yeah homer and marge are like your parents were in the 60s but once they made the way we was it's well, let's put them in time. Yes. So I think this was written before The Way We Was with that idea of Homer as the guy who likes Mambo on the radio and things like that. So it's a little, I mean, that is part of the joke where Homer is so stupid he doesn't know who Michael Jackson is.

But Marge, poor sweet Marge, who has little to do in this story, should at least say, that's Michael Jackson, Homer. Wow. Or that guy doesn't look like Michael Jackson, Homer. Yes, exactly. The design of Leon is pretty interesting that like he looks like Barney Gumbel with his head shaved, but like a foot taller. And he has like a stereotypical like Navy anchor tattoo on his arm. Like it's all very, I mean, animating him doing the moonwalk,

like again again great animation like richmore and his team did a great job uh we then get a quick itchy and scratchy cartoon uh it's been it's the first one in seven episodes like i think they uh i think they oh after they did itchy and scratchy and marge they're like you know what let's take a little break from itchy and scratchy we've had a lot of itchy and scratchy but yes the uh there's it's very fun of like scratchy gets his head exploded as as his tongue is wrapped around a present and then it smashes on his uh the party hat the the shot of bart and lisa laughing i love that drawing it's such a great crazy shot you shouldn't be able to see their gums but i like it it just shows you how much they're laughing and uh bang the cat slowly not the meaning you

think it has uh a reference to uh bang the drum Cat Slowly, not the meaning you think it has. A reference to Bang the Drum Slowly, which is not about banging a drum. It's about Hodgkin's disease. And there was a 1973 movie. I didn't know that. I just knew it was a thing that people referenced because it's got a weird name. Baseball themed, if I'm not mistaken. Yes.

It's a baseball themed Hodgkin's movie. Like Robert De Niro. Maybe even like a very, very young Robert De Niro. I think you're correct. It is in the baseball theme Hodgkin's movie category on Netflix. They know if you watch that one, they're going to send dozens at you. So I also like that Lisa at this point knows what Itchy and Scratchy's are for. And she just says like she mentions that this is curiously related to exactly what's going on in their lives isn't that funny like they know that the show is watching them at this point i like bart's response

of like you want that once a year empty jester you got it sis like that's such a good line so yes then we go back and the the tour the place like it's just cuckoo's nest they draw the poker group exactly the same like you could just say like there's christopher lloyd and that's that's danny devito and there's billy bibbitt billy babbitt the the most yes yeah and the great brad duras perhaps the first reference i remember seeing to the silence of the lambs because that came out in february of 91 this is september yeah that had to be such a late edition i mean you know manhunter had come out, but nobody was doing a Manhunter reference. Was he in that, like, straitjacket strapped to something in Manhunter?

I don't think he was, no. Yeah. No, no, no. Because when they visit him, he's just in the mental hospital. Yeah. Later in this, they have Hannibal Lecter sipping soda through that mask he wears. Right, right. It was fresh then, you know.

It became hack once Billy Crystal came out in it. Then it became officially hack. Once Al Jean and Mike Reese. He also ruined Blackface. He was the one. He enjoyed it and then Crystal Hydra brought it into the ground and ruined it forever. I think in

1994 once Al Jean and Mike Reese wrote the parody Honey I Ate the Kids on The Critic. That's when it ended for Hannibal Lecter parodies. You ate the kids again? That's right. Oh, dear. Well, so this reminded me, too, of like there was a funny moment on Twitter where I remember somebody tried to say that Nurse Ratched was like not the villain of the film and that she was kind of a girl boss. I was like, what?

What? Like, I mean, I haven't read the book, but just in the film, she drives a patient to take his life like out of pure sexually shaming him. Like it's that's not a good character. I don't. You can certainly take issue with like oh this is you know in the 60s and there's certainly a patriarchal like sexism to it and jack's character is not a perfect guy at all but it's like nurse ratchet is not good like she's she's

bad for more on this please watch ratchet on netflix yes it's the prequel it is the prequel yeah i can't believe that shit yeah it's it yeah okay gotta watch something gotta world's ending better watch ratchet so this is when i learned the term idiot savant as well as homer is very impressed by a man who can who can do not have uh nine times nine no four times five nine five times nine that's the one and we all i mean that's a that's that's a rain man thing yeah yeah early rain man too you know like oh boy fairly recent 88 89 on the critic there are countless rain man references i know it's they they loved that character it's crazy to think like that was

pop culture is what autism was for like 15 years and now you look at that like yeah that's an incredibly weird kind of a tasteless offensive very extreme form of that like yeah yeah like oh that's what if you're if you're autistic then you act just like dustin hoffman in right man though you know even like 10 years ago on community they they were mocking how other like, like detective shows then were like, Oh, the magic autistic guy who can solve everything. Like,

but yeah, we, we, when we, where you watch the critic, one thing we noted many times was if they want to make an ableist joke, they make, they bring in rain,

man. If they want to make a transphobic joke, it's like, no, no, it's a reference to the crying game. The crying game. Yes.

Yeah. It's like, no, it's not, it's not just as making fun of a reference to the crying game the crying game yes yeah it's like no it's not it's not just us making fun of a trans person it's a crying game popular movie popular movie yeah they admit that they try to start a runner with bart as he gets a phone call from michael jackson which again if you watch leaving neverland a key part of michael jackson's grooming process is that he talks to the kids on the phone for a very long amount of time which in context of that I can see again why Al Jean was like oh we can't re-air this episode anymore like this completely changes the tenor of this scene Joe's crematorium you kill him we grill him hello who is this I'm Bart Simpson who the hell are you

I'm Michael Jackson the Michael Jackson no way it's true I'm with your. Who the hell are you? I'm Michael Jackson. The Michael Jackson? No way. It's true. I'm with your father in a mental institution. Uh-huh. And is Elvis with you? He could be. It's a big hospital. Oh, come on. If you're really Michael Jackson, who were your last four dates for the Grammys? Brooke Shields, Diana Ross, Emanuel Lewis, and Bubbles. Shiver me timbers! You are Michael Jackson!

Can you stay on the line while I get all my friends and relatives? I'm afraid not, Bart. Your father really needs your help. You don't want him to get a lobotomy, do you? Hmm... Lobotomy... That's all right, son. Well, there's probably a downside I don't see. Uh-huh. You bet,lam Asylum. Loves us. Needs us.

Fears he may never see us again. Got it. Michael Jackson. Woo-hoo! I love you, man. Hey, Mom. Dad's in a mental institution. Oh, my God.

Mother was right. But this is where apparently they say they're only other than Michael Jackson's want to have him hang out with Bart all night. They also had them change one line, which is Bart says to him, oh, yes, Prince. He was originally said, oh, yes, Prince there. And he says, could be it's a big place. But he, Michael Jackson, because he already was in a deep rivalry with Prince at that point, did not want to reference Prince. And they changed it to Elvis. So when Bart asks if Elvis is there, that's because he did not want to reference prince and they changed it to elvis so when bart asked if

elvis is there that's because he did not want to reference prince but apparently prince even was going to be on the like bad music video like that was michael jackson's pitch that like that the wesley snipes character snipes said the same thing that in some early version of the bad music video the wesley snipes character in it was going to be prince yeah it's funny that kind of reminds me of uh god around this time mc hammer was one of the most successful musicians around and he had his big five million dollar video truly just to quit uh which was going to and his whole thing is i'm the king of pop music it's me prince and michael jackson we're all equally talented so at the end of the two legit to quit they have you see a figure and you know it's a white glove and he does the two legit to quit

hand gestures which again was a testament to even when i'm the biggest rapper in the world for three and a half months i have to impishly you know so like i'm the part of the same way you know like everybody had to acknowledge that you know michael jackson was the king and everybody else was even prince who looked back like a much more talented human being i mean michael jackson did not play every instrument brilliantly you know michael jackson did not write 7 000 songs a lot of which were absolutely brilliant and yeah i think it was until like you know they both had to be dead for us to be like prince is the greater artist sure like he wasn't as successful but he was the greater artist and still pretty successful yeah it's just like

but no but you know nobody was as successful as the dude who did thriller but you're right that hammer video the two like that's as corny as it gets to hire an impersonator of jackson to have him do it like that's oh yeah makes you it makes you look so secondary like it makes you look thirsty yes yeah so bart quizzes him about who he took to the grammys which is all accurate he took brooke shields and emmanuel lewis together in 1984 let's not think about that in 1980 in 1986 he took diana ross and i couldn't find when bubbles the chimp went with him to it and i well i will say i don't believe shields has gone on the record since leaving neverland came out but emmanuel lewis and diana ross both apparently

have said they deny it and say like no jack no, Jackson was blah, blah, blah. They don't believe it still, which, like, whatever. Whatever. Also, though, I learned Bubbles the Chimp's still alive, at least as of, like, last year. After Jackson's passing, he was taken to a primate reserve and is still with us. Like, you could. Yeah. Apparently there's a blacklist screenplay that is i believe a stop

motion sort of look at michael jackson's life through bubbles the chimp for a while there i think there was talk of spike jones or charlie kaufman producing it i think that might be one of those me too things but even that like yesterday i was i read a review of the michael jackson musical oh yeah there's like broadway or west end and yeah the giant shocker it's a big whitewash uh and you know they they do not acknowledge all of the disturbing elements of his life but he's still not canceled enough that there's a big old michael jackson musical that probably will be a big hit because people love the guy i mean at the time of this recording rudy giuliani just appeared on uh or was the mask

singer or a mask singer so it's like there is no what is canceled like there's nothing like you what is there you know according to uh keepers at his new sanctuary bubbles is now quote huge and ugly no but has a sweet character that's nice so i mean i gotta think you probably learned a lot of like bad eating habits as the pet of a celebrity but uh i think it's the pandemic oh sure it affected us all in that way that's true but then there's a very proto cutaway uh family guy joke of homer of bart imagining homer with a lobotomy with just his two lobotomy scars on his head and i do love bart saying like there's probably a downside i don't see like it's such a great line yes michael jackson then hangs up with him and it's also funny that homer wanted him to call on his behalf because

like they think i'm a god like what a great line but uh that's it that's a great line they think that i'm a god the idea that his family holds him in a worshipful high regard but then there's another line that feels like if of michael jackson bart saying michael jackson i love you man i was like yeah that hits a different chord these days don't like that don't like that like I was a kid at that time, and we loved Michael Jackson. I remember, again, as a kid, those kids are so lucky. Exactly. That I could go to Neverland and meet the world's most famous person, and we'd hang out, and he'd buy me a jacket. And, again, I never thought that literally would be the worst thing that could happen to me, like i would be scarred uh for life but yeah

at the time you're just like he seems so nice and he seems so sweet and he's so unbelievably talented yeah and here here he is he's taking an interest in me he's gonna make me famous too wow how great it's like yeah no uh then anyway bart then uh moon walks the room, which was definitely used in ads for the episode to, again, just hit it real hard for viewers. Like, no, seriously, Michael Jackson, watch this. Watch it. Yeah, John J. Smith might not be the actual guy. And I wonder if they had to pay for Bart humming Beat It. Like, do you think they had to pay a songwriting?

I think there's enough notes in there to qualify. jackson gave jackson he did the money as did the members of toto who played and wrote a lot of songs out there that's right i forget that about i i learned that secret from the uh that early aughts uh comedy video series about yacht rock yeah that's that's a thriller is a yacht rock album like it's probably the best yeah and part of it is because toto isn't every single song yeah but yes so musicians uh the the band toto i know like uh people listen to that more than the the listen to their africa not weezer's Africa, people. Watch, listen, hear, listen to the original. But yes, then Bart reveals that he's in a mental institution and Bart says, God, my mother was right.

That feels like a very Brooks line as well there. Yeah. And then we have a Bronson voice, Nicholson dating the nurse. Dating the nurse. Like, yeah, I like that it's a blue haired Jack Nicholson too. They would not design that. Which that's also funny. I wonder if Brooks was like, do you think Brooks ever thought they'd get Nicholson?

Like, honestly, with the closeness that James L. Brooks has with Nicholson, like he got Nicholson like at least one Oscar. Well, we learned about Hercules. He asked for a lot of money. That's true. He's not about the favors. He is like after Joker, after making like $80 million playing the Joker, he's like, I don't do favor guest appearances anymore.

I don't do favor guest appearances. You have to pull your hair back. You have to pull the hair back, as I say. But then we also get the start of a new runner in The Simpsons here where hold music makes people cry and is very accurate here. It's crazy. the patsy klein crazy and i like to think that willie nelson uh got a little bit of money oh yeah probably a lot of money because my god that uh episode was seen over and over and over and over again that's true

more money than kip lennon oh yeah i bet kip lennon probably was just doing it for exposure like a lot of the many hangers on in in the you know he's related to the lennon. Oh yeah, I bet Kip Lennon probably was just doing it for exposure like a lot of the many hangers on in the Jackson world. You know, he's related to the Lennon family. Oh yeah, so he doesn't need it. I told you kids you were going to send your father to the crazy house. Mom, you said poor house. I said crazy

house. Poor house. Crazy house. Poor house. Crazy house. Hello, you've reached the new Bedlam wrongly committed hotline. All of our operators are currently busy. Please stay on the line. Crazy. Crazy for feeling. What's wrong, Homer?

This place is so strange, Mike. I'm ashamed to admit it to another guy, but I'm... I'm scared. We all get scared once in a while. Maybe I can help you. Homer, the two of us need look no more We both found what we were looking for With a friend to call my own.

I'll never be alone. And you, my friend, will see. You've got a friend in me. Mmm. Pancakes. Football. Boobies. Bubbles.

It's going to be a long night and uh also you know good cut marge is sobbing on the phone and then it cuts to homer crying uh alone in his room too uh which then leads to kip lennon singing ben of a deep cut in the world of michael jackson then even though it was an oscar-nominated song. And it's a reference to... Oh, go ahead. From a major motion picture. Yeah, the weird history of this is that Ben is about the titular character of the movie Ben. And Ben the movie is a spinoff of the killer rat movie Willard.

So this is a song about a rat. And Ben was so popular. Ben, I didn't know this until this research because I don't know a lot about Michael Jackson. Ben is the name of his second album. His second album is called Ben. Wow. And then Willard was later remade with Crispin Glover. Right.

Who covered the song Ben. Like he sings it to a rat as well. Yes. Yeah, I remember that. But yeah, Jackson sung this as a child at the 1973 Grammys, correct? And that was a hallmark of his career that people in their 20s or 30s watching this would know. And I do think guys like Brooks and Grading, for them who are older than us, like 20 to 40 years older than us, they think they probably thought of, they've seen jackson grow up so also i can see

why they're you think you know this person because you've known them since they were like six basically like i can also see why you would not assume the worst about his intentions when you think you know somebody their entire life like that as as a famous person like jackson was but uh yes kip lennon sings the song in here towards towards homer which is uh it's sweet in context like in uh it's a it's a sweet moment it's weird how homer is dreaming about i'd never like it when homer says boobies like that i i don't like a horny homer i've said it before not not pro horny horny homer and it also just feels very lazy yes yeah it's like a caricature of a caricature and there's no lip sync on it too so clearly that's like they added it late they juiced it up yeah they're like

homer snoring wouldn't be funny enough he gets pancakes but not football or boobies that's true i guess marge shows up and she brought the boobies yeah you know from a certain point of view yes so first we have uh as as we get to homer getting out we have uh basically vaudeville gag set in uh group therapy here as homer learns what agoraphobia is and he thinks the guy is a baby please feel free to express yourselves in these sessions we want you to feel relaxed and uninhibited. Okay, so I was working in an insurance company, right? Youngest VP in the history of the firm, okay? The job was my life. Then one Monday morning, I got up. I couldn't leave the house. I just couldn't.

Was the door locked? No. I just couldn't face what was out there. Was it raining? No. Homer, Dave suffers from agoraphobia, a fear of open areas and crowds please dave go on thank you anyway that day i knew i i just couldn't make that long drive to work we out of gas baby mrs simpson i'm sorry but your husband suffers from a persecution complex extreme paranoia and bladder hostility doctor if you just talk to him for five minutes without mentioning our son Bart, you'd see how sane he is.

You mean there really is a Bart? Good Lord! Harry Shearer is such a... What a great job on that tiny character. Just all of the stammering, the swallowing, the breathing. Yes, he's so good. It feels like he's a guy from a real movie

about mental illness. I don't think it's so naturalistic that it feels like an actual person with agoraphobia, but it's just, it's like, oh, this is worthy of a serious drama, which makes it funnier how Homer doesn't believe it's real. Though that's what, what I think most people actually felt that way about agoraphobia then and thought like, ah, it's just fake. Like, yeah, grow up baby. But Homer, Homer's lack of caring is very funny there. felt that way about agoraphobia then thought like ah it's just fake like yeah grow up baby but homer homer's lack of caring is very funny there but yes also the the doctor going like there's there

really is a bart like he just didn't believe it i like the idea of bart is a demon you know bart is like this nightmare boogeyman that exists only in his father's head yep yeah that he's that he's been telling everyone about like no bart bart did it bart committed me here bart did this and homer's thinking is so short term he said that he's leaving the asylum because uh the pancakes uh delicious stack of pancakes there just like we saw in the previous episode of uh season two the uh the blood feud homer as well he loves this was you know pork chops no more the joke food for homer pancakes this is the pancake pancakes are easy to draw yeah it's true uh and so yes marge though then uh reunites with homer a funny creepy reaction shot of the other patients

watching them kiss and feeling lonely or making kissy faces that's uh very uncomfortable the ideal of the line we believe you're no threat to yourself or others that's the most flattering thing anyone has ever said to me can i get that in writing sure they just had it too great great exchange this is not insane certificates i need to hang that up one of those in my house too like oh nope see my obsession with the simpsons very normal got the sign right there but yeah then we find out that leon is only there voluntarily and that he can leave which means he's not a threat yep not a yeah yep but in the real world michael jackson actually really did he could have used some help i'm not you know i've yeah maybe being

committed what wouldn't have been the worst thing that could happen to Michael Jackson. But as he explains why he did it, he says because in 1980, his Off the Wall album got only one lousy Grammy nomination, which I don't blame Maljean and Mike Reese for being not entirely correct about this because this was a pre-internet age, but to be specific, in the 1980 Grammy Awards, Don't Stop Till You Get Enough, the single won Best R&B Vocal Performance, but it was the only nomination. So technically, yes, it did only get one Grammy nomination, but it also won, and I feel like actually you would say off the wall, won only one Grammy.

Well, Michael should have corrected him in the booth. That's true. He should have. He should have. Although I discovered that kip lennon uh sang the song for chud too but the chud what which actually went egot uh it won the oscar i've seen the every award it was very impressive i've seen the chud too musical out here in san franc Francisco tickets cost more than Hamilton you know what if there was a chud musical it'd be better than Hamilton I you know I'd give it a shot yeah I'd uh you know the also it's funny too like that was before back in 1991 it was the

iconoclastic thing to say like you know actually off the wall is the better album than thriller you know everybody likes thriller but actually off the wall is the better album than thriller you know everybody likes thriller but actually off the wall is the better it was the pinkerton of its day it was the pink that's a great album yes again in a vacuum yes great album it's my favorite kip lennon album yes yeah if quincy jones can get back in the uh get back in the recording booth with kip lennon and just do a replacement album that'd be fine but yes we then get the opening sound of this episode of a very very sad scene of lisa crying as her overlooked middle child and singing happy birthday herself which it's extra weird that like i get that marge and homer aren't there for it but in the next scene bart answers the phone

outside the kitchen so it takes on the feeling that bart is hearing her singing that and he's in the next room like not noticing he's avoiding his weird sister who's singing to herself that's true yes but yeah so that scene ends with maggie blowing the noisemaker herself which is uh very very very sad then in the next scene homer gets a call homer calls bart this is when Bart finds out he's coming home. Just taxidermy. You snuff him, we stuff him. Boy, when I get home, I'm going to wrap my hands around your neck and smother you with kisses.

Homer, whatever they got you on, cut the dose. Now listen, I'm bringing Michael Jackson home to stay with us for a few days. Isn't that cute? He's heard of you. Now, make sure we have plenty of cold cuts and put some beer on ice. Um, Homer, I'm a vegetarian, and I don't drink. Are you sure you're here voluntarily? Yes. Now, Homer, please make sure he doesn't tell anybody I'm coming.

Yes, Dad, I solemnly swear I will not tell another living soul. No, not even Milhouse. Huh? I swear I will not tell another living soul. No, not even Milhouse. Hello, Milhouse? Can you keep a secret? No. Oh, well, who cares? Michael Jackson is coming to my house! Michael Jackson! Michael Jackson! Michael Jackson?

Aunt Bella! Wait a minute, I got a call on the other line michael jackson michael jackson i love homer's like and smother you with kisses like he has to change he might not be allowed out and then bart's like homer whatever they got you on cut the dose and a lot of the writing here uh it seems like algin and mike reese bought like 101 facts about michael jackson tabloid book because so many things in this are just like did you know this about him vegetarian doesn't drink but you know what he does do goofballs everybody goofballs no it's right he was ahead of the curve of dying of a fentanyl that's true yeah you know

he always probably the first time first time a lot of people heard about fentanyl was when he died of an overdose that's true incidentally i read the i read the book of his doctor and it is completely insane for a million different reasons one of which is that he sees himself as basically a contemporary of michael jackson he's like we were two great humanitarians beloved by the world one of us had a medical degree and that made us more impressive but the other one is good at dancing or whatever oh my god so again his whole thing is basically like michael jackson was lucky to work with me because i'm one of the world's great humanitarians. That's amazing. Wow, that is amazing. But, you know.

One of the sleaziest books I've ever read. And that's saying something. Read an awful lot of them. Yeah. Homer's going to take this mental patient he just met home to his suburban house. March has no input. Nope. No dialogue.

Doesn't care one way or the other. Doesn't care that he's michael jackson he tells bart and okay so this again as james safe chuck in leaving neverland talks about they talk about that part of their activity was jackson was that jackson was like i'm gonna come to your house but send your dad over to secretly get me here and it was part of like this adventure of like oh michael jackson's gonna be in our house and but he's gotta escape the paparazzi isn't this exciting like so again when i know that fact and then i see that it's like oh michael jackson comes home to somebody's house and and the paparazzi chase him there i'm like he was literally james safe chuck says 1991

when this aired he was it was happening like it's well yeah i was hiding in plain sight one of jackson's uh demand well demands sounds a bit more forceful than it probably was one of his requests for the script is that he wanted the entire town to come out to see him so it's another one of those messaging things where it's like no everybody loves me i i'm safe everyone loves me i bring happiness to the world mine everybody's just destroyed when they realize that it's not him that is just some weird white guy and uh yeah also i mean yes there's there's also that component that was the joke by the year 1995 which is michael jackson he's a white guy like at this point like that was the joke everybody made like that he i

believe the theory that he wanted to look like peter pan that was the joke everybody made like that he i believe the theory that he wanted to look like peter pan that was the many facial surgeries was to look like that also written by algin and mike reese lisa sacks michael jackson still was black yes that was the joke too yeah yeah uh but but yes bart is told to keep a secret which also then i feel like it anyway yeah so he's like can you keep a secret and he goes like no oh who cares and he calls everybody and then they use every scene they ever had of people on the phone to have like they only had a few new ones i love crusty on the phone with his aunt aunt bella like that's such a great one one little thing i like about this not to linger too long on

it is the background for all of the new phone scenes. The backgrounds the characters are in tell you everything about them. You see Kearney's horrifying teenager room. Otto is in front of, like, a ton of school buses. So it's like, that's Otto the bus driver. And Krusty, in case you forget who Krusty is, he has a picture of himself in the background. He's answering a Krusty phone. It's amazing.

I love that. And a reused footage of snake from uh war of the simpsons it's like i think azaria forgot how snake talked he was like when he when he says michael jackson's snake he doesn't exactly sound like perfect snake there and i like this little tiny bit of a poo character development because who was a poo just some guy who yells at you in the quickie mart this one we can see his workaholism where the store is never closed this time he will close the store so a little bit more to a poo is going on in this episode that he is the the endlessly hard-working immigrant like that's his his character which you know as far as like

positive stereotypes of immigrants you could do worse you know it's still it's still a stereotype about an indian man who moved to america well and they got an indian actor to do the voice of course i thought was very very sensitive and considerate given the time well without this joke you couldn't have him later thinking he was a hummingbird he worked so much that's true yes yeah i uh also this led to a fun fun joke with me and my mom growing up. So I didn't know about iron butterflies in a God of Davida like this. And there's a bigger joke with the song later in the Simpsons in season seven, uh, in Bart sells a soul. But this scene of in a God of Davida, like I had to ask my mom who she was a kid of the seventies and knew the song.

And I asked her like, well, what, what is that what is that she's like well it's famously a 20 minute long song with an endless drum solo we as a joke like more than once we me and my mom would try to call our local radio station and request the long version of inigata davida and i think we got through once and the guy was like no we can't i'm sorry and me and my mom were like teeheehee like it's. Like, it's a nice, I'm just saying, it's a nice memory among all these poisoned childhood memories of this episode. I like hearing about a wholesome mother and son prank. Yes, yeah.

On corporate media. Well, I've been to 40-something fish shows, so for me, Nevada Gavita is like a little ditty. It's a concise little pop song that I guess children enjoy it's like a ringtone yeah it's not like uh it's not like the long version of wilson huh is that yeah i i i listened to a podcast about fish that you were a guest on i know i know names of fish songs yeah i gotta talk about the john 316 guy rainbow man rainbow man shows, a big fixture in the 70s and 80s at sporting events. In fact, that's where Austin 316 comes from.

He's referencing Rainbow Man, a.k.a. Roland Stewart, who is now in jail after multiple kidnapping incidents. What? Yeah, I have a documentary about him. A very, very fascinating and disturbing one. Boy, this is not the same happy ending as Morgana the Kissing Bandit had. No, no. And listen, these kidnapping incidents happened in 1992, so they're lucky they got Rainbow

Man on the show in 91. Wow. And by the way, there's a documentary called Rainbow Man from 97 if you want to learn about his horrifying life. Wow. I'm shocked to learn this. I never knew this about Rainbow Man. It turns out a guy holds up a Bible verse at sports events.

Not very stable. Oh. No. You got. Also, on a lot of drags. Yes. And not the good ones either. They're the ones that, you know, took him to some, some bad places.

So if you see this and think it's not. I don't like Michael Jackson. Exactly. So if you see this and think it's a Stone Cold Steve Austin reference, well, you're wrong. You're wrong, buddy. You got to wait about, what, five, six years? It was, of course, King of the Ring 1996. I just kicked your ass.

Yes. Now that I could give you a whole history on, as well as Stone Cold Steve Austin's arrest as well. But you know what? That's depressing. Anyway. Also, well, speaking of jokes I didn't get, the incumbents. Okay, there's a football team there, and their helmet, speaking of jokes I didn't get, the incumbents, okay, there's a football team there and their helmet says incumbents.

I don't get that. I couldn't find any football team named the incumbents. I don't know what that joke is. I think it's just a bad name for a football team. Okay. There's also a baseball team called the Senators. Yeah, I was thinking of that too. Okay.

The Springfield incumbents did not become the football team. Now, I will say how crazy the crowd is here. Watching the Leaving Neverland documentary too, they have to make a point of like the context of, no, you really need to know how famous this person is because this was something I really liked in the OJ documentary made in America, which is fantastic.

Like I can't say enough good stuff about it it spends like an hour just saying how racist the lapd was right then like this because you need to know and the same deal here like they just show like thousands of people like hysterics the world over just at the sight of like michael jackson is at this airport he's in that car and just people like rending their garments and just like sobbing uncontrollably like that that was how famous he was like this honestly this crowd doesn't do justice to the type of crowds that would show up if the people knew michael jackson was going to be there uh i also yeah this crowd of of springfield they they we

then find out that like the last big celebrity to come there was the Dalai Lama, which this is so early in The Simpsons that many, many celebrities will come to the Springfield after this, like countless of them. So we have the Dalai Lama Expressway, renamed the Michael Jackson Expressway, renamed the Matlock Expressway. That's right. And we talked about black Smithersers in season one if you look very closely at this crowd you can see black groundskeeper willie yep a brief appearance of

him looking a lot like fred samford yeah it's uh it is all his colors are wrong not just his skin tone but yeah it's how we use electricity can be smarter cleaner and greener. At Electric Ireland, we can help guide you there. You see, our new Net Zero Hub has all you need to know about smart meter plans, EV tariffs, solar panels and much more. Making your usage clearer, your trips greener, your home cozier and your world brighter. Find our Net Zero Hub at electricireland.ie it's actually very distraught it's among the other people who gasp what addressed in i mean also too like the amount of specifics of michael jackson merch on the people there is impressive like there's a usa for africa shirt as well in there there's like bad and dangerous like it's all very deep references

in there i also like the bad journalistic action of ken brockman identifying homer he was just released from a mental institution like what a horrible thing to say it's just so good but yes everybody sees quote unquote michael jackson uh this is the most exciting thing to happen to our fair town since the Dalai Lama visited in 1952. And so I hereby declare that Route 401, currently known as the Dalai Lama Expressway, will henceforth be known as the Michael Jackson Expressway. I can see him.

Oh, here he comes. I see him. They, here he comes. And the guy in the pink shirt is the father of the family, who it turns out was just released from a mental hospital. Hey, everybody. It's great to be sane. We want Michael. We want Michael. We want Michael.

Here he is. Here's the guy you want to see! Wow! Huh? Huh? He's 300 pounds. He's white. He's dressed without flair.

Boo! I love that line. He's dressed without flair. What a weird thing for Mo to say. Not that he's like, he's not wearing the clothes he normally wears. Like, dressed without flair what a weird thing for mo to say like not that he's like he's not wearing the clothes he normally is like dressed without flair mo showed up for the flair alone he wanted to see that flair yeah yeah every everybody just starts booing it's the first of many times everyone in town hates the simpsons fam the simpson family as well and then there's also a very sad scene of lisa the chewing out bard and just, I do love the line.

I think I maybe have used it in my life too. Like, maybe you should trust that instinct and not ask. Bart's just being real. Yeah, he's like, look, you know I didn't. Bart, the entire town is howling for your blood. And before I join them, I have one question. Today is my birthday. You promised you'd get me something and...

and I'm afraid to ask. You know, maybe you should trust that instinct and not ask. I thought so. Oh, Bart. You... I'm off. I'm Zane now. Dear Bart, I am using the stationary Mom and Dad gave me for my birthday

to inform you that we are now brother and sister in name only. Perhaps if a professional so advises, I will give you a hug at some far distant family reunion. But rest assured, it will be purely for show. I mean, I guess he was so distracted by the Michael Jackson thing, but he had ample warning by Lisa. He just didn't do it. He has an excuse in that a man tricked him into thinking he was Michael Jackson. You know what?

That's true. That's true. Yes. And again, this. All right. So then now they. What? Now is the most uncomfortable right. So then now they, now's the most uncomfortable part of the episode. One thing I want to mention that's not uncomfortable, that's a needlessly pedantic, you know, nitpick here is that once we get into the house, we start hearing the sound of crickets.

I think they forgot an establishing shot to show you it's night. So you just start hearing crickets. I think you're right. And it's not until they go to the tree house that you realize, oh, it's nighttime. So I think they forgot to put an establishing shot with the first few lines of dialogue over the house at night. You're right. Yeah. They need an establishing shot.

Editing mistake. Yeah, you're right. Get to the disgusting stuff. Good catch there, Bob. All right. So Michael Jackson is walking alone into the room with Bart. And no, it's no. I mean, it's just it's it's it's OK.

As the character of Leon Kompowski, who is innocent, the Leon Kompowski. I'm tweeting Leon Kompowski innocent all in caps. It's fun to see him just walk through the house and first seeing Homer failing to wash insane off of his hand and that he's like branded for life. You know, you know what? OK, so this is me uh thinking of michael jackson it is strange this is my reading of the scene is that he walks by lisa like and he's like helping a little girl no thanks helping a little boy bingo yeah it's like he could he could cheer lisa up yeah how about you just directly cheer lisa yeah yeah but he's like well no i'm gonna go on i'm gonna sit on the bed with bart now that's what i'm going to go on. I'm going to sit on the bed with Bart now. That's what I'm going to do. Yes, yes. Yeah.

I do love Lisa's very passive aggressive. Like, it feels like passive aggressive letters I, as a nerd, have written as well. Like, I assure you it will be purely for show. Also, the way she says that mom and dad got me for my birthday. A journal for her birthday is kind of a crappy gift from her parents. I gotta say. There's got to be some nice pens in that stationery set. I sure but it's like you know a bike a bike's a better gift but but yes so as michael jackson requested he is going to stay up all night with bart to write a song hey you when i was a kid i didn't have much money so you know what i did when my sister's

birthdays rolled around stiff Stiffed them? No. I wrote them a song. To show that I cared. I can't write a song. I'm only ten. Only ten? When I was your age, I had six gold records. Hey, Looney Tunes! This is what Michael Jackson looks like.

You look like a big, fat, mental patient. You'd be amazed how often I hear that. Just leave me alone. Look, boy, either Michael Jackson is some guy working in a recording studio in L.A., or he's here with you willing to work on this song. It's your choice. So long. Wait, wait, Michael.

You go sit at the piano, and I'll boil some coffee. The Only Ten, that's another one of those, like, they read a fan book on Michael Jackson of, like, Only Ten? When I was ten, I had three gold records. Like, yes, yeah. that's another one of those like they read a fan book on michael jackson of like only 10 when i was 10 i had three gold records like yes yeah which then bart saying like hey looney tunes this is what michael jackson looks like which even on the 2002 commentary they're like not anymore y'all laugh but it's i mean it's a accurate rendering of that album cover which which then bart when he's summoning zombies will wear that same album cover in treehouse of horror two three i also love

the line you look like a big fat mental patient like you'd be amazed how often i hear that but uh yes in real life bart is left alone with this guy who then writes a song with him. The Simpsons, for the first time, I think, have a piano in the house, which only occasionally shows up. I thought so, too. But at the end of the Christmas special, they play Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Of course. What am I saying? You're right.

And Paul F. Tompkins has a great bit about how, for a long time, people just had pianos in their houses. Because for a certain generation, that was like the rock band or guitar hero that's what you did and so like most people have a piano that's like two generations old just sitting and things are piled on top of it oh sorry nathan oh i have a piano and nobody in my family plays piano i don't even know how we got it i just yeah my wife's family just sort of gave us a piano and now it just kind of sits there my my son attacked it with a hand oh gee well there you go you know if you have a piano he's gonna be a free jazz superstar a regular uh john cage but if you have a piano i think the reason is because it's hard to get rid of a piano that's why you have one it's just like it's just

like vintage arcade machines the same same albatross around your neck as you purchase it. Well, the non-problematic part of this scene is when Bart has his own Lisa song parody. The Lisa, her teeth are big and green, the Colonel Bogey March song. Yes, yeah, here, I've got that. Lisa, her teeth are big and green. Lisa, she smells like gasoline. Lisa, da-da-da-disa, she is my sister. Her birthday I missed her.

Uh, no. Bart, we've got to get to your real feelings about your sister. I don't have any. Well, let's go look at her. Maybe that'll help. Oh, she looks sad. That's because, let's go look at her. Maybe that'll help. Oh, she looks sad. That's because she knows you're looking at her. Although I'm aware you're looking at me, I would look exactly the same even if you weren't. And again, with 2022 Brain, post-Leaving Neverland Brain, he and Michael are brainstorming.

I'm not trying to make light of this, by the way. This is something I really think. He and Bart are brainstorming, and Michael's trying to make light of this, by the way. This is something I really think. He and Bart are brainstorming. And Michael's like, well, what happens when you're eight? And Bart goes, the training wheels fall off your bike. And he goes, the training wheels fall off your bike. You start to notice, boys. You're like, wait a minute.

Bart didn't say anything about that second line. No. And then there's a later lyric. Did Bart make up the kissing a boy lyric? I mean, yes. It can be seen as innocent. But knowing what we know now, I feel i feel that boy there's a lot of baggage behind some of these things knowing that bart didn't say well i guess you kiss boys when you're

that age it's coming out of his head yeah yeah yeah no although i gotta say though that that happy birthday lisa lisa's birthday is an incredibly catchy song and that i started having it go through my head all over again when I was invited to be part of this thing and it just has not left my brain. I'm sorry to curse you. Might need some matter of full frontal lobotomy to get that particular

earworm out of my head. You know, there's probably a downside you're not seeing to that. My thought was like after hearing the credits version, I think if they actually got michael jackson to sing this they probably tried to would have tried to make it a single oh sure totally yeah yeah yeah it probably would have you know that do the bart man was like a number one hit that's kind of and and yeah because the the end credits they have a string section yeah that would

be on the songs in the key of springfield album but never like on again they the sequel album to simpsons sings the blues the yellow album it was supposed to have bart singing a song with prince that again fell apart around the same time yeah i think i wrote about that for for my world of flops and oh my goodness that is an abomination again it's kind of the the sort of thing that the simpsons should be making fun of uh except that they're just serving it up straight because they like having money they should have never released that they really should have just been like just say like you know guys we messed up like it's like how uh cisco made a five million dollar music video that was so corny and bad he's like nope can't release it like it he like he fights godzilla and he realized

like no this is bad maybe a future podcast i don't know everyone is so weirdly pitched up on that album too it doesn't even sound like the characters it's it's all wrong yes but yeah but yes after bart stays up all night with michael jackson and there's a time cut of the shows that they were up all night also again with one with the other accuser in the documentary wade the friendship with wade and his sister it was part of his cover too like the sister was an accessory not not accessory but she was part of the i don't mean in a criminal sense accessory but she was part of his scheme as well she was not abused but like saying like yeah you and your sister like you and your sister come over like all that stuff but anyway they push the piano up the stairs

in a funny bit that bart makes him put a piano all the way to the second leon can do it he's strong it'd be easier to uh to pick lisa up and bring her downstairs but uh but yeah so then bart wakes lisa up the same way she did it at the start of the episode. Very funny drawings on Lisa's crazy face there. And then we hear the natural version of Lisa, it's your birthday. Happy birthday, Lisa, which I'll drop in right here. And a one and a two and a one, two, three, four. Lisa, it's your birthday.

God bless you this day. You gave me the gift of a little sister and I'm proud of you today. Lisa, it's your birthday. Happy birthday, Lisa. Lisa, it's your birthday. Happy birthday, Lisa. Lisa, it's your birthday. Happy birthday, Lisa. I wish you love and goodwill. I wish you praise and joy.

I wish you better than your heart desires. And your first kiss from a boy this time it's your birthday happy birthday lisa this time it's your birthday happy birthday lisa and uh there's a very funny story on the commentary from Mike Reese in that they didn't have computer access. Someone on the show did. So every week they would bring in like a huge printout of paper of news group reviews of the episode. And someone who worked on this episode on the art side, on the layout artist side, wrote that like, oh, I just did the worst scene for The Simpsons. The show has really lost its edge.

I can't believe they're doing this crap. And she didn't know that mike reese read it uh that's so and it's so funny to hear him in 2002 be like yeah i did read it i it's still hurt i'm still hurt by it i'm mad but then he says you shouldn't have been so hard on yourself it's great but i could see there were some some people on the staff had reservations for this michael jack Jackson suck job they were doing. Yeah. Yeah. Consensual suck job. No, I'm just saying that term. Yeah.

I didn't make it up. No. Bob Mackie, innocent. I wonder, you know, I wonder if this is why, like, they do this one, then they do the baseball one, which Al Jean would later say Harry Scherer hated that episode, thought it was shit. So great. which uh al jean would later say harry sure hated that episode thought it was shit and so great and then after that they do crusty get canceled which like cavner didn't do like i think they were getting to a point of some of the people on the cast were like enough of this celebrity like star fucking like let's uh what happened to the family on this thing but it's not like center

and live in that respect where like i remember remember watching the Donald Trump episode for more of a historical thing alone. And like all of the gags were Donald Trump is so cool and he's even more impressive than he says. And he's got a bit of a big mouth, but, you know, he's just a great guy. think somebody very famous is compromising your show and compromising your integrity and making it look like it's all about you know star fucking and not about trying to be funny and it's like we had in that alec baldwin episode of the simpsons where it feels a little bit of like laundering of their of their brand because he's like you know in that episode it's like you can make like little jokes about us you can make some little ones to show we're good sports but there's an understood line you don't cross in the self-deprecation of that and

you can tell that some celebrities have uh stronger lines than others about what you're supposed to make fun of them for well those apparently like for donald trump the the roast of donald trump the one big thing that was off limits was nobody could say that he didn't have as much money as he said like that was the one thing you could say whatever the hair the blah blah blah blah blah but don't say that he's not as rich as he says he is well the the alec baldwin ones like was so egregious compared to this because homer wanted to be alec baldwin's best friend and hang out with him he doesn't care about michael jackson or leon kapowski he's just like i hang out with him. He doesn't care about Michael Jackson or Leon Kompowski.

He's just like, hang out with my son. I'm out of here. Yes, that's true. Yeah. I'll leave you alone with my kid. Yes. Yeah. Well, one, I did note that like, oh, yeah, there's another bit in Leaving Neverland is

that Michael Jackson was raised Jehovah's Witness. So he doesn't celebrate birthdays. So actually having a song as a birthday song is actually kind of against his religion I don't like the whole god bless you worked into this song let's leave god out of the birthday equation that's true yeah come on maybe that also is MJ putting his uh his stamp on it but uh we also get a quick little reference to Biggie the rabbit from life and hell that was uh Maggie's doll in the bed with her, which was cute. But yes, first kiss from a boy. Gross line.

Don't like that. But hey, it's run is very sweet for Lisa. She hugs Bart. And oh, isn't this adorable? And this is when we get the happy ending. Oh, this is the best present I ever got. Thank you, Bart. Thank you, Michael.

Well, my work is done here. Hey, Michael. What happened to your voice? This is my real voice. My name is Leon Kompowski, and I'm a bricklayer from Paterson, New Jersey. All my life I was very angry, until one day I just... Talked like this. All of a sudden everybody was smiling at me, and I was only doing good on this earth.

So I kept on doing it. To make a tired point. Which one of us is truly crazy? That me! I got this. Bye-bye, Leon. You're a credit to dementia. See ya. Lisa, it's your birthday.

God bless you this day. You gave me the gift of do-do-do-do-do-do and I'm proud of you today. Is that Hank Azaria? It is, yeah. Yeah. I like his Leon voice voice it's a funny combo with it i wish i wish they'd have kept in the original last parting thing of him singing man in the mirror which that would be funnier in the context of leon singing that song but uh they they decided to i i

don't know it was a decision they made late i don't know it's that michael jackson didn't want it or if they just thought or maybe it was like a song licensing thing or whatever. But instead he just sings Lisa. Bart Hummed beat it. That was $50,000. Well, and the thing about it, too, is that it's if you want to parse this thing, it's not his talking voice that made everybody love with Michael Jackson. His talking voice. People made fun of it. They said he sounded like a woman.

They said he sounded weak and effeminate. It was the singing voice. So, yeah, that's, again, that's kind of interesting. Because, yeah, definitely, I mean, you know, back then, you know, we had much different conceptions of sexuality and gender and masculinity and what that had to mean no and it's very hetero like you said earlier it's very heteronormative to write a song about like how lisa you're gonna want to kiss boys like that's it's a better joke you're eight years old

but we know that you're gonna kiss boys it's like that's like marge talking about the gorvadoll book saying like girls lisa boys kiss girls but but yeah the joke that leon the story beat that's supposed to be sweet that leon using michael jackson's voice is like a disarming charm that also has a sinister feel now when you watch it you know like it's just i mean the fact that r kelly literally billed himself as the pied piper r&b absolutely literally said i am a man who will lure children into a weird end because of like and that was your again you talk about sort of hiding in plain sight yeah and i feel like definitely an element of the show is michael jackson kind of showing who he is through this character and again through this through this fantasy of him as this exemplar of everything that's good and sweet and you know the people love in the world

you know that he's just this person who spreads magic and joy and happiness everywhere that he goes and you could believe that at the time and you look back at that now and it's like yeah this is very disturbing unnerving thing to watch in 2022 like you said with r kelly and this goes to many people like that like i'd also say like louis ck like part of it is that you can tell they put some of that in the surface is like it was part of their thrill or their interest like was also to make it like oh this is like a wink to the people who know the horrible things i do like these like so when you look back on it you're like oh wait that he was hiding in plain sight kind of shit like these were their zodiac

letters just taunting the police yes yeah we can still like all of i guess my final thought on this episode is i think like people of our age who grew up with it uh like michael jackson's music or like the thriller music video or whatever you can remember the happy memories you had with it uh like michael jackson's music or like the thriller music video or whatever you can remember the happy memories you had with it when that time happened but as an adult now you can't you can't go back you can't go back to your childhood it's not there and it's i feel like out of context i would not want a kid to see this as just a regular simpsons episode like is this being in the disney vault i i understand it certainly there is a you know free speech absolutist view or there's an absolutist view on this kind of thing to just say like everything should be available everywhere

and in that context it already is it's you can get the dvds of it it's not truly gone but doing the revisit for this made it very clear to me of like i don't feel that bad that it can't be seen because it just makes me feel icky yeah after post 2019 it's it's a tough watch and there's a few funny things in here but not enough to salvage the entire episode and the baggage it carries so yeah like you said henry this will never not be available it's on 30 million dvds it aired 100 000 times if you want to find it and see it, you can. You just can't do that on Disney+. Any final thoughts, Nathan? Again, this is just a very, very disconcerting show to watch,

and I haven't seen an episode of The Simpsons in a while. And this is one to go back, because, again, there's the stuff that made it great and the stuff that made it funny and, like, all these, you know, clever, great character moments. But the whole, the grand gestalt uh is very very hard to swallow now and you know we know so much more than we knew at the time and there was this incredible innocence and sweetness and gentleness and tenderness to it that now feels like a lie and feels like a trap and feels like you know a very disturbed individual bending this show to his will and making it a you know a valentine to a guy who again way creepier than we would like

to acknowledge at the moment and you know way creepier than he would like the world to see him as you know i i guess uh for a silver lining at the end i think at least good that documentaries like leaving neverlander out there that lets the people tell their story and at least you know finally they can be heard at least and and people know more it's not kept a secret anymore at the very least but and hopefully those people can move on in some some way yes thank you for joining us nathan for this uh difficult episode uh please let us know where And hopefully those people can move on in some way. Yes. All right. Anyway. Thank you for joining us, Nathan, for this difficult episode. Please let us know where to find you online.

I know you're on Twitter. You've got a Patreon, a website, several books. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Most of what I do is at my website, which is Nathan Rabin's Happy Place. It's my name, N-A-T-H-A-N-R-A-B-I-N.com. I have a new book called the joy of trash that's about the many many terrible things that make the world full of joy and then i've written a bunch of books about weird l yankovic uh most recently i did a coloring book that did very very well called the word a coloring to al uh yeah when i was on uh comedy bang Bang they mentioned my thing and how title doesn't make any sense at all

because it's riffing on another book that I wrote about Weird Al Yankovic called Weird Accordion to Al and that barely made sense either it's kind of a play on the world according to Al but yeah that is out in hardcover and paperback

and online. It's a 500-page book about the sum of Weird Al Yankovic's career in music and also in television and film. And yeah, the extended version is called the Ridiculously Self-Indulgent Ill-Advised Vanity Edition. After a tour that Al did that I went on like eight or nine stops on where he played none of his hits uh just his originals and his bestiches and uh that's coming back he's doing a hundred and yes he and bob got tickets to it yeah yeah he will not be performing uh this will be our first i'm very excited about that and you can read this book to to prepare yourself for this uh tour because again he's going to be doing all of his

weird songs I want to hear Dare to be Stupid in one more minute those are the two I'll be satisfied with those are great and you'll probably hear those you did Dare to be Stupid in the style of 1960's Grateful Dead the last time around which was pretty nifty

everything you know is wrong second encore all of my and I did a full color hardcover version of the coloring book because my illustrator is a colorist by trade. So yeah, that is a bunch of things that coloring books aren't supposed to be. It's colored in, it's expensive, it's collectible, but we're really, really proud of it, and it turned out great. You're reinventing the genre yeah yes you can totally buy all of my stuff for cheap signed uh at the shop of my store which i encourage everybody to go through instead of amazon no i we people are

monsters no we we love your work we love i mean we've said before on your previous times but really like you me and bob were so influenced by your work uh when i mean we've said before on your previous times but really like you me and bob were so influenced by your work uh when we were reading it just on the av club up to now and like we wouldn't know half of the esoteric things we know if we hadn't read about them first from your reviews about it so and then finally i have a podcast called travel to cage uh where me and my co-host clint worthington go through the complete filmographies of nicholas cage and john travolta to see who is the greatest greater actor took about three episodes realized nicholas cage by a freaking long shot the man is

a god he has this incredible body of work and john travolta's handsome talented actor uh he's not a god like nicholas cage we've had yeah really amazing guests ellie kalin uh was just on awesome bill corbett uh he's gonna be in our wicker man uh episode which we're very very excited about so you definitely check out revolta cage because it's a lot of fun and we talk a lot of great movies and a lot of unspeakably terrible movies that's awesome well yeah everybody should check all that out. Thank you so much, Nathan. It was so awesome to have you back. Thanks again, Nathan.

Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Thank you. My pleasure. I'm going to go return to my family. I think they need me. You're free to go. Awesome.

Bye, guys. Bye-bye. So thanks again to Nathan Rabin for being on the show. Please check out all of his stuff. And as for us, if you want to check out more of what we do and get all these episodes one week at a time and ad-free, please go to patreon.com slash talking simpsons sign up there you get everything i just mentioned but also you get all of our exclusive episodes behind the paywall that's a bunch of mini series we've done over the past nearly five years over 100 episodes

and that also gives you access to new monthly episodes of talking futurama and talking of the hill our two exclusive monthly miniseries only behind the $5 paywall only at patreon.com slash talking simpsons and there is a $10 level as well when you sign up for that you get all the $5 stuff naturally but also access to one mega long podcast once a month only for patrons of that level or higher what is that Henry? Bob is talking about the what a cartoon movie podcast where me and Bob go super in-depth into an animated feature film each month. And when I say super in-depth, I mean over five hours sometimes we talk, easily over four hours in most episodes.

Recent ones have included, in this month of March, we're doing the Disney Golden Age classic Pinocchio. The month before that, we south park bigger longer and uncut and a giant back catalog we have recently done things like the lion king 2 simba's pride which we had a whole lot of fun talking about that direct-to-video sequel and the month before that we did millennium actress a truly amazing film it is a huge back catalog, over 200 hours worth of them, of what a cartoon movie podcast at that $10 level, and to get all the $5 things Bob just mentioned. You can easily see what you're missing out on if you visit patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons.

So as for me, I've been one of your hosts, Bob Mackie. You can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. And my other podcast, by the way, is Retronauts. That's a classic gaming podcast all about old video games. You can find that wherever you find podcasts or go to patreon.com slash retronauts and sign up there for two full-length bonus episodes every month. And Henry, what about you?

You can follow me on Twitter at H-E-N-E-R-E-Y-G. I'm always tweeting up fun stuff there. And if you'd like to stay in the loop of what's going on with our podcast, follow at TalkSimpsonsPod on Twitter. You'll always tweeting up fun stuff there. And if you'd like to stay in the loop of what's going on with our podcast, follow at TalkSimpsonsPod on Twitter. You'll always stay up to date there. And if you want to find an easy back catalog of all our free episodes, please visit TalkingSimpsonsPodcast.com.

Thank you so much for listening, folks. We'll see you again next time for Season 13's The Parents Rap, and we'll see you then. Lisa, it's your birthday. Happy birthday, Lisa. I wish you love and goodwill. I wish you praise and joy. I wish you better than your heart desires.

And your first kiss from a boy. Lisa, it's your birthday. Happy birthday, Lisa. Lisa, it's your birthday. Happy birthday, Lisa. Lisa, it's your birthday. Happy birthday, Lisa. Take it away, Lisa. Lisa, it's your birthday Happy birthday, Lisa