Talking Simpsons - Talking Simpsons - The Otto Show With Found Footage Fest

Episode Date: April 26, 2023

Nobody rocks like Springfield in an extra-long ep with special guests Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher of Found Footage Festival and VCR Party Live! (Check out the new documentary about them, Chop & Steele!) We go over the real history of fake band Spinal Tap, then follow the rollicking tale of Bart learning to play guitar and Otto learning to drive--neither of which actually happens. Learn that and tons of great tangents in this week's rockin' podcast! Support this podcast and get over 150 bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! And please follow the official Twitter, @TalkSimpsonsPod!

This podcast is brought to you by patreon.com slash talking Simpsons. Head there to check out exclusive podcasts like Talking Futurama, Talking of the Hill, the What a Cartoon Movie podcast, and tons more. I heartily endorse this event or product. Ahoy, hoy, everybody. Welcome to Talking Simpsons, where we try to put a tiny thrill in your gray little lives. I'm one of your hosts, your half-inflated Dark Lord, Bob Mackie, and this is our chronological exploration of The Simpsons. Who is here with me today, as always, in the same room? Rock-a-doodle-doo, you're listening to Henry Gilbert.

And who do we have on the line? Our special guests. This is Nick Truer and I'm the host of the Bleeding Splish Flash show. And I'm Joe Pickett and I have a hankering for some pork products. And this week's episode is The Otto Show. Mayor Quimby honored the aging supergroup in a ceremony at City Hall. I guess you could say he was trying to tap into the spines of the young voters huh yeah let's play the tape this week's episode originally aired on april 23rd 1992 and as always henry will tell us what happened on this

mythical day in real world history oh my god oh boy bobby Bobby! The Freddie Mercury tribute concert happens, ABC broadcasts the series finales of Who's the Boss, Growing Pains, and MacGyver, and Los Angeles reacts to the Rodney King verdict. I thought the riots were over the cancellation of MacGyver. Yeah, they were very mad that MacGyver went away, and Who's the Boss 2, they're not a cliffhanger. It was a sad day.

An interesting time here especially when this episode includes a riot but I feel like it's a, I'll get to it, but I feel like it's a reference to a 1991 riot. It's just a riotous happenstance here. But again MacGyver's last episode happening right when the Simpsons is making

MacGyver jokes a regular thing with Patty and Selma as it's being canceled with these finales ABC is giving the 80s a lethal injection the 90s have truly begun and I remember that Freddie Mercury uh tribute concert as a kid like I was I had just gotten into as a 10 year old 9-year-old because of Wayne's World. And then I see the Freddie Mercury tribute concert stuff on TV, and I was like, wait, he's dead? I just started getting into this guy, and he's dead now? Well, you know, I heard they made a great movie about him.

Yeah, made by a great guy, a wonderful director. I didn't see it. Can we just stop? I want to stop all biopics. I don't want Elton John. I don't want Elvis. They've been dissected to death. I just think we should put a moratorium on them for a while.

The thing that I do with those biopic movies is I just don't watch them. That's my thing. I just don't even watch them. Interesting. Okay. All right. I'll have to try that. I avoid them altogether. The Queen one, I hated that it was lip syncing too.

At least in that Rocketman one, the guy they got to play elton john just sings his own stuff like it i i just hate when it's like a good actor who then they just open their mouth and they're just lip-syncing along and they're also wearing like austin powers teeth yes yeah yeah do you know henry as a queen fan do you the song from queen that i just can't stand is Radio Goo Goo. Is that what it's called? Yeah, yeah. Because I know it's trying to be annoying. It's about how the radio is just a bunch of blather and, you know, Radio Goo Goo, Radio Gaga.

And I guess that's how Lady Gaga took her name and all that. But the song is just genuinely annoying to me. I don't know. I guess I'm not the hugest Queen fan. I'm okay with Queen, but it's that song and the Riding My Bicycle song. Are they the same song? Because they're just as irritating. I think they're years apart.

Well, part of the fun with Queen is that they really are like a novelty band that just rocks really hard. Fat Bottom Girls is a joke song. It may as well be a novelty song, except it's played so big and sung so well that you don't think it's uh it may as well be a novelty song except it's played so big that and sung so well that you don't think it's like yeah it is about how not to get ahead of ourselves with spinal tap but how different is that from big bottom woman the joke song that spinal tap wrote that's true that does reframe queen for me a little bit you know and then they make a stadium rock sort of anthem that actually just is played in stadiums which one came first day the queen song came first right i think so i think it was late 70s the song yeah the movie is 84 so yeah yeah and uh yeah also i already made

everyone uncomfortable with the rodney king thing but there's other there's another bit of history here uh that's uncomfortable the week after this is the finale of the cosby show oh and uh that the the simpsons was playing against the entire time and uh the simpsons then did a dedicated so the night cosby show airs the week after this the simpsons air two bart episodes as a radio bart and three men in a comic book up against it i think it was their counter programming of like look you're a little kid who likes bart you don't want to watch cosby so well watch the bart episodes they did one original send-off to cosby on on the show and and i have the clip from it uh a rarely heard bit of simpsons uh ephemera is their dedication to

the cosby show ending again 31 years ago when this aired little Theo you grew up before our eyes hey dad how come they're taking the Cosby show off the air because Mr. Cosby wanted to stop before the quality suffered. Quality schmality. If I had a TV show, I'd run that sucker into the ground. Amen, boy. Amen. They called it. Yep, the bitter irony.

I know. Wow. Simpsons predicts it again. It's pretty amazing to hear that line said in late season three of like, I'd run that thing into the ground. But back when the idea of a TV show running for more than 10 years was absurd, like, OK, maybe cheers and mash, but that's it. That's all we'll allow. And we have a theory that The Simpsons running this long has given license for everything to run much longer than it should have. Yeah.

But I was going to say, like, this era, like 92, I feel like this is when we're kind of getting out of the 80s now like everything's dying off cosby show's going away macgyver's going away we've got the riots and now simpsons is hitting its stride i feel like we're like fully into the 90s at this point maybe like this is the start of the 90s 1992 but i mean obviously still at least for simpsons writers some nostalgia for the 80s when you're talking about having spinal tap on and making a comeback and I don't know sort of referencing them in this episode too. You know if this was a movie this would be where the the first strings of Smells Like Teen Spirit would be coming in it'd be like the 90s truly began. That's who Bart should be a fan of. Before we get ahead of ourselves though

let's introduce our special guests today we have Joe Pickett and Nick Pruer from the Found Footage Festival. They're currently on tour to premiere their new movie, Chop and Steal. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Love the show. Thank you. Oh, thanks.

We had on Nick a little more recently, but Nick and Joe together was one of our last in-person recordings before lockdown. It's nuts. February of 2020, I think, something like that. Yeah, it was right on the cusp. Yeah, but I don't even think we were even really talking about COVID or coronavirus, whatever we were calling it then. I don't even think we mentioned it, did we?

Was it like in the news? It was barely in the news. I think it was happening maybe in China at the time. It didn't seem like a bad thing at the time. I remember going like, oh, because i remembered reading headlines of like oh in like china or also japan was starting to lock down stuff was like boy that's crazy over there now that happened here though we only he came into contact with the jokes not the virus oh yes yeah and then nick and i flew from your uh studio well apartment, and flew to England for like a 12-day tour.

And the audiences diminished as that tour went along. So we'd see like 10 fewer people at every show. And then finally the last one was like for four people. Yeah, I was in Liverpool. And they were like, do you still want to do it? And we're like, sure. We did it. And there were some really dedicated people who showed up.

But then it was like, oh should we shouldn't have done this because the next day we had to fly home and there was all these um you know will there be rules about flying from another country and i remember that it was the scariest flight i ever had coming back from manchester to new york i wasn't wearing a mask yet but i got a bunch of hand sanitizer you know and was nervous about anybody coughing next to me. But there was some stag do that was a bunch of guys from Manchester flying to New York to have a big bachelor party. I remember one of the guys having some hand sanitizer and I guess the bachelor,

the guy getting married with the bald guy and the guy was sitting behind him and I was watching him the whole time squirting little bits of hand sanitizer on the bald head and then all his buddies were snickering, you know, all these lads. That might have saved his life though. I think that's it. Yeah. And so

I was watching that. So they clearly had no pandemic concerns about their stag do, but everybody else was very nervous. I remember being on that flight and sneezing once and just, you'd think there was an active shooter on the airplane. Everybody turned around and looked. They remember being on that flight and sneezing once, and just, you'd think there was an active shooter on the airplane. Everybody turned around and looked. They didn't realize that

at the dawn of the pandemic, hand sanitizer was like $100 an ounce. It was like cocaine. I know. They were just wasting it willy-nilly like full. And I was snorting it, too. Like cocaine. It'll get you there. Saved your life. And you guys are touring chorn around you're

about to cut what the time is recording you're about to come to san francisco you guys have a brand new movie a documentary out yeah it's called chop and steel and we are actually the subjects of it we didn't produce it we didn't make it but yeah like nick and i we do a show called the found footage festival we find vhs tapes at thrift stores and garage sales we've been doing it in our entire adult life since like 2004 almost 20 years we've been doing this show. And then what was it like 2017? We got a federal lawsuit filed against us. We started doing, when we'd be on the road, we would do these morning news shows, right? If we were in Sacramento, we'd do Wake Up Sacramento. But then we realized it was very easy to get on these morning news shows and so we wrote up fake press

releases for fake people and we tried to get those fake people onto the morning news shows. It was very easy. And we did this. I mean, since Joe and I have known each other since we were 10, we have nothing left to talk about. So when we're on the road for 120 days a year, this was our entertainment.

It was like, oh, let's set a book and ourselves on morning shows. Let's see if we can get a ridiculous character on. And yeah, it ended up working better. Like these fake people got booked way more than we ever did. So you might remember Kenny, the yo-yo expert, Kenny Strasser kind of made the rounds. This is our buddy Mark conceived of this with Joe.

And they started doing these morning shows with a yo-yo expert who didn't know how to yo-yo, promoting environmentalism. Well, Mark had no idea how to yo-yo, but that's not how we would sell. We'd say like, oh, he won the Kyoto International and he'll be coming to your town. So we'd have Mark show up with his yo-yoing arm and a sling or one time he showed up and he brought the yo-yo, but he forgot the string. And it would just be awkwardness be awkwardness we got him on seven morning news shows and then uh what was like three years later we're like oh let's just let's just keep doing it so then uh nick opposed as a celebrity chef named chef keith and the idea was for him to come up with the grossest recipes like chicken and like

cranberries and mashed potatoes all blended up into a blend. Made into a smoothie. Then we'd say, hey, try a little bit of this to the news anchor. They did. They just want to keep the show running. Most of them would gulp it right down. Then we're like, let's just keep poking the bear. Four years later, we wrote up a new press release saying that Nick and I were a strongman duo called Chop and

Steel. You can't see us, but we aren't strong at all. We're doughy. I would say we're more doughy we got on three morning news shows and then we found out we were getting sued in federal court and so that's really where the documentary started uh we had a documentary crew follow us as we were getting sued and uh hilarity ensues now it's funny now like when it was happening we were we weren't laughing yeah i encourage all of our listeners to check out the trailer for sure for the movie. You guys are coming around to doing live shows around Alamo Drafthouses across these great United States.

Yeah, we're touring it around the country. And then actually, I think we're going to see John Vitti in Los Angeles. He and his wife, George Meyer's sister, always come and check us out in L.A. They're the first to buy tickets. And so we're going to see them next week. Yeah, and then after that, it'll be video on demand so everybody can get it on Apple, iTunes, and all that on

May 9th. So if you're interested in seeing the movie at home, you can do it that way. ChopandSteel.com. You can see all of our tour dates there. And Steel is S-T-E-E-L-E. As part of these you know acts here like what like do you guys look to things like spinal tap for inspiration of of how to play characters improv scenes like these the one thing i thought about is i remember on the spinal tap um criterion

collection dvd there was an episode on where they went on the joe franklin show which is a local new york talk show by this older guy named joe franklin and they just sent a press release to him and said they were a real band you know and they got on they got on as spinal tap and talked about their history in character and joe franklin was a square you know he didn't know that they were fake at all so they went on and did a full appearance on the joe franklin show as spinal tap without anybody from the staff let alone the host knowing they were not a real band. And so, I mean, I didn't think about that at the time. But one thing that I realized was that when you wear a stupid costume, it's very easy to just be that character.

I think the other thing is, is like you're kind of seeing it from a first person point of view. So you don't realize how stupid you're being you're just playing the reality of where you are you know and the the news anchor doesn't realize you're fake either so they're you know just doing what they would normally do and i think the the one time joe you said you came close to breaking was when i was you had we were doing these unimpressive feats of strength and and one was me throwing sticks at Joe's naked back. So Joe is facing away from me, holding his shirt up, and I'm throwing sticks at his back. Yeah. And you looked in the monitor.

No, no, no. Like I was facing towards the other anchors who were waiting to go on after us, and they were kind of like had their arms crossed. And like just the body language was just like, and they're looking at the ground. And that was when I was just like, oh, this is the stupidest thing ever. And I almost cracked then, but thinking about their reactions to it.

Yeah. But most of the time it feels like you're robbing a bank, you know, and it feels like the police are going to get called like when you're done doing this, but they never did. I mean, they're just so frazzled in the morning that they're just like,

all right, let's bring on the strong men here. They didn't even bother to look. There was one place that actually did see how we looked and he's like, you guys aren't strongmen. We're like, no, we are. We're strongmen. He's like, nah, I'm not going to have you on. One had sense.

One journalist did their job. But then 16 others let us on. Now that Joe Franklin one, I looked that up. I cracked out my Blu-ray. And unfortunately, it's only like two minutes of it that was on this Blu-ray. But the funniest part to me was watching the clip was Joe Franklin, it's the end of the show and he's wrapping up.

And I do think he's starting to feel a little. I feel like he is starting to think like, wait a minute. Like these guys have funny responses. But there's another person who's like another guest who's like paneling on the couch. And he's asking like real questions like, so what's it like to play these places? Like he's very interested in Spinal Tap's tour. Is the audience, are they laughing at Spinal Tap's jokes? Or are they not really getting it?

I think they didn't seem to be really reacting much. I didn't hear much audience reaction. I've got to check that out. That sounds fantastic. One thing I was thinking about in watching this episode, and one reason why I think at the time, I remember seeing the promos for it. My dad introduced me to Spinal Tap at a formative age.

It was one of our movies that we loved. And seeing the promos for it. And I was like, oh, this is going to be the two things I love the most converging. And the reason I think I was a little disappointed, at least with the beginning part of it, was that it was scripted, you know, and Spinal Tap had that sort of kind of without a net feel in that, you know, I'm sure they had bits and written out but like all the the christopher guest movies they sort of knew you know things they had to hit but they didn't script it and because animation is so precise it had to be scripted and i've thought about that because on this tour we've been asked to like do things in character as chop and steel the strong men

and we're just like no if this if you're in on it it's not funny to us you know if it's yeah like a planned bit then it's not we were on tosh.0 like during the lawsuit and they wanted us to come on in character and we're not really i don't know i wouldn't say we're that kind of comedian we're not really like sketch character guys we just did this on the morning news shows and we rehearsed the lines and we got we knew where we wanted to go with everything and there was a lot of improvised stuff on there but to go on there in character it's like oh we're playing these characters now it was a little bit uncomfortable because he what he asked us serious questions but we have to be jokey characters answering serious questions about the loss i don't know it was just weird yeah i think they they do capture the the voices of the

characters but uh thinking about it after watching it again i thought like oh this is just spinal tap fanfic they're writing they're just they're fans of spinal tap and writing their own fan fiction and then they kill them and they kill the band that was that was a great i like that they had they just their tour bus exploded i know i watched it the other day i was like i'm expecting them to like crawl out of the bus nope they just killed him well and last preamble thing actually and i nearly forgot to to ask this but i was like oh wait nick's here i have to ask nick are you aware of the most recent appearance of elf on the simpsons that and real elf yes so i got a lot of emails about it and uh so that was i don't watch every simpsons episode anymore but i did go and and

watch that one and uh yeah it was like he wasn't even in pog form it was a totally different elf appearance so yeah that was that was well on my radar after the fact yes and i was impressed well i guess i shouldn't be that impressed because aljean worked on elf and he has uh paul fusco's phone number so he can he can get Alf on the show. Paul's been in his ear for quite some time about playing Alf on The Simpsons. Yeah, honestly, I think probably in his opinion, Alf hasn't appeared enough on The Simpsons, really. Did he get the guy who did Alf's voice on there,

on The Simpsons episode? They got him. It's him, yeah. Oh, wow, he's still around. Okay. You know, Nick did an Alf show on our network, on our found footage network. Nick, did you ever get Fusco on the show?

No, I tried. I emailed his assistant. I emailed, yeah, I tried, show on our network on our found footage network nick did you ever get flusco on the show no i tried i emailed his assistant um i emailed uh yeah i tried but he's uh stonewalling me thus far so paul if you're listening uh i'd love to have you and we watch an entire season in a row on twitch now every year on the debut of september 22nd the debut of ALF. So we'll be watching the entire third season in September of this year. And Paul, maybe he could call in. ALF has never been more available than right now. Like Shout Factory made a new deal for ALF stuff. And I don't think they're out yet because I would have bought them.

But I think they're putting out the new. I didn't buy the previous ALF DVDs because I knew that they were the syndicated cuts, not the broadcast cuts. that they were the syndicated cuts, not the broadcast cuts, so they were shorter. And I believe Shop Factory is supposed to be releasing the real cuts of ALF, not the syndicated ones. That's what I've heard. Well, those true fans went to Amazon.de and bought the German versions that are the uncut versions.

So, uh... Should I call Henry not a true fan? Yeah, basically. Yeah's that's kind of what i'm getting at but uh listening to talking elf my new podcast coming soon uh but i guess yeah this this episode is an interesting one it's called the auto show even though like it's like half an auto show and it's yeah it's we've said it before late in the season they're getting punchy like they're it's funny on the commentary jeff mart before late in the season they're getting punchy like they're it's funny on the commentary jeff martin is even goofing like oh this plot really doesn't work or

he's like kind of saying like oh this oh there's otto in the episode or wait why did bart learn this lesson all this stuff yeah i mean they correctly point out on the commentary uh this is the end of otto they were infatuated with the character in the early years. He's designed to look like writer Wally Wolodarski. He's really a relic of the time period he was created. And I think that Otto was, the misfortune behind Otto is that he was created

at almost the exact same time as both Bill and Ted and Wayne and Garth. Because I looked up to see when they were created. They both premiered in February of 89. The first Wayne's World sketch, February of 89. And Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure was in theaters in February of 89. They are developing The Simpsons then. And that kind of a character was new.

Like the heavy metal stoner in popular entertainment. I think that by season 3, by 92, it was no longer a fresh idea. So, autos really show up to the background. And to this day, there has never been another auto-dedicated episode. The closest that ever came to that was, I think it's season 11's Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Marge, in which act one is about him getting married. But to date, there has never been any more in-depth auto stories, period. Ah, but I feel like maybe a couple years later was Beavis and Butthead, right?

I mean, like... Yeah, yeah, just the next year people just love the dumb guy characters the dumb stoner characters don't they I mean you can't get enough of them personally I can take them all day long every pot joke on the show Otto shows up for a pot joke a lot but yeah like

more than three jokes in an episode very rare for Otto and I think this is also the end of like Otto was originally written if you see him in the the end of like Otto was originally written if you see him in the first episodes of like he's the one adult Bart trusts and he's like Bart has a bad day at school and Otto's like oh man here's some advice this is also kind of the end of that too like I think we get to know Otto so well that Bart no longer really looks up to Otto man and I also think that Harry Shearer doesn't like doing the voice. And now that he's 80, I think he really doesn't like doing the voice.

It sounds tough. It sounds rough on the part. Just doing impressions, it kind of hurts after a while. Yeah, and I think that there are some Simpsons characters where it's really fun that they expand them out and do a whole episode based on them. You get to know more about their inner life. I think Skinner is a good example of that, where I think they did some interesting things with him and learning more about his relationship with mother and i love that they expanded that but otto i mean he is almost better coming in and being like you know uh one of those guitars it's like a double guitar you know like when it's just that like

one bit or you know smells like otto's jacket or you know like i i don't know that there's much more depth to that i think he's like a fonzie or like a kramer or something it's like you love him when he's on there just for a couple scenes but you don't need a full episode of him yeah you know it's funny we mentioned the castor theater earlier or uh was that off mic yeah i was off mic we were talking about it but at the castor theater that is where i got to see an original 35 millimeter print of the movie this is spinal tap and it really is something to see it with a big audience like yeah yeah i mean i saw it for the first time a few days ago uh i'm 40 years old and it's the year 2023 so spinal tap has a bit of a different effect but when i saw this my parents had to tell

me oh there were some fake movie from some sorry some fake band from some movie like last the last decade and i was like okay i searched for that movie forever when i was a kid like no video store had it sunkos didn't have it and even today it's hard to get digitally like you cannot rent this movie you have to buy it digitally for 15 so i pirated it i'm not going to pay you 15 to watch a movie once i'm sorry i bought the dvd i was the same way though like i i'm from a small town in w, and I remember one kid in my school talking about Spinal Tap, and I could never see it because our video store was a gas station. That's where we would go. And I guess they didn't order Spinal Tap.

So I didn't see it until college. So I'm a late bloomer, too, with Spinal Tap. I don't think I'm wrong. The Simpsons popularized Spinal Tap because it was not a popular movie. And there's stories in the commentary from people who were there when it was in theater saying nobody got it nobody understood that it was a fake band my mom did know it I it's kind of like uh Nick with you and your dad you mentioned like my mom did know it and she told me like this isn't a real band that's the joke it's the characters from a movie appearing in it and they're really funny i don't think i saw it until in the year 2000 i believe was when the uh a non-criterion dvd of it came

out the criterion version is still one of the most like sought after criterion and out of print uh ones there is i think i recall it has a commentary track where it's the characters basically doing a riff of the movie right yeah yeah yeah yeah i gotta dig that out of storage i didn't realize that was so rare now the criterion one especially yeah it's apparently pretty rare and uh and yeah i like then i got to see it in the theater in 2011 on uh this was so cool the cast were like the guy made sure like he contacted studio canal in europe to have it sent to san francisco to play the original print of the movie it was really great and i just re-watched it a few weeks ago and i i gotta say i thought it was funnier now than i've ever thought it was funny you know i mean like i loved it in college but i feel like

maybe i didn't get all the jokes i feel like now i get all the jokes well now you guys have lived you guys have lived a touring life as well like like the now we're the aging touring basically yeah these guys are all like in their late 30s making this movie they're not even that old yeah no i you know it is it was funny i re-watched it this last week uh and i still i still love it but it is funny the, I think I like as movies more the later guest trilogy of films that are filmed pretty much the same, like Waiting for Guffman, Mighty Wind, and Best in Show. I love, love, love all three of those.

So it's funny to go back to like 84 when this, it's not the first mockumentary, but this being made in that kind of way, it is kind of the first of that. It was a real trailblazer. So you can see they learned a lot of lessons in making it since then when they're making that trilogy of movies. I think Rob Reiner is the weak link in this movie. I'll say it. He's the not funny fourth friend who's just hanging around. Yeah, yeah.

He's like, I know cool comedians. I'll be in the movie too. But I forget. Well, Paul Schaefer's funny and Fran Drescher, she's so good. Like, I mean, I forget that she was like, I mean, of course UHF and The Nanny and Cadillac Man, but like as one of her early things, she was really funny in this.

I love her speech to the guy explaining what the cover of Smell the Glove is. And he goes like, yeah, yeah. Like she goes, somebody said, they say it's sexist. And then I think Nigel says, what's the matter with being sexy? They're like, no, sexist, not sexy. And then, well, yeah, actually my newest thought on watching it again this time, I was like, I don't find Christopher Guest very attractive normally.

He's a fine looking man. But when he's in characters, Nigel Tufton in the movie, I was man he is hot like i was thinking the whole movie i was like he's genuinely looks cool yeah yeah yeah absolutely and it's funny because we know harry shearer as just like a curmudgeon who does smug political comedy but it's great to see him 40 years ago and basically light bondage gear and a crazy mustache like he used to have fun harry shearer i also want to mention i listened to the i hadn't listened to it in a while i re-listened to the 2015 uh mark maron wtf interview with shearer which is really interesting uh because it's it's full of him talking about like maron is kind of pushing him of like hey i hear you people you don't like a lot of people and he's like well i think they don't like me

and he talks about like him and guest have always been friends but at the time him and mckeon were kind of on the outs but i think they're they're doing good now because they are working on a new movie now but and also re-listening to it too i it's where it hit me like oh shearer says on it that he was the guy leading the charge of the actors getting a raise on simpsons like he was the one who i believe this phrasing is i was leading the charge on that for them to all unite in season 10 to get a big raise a deserved raise and also if you just want to hear a guy dumping on lauren michaels and calling him a hack for like an hour like it's pretty funny it's always fun on my list look it up it's really

though also i didn't know like he there's other funny stories like how he had a falling out with albert brooks uh he also talks about he was a child actor who worked with mel blank as a kid like he it's it's crazy yeah is he is he a hollywood guy he's a hollywood kid yeah yeah okay okay it's fun michael mckeon of the three is the only normal upbringing person of the two like Christopher Guest he's a nepo baby let's just say he's a baron he's literally a baron

his father is a British man from the House of Lords and Jamie Lee Curtis' wife is Hollywood royalty yeah also a nepo baby they found each other yeah and I Christopher Guest and Harry Schur both don't have the reputation as being the most warm and friendly outwardly guys. And I can identify with that, too.

I mean, you always want to be friendly to strangers. At least I don't. That's a huge dick, by the way. He's being nice to strangers. Exactly. Yeah. No, you guys are the nice but michael mckean uh michael mckean has like commented on our our stuff and said he's a fan of found footage festival before on uh twitter and things like

that and just seems like one of these just genuinely warm and friendly guys so he might have been the secret sauce in terms of the the chemistry yeah between the three he's surprisingly online for being a guy like in his 70s now michael McKeon. And he just had a huge like thing on Saul's show, I Better Call Saul. He was like getting Emmy noms. And yeah, it was funny. This is not a history of Spinal Tap, but it was funny looking back that like it all goes back to like Fernwood Tonight and The Tomorrow Show. Like all of these like what we would have called alternative comedy, but they didn't

have the word for it in like the 70s. And you mentioned this isn't the first mockumentary like i think i had seen i definitely had seen uh all you need is cash the monty python beatles parody yeah the ruddles yeah yeah and i did like that but like that was on comedy central i think yeah it got replayed on comedy central a ton yeah sorry one last spinal tap thing uh before i get into the show is that fox hated this idea they said for the amount of money you paid, you could have gotten a real band with real songs because they waited until far too late to clear the songs

and they ended up costing a lot more money. And it ended up being a very expensive episode for an inside joke that not a lot of the viewers actually got. I could see that. I mean, I'm not a big fan of in sitcoms or in anything, whenever they bring in like real life pop culture into their world like you know when full house has on like the beach boys or something just i want their world to be their world and have like your fake bands over there but like yeah full house is

gonna have like urkel on a jet pack flying through the you know like a guest episode and then and then you're also gonna have the beach boys so it's like those two things exist in the same world so yes with the spinal tap thing i was just like i don't need like the like the smashing pumpkins episodes not my favorite either and uh yeah what is it like kid rock wasn't like yes yeah that's a very low point yeah you know i think fake bands are a better idea than real bands because i've been reading up on steven tyler lately and you know i think spinal tap should have played flaming mose and not aerosmith yeah uh well also spinal tap they were promoting a new album like when this came out like they had the song they sing in the episode was their big single at the time that they had done a music video for for

their 92 album and well it's also a harry sheer of four years or 2017 sued the co-owners of spinal tap like i think spinal tap is owned by a company that tries to squeeze every dollar out of spinal tap and that the actual performers of it i don't think like and so i'm not surprised when it came time to license the music that they found out they weren't getting friend prices anymore on licensing it for the show i feel like it's not uh it wasn't sheer's thing it's also crazy to find out like spinal tap sort of started as a spinoff of lenny and the squeak tones as a fake man mckeon was in and they were also friends with uh with david lander too yeah and nigel tufton plays his guest plays on it and he's on the lenny and the squeak tones album credited as nigel

tufton i think we need to tell people out there Lenny and Squeaky were characters from Liver and Shirley a sitcom sorry we're all very old we know this but if you're like 30 you might not know this one other funny thing I learned from trying to find out why they did it on this episode is Shearer was interviewed in England and England comedy nerds like if we think we like Spinal Tap in America, British, UK comedy nerds love Spinal Tap. Like I thought it was an interview with Shearer where it was like 60% Spinal Tap questions and 40% Simpsons questions. And he refused to answer the Simpsons questions. Pretty much. But they did ask him like how they get on the show.

And he said he swore it was not his pitch to put them on the show the producers and writers of simpsons came to him with hey shouldn't spinal tap be on the show and then also he said it was the only time they ever worked off a script to do spinal tap which that is why i think christopher guest i think didn't like working on this episode because i think he wanted to improvise and they said i mean if you feel such ownership over your character and then even a great writer comes in and says no you say this now and especially if you're like kind of a touchy character like uh christopher guest might be yeah he actually refused to say my strumming arm yes can i ask you guys the simpsons questions because you guys you guys are the simpsons pros here you guys know everything

yeah has there ever been an improvised moment in a Simpsons episode? Yeah, I think a lot of the funnier lines have been ad-libs by the actors, like Hank Azaria and Dan Castaneda especially have ad-libbed a lot of stuff, and they'll call it out on the commentary. As far as entire scenes,

I think it's not a great episode. They basically built an entire episode around Ricky Gervais kind of playing a David Brent style character. And over the credits, he's like improvising a song and like talking through it. And I think that's like one big example of the one of the few times it's ever happened, I'm guessing. OK. All right. I feel like the Albert Brooks, the early episodes, too, they just kind of let him riff and animated to that as well. Yeah, yes.

Yeah. And a lot of the scenes he is riffing with Julie. In fact, we covered this in our season one revisit in the original episode. But the bowling guy was going to be a Swedish tennis instructor. And he came in and he changed the character and improvised as a French guy. And also from that interview with Shearer, I have to apologize. When his wife, Judith Ow owens appeared on the show i think we uh i definitely jumped to the conclusion that oh this was a favor to harry

sheer or whatever uh in the interview he's on it with judith owens who she's a professional singer uh and she has released albums and she sang on the show in a season 13 episode and sheer and her swore they're like the producers came to us and when they say one of the producers i think it's mike scully but that's my assumption they said one of the producers said he just loved her music and we want to put it on the show so i apologize that i thought that it was them doing a favor to harry shearer because uh both him and his wife said no it was the opposite they they came to her and you trust them and you know look that's good journalism though that's good journalism you're you're admitting yeah that's good making the question now i have to go back to our old podcast and i'll plug that

in in the audio there but we've anchored judith owen and she's a pianist there's supposed to be a spinal tap 2 coming out in 2024 they've uh they announced it last year i am assuming they're filming it now but they haven't had any updates since late last year reiner's directing it again too which i feel like i think that's part of the deal like i think they don't get to do it if reiner's not there maybe like rob reiner like look i love princess bride i don't want to talk too bad about rob reiner that was 37 years ago yeah they just can't let a thing be a thing right like now with all the streaming channels like they have to like let's bring it back they probably gave him ridiculous money for it so uh i mean i'll definitely watch it but man i'm skeptical all right well i was wondering too because eugene levy came out in an interview

recently and said we can't do the christopher guest style mockumentaries anymore because tv shows like perks and rec and the american office kind of drove that into the ground with treating that that like those are mockumentaries you know and having the confessional parts and then so it's almost like that form isn't novel anymore uh it's not surprising it's kind of they've mined it for all it's worth tv has definitely kind of ruined it well not ruined it but made it less special of like yeah you're you see it so much that it doesn't feel as is i mean even that's why like they did that for your consideration one, which sort of was it, but they got away from it being framed like a there. I definitely don't think that had testimonials in it.

I think it was played like a regular fiction film. And I think at least with the office, even the American office, they stick with the conceit like this is being filmed for some reason. But with Parks and Rec and Modern Family, it's just like, well, this is just kind of shot like one of these things. But there's no there's no reason why certain things are being filmed for some reason but with parks and rec and modern family it's just like well this is just kind of shot like one of these things but there's no there's no reason why certain things are being filmed right now or such access is being given to filmmakers right right right i always wonder what the office was like what documentary are they making right now like what's like where's this gonna air you know what i mean like i guess we were watching the documentary

that they were making right is that the final season did answer that question that was one of my favorite bits in the final season when they when they were getting to the end they're like you know what we're gonna answer what the documentary will be released and we'll we'll do it it uh it was it was a documentary that was filmed for like what 12 years in real time yes and then finally released. The Simpsons will be right back. Tonight, Bart Simpson has a dream. I want to be a rock star. To make it big in music.

Maybe we should buy him a guitar. We already have a guitar. So Homer's taking him to see Spinal guitar. We already have a guitar. So Homer's taking him to see Spinal Tap. Nobody rocks like Springfield. But will his first rock concert be his last? Ooh, a beer-fueled

riot. Fox Rocks. My poor little baby's okay. See for yourself. The Simpsons, tonight at 8 on Fox 25. When you really care about someone, you shout it from the mountaintops. So on behalf of Desjardins Insurance, I'm standing 20,000 feet above sea level to tell our clients that we really care about you. Home and auto insurance personalized to your needs.

Weird, I don't remember saying that part. Visit Desjardins.com slash care and get insurance that's really big on care. Did I mention that we care? Hey, it's Henry Gilbert. Thanks for listening to this podcast. If you're in the dumpster brand or not, and we have a big thank you to our guests this week, Joe Pickett and Nick Pruer of both Found Footage Fest and VCR Party. It was so cool having Nick and Joe on, especially because they are promoting the documentary All About Them, Chop and Steal.

Check if in your local areas, if it's playing at the alamo draft house near you if you're in a city lucky enough to have it there and if not very soon in may it's going to be uh available on streaming services so please keep an eye out for chop and steal i've seen it since uh this is recorded a little after we recorded with them we saw it we got to meet nick and Joe in person again. It was so great seeing them again. And the movie is awesome.

It really, really speaks to you, especially if you're a person like me and Bob doing our jobs as well. So thanks again, Nick and Joe. Please, everybody out there, check out Chop and Steal. out chopping steel as well if you're a fan of talking simpsons you should know this podcast is only possible because of listeners like you who support us at patreon.com slash talking simpsons for five bucks a month people get tons of exclusives as well as knowing that me and bob are living our best lives you get monthly episode of talking futurama and a monthly episode of talk king of the hill that's only for you if you're a patron. And you also get access to over 150 previously released Patreon

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he's got eggs ready to whip him at the warm-up act you know i don't like i have little patience for warm-up acts at shows i'll admit i have trouble with they they have a needed thing like you need you can't just go straight to the band you need to get the crowd ready but and test things out but yeah every when i went to a show i went to see weezer and the pixies live uh before the pandemic in the warm-up band for it like they did four songs and they were like this is our last song guys thanks thanks they they were like running off stage i mean that's the way to do it i i saw built a spill and they had some acoustic guy. This is probably 2001 or something. They had an acoustic guy go up there and play. Everybody was yapping. Nobody was paying attention.

Then Doug March, the front man for Built to Spill, came out and yelled at everybody for five minutes. It was like, this guy's a genius and you guys talked through the entire thing. The show's off to a great start. Boy, now I wish I'd seen it. Built to Spill came to town just last

week that's right it's sold out i underestimated their drawing power when i saw violent femmes uh i don't know five years ago maybe the opening act was maybe sitar music and it just was a very different vibe from you know watching the violent femmes play music so yeah yeah kind of strange and uh homer's wearing he pulled his concert jacket out of storage, which I like the implication. Like, he used to go to concerts all the time before he had kids, and now he can bust it out again. And he's been saving Billy Beer, which we've done a history of Billy Beer before, but it existed for one year, shut down in 78.

It was a rare thing in 1992. So you can actually place the last time Homer was at a concert. It was between 77 and 78. And since we last covered this, I have seen a can of Billy Beer in the wild, and was at a concert. It was between 77 and 78. And since we last covered this, I have seen a can of Billy beer in the wild and it's very affordable. I could have bought it just to put on my desk. Oh, really? I mean, I just looked on eBay just now

and it looks like $6.79 for an unopened can. Oh, yeah. This one was open, so you could tap the Rockies with that one. I'm sure it tastes even better now. Yeah. but you know it does have it had the lid where you tear off the whole top you remember those like i think yeah i think they stopped doing because people would like step on them barefoot and like yeah

but like i want i've always wanted to pull one of those off yeah even in the show homer does the pull tab on the can he does yeah i love the animation of him drinking it. There's something like he is just, he is chugging it. And he's about to drive his child in a car when he's doing it. Hey, Homer, let's book. I want to get there in time to whip eggs at the warm-up act. Wow, my concert going jacket still fits. And this is where I used to hide my beer. Philly beer!

My little guy's first rock concert. I hope the spinal taps don't play too loud. Oh, Marge, I went to thousands of heavy metal concerts, and it never hurt me. I hear you. Come on, boy. When Marge wishes him well, Bob has done this to me in real life, and it's very fun. Oh, right, right.

I'm very into pro wrestling. Bob is very nice about it. I'm against it. When I was going to see the return of CM Punk, Bob wished me well with, I hope the CM Punk still played too loud. It's a way to show that you're ignorant, but you're also wishing them the best of luck.

Wishing them well. I like Marge getting things wrong too, like the spinal taps or here comes the Shaq attack. Things like that. It's a sweet mom thing, yeah. My dad would always do that, too. But I think that he did it intentionally. I remember going to see Kindergarten Cop with me and my brothers.

I have two younger brothers. And my dad, we were at the box office. He was like, four tickets to the Kindergarten Cops? We were just like, oh. We all just, like, slinked away. We were just like, oh, it's Kindergarten Cop. It's a senior. Oh, he likes to intentionally embarrass you. All the time. I think still to this day i had endured a lifetime of that yeah kindergarten

cops jokes this joke with marge being muffled by homer's awful tinnitus i need to know if any audio engineer has isolated her audio because according to the writer of the episode what she's saying is very funny and in fact she was at one point of the edit when they were putting it together she was you could tell what she was saying but they decided to muffle it completely and i think it's a better joke but apparently it took them a long time to come up with what she was saying in that scene is there such a thing as a cartoon lip reader i mean you know can't yeah well we if we hear back from the writer of this episode that's gonna be my second question we should have asked him that too yeah well he hasn't responded well you know i should check my phone right now he might have uh no he's not responding yeah i i just uh based i i listened to it a few times again and i

was like the the joke is like a list of things it's all i can really make out i just love homer going yeah yeah yeah like that's uh it's a very husband like hey yeah like i've done that before i'm definitely listening. Yeah, yeah. I was like, wait, why are Patty and Selma here just to make fun of Homer? I was like, oh, yes, it's actually important for the story that you know Patty and Selma don't like Homer. I think they were overthinking it. Yeah, yeah.

Just set up the green marker, red marker thing at the end, basically, with the cast. Is that right? Yeah, yeah. marker thing at the end basically with the cast is that right yeah yeah you know this is early enough in the show that they i think they are like oh maybe there's a new viewer who doesn't know all the character relationships which is crazy to think with the simpsons as a simpsons viewer but yeah so then we get to hear from uh bill and marty uh on the phone talking to the aging rock group and i love that uh dan plays bill harry plays marty they're so funny together i just love when bill gives marty nothing like marty is trying to have fun with bill and bill

is just like yeah let's go to the tape like yeah gives him half of a laugh yeah soon in the future he'll just tell mike you're dead weight marty yeah harry shearer was working overtime on this one i mean like he had so many characters in this one right i wonder if he broke a record with this one auto of course and yeah i mean then bernard smithers yeah skin but you know i gotta say despite however prickly he is or whatever his current disposition is the guy's a genius i mean like his delivery and i know he legendarily like you know nancy cartwright is underlining lines and where to put the emphasis and he just comes in and does cold reads and gets it exactly right and the radio dj is so in his wheelhouse with like the snl character that he later did on wayne's world didn't he at wayne's world 2 was it airheads um Was he in Airheads? Or was it Airheads? It was Airheads. That's right. It was the E.J. in Airheads.

Yes. Doing that, uh-huh, uh-huh, you know, not paying attention. Yeah. He is definitely one of the strongest comic performers on the show. I'll forgive his grumpiness just for that. And if you, I mean, we listened to the clips isolated. You can definitely tell with him, like, he is so specific about the stutters and the breaths and just certain intonations. And it all just feels very natural to him.

There's a, and he clearly had, like, a sort of a subversive comedic eye to and spinal tap is about that but like i remember on the old uh late night letterman shows they used to have the late night film festival and they would invite harry to submit a short film and give him a small budget and he would come on i when i used to work at the cbs letterman show and they but they had all the archives so i went back and dubbed all the old late night film festivals and he did one called the making of you wouldn't believe our world i think that's what it's called it's probably on youtube now and it was the making of the behind the scenes of a corporate training video and like that was just such a hyper specific thing to do especially in the 80s but he was just on this whole other tip i think at that time

okay this you just unlocked a thing from the wtf interview actually that it's funny too because this is all in the news right now 10 years ago in the last 10 years he did a one of those films short films about bohemian grove like which is now all in the news is the place where clarence thomas gets his like million dollar blow jobs or whatever uh but he's but but that he got to like go to bohemian grove and and do research there like he got invited into that weird enclave it's uh i this makes me want to look it up even more now it's i think gary sheer he said okay this is also in the wtf interview he says that through years of therapy he realizes that you can

have two contradicting feelings at the same time and one of them is that he feels that he is grossly overpaid for the amount of work he puts into the simpsons but also incredibly underpaid but for uh based on how much money it makes and that is something he's had to reconcile over the years and uh with his feelings but in these first 10 years when he's really trying like he is so good he might be the best on the show but is he not trying anymore i mean he's kind of a one-take guy who records everything from either louisiana or england he doesn't, yeah. He's actually crusty at this point, right? Pretty much, yeah. There's another thing

I remember about him, too, is that Paul Schaefer, Harry Shearer, and I think Martin Short, whenever they're, they used to, whenever they're in the same town, they would go, they'd say let's make a trip to Branson or Las Vegas, and we will go see the worst, tackiest production playing there.

And they would get dressed up. They'd make a whole event out of it. And it would be like a date with those three guys, like going to see the tackiest one-man show in New York. And then we'd just have the best time of their lives going to this. And I always liked that idea of just like, all right, we're all semi-famous, but we're going to go out and go see I'm Jewish, I'm Italian, and I'm in therapy or whatever the terrible one-man show was. And then just go see, yeah, whatever they deemed the worst entertainment playing in that town.

That's, you know, it just hit me. You work with a guy who's in Spinal Tap. Like Paul Schaefer, he has a long scene in the movie as their terrible local ad guy in Chicago who fails to get anybody to show up. Artie Fufkin? Yeah, I like that. He says it a million times.

He's really funny in it. When I was looking for a version of the movie to download, I saw it online. There was a 4. looking for a version of the movie to download, I saw it online. There was a 4.5 hour work print of the movie. So they had a lot to choose from in terms of scenes to use. Wow, I would love to see that. It's all through the power of Torrance.

Man, I should have. Foolish me buying that Blu-ray. Milhoff shows up with an amazing leather jacket. He says it is from 50, 000 bazooka joe comics to give you uh an idea of what the bazooka joe economy was in the 60s which this joke is about from bazooka joe prizes if you wanted to get a spy camera like the one bart has in that uh the classic season one episode uh you could either send in 250 comics or 10 comics and 50 cents uh or you could get uh duane wade style flip shades for 500 comics or 20 comics and a dollar that's uh that shows you the the economy of 50 000

uh for that leather jacket quite quite a lot it's the most badass millhouse has ever looked he never looks cool again yeah do you guys remember the tootsie pops where like if you had the uh native american shooting the bow and arrow at a star, that you got something? But they never, I don't know, I never read the rules. It was like kids in school would say, oh, you got the Native American shooting the star. But what do I do with it? Do I take it down to the store and what do I get? I think you got a free comic book.

I think that's what you got was a free comic book. Well, I had heard those. You know, I think one thing that Matt Groening is so good at is sort of being the historian of schoolyard songs and rumors and stuff that, you know, like rhymes that you'd say in the playground and things like that. Because those were never cataloged except for like Life in Hell and in early Simpsons episodes. And that was one of those things that I heard that if you turned in, I think it was 50 Tootsie Pop rappers that had the American Indian shooting the star, you'd get a free bag of Tootsie Pops. That's what I heard. So I remember taking it to the local grocery store and actually saving these up and taking them in.

Oh, you actually did this? I didn't know this story. I did. Oh, wow. Yeah. And I took them to the poor clerk and I'm like, here's my, how do I get my free bag? She goes, I don't know anything about that kid. I was crestfallen. It was the first dose of reality I got, this magical thinking I had.

You walked out and dumped all the wrappers in the garbage. I was just doing some Tootsie Pop research in the background here, and that is an unsubstantiated myth, the star thing. And you know what? Thanks to woke culture, they're going to remove the Native American. There's not going to be any more myths. Of course, I'm kidding. But I can see people getting upset about that. Kid Rock's going to shoot a bag of

Tootsie Pops now. They're going to put a female studies major on the rapper. Next thing you know. Holding a book. So they head to the springfield coliseum i also thought it was funny like oh homer i get it as a joke now homer just lets his these two kids go into a concert alone and he's like i'll just be outside like you parents escort their kids to like children's concerts they don't let you don't let their kids just walk inside

uh maybe it was different in the 70s we i had a big conversation the other day about uh with my brothers about like what movies our our parents would let us watch and we saw pet cemetery in the theater and now uh i mean that's the most brutal movie of all time they like kill a toddler in that movie for crying out loud but uh but now my brother who saw pet cemetery it destroyed him for life uh has a kid and they took him to the mario movie and he's like my son was the same age as i was when i went to see pet cemetery he was like so yeah it's a different time it's uh parents didn't give a shit back then they give a shit now my folks drove me to go see um they might be giants flood tour in 1990 i remember then they just dropped me off and like two and a half hours later picked me up.

And that was like one of my first unsupervised things. You know, I guess I was, maybe I was in eighth grade or between summer of eighth grade and ninth grade. So I wasn't like Bart Milhouse's age, but still felt like a little bit of freedom. But you didn't get injured in the mosh pits then? It was fairly, there was a conga line that I didn't want to mosh pits then it was fairly there was a conga line that i didn't want to participate in your soul conga line yeah no i that was i think tmbg was my first concert too i don't know if it was but i know bob absolutely not my first concert

was jimmy buffett my parents took me we're talking about uh r-rated movies like i feel it was it was columbine that when they started cracking down on kids going to see R-rated movies I saw so many R-rated movies underage And Columbine happened a month before I turned 17 but then after that I had a girlfriend Who was 15 and They wouldn't let her see Sleepy Hollow with me And I thought no precedent has been set

Yeah precedent has been set I saw wild things when I was 16 I saw Scream when I was 14 What's going on here? Did she have to show ID or something? Were they asking for ID? Yes, and she actually bought a ticket to The Bachelor, and she snuck into Sleepy Hollow with us.

I wish my first star-rated movie was Barton Fink, just for the sake of Simpsons lore. That would have been good. Man, I forget my first star-rated movie in theater, but my mom took me to more a lot that honestly ended up just being uncomfortable for me. The one I always remember is as a kid, as a young teen into alternative comedy,

I want to see a Jean Garofalo movie. I want to see. She's in this new movie, Truth About Cats and Dogs. So my mom takes me to it, and there's a lengthy phone sex scene in it that is just like so uncomfortable to watch sitting next to your mom yes yeah that's rough that's rough well speaking of uncomfortable parental sex memories homer has uh teases that he has one uh which now this time i think it's i viewed as dirtier his memory than i remember

because homer is rocking back and forth and you only see him and he's saying, oh, baby. I think you're supposed to think he is receiving oral sex. I didn't like this. I didn't like it at all. One, I didn't think it was that funny. But also, I don't want to see Homer that, even imagining him in that situation. Dick, would you have been embarrassed watching that with your parents? Absolutely.

My story is, I remember one time in college, Airplane was playing on TV and my family, my sister, my mom were like, oh, let's just sit and watch Airplane. Probably the HBO version. It was the HBO version. Oh, it's just on TV. It's a Sunday when I'm back from college.

We're watching it and I know where the topless woman's jiggling breasts are during the turbulence scene. I mean, that's imprinted as a core memory of seeing that as a kid. I became a man that day. I'm like, oh, God, what am I going to get my mom and sister?

We all have to sit and watch that. It's only a half-second scene, but I'm like, I'm going to be uncomfortable during it. My dad, unspokenly and i i knew it he knew it but nobody else did he flipped the channel and pretended like it was an accident he's like oh sorry what did i do what did i do and they're like my sister's like turn it back turn it back and i'm like and uh he turns it back just as the scene is ending and uh i i just knew i was like that was a master class in avoiding that discomfort uh and he did it i had to give him credit genius he's like he's like a he's like a jazz performer just like work in the remote yeah wow this is this is accidentally

flipped it again this is the second oral sex homer mislead joke the other one was in i think war of the simpsons when he sends Bart to bed and Bart says, you can't have any fun in bed. He said, you'll be surprised, boy. And we cut to him seemingly receiving oral sex, but then we pull out to see he's eating a sandwich. Yes, yeah. I mean, same joke essentially here.

And then we see Homer's been doing it. I mean, I do love the idea that Homer, Homer could eat garbage anywhere but he drove to a makeout spot to sit in the back seat with a pile of junk food and just eat it there like i think it's part of a trio of jokes because next season you'll have making bacon on the beach where he thinks about that and it's actually him making bacon on the beach in a sexy speedo no less yeah yeah i also like that he's wearing a shirt yeah okay yeah i also like how barton millhouse just kind of shrug his homers like drooling over his memory i'm like

let's just walk away like yeah these 31 t-shirt prices are a joke here i just went to a wrestling show at the start of march 40 for a plain t-shirt like this 85 85 for a hoodie at it, if you wanted it. And you better believe I bought three t-shirts. Three? Well, people have to know I was there. Were they even 100% cotton? You know, I can't tell you. You better hang dry those, Henry.

Well, one was for my husband who couldn't make it to the show. You could probably resell it in like 20 years for, you know, double that. I don't know. I'm hopeful know i'm hopeful i'm hopeful i've got a few i was theirs that there's one that uh definitely i think is worth something but uh i also whenever i buy a cheap t-shirt because it's unpopular i think of spinal tap kicking momar kaddafi in the butt i think of that same whatever got dated very quickly that one and so yeah it's also a very off-model comic book guy in that scene but yeah so then i have the the clip here of this interview this feels i definitely think they were

written but this feels a little looser than the other spinal tap appearances and i think i think dan castellaneta was ready to like play along with these guys for this scene too uh but yes it's uh here's spinal tap being interviewed hey hey hey bill and marty here and we're backstage rapping with a tap fellas i'm gonna hit you with a phrase that has dogged you throughout your career washed up yet here you are among the top 105 concert acts today what's your secret guys well after the berlin wall fell our record started selling on the dismal side of the iron curtain and naturally that gave us a boost. We're very big in Bulgaria.

And what's his name? Yadagaria? Hungaria? Yeah, whatever. I can't think of anyone who's benefited more from the death of communism than us. Well, maybe the people who actually live in the communist countries. Oh, yeah, I hadn't thought of that. I bet you're right.

Yeah, on the other hand, each of us just bought our own soccer team. How many Hungarians can say that, eh? You know, hearing it in isolation, I'm more sure of it. I think that was Michael McKeon saying how many Hungarians can say that, not Christopher Guest. I think they animated the wrong voice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, after watching the movie, all I can think of is,

wow, they're talking so fast in this scene, but they have to. The Simpsons is now like a very fast-paced show. They're not kind of like, a lot of the improv in the movie is just like a lot of low-key mumbling and that's what their characters are but here they have to get to the point for their one act of the simpsons that's why it seems a little off to me i think yeah because because it's not as casual there isn't enough time to breathe they have to get in the jokes well probably they got edited down a lot like afterwards uh any ums or uhs or pauses like and yes they say on the commentary that uh one was a they said they won't name names but one was a difficult guest they say i'm gonna say i think he was defensive of his character i

think he's i've just heard he's hard to work with there's in general yeah that's true yeah but you know that that joke about being in the top 105 touring acts isn't funny because we're in the top 140 podcast on Patreon, so it's a good place to be. We'd kill to be. Yeah, we would kill

to be in the top 105. We'd be set for life. Yeah, I was like, that didn't sound that bad. Top 100? Like, yeah. I mean, I love it because if they were

in the top 100, they would say that. You have to say 105 because there's like 104 or whatever on the list. We're 139 right now. That's why I said top 140. Oh, there you go.

And then we have a quick cut to Bart getting into the concert. It's a good design of like, this is how it feels walking into a concert as you're waiting for it to start up. And you see the band on stage. Oh, I know the last concert. Well, Bob might have gone to one since then but me and bob went to see weird al when he came to town yeah yeah yeah i have not been to one since then the uh the opening act was emo phillips it was really fun it was also great to like uh i'm stealing bob's joke but they're like we sat through the whole thing and weird al was sat

down the whole time we were just like you know what we're all old we're gonna sit down standing up for a concert yep i went to that show as well in new york and uh carnegie hall of all places and uh yeah i didn't mind the sitting um i you know no conga lines in sight i loved it cut to them being interviewed some more uh well i just gotta play it i love them being asked to do a promotion see guys i wonder if you'd mind recording a couple of promos for us. Like what? Maybe you could say, nobody rocks like Bill and Marty on KBBO. Well, we don't know that, do we? What if somebody rocks as good as you?

Or better. I mean, we don't want to look stupid. Okay, we can respect that. How about rock-a-doodle-doo, you're listening to Bill and Marty. Yeah, sure. That's good, yeah. Love that joke that's good they don't they just like a rock-a-doodle like it it does make you think about any in your local area when they would play the like local band saying hey you're

listening to this or whatever and you're like wow they have these very famous musicians are just saying like hey listen to this listen to your local guy they're the best start asking guests to do these for us oh you should and it'll always be rockadoodle yeah it should always be rockadoodle you're right yeah it should only be rockadoodle do it's similar to the joke of uh how about instead of uh what i got you got to get and put it into you it's uh what i'd like is i'd like to hug and kiss you oh that's great now everybody can enjoy our music it's it's a similar joke where they just kind of immediately acquiesce to a worse suggestion. I think we missed it. Is this the first on-screen Bill and Marty?

That's right. Yes, you're right, Bob. Oh, really? We've heard them off-screen since season two, but this is their first on-screen appearance. Yeah. And they'd appear a lot more on-screen. Yeah, in future appearances, even when they would just be on on the radio like they'd cut to them in the studio but this is just them our first time actually seeing them yeah yeah it's uh i guess it's also their way of getting more spinal tap into the show

without meeting the characters like that i mean this feels crazy compared to just even a few years later on the show like every major guest star character shares a scene with a major simpsons character almost every time but in this episode they're like well bart would meet spinal tap like that wouldn't happen like they're the big stars and he's just going to the show but he's the sixth member of the band well also you guys when you've been on tour have you had any bleeding splish splash shows that you've had to deal with? We've definitely played some venues where they didn't have air conditioning and everyone was just sweltering hot, and we were wearing shorts like real professionals on a stage,

wearing shorts with box fans. Just like Frank Sinatra did, right? Joe was shirtless for a show we did in Hawaii one time. I was shirtless. I had heard that it's okay in Hawaii with Hawaiian shirts. Everybody does actually wear Hawaiian shirts in Hawaii. But you can button them down lower than you think you should in Hawaii. And I remember doing a whole show with it buttoned down.

And then a woman from Hawaii afterwards came up and said, I like the show. But your shirt's buttoned down way too low. That was like too low for Hawaiian standards. So I had to like go up like two buttons. Too indecent for Hawaiians. It was. And I remember we did one show too that was used in a hot packed, cramped like rock club.

And, you know, I don't want to take credit for this, but we were showing some sort of, I think it was a penile implant video, like an instructional video. We showed a lot of clinical, yeah. Yeah. And all of a sudden, we just saw this sea of people part. And what happened was a guy passed out during that moment.

So I don't know if it was the footage or if it was just the hot, cramped room. But yeah, the guy passed out because the venue was so loud. And at that same show, we had to get on stage by going through the audience. And it was a packed house and everybody was standing. It was the empty bottle in Chicago. And I remember I accidentally nudged somebody who spilled their beer

and this woman who had this fancy coat and she's screaming at me as I'm going up on stage to say, hey, everybody, welcome to the show. And she's like, God, you owe me for this fucking thing. You know, swearing at me. You asshole.

I'm just like, sorry, sorry, sorry. Hey, everybody, welcome to the show. But you guys have never been sponsored by beer or cigarettes like Spinal Tap. Brooklyn Beer. Brooklyn Beer sponsored us for a year. Yeah. Brooklyn Brewery. Still looking for that cigarette sponsor, though. When they're naming, getting the

name of the city wrong and doing on the 401 and doing the local references, just on Thursday night, I think Joe, we were playing the Arlington Cinema and Drafthouse and you said we love being here at the Alamo Drafthouse. I caught myself.

You caught yourself. I thought of that moment when I was watching this episode. But everybody knew what I said. Yeah, yeah. There was a, yeah. Yeah, that was a toll. Local reference is pretty important on touring shows.

We try to get a local video. So it's a little bit of pandering, but we're like, oh, here's this funny cat that came from Pittsburgh. And we'll play that video in Pittsburgh. That kind of thing no i just saw when i saw john mulaney last year and he came to berkeley he basically had like two minutes of saying like local references to berkeley and how he said like and uh no i wouldn't do my san francisco stuff you guys are a totally different city you guys aren't san francisco blah blah anyway and then he just went to his actual. It's true, damn it. Yeah, it is true.

But he gave you some local stuff up top, and then he went into the routine. Okay, that's nice. But especially if you're like a guy from Chicago who's also lived in New York for a million years. You come to Berkeley and hear Berkeley people say, we're not San Francisco. You probably just do the jack-off motion to them. Like, yeah, yeah, sure. Sometimes we'll compliment their public access because we're big public access aficionados. And so like if we're in Fort Wayne, Indiana, we'll be like, you guys have like top five public access in the country.

We'll compliment them that way. Or thrift stores. If they have fantastic thrift stores, we'll be like, hey, we went down to Salvation Army down there on 401 South. And you guys have one of the best ones in the country. And then we get applause for that. So we pander we'll absolutely pander so they they break into a song this is the song break like the wind it's the title track off the album they were promoting at the time of uh the this episode aired and uh on that song so 92 when this came out really was their like so smile tap comes out it's it's a a huge hit, at least in America, but bands love it.

Like they get to hear for years how big bands are like, oh, you, like real rock bands are like, oh, you guys, this is just reality. This isn't jokes to us. Like this just happens to us on tour. So on the 92 album, they're calling in all of the favors from all those famous fans of it. So on break like the wind in this scene here, the guitar work you're hearing is from Jeff Beck, Joe Satriani, and Slash. They are all on this song. This is Slash at his most powerful is playing on this album. His hat was never bigger.

I also love the gag this did feel like them uh like you said spinal tap fanfic of the joke is that the bad thing happens to derrick smalls that the third guy that uh that she replays that like he's he's off for the lighting like the lighting cue for him on the third guy comes on but he's he misses the spotlight and has to step into it oh also you know that comb over joke uh about michael mckeon's character not as funny to me now as i am battling uh thinning hair at this moment i don't that hit close to home henry for me as well i uh there's a reason i often wear hats on stage so the lighting has to be just right are you walking around shouting medium setting yeah exactly i did not

the show with the box fans was a real problem for me uh personally you know i wonder if they think they're so protective over the history of their characters and what's is and isn't canon do you think they were cool with them saying like oh yeah this character officially has a comb over and is bald i was thinking that there's there's some weirdly lowbrow jokes in this like oh the guy's actually. And then later there's like a fat woman joke. I'm like, The Simpsons doesn't really do this kind of humor. You know, it felt like they were kind of reaching for more gags for this scene. And we cut to Homer eating in the car.

He's listening to a song. Bob directed me to the song. The first thing he sings, everyone thinks of the Spanish flea thing. Well, it's the funniest thing. But before that, he's humming along to Summer Samba by Walter Wanderly. It's one of those cocktail party organ songs. Is that the...

That's Spanish flea. Oh, that's Spanish flea. When Homer's like... That's the very, very cocktail party very 60s. Homer has reverted to his Mambo-loving self from season one, basically. There's a good gag of Nigel having to turn his head upside down to read that sign. Can we go back to Spanish Flaming?

He made up those lyrics, right? Simpsons writers wrote those lyrics, right? Are those the actual lyrics to that song? Yes, actually, they're the real lyrics to the song. There's more than one different set of lyrics because it was an instrumental song, and then different people covered it, and some of the ones with lyrics became more popular in certain regions.

And I think they just asked Dan to do it, and from memory he did it, right? Because there's an improv version of it on the DVD. Yes, yeah, yeah. The version he's doing, I believe, is made famous in 66 by a singer named Frankie Randall. But yeah, there's multiple lyrical versions of it, but there's that one. But everybody now knows the instrumental one, thanks to, I get what, the dating game made it? I think the dating game.

Herb Albert? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the lyrics were so stupid. I was like, this has to be a joke. get what the dating game made it i think the dating game heard albert yeah yeah i mean the lyrics were so stupid i was like this has to be a joke this like the stupidest lyrics i love how dated it is because it's like he's heard of the beatles the chipmunks he's seen on tv like yes the beatles and the chipmunks why not a spanish flea oh so this is funny too listeners heard it because i plugged it in in our break the commercial for this episode features two alternate lines.

And one of them is in that version, the nobody rocks, like Springfield. That line is actually said by Christopher guest, not Harry Shearer. And I think they must've, there's a couple of times where I think somebody in the animation side mixed up,

which character says what. And so I think they had to like redo it with shearer before the airing to get it to be the right guy but yeah it's uh it's funny ever noticed i mean i i never noticed i mean because i don't you noticed i mean well only now watching very closely yes yeah i also love that at a here with all the satanic panic about rock bands, here at Spinal Tap, they pull out their inflated Dark Lord and do invoke you to worship him and throw the devil horns. And it's also so funny seeing them do the one middle finger devil horns

with four fingers. Oh, yeah. I didn't think about that. I know it was done for the sake of humor, but as a kid in Catholic school, this was a little dangerous for me to watch. Like, ooh, they're bringing down the devil. Though have uninflated props must have let you guys down at one time or another. I wish we had inflatable props.

We had beach balls at one. We did a whole show where we kind of riffed on a movie called Computer Beach Party, and we had beach balls. But I don't think they ever deflated. I think those were... I would say props in general, we usually bring some props along but i think i think in our first volume of shows when it was like 2004 2005 when we were touring we got real ambitious we had like wardrobe changes and we had uh props with the easels that we would bring up and now like we'll bring a rejuvenate face mask or something now with something small like a frisbee at this point yeah we've gotten lazy yeah 20 years in so without roadies it's hard to have inflatables the only prop we bring is our

anxiety to every live show that's a guarantee uh and uh and yes this when i think of a show going poorly this this close out here is one of my favorite lines in any history of the show. You know, people think there are only five members of Spinal Tap, but they are wrong. Could we turn up the house lights, please? That was the cue to turn up the house lights so we can tell the audience they're the sixth member of the freaking group. We are trying to put a tiny thrill into their gray little lives. So forget it. Turn on the lasers. Yeah, my vision.

That's it. Show's over. Good night, Springton. There will be no encores. I just love it. Good night, Springton. There will be no encores. That announcement would be a relief

in my old age now. Just like, okay, I can go home now. It's 1030, an encore now. Oh, gosh. I got to say, I got to compliment you on the Sketchfest show you did this year with Matt Chrisman about The Simpsons Predicted It. It was so tight and well-produced, and it kind of was, I think, the definitive recap of of you know what

people saying that simpsons predicted things and how annoying that is but also covering those things thank you thank you and now at least two more things have happened in the past three months since that uh live show it's it's crazy bring it back uh we will i'm sure there will we could do it every year with just an update like okay so in last year, here's what people say they predicted it, including, I mean, yes, the most recent one was the Statue of David one, which is insane. Can I just ask you guys, we're all music. We go to concerts and everything. What do you think about the encore? Are you guys for it or are you against it?

Like, I'm personally just like, oh, we have to go through this little charade right now. We have to, like, you walk off and then we have to cheer and then you force us to cheer it's like i i don't know i think it's a little sure sometimes i see bands i think i wonder if like built a spill i could see doug march who's also a pretty crusty guy i bet he didn't do one you know i could see him just being like we go off the stage now we're done and i kind of like that yeah i think when i was uh going to concerts you know some of my first concert i was tickled by the idea like oh we made them come back but you know as as i've uh gone through you know uh getting older and going to more concerts i've been to concerts in which they didn't come back and the applause just kind of slowly petered out everyone just

kind of shrugged and went home and i think i i need to know if they are coming back i don't want to invest all this clapping energy into nothing and that aforementioned weezer show there was a feeling in the air of like will there be an encore and then the lights turned on like almost immediately after they got off stage like okay all right no longer there wasn't one yeah the lights are the cue i've you know i went to another show uh that i really loved if people can go to the uh uh see him i think he's touring around some more tim heidecker on his two tims show a tour two tims tour uh bob and me went to that when they came to sf and uh he he did sort of do an encore but it he didn't have to beg for it like it was like like two minutes he off stage for two minutes then back on stage and does it and it did do a thing that i don't like where it's like i've been waiting for

a song that like had a music video of theirs so a bigger song and then they do it for the encore i was like oh don't make me wait for the encore for the big song like have a deeper cut for the encore not not your big a big hit exactly or do like a weird cover of somebody else give us a little bonus thing a bonus weird thing at the end yeah yeah also there's another line in the commercial that's not there where bart right before the riot happens he says cool a beer filled riot beer fueled riot that's when they get trampled in the show they just got or at least on the dvd they cut to just them being trampled i i don't know if that aired originally but if it did my theory is it was cut for the rerun because it's the summer of 1992 and we don't want to make jokes about riots and then maybe that version ended up on

the dvds they didn't retain the original cut of the episode but i i don't even know if it ever aired if somebody out there has the original airing i'd like to know because unfortunately i missed this original airing it wasn't on the Henry tapes. Would that tape still be playable today? Could you check it today? It must be somewhere. You know, I should talk to my brother, who I don't talk to enough. Where are the tape archives? He would have them, I think.

Or my mom. I mean, if they got thrown out, I'll be sad. I need to know the chain of custody with the Henry archives. Well, Henry, we have some VCRs we love that play even our worst tape so if you if you need to get the episodes off there and digitized we can we can we can do very little else but we can uh offer you that sir thank you i i you guys are the masters of it i i will if i find it it's only 25 an hour and yeah that's the friend rates that's a steal that's a steal i so though this concert right i think is there have been uh rock concerts that broke into violence uh in the past but this was written in

late 1991 or mid-1991 july 1991 is when the riverport riot uh for guns and roses happened and which is similar to what happens here where axl rose is having arguments with the audience like through the whole show and 10 to 15 songs in he gets pissed at somebody taking photos of him in the audience and he said and he tells security to stop him they won't do it he runs into the audience and starts getting hit and then he just goes up on stage and goes like fuck fuck this, and then just leaves the stage. The show's over. The audience is very mad at that.

Dozens are injured. There's no deaths at it. So, yeah, I'm wondering if this show being cut short early causing a riot is a reference to that Guns N' Roses show. I think the timeline does line up. It was hard to look up i was like wait guns and roses uh where which show at riot this it was hard to pin down one but this is the one i think like he caused vancouver uh audience to riot like there's that's what i remember i remember it being canadian and they overturned cars and everything i was like canada

does that too i thought that was just us at least that the guns and roses fans do in canada yeah so and this would have been two years before woodstock 94 and that whole debacle so you know oh 99 was the bad one i think oh 99 was the bad one you're right yeah so that was years before this and uh yes uh homer he's singing the song uh so the oh other Spanish Flea thing, and I've heard this straight from the source. They thought they got Spanish Flea on the show, but then they were turned down by the publishing company. They were, apparently they, it was too expensive. And so they asked writer on the show, Jay Kogan, if he could get them a deal on it because,

and he could because Jay Kogan's uncle was a member of the Baja Marimba band, uh, which was formed around Julius Wechner, the writer of Spanish flea. So he, it was all thanks to these family connections that they were able to get, uh, the song Hollywood Kogan.

Yeah. So much work for Spanish flea. I want to point out one thing that gets missing is he's, uh, Homer's chips that he's eating in the car are Snorful's brand. Which I enjoy that fake product name. Somebody make a t-shirt of those. Snorful's t-shirt or something. They got a Tijuana taxi in Park It's Hit By A Car. I think that's secretly the better Herb Alpert song.

Honestly. Yeah, they're pretty good yeah i think am i i you know it's hard to not think of spanish flea with the tiktok sound put over it by uh or the song ending right when the the question on the dating game happens or ends oh yeah yeah i know what you're saying i thought you're talking about the the social media app no no no are teens dancing to spanish flea sorry i mean like putting up putting up like bad covet advice it should be that should be the new tiktok dance in a spanish flea and stuff uh and then uh we cut to the editorializing of camp rockman i love for well

first off the line of like the first time ever a hockey arena becomes a sign of a scene of violence tonight the city weeps as for the first time ever a hockey arena becomes a scene of violence. Tonight, the city weeps. As for the first time ever, a hockey arena becomes a scene of violence, following a concert by Spinal Tap. I hope my poor little baby's okay. See for yourself. Ah! Of course, it would be wrong to suggest

that this sort of mayhem began with rock and roll. After all, there were riots at the premiere of Mozart's The Magic Flute. So, what's the answer? Ban all music? In this reporter's opinion, the answer, sadly, is yes. Hi, Mom. Oh, thank God. Mom, I want to be a rock star. We'll discuss it later. Is Milhouse okay? He'll be right back

help help that he says that should we ban all music in my opinion sadly yes like he just it's such a great parody of bad editorial writing because people the gag in editorials is somebody goes up to the edge of saying like but should we plan this thing obviously not but we should do blah blah but he goes like should we ban it yes yes we should i also like that he says this reporter thinks you know like i just love that that reporting this reporter thinks yes they kind of i love that he just he jumps to you know he's always jumping to uh conclusions and you know toiling in underground sugar caves immediately and you know i just love brockman as a character it really brings his editorial to a screeching halt there's nothing there's nowhere else to go from there yeah just music should be

banned yes yeah the end we should ban all music that's the answer i reporters still do that this reporter from this reporters they don't do that anymore do they well you know well actually i guess yeah that's uh in your in the subject of your film or in the in the your the documentary you featured in you there's a few kent brockman's in in as part of i can't see kent bro Brockman suing anybody over me. Would he sue the guy who said that Godzilla was running around town IP freely? Would he sue that? Well, it was actually the parent company of the station.

So we were probably getting sued by Montgomery Burns to put it in Simpsons parlance. I see. He does have no sense of humor. I think most local news stations don't make room for editorials i think it's like well here are your right wing talking points here is your your black crime statistics now tell the world that's true well yeah what was that thing uh i feel like i see a new one of those every couple years but it was like media matters pulled together the clip of like every sinclair station had their reporters read the exact same

editorial yes yes word for word yeah yeah yep john stewart used to put those together they're just reading off of a there's no time to actually editorialize anymore and uh though also when he says that there were riots at the magic flute premiere i could not find that online though then when i tried to learn things about the history of the magic flute like three different websites were like and of course the magic flute is full of masonic imagery and that mozart was actually amazed i was like wait what well i didn't mean to fall down a masonry conspiracy theory oh rabbit hole here uh and uh you know henry lots of buildings in downtown berkeley they've got the free mason symbol on them are you allowed into them i don't know i've never tried to go into

them you should try it. Look at the back of a dollar, guys. Come on. We're through the looking glass. I had this conversation the other day. Where was I? I was in Arlington, Virginia, and we walked right by one that had a huge symbol. And it is kind of an ominous symbol.

It doesn't kind of look scary. But it was where they could hang out. And I was wondering, do they just get to hang out there and is that how it is still now today like free a free place to stay or like oh free meal if you're a mason or whatever is that what it is like i don't know like just because you have that particular occupation like you get to be in this club i wonder if it is like the stone cutters where it's just a place to get drunk and play ping pong. I mean, because our city is old for a West Coast city, I see buildings like the Odd Fellow Society, all these weird old fraternal organizations. I don't know if they still occupy those spaces,

but their logos are there still. Yeah. My grandfather had a retirement party at an Elks Club, so I've been into one of those hallowed spots. And yeah, it's just like a community center that's served alcohol. I think basically it i've been to a couple of elks lodges because they would often host uh independent wrestling shows you can always count on oh of course yeah yeah oh the amateur like like homemade type of stuff yes yeah the smaller local stuff yeah i so bart uh somehow escapes alive from it and it made him realize he wants to be

a rock star. And this is when they realized they left Milhouse there. So I think this is a real major moment for the show that like Milhouse had always been around and Bart's friend, but this is when they realized like when horrible things happen to Milhouse, it's funny and we need to do more of this stuff uh and that and then the next episode is the millhouse featured episode it's like his auto show but they come away from it feeling like we haven't done enough with millhouse yet we got to do uh the next episode is the samantha stanky one at the stanky yeah i watched those two in order

and yeah i love the uh love the drawing of Milhouse and that when he's underneath all the folding chairs and he comes up and he doesn't have glasses on. Like that was even, like the choice to take his glasses off completely was hilarious. Rather than having to like askew. Yeah.

Somebody has that animation cell. That would be a good one. Oh, that'd be a great cell. And Pamela Hayden, his voice actress, she does such great like, help, help help help uh the dvd you can hear some extra takes of that help uh the desperate hell for real yeah it's uh it's one of those dvd easter eggs you got to dig for back when they used to do those things but now they're all on like youtube or

twitter yeah yeah no i i mean i didn't dial it up on my dvd i just went to uh the always helpful resource daily simpsons on twitter, at Daily Simpsons. Well, sometimes it's like, okay, now push these numbers. And my remote has no numbers anymore for watching DVDs. Like, what do I do? Yeah, yeah. There aren't number buttons on my Xbox controller when I'm watching it on my Xbox. Now, DVD remotes, I mean, we still use a PlayStation 3 to play the DVD we use in our live

shows because that has the best remote. It's a Bluetooth remote. It reaches 300 feet away through concrete and it has everything you need on it. It's got the top menu and the pop-up menu and the newer for the PlayStation 5, they don't have it. So we're stuck with the 3 the three wow i didn't know how useful it was man that's great oh it's incredible we stopped we stocked up on ps3s i wrote a letter to uh a letter i emailed playstation yeah sony and i was like hey can you add the pop-up menu button on your remote i haven't heard back yet and that was four years ago they then had we come back from break i like how it's like them putting maggie to bed while they have this conversation i think it's really cute of them deciding whether to get

part of the guitar or not and i love the sound of homer hitting himself in the head with the crappy kid's guitar and they are going to spend a lot of money on this guitar i guess first guitar they buy him has to be like 300 400 yeah it's it's a huge mistake like get your kid a shitty acoustic guitar because electric guitar needs an amp this one is magic it doesn't need an amp most times it's a very magical guitar how we use electricity can be smarter cleaner and greener at electric ireland we can help guide you there. You see, our new Net Zero Hub has all you need to know about smart meter plans, EV tariffs, solar panels, and much more. Making your usage clearer, your trips greener, your home cozier, and your world brighter. Find our Net Zero

Hub at electricireland.ie when i i never learned how to play guitar bob i know you you gave it a go in your youth i did uh but then uh i didn't like my band members and i got grew very disillusioned so i became a writer instead my dad played guitar in a band all growing up with travel kind of a wedding band style thing and he made a valiant effort to teach me how to play but too hard i just realized it's way too hard to play guitar so i i stopped i couldn't do yeah i i've started and stopped three or four times in my lifetime and uh in what homer's advice to bart at the end of that uh you know or bart says it was too hard so i just gave up that's 100 what it was it was too hard so i just gave up that's 100 what it was it was too hard so i just gave up so

did your neither of your fathers threatened to punch you like homer does as encouragement no threats of violence no no i just quit on my own my dad probably just embarrassed me somehow i mean for me it did get too hard and guitar players out there will agree with me the f chord they made it way too hard they should have reworked that entire chord because you have to put your entire finger across the entire first uh or whatever you call it it sucks i could yeah for like practicing for four years i could never pull off an f chord and and i was still like young and growing and powerful i can't i can barely do it these days who has that finger strength like nobody does i was surprised at how like my dad's fingers tips of his fingers

were all calloused from you know but i i didn't realize how much you had to press into the strings themselves and and how that gets a different sound and yeah i just gave up right away the four of us should do like a guitar podcast like where we just talk about guitar playing our experiences with it just Just complaining about specific chords? Fuck you, C minor. It's a weekly podcast and we each try to learn a song until we can play the song. Four guys who

tried to learn the guitar and didn't. They should all just be like the A chord. You hold down, pinch the neck a little and you got an A chord and it's fine. I also like the instruction manual of 99 easy lessons like that was like printed in 1961 with the the smiling guy with his guitar and also important to note here for trivia reasons they draw bart playing it left-handed he has the guitar

left-hand style like you know mccartney or jimmy hendrick i that's what i blame on me not learning guitars my dad was righty i'm lefty and I just couldn't transpose it in my head. So that's why I'm not a guitar player. It's also great that Bart's instant cynical rock fantasy is just so good. Like here's, I have a clip here. It's called Dreams vs. Reality. Bart, you've got to go on. Slag off.

You've changed, man. It used to be about the music. on. Slag off. You've changed, man. It used to be about the music. I said slag off. Cool. Knock it off. I'm sorry? Knock it off. I was just jamming with you.

Hey, Simpson, what are you trying to play? Polly Wolly Doodle. Oh, yeah? Well, it sounds Polly Wolly crappy. Ha ha! Burn! They almost changed Nelson's catchphrase there. It's true. They're like, it's ha ha enough.

He needs to say burn when he walks off screen. Like, burn! He'd said ha ha up to that point, right? Yes. Okay. Funny that they didn't go with a ha ha there. They wanted to follow it up with a burn. Okay. go with a ha ha there it's uh they wanted to follow it up with a burn i i also uh yeah they said that they tried to get piss off and sawed off on the show but the censors wouldn't allow it so they but they got in slag off i think it's a more creative choice you know you're not expecting

to hear the phrase slag off and then bart's fantasy instantly cuts to like the most cynical ending and him throwing an empty Jack Daniels bottle at his friend used to be about the music I also like that Lisa is enjoying bullying Bart like normally he always gets to mock her musical ability but now she's like just showing off and making him feel bad I didn't take it as bullying though I thought she was excited like oh Bart's trying to like play music so i wanted this is the one way i can interface with my brother but she doesn't realize she's making him feel bad with her supreme skill she's just yeah no she wants to run circles around him that's totally that's what that's what i yeah that's how i took i never read it that way but maybe that is the intent uh this is when bart is

very sad and he walks onto the bus and this also i have to remind myself this with auto too this is like the end of a running gag with auto up to this point he had always been it's him on the bus while driving the bus he is humming songs like like he's humming like frankenstein or iron man or purple haze so this is him finally like i'm gonna play for real a song instead of just humming the tune of it and honestly like otto is so good this should be his real job i'd say his father was right that he abandoned to nothing because then why are you not doing this as your real job when you're as a great guitarist like uh what what's the what's wrong with you otto this episode does reveal otto's age which i forgot because he was apparently born in 63 so

he is 29 in this episode and I guess presumably for the entire run of the show he's a 29 year old man I think oh his specific date is the day after my birthday it's January 18th I feel like you guys should mark that on the calendar and have a you know celebrate his birthday yeah he'll be 61 next year yeah he's 60 this year yeah when they made an episode about otto in 99 or at least the opening bit of his wedding that even then it was like he's such a dated character like his love of uh what was it it's white snake he has a fake white snake band at his uh wedding and it's like this is dated like this is an old you'd have to be old to want white snake at your uh wedding

in 99 and yeah and auto today if you when they draw him in the show he's still got the the cassette player strapped to him and the puffy white old-fashioned um uh headphones too like he they never updated that he didn't give them they didn't give him like an ipod or whatever for his design i'm glad they did he should always be that but like what is there a modern modern um antecedent to like this burnout rock and roll dude i was thinking like spicoli from fast times at regimont high is that what you're looking for thinking yeah but like what is what is the modern version like in a movie set in the 2000s yeah like what is the what is that um is there a trope that's similar but for like a new

like modern teen comedy or something like what's their version of the stoner burnout because pot like everybody smokes pot now as like just a normal thing so like i guess what is when sean william scott stopped acting we lost those characters died with him no i you know i'm trying so a recent movie that stars young people in it uh that i'm trying to think of was uh was scream six uh which i really liked it's a really great movie but the young people in it i'm like okay well who's the burnout of them and i think the closest to it is like the stoneriest character in it is this pansexual young lady in it uh who is uh the niece of jamie kennedy's character from the first movie and i was like well she's kind of like she's the

stoner of the group but she's also the movie nerd that's the best i can think because otherwise like the other the hesher type guys usually they now are like the incel characters in movies who like well they can't have sex and they're a loser like yeah it's and and also yes that that pot is everywhere it's harder i would think it's probably harder to build your personality on being a stoner these days yeah you're not rebelling you're not rebelling against anything anymore you know it means you went to the weed store and you spent a lot of money yeah exactly now some of the current stuff with auto on the show is auto being upset that it's like everybody smokes pot now.

That's the most recent Otto thing where he goes to – there's an episode where Marge works at the dispensary. And he goes to the dispensary and he's incredibly uncomfortable just openly asking to purchase pot. He's like, what? Can't you at least dress this up a little bit? It's funny. Let's say Dr. Dre is the chronic now because it's just like, can't you at least dress this up a little bit? It's funny. Listen to like Dr. Dre's the chronic now, you know?

Cause it's just like, Oh, smoking pot. Like that whole album was all about pot. And you know, that was the whole thing. And now it's just like, I don't know.

Everybody kind of does it. It's like, you're not like the bad boy anymore. You know, like Cheech and Chong's whole act is like dead. If you want to be counterculture. Now you don't smoke pot. Kevin Smith stopped smoking pot.

Recently. You know what they got to do for counterculture now, you don't smoke pot. Kevin Smith stopped smoking pot recently. You know what they got to do for counterculture? They got to start smoking cigarettes. Go back to cigarettes. That's the next one. Yeah. No, I had that with a friend. I don't actually have any close friends who actually still smoke cigarettes. A lot of them just transferred over to vape.

But I did hang out with a friend a few years ago uh like 10 years ago where they were they were smoking a cigar they're like you know what fuck you i want to smoke a cigar this was a woman too who wanted to do it but and then when she was smoking the cigar somebody at first like was like oh cool is that a blunt can i hit it and then she's like no it's it's just a cigar and they were like like, bleh. They were disgusted. Lady, you sicken me. I wonder if Dr. Dre's next album will be all about how much he loves Marlbros. Or he loves a camel. Instead of the pot leaf on the CD, it'll be a hard pack of Marlboro Reds.

I think it'll be about his blood pressure medication because he's like 60 now. Oh, that's right. He's Otto's age uh so uh so yeah they then otto then breaks into freebird which this commentary was the one where i realized how if a song if a real song is played on a show that costs money because they complain about it on the commentary and i was like all right you that's when i realized how expensive it is i mean to play freebird on the show even a cover that had to cost them tens of thousands of dollars yeah they just didn't have to pay the publishing because

i was singing it but they still had to pay for the composition and that's i think that's the more expensive of the two yeah i uh i uh soon after this dvd set came out i think was when i learned that in the royal tenenbaums movie uh if you've seen it in the early in the movie during the the growing up montage it ends with like a bit of a triumphant falcon flying to the hey jude and they wanted real hey jude in the movie and they're like they could barely afford a cover of hey jude in it like they it was that expensive i think the simpsons writers were just very tickled by these super long rock songs because freebird is nine minutes long there's a joke about uh the opening of the

concert for bangladesh uh in this season later they do an in a god of davida song i think there's like one more i think there's no any god of davida joke before that even like long version yeah that's in the michael jackson one so i think they're just tickled by these songs from their teenage years that are just endless. I was a production assistant for right after college, and I was working on a shoot with one of the producers who happened to be, I think, the front man for Lips Inc. who did

Funky Town. And I overheard a phone call he was getting, and he's like, okay, that's great. Alright, awesome. And he hung up, and he's like, I just got $30,000 for Funky Town. For the movie Contact, the Jodie Foster foster movie contact and then i remember watching the movie and funky town comes up 1.5 seconds and it's like covered in static you can't even hear it it's like that dude got thirty thousand dollars just for that nothing part of the song i would have asked can i have one thousand dollars just just test your luck there you know that freebird thing too i do people still

shout it out at concerts to be funny like i i hope it's dead that's long gone okay i haven't heard that in years david cross had your your pal david cross had a great joke about it where somebody would i think he this was like early as, he did a bit where if somebody yelled Freebird during his show, he had like a fake check that he would bring out and give them. Like, you're the one millionth person to say Freebird on a live show. That's a good way to handle it. This could be apocryphal. I think it actually happened. There was a band, or maybe still is a band, in which if people would yell that out, they would actually punish the audience and play it.

They would keep Freebird in their back pocket. So yes, we have a time cut that's him to the end of Freebird. So yeah, they've been sat there for nine minutes. I love, I would have been the nerd on the bus like Martin telling people we were late for school. I would have been the one to say. But yes, Otto decides it's time to put a pedal to the metal. He tells everybody

just try to go live that's a great line reading too he drives through the tire fire and this is the craziest one where like apparently in their original version they just drove by spinal taps bus they decided that they would pay extra for a late retake because like that doesn't feel good enough. So it was a late addition that Spinal Tap's bus explodes. Which apparently also annoyed Christopher Guest. I mean, honestly, it is kind of an F you to like,

oh, we put your characters in the show and we just unambiguously killed you. Like, you guys are dead. I thought that would have been fun. I love that idea. They're like, yeah, go ahead and kill us off. You know? Yeah.

Does it disrupt the canon of Spinal Tap by doing that? Or was it that it wasn't their idea that he didn't like? Maybe. Well, I think they probably didn't like it wasn't their idea. But also it's like, you know, if you want to be a big nerd about it, like I like being, then this is the

Simpsons universe version of Spinal Tap, not our universe version of Spinal Tap. That's what I'm saying with the conflict of like pop culture, our pop culture, and then the fictional world's pop culture. When they combine like that, it disrupts. So,

yeah. And well, and then, well, yes, also it's funny hearing Christopher Guest tell the story that, or apparently Reese had heard that Christopher Guest's kids watched the episode with him and asked him, like, so are you guys dead? And he's like, I guess we are.

One thing they couldn't capture with his character, what's his name, Nigel Tufnell or something? Yeah, yeah. In the movie, he is always chewing gum, like, very aggressively. And they couldn't really translate that to an animated character, it'd be too distracting. But that's, like, the hallmark of his kind of improv style with the character, just slack jaw chewing gum, looking very disinterested and everything.

That'd be so difficult to animate, chewing gum and like moving their lips to speak. I like that they get a few lines of dialogue before they crash, and they're talking about how well the show went, when it was clearly a disaster, you know, like the thing didn't inflate and they called it early and yeah there's no i thought it went great and i like that harry

shearer's character has his pipe which he had all the time in the movie i also like that yeah yeah and also i was thinking a guest of like oh yeah his most recent appearance was i was hoping to see him at that oscars and when jamie lee curtis won i was like so we're gonna see him and she she thanked him like my wonderful husband christopher guest cut to him at the oscars and when jamie lee curtis won i was like so we're gonna see him and she she thanked him like my wonderful husband christopher guest cut to him in the audience and he's just a proud proud husband and you know what the hollywood they say these things don't last they've been together a long time those two and i hope they're never they never divorce it's cute i always think because she's so outgoing and seems like just kind of a firecracker and a lot of

fun and christopher guest is the opposite as a public persona anyway so i think it works i also like their kids the the kids they talked about as they were growing up their kids are also like big dorks like us uh and that especially for video games and anime and five six years ago at a big fighting game convention uh called evo the kids went the their their teen kids went there dressed up and jamie lee and christopher guest also came dressed up as uh fighting game characters from street fighter and tekken uh respectively jamie lee curtis i believe was she was vega i think i think so and now she's lobbying to be in the one piece live action netflix show because uh well because jam Because Jamie Lee Curtis' daughter loves One Piece.

Yeah. But yeah, so they then crash the bus. It even knocks over the Jebediah Springfield statue. It's like, wow, that's a lot of damage. Yeah, Otto gets a slap on the wrist. He's killed three men. He's destroyed a statue. He says there's no zero fatalities, but yes, you're right.

He did kill. He just killed everybody on that tour bus, really. Yeah. But this is when Skinner fires Otto. Or actually, no. He gives him like, he bans him from driving until he gets a license. He actually doesn't even fire him. Oh, it's a miracle no one was hurt.

Oh, I stand on my record. 15 crashes and not a single fatality let's see your license pal no can do never got one but if you need proof of my identity i wrote my name in my underwear oh wait these aren't mine well that tears it until you get a license and wear your own underwear mister you are suspended without pay. Who's going to drive the bus? I drove an all-terrain vehicle into Nang. I think I can handle it. Boy, ever since they discovered Skinner's backstory, they are just hitting it with a Vietnam joke every episode.

Yeah, guys, it was only six produced, five aired episodes and six produced episodes earlier they decided that Skinner was a Vietnam vet, and now it's every episode they they they're hitting it the next episode is the great series of speeches of him just going like i thought they'd be welcoming back then they spat on me anyway did he say well that just tears it because i've never heard that expression before that just tears it yeah yeah it's a good old man i don't think i ever heard somebody say that for real it's a nice fuddy-duddy expression okay probably old movies they would say it yeah i love his

stance of like until you get your own light get a license and wear your own underwear we cut to skinner driving the bus and i like his line of like that's one palindrome you won't be hearing for a while i love that joke and bart is shocked like bart knows what he means by that he didn't have to say he's suspended he's just like gasp auto's gone and uh skinner at first thinks it's all silly songs and chuckles but he'll learn uh i never had this song growing up as a kid did you guys have anything like it and this didn't really teach us uh in my school to sing like no no one sang this song i mean like the jingle bells batman smells i had heard that before the simpsons but that really popularized it you would hear that nobody was doing this one at least in my school i'd never heard before the simpsons

yeah no we did uh wheels on the bus go round and round and also we had a bus driver who was also the geometry teacher oh boy named named mr theady norman theity and so we did a clever parody called dent dent dent a norman drives the bus and uh that was the thing we did to annoy that bus driver but no it was mostly spit wads and things like that and echoing in his head as he's drinking bourbon at the end of the night yeah but i remember having some like farm kid friends and uh going to their house house for an overnight on Friday. And just like the buses were just unruly. I mean, this is probably like mid-80s, like late 80s.

But man, it was just Lord of the Flies on those buses. Yeah. Were either of you bus kids growing up? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. In middle school and high school. Did you know how to do... Yeah.

Did you... Because I remember going on field trips. It on field trips. I was within walking distance of the school. But the bus kids, they always knew how to do those really complicated windows where you have to apply all the pressure in the world on your fingertips to go in and then down. So I'd always have to ask a bus kid for help with the windows on a field trip bus trip. I mean, those were usually just blood blisters waiting to happen. They're just going to tear apart your fingers, those windows. And most of them were just jams.

Yeah. Oh, they'd be like sort of crooked. Like, uh, yeah, now I, I'm kind of glad I became a bus kid in middle school because,

uh, in elementary school, my mom worked close by so she could drop us off or we'd walk home from it. But, uh, uh, yeah, as by middle school, I was,

I mean, I, I probably would be an even more cloistered, uh, little boy had I not gotten to be on the bus. And it was, it a rough first year being on the bus with the bus kids. Uh,

yes, yes, it was, but eventually I, and that's where I got my, my childhood nickname of Opie, uh, which was a reference to the film to the

film baby's kids uh which in that movie but when the one white kid becomes friends with uh the the the stars of the show they say like we're gonna we we're gonna call you opie and that's titular baby's kids yes the baby's kids call it friend opie and that's why it was my nickname so eventually they they brought you. You did the initiation, and you got on. Pretty much, yeah. I'm not saying I was never bullied again, but there was some level of proving themselves.

Well, from one cloistered kid to another, I'm proud of you for that, Henry. Good job. There was no initiation. I just got on the bus and sat down. Oh, man. For me. There was a real feeling of like, who's this dweeb we got to test him like you know just a lot of a lot of questions and answers so yes uh well speaking of questions this is when we go back to the dmv we see petty and selma and uh they are talking again about how much they don't like homer just

to build up what's going to happen and uh this is when auto's going to take his test and uh this is an important lesson to to even today do not question someone's gender out like a stranger like that's a very rude thing to do like even if it's probably even worse if you say i'm open-minded like don't you know auto is i will say he's not hateful he's curious but he's also tactless yes yeah it's i i like he says like i'm open-minded like he's uh yeah does it say don't take this the wrong way or something yeah yeah you were born a man right yeah which uh that is a terrible way to start with pat i just love her like won't be needing this just drops it and auto in his test, celebrates hitting over every single cone. Then we cut back to Skinner after Otto fails the test.

And this is, again, one of my other favorite moments. There's a lot of great moments in this episode. All right! Yeah! So, how'd I do? Well, you failed every segment and misspelled bus on your application. Dre. Let me in! Let me in.

Let me in. He steps on the clutch and the toilet goes flush. Hail to the... Shut up! He had some life in him back then. Shut up! Yeah, you're right. That's just like how when he's Mr. Burns screaming at his lawyers and

bar gets hit by a car yeah i couldn't help but think of the um sideshow uh bob's stepping on a rake uh with the grumble that he makes there with you it's very similar you're right yeah it's uh same kind of like direction they must have given on like this is how we want a shutter to be that's such a great like and and yes i also when i learned to drive i had this same problem that skinner has it was just like oh no no okay i can't merge there's a uh yeah there's a portlandia bit where i think fred arms is playing peter who's the very like emasculated you know portland resident who just can't his wife gets so mad at him because he can't get home. Cause he can't make a left turn. Even on a slow street in Portland.

I love the droid of Skinner there too. Once he's like exasperated and he has like stubble, he has like Homer stubble now. And then like the, he undid his tie and unbuttoned his shirt. Oh man. Adding the stubble was genius. Yeah.

You know, this is back when they could give guys Homer stubble. Now it's a rule. Like nobody gets to have Homer stubble, but Homer Yeah, you know, this is back when they could give guys Homer stubble. Now it's a rule like nobody gets to have Homer stubble but Homer. But then this is when we have the great fun eviction scene. Speaking of being an innocent child, I didn't know what eviction was as a kid. I learned it from this. Like, oh, someone can tell you to not live where you live. You can run out of rent.

What is this rent thing? But I have the line reading i had mustard in my head uh it's been there forever whenever i see mustard in my fridge i think of this uh that's great yeah i had mustard i also like that the landlord has the new york accent like i feel like most landlords and cartoons or any sort of like central casting landlords like hey you know yes yeah yeah but yeah they always pull out the new york accent for those guys every landlord comes from new york they move to everywhere else i also like how he says like psycho magazines which apparently that's uh

psycho magazine was a real old horror comic anthology. Oh, I thought it was Psycho. Oh, Psycho? I thought it was Psycho. Motorcycle, because later he's asking Marge if she has any magazines where people send in pictures of their chicks. Oh, okay. Easy writer. Which, those are sex crimes now.

I remember it says Psycho in the subtitles on the Disney Plus version of it, so i don't know if that was a it's p you know capital p s uh y c h o i feel like cycle's funnier though i feel like cycle has to be it like he has a couple cycle magazines but yeah he also would have old obscure horror magazines too so yeah it could be either but yeah cycle magazines is funny and see now we have a new question for the Internet. Like, is it Cycle or Psycho, they says there.

We got all the more reason to get an answer from Jeff Martin. Hey, Frankie X says Cycle. They're not always right, but in this case, I'll use them to prove myself correct. Wow. So the Disney one says Psycho, and this says, but Frankie X says Cycle. That's crazy. Well, wait. No, I have it up now, and it's capital Cycle.

Like, the title is Cycle Like a Motor oh i'm wrong i got it okay then it's just me i misheard cycle as psycho okay at ease internet at ease all right well there you go i i i've been they've already written and deleted their comments my my childhood has been defeated here uh so then well also speaking of things i didn't know as a kid i didn't know what chutney was i i think unfortunately it's given this chutney squishy joke has given me a bad impression of i never have actually tried chutney i've had other indian food but chutney's wonderful it's delightful it's just like a jam like a mango jam or yeah it's good uh bart's bart's reaction has scared me ever since as a kid it's uh i mean it's not it's not like i have indian food all the time anyway but uh you know what now next time this will drive me i'm gonna finally eat chutney

get yourself some chutney and uh it's not like i'm an unadventurous eater i've had other stuff but yeah it's uh you couldn't cite another food item I've eaten stuff believe me if stuff is there I'm no I mean I've had other Indian food I've had well of course the white guy won the chicken tiki marsala

of course I had that you called it marsala yeah alright my case is falling apart here. We're going to Raj's Indian restaurant right after this, fellas. Come on, let's do it. And so then this is when everybody gets to learn the dumpster. They credit this to George Meyer, this wonderful joke about brands.

Ow! Auto Man? You're living in a dumpster oh man i wish dumpster brand trash bins are top of the line this is just a trash go waste disposal unit auto why don't you come home with me you can stay in our garage a garage somebody up there likes me that's a great sound i forget how long it goes and this is also an important moment in the show because it's the first time someone is invited to live with them and that will happen again in like two episodes with her powell right right yeah he moves into that this just becomes a standard plot device for the show somebody moves in yeah

carney's don't they kind of make fun of that with the Poochie episode too? Roy's moving in. Yeah, Roy shows up. Chester Lampwick. Michael Keaton's character from the X-Con. This is something about American slang. We like to call things the most prominent brand name. We call things Kleenex. We call things Band-Aids. And we call things the most prominent brand name we call yeah we call things kleenex

we call things band-aids and we call things dumpsters and yeah i always thought like leah's a dumpster is just that's where you put a whole bunch of trash but dumpster is a brand name like it is a dumpster and so it's so great that i was like uh dumpsters top of the line i'm just in a trash co-waste disposal unit the only reason i know that that dumpster's top of the line. I'm just in a trash-co-waste disposal unit. The only reason I know that dumpster was a brand is because when we started, we sent out our own press releases for our found footage show. And, Nick, I remember you'd make up the press release, and I'd always see dumpster capitalized and be like,

why is he capitalizing dumpster? It's like, no, no, it's supposed to be actually capitalized. Like, what? Yeah, it's because autocorrects would say, hey, it's wrong. You know, add a capital D there. But, you know, the British like to lord that over you. Like, oh, you call everything Kleenex and dumpsters. They call vacuuming hoovering.

They're the worst offenders of all. So take that, England. You do it too. Let me ask you this, though. What is a dumpster, then, if it's not a dumpster? Because I don't know any, like, tissue for Kleenex. Yeah, obviously, there's other words. But what is a dumpster? if it's not a dumpster because i don't know any like tissue for kleenex yeah obviously there's other words but what is a dumpster what would you call that it's weird because when i was writing the note uh i was just describing what was happening like auto was in the

dumpster and i was like oh wait that's the joke that he's not in the dumpster but nobody says waste disposal unit or whatever no if i pointed at it i can't like i looked up like oh in england they call them like skips or like i guess oh i guess i would say like it's a mega bin yeah i guess i mean i'd call it i would point to it and say like the big bin put it in there if i didn't say dumpster but you would just say dumpster i mean also because like thanks to internet parlance like dumpster is hotter than ever now the word dumpster fire is dumpster fire yes yes wow dumpster nice work on that name i mean it's i think the weirdest the weirdest one to me when you don't use the brand name though is

sanitary napkin i mean it's a mac it's a maxi pad like i mean a napkin i don't know for some reason that one is just uh the the brits it bothers me the brits confused me with plaster for a band-aid band- Band-Aid, yes. That's the weirdest one. Yeah, because I was like, well, wait, plaster is, to me, sounds like a liquid that then becomes solid, which is not what a Band-Aid does. Yeah, it sounds like you're spackling your wound.

Yeah. I guess you kind of are. But, like, what do they call plaster, then? Plaster? I don't know. I mean, torch versus flashlight at least flashlight isn't a brand name or maybe it is actually now i'm saying this maybe it is actually a brand name well we do it the right way i think we can all yeah yeah we're always correct we have nukes too

we have nuclear weapons so don't argue with us uk is only borrowing nukes from us yeah yeah yeah they can't boss us around with our nukes so yes we cut back to it and here is where a great mystery comes in which me and bob tried to dig for extra answers on this and have yet to get one but bob well you were the one who reminded me of it bob yes so uh there's a little thing called the disney afternoon in which uh new shows would premiere things that we grew up with like tailspin and darkwing duck and goof troop one of the least popular shows of that block was called quack pack which was about donald duck raising huey dewey and louie except now they're like cool poochie style teens and uh jeff martin the writer of that this episode

is credited with that theme song and it turns out the song auto is playing in this episode is uh suspiciously similar to the Quack Pack theme song. So I guess we can play the clip and then talk about it. Here, listen to them back-to-back to compare. I feel like quacking so I think I will. I'm gonna quack, quack, quack until I get my fill. So there you have it. 100%. 100%.

I think there's a lawsuit to be had there. Well, Jeff Martin had a deal with Disney. When he left The Simpsons after season four, he created two sitcoms. They were both Touchstone television. He also wrote for Homeboys from Outer Space. That is Touchstone as well. And I feel like they needed a Quack Pack theme song. He had that in his back pocket, and he was able to use it for both shows.

Get paid twice. So good on him. Guys, this is the only show that would uncover something like that. So bravo. I got to say, that is just genius. Tipping my hat to that. I don't know if we should be ashamed or not, but no one else is going to do this. A little.

I feel a small amount of shame. I don't believe it's even on Disney+. I think it's one of those ones that's not on Disney+. They give you bonkers, but not Quack Pack? Come on. Oh, no, wait, guys. Guys, no, i'm looking on new york times actually covered this a few years ago oh is it frank rich yeah sorry yeah you guys are

you guys are late to this oh i am incorrect quack pack is on disney plus my bad but uh well i think it totally was that jeff martin we we we have his email but he has not replied yet uh well give an update listeners when we find out we did find out that like algin and mike reese who also signed this overall deal at disney that then when disney doesn't make their tv shows they're like well since we're paying you like help with this cartoon thing for a couple afternoons so like if you guys remember that there was a mighty ducks um cartoon that was about like basically ninja turtle style mighty ducks like not no i don't remember this they were actual ducks right yeah they were ducks from outer space that uh were uh and al gene and mike reese like wrote on the original like story bible for that like they came up with

it and worked on it early and so i think i would assume the same deal happened to jeff martin that he was like that michael eisner was probably saying we're paying this guy millions of dollars and we don't even make his tv show make him write something for a cartoon make him do the opening to this thing if they were separate companies now Fox maybe could sue Disney over this but now they're just owned by the same people so it doesn't even matter and nobody except you notice that nobody I guarantee this is why it's our job yes respect the hell out of it hello everybody it's henry and bob from the future here and we did just two days after the recording we got an answer from jeff martin that we were hoping for you might not recognize us but yes

we are two years older sorry two days older feels like two no yeah so we asked jeff martin that we were hoping for you might not recognize us but yes we are two years older sorry two days older feels like two no yeah so we asked jeff martin why uh the quack pack sounds so much like the song in this episode and here's what he had to say i was on an overall deal at disney and they asked if i could take a shot at writing a theme song for quack pack so i plagiarized myself i'm not a good enough songwriter to keep coming up with entirely new tunes the flaming mo song has the same opening as the late night anthem i wrote for letterman and so there you go i had and i asked him like is it this late night anthem and he he agreed like uh listen to the start of this it is the same as Flaming Bows. I think he just ripped himself off for the intro.

Yeah, just the intro, not the full song. Hey, you know, if you can make it work, make it work. And Jeff Martin certainly did. Yeah, I love that. He also had a funny thing, too. We asked him as well, like, do you know whose idea was to put Spinal Tap in the show? And he says, I don't remember where the idea to use Spinal Tap came from. Probably we all just loved the movie.

There was an idea for Milhouse and Bart to go to a rock concert, and Harry was right there. And he also had one other funny thing to say. The cultural reach of Simpsons is so amazing that someone can reference, for example, Old Man Yells at Cloud, and everyone knows what they're talking about. year i was driving through south dakota listening to the radio and nobody rocks like springfield was mentioned i thought holy cow i wrote that joke kind of mind-blowing so there you go though our guess that it was part of his

disney overall deal was true we were correct and uh and we thank jeff martin very much for clarifying and letting us know he's a great guy he took time out of his busy jeff martin lifestyle yeah he's writing the same song over and over again we're on to you pal uh and hey if you haven't yet go back in the archives and listen to our interview with jeff martin from unbelievably four years ago in 2019. But all right, back to this podcast you were listening to. So after that fun song, this is when Bart pitches to them moving in,

which I, this is a quick clip here. I love every time somebody, I mean, we love doing impressions of Julie Kavner's Marge I love when any character does it on the show Mom I thought you might forget our little conversation this afternoon so I took the precaution of recording it What conversation?

Mom, can Otto live in our garage for as long as he wants? He sure can Marge, what were you thinking? That's not my voice oh everybody says that when they hear themselves on tape solid comedy right there it's as good as it gets old homer of his own wife's voice i mean i do feel that when i hear recordings of my own voice at first when this job started i was like oh man i guess i do sound like that now i just power through i still don't love the sound of my own voice.

No, we're the same. We have 257 episodes of our VCR party show. And at first I was just like, I can't bear to watch this. But now I'm used to my own irritating voice. We can begrudgingly edit ourselves in Premiere. We get to hear why he can't move in with his parents. The Admiral and I don't get along. And we meet the Admiral in Season 11, so they pay that off

for Otto's other biggest starring role to date in Season 11. You know, that must have been a trope, too, because I believe in Bill and Ted, Keanu Reeves' dad is a military guy, too. I don't know if he's an Admiral, but he's a high up in the military and sending him off to Alaska to go to military school right so that must have been it like the stoner

you know rebellious stoner always has the military father that's another of my favorite scenes in spinal tap when they go to the military base just fred willard oh all right i wanted more of him in the movie he was like he's such a bright spot at the end of the movie. Yeah, more of Fred Willard in every movie. What happened? That's another of my all-time favorite things. But I also love Marge quotes Matthew 2540, and then Homer just makes up a quote,

which I love how he says, thou shalt not take moochers into thine hut. He's trying to think of what the word would be. Where would people in biblical times live? Not home. Hut. Yeah. That's what they're living in.

Like cavemen or something. I love that word. You can see the gears turning too. And he says, hut. To thine hut. Yeah, he has the satisfaction of hut. It just hits him. Yeah. He has like the satisfaction of like, huh? Like he's, it just, and, uh, I think we've all been there shirtless,

like auto watching prices, right. In the afternoon, we've all been there getting hungry for cans of corn. Yeah. I take my shirt off every opportunity I can. Like if it's, if it's a little too hot out,

shirt comes off easily. And I don't have one of those bodies to like show off either, but like, I'll do it. Cause it feels nice. And 57 cents for a can of corn that's uh not it wouldn't get that much uh not that cheap these days now march tells him he should uh he should he's trying to tell him to look for a job uh but he's thinking that's to read and i love his three examples of things he would read where's waldo a book from the vampire's point of view which i would guess means interview with a vampire or similar type films and then

guys sending pictures of their naked chicks which yeah i guess that was like easy rider or motorcycle magazines though that that must be those magazines can't do that anymore right like that's revenge porn like you can't do that anymore no i think it was like it was from easy rider because i and i know this because we have a couple easy rider videos but like we have 10 of them i counted in the office last time yeah but they the the concept of the of the magazine was to uh have the biker guys sending pictures of their wives or girlfriends so i don't know i mean it well i don't know maybe it was like a revenge porn i guess i was looked at as like hey we're all buddies here let's see them well i guess if the wives are doing it like if they consented to it then that's cool yeah i guess yeah easy rider didn't require a notarized letter of consent though that's true i can't imagine

a bit of a power dynamic it's not exactly equal playing field and biker culture i don't think you know some of the weirdest vcr parties are when you guys have watched light pornography. Oh, yeah. What was that one? It was about internet sex or online sex. How to have cyber sex on the internet. That was an instructional video teaching you how to do that. A complicated process.

They didn't give you any real information. That's not why people bought it so but it was like the the instructor who's teaching you about the internet they didn't even use like a real web browser or anything she would do it topless while she's teaching you about the internet so like on a dial-up yeah i guess it's really just to help guys imagine that like yes it's a beautiful topless woman who i'm talking to on the other yeah yeah but it's actually very a very tedious video you watch this and you're like oh cyber sex is really tedious it's funny that now the internet has ruined the market of those videos of like that you would pay like 40 to see like five minutes of boobs or something it's just like it

the the economy of that is completely changed oh Oh, yeah. Those videos don't exist anymore, except, I guess, in our office in Brooklyn. We got a lot of them, too. And so this is when Homer teaches a bad lesson to Bart. This is also how, on the commentary, they mock how, like, oh, I guess this is how we wrap up this story, like, very emptily. Bart stops learning how to play guitar. Will you knock it off? I can't hear myself sing.

I want some peanuts. That's better. Hey, how come you never play your guitar anymore? I'll tell you the truth, dad. I wasn't good at it right away, so I quit. I hope you're not mad. Son, come here. Of course I'm not mad.

If something's hard to do, then it's not worth doing. You just stick that guitar in the closet next to your shortwave radio, your karate outfit, and your unicycle, and we'll go inside and watch TV. What's on? It doesn't matter. The music makes it complete there. I love it. As a kid, I don't think i realized

enough that this is a joke uh yeah it's a lesson i'm still trying to unlearn like if something's hard it's not worth doing like the orchestration is such a sitcom trope though you know like nick and i in college we would stay up and we'd watch two episodes of step by step every single night at 1 o'clock in the morning until 2 o'clock in the morning. And we called them orchestration scenes. The orchestration would come in when they're telling the serious lesson, and then we would do the – we're conducting the orchestra as it comes up. Oh, step-by-step orchestra. Yeah. That was a very signature TGIF move.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, the orchestration coming in during the serious part lets you know it's a serious part. I just love it. It's not worth doing. What are they going to do now? Passively watch television. It doesn't even matter what's on.

Just that you watch it. That's all you have to do. I've been trying to unlearn this lesson my whole life. This was irony. We do our own sort of cartoon based series on youtube called shatterday morning cartoons where we're watching forgettable cartoons i think some of them you you've covered too on your cartoon show and we've had you guys both on um separately on on episodes and joe often will ask me because i my sister and I would watch every cartoon. We

would go through the TV guide, okay, 6 a.m. Smurf, switch over at 6.30 to Fluffy Dogs. We had it all mapped out. And Joe often asks, well, what were you doing? Were you engaging in these cartoons? And it was like, no, we were just passively watching them for something to do while eating cereal. Joylessly staring at the TV. Not thinking critically about them. Just taking them in. Having discussions afterwards? Would you have discussions with your sister? Absolutely not.

No. Yeah, no. I think I've heard my mom joke to me that, like, as a kid, when I first watched TV, she was just, like, just open mouth, staring at it. Just like, well, it's TV. I have to watch it. Like, yeah. The irony would come in like i think

simpsons was one of the first things that teach me like you can actually like really like something and it's actually like good and not just like the a cartoon to watch because it's a cartoon and you have nothing else to do you know i have good news though about the state of the world my niece and nephew they're seven and nine in the last six months they found simpsons and they can't get enough like my nephew especially the the my quote at the beginning the hankering for some pork products i texted my brother i was like have harry give me a quote for this and he did the crusty line of hankering and he did the whole recited the whole line nine years old the problem is that my brother is just like he goes i didn I didn't realize like, you know, it's a pretty cynical and sometimes dark show.

He's like, for a nine-year-old, he's like, sometimes I wonder if I should actually have, you know, be having him watch this. But they can't get enough. They watched it constantly. And it's so great. And I love it. Oh, that's awesome. I love hearing that.

Yeah. You hear that this show, Disney Plus is one of their business weeklies. They brag like it's one of the most watched things consistently all the time on there is Simpsons. And I was like, well, I hope it's not just, you know, people in their 40s who are at the end of a hard day just like, oh, just put on a Simpsons. I mean, that's the main reason I have it. Yeah. Disney Plus. Yeah.

But I'm glad some young people are watching it, too. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. They, yeah. They love it. Actually, when we got to do our photo op with Conan O'Brien, he was telling us that Bob was wearing a Simpsons pin, and he says, like, oh, I'm so happy my son,

I'm watching it with him all the time. He loves The Simpsons now. Yeah. Even with the celebs. It's pretty evergreen. Everything's pretty much evergreen on that show. I would say like 85% of every episode. I think the thing that dated this episode is the most was Nelson saying burn.

To me, that red is a sort of a Wayne's World era not kind of thing. But everything else. Kids will be confused by that Crystal Pepsi reference. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's true. So after all that's resolved, it's to for homer to get sick of auto i love his his little peepee dance i don't know how else to put it i've just called a

peepee dance so he's gonna like i gotta go and no fooling like and this is when it hit me how extra rude auto is being because he's not using the kids bathroom he's in the their bedroom using the bathroom in the master bedroom like that is extremely rude to do and clogging up the drain leaving a spilling clogged drain to like yeah you can see why Homer wants him out of there

I also like that he's called poppin fresh the not the last time Homer will be confused for poppin fresh the P the last time homer will be uh confused for popping fresh of the pillsbury double triple blue maybe there's another dated reference there too i don't know i don't think popping fresh did they kill him off i think you still see him i think you know what like i remember you know we talked about airplane earlier and i remember watching that and then the part where they're doing um you know like oh that's

odd bill never orders fish at home and that was a reference i realized years later to an advertising campaign of somebody's thinking in their head oh that's odd you know their husband never does this at home and like there's a reference to a folgers commercial in airplane too that like i didn't get any of that but it just seems like a funny non sequitur and or it makes you want to like ask your parents what were they referencing here and that's not bad that's not a bad thing I view our podcast is helpful to let people know that too like just if you you weren't around for this 1990 commercial that they are directly like oh this commercial about well actually this isn't, but yes, you child could not possibly remember the commercial where the guy takes a break and he drinks his Diet Coke and all the ladies watch him from a window. Or like the Mean Joe Green Coke commercial that I never saw as a kid, but I saw it referenced a lot 10 years later.

And so, yes, Homer, then he says, got to get rid of this guy. They then pan up to him telling a bedtime story to lisa and he's telling her when i like the top urban legends around like in an urban legend so big that in the start of the 1998 horror film urban legends this is the urban legend they show in the start of it of the killer in the back seat is what it's officially called there's a whole great snopes article trying to deconstruct the origins of it of like, where was it first talked about? The first time they could find it published was like in the mid 60s.

And there's sort of a Twilight Zone episode that has this sort of concept in it. But just the idea of like, usually a woman stops her car somewhere, gets back in her car and doesn't realize somebody got in the backseat. A person is flashing their lights the entire time and they think she's being harassed by the guy behind her but it's actually trying to warn them and uh i've heard the version of the story too where the woman like stops at a gas station and then the the uh attendant says oh can i i need to ask you a question about your bill in the building or at the register. And they go inside.

He's like, you know, there's a guy back there. And then they call the cops and all that. But Snopes isn't really sure where it came from. There's no one like real incident that inspired it, apparently. And a great scream by Yardley when he says that because I'm that maniac. Huge scream. Like we're saying it with harry shearer yardley smith goes huge on this lisa scream here well you know it's one of three lines she's given

in this episode so she saved up all of her lung power for this oh yeah go big she uh yeah actually her own uh what she points at bart on the tv and says like uh see for yourself and also i was just jamming with you yeah that's and we don't have seat belts oh yeah this is their fourth line this episode easy week for yardley yeah so this is when homer has had enough and he's telling him to leave did the maniac kill her that and you know how i know? Because I was that maniac. Hey, hey, I was just kidding.

That's it. He's out of here. But Homer, we're the only family he's got. I don't care. This is not happy days and he is not the Fonz. Hey, Mr. S. Listen, you drain-clogging, last-cookie- eating, collect-call-getting sponge. I want you out of my house

heavy what are you gonna do auto oh don't worry there's plenty of money out there for a guy who knows how to fake his own death well before you do that maybe you should take the driving test again oh i can't pass that thing i got a zero last time this time i'm hung over this time i'm hung over god such a great delivery it's a well-drawn character in this episode like every line is spot on and he's like oh this like he got really drunk the night before and now he's being forced to take it and then in the next scene when he's studying up he says like alcohol increases your ability to drive false oh man like it seemed like he was thinking like well if i get drunk i'll do better on the test right that was my biggest laugh of the episode is when he had to flip to the pages

and went false like text the back yeah i also like how he says he says when i've been tried as an adult before but i'll do it like he've been tried as an adult before, but I'll do it. Like he's never actually been an adult before. So they go to take the test. Otto finds his confidence because it's another great bit of like, oh, one thing's not insulting, but if it's a sponge, that's a sponge. Yeah, it's another. Every way he says words in this is funny. They should have had more Otto.

Maybe this just wrecked Harry Shearer. As a rule, he's like, you get two auto lines tops for me in any episode. I got to say, both of you guys have great auto impressions. Thank you. Both of you do. I thought you were actually playing something right there. I thought when you said your auto impression. So another tip of the hat to you guys for your auto impressions.

Thank you. I'm sure we're doing significant damage to our voice boxes boxes you know you can hear the nodes forming as we every time we do it it's funny too they mentioned that he's now he mentioned the that he was based on wally walidarski and his long hair at the time because if anybody knows what wally walidarski looks like it's because later in life like he appears in several wes anderson films like he's a collaborator with wes anderson he's in uh darjeeling limited and and but his character is like they make fun of him for being completely hairless in it like that he is a very hairless guy and so it's funny like otto is based on him being incredibly hairy, and now he is the hairless guy that Owen Wilson makes fun of in a movie.

And he basically plays the same character in Fantastic Mr. Fox, which I watched recently. I was like, all right, he's like the fifth most important character in Fantastic Mr. Fox. I had no idea. Yeah, he's a fun little possum guy who's like the right-hand man of Fantastic, of the Mr. Fox. Bob, I don't know if you want to see that or if you've seen it before. That is bird violence the movie, man.

Birds really take it in that movie. He disgusts me, that Wes Anderson. Well, look, man, he's a fox. Yeah, is Walidarski in Astrid City? Do you know if he's going to be in the new Wes Anderson? I got to think he is. He's a regular now. He's the Jeff Goldblum.

He's in every one. I'm looking forward to that one. I'm looking forward to that one. I've never heard Wally Wolderski talk. Does he sound like Otto? Is he like, I'm a cool possum? No, he sounds like a dork. That's why he plays like nerds in Wes Anderson movies.

He sounds like a nerd. Or maybe he's playing up his nerd voice. I'll tell you, that's a killer auto. You have a killer auto. I'll be replacing Harry Shearer soon. This is just one long con to get onto the show to play one character who speaks every eight episodes. Have you guys done a walk-on for the voice? For any voices yet?

It seems like they should have you on at some point. They should. Not yet. They don't welcome Simpsons podcasters. Yeah, no, we probably, we should be at the top of the list when that day comes. And if there's ever a Simpsons podcaster before us on there, I'll be sad.

It's my theory, really, that back in the aughts on the commentaries, they would complain about websites and forums. If they were still making commentaries, they'd be complaining about us on there and i need to hear them i really need to hear them insulting us uh so uh so i have one last clip here it's the happy ending because uh auto busts in full of excitement patty is ready to fail him all over again but then she realizes that he hates homer simpson too and she instantly lets him cheat

and just gives him all the answers i love how quickly she says like a b b a like two raspy voice characters sharing the scene i love it yeah yeah and uh rasp off and this is when uh auto gets his license. Homer had a piece of food on his face for three days! That's what my driver's license is. Hail to the bus driver, bus driver, bus driver. Yes, hail to the bus driver, bus driver man. Great rocking finale there. Yeah, and actually, if you listen to the end of the credits on the episode, there's like a Gracie Films rock and roll sting.

They changed the Gracie Films music. I usually never stick around that long. Yeah, I thought they were going to change. I remembered them changing the Simpsons outro theme to the guitar version, but no, it was just the Gracie logo at the end. And also, was it Patty or Selma? It was Patty. It was Patty. Her choice of drink being margaritas was perfect. That's spot on.

That's totally what she would want to get after work. Let's go get some margaritas. And she's buying. That's how excited she is. I'm paying for this. Much more Homer being terrible stories. I loved her. It's so natural the way she goes like, wing like there's a

great moment earlier where they're both laughing about homer getting his nose caught in the toaster and patty goes we'll watch the tape tonight yes they have a video of it right yeah uh and the animation of him just plot you only see the backs of them but him just plowing over all of the pedestrian so he goes what was that and she's like uh nothing nothing yeah i think the last one was like a like a parent and their child too i think it's like a child sandy yeah it just explodes into a bunch of splinters god and yes uh when we see his license you see his birth date he's 29 when this aired 60 60 years old now. That's how time works. And also, yeah, apparently Jake Hogan and Wally Walidarski, they created the Otto character for their,

they wrote the first episode, first-ish episode, Homer's Odyssey. It was the first script, not the first pilot. You listeners, you all know this. But Otto first appears in that. They wanted his last name to be Mechanic because apparently there was an executive at Fox whose last name really was Mechanic. So they're like, oh, it's a fun reference, Otto Mechanic.

But on his license, though, it is Otto Man with two Ns, I believe. Because I guess Bart would say, hey, Otto Man. Is that why? Yeah, yeah. So now it makes it his true name. And we didn't say this at any point during the podcast, but this is directed by Wes Archer. And I think he is the most rock and roll

of the Simpsons early directors. Of course, he would go on to be lead director on King of the Hill and help develop that show. But in seasons three and four, he only directs two episodes each. So in this season, he only did this and Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington. But this is a great looking episode.

Yeah, yeah. He stepped back because he was not having a good time, I think, working on The Simpsons Deadline. So he only did two of those seasons. But this is so great. Yeah, the rock and just general animation compliments, too. Like the rock music stuff of Spinal Tap playing, like that just looks really good. Like it's not comedic. It's just like, oh, that's just like great guitar playing

and jancing around the stage and also the details of like nigel's tongue hanging out which is like his whole thing was like having the tongue they had the tongue hanging out just like small details like that yeah and don't forget the drawing of millhouse under all the chairs saying help i mean that's just we gotta find that cell that's gotta be the cell to the cells and the cells are only getting more pricey i learned it myself trying to get there was a really good auction full of great cells and i was like well this one can't go for more than 600 right goes for a thousand goes for 12 i didn't buy any of them i had i had a limit on them the the cells the cells are going to miss the bus on this i think we missed the bus on this right i mean if you're if you're ready to spend uh i mean i bought

i did buy a 500 cell but uh that's one was like $400, that one there. But that one down there, that was a $500, $600 cell. Well worth it. Yeah, I think so. I think so. Well, if you buy it. You can probably get more for it now. They are collect, this is what I told my husband.

They're collector's item. They're only getting more rare, really. Well, if you get that Milhouse cell, people will ask, why is there a drawing of a pile of chairs on your wall? You can say, look closer. I got one. Our co-host on our VCR party YouTube show, George, gifted me for a birthday

a still of Martin and Bart in the treehouse. I can't remember what episode this is from, but I always wanted a Simpsons animation cell, and now I got one. So, hangs proudly above my bathroom. I do need one of at least one of the nerds now.

I do. If Martin, Milhouse or Database, the Database ones. I wonder if the Database ones, are they rarer, but are they also cheaper because it's a character not as many people want? Yeah, what's the market for Database? if the database ones are they rarer but are they also cheaper because it's a character not as many people want yeah what's the market for database yeah what's that what's the economy for database cells like yeah good question i need to i need to find these answers well when my wife and i get

our new place we will buy the cell to rule them all it will be the ten thousand dollar homer skipping through the land of chocolate so oh you've been worth it when we were at the i say this every time it's better to say this when when uh the person who helped us go to oh yes yes we can thank him again when we went to the with me bob and you know went to the simpsons table read that nick so again nick thank you so much for hooking us up with that that was yeah that was our buddy mark malikoff who was the did the heavy lifting on that one yes but but we thank you too nick and and mark they mark was so great that day but at it they were selling simpson cells afterwards they like had a table set up and they were selling simpson cells that's where i bought the grandpa one that's behind me here and and you and nina

held off because there wasn't a truly great i i was like i have to buy one cell so i got my favorite one that was there but there was no one that was like there wasn't a truly great, I was like, I have to buy one cell. So I got my favorite one that was there, but there was no one that was like, there wasn't one there that was like my dream cell. And you guys are being the more responsible with your money and waiting to buy the one you like. Oh, a truly, truly great cell. We're not having children. We're having our dream cell.

So the table read had a merch table on the lot about uh about a half a block about a block away near the uh near the studio store this was on the fox studio lot there was a guy there he's just like we've got cells like you want to buy them like they were just selling it like a merchandise tent yeah it was crazy it's like an impulse buy too as, as you're leaving. You're on your way out. My dream sell, if I could ever get one, is remember when Krusty gets canceled where Krusty has a dummy.

He's trying to compete with Gabbo, and he has the dummy. And then he says, it's not alive, it's dead. And he throws it into the audience, and then it just kind of lays lifeless in the audience. And all the children are going, ah! Just the drawing of the lifeless dummy in the audience of the Krusty show would be my number one. That is a great one, man.

Joe, if you could get one, so what would you get? I already said the Milhouse one. That was my. Yeah. I love Principal Skinner. My wife loves Chalmers. And that does not describe our relationship in any way, by the way. But we want something with them but I think

we would both go in on it like a Mr. Burns sell but it's going to be a long discussion and it's going to be a huge investment when it finally happens actually I'm going to switch it I think it's when Homer like washed his neck and then had the filthy the filthy rag I think that would be a great one right there the filthy rag

yeah that would be good and one right there. The filthy rag. That would be good. And you know what? Cartoons haven't been animated on sales pretty much for over 20 years now. So they really are getting more valuable. But that might be your retirement behind you. You know, I'm hoping. Social security hangs in there.

You may not need to, but it's not. It's not going to. I'd bet on the worth of a sell off over my Social Security actually being paid to me this has been a very long recording final thoughts you know I feel like audio shouldn't have died here you know the character I mean he's just a gag character now but I think there is

room for another auto episode about him and his life and yes let's make an 80 year old man do this voice if only to torture Harry Shearer let's do another Otto episode I think there's more to him make him earn his 250k per episode I can't believe that they didn't kill off Otto but they didn't have

any more episodes this is a great Otto episode I thought it would have produced more out of it but But when they do, Nick, talk to Mark about getting... He has connections to Simpsons people. Both of you guys have killer Otto impressions. Let's get them to be Otto. Let's have his kids on the show.

You guys are the progeny of Otto. Something like that. I'm Otto Jr. yeah something like that all right thanks dad i'm otto jr uh no i i really like this episode too otto i think they're too negative on and on the commentary i think so yeah it's like a weak episode i mean is it they're yeah but they're comedy writers i mean comedy writers always take about everything aren't they it's not the most tightly plotted one but everything's funny in it Like the animation is some of the best of the whole season. And yeah, I mean, also the Spinal Tap actors might not have loved doing it, but I thought they were great in the episode.

I mean, as far as like a, oh, this is kind of a tip of the hat from insider, like from comedy nerds to another. And also this is kind of like it by 92 this was spinal tap getting its flowers like this was it finally being big enough that like they could actually cash in and do more of spinal tap which we're gonna get it at least one more time in 2024 and i was just thinking that it's impossible to rent uh it's not streaming anywhere but if you have disney plus you can watch like five minutes ofinal Tap via The Simpsons, and that's important to keep the idea alive. Well, I guess, yeah. You guys, any final thoughts? Well, yeah. No, I think that you guys should be auto, and that there should be more auto episodes coming forward. And I'm super happy that my niece

and nephew are into The Simpsons, because you guys will have jobs forever now. I mean, because they're seven and nine. So like, once they get older, I'm not going to tell them to listen to this particular podcast. I don't think that's, I think we'll skip this one. I think there are a couple of forwards in it. But yes, you guys have a job forever. So nice work.

I remember being disappointed because I was like, Spinal Tap, the world's converging and being disappointed. But in re-watching it, I liked it. I think the Spinal Tap thing, it's a fake band on a fake show. I think there's still something weird about that. But the Otto stuff I think was really strong. So yeah,

this episode was redeemed in my mind on the re-watch. Well, thank you again, Joe and Nick. Please let us know where to find you online and please remind everybody about the new documentary Chop and Steal. You can see that in theaters and on demand starting May 9th. And that's at chopandsteal.com. Or you can go to foundfootagefest.com.

That's all of our tour dates for both Found Footage Festival shows and the movie. We have a show called VCR Party on Tuesday nights on YouTube and Facebook. And Saturday Morning Cartoons on Saturday mornings on YouTube and Facebook also. I think that's all our plugs, right? We'd love to have you back on Saturday Morning Cartoons. Yeah, we gotta have you guys. You're the experts. You need one more podcast to record in your lives,

right? That's what you're looking for. I love doing it. Yeah, I remember I did the Hulk Hogan wrestling cartoon. If folks want to look up at the episode i was on i uh i believe i was on the super mario brothers super show episode uh three yeah no that was so much fun i like you guys are on patreon as well just like us right yeah yeah trying to eck out a living doing uh talking about uh old things as well yes no i love you guys are still doing lord's, and I love that you can still find new things in the VHS bins all around America.

It's a bottomless pit. We think we run out, and then all of a sudden we get a box the next day. And that's the other cool thing is that people watch our show, and then they send us stuff. So now just stuff shows up at our doorstep. I am as excited as I have ever been about doing it because we just keep finding new, incredible stuff. So now just stuff shows up at our doorstep. So that's, yeah, I'm as excited as I have ever been about doing it because we just keep finding new incredible stuff. And I wish you

guys lots of luck someday getting Alf. It'll happen. Fingers crossed. I'm very excited about the possibility Joe is nonplussed, but I really want to get him. Take it or leave it. Yeah, if he comes on great if he doesn't no

but thank you guys so so much thank you yeah thank you thanks Bob and Henry thanks again to Nick and Joe of the found footage festival please check out everything they do as well as chop and steal a movie about them and as for us we check out more of what we do and get these podcasts one week at a time and add free

please head on over to patreon.com slash talking simpsons. Sign up there for five bucks a month. You get just that, but also access to everything behind the $5 paywall. That's over 150 bonus miniseries podcasts and monthly access to new episodes of both Talking Futurama and Talking the Hill. If you've never been on our Patreon before, there's nearly six complete years worth of content waiting for you the second you sign up at patreon.com slash talking simpsons and there's a ten dollar level as well when you sign up for that you can access all of the five dollar stuff naturally but you can also access one extremely long podcast once a month only for patrons of that level or higher and what is that henry bob is talking about the what a cartoon movie podcast me and bob going as

in depth as we do on The Simpsons into an animated feature film for our $10 and up subscribers at patreon.com slash talking Simpsons. This month we're doing our April tradition of covering live action. So we are covering the live action Little Shop of Horrors 1986 musical.

It is going to be a ton of fun. And the month before that, we covered Aardman's 2000 classic chicken run we have a giant back catalog over 50 episodes of what a cartoon movie in addition to all the five dollar things bob just mentioned for your ten dollar a month subscription there uh we've covered so many varied things tons of anime tons of american stuff stuff like south park or who framed roger rabbit for six and a half hours. We talked about that. Everything from Akira to a goofy movie.

I like to say you need to check it all out for yourself. See everything you're missing out on at patreon.com slash TalkingSimpsons. And I've been one of your hosts, Bob Mackie. You can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. And my other podcast is Retronauts, the classic gaming podcast all about old video games. You can find that wherever you download your podcast or go to patreon. podcast is Retronauts, it's a classic gaming podcast all about old video games. You can find that wherever you download your podcast or go to patreon.com slash retronauts.

Sign up there for two full-length bonus episodes every month. And Henry, how about you? I'm Henry Gilbert and please follow me on Twitter at H-E-N-E-R-E-Y-G. I'm always tweeting up a storm as well. You should be following

the official Twitter account of this podcast at TalkSimpsonsPod. If you follow at TalkSimpsons pod if you follow at talk simpsons pod on twitter you get to stay up to date whenever we have new episodes whenever we do a live show whenever we've got stuff on the patreon you'll learn about it first if you follow at talk simpsons pod on twitter so please do that and the same goes for our awesome instagram

account too at talk simpsons pod on there as well and of course if you want to keep up to date on all this stuff and find all of our previously released free podcasts, head on over to TalkingSimpsonsPodcast.com. Thanks so much for listening, folks. We'll see you again next time for the latest episode of our community podcast, Talk to the Audience, and we'll see you then. official tour 92 t-shirts 31 check it out spinal tap kicking momar in the butt the timeless classic now two for a dollar