Talking Simpsons - Talking Simpsons - The Old Man and the "C" Student With Pop Arena

Episode Date: December 11, 2019

We welcome on one of our favorite YouTube creators, Pop Arena (creator of the Nickelodeon retrospective Nick Knacks) on to talk about a really unpredictable episode! After the town loses out on an Olympics, somehow Bart befriends a bunch of old people who then engage in a Cuckoo's Nest/Titanic parody, all while Homer tries to sell springs. Grab you favorite taquitos and listen now! Support this podcast and get dozens of bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! And please follow the new official Twitter, @TalkSimpsonsPod!

attention podcast listener we've got an exciting new podcast coming just for patrons of patreon.com slash talking simpsons talking futurama season two part one has begun exclusively for our five dollar and up patrons on the talking simpsons network that's the first 10 episodes of futurama coming to you once a week so just sign up for $5 a month at patreon.com slash talking simpsons and you'll get Talking Futurama season two and all of our limited miniseries, including the entirety of Talking Futurama season one. That's 13 episodes.

That is patreon.com slash talking simpsons. Now, please enjoy the rest of this podcast. I heartily endorse this event or product ahoy everybody and welcome to talking simpsons home of gang warfare and dangerous infections i'm your host the bubbly long neck beaked wood age lover bob mackie and this is our Ahoy, ahoy, everybody, and welcome to Talking Simpsons, home of gang warfare and dangerous infections. I'm your host, the bubbly, long-necked, Beak-Twin-Age lover, Bob Mackie, and this is our chronological exploration of The Simpsons, who is here with me today... Henry Gilbert, and I promise I'm not flushing springs down the toilet. Who do we have on the line? I'm Greg Stevens, and my natural mushiness prevents choking and promotes regularity.

Excellent. And today's episode is The Old Man and the Sea Student. Okay, just breathe through your mouth and don't ask how they're feeling. Today's episode aired on April 25th, 1999. And as always, Henry will tell us what happened on this day in real world history. Oh boy, Bobby. Jay Leno is the first U.S. late night show to be broadcast in high definition some stuff happens in calvine and stone cold steve austin defeats the rock in their return match from the wrestlemania 15 live event at backlash that's right so uh jay leno now in the

news yes you know yeah he told crusty don't do the flapping j uh dicky miso sally joke and what's Backlash! That's right. So Jay Leno now in the news. Yes. Oh, yeah. He told Krusty, don't do the flapping Dickie Miso Sully joke. And what's he doing now? He's performing for the Ukrainians, apparently. Oh, boy. Man, yes. The Columbine massacre happened this week as well. We can go back to, I think, Talking Futurama episode three.

We talk a lot about that there. We don't want to bring anyone down with another discussion of Columbine. Yes, but Bob has quite a Columbine story. Oh, yeah. And yes, that Stone Cold and Rock rematch, I think it's one of their best matches. Now, obviously, the WrestleMania 17 match, that's the ultimate Rock-Austin match, I'd say. Some might say 19, but I don't think so. But their Backlash rematch is a very good one, too. That has a first-person stunner in it

where The Rock is holding one of the cameras and Stone Cold hits him with a stunner while he's holding the camera so you get to see what it looks like through the camera. The technology was there for a first-person stunner. Well, one of the people in that fight is a podcaster and one is the new Arnold Schwarzenegger. So who ultimately won?

Stone Cold is on our level, Henry. Well, The Rock's on his way to being president, 100%. Oh, yeah. He'll probably defeat President Bernie Sanders in 2024, I bet. Bernie will be a one-termer, and The Rock will be the next one. He'll be very charismatic about starving the poor. His means testing will be the most electrifying means testing in presidential history. He's going to give the people's elbow to entitlements.

But Greg, welcome to the show. Yes. Thank you for having me. So Greg is behind the amazing YouTube channel Pop Arena, and we are huge fans of his Knickknacks miniseries in which Greg is going through every Nickelodeon show throughout the chronology of Nickelodeon. And at this point in time, you're around 1985-ish, and that's when I started becoming aware of Nickelodeon show throughout the chronology of Nickelodeon. And at this point in time, you're around 1985-ish. And that's when I started becoming aware of Nickelodeon.

Yep. I'm just wrapping up 1985. By the time this episode goes out, I should be just, no promises, but I should be done with my Nick at Night episode. And then it's on to 1986 and Double Dare. Oh, wow. Yes. Yeah. You know, that's what I love. Well, as everybody knows, me and Bob love chronologically analyzing anything. It's our bit. And so to take on Nickelodeon programming, knowing that you'd have a good two years of stuff that almost nobody remembers, that makes it all the sweeter when you start getting to things people actually have nostalgia for, like Double Dare.

Oh, yeah. I highly anticipate becoming the most famous YouTuber ever. And, yeah, if you think you know Nickelodeon, then you've never seen Pop Arena videos on things like the Reggie Jackson sports show and Livewire and some city city going bananas is that what the name of it uh it was originally columbia goes bananas and then it became america goes bananas when it went national and uh that one where they just read comic books to you yes video comics they nickelodeon used to be owned by uh warner brothers so they had access to the dc comic library so they just had a show where people would read comic books at you. It predicted the brief short-lived era of motion comics that we all hated. And yeah, at the age of, by the end of 85, I was three, which was probably when I would start my love affair with television, which is just being parked in front of it hypnotically.

Your brain was learning to love brands more than other humans. And so these are finally the content that I have hazy recollections of these or that I watched. By the time I got to six, Nickelodeon was a channel that was always on. So reruns of things from 85 into 89 even, I just have committed to memory. So yeah, these have all been great.

I can't endorse the Knacksacks series enough we just passed uh thanksgiving and your thanksgiving uh you you skipped ahead and did the thanksgiving special as well that was really good yeah i do occasionally break chronology in order to talk about something a little more festive i'm going to be uh doing the rugrats hanukkah special uh in a few weeks so oh awesome yeah i did like i think you did it a few years ago you did an episode about the wienerville hanukkah special which was yeah i totally forgot about the exact opposite of quality to the rugrats oh come on you don't like screaming puppets i don't like screaming puppets well greg i was curious so too what is your history with the simpson uh very often on uh when i was kid, up until I was probably about 14,

I didn't really have any control on the evening television. After like five or six, that's parents' TV. So I was bound to what they would watch. And they were very sporadic Simpsons watchers. They were also very cautious because there was that kind of right wing backlash. The, you know, the H.W. Bush screaming at the TV deal. And they were very cautious about that. But then they actually watched it and was like, this is fine.

This is what's what's the president going off about? So I've I've enjoyed it. I got especially really invested in the Who Shot Mr. Burns arc. I actually, I believe there was a submission thing? There was either a submission thing where you guessed who it was, or someone lied to me about a submission thing

that I sent in a letter thinking it was for some reason I thought Skinner. Oh. I cannot remember my logic in that, but that's who I accused. Well, unfortunately, I have to break the news to you. You were lied to. The only way to enter the contest was to call, use the 1-800-COLLECT service during a certain period of time.

And then after you made your collect call, you would be asked to choose. Right? Is that how it worked, Henry? Yeah. I mean, you know. I'm remembering it wrong. Oh, actually, they would have to have submissions. Yeah, legally.

Legally. They have to let you submit for free. So maybe that was the, you got to do the secondary submission. You wrote a parent's brains on a three by five postcard. Yeah. So it's always kind of been this, this background element. I haven't been able to, wasn't able to commit to The Simpsons until past its real, what many would consider its prime years. Season 10 specifically, I didn't see at all because I was homeless. So I didn't have any television viewing at that time.

So going back, especially recently, has been kind of like a mission to see what passed me by. That's not, well, I'm glad we could help with that in this episode. Wow, that's quite a story. I'm glad everything worked out. Well, this episode, for me, I think, actually, is kind of a messy episode. This feels like an episode. We talk about them getting tired at the end of the season.

This feels like one of those. It happens even in the best of seasons but uh i do want to talk about the writer of this episode a new credited episode writer for the show so uh julie thacker who is also the uh the second wife of mike scully he calls her the good one so they got married in 1999 the same year of the show that we're in right now so they were either newly married or about to get married, but that's when they became a husband and wife. That's sweet. That's sweet. And she had five daughters. That's a lot of daughters. That is quite a number of daughters. They were busy.

I guess he hired her for his first season because her first episode she wrote on as a producer or co-producer was Treehouse of Horror 8. So the season nine treehouse of horror eight so the season nine treehouse of horror basically she wrote through all of mike scully's seasons and left with him when he left the show in season 12 and after that she created uh now three shows with mike scully so number one is the pits number two is complete savages and number three is duncanville and i did want to highlight the pits because i was looking at your Twitter account, Greg, and I saw you talking about The Pits and it reminded me of how bizarre and just very, very off the show was for when it aired because it is a very much a get a lifestyle sitcom,

but about 10 years after Get a Life aired on Fox, where it's just a very high concept comedy about a family where everything bad happens to them. So it's very much a live-action cartoon. But I included the theme song that Henry can play here just to give you a sense of what the show is about. So that's the pits. What we're missing from not watching the theme song is that there's scenes of them of this very kind of wholesome brady bunch full house family being chased by dinosaurs tussling with werewolves uh there's a gusher of blood hitting them it's uh it's very this was a

post uh the brady bunch movie and i think there was this kind of desire to recontextualize this really old sitcom formula, which The Simpsons kind of is. I did not mention in my Dennis the Menace episode of Knickknacks that Matt Groening hated Dennis the Menace and made Bart Simpson as kind of a response to how not menacing Dennis the Menace is. But yeah, there was this kind of this desire to recontextualize sitcoms in this very absurd way, which was already kind of old hat by time 2003 came around. It really was. And it's just, it was weird to see this show because what you're not seeing, they get chased by dinosaurs in the opening theme song. Also, a lot of other things happen to them. Like, you know how like in a sitcom, when they're showing off the characters in an old-fashioned sitcom opening,

they'll just get like a little shot, like opening a door and saying, hi, well, in this one, the mom is bitten in the neck by a cobra. And again, like the song had the word, the phrase open sores in it. So not the best show to be like a post 9-11, let's all chill out show.

So seven episodes were made made five of them aired i remember i i really want to re-watch it again i'm not sure how great it is and i do want to talk to mike scully about it because we've interviewed him twice now but i remember in 2003 mike scully was still like public enemy number one for simpsons fans because the common uh theory was like well he ruined the simpsons and then also futurama was canceled in 2003 so anything that came on Fox in 2003 the refrain was they cancelled Futurama for this so that's exactly how I thought about The Pits so I did hate watch

The Pits all of it that aired but I remember none of it it's not awful it's not great it's okay B minus there's a young Lizzie Kaplan playing the daughter I was shocked seeing that in there.

And also, Dylan Baker, this great character actor who's been in a billion things, him being the lead in anything is surprising to see. I love when character actors get a lead role in something. But no, I was completely disengaged from Fox programming in 2003, so i totally missed this i probably would have made time if this had come out in like 98 i would have just watched it but uh yeah i was i was uh not making time for it then so yeah it is heads and shoulders better than the other show complete sav, which is just a bunch, was produced by Mel Gibson.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I don't know if Mike Scully and Mel Gibson are the best of buddies now in current times. I would hope not. It's just wall-to-wall man jokes. Jokes about women are like this and men are like that. And it's awful. I mean, it was a big deal at the time to get Mel Gibson to produce and even make cameo appearances in a TV show. That's right.

He did show up a few times. He was kind of their Troy McClure on the show, I believe, as Scully explained it. Like, he'd host their videos and whatnot. But as a different character, not as Mel Gibson. Speaking of the Mike Scully backlash, Julie Thacker getting on the show did not help that because, uh, I went through like old usenet boards and some old Simpsons fan forums that are archived.

And, uh, there were more than one accusations of nepotism, uh, because Brian Scully, uh, Mike Scully's brother also got in on the show. So there's a lot of conspiracy theories

going around about that. I think I would make the same posts when I was a teenager or at least agree with them. But now that I've grown up and I've entered the working world, it's just like, well, everyone just hires their friends.

That's just how every business works. It's not a meritocracy at all. It's just like, and Julie Thacker's touted it and everything, but I understand how the world works now. It's like, well uh this woman i know is really funny maybe i'm also dating her but yeah come on the show and write my brother's really funny he can write for the show too like you see these opportunities you want to give them the people that you love well and if it's somebody you're going to be working with all day you'd want to work with somebody you like but

yeah i mean i think that kind of thing is easier to identify when it is like a familial or marriage relationship. But it's like if Simpsons fans wanted to complain about favoritism, every single right. Like the majority of writers in the first four seasons were roommates with each other in Harvard. So they're all from the same family. That's the Harvard lampoon. Yeah. It's not what you know. It's who you know.

Exactly. Which like, you know know when you accept that in entertainment then you can just go like well this was good in spite of this or it was bad because colin jost is just like a harvard lampoon douche who hires his friends to write bad comedy for snl you can say both of those things like uh it's i guess really it's about which year of the lampoon had funnier writers and which had a worse crop of them since the lampoon will control all of comedy i do have a few more things about the pits before we continue because it's just fascinating this whole pit story so again seven

episodes uh produced five aired i don't know if the two that are lost or anywhere right now but you can find all seven on on youtube right now okay awesome so you can watch them all uh just let me know how you what you guys think about them i want to know if they're worth watching but so also in 2007 i read that they were kicking around the idea of making the pits an animated show on fox they produced a pilot which i could not find online but the pilot did not get picked up for 2008 uh season so there you have it and of course mike scully and julie thacker are now co-creators of the upcoming Duncanville, which Mike Scully talked about on our most recent interview with him. And

that'll be airing, I believe, in February, co-produced with Amy Poehler. Yeah. And she's one of the co-stars with Rashida Jones, where they play. One of them plays a boy, one plays a girl, and they have a crush on them, as Scullyully put it if you're a parks and rec fan who wanted to see amy poehler and rashida jones get together you'll finally be able to on duncanville uh i i wish them nothing but the best in their new show yeah i think i mean julie thacker too getting uh yeah i mean it's it's weird to have uh the the showrunner's wife be a writer on the show it does seem like favoritism. Yeah, I don't know what the timeline is.

Were they dating before that? Did they meet through the show? I mean, my current girlfriend works for us in a way, so who am I to judge? No, it's easy. They're always with you, especially when your job takes up so much of your life. It's easy to just intermingle those things.

And I think, too, probably Julie Thacker was the one woman in the writer's room in those days anyway, takes up so much of your life it's easy to just intermingle those things uh and i think too like probably julie thacker was the one woman in the writer's room in those days anyway so if she wasn't there it would have been entirely a boys club instead of just a boys club with one wife included uh but yeah but the story for this episode was inspired by a real life occurrence in the scully's life where basically their school required their children to do volunteer work in order to meet certain credentials and the Scully girls had to volunteer at a nursing home uh that she the Julie remembers Mike not being there for any of it I love that I love she's taking him to task on the commentary of just like uh if you'd have

attended these Mike you'd know that this was really hard to do. And I had to do all of it. So yeah, a lot of the jokes near come from her experience of being in a nursing home. The one funny anecdote I remember is her saying, the joke in this episode is that the prize for winning bingo is a banana. In her real life experience, it was half a banana. That was the prize in bingo. Only half a banana banana these poor moms of the 90s like my mom just tasked with on top of a job and uh taking care of the home if your kids have an after-school project you must be their escort like god as a kid i remembered being mad if a parent didn't see me do something or whatever and now i look back on it just like they were busy

it's hard i wouldn't want to watch a kid do anything ever oh yeah the other funny thing i remember is julie saying uh the old people loved young skin and touching young skin that uh that's yeah well also this episode was inspired by the uh the 1998 scandal of the salt lake city olympics oh you're right yeah as uh now the olympics have been full of bribery and greed and a lot of back dealing long before 1998 but i think at least for americans this was when it was exposed to us that such things went on because in 1998 salt lake city got uh the olympics that well i believe it was going to be for O2. They get the O2 Olympics. And a lot of people were saying, like, why the fuck would anybody go to Salt Lake City,

let alone the Olympics? And as USA Today put it in their retrospective, Back in 1998, accusations were made that various cities hoping to host future Olympic Games bribed numerous IOC members with all kinds of gifts including cash cosmetic surgery trips to disneyland and proving that no bad idea goes completely out of style college scholarships for ioc members children so it exposed a ton of bribery so you can see why in that when they're writing this probably in mid to late 1998 they're all thinking of well what if springfield had to bribe people like salt lake city did for the olympic committee so that's that's why we get all this olympic stuff

in there and there was uh apparently just uh in 2016 uh the olympic advisor for the japanese uh 2020 olympics he resigned when he got caught in a big-time bribery scandal of like hiring olympic committee children to uh to fake jobs for just big-time money and the olympics destroys whatever it touches pretty much whatever city it touches yeah it's springfield would not survive hosting the olympics it would tear it to pieces i actually have some statistics here if you'd like oh go for it uh the 2016 olympics in rio de janeiro brazil uh went 10 billion dollars over budget an estimated budget 3 billion but went to 13 billion brazil ended the olympics in its deepest recession since the 1930s and was forced to cut funding to schools hospitals and police the 2014 The 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia

went $38 billion over budget. $12 billion estimate versus $50 billion actual. Wow. The 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy was funded by a scratch-off lottery game and lost an estimated $3.2 million. And the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece has become the poster child of Olympics ruining an economy.

If you actually get into the weeds on that, that's not entirely fair. But it is a long-standing pop culture idea that the Olympics ruined Greece. Yeah, Friends of the Show, the Citations Needed podcast, has a really good episode about how the olympics is a huge scam that just ruins whatever it touches yes yeah yeah well cities spend tons of money for the honor of getting the olympics thinking it'll be put them on the map and instead they end up getting uh like really screwed over and same with the world cup the world cup also destroys places it might even be more evil than the olympics possibly

i have one more thing to mention up top here where uh this whole episode they don't really touch upon it on the commentary this whole episode is sort of a soft one flew over the cuckoo's nest parody where bart is very much the jack nicholson character instead of being the uh the sane person in the world of the insane he is the young person in the world of the old force to be with them and trying to change them and it's sort of uh it is a parody if cuckoo's nest ended on that scene with jack nicholson taking them out on the boat instead of just like one episode of him having fun with the uh the asylum people both yeah but yeah of course um i thought i was so clever when i was watching like oh that's nurse ratchet but then the native american guy shows up and throws the drinking

fountain through the window so uh I wasn't so clever. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was my first movie that I claimed was my favorite movie in order to impress adults. What's your favorite movie? Instead of saying Who Framed Roger Rabbit, I said, oh, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. And I think Godfather was my first of that poserism as a child. I was probably like, uh, vertigo. I watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest because there were just so many references to it in classic Simpsons that I had to make sense of them.

And I don't think I really fully understood the tragic suicide at the end of that film in my childhood. Assisted suicide. Yeah, I think that's an issue. Why I think this one is messy is that it can't fully commit to even the one flew over the cuckoo's nest thing because they also bring in the idea that bart has a misconception about what old people should act like and he wants them to act like on tv so it's like well is that the idea or is it or is it a cuckoo's nest parody

like it kind of it mixes too many things with not enough time either. It all feels kind of rushed. It doesn't transition smoothly. And you really can't feel the point A to point B to point C in this. If you fall asleep in the first minute of the show and wake up in the last minute of the show, you cannot possibly guess how these two points got together. It doesn't help that they had already done better Cuckoo's Nest parodies in the show you cannot possibly guess it's true two points got together it doesn't help that they had already done better cuckoo's nest parodies in the past including with the chief because like it's about time somebody reached out to me when they ask him if he wants any gum

and also the scene from the clip show where barney tries to kill homer and then throws the drinking thing through the window and escapes that way oh yeah he really needs a girlfriend yeah to get a third one of those jokes, there's a few. We say it every time a lot in this season. There's several times it's like, well, they kind of did that joke before. They've kind of done that joke twice before.

Although I did laugh like a huge gut laugh when the chief throws it back through the window for the act break of the second act and scares Lisa. That is a good joke. Yeah. The Simpsons will be right back. We hope this week's episode of Talking Simpsons didn't leave you hungry for taquitos. But a big thank you to our guest, Greg, from the channel Pop Arena. If you guys enjoy Talking Simpsons didn't leave you hungry for taquitos. But a big thank you to our guest, Greg, from the channel Pop Arena.

If you guys enjoy Talking Simpsons, you really should check out all of his knickknacks videos. They are really, really good. Thank you so much, Greg, for your time. And please, if you're a fan of this podcast, did you know that you could hear next week's episode a week ahead of time and ad free? Did you know you could also do that for our sister podcast, What cartoon where we cover a different animated series each week the only way you can do that if you sign up at the five dollar level at patreon.com slash talking simpsons folks who sign up there and support me and bob doing this full-time not only get access to every episode of this and what a cartoon a week ahead of time and ad free but you also get to listen to

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And if you sign up in December, you'll get to hear our one for this month, which is The Iron Giant. I think you're going to enjoy it. Over 40 hours of exclusive podcast content if you're a $10 subscriber at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. Oh, so the episode opens at the International Olympic Committee. We get to see that they change up the logo so it's not interlocking rings because they are very litigious at the Olympics.

Even their parody of Izzy, the Atlanta Olympics mascot, does not have different colored rings on him. It's all the same color. Oh, I have a lot to say about Izzy. What is he? Well, we'll get to that in a minute. But let's hear the opening as the Olympics come to Springfield. You are all crazy!

The answer is Buenos Aires! Hokkaido! Cleveland! London! People, people, please! You are forgetting what the Olympics are all about. Giving out medals of beautiful gold, social silver, and shameful bronze. I have here a letter from a little girl named Lisa Simpson. She says her town might not be important enough to host the Olympics, but she asks if the torch could

just pass by so she can experience the glow that we feel every day. Well, I say we don't bring her the torch. I say we bring her the Olympic Games. Who is with me? Well, I don't care. It's my decision. I forgot they even added a cricket shirt there. That's nice.

Yeah, so the outside sign says, now with Myanmar. And that was a new Southeast Asian nation as of 97. Oh, okay. That's a good joke. Interesting coincidence. The day this aired, April 25th, 1999, the sixth president of the International Olympic Committee, Michael Morris, died. Oh. Mysteriously or just a heart attack? the sixth president of the international olympic committee michael morris uh died oh mysteriously or just uh heart attack no just just from being 84 years old oh that'll do it yeah that sounds

like a conspiracy to me that's a common cause of death being 84 this bit here though this opening it feels like them just redoing the model un jokes they did for das bus like everybody looks like they're at a small world i i was uh I was conflating a lot of the jokes. I thought the Polish jokes were in this episode from Das Bus. As we know from the real UN, people don't dress like their country when they go to work.

They all just wear business suits. I think they should dress like their country. They should make the French guys wear berets. They have to. I like when the French guy throws the wine at him. Seemingly the IOC chief had wine of his own to throw back at his face.

They prepare when there are Frenchmen around. The rubles joke, 1998 did see a strong inflation of the ruble. It wasn't worth 1,000 rubles, though. At the time in 1999 when this episode aired a dollar would get you 24 rubles as opposed to six rubles which is its worth at the start of 1998

uh and then that mongolian joke not so great the master of accents hank azaria yeah oh yeah he was very nice to us by the way very nice guy great Great guy. Wouldn't want to make fun of him. His take on Mongolian was interesting. Sure. Yeah. And though I do like the joke that being the third best in the world and getting bronze should definitely be an honor, but everybody treats it like shit. Like if you're, no one has a parade for a bronze medalist. They should make it a more valuable medal third place.

A more valuable. You're the third fastest person in the world? Whatever. Here's a brown medal. Yeah, fuck off. Like, yeah, I especially think in America, it's like gold or go home. We don't. We don't.

And probably in other countries, too. But we definitely only care about gold this letter that lisa wrote for the olympics uh it does remind me of as a child living through olympic bidding fever oh right you were close to it yes in 1990 my family lived in a suburb of atlanta georgia uh marietta and we got to live through the olympic fever like they were pushing so hard to get the olympics and i remember in september 1990 finding out seeing the the clip a million times over of the olympics goes to the city of atlanta yay cheers and now atlanta olympics are back in the news with that richard jewell movie right yes yeah the the richard jewell film. I'm looking forward to seeing that one, just because I lived it, man.

And, you know, hey, Clint Eastwood, he makes one out of ten films that's still pretty good these years. That's one of his? Oh, yeah. Of course it is. It's about how the government overreaches and does too much and hurt an innocent white man. Oh, and it's about how the media also,

if the trailer is to go by, it's the media going like, it's a big fat white guy. Let's take him down. I'm looking forward to when he's still directing at 103 and his brain doesn't work anymore. So he's just making outsider art at that point. Starring lots of people.

It's like he's just filming the character's feet. It's amazing. It's a field of empty chairs. it's all to be yelled at uh so yes the though unfortunately we didn't live in atlanta by 96 we'd have moved we moved out we moved out of jacksonville got escaped that olympics fever yeah sadly but uh but i was also there for uh for another part of the olympic fever what's it the uh the debut of what's it so uh he was revealed at the end of the 92 olympics i was still living in georgia at the time and so we were all glued to it because uh as you know at the end of every olympics they do a ceremonial at the closing

ceremonies they do a ceremonial handoff to the next city that's going to have it that's how we learned about like uh didn't like the prime minister of japan come out of a green pipe or something like that came out of a green pipe and when everybody was sharing it people who actually know japanese politics say like you don't celebrate this guy he's the fucking trump of japan like shinjo abi sucks but uh it wasn't cute to see him in that pipe i i applauded i don't need to know international politics but uh but yes at the 1992 games it ends with everybody waiting at least in atlanta to see what our mascot's gonna be and it is a blue glob of toothpaste with a bunch of rings on them

called originally what is it and uh i liked it i was a dumb kid i was eight years old i thought or 10 i thought he was cool it looks like a brazilian cartoon character i i had a can of coke that was the inaugural what what is it reveal can of coke and i kept it for the longest time just to see see izzy on my bookshelf every day but But adults hated him. And the rings are represented on his body, right? Yes, yeah. He's got three rings on his tail and two on his eyeballs. Disgusting. He was widely rejected by adults.

Everybody in Atlanta hated What Is It? And he was retooled a lot over the next three years until, I believe it's at the start of 95 he is officially reintroduced as easy so when they bring up was it the what's it in here that's his original design by 96 he was easy a slightly more palatable blob of what is he there was a television special is he? There was a television special, Izzy's Quest for Olympic Gold, which is now considered lost media. And I believe Rob Paulson voiced Izzy. Wow.

Yeah, and there's also a platforming game, Izzy's Quest for the Olympic Rings. I was going to ask you about that lost media, Greg, because you're better at finding those things. Is it truly nobody taped it off TV back in 95? I'll never say nobody. We're still finding plenty of stuff that's, you know, someone records it, don't know what they have, put it in a closet for decades. So it's very, very possible, especially since this was a special event tied to the Olympics, that this will eventually show up. But as of right now, as of this recording, no known footage is available. We have some animation cells, the firsthand accounts.

But as of right now, it is nowhere to be found. Somebody needs to fly down to Atlanta and start knocking on the doors of old grandmas and grandpas and see if they've got the tapes of it in there. I think that's where you're going to find it. Say What You Will about Izzy is a very stupid... He reminds me of... For some reason, he reminds me of Bubsy. Maybe it's the Ron Paulson connection, but he...

Oh, yeah. He's that kind of character. You said he originated in the video game as a character platformer. I believe you. Yeah, I mean, yeah, they're both in bad video games so uh it makes sense say what you want can you guys name any other olympics mascots is there a good one there's got to be a good one for uh tokyo because japan they do mascots better than anybody you know i haven't seen it though but yeah it's weird when they're doing the the

news broadcast that they bring up uh what's, and it's very clearly Izzy. But then they say the Montreal Vampire, which was not a thing. Oh, yeah. That one I fact-checked. olympics was uh akum but sorry amic a uh a black blob with a rainbow on it that's apparently supposed to be a beaver that's uh the uh the the japan ones don't look too bad i'm looking at them now they look just look like kind of digimon ish okay yeah they could be better but they're not bad nobody can name any other mascots so So love Izzy, hate Izzy. At least you know who Izzy is.

That's true. Nobody remembers the Salt Lake City one, even if it's just trying to remember the American one. Just the Mormon guy, right? A friendly, smiling Mormon. No, it should be a golden plate. That should work. Oh, yeah. Platey. Yeah, that the Izzy thing

was even animated by Phil Roman who was handling Simpsons animation at this time. So maybe somebody who worked on the What's It

animated that. Drew Izzy in that scene. There ought to be some crossover even overseas. Maybe Phil Roman just has like

he's got to have a master of it in his home somewhere. We're going to demand it. Using the power of our show. Dig out your tapes, your 1996 tapes. 95. 95 tapes.

Find it, please. But yes, the Springfield news is excited about the Olympics. Springfield was shocked today to learn it will host the next Olympics. Economists predict our city will experience the same boom that Sarajevo enjoyed after the 1984 games. And it's all because of your letter, Lisa. Well, actually, I just wrote it for a school assignment. Everyone else wrote to the Backstreet Boys. To honor the arrival of our foreign friends and enemies, Channel 6 is sponsoring a contest to find a Springfield Olympic mascot. The winner will join such other memorable mascots as the Atlanta What's It and the Montreal Vampire. A mascot contest? I'm sure to win that.

Unless one of you jinxes me. No one's going to jinx you, Homer. In fact, we're rooting for you. Yeah, go for the gold, Dad. Shut up, shut up, shut up. I did enjoy that picture of the Montreal vampire. Yeah, it's a buff vampire. Again, there's no, why would Montreal have a vampire? What associates vampires with Montreal?

Those are the 1976 Summer Olympics, by the way. Ah, okay. One other thing I love about Izzy is that I think his first presentation it was also like in cg so it was like 1992 it's early computer graphics but they think it looks really good but it looks like shit like that's another reason he looks like a polygon as well and he has all these like lack of characteristics i think very round very they they slimmed him down when he became izzy the izzy that appeared in that lost media he is a much more uh nimble character and uh which which fits his activity his active lifestyle as an olympian uh it made me feel old hearing lisa say backstreet boys i don't like it i don't she it just makes me sad to think of uh the girl from

1990 now talking about her school chums writing letters to the they're all uh probably performing on cruise ships now right that's where that's where uh people of our generation go to see the bands they used to like i know the backstreet boys a few years ago did a tour with the new kids on the block it was a it was a combo tour for uh for oldies to, for old children to see them perform together. And yeah, so Homer, I like Homer, apparently thinks the entire family's out to get him and wish ill on him.

So he first presents a thing that clearly killed their cat, Snowball. Like if you're going to encase a cat in papier-mâché, including covering its mouth, that cat is dead it was healthy and i guess i could breathe through the eye holes i guess it hissed at home or afterwards how did even stay still for that long very cooperative while it it hardened i'm gonna say cat drugs uh and i do like that lisa calls her my cat which is like they kind of waffle on that from time to time of like is it the family's cat or

is it lisa's cat like i think in future ones when they'll do snowball specific stories the rare times that happens they're right she's identified as lisa's yeah i think snowball gets about one joke per season i feel like it's a few more seasons until they do the episode where they kill snowball off and eventually replace her yes homer then knowing i like that homer knows how comedy works and he's like well knowing that you hated my first idea here's my second in this next clip well you said i couldn't do it but here it is meet abby the olympic tabby how'd you get the eyes to move? You paper-mache-ed my cat? Just for the prototype, honey.

Knowing you always hate my first idea, I prepared a backup. How about a big Olympic hello for Springy, the Springfield Spurring? Those aren't the dog's eyes, are they? Hey, that's cute. Good work, Dad. It's fun for the whole family. The Springfields! Bering! Those aren't the dog's eyes, are they? Hey, that's cute! Good work, Dad! It's fun for the whole family, and the ends are razor sharp to protect our nation and its interests.

Ow! God bless America! So that's going to be a lot of springs coming up in eyeballs soon. Boy, they were most interested in the springs because of the pain they can inflict, I think. I like that Homer takes the razor sharpness as a way to talk about the militarism of America, I guess. And there's two jokes in this episode

about pricking a boy's finger with something. Oh, you're right, yeah. Except Bart did not get the dangerous infection so that's true and they didn't even draw blood on him like well what a cop out but yeah the the springfield spring uh very out of nowhere i do like on the commentary they use that as an excuse to talk about how they design they were designing characters or things at that time through kind of ron haugi working as the middleman in the writer's room. Yeah.

In case you forgot, he came from Ren and Stimpy, Ron Hauge. He was a writer on Ren and Stimpy who did like some, he wasn't like a border or like a layout guy or anything like that, but his art skills did lend to the writing of that show. So he was on hand to sort of interpret what the writers were saying for the artists.

I mean that, if I were the artists on the show i would love having to finally have an animator in the room who could say like well this is how to actually express this or that actually is really hard to animate i think i think the writers maybe listen more to another of their group than when an animator tells them that's really hard it's great on the commentary where mark kirkland even says uh is asked what's the hardest to draw he's like uh mobs they're really hard to draw them then they say well we do that every episode don't they and the kirkland's like yep you sure do you sure do it's not an episode without a mob this one doesn't have a mob but it does have a giant crowd on a sinking ship.

Yeah, it has a smaller mob of elderly people. Springy's not the best design, but is it any worse than What's It? I don't think so. Not really. It's very much like a rare video game design. By rare, I mean the company rare. Oh, yes. Google-y.

It's like put eyeballs on an existing thing and you have life. Sort of like Forky from Toy Story 4. Oh, yes. It's kind of how they're doing pokemon these days oh yeah yeah it's just i'm looking around the room uh how about a lamp pokemon yeah they've done a lot of pokemon designs it's hard they gotta give them a break all right and everyone better appear in the next game or i'm gonna revolt so then there's a they do the classic you know newspaper gag uh saying that pickpockets are coming in from out of town

to help with the rival of the Olympic Committee. But then there's a very uncharacteristic Simpsons editing style move of like, they instead of fading or just hard cutting, the newspaper move slides left as the next scene slides in. I think it's definitely like a video effect it's not done in animation but i think they just thought they could make it look cool because

as it's sliding over someone's pushing the broom so the broom is almost like pushing the uh the newspaper away you know the big newspaper image away but yeah you don't see something like that that often in this in this next bit of stuff it's just a bunch of silly jokes about how they're changing the city. The lap dancing into Lapland dancing, not the funniest, especially because it should be something you write around the letters lap. Instead, it's like it just completely rearranges the letters. They shift it to the left. Yeah, it's not my favorite gag. I feel like everybody learned what lap dancing was after the Elizabeth Berkley appearance

on the David Letterman show to promote Showgirls. Not enough jokes about Laplanders, though. Where is Lapland? I don't know. You're revealing my ignorance. I'm more ignorant. We get to see Wiggum shooing off his animal friends. I feel like it should be better as Moe,

if Moe is saying goodbye to his rat friends but i like uh rizzo and cinnamon those are fun names yeah by the way lapland is in finland no comments delete the comment you already made as soon as i said i don't know where it is please and uh then we get a reference to the tire fire which discontinuity here they say the there's a sign that says the springfield tire fire was established in 1989 that's when the simpsons series premiered in december of 89 we're in the 30th anniversary soon pretty exciting but that's not what they did before in the flaming mose episode when they first showed the tire fire it was established as the 25th anniversary of the tire fire in 1991 meaning it started in 1966 so they got that wrong and i'm wearing my genius

at work shirt as i say that i bet the writers are happy now that frankie exists because they could just type in tire fire and see the amount of times they've referenced to be like oh yeah we did make this joke or that we said this about it it probably has eased up their job i think they just had to make these assumptions back then of like well we we had a springfield tire fire right well when was it ah forget it let's just say it started when the show started the comedy of a long-running tire fire that nobody ever pits out that then the joke is all they needed to do was spray it with a slight amount of water that it goes out. So yes, the IOC is seeing the sights of Springfield. They say that the sewer has never been cleaner, which I like the implication that Lenny and Carl seemingly cleaned it personally.

They're very bashful about it. Even Burns is pretending that his nuclear power plant is a solar power plant, which I guess he's going to make a lot of money off the Olympics. That's why he got into it. And I also really love the silliness of the line, we're willing to do anything, including but not limited to anything. Yeah, you know, with the title,

The Old Man and the Sea Student in this episode, I expected this to be like a Burns show. I totally forgot he's barely in it. I want more Burns. And this would be the second of three times that I can recall that they used the old man in the sea to base a title off of. So the old man in the Lisa, the old man in the sea student,

and then season 14, I think is the old man in the key. Oh, which is about grandpa Simpson learning to drive. Oh yeah. That one. Now, yeah.

You know what? Also, it's very generous to call bart a c student he is not he's an underachiever that's that goes under c level made a whole episode about his grades and a d plus was the best he could do old man the d student you lose the pun though i guess yeah that's true i like it almost sounds like lawyer talk of including but not limited to anything. I do like how approvingly the IOC all nods at the woman in the bathing suit holding a Tommy gun and a sack of money. That's a very funny little image there.

They then get on to the presentation and Homer is honored. We've just chosen our official Olympic mascot. They picked Springy! In your face, Patty and Selma. Well, we still love you, Siggy. Yeah. That glue really gives it a pop. And now, because the children are our future, here are the children of Springfield Elementary

with a song they call The Children Are Our Future. Children? Children. Children. Children. Future. Future. Are you ready for the children?

Whoa, whoa, whoa The future is a-comin' Hey, hey, hey Children, children Future, future I've never wanted a beer worse than my life. I love you, honey. Are you talking to me or the beer? To you, my bubbly, long-necked, beachwood-aged lover.

Children, children, children are the future. Kids! Is this a purity of anything specific? Yes! God, I love... Is this a purity of anything specific? Just like the platitude you hear from every politician or authority figure where it's meaningless, but it's like, well, that is true. But I do like how the song is just like,

children are the future and also the future is coming. Those are the two statements made in this statement. But I guess on the commentary, they're like, that's all you hear when you are watching people talk about future plans and politicians. And I'm sure we're going to be hearing it a lot more when the election starts ramping up even more. So yeah, just a very generic platitude that everyone agrees with. But that also means nothing because, yes, children will grow into adults. We understand that. It sounds very 70s. I got kind of a schoolhouse rock vibe

from it. I do think George Meyer wrote this and also choreographed it, as I say in the credits. George Meyer famously hates, love hates up with people, so I think it's a little bit from that kind of positivity

bullshit of the 70s yeah and i also feel like it wants to be a rolling on the river uh parody but they didn't get the rights to the music so it's sort of a sound alike parody i though i remember this sentiment i it felt really real to me in 99 when i first saw that because i felt like in elementary school we had to sing stupid songs like this first saw that because i felt like in elementary school we had to sing stupid songs like this in chorus that were just about like general principles of children are the future and hope and all that that maybe had just a tiny bit of better take care of the planet it's for your kids future type things yeah posh and scrimshaw nobody listened to that one adults projecting their wishes for you onto you

i i think children are not the future now i think the future is just uh rising seas that's that's the future boats are the future find one today like the end of this episode yeah i just love how but now it i that's that was one of our longest clips ever i'm sorry for how long it was but i wanted people to enjoy the full banality of children future oh god and yes the dance moves are just they're the kind you would teach a child like a child can only learn so much yeah i think too this comes from julie thacker's own distaste at having to sit through these kind of things i i'd almost at first reads when march takes a beer out of her purse that she thinks it's for her like she's going to drink it and when homer takes it that's when she's angry i think they maybe mistimed the animation that she should act angry when he starts to describe it

but instead she acts angry the second he takes it so it looks more like he just took it from her i didn't notice that but yeah i guess the anger came a little too early so once the song is over seemingly springfield has it in the bag there is no reason for anything to continue skinner is so stupid that's skinner is really out of character here too though that like bart is the last person in the world he should trust and he's the kind of fuddy-duddy who would not like bart's sense of humor skinner is the guy who put all the bullies and Bart in the basement while the Chalmers was visiting. Yeah. But here instead they write Skinner is just a complete moron

who really loves Bart's death comedy jam, as we see here in this next clip. It gives me great pride to officially declare the next Olympics will be held right here in... Wait, wait, we have one more act. The patriotic comedy stylings of Bart Simpson. Thank you, thank you. So, uh, you're from Russia, huh?

Duh. You drunk yet? Duh. Poland, eh? Too easy. How you doing, Germany? Here's my impression of an East German woman. Kiss me or I'll crush you.

He touched my parole sinking. I'm not sinking that. Hey, Swiss Miss, there's no missing you, babe. Lay off the cocoa. Now I'd like to say one last thing to our Olympic representatives. If there was a medal for horrible audiences, you'd get the gold. Peace out. So, yeah, Bart, I mean, he even in Chris Rock late 90s form says peace out and drops.

That was a Chris Rock maneuver. Well, Chris Rock definitely did the mic drop. Now everybody talks about the mic drop, but it actually was. At least he popularized it. I don't fully know how the mic drop began, but he definitely popularized it. There's a really bad mic drop clip out there I've seen. It's about a decade old right now, but I think it's Carlos Mencia who does it. He was just like, you know, we've had a lot of fun tonight,

but just think this could all be gone one day. Like just becoming like super maudlin. And then he drops the mic and walks off stage after this like very maudlin speech about like treasuring what you have and living in the present and stuff like that. Just like, whoa, this is not your routine, dude. He should have just ripped off Chris Rock and then peace out. Drop the mic.

So yeah, Bart's whole routine too. he only makes fun of white countries as well which uh good good move there all right well he didn't get to his eubanky routine so uh yeah hey i thank goodness they we all knew about lake titicaca but we didn't really know about eubanky yet that's true it's a deeper cut well yeah so the next scene where they talk about all these funny city names, it just feels like, I don't know, like too juvenile for the show. Just like, intercourse, Pennsylvania. I did like hearing Chalmers say all that, not knowing that Bart could easily turn those into jokes. Sure, sure. That is funny. Ball State, yes. do like bart passing on poland like that was funny though the and the polish guy i looked it up his outfit is almost exactly the same as the polish outfit that bill house wears in the model un for

that show no wonder i messed it up and i guess so yeah uh chalmers was born in new york uh then went to college at ball state indiana and then lived in pennsylvania so he was just living in the midwest for a bit and i looked it up and I was like, okay, Intercourse, Pennsylvania is real. And it's a real town in Pennsylvania, famous for like Amish stuff. And famously, its signs are stolen all the time because it just says Intercourse really big. And it didn't used to be called Intercourse. It used to be called something else. But apparently, the origins of the town name are mixed up.

It doesn't mean sexual intercourse. I think it means like the meeting of two roads Like the intercourse of two roads Yeah makes sense But of course we know what eventually We only associate intercourse with one thing now Sex Exactly which is why it's funny

When you read when I read old books And the word ejaculated Is used to say he exclaimed Like what are you doing he ejaculated Like so he say i he exclaimed like what are you doing he ejaculated like so he said that then he came what's happening here in this book yes yeah that one really changed a lot i uh i gotta say bart's about 10 years out of date doing an east germany joke yeah it uh the the wall has fallen a long time ago the wall felt like uh the year he was born in this timeline oh yeah for

him to be 10 and 99 yeah you're right also though i do like i think of this that bit sometimes when i think of the concept of comedy and stand-up of homer saying he says what we're all thinking and marge insistently going like i'm not thinking that like that's a good thing to keep in mind about uh about stand-ups today. Bart Simpson would very much have a Netflix special called Triggered. Oh, yeah. An unsafe space with Bart Simpson. And the Netflix image would be just the mic being dropped.

Like, can you handle this? You can't take this hot truth. You see that thing with Pete Davidson, man? I didn't even want to click on the link. I just read the headline, and I just, I can't go there. I can't torture myself with this. I read the whole article. If you go to a Pete David, one of these Pete Davidson shows,

you sign a million-dollar NDA that if you tell anyone about stuff he did or the jokes he tells, then you can be sued for a million dollars does he just really want to say the n-word and be protected i don't know i mean he uh apparently in the last couple years he did some thing in a college that didn't go well and he definitely yelled at the college students that they were too sensitive and they were ruining comedy isn't he like 13 years old also i know he's a child like he's way younger than us and i think he's had some problems yeah let's say i think he's going through some uh exhaustion issues these days note that henry was making the drinky drinky motion okay enough mean things about him let's talk about jan murray no not really uh he's a borscht

bell comedian mostly famous for hosting uh game shows in the 50s and early 60s. I couldn't recall one bit. Apparently, he has a bit part in History of the World Part 1, but I couldn't even find a clip of that. Yeah, and then he was an actor. But game shows went away for a while until the 70s because of all the scandals. So all the game shows he's part of were just never rerun. The 70s shows and onwards are the ones that we see reruns of and the ones that are parodied more. I like that Chalmers brings him up though like he's trying to think of a comedian he says jan murray of all people who was still alive when this episode aired uh passed away i believe

in 06 yeah like 90 so 289 years old same age as their other guest star who died when he died they're both 89 i i tried to find a clip of his stand-up. All I found was a clip of him at Milton Berle's 93rd birthday party. I'm one of Milton Berle's oldest friends. Literally. And then his heart died

and he passed out. I think he outlived Milt. Yeah, I'm pretty sure. Milton Berle died right after that critic episode he was in, remember? Oh, no, he was into the... I remember him being on The Daily Show. Really? Okay.

He's being babysat by one of his wives or something on that. Anyway, yes, so the kids are in trouble, and they get assigned to some community service in this next clip. All right, Martin, for your community service, you'll be setting up a midnight basketball program for inner-city street games. All right, gang, shirts and skins, let's hustle! Millhouse, do you like the beach? Who doesn't?

Good. I want you to pick up all this medical waste that's washed up on the shore here. Ow! I pricked myself! Well, just keep working. You'll prick yourself with the antidote sooner or later. What are you going to do to me? Bart, not all community service is gang warfare and dangerous infection. And to illustrate that point, here's where you'll be working.

The fireworks candy and puppy dog store? No, no, no. Next to it. Settle a bet. Boil or mole? Eww. It is really unfair. It's a very teacher very teacher manager thing that skinner punishes all the students for something that bart did yeah that's true skinner did i actually skinner lets happen but yeah i thought like after i got out of uh grade school in high school this uh you know

making everyone suffer for one person's crimes would end but it followed me throughout my entire working career in fact i think in Henry and Maya's last job, like one person screwed up and we were all punished for it. I forget what even happened, but I was just like, this is still happening to me? I'm in my mid-30s. No, that drove me crazy. Well, I won't name names on it,

but there was one junior staff member who was not doing a good job of writing articles, honestly, because he was just fully untrained and just tired, not ready to do the job. But the entire team of editors for the site were treated like they didn't know how to write articles or find news. And so he went through an over an hour long meeting

to talk us through how to do news articles. And like, okay, well, this is Reddit. You just type in Reddit in your search bar, and look, you can find all the stories here. You can write about anything you see on this page. Yep. Like, I've been writing articles for 20 years. That was one of many last straws.

Yeah. A collection of a bale of last straws, I guess you'd say. I just, I don't get that technique, why people haven't learned. It doesn't make you upset at the person who screwed up. It makes you resentful of the authority figure it never works well also in those situations i i heard this that like the person who the people okay the way when you punish everybody too it makes people who are doing their jobs correctly but who over worry think they're not doing their jobs correctly and then

the person who's not doing their job correctly they think that they're still doing it right so they think well this isn't for me to learn like you just have to be direct in these things but i mean managers are a spineless uh lot so they don't give a shot i am really relieved they didn't show the street gang members on screen that is a real minefield of what they would have drawn there so one of the darker millhouse uh injury jokes is uh you'll prick yourself with the antidote sooner or later that's just us i mean we get this joke and then the spring uh in the eyes joke very soon like two like very uh deeply violent and disturbing gags being stabbed with medical waste is a very horrifying joke and it's also very like feels

like 90s los angeles joke too especially i feel like it's coming close to an aids joke of the time pretty close yeah close i'd say yeah yeah i do like the line though not all community services gang warfare and dangerous infection i feel like if skinner really wanted to punish party would have given him that not the old folks on the old millhouse would be given him that, not the old folks. Millhouse would be ecstatic to do the old folks home instead of stabbing himself with medical waste all day. Again, talk about jokes that are kind of repeated. If you remember everything that was on the way to the box factory, they didn't combine that into one store, the fireworks candy and puppy dog factory. And the fireworks factory was in the poochie show too

oh yes yeah yeah so uh more retreads of jokes there and also though you gotta expect that bart is gonna run next door to the puppy dog fireworks place the second he gets dropped off there like he's not doing this job so i think like uh so on the way to the box factory was a fireworks testing range and the slide factory ah okay yeah no puppy dogs in that case it's just fireworks factories are just on the mind there though there's one thing puppy dogs love it's fireworks they're right next to the fireworks factory it's a bad idea so when bart enters the place he starts pinching at his young skin as julie thacker remarked on that reality. It's a funny drawing of Bart's stretched out face.

It kind of reminds me of Brazil, of the mother getting her face all stretched out. I thought you mentioned, we rarely see the Simpsons character's gums. Oh, yeah. So it's weird to see pink gums in Bart's mouth. And yes, Lisa is there too, and she teaches Bart the ropes.

Oh, no, Lisa, they got you too? Got me? What are you talking about? I've been volunteering here for a year. Hello, let's hear some numbers. I got a nice diagonal going here. B3. You suck my battleship. G52. You suck my battleship. Oh, I got a bingo.

What do I win? A banana. A whole one? Yep. That's the prize, a banana? Their natural mushiness prevents choking and promotes regularity. They're not babies, Lisa. Give them something fun, like cigars or booze.

We tried giving them eggnog at Christmas, but it led to widespread de-shawling. Well, that's what they get for wearing such tight little shawls. Oh! Okay, four o'clock, nap time. You tell them when to sleep? Shh, don't wake them. While they sleep, we suck up excess dirt and crumbs. Here you go.

Make sure you get into every crevice. I do like the Homer grandpa joke. That's a funny one. Yeah, I do like that. He's all that loose skin pulled into the... He's a pretty deep sleeper not to wake up from that. But again, in real life, they only got half a banana, and I assume it was cut up for them. Oh, yeah, you can't expect

Grandpa to eat that banana himself. That widespread de-shawling joke that came up, it did remind me of, I did read some news stories in the past about how STDs or STIs, whatever you call them now, are an issue at nursing homes because people there

still are sexually active. And if you have herpes and have it your whole life, if you have an outbreak and have sex, you can spread disease. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, I remember that. Nobody wants to talk about this danger of STDs with old people because it makes you think of old people having sex. Yeah. Sex!

Though what old Jewish man there is doing is sexual harassment and that's not okay. But our modern old people, I mean, they're our parents now. They're aging into our modern old people.

They're not the shawl wearers of this era. I just wonder what our new generation of old people will look like and what we will look like when we're old. I assume we'll just be wearing

flannels and jeans and stuff when we're old men. Yeah, I would be wearing flannels and jeans and stuff when we're old, man. Yeah, I would think I'll keep wearing the same t-shirts that'll really confuse the youngsters when I'm old. I mean, again, I think we're going to all be underwater. True, true. We'll be wearing scuba tanks.

That's what it'll be. Well, young man, it's Han Solo and Chewbacca, but they're drawn like Calvin and Hobbes. That Yoda's not even a baby. Oh, baby Yoda is the curse of your... It's going to destroy my brain. I just can't deal with it anymore.

Oh, I also like on the commentary, they talk about the line of the woman telling Barla, like, where do you think you're going? Became a runner in the writer's room of just telling somebody, like, where do you think you're going if they're leaving early for work or something? Going back to that One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest parody, parody in quotes. This nurse character comes in, looks like Nurse Ratched, but doesn't act a thing like the movie's Nurse Ratched. No, I don't even think she was written to be a parody of Nurse Ratched. They just needed an authority figure in the room.

And then Mark was like, the director, Mark Kirk, was like, we made her look like Nurse Ratched. So I don't think that was in the writing of the character. They just thought like, oh, this is clearly a Cougars parody. Let's have a Nurse Ratched in the show. Well, this exact design of the nurse at the nursing home, it wasn't exactly a repeat. But if you remember in the Hellfish episode, the nurse is like, the patients are trying to do that. That it was a ratchet-esque design. I think pretty much in this era of the Simpsons, if you told them to design a nurse, they would look like some version of Nurse Ratched.

She's much nicer than Nurse Ratched. She says, don't play with the faces. Yeah. She is far more respectful of Bart than Nurse Ratched is of Jack Nicholson's character. And she just wants to help these poor old people. I like how, too, the second she she says it's nap time they are all out just in their seats sitting up to go to bed or anything uh also i like that jasper always says you sunk my battleship and everybody laughs every time as at the same amount he probably says it

every time he says a letter at least they're happy oh yeah part of the julie thacker experience that she went through for this episode was a lot of bingo oh yeah so she lived through a lot of bingo bingo is a good time i never played it although it was a big money maker at my catholic school oh yeah bingo for the old people they do drag bingo uh one city down i go to every couple of months it's pretty fun oh that does sound like fun yeah i i've played bingo on school trips or i've played it at on a carnival cruise line on a family vacation it is that uh never won obviously but the excitement you feel feel when you've got four filled up and you're like come on say the next one next one. There's an excitement to it. I think that the pace of it is much more exciting than just a one-off thing of cards or roulette

of win or lose. The prizes can really affect that too. It's one thing to be playing bingo for a McDonald's coupon. Another thing to be playing bingo for like a sex toy oh well yes that would that would make a big difference so the next thing the kids are reflecting on their work bart bart is asked how his uh first day of forced volunteerism went uh and i really like that marge just wants a life of consistency and no surprises that

that old people life sounds good and i'm with her i agree like it just and no surprises. That old people life sounds good. And I'm with her. I agree. It just sounds no surprises, nothing, no bad news coming. You just keep living that life. But that's because they're the greatest generation who had all this money sitting around, or at least the white people did from that generation. Just them. Yeah. Well, because they kept it away from the other people. They didn't share.

And then there's a knock at the door, also a very 50s sitcom-style joke, where Homer is saying, like, the steak is tough and he's having trouble cutting through it. That is a very, like, believe it to beaver kind of joke. Great, good steak, honey. The doorbell rings, Homer runs off to get it, very excitedly, like a child. I like when Homer's written as a child. And that's when he sees he's got a bunch of springs that he's having trouble selling, which feels like another retread of the Sugar Man storyline with Homer.

Except in this one. He weirdly opens the crate with a picture of Grandpa and throws it behind him. That was the biggest laugh of the whole episode for me. That was pretty good. Then it goes to the next scene, the old folks' home, and they have the altered dialogue for Gone with the Wind, which also feels like a retread of what they did the season before with a Casablanca alternate ending of having a nice ending for old people.

The Hans Molman line, though, really made it for me. Didn't this movie used to have a war? You've been warned. He gets strong-armed away. But it makes you think, like, what else did they cut out of Gone with the Wind? It has to be, like, a 45-minute cut of that long-ass movie. That movie's too long, so I think they made the right choice.

Oh, Rhett. Rhett. Oh, Rhett. Whereett. Oh, Rhett. Where will I go? What will I do? Frankly, my dear, I love you. Let's remarry.

What a lovely ending. They cut out the best word. Didn't that movie used to have a war in it? Come on. You've been warned. Picture yourself on a beautiful sailboat. the best word. Didn't that movie used to have a war in it? Come on, get up. You've been warned. Picture yourself

on a beautiful sailboat. Ah, can't you just feel the sea breeze in your hair? Or scalps? Say, I hear a foghorn. Boring. Come on, Bart. We don't want to

overstimulate these people. They just had pudding. That's, again, very nice of the nurse ration there. You don't want to be too overstimulated when you're full of pudding. And Bart is proven wrong eventually, so she's right to feed them pudding and put them to sleep. But man, the orderlies dragging Mole Man away. It has to be Mole Man. If it was Jasper or Abe who who said that it wouldn't be as

funny it's it's funniest that mole man is punished this is really the only time it feels like the people in the old folks home are being i don't know if oppressed is the right word but are being talked down to treated badly so patronized i guess i mean the classic joke from the very first time you saw this uh the retirement castle was, please do not talk about the outside world. So that's always been hanging next to the door from the very first time we saw it. I also like that Bart obviously is not a film connoisseur and he wouldn't know the end of this movie, except that it says the word damn in it.

He would know that. I'm sure that's what I knew about the movie the most as a kid and probably even now is the frankly my dear line other than that there's uh the only other line i remember from is one i don't want to repeat because it's uh it's about babies yep yeah that uh i don't feel comfortable saying it i i've never watched the whole thing it just feels like an endless movie to me even when it felt like something you had to watch to be part know what's going on in popular culture now nobody references gone with the wind ever like it's just kind of lost all i know is like the damn line and also the popular reference of like panning over all the bodies oh yeah yeah but simpsons did that too exactly that's why i know it simpsons i only hear it in reference to you know old hollywood

racism along with uh birth of a nation oh yeah and the uh as god is my witness i will never go hungry again that line that's true yeah that's it but three things and also i hear about it when people say that adjusted for inflation it's still the biggest movie ever like is it it sold the most tickets of any film because there weren't televisions or internets the imagination sequence that's that's nice i'm glad the old people are even enjoying it, too. I would think they would be very negative about it. They wouldn't want to listen to some kid telling them what to do. Thankfully, Abe is not having Pearl Harbor flashbacks during this scene.

He seems to remember Pearl Harbor happily. But yes, we then go to Homer trying to sell his springs. Very similarly in the sugar salesman thing, he goes to Skin homer trying to sell his springs very similarly in the sugar salesman thing he goes to skinner's house to sell his spring this is the one time skinner is really allowed uh to be violent uh since since that scene from um lisa the beauty queen where he's the green beret oh yeah and he knocks out the disney guys this uh repeated punching of homer in the face is like uh not the typicalner. He's been pushed to his limits. Which also, again, blame yourself, Skinner. You put Bart on the mic. That's your

fault. But yeah, he punches Homer like four times in a row. I mean, it's a funny animation of Homer springing back and forth, but it seems like that was their original thought. And they're like, well, who punches him? Came a little late. Copyright expired. Now, that's cool. The way he breaks some guy's windpipe. A justice tie, yeah. But yes, then we get to Homer decides instead of going door to door to sell it, he'll sell it via pranks.

Boy, Lenny, you sure look hungry. Have some nuts. Hey, thanks. Oh, my eye. Ow, ow, ow, ow you sure look hungry. Have some nuts. Hey, thanks. Ow, my eye! Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow. Now, if you want to be the life of the party like Lenny here, just place your order for this hilarious novelty item. Homer, get out of here.

Boy, Moe, you sure look angry. Here, have some nuts. Hey, thanks. Ow! God, my eye! Get it out! Don't pull! Don't pull! I said don't pull! Don't!

We're getting to the Lenny getting things in his eye runner. I forgot that it ends like it escalates to them getting their springs caught on each other. I was surprised by how far that went but i did laugh at uh lenny thinking he's supposed to pull away from mo he's like no don't pull don't this is a borderline ren and snippy gag oh yeah yeah yeah hey we've got to run a snippy right around board for this season so you never know well it's funny too that in this scene mo so you never know. Well, it's funny, too, that in this scene, Moe and Lenny are injured equally, but it's the injuries to Lenny that continue.

Moe, I mean, Moe gets hurt every now and then, but not like Lenny gets. Like, in the very next episode, Lenny gets a coin stuck in his head that has a giant gusher of blood. That's right. He's like, hello, ma'am. Lenny is a fun character to hurt. I do like, isolating the audio, I do like hearing Harry Shearer going, ah, in the background. It's very nice.

It does make you laugh. Yeah. God, and then Homer's reaction to Lenny getting stabbed in the eye is him going, like, if you want to be the life of the party like Lenny. And also, there's a really weird super brief insert shot of the word party nuts, just so you can read it in Homer's writing. Which gets close to the

Paul F. Tompkins classic bit about peanut brittle. Just look it up right now if you haven't heard it. It's amazing. But a continuity mistake there, though. I triple-checked this. Lenny gets it in his left eye when it starts, but when he gets it tangled up with mo it's in his right eye i think because lenny is on the right of the shot and so

if it's in his right eye the spring doesn't cross over his nose and it's better shot to draw yeah but that's discontinuity there there's a second spring off screen it switched eyes when we weren't looking he's just that clumsy he's like i got it out now it's in the other eye i mean lenny is a great guy to hear screaming i guess that's that's really why the second they heard harry shearer screaming as lenny they're like ah we gotta hurt Lenny more often. Not Lenny. Not Lenny. So yes, we then head over to the old folks' home again and Bart has seen

enough. And who's waiting for us at the dock? Why, it's all your childhood dogs. I see Petey and Blackie and Schnoodle. Oh, no. Pirates. Pirates. Ahoy, mateys. It's me, Long Bart Silver, and I'm gonna rip you a new IV hole.

Hi! Bart, what are you doing? I'm just trying to liven things up around here. These people need to ride motorcycles and play rockin' electric guitars like the old people on TV. Excuse me, but when those pirates boarded, I swallowed my wedding ring for safekeeping. Get me some hippocack. I'd like to expunge it.

Okay, she's gone. Let's break out of here and have some fun. Should we ask someone? Get up. Somebody will take my chair. Got that right. It's the only one left with padding. The love of the padding.

They're all like, I know that's like in a cheap place. There's only one chair with padding and i got it like uh it underfunded schools oh expunge that's a great word i i didn't know what ipicac was then i uh it took a family guy joke to teach me what ipicac was i knew that because it was part of a puzzle in the curse of monkey island that's how i learned what ipicac was okay which uh if you don't know, it's a vomit-inducing drug. It was the episode of Family Guy where Peter takes over the Jewish guy's pharmacy

and he takes home Ipecac and they have a contest to see who can not vomit the soonest. And then it ends in basically all of them vomiting together. It's basically a giant vomit party on Family Guy. What fun times.

Very early U2, there was the epic challenge which was basically that just racing to see who vomits last boy good times good at least we're doing that for charity now uh i again i wish they'd have done more with bart's weird commercial misconception of what he thinks old people act like, because this is very much in the rapping grandma age of TV. Yeah, I mean, quote unquote, old Jewish man was in the Buzz Cole commercial. Yeah! One sip and I'm totally hip. I think they could have gotten more out of it.

It would have been like Homer wanting a crusty old dean at the college. Yeah. It would have been similar with Bart, but they have to have Cuckoo's Nest and then transition to Titanic. And it's just... That's right. It's a lot of stuff mixed in here. It's too much.

Too many metaphors to really deal with. Any of them. I guess we could have lost one of the Homer spring scenes if we're going to fix this episode and put in a commercial parody that would brainwash Bart into thinking, well, this is what old people are like. But then we wouldn't have had Lenny's eye damage.

That's true. And yes, then we get the whole chief from Cuckoo's Nest scene. I think it honestly goes on too long and we'd seen it done better twice before this in the show. What surprised me, I think a good addition was his re-entry into the uh the institution which is a joke that has not been done before that's true when he comes back using the same method though in 1999 i feel like one comedy writer went to a native american casino and told all his friends about it and then the next four years of cartoons and sitcoms were all like

the indian casino episode like it's just hey i'm so tired of indian casino jokes it let you like dust off all of the like ancient uh native american jokes like making fun of the native american names and things like that so it was just a good excuse to like dust off bad jokes all your f troop material exactly yeah uh though prop 217 that's a reference to mike and julie's So it was just a good excuse to dust off bad jokes. All your F Troop material can be used again. Though Prop 217, that's a reference to Mike and Julie's anniversary and their first date. Very cute. February 17th.

Oh, you know what? When I'm saying all these other references here, they also take about a minute for a Hard Day's Night parody on top of all of that. The most famous version of that song, of course, covered by the New Rhythm and Blues Quartet or NRBQ, Mike Scully's favorite band. I honestly, I mean,

I know they've been going since like the late 60s, but I think the Simpsons put them on the map for most people because Scully loved them and they've been in what, like four episodes so far? Yeah, just so far. Yeah. They are used so much. I mean, they're a fine band they really had money can't buy me love on the mind lately because the very next episode is titled monty can't buy me

love yeah it always confuses me that these two episodes are back to back on top of the constant use of old man in the blank uh for episode titles and then this together in the UN and Olympic committee sort of similarities. So yeah, they, it's a lot of similar ideas bouncing about in the Simpsons writers room. And to think of the money they spent on this too, like even a cover of a Beatles song is not cheap. Even of their early ones.

I think it's a fun idea. I don't know if it works because I think they are trying to simulate the fast motion like the undercranked footage in those old videos and that old footage, but it doesn't quite work out with this kind of animation. Yeah. Too many obvious loops. Yeah, like when Jasper

and Abe are fighting with his leg and Abe's cane, it wants to do that undercranked fast motion you see in a lot of the old Beatles stuff, but it just doesn't work in this animation. They even run it backwards to do the fight, which it just, I get they want it to read like a scene from Hard Day's Night,

but yet instead just reads as them reusing something cheaply. You have to remind yourself, oh no, remember in Hard Day's Night they ran footage backwards to the music. You know, I've never seen Hard Day's Night in full. I've just seen clips of it. I just know this type of video techniques used by the monkeys when they had their own show that parodied this kind of stuff. Yeah, them going down the beach with fast motion.

That's what I really think of when i think of this uh the style cutting a ton of frames which also is hard to do in animation too or it uh or then i mean the slow-mo floating as well that's even harder for them yeah that really i think doesn't read as well the writers are biting off more than the animation could chew especially with a tv budget episode like this yeah though then the skate parks in the wheelchair thing like that just feels it feels like them doing a joke about the thing they're mocking through bard of his misconception of seniors it's like no here here are the bodacious seniors we're just doing a bodacious seniors joke i guess the show is not presenting it as the reality that bard uh wants to believe and it's actually true no old people are cool and like the reality is old

people are cool just for like an hour a day maybe until they need the medication well and then also with old people it's the minefield of like will they say something racist you never know like it's a danger well though i did notice the the first time that one of the wheelchair seniors, it is the return of the, can I come too? Oh, you're right. Yeah. I think they realized they only had two old character designs of an old person in a wheelchair. So they brought her back. So it's her second appearance, non-speaking.

She actually got to have fun. Finally. She got let out of the retirement castle. Though, actually, no, she was at the Hal Roach retirement place. I guess she's been moved over to the retirement castle since then. And Lady Bouvier is a lover. She got to hear all about Abe's date from 10 years ago. Maybe she was already at the skate park.

Maybe she's a regular. Oh, I could see that. And I also do like they do pay attention to the continuity that Jasper has a wooden leg. That's nice. Yeah. And so Bart then decides to take things up a notch with a boat ride. Today's grass is far sharper than the grass in my day. Hey, everybody.

How'd you like to go on a real boat trip? Oh, that's not there. go on a real boat trip oh not a looker a mother full speed ahead damn the torpedoes what do you say put on our tuxedos i want some taquitos they love that line which is why it comes back later it's uh i mean the construction is not the funniest of like telephone joke but hearing old jewish man say i want some taquitos is a funny delivery i think this is the first place that i actually heard about taquitos was this episode so whenever i see taquitos i think of that i want some taquitos i've i've never wanted one though i've uh just a nice little roll of uh beef if you want to get beef in there, but I get them with beans and cheese. Oh, I see. Yeah, like a little taco cigar.

That sounds nice, but... You could make them in your beloved air fryer, Henry, that you can't stop talking about. Sorry, I'm an air fryer. No, actually, Henry hasn't talked about the air fryer in over a month. I'm kidding. It's been a little while. I was inspired further by

Bill Oakley, the Prostal... He's the John the john the baptist of air that's true uh but he's he's the one who turned me on to him and simpsons writer bill oakley he talked about how he never liked hot pockets until he could make hot pockets in the air fryer and now he actually has them with some regularity wow wow sounds dangerous way better out of the... I've started eating a couple Hot Pockets. What is the air fryer doing to us? I don't think we're meant to eat them.

I think it probably is definitely more unhealthy for us. I do think it is. But I would eat taquitos if you made them in your air fryer. I air fried some turkey on Thanksgiving Day even. I've seen a few people doing that online. It's pretty good. Everybody talks about the dangers of frying turkeys, but if you do it with an air fryer, it's still pretty good.

No more scoldings. Greg, you've got to get one of these air fryers, I'm telling you. You haven't heard me talk about this. They're great. I mean, it's a great holiday gift. If you want to surprise somebody with a gift they need, a $50 air fryer on Amazon or Walmart or or whatever totally worth it i'll put it on my christmas list uh but sea captain seemingly is judging the looks of these people who he can't see

like oh but i guess we'll talk about that a little later but how does he know what these people look like maybe um he's he's feeling them he's touching he's just touching their face here devil echolocation powers there you go yeah so then in the next scene homer's using his springs to cook hamburgers i didn't like this even when it first aired because i was like it's just a countdown to him being lit on fire we all know this it's a grease fire yeah though i would think his springs wouldn't even sit on the burner it It's just like the springs would melt when you place them directly on the burner. Or just get really hot. I like that Marge puts out the curtains before Homer.

She's very pissed off at him. She's right to do that. Yes. And then Homer reveals that he's covered Maggie in springs and he starts bouncing her around like a basketball. I do like Maggie's fear in her eyes. And Marge is seriously alarmed at this. She she's like give me my baby back yes uh saying my baby makes it even more intense yeah just like this is not your baby it's my baby homer's humming the we couldn't license the harlem globetrotters theme ah yes yeah it's a sour ge Brown. Well, in just a year, within a year after this,

Bender will do this exact joke on Futurama of spinning around a thing in a kitchen, even. But yes, after Marge tells Homer it's time to get rid of the springs, we then have a classic jerk-ass Homer moment, I'd say. Oh! Are you okay? Some second-degree burns, but some first-class burgers.

I want you to get rid of these springs. But you haven't seen the baby of tomorrow. Ta-da! Now if I drop her, no more tears. Give me my baby! Sit up, Marge. I'm going to the hole! I want these springs out of our house today! You flush one down, it swirls around.

999 springs to flush down. You're not flushing those springs down our toilet, are you? Of course not! 996 springs to bite down. 996 springs. Oh, boy. The scraping as they go down is just perfect, but it also makes me want to die. Oh, yes.

But I think they added the cartoony boing sound effects because Homer is dropping his baby repeatedly in this scene. He softens it a little bit, I suppose. So this is what I don't like about Homer in that scene. Mar softens it a little bit, I suppose. But man, so this is what I don't like about Homer in that scene. Marge directly asks him, are you doing this?

Of course not. And then sings a song about how he is doing that. He's like, you're not flushing springs. Of course not. 996 springs to flush down. And then the way Marge just shakes her head of just like, why do I bother? Yeah, Marge is not uh being

treated very well in this episode yeah uh so we head back to the boat there they're on the open sea you see that lisa has paddle boated out to meet up with bart and uh i do it you know calling her a sea hag that's a very just like little brother thing but i do like the design of lisa distorted in the telescope and this is really where the cuckoo the like the design of Lisa distorted in the telescope. And this is really where the very specific parody of that Cuckoo's Nest scene is happening here. And that they're referencing it directly. The rest of the episode was just very vague Cuckoo's Nest stuff. But this is like, well, here is a scene from the movie. But in that scene, they just have fun.

There's no Titanic parody that attacks them or whatever. In this case, a Titanic parody barges into it with a little gay joke layered on top here. Oh, Abe, you dance divinely. I haven't felt this relaxed and carefree since I was watch commander at Pearl Harbor. Oh, geez. This place used to be crawling with Russian subs. Now there's just four. Ah! Seahead!

Bart Simpson! Bart, are you crazy? You've got to get the old folks home to the old folks' home. No way. They're finally having some fun. How low can I go? That's it. Gee, Bart, maybe you're right. They don't even seem to care that it's medication time. Medication time? Hot dog. But I've set you free. No more nap time, no more

bingo. You can do whatever you want. Let's play bingo. Yeah, let's play bingo. You suck my battleship. The show normally kind of pisses all over old people, but they do come off as very sweet in this episode. The meanest and old person in this is like, where do you think

you're going, lady? But they're just very gentle and easily amused. They just want to play bingo and go back to their routine they're big kids yeah bart bart should have heard them being where it's honestly knowing how negative the old people normally are that the fact they went along with bart's plans at all seem kinds of out of character for them uh but once they hear about medication they're all like no let's get back on that like we're just we were just killing i mean that also is a real shrug of a change in the script where the old people like yeah we were just killing time till we got medication like oh all right i guess that plots over with good good good story but yes once they uh get the promise of pills and bingo they think they're gonna head back to support but then a

little film called titanic came out 18 months before i mean i can forgive them because uh in just a few short months uh putorama the season premiere of the next of the fall 99 season would be here's our titanic episode and news radio did it it was the biggest movie and everyone did their titanic parody animation takes a long time i understand that but titanic came out in 97 all the awards were in 98 this is now 1999 it we'd all seen every single possible titanic joke but i i wasn't that excited have you seen thumb tanic sir uh no best parody i passed by that on the shelf when I walk by it. I got all I needed out of Thumb Wars. I was not going to get Thumbtanic.

It's no bad thumb. Now, Smithies, you say you painted all your Navy buddies this week? Until I was discharged, sir. Because he's gay. I get it. I don't get it, Grandpa. If you guys like all that boring stuff, why did you follow me out here?

Gotta do something, Tilt Bingo. How could you miss that huge boat coming right at us? Oh, two glass eyes. Oh, it's not fair. I'm not supposed to die now. I'm supposed to die in a foolish motorcycle stunt at the age of 15. You're not dead yet, you pudgy little pisser. Jack LaLanne!

Don't worry. I'll save you the Jack LaLanne way. And that's basically all he says in this episode right other than like oh i think that's kind of it but yes that is the jack lane fitness icon uh bodybuilder extraordinaire he was arnold schwarzenegger before there was an arnold schwarzenegger yeah and like the first fitness celebrity yeah fitness guru and like uh we are all kids of the 80s and 90s, and we remember him most for appearing on shows, just being the weird, too-buff old dude who did a ton of stunts in his old age. Or you'd see him on an infomercial or something.

On The Critic, they joked about him doing a marathon while pulling a train with his teeth, right? Yeah, he would often pull things or swim across long distances in his 40s and 50s and 60s. That's why he pulls this boat with his teeth, too. I guess in 1984 was his last stunt at age 70. He handcuffed, shackled, and fighting strong wings and currents, he towed 70 rowboats,

one with several guests, from the Queensway Bridge to the Long Beach Harbor to the Queen Mary, one whole mile. So he pulled 70 rowboats and one with guests one mile that's pretty good at age 70 but pretty good he was killed by what kills many men toxic masculinity so i'll tell you how he died at 96 did we play the death jingle yet oh yes let's play the death jingle for all of our podcast guests who have passed away. Death stalks you at every turn. There it is. Death.

So, died in 2011 at the age of 96. This is according to Wikipedia, and this is cited. He was 96. According to his family, he had been sick for a week but refused to see a doctor. They added that he had been performing his daily workout routine the day before his death so uh see a doctor if you're old and sick folks um when i was like before i read the jim henson uh biography the really big one that came out like uh six or seven years ago i was like oh he had cancer right it's like no he just had a regular like flu and he just never went to the doctor and that's what killed him it's like he was just done him and he was 50

jack land was 96 he was on his way out anyways but still man boy just being a tough guy uh you're gonna make me want to go to the doctor more i i don't henry i can't run this podcast network myself uh i'm fine bob don't i'm i i don't need no stinking doctor leave that saw bones alone i don't like that doctor stupid all i know is if any of us get sick our country will take care of us oh yes they're not going to be thrown to the wolves jack well i do like to that lisa and bart instantly recognize jack lane and know exactly who he is i mean i'd seen him on like infomercials and stuff too as a kid like he'd he'd be on some fitness system or whatever i think after the george foreman grill he was doing the Jack LaLanne juicer.

I think that was one of his, they mentioned it on the commentary. They're like, oh, at the time of the commentary, he was still alive. And I just saw him selling some juicer. And yeah, I'm looking at most of his stunts. Most of them involved him pulling boats while swimming. Damn, they're really, you know, good, smart fit there.

And it looks like Jack LaLanne was definitely ready to play around. Also, I saw that he's kind of a Bay Area icon for me and Bob living in the Bay Area. The first gym he opened, which was apparently one of the first gyms or gyms in U.S. history, was open in Oakland, California. Wow, okay. Yeah. I think he was also so healthy and, you know,

lived so long because he was short. Oh, I see. Tall people like me suffer so many health problems from our tallness. It's not fair. To be compact,

what a dream that would be. So comfortable on all the planes. But what kind of life is that? Is that really living? Yeah. Now, actually, man, I see little people on planes and I'm like, like boy i'd like to

i wish i was five foot one sometimes at least when i'm on a plane i wish i was yeah like my uh my girlfriend uh in front of the show nina she's a foot shorter than me and i think we had to tell her like no flying on planes is very uncomfortable it's like what you can't just curl up in a seat like no so yes the boat hits them they do the paint me like you're french girls joke which everybody was doing at the time and of course they have it be a joke about uh don't ask don't tell as well all the because smithers is gay you see and uh that's unnatural but and also burns isn't naked but skinner is uh sorry smithers is drawing him naked yes yeah which at the very least fits with how he's drawn nude in brush with the

greatness brush with greatness yes including all the liver spots yeah yeah is this bony old behind is uh never look better got it type the kids uh sink think they're saved by jack lelaine but jack lelaine just tears off the front of the boat he's too strong and uh seemingly he just leaves them to drown then the boat capsizes in the titanic style where they're all hanging on to the back of the boat so it's fully a titanic parody not just the uh smashing into it bit there i'm just thinking of all the work the animators are having to do just like okay we'll draw a boat full of people sinking and then coming back up and then sinking again over and over again you can do that right Make sure you can see all the people on the boat, too.

Boy, that sounds really hard. Yeah, and also bouncing on a bunch of springs. Okay, wait. Let's talk about Sea Captain's eyes. Let's talk about this. Okay, finally. So he has two glass eyes. This is established from now on.

At the very least, you could say maybe he had one or both eyes in previous scenes, but at least from this point forward, he is established to have two glass eyes and he can't see anything let's remember this every time we see sea captain and he does anything that shows he has sight we're gonna bring it up every time i just thought this was a family guy joke because i remember there's a uh like a sea captain character and family guy who has four peg appendages and also two glass eyes. Oh, yes. So I just remember two glass eyes being a Family Guy joke,

so I was surprised when I saw it here. I like him tapping his glass eyes with his corncob pipe. That's cute. Nice little foley in there. But yes, I mean,

they even joke on the commentary. They have not kept up with the joke that Sea Captain has two glass eyes, which again, that means you're blind.

Yeah. But yes, as all the old people are about to drown, Abe has a nice speech. This is all Bart's fault. Hit him. I blame him. Kill this all.

I want some taquitos. Leave him alone. Sure, Bart's responsible for our deaths, but he gave us the most fun we had in 20 years. So before we go to our watery graves, I stink of the blue. So like all those old people are just dead of pneumonia the next day, right? That's the thing, yes. Even though they are splashed back up, I would

think the stress and the cold of all that water kills all of them. They're almost definitely dead. We can only hope. Also, I mean, they also have to cheat a bit. They're like, how far out to sea are they? You ask a lot more questions about the Springfield seaport. I mean, honestly, the Mike Scully years are marked by the amount of times people go out to sea.

It really is, yeah. What's going on with that? They're not on the Honey Bunch, though, I don't think. I think the ship of lost souls is a different ship than Sea Captain O's. And then we'll have Weekend at Bernsie's, I think, next season, where they go out on the boat and then kill everybody in the net under them. Do they all get rich and buy boats on the Simpsons? Could be the middle-age boat years, like the midlife boat crisis.

But yes, the A and B plots at least dovetail together, as they say on the commentary of the springs save all of them. And Homer's flushing the springs actually pays off. I do like that Abe's big speech is just ended too early by drowning. That's at least a funny bit about it. And yes, we get to the end and they have kind of a small ending that I think in a very ADR line they try to add an extra joke in. Yeah, by killing Abe. Seemingly. I think in a very ADR line, they try to add an extra joke in. Yeah, by killing Abe, seemingly.

Ah, what a shame. Not a looker in the bunch. So, you working tomorrow at the home, Bart? Well, I finished my community service. Oh, right. But I could swing by after school. I'll bring the limbo stick. Hot diggity!

La, la, la, la, la, la, la! Hey, stop seeking the harness! Oh, no! Can I go? This very last scene is for an episode about Bart and Grandpa's relationship, which this episode is not about. It's true. It was really about Bart. So the episode is called The Old Man and the Sea Student. You're presumably about one old man and Bart, but really it's Bart's relationship with the elderly in general. And then at the end, it's like, oh, no, actually, it was really about Bart and Grandpa. When I think the Flying Hellfish episode was much more about that than this. Yeah, it just kind of pulls it out of the last second for some schmaltzy stuff between Bart and Grandpa.

Also, like, yeah, of course, Bart's never coming back to the old folks' home. Like, no way. Especially not after Abe drops him back in the water. Yeah, it's just trying to pull out some heartstrings at the very last moment. And it isn't particularly earned. And then it just smashes into a, like, The Beatles parody, where they do the NRBQ cover, but it's also the Hard Day's Night record cover with The Simpsons on it,

which is, it's cute, but it's just like, sure, fine. I think it was at the end of the day, they spent all that money on the cover. They're like, we gotta play it over the credits too. So somebody design a Beatles parody cover. I mean, they love The Beatles in this era. The Simpsons, no matter who the showrunner is, loves to make Beatles references.

I do think it's a good design on a Bart Day's night, but though I guess I can't pitch a better parody there. Oh yeah, was it Bart Day's night? That's right. I guess Bart and Hart kind of sound similar. Kind of, yeah. I'd call it a hard day's Simpsons. That's what I'd say. But yeah, it's a real tangled episode. Definitely feels like end of the year kind of thing but there's there are funny gags in it lenny's eye injury is funny uh there i want some taquitos uh there's there's good jokes in this but it's a it's a real messy episode yeah there's good things for a clip show but it just does not gel together. What I like is I'm kind of nostalgic for jokes about this

era of old people who are all dead now, pretty much. If they're not dead, they're kicking off as we record this, but I do enjoy that. I also think the Scully years don't do a lot with old-timey jokes, so it's fun to see them again because I think the Harvard guys, the Harvard showrunners, and Dave Merkin

too, they really love both the old-timey jokes and the cruelty to old people jokes. Yes. And we see that a lot here which is mostly missing from Scully.

Burns is barely a character in Scully's years. Thankfully, we'll get an episode with him next time but it's just fun to see Burns again even for like two jokes.

So, Greg, you've been our guest. Please talk about your amazing YouTube channel, what you're doing, where we can find it and how we can support you. Yeah, I have a YouTube channel called Pop Arena. The main show I do on there is Knick Knacks, which is a chronological look at every single show that aired on Nickelodeon.

It has other programs, too. I'm also talking about the Goosebumps series by R.L. Stine. I talk about some very geeky subjects like Doctor Who, but predominantly Nickelodeon history. You can find me on Twitter at pop underscore arena. And I have a Patreon if you are exceptionally rich and feel like giving money to people who talk about cable. I give to your Patreon.

Me too. It's well worth it. We really enjoy all your stuff. I hardly endorse it. I think it's funny. I retweeted somebody who said just like, I will not watch a three and a half hour Scorsese movie, but I will rewatch the same two hour YouTube video

over and over again. So I think that's really what I do with yours. If I'm like, oh, it's time to eat lunch, I'll watch the Dennis the Menace knickknacks again. Can you tease any of the ones that you're working on or coming up over the next few months? Well, like I said earlier, the Nick at Night episode should be done by the time this podcast drops.

After that, we hit 1986, which will give us a couple of odd shows, a couple of attempts to bring old 50s television off of Nick at Night onto Nickelodeon. But what excites me the most, we got a couple of animated shows coming up. Mysterious Cities of Gold

and Spartacus and the Sun Beneath the Sea. Two very odd, interesting, and fun shows that I'm very looking forward to talking about. Yeah, I'm looking forward to all the anime. Actually, when I was in Vancouver recently, I think Henry and I were having an exchange on Twitter about the two shows on Nickelodeon about koalas that were anime. So The Adventures of Little Koala and also The Nuzzles. Yeah. Nuzzles.

Nuzzles, sorry. Nuzzles is a word. Nuzzle is a fake word yeah uh japan had like this huge koala boom i think they they got a koala uh at one of their zoos and it became extremely popular so they started making koala based media no you're uh all the anime ones have been my favorites i think because watching them for me at least has been this like return of memories that i had completely forgotten of just like my ages four five and six i didn't remember when or how i watched these shows but when i see the little prince opening or just like

certain moments from it i'm like oh yeah yeah I remember all of this now. And to know the background on those productions, I learned so much. You really put in the research, Greg. And it shows. So thank you so much for all you do on Popperina. And in case our listeners are on the edge of their seats, I think we'd agree that The Adventures

of the Little Koala is a superior koala show. Henry, you won me over. I watched the intro, and I was like, Oh, it's the blue penguins. I love blue penguins in anime and video games. That's all. I don't think I agree guys.

Oh, we'll see. I'm a newsles man. Yeah. All right. Well, we'll see when we get, when we get to 1988,

we'll see what happens. But, but thank you, Greg, so much. Thank you for having me. Yeah. Thanks again.

So thanks again to Greg and make sure you check out his YouTube channel youtube channel pop arena he's got a lot of stuff on there but we're obviously big fans of the nick nacks episodes that he does and if you want to hear more of greg he was also on our doug episode of what a cartoon yeah that was a lot of fun to talk a nick show with mr nick nacks and i think he said he'll get to it in like five years there's so much before doug but i can't wait but as for us if you want to support our show and get all of our episodes one week ahead of time and ad free please go to patreon.com slash talking simpsons if you sign up at the five dollar level you'll get just that but also access to all of our exclusive paywall episodes including all of our mini series and so so much more too much to mention in this final wrap up of our podcast here.

But I will tell you, we are currently reaching the end of talking Futurama season two, part one, 10 episodes of talking Futurama season two to get you through the end of the year. That's all happening on the Patreon and also over a hundred bonus podcasts that you haven't heard. If you have not been on the Patreon yet,

but Henry will tell you what happens if you sign up at the $10 level, you'll get access to everything at the five dollar level of course but also one extra long podcast every month our most recent one was over four hours long please henry let people know what that is yes if you enjoy our sister podcast what a cartoon but wish we talked about a feature-length film we do that once a month for our ten dollar and up Patreon supporters. That's the What a Cartoon movie, where we talk about a different movie each month. Most recently, we did Toy Story, the Pixar original. Four hours and 15 minutes of chat about Toy Story. We did a ton of research.

We did a ton of talking about this classic film for its 20, well, close to its 25th anniversary. And I think you'll really enjoy hearing that. And over 36 hours of previous What a Cartoon movies that you can only hear in full if you sign up at the $10 level or up your $5 pledge to 10 bucks at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. So I've been one of your hosts, Bob Mackey.

You can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. I have another podcast, by the way. It is called Retronauts to Classic Gaming Podcast. Find it every Monday and occasionally on Friday at retronauts.com. And I should bring up the fact that our Twitter account has recently been revamped. So you can follow us on Twitter, our podcast

at TalkSimpsonsPod. We'll keep you updated there as well if you want to follow that along with our Twitter accounts. And you can follow me on Twitter at H-E-N-E-R-E-Y-G. I'm sure to tweet whenever new stuff comes out or when I promote stuff like I promote our upcoming

SF Sketch Fest show if you're in the Bay Area on January 14th, Tuesday, 8pm at the Piano Fight Bar. Me and Bob, and maybe a special guest, will be talking about Season 1,

celebrating the 30th anniversary of the first season of The Simpsons. We're going to be doing it live, live, live, live at SF Sketch Fest. That's January 14th, Tuesday night, 8pm at the Piano Fight Bar in San Francisco. Please check it out. And get your tickets now because it's

a rather small venue and our first show there was basically standing room only. Yes, you gotta move fast, buddy. Yes. So that's it for us this week. We'll see you next week with Monty Can't Buy Me Love and we will see you then. Buy me love Everybody tells me so Can't buy me love Bye. Tell me that you want the kind of things that money just can't buy.

I don't care too much for money. Money can buy me love. Buy me love. Love. Buy me love. Love. Hit the road, Lefty. You too, Rizzo. Oh, Cinnamon.

Don't make this harder than it already is.