Talking Simpsons - Talking Simpsons - The Telltale Head (Revisited) With Matthew Jay

Episode Date: March 25, 2020

Our journey through season one hits a critical episode and our pal Matthew Jay (The Deep End, Cartoons 101) is back to help us explore it! Bart beheads a statue in a quest for popularity and we get a tour of the whole town as it falls into a murderous rage! We talk about that and the first appearances of Apu, Lovejoy, Kearney, Sideshow Bob, AND MORE this week's podcast! Support this podcast and get dozens of bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! And please follow the new official Twitter, @TalkSimpsonsPod!

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

That is patreon.com slash talking simpsons. Now, please enjoy the rest of this podcast. I heartily endorse this event or product ahoy everybody and welcome to talking simpsons where gangrenous limbs wait for us in heaven. I'm your host, Cloud Talker Bob Mackie, and this is our chronological exploration of The Simpsons. Who else is here with me today? Henry Gilbert, known for my irreverent attitude. That's very true. And who is on the line? I'm Matthew Jane. When I was your age, I pulled a few boners as well.

Who hasn't? And today's episode is The Telltale Head. I think you'll find that people are pretty decent if you give them half. There he is. The Head. Kill him! Today's episode aired on February 25th, 1990. And as always, Henry will tell us what happened on this mythical day in real world history. Oh my God.

Oh, boy, Bobby. The continuation of Mission Impossible as a television series is canceled after two seasons. Smoking is banned by the U.S. government on all American flights that are less than six hours in length. And look who's talking is number one at the box office, baby. I mean that baby literally. yes so the mission impossible tv series no one remembers it peter graves was in it the only lasting legacy of that was an nes game made by konami that's why there was a mission impossible game exactly it's based on that version of mission impossible and we talked about it on retronauts episode called television games Games from a couple of years ago.

So, yeah, it's a really hard game, but the music is amazing. It's Konami music of that era. It's pretty cool. It's got one of the coolest versions of that intro that I've ever heard. It's also funny with Look Who's Talking that they, you know, the novelty of what if a baby had bruce willis's voice and there's there's also a shot in it that i'm just like this seems dangerous of a baby stand i'd only watch the trailer again but like the toddler baby he stands in the middle of traffic but it's a good faked shot at least of an endangered baby and also john travolta like it's his it's five four years before pulp fiction this i think

is his like nadir oh yeah like this was the number one hit in the theater so what am i talking about right before yeah it was a huge movie and right before pulp fiction was look who's talking now yes that's right that's why we get the joke yeah it looks like yeah he was in a bad place what was the other news uh it was that the government u.s in the united states banned smoking on all flights less than six hours in length what a nightmare it's uh there's i in my research on this i read a really good new york times article from um like the 25th anniversary of when this happened and they talked to people who were flight attendants then and they're like you know how crazy it is to our generation to even imagine smoking in an airplane like that that would never

happen and the flight attendant is just like yeah it was a big tube filled with smoke it was it was horrible to do to the flight attendants it's it's unimaginable it was legal for that law yeah i felt bad enough for people in bars and restaurants when they had to breathe in all that smoke. The law first just said any flight less than six hours. So if you're on a super long flight, they'd still let you smoke. They felt bad for the smokers. Smokers' rights. Slowly but surely over the years, that lessened more and more.

By the end of the 90s, you couldn't smoke on any American origin flight. And at this point but virtually every airline won't let you smoke in all around the world if you watch the uh the twilight zone episode terror at 20 000 feet the william shatner one there are three markers of that show that make it a very very uh ancient time piece about flying at that time so number one everyone is dressed up everyone's wearing like a suit and a tie or like a nice dress to fly because people used to do that. Number two, somebody on the plane is armed.

Probably more than one person, but at least one person has a gun, which William Shatner uses in that episode. And number three, they're smoking. They're smoking on the plane. So I love watching that episode just to see like, God, air travel was a nightmare. But anyway, hey.

And he shoots the window out, right? He he does yeah i i guess you can do that now and just grab it from an air marshal yeah but which one is the air marshal uh they're all hiding well that was the best joke that was one of my favorite jokes in bridesmaid was how uh when melissa mccarthy realized who the air marshal was and he was just like what are you talking about she's like oh i know hey i'm watching out too buddy like yeah yes whenever you see that guy in movies and you're like no one would cast him he's like a bald guy with a mustache like he'd never be in movies that's how you know it's her husband again appearing in a film like not that he's a bad actor he's a great actor but yeah they write all those shitty movies that they get to keep making uh yep yeah it's we've seen happy town murders oh for sure he's a happy town awful awful

but hey welcome back matt j our friend yes matt j of the deep end and cartoons 101 patreons very good uh podcast episodes come out of both of those thank you yeah glad to be here yeah yeah the deep end my adult swim podcast with my buddy steve yurko uh who works on rick and morty and is a very cool guy and cartoons 101 which i do uh just series about animation like i did uh satoshi cone just did don bluth i'm starting today actually uh or tomorrow when you're listening to this it's already happened series on non-disney renaissance 90s animated films with a goofy movie so i'm doing my buddy alec robbins uh who the internet may know as mr boop will come on and talk to me about a goofy movie i love mr boop the comic yeah that's my that's my friend alec uh

i am i'm very uh happy for him that he can marry such a beautiful hot woman uh betty boop he's also just a very funny wonderful man uh in his own right i have to say so we did the secret of nymph for what a cartoon movie but you've been working your way or you have worked your way through all the don bluth movies and i love that you got into it thinking don bluth was really good but then by the fifth movie you're like what are we doing why are we still doing this i did not realize more than half of his his library was just awful like i thought they'd be like fun but like his bad movies there is absolutely nothing there to enjoy it's it's really it was there was a four-week stretch uh where i was like i might just cancel all of this like i cannot do

this anymore the uh that troll in central park he's so wacky yeah i mean even anastasia is a very expensive but also not good it's just like a very pretty bad movie it's kind of boring it's i think there's a lot to like there but it's not a great movie bartok the magnificent is actually much better and more enjoyable uh well and also we did your satoshi cloneversations about tokyo godfathers and you really were ahead of the curve of the return of satoshi kone content to america like i uh i take full uh responsibility and credit for satoshi kone uh his revival uh his post-mortem revival as well as aven gell and being on netflix i think that was all me both of those things you did it all i especially like i when we did the tokyo godfathers one i am very excited to

hear this fully new localization and translate and and a dubbing that seems to be done with much more uh care and interest in the trans narrative of it than it that's true yes yeah yeah that woman from difficult people i'm really excited i think it's tomorrow as of this or no wednesday it's a couple days from now as of this recording i'm sorry to date it again you missed it i'm excited to see it in the theater and i got my millennium actress blu-ray too oh that's out now oh damn okay good times but uh but anywho thanks thanks so much for coming back man jay like you uh as we always say in the age check portion of our podcast you were one of the ones who were born during the airing of this season i think right so i was born in july 89 so right

before the season starts right so you must have gotten to know season one just in reruns then oh yeah it was when i was a kid they didn't play season one that often and then when the dvd came out uh i was so excited because i was getting into dvd on tv and the simpsons were kind of the first ones to do it really well yep got season one and i was like oh my god i haven't seen almost any of these episodes and i was like 13 maybe even 12 you know the the conceptions people have of season one a lot of people don't like it or say to skip it or anything because i was so young and just loved the simpsons i didn't think that at all i just i just was like this is simpsons i've never seen i love this and i particularly uh i always think about the camp uh camping episode i think is my favorite of season

one and i just saw it as more episodes i was like yeah maybe it's slower and not as funny but i like i devoured the commentaries uh i was all about i still have my my actual season one box set that i bought then i think at uh yeah i bought it at coconuts uh wow store if you mention a store name from 2000 is almost certainly defunct fye yeah yeah maybe i might have gotten it sam goody i feel a certain warmth pulling out my aged and ragged season one dvd i I bought in the early aughts as well. It's nice. And there's an extra special difference to it now that we'll talk about later in this. This episode, this podcast will have two, I think, new discoveries about this episode.

It's fun. So much fun to go back to these now with the second take and find new things. For sure. Before we get started, though, we have a director's corner, a newcomer to The Simpsons, a very, very esteemed animator and director today. This was his first job as director, period. So Rich Moore. So let's talk about Rich Moore really quickly. Director of this episode, directed 17 total, and he left in the season for Exodus to be supervising director on The Critic.

And he is the designer of Ned Flanders. He designed that character. That's, I mean, Rich Moore, what a massive amount of work he did in the first four seasons, like directing 17 episodes of The Simpsons, but only in four years of it. Yeah. Pretty good. Especially when he's a less, he was a lesser director in season one. Like, I think he was the guy who they subbed in when they fired the

saturday morning the kent butterworths and milton grays they're like oh shit uh rich you could direct this couldn't you it seems like he was a later hire because he's not you know an almond guy or anything like that so yes um he is in the show actually so if you watch the show if you watch homer goes to college he is uh Gary, the black nerd of the trio. But he is not a black man. He's a white man. But that background character existed in the show. A caricature of him existed as a background character.

So when they needed another nerd, they're like, this guy looks like a nerd. Let's just paint him brown and call him Gary. And that's exactly what Rich looked like in the early 90s. He had really messed up teeth. And if you watch the Critic DVD extras, he has braces in those. So he got his teeth fixed in the early 2000s. Now we can just do Invisalign. It's true.

This is not an ad here. They are not a sponsor. No. But actually, if you watch the end of Marge vs. the Monorail, you see three directors go over. David Silverman, Wes Archer with the beret for some reason, also rich more they all go over the uh the escalator to nowhere so since they fully had that character design there that was the one that that was at the end of season four so homer goes to college one of the first in season five production it's pretty soon after they just pull that character out of the uh the model he doesn't work here anymore yeah also let's change his race very insensitive a little bit so uh he goes way back with uh director jim reardon sorry future

director of the simpsons jim reardon believe they were in college together or in animation school together at cal arts i would assume uh i don't want to say that for sure because i didn't find that information i could be wrong it could be it could be one of those two, but only those two. I'm guessing it was CalArts because he worked with Brad Bird, but more on that later. So if you watch the classic, very messed up short, Bring Me the Head of Charlie Brown, you will hear Rich Moore do the narration. Really? That's him.

Oh, I didn't know that. Wow. So if you've heard his voice on the commentaries, you'll recognize it immediately. He's got a funny voice. He does. So first credit I could find on IMDb is a really good one. So he was assistant animator on the Amazing Stories episode Family Dog. Oh, well.

Wow. Okay. That's, I mean, yeah, Brad Bird. We talked about a lot in our Iron Giant What a Cartoon movie that he has a real eye for good animators. And if he picks you you it does say something about the person's skill i think he was a brad bird bud yeah i mean look brad bird likes his buds too i'm not saying he's like he's not uh immune to cronyism aren't we all like sure so richard moore was in the pre-ren and stimpy john chris feluci world with uh major roles on both

the new adventures of beanie and Cecil and Mighty Mouse The New Adventures. Oh, he's a Bakshi boy. Yeah, yeah. I see. He worked with Bakshi and my guess is if he didn't go on

to work on The Simpsons he would have worked on Ren and Stimpy but he either got a new opportunity or didn't want to work for an abusive pedophile. One of those two.

One of the two. Well, Matt, you know you did a whole Bakshi series on Cartoons 101 as well, right? yeah uh did all of his his films bakshi's a very interesting guy uh i've heard a lot of things about him not being the nicest person to work for but when you're making you know independent films in the 70s i think you can expect that to be the case you know yeah i don't think any director before six years ago was ever nice to anyone

probably it's true actually there's an entire awful episode of the ren and stimpy uh spike tv series that's about working with ralph backshee it's it's terrible and guess what he does his own voice i think he's still with a whole bummer his whole thing with because he's still he's like problematic in that way but he was very progressive and very smart and very political in a good way so to have him so tied to john k is a big bummer but i think also like he's not one of the people that came up under john k and would like learn from him or or or enable him i think i think i think back she is just like i think he's he's far enough from that that it's okay well and rich rich Moore being one of the Bakshi guys,

that shows the kind of dirtier spirit, I think, that he has, which is funny knowing where he goes to in the future. That's true. So like I said before, from The Simpsons, he went to The Critic. He was informally the supervising director, although I don't think he ever had that title officially on the show. On Critic? Yeah, I was watching episodes and I was like, oh, there's no supervising director credit. I don't think they had that that title officially on the show yeah like i was watching episodes and i was like oh there's no supervising director credit i don't think they

had that role yet a guy was just doing that and he wasn't being credited or paid to do that yeah it sounded like a pretty thankless role even though he was like the director of their major episodes that redefined any looks so yeah i think i mean the the critic as we learned from our podcast a messy production done by uh with a lot of different enemies hurting it yeah and he was also one of the four character designers with like uh everett peck david silverman him and one other guy i think david cutler so that's why there's no like distinct look for the credit because there's four people drawing all the characters so from the critic he went on to work for futurama as the supervising director so a lot of good work there and those are just the fox episodes although

i believe he had a like executive director role on uh bender's big score the first futurama movie yeah i believe so i i mean that what a gift that was to get rich more on futurama like that was the he getting him back into the grading world was really important i'm glad they got him instead of him having to go to like fucking baby blues or some shit oh he directed one episode of baby oh that's okay that's why that was in my brain he did work on baby uh just one episode i think he was available but uh he wasn't the super i'll replace that with dilbert he was the supervising director on dilbert he wasn't or was no he wasn't he wasn't uh yeah there was a real, like,

critic to Futurama, like, artist pipeline, I think because of Rough Draft. Oh, yeah, it's totally the Rough Draft machine, yeah. And Greg Vanzo, of course, did the Beauty and King Dork scene from the first episode that we talked about. With Brother Scott Vanzo. So, interesting fact about him,

sequence director on The Simpsons movie, but also his last TV credit as a supervising director is on half of sit down shut up the show that famously split oakley and weinstein into although not because they were feuding or fighting or anything like that it's because they want everyone to sign contracts that did not abide by wga rules they're like we've achieved some of the same things but this will not be on the same terms as the writers it's close enough right yeah i mean the as we talked about in our uh second interview with mike scully to get wga

rules on animated sitcoms uh network sitcoms back then was a real struggle that they didn't achieve on the simpsons until like 1999 thanks in part to scully working with seth mcfarlane as well to to get it set up at least at fox and so you think about how hard fought that was in 1999 and then in 06 for a new fox animated sitcom they're like you know what let's not do wga after all like i can see why some writers would be against that it was uh it was actually 2009 and i think I think it was because of the writer's strike. I read a lot of very boring Variety articles about this for this podcast, because I was like, what happened? But it was because of the writer's strike,

and I think they're like, we don't want to give these people a union show. Look what they just did to us. So they're like, here's this kind of similar WGA contract. That's what Oakley was like, no, I'm in the Writer's Guild. I make shows for the writers guild with those rules i'm not going to do this but i'm moving to portland i'm out of here exactly

and i've never seen that show and i watched one minute of it it's okay created by mitch herwitz quote because he needed money unquote yes yeah well yeah the uh the whole union writing thing for animation versus live action split really sucks and affects a lot of people very negatively because there are in hollywood generally two unions the writers guild well there's a bunch of other guilds but for writers there's the writers guild and but if you work in animation unless you work on a primetime show like family guy or the simpsons uh you're probably in the animation guild uh which is iotsy which is totally separate and some people have to be in both to be in shows and to move from show to show,

because you're only working on a show for like six months. And then you have to find new work. And then those people have to be in both guilds, which means they have to pay dues to both guilds, like just to get, you know, just to make sure they have health insurance all year or can like even be available to get those jobs. Because if you don't get enough hours

or episodes worked within the year, you lose your coverage and you get kicked out of the guild. Yeah, so there's people jumping from Rick and Morty to The Simpsons to Family Guy to DuckTales or whatever, and they're split between two things, even though it's literally the exact same job, no matter what show you're on. No, i remember previous

guest kate raft she talked about it on twitter and she was like if you haven't a cartoon show please hire me because i'm about to lose my animation insurance and my husband needs asthma medication there's there's a quote-unquote funny moment on the commentary where they're talking about um the price where maggie is scanned what that means analogy It's like, oh, that must be what the royalties are we get for this episode. And Rich Moore's like, you guys get royalties, huh? I don't. And then there's a little pause where Rich Moore goes like,

anyway, that's a nice drawing, right? I love the kind of adversarial nature. I think they eventually learn through doing these commentaries, like, oh, we don't respect these people enough. Yeah, I'm hoping they learn that. Well, it's also funny because, like, Gene and gene and reese i think came they go into that commentary with more respect for rich more because he was a high level animator on critic with them so he's not just a regular pencil pusher to to them but uh i mean i'm sure they're friends with rich more

and i mean now rich more is above them In status I would say actually Very true so after Sit down shut up doing half of that He went to Disney Where he directed Wreck-It Ralph, Zootopia And also Ralph Breaks the Internet Which I have not seen because it looked Like the Emoji Movie

It's a better Emoji Movie What's that Matt? It's bad I was just going to say it's bad And then Hank complimented it Alright don look you you don't have to like it it is you know what i don't even like wreck it ralph that much it's not bad i just i saw it once i don't want to see it again i was sold a video game retro movie and i watched a candy movie you did about also about subway i'll say this the direction is not the problem with that movie oh no scripted that movie looks amazing it's amazing yeah i mean it's sad that all the money and work they put into

these jokes that okay so all the internet jokes are the exact jokes they made in the futurama episode about the internet from season two that rich more worked on oh yeah the funniest thing i realized in that movie was that they make this whole movie that's about you know it's like every goddamn animated movie right now it's about dads watching their kids go to college that's what the movie's about but the halfway through making it when they did the what they thought would be just a nice treat of like all the princesses team up they then realize like oh no the princess team up movie is what everybody wants they don't want this that's the one clip i saw ad was the princess team up movie

yeah that's the one clip i saw of it he also voiced uh zangief in the movie oh and oh sorry sour bill yeah and i think he does voices in zootopia i haven't seen that either but yeah so he directed those three movies that's a good hor movie. A lot of furries are way into it. I've seen a very well-illustrated comic about abortion starring those two main characters. I've never seen them drawn better in my life. They're rendered very well. Look it up, everybody.

It's not as disgusting as you would think. And Rich Moore's an Oscar winner now, thanks to that. Yeah, yeah. For Zootopia, that was the best animated movie of that Oscars year, right? Yes, yeah. Yeah, Rich rich and also for wreck it ralph in 2012 when they did the promotional tour for it i got to interview rich

more i got to meet him in person and to tell mike oh i uh after it was over i did a now i look back and this is like why did i even act professional that job was bullshit but i did act professional and just gave gave real questions only about Wreck-It Ralph. And then when it was over, I was like, I'm a giant Simpsons nerd. I know you're the director of Monorail. You're the greatest. He's like, oh, thanks. I would have signed your DVDs if you brought them.

I regret every moment I acted professionally in the Games Press. It was not worth it at all. A waste of time. It didn't matter. So in April of 2019, so almost a year ago, he announced that he left Disney for Sony Pictures Animation. I miss this. And he's working on something. I don't believe it's been announced yet.

He's producer on something that's coming up, but he's not been attached as a director to anything. I mean, he'll be working on it for like three years before the trailer comes out, probably. I think so.

But I mean, they're doing very well. I mean, Into the Spider-Verse. Lord and Miller have a new movie. I mean, it's kind of about a dad. So I roll for me. It's always dads. But I mean, Spider-Man was about dads too oh yeah a couple of dads going right in there it's always i mean i just watched onward and onward is up front about it being all about dads

which is dads are bigger heroes and soldiers on onward makes an interesting you know this is too much of a spoiler for onward i can't please does anybody care i think people out there want to see onward okay fine at least to see the simpson shorts beforehand but we can talk more about that on talk to the audience this month right yeah man you probably haven't uh treated yourself to the wonders of onward yet have you not yet sometime this week i think so i have I think it looks fine. I have actually variable interest in it, but I have the AMCA list, so I'm going to see it. Yeah, it may as well. The Sony Pictures Animation hiring Rich Moore is a big get for them. Until Spider-Verse, I just looked down on all of

those, that entire company, even though Clyde with a Chance of Meatballs was really good, but I always treated that as like they accidentally accidentally made a good thing all the rest of this is open season four and all that other shit but i think they barnyard i think after winning that oscar they they realized like we could make good things couldn't we did lego movie too right that was warner oh that was warner okay yeah i felt lord miller did yeah i thought so that's why they hired lord miller away for spider verse to uh yeah anyway but that's i'm excited to see what richmore will be up to in uh in two years or whenever when that trailer comes out i figured he was on his way to be the next um phil lassiter oh john lassiter john lassiter he was hired by

john lassiter uh hey let's not hold that against him. One of the few nice things he did. Oh, yeah. But I wonder, you know, did he quit because he thought he'd get installed in the Lassiter position and didn't? It's like, I don't know. This is just me spreading rumors and falses. We'll never get rich more now.

The Sentence will be right back. Tonight. Lisa, you look lovely. Bart, assume the position. Meet Bart Simpson. Were you going to listen to rock music in Sunday school? Maybe. He's a chip off the old block.

It's good! It's good! Catch the Simpsons at their Sunday best next. Hope you guys are enjoying this week's podcast on your personal stereo, as Marge would call it. And a big thank you to our guest, Matt J., for coming back on to chat with us about the telltale head follow him on twitter and at mr matt jay and check out his podcasts cartoons 101 and the deep end also if you like this podcast and want to hear more of it as well as our sister podcast what a cartoon you should consider subscribing to our patreon at patreon.com slash talking simpsons this supports me and bob doing this as our full-time jobs and you get so much for your support every episode of talking simpsons one week ahead of time and ad free you can hear next week's right now and the same goes for our sister podcast what a cartoon where we

talk about a different animated series once a week plus you get access to over two dozen original interviews many with folks who have worked on The Simpsons from the very beginning. Plus, our exclusive podcast miniseries where we give The Talking Simpsons treatment to shows like King of the Hill, Futurama, and The Critic. With one coming for the complete series of Mission Hill very soon. All that for just five bucks a month at patreon.com slash talking simpsons but if you really want to share the wealth the way homer says you should sign up at the ten dollar level for all the premium things you get all that five dollar stuff i just talked about plus our monthly what a cartoon movie podcast where we talk about a different animated feature film once a month just did the great mouse detective this month we're doing the spongebob square pants

movie and you'll get to hear those plus over a dozen previous ones too that include films like batman mask of the phantasm akira a goofy movie and so so so much more you got to hear all of those over 50 hours of exclusive premium podcasts at patreon.com slash talking simpsons but yes onto the telltale hey oh yes actually one more thing sorry i wanted to spotlight somebody real quick oh sure this uh well first off this episode's boarded by rich moore as well as steven dean moore and your director and barry caldwell who's future nothing on simpsons well because he i think he was one of the saturday morning guys who didn't work out and so after this he went straight to tiny tunes animaniacs and then a bunch of things that are not as good as that um but no the person i wanted

to spotlight was tress mcneil oh right yeah this is her first appearance in the series playing a character she would not play in the future no maggie roswell takes over that voice so she would stay as dolph she oh she kept playing uh dolph after this pamela hayden is jimbo yes and uh dolph is uh trust mcneil and kearney is nancy cartwright right i believe that is it yes yeah so she's she's dolph the least liked member of the trio, the one who nobody remembers. Who I believe former guest of the show Ian Boothby gave him a last name that the show has retconned. Where there's a Simpsons comic where it's revealed his parents are hippies. But in a future Simpsons episode, it was revealed that he's Jewish and his last name is Shapiro.

Dolph Shapiro. Yeah. I guess that gets him away from the Adolph-ness of his name. Yeah. You want to back away from that. But yes, Tress McNeil, she would do, you know, a few. I looked through her credits just in Simpsons alone, and she would make like random appearances here and there. But she was not as used as often as Pamela Hayden.

Her major characters were more sporadic appearing and that it was really in season seven when they started getting her to appear much more by season nine she's just a regular oh yeah she's regular according to IMDB 544 episodes of Simpsons she's credited on now so that's I mean once Lindsay Nagle became a recurring recurring character, she's a regular Simpsons employee from then on. And I believe we also got to see, me and you, Bob, see Tress McNeil do a Bart impersonation. Yes. It sounds just like the Bart she did on Tiny Toons. As Lester.

Oh, Lester, yeah. Well, also the Lester Bart she did in the Itchy and Scratchy episode. But you're right. When Babs bunny impersonated bart simpson that was also the voice she used and there's also a uh episode of tiny tunes that's an snl parody that's hosted by a bart simpson parody it's very confusing right yeah but i was noon live oh yeah confused me as a kid i thought it was uh real i did not understand that it was not a real show burt stampson or something stupid like that

but no we saw her in person she's uh she's sparkling yes she's tress mcneil is a living legend of voice acting like she is the june foray of our day as josh weinstein even called her on a commentary like she's i mean her most iconic roles are she's daisy duck she'll be daisy duck till she's dead she's babs bunny which is like her huge breakout role in tiny tunes she did a bunch of bullshit on like hannah barbara crap before that but when she got cast as as babs in in 1990 that was her her big moment and then she continued on as the female lead dot warner in animaniacs and she's just in everything she's also wilma flint. Whatever Wilma Flintstone

stuff, that's another major thing. I looked at her career, like she got her start as, there's a cute little interview that sounds like I'm demeaning Nancy Cartwright, but it's a cute interview between Nancy and Tress about getting into the voice acting world. And Tress talks about it like, yeah, she was cartoon loving child who just loved to do silly voices around the house. And by the time she got into college, she got into radio where she could just do sound-alikes and joke voices all the time. And she moved to Hollywood with the intention of either radio or voice acting. And she also said a huge thing that helped her was getting into improv. For over a decade, starting in the 80s, she was in the Groundlings in Los Angeles.

The Groundlings website is really helpful that you can look at alums like her and a list like Groundlings shows that she was in and the whole cast was in it. So in multiple shows, she was in with Phil Hartman and John Lovitz and Kathy Griffin. Oh, wow. And also Edie McClurg. Edie McClurg was a groundling. I didn't know that. She's lovely. Yeah.

It's so funny that I just thought of Edie McClurg as the character she was always cast as to play. Like, ooh, the nice lady. But she's like the Betsy Sedaro of her time. Oh, that's a great comparison. Yeah. It is. Looking into the Groundlings stuff, it gave me so much more perspective. Like today, I know all of these improvisers because they were

first on comedy podcasts, and now they're being the new generation of voice actors. That's what Tress McNeil's generation of Groundlings was. We just couldn't see their improv shows because we didn't live in Los Angeles and they didn't spread them around. And there were no podcasts in the 80s, unfortunately. Oh, and Tress was a buddy of the Pee Wee Herman show, too. She was an early cast member on that. And friend of Weird Al.

She's in the Oh Ricky video. Yes, yeah. Playing Lucille Ball. Yeah, that's right. She's so funny in that video. And she also uh is a graduate of uc berkeley so right down the street from here that's great there should be a statue of chris mcneil in our town uh she's she's amazing and yes i mean her most iconic character is agnes

skinner like that on simpsons her most iconic character agnes skinner she's great we got to watch her do agnes in person. I think she was probably hired because she was one of the Saturday morning voices they had, like Susan Blue, who we talked about before, or other Saturday morning voices that didn't stick around. But Tress and Maggie Roswell, they did stick around for a real long time. And then Lucy Taylor too. So some did, some didn't, but they were damn lucky to get tress right as she was moving on up like they they were lucky to be maybe she did fewer voices until season seven because she's so busy with tiny tunes and animaniacs for like seven years straight she was in the warner

brothers uh silver age minds but anyway yes i just wanted to tribute to tress mcneil again 544 episodes that's crazy that's i never think of her as being that many probably does more work than uh harry sheer does on the show now 100 absolutely i want to talk about her just for a quick second just because she she has this incredible quality about her that she's this like everyone trusts her like she's this amazing utility player that she is she is the woman voice actor version of phil hartman for these shows for the simpsons of futurama where like there are so many voices that you're like why isn't that like a celebrity like i the one i always think of is um on futurama the the bureaucrat lady the dirty boy

dirty dirty dirty like why isn't that you know carmen electra or whoever the hell like you would get at the time that futurama did fall into a little bit, the Simpsons trap of having celebrities come in, but like they would have a one shot character come in and they would let her play them. Cause she doesn't sound like one of the main people and can totally stretch it and, and have it feel totally unique. Even though she is this regular cast member on the show,

you know, like they just let her run wild. Like she ends up being more like used than some of the main cast members just because she can feel like she's like dave herman as well like people that can just do any voice and uh just to duck nerd about it for a second you mentioned that she's daisy duck and has been for like 20 years daisy is a character that kind of had a personality for a long time like she was this like she was mostly like donald's girlfriend and she was she could be like kind of a harpy sometimes like she they usually used very like stereotypical women personality traits for her and cartoons a lot to give donald a foil that's like

she makes him go shopping for him or whatever yeah and she found in that this very modern strong woman takes no shit from her like boyfriend who has anger issues and she will not deal with it and like give her her own issue like the modern daisy is one of the most defined for people that always complain about the the big you know five or six disney characters as being personality lists or whatever the modern daisy is like one of the greatest cartoon characters ever because of what tress uh saw in that character and was able to bring to it and now when you go to the parks or whatever, Daisy acts. Like, that comes from Tress, I think.

The sassiness of her. Yeah, I think you're right. Yeah. I'm looking forward to it. Daisy has been confirmed to be in DuckTales Season 3. Bring everybody aboard. Bonkers is still holding out for more money. Oh, so one last thing.

Matt mentioned that Tress McNeil plays a lot of, you know, roles that would be guest characters or guest stars. I think a lot of what happens is that she will come in and do the temp track, and they just sort of like, well, she did a great job. Let's just have this be the character. Or they can't get Stalker Channing in some cases. In the case of Belle in the Maison Derriere, yeah. Oh, God. Yeah, Tress McNeil, what a hero.

But I guess now at 40 minutes, why don't we talk about... Hey, we had some stuff to cover, two new people on the show. But this episode, it's so important. But watching it again, and I don't even know what I said five years ago, but it's kind of a mess. Oh, yeah. And there is so much of what Al Jean and Mike Reese would do in the future in this episode. Bad things they would do. Although, it wasn't their fault.

No. do in the future in this episode bad things they would do although it wasn't their fault no it was taken out of their hands and sort of uh retrofitted where the the third act was split in half because it was not good so you see half of the half of the third act up front and the other half at the end i i think for better and worse this taught gene and reese the power of editing last minute and rock and rolling voices doing ADR like it is an important ability to fix an episode at the last minute like it was something Brad Bird one of his biggest praises of Simpsons I found in looking at interviews where he talks about Simpsons was him learning from them like oh that's you can edit something till the last minute and only the day before the show airs you're like it finally works we finally get it to work like but i think that showed them they could edit too

much and they edit to death i mean we we've said about the movie that's the worst thing about the movie yeah or like lose confidence in the show they've seen too many times yeah yeah but and this i think is the most heavily edited and 80-yard episode of season one. Like, there's a lot of fixes going on, especially in the first two minutes. I feel like all of the third act that we see that's split up, like, I think, like, 80% of the dialogue is done after the fact. Like, re-recorded and, you know, matched to new animations or, like, rock-and-rolled video edits on the mounds. And also, I went back to our interview with Mike Reese we did about a year and a half ago.

I asked him in his book, he lists like these are the 10 most important episodes of Simpsons I did or whatever. And Telltale Head wasn't on there. And I asked him like, well, you know, this is a pretty important episode. It introduces all these characters. It's the first one where Springfield

feels like a defined city. And it's the first time there's a feels like a defined city and it's the first time there's a mob and his defense was just like yeah but it's just a messy episode i'm kind of ashamed of it he says like he just remembers that as a script that died at the table read and it's not one of his favorites that has his name on it so yeah you think it's going to be a pair i mean if you see the title you think it might be a parody of that short story, but that figures into it for about eight seconds. And on the commentary, Mike Reese was like, this never worked. This Telltale Heart stuff just wasn't funny and never worked. Yeah, they did it much better in, well, the season six airing Lisa's Rival. That's true.

It was a much better Telltale. I mean, I think I hear something. I feel bad for Richmore that his first directing one is like, oh, start with, well, actually not start with, but do a giant mob, a bunch of group scenes. But I think at least in there, they were lucky that they finally had enough to find characters in Springfield to fill the mob with definable people. It's true. This started the trend of like, if there's a mob, it will have characters that the viewers will recognize.

The problem with that is, which I think is funny is funny is like you always see the mobs or you see the people in court or like at a restaurant or in church you're like why is mr burns here why is skinner at the itchy and at the itchy and scratchy trial like you ask all these questions but they just want to put characters you recognize in these scenes and uh well actually, yes. Let's hear the first mob here as they are yelling at Bart. This whole thing was my fault. You went along. Son, we're in this mess together,

no matter how tempting it might be. I can't let my only boy get ripped limb from limb by a bloodthirsty mob. Oh, Dad. We'll die together like a father and son should. Look, now we got him.

Hey, that's Homer Simpson. And his kid, Bart. Let's kill them. Bring him up. Watch the kid. Watch the kid, Bart. Let's kill these guys. Murderous mob, I beg you to spare our lives,

at least until you've heard the story of how we ended up with the head of our beloved town founder. How long will this story take? Uh, about 23 minutes and 5 seconds. That's too long. 23 or 5? Well, alright, go ahead. Okay, it all started Sunday morning.

Kids, we're late for church. Get your butts down here right now. And that's where the episode originally started. Yeah, I'd remember this episode as much more boring if it just started with Marge saying, get your butts down here right now for church. So I think they made the right choice to move that up in the episode. But yeah, everything is just very ADR.

I mean, that Dan line of like, well, OK, better be quick. Like, that's a very good just Dan improv line there. I do love the harry sure off screen it's too long i laugh whenever i hear that and they want to murder them it's so weird to hear like genuine murderous intent in so many springfieldians like for cutting the head off a statue yeah i think crusty's first spoken lines on the series proper are about killing bart yeah it's like kill him yeah i think i believe that's his first word uh in the show he was in the this is the first time on screen for crusty

though we've seen him in posters throughout the season i said series speaking role yes although he was uh on the shorts yes one of them at least and in this episode dan is still doing the shorts voice which is much more his impersonation of Bozo, the Chicago Bozo. By Krusty gets busted, he's got it a little more close to what we think of as the Krusty voice. He's not quite as world-weary yet. It's more up here. Also, yes, it starts off with Homer saying, I pulled a few boners, which I think they knew what they were saying then. I still love that Batman comic where the Joker's talking about boners all the time boners it rules mike reese even has a funny thing he says on a

commentary of like i was watching this at home and saw that it changed to have this at the opening like he didn't know they made that they did it after the color screening so after all the animation came back that the last minute they're like let's just move everything around. Yeah, yeah. This needs a stronger opening than the family goes to church. And also, yeah, to see Grandpa at the front of the mob, it's like he's going to murder his son and grandson. And Patty and Selma are there, too. They are going to murder their nephew, their beloved nephew. They will rip him apart.

One character I noticed, because they really needed characters way in the back, is Miss Botts way in the back is miss bots um colored differently so she even she's there oh it's worth mentioning too we talk about production order this is the last one in production order before xmas like xmas is seventh in production this is sixth so you're supposed to see all of these before the christmas special yes yeah which it's funny to hear skinner say before the christmas special it's that boy bart kill it and i mean the more you think about the the history of lynch mobs in america it's even darker these this bit here but it's it's funny how long they've just had the lynch mob be central to the simpsons world like it's it's just always happened yeah from

the very first season and we see some nice redesigns of characters so we have non-flesh hair barney his hair is finally a non-flesh color and also a newly designed smithers with his green jacket and smithers is who he will be for the rest of the series smithers is truly himself yeah yeah he yeah they make yeah yeah he loves mr burns joke i was surprised to see that so early yeah it it was an interesting choice they finally figured him out like in his first appearance of course we all know about blacksmithers but his middle appearance where his skin is white but he's still wearing the lab coats he's he's obsequious to burns but not fully the guy who blows his nose for him you know and says the feeling is more than mutual sir and it's funny that uh so about five episodes ago or maybe four aljean and mike reese wrote

no disgrace like home this has the exact opposite dynamic where marge is the person trying to whip the family into shape and homer is the bad parent and lisa is not even on the table in this episode she has like two lives i think she explains valhalla and um i think she says it's so sad yes yeah she's she's mainly just a sounding board for like here's how you should feel but uh oh before we get done with the flash forward though the i i love homer says like we'll die together like a father and son should yeah no matter how tempting it may be i can't let you be ripped apart limb from limb by a bloodthirsty bob and also to get to the town square this is not fully consistent in like every simpsons video

game or something but in a lot of them the town square with the springfield statue in the center is pretty consistent i virtual springfield you start at that at the statue and you do see the pretty much the town square as it's shown in this episode you gotta have that candy store there it's always there good we love that dandy candy and the head getting cut off the statue becomes this indelible simpsons memory that to the point that uh it's in the intro now like the hd intro has the head fall off i think it was also referenced on the south park episode about the simpsons and family guy it's like the worst thing bart's ever done yeah no you're right i i get i i've watched that hd intro so many times

where where ralph gets hit in the head with the falling head i never thought about that that's because bart cut the head off and it's still loose it for some reason put it back on in the end of the episode nobody like adheres it to it at all so it's just loose forever it's like swivels back on i never took that as a full callback to this episode but you're totally right totally right i've been watching a lot of uh see we've been playing a little game in our apartment because uh we watch so much Simpsons in this apartment thanks to Disney+. I believe I've watched seasons 1 through 11 three times since Disney+, because it's hard to just keep going after that. But I have now.

I'm in season 15. We're going to keep going. We're never stopping. It gets a little tough. In season 12, we noticed there's a serious uptick where it gets very funny again. And we've been playing this game now where we get some D&D dice and we pick a season between we roll for it to get between 25 and 30. Because we have no idea what happens in there except for a few select episodes. Same. And then we see how many episodes are in the season we roll.

And then we roll the episode. And we've done that. That's how we put things on in our living room now. And it's generally a horrible mistake but sometimes we find a little special gem in there that we enjoy that's there's usually at least one good joke in in a simpsons i watched season 13 one yesterday and i really enjoyed it uh take me back to 2001 uh so then we get the regular start of the episode where Bart and Lisa and Maggie are all ready for church. Bart gets patted down and he has dice and a comic book in his pocket.

And it's still like the weird green radioactive man from the Bart the Genius episode. Yeah, they just pulled the prop out of the list, I guess. And yeah, this all feels very very short especially like in a couple shots Bart's face is more of the shorts proportions like he's he doesn't look like tv show uh version of him and uh meanwhile Homer is not paying attention he's uh he's watching a football game and uh I I like his commentary here we've got an upset in the making. No, we don't. Try being objective for once and you'll... Let's go, Homer.

But you don't understand, Marge. I have 50 bucks riding on this game. Oh, you promised me. This isn't gambling, Marge. It's a lead pipe cinch. Oh, no! Oh, no! Oh! Homer! He takes it at the five. And, oh, my, he fumbles. Oh, no. In the end zone, another touchdown.

Oh. Come on. Standing tops and curvy. Why should I feel like a traffic cop every Sunday morning? I'm just trying to get a little goodness into the family. Where is it? The game. Where is it?

Ah. All right, Cogan's got Wolodowski open in the end zone. He throws it. Catch it, catch it. It's complete. Touch right oh doctor we got a barn burner here this could be the most remarkable comeback since lazarus rose from the dead yes so kogan and waldarski are name checked in that game yeah that uh man the sound mixing is weird i it's just so distracting every word that isn't marge and homer there but yeah also kogan walidarski get name check they the same with j wally kogan the uh the character from the super bowl episode that's right something about those

two uh writers names gets connected to football and please check out our jay kogan interview on the patreon yeah i very good i every time this is the first sports gambling joke in the show yeah i i love on the commentary they did for the super bowl their first super bowl episode the way reese just shits all over and he's like you guys with your sports gambling i didn't care you it was a perfect bell curve your all your strategies were meaningless he's i love that he's like the one dork around all these dorks who like football it was a writer's room full of degenerate gamblers at this time and i think it's because like there were just no other distractions like that could make your writing you know day

more interesting you didn't have an iphone you didn't have a laptop you had snacks and writing jokes for the simpsons and that's it so add gambling to that makes it more fun they were probably all talking about beating the spread while eating free Butterfinger BBs all day long. Mrs. Plopwell, you've done it again. Homer also says that he has 50 bucks riding on the game, which I guess he means I have the chance to win 50 bucks. But I think generally when people say that, they mean like this is how much I bet. Yeah. But he wins $50 later.

So either it's not a very terrible uh bet that he wins or he i think he just says something stupid there because i feel like when you say like i have this much money it's like how much you can lose that's what you're writing yeah or he bet 50 and then won 100 maybe it sounds like he broke even or something yeah i guess so yeah yeah it's a weird like d plot in this episode that homer does win and then he shops for bowling balls later yeah it's uh kind of forgotten i i also as a kid until i learned how to drive i didn't get that homer must be uh hitting his brights while pressing the horn at the same time which that's you know homer doesn't usually that dexterous

it's kind of impressive and i'd say marge is uh the character you're supposed to sympathize with in this first act but she is not likable at all it's very much the don't do that don't do that squirrel from itchy and scratchy and marge it's just like man she is not fun i mean when she performance is so not there yet too the she she just talks like this homer don't do that like later like a season later she'd be have much more energy and actually sound like marge well i mean for the writers who they're still dealing with the only marge content they'd seen to this point was now no burping in my house i say are you making faces like that's all that's all her character was in

the short yeah i mean next we have life on the fast lane and i think that really helps to find I say, are you making faces? Like, that's all her character was in the shorts. Yeah, I mean, next we have life on the fast lane, and I think that really helps define Marge. Finally. Yeah, they really figure her out there. But also that Homer's Laza who, that I forgot that season one's runner is just Homer, not knowing the names of famous things, anybody.

Like, who's Tiny Tim? I guess, guess like it trusts the audience to know that lazareth is a biblical thing lazarus but that's putting a lot of trust in a 1990 audience that's ready to roll into married with children next but but it does make it extra funny that they pull up to the church so he's a regular churchgoer but doesn't know who lazarus is let's uh though it's also obvious adR or they've just fucked up because there is no lip sync on Homer at all as he says it. So they get out of the car. This is where Marge yells at Homer for his irreverent attitude, which that especially I was like, what a nag you are, Marge.

Man, oh, man. It's that is this. I get that like Bart shouldn't have a personal stereo. Rock and roll. But to then tell Homer, you're a reverent attitude. That's so harsh. And at least it's funnier. This string of stuff reminds me of the Bart's girlfriend one.

Marge has funny things she's conservative about. Like the troll. Yeah, this bizarre hair. Awful, awful hair. That's at least funny in the extreme but this is just her being a total just nag yeah and she's not very perceptive to realize her husband is wearing these giant earbuds with uh dangling cords next to her everybody's headphone blind in this world i love how to really let you know when this was made that personal stereo is gigantic i laugh at the phrase personal stereo she should say transistor radio to sound even older you're

walking now i love bart's little dance as he's he's walking around to his rock and roll music homer did try i do like that homer tries to sneakily just sit in the car and listen to the the game the entire time and he goes uh maybe maybe when when she asked him i also another great bit on the commentary is they are like giving rich more notes live and like his head's a little more like eight shaped there homer's a little off and then he's like yeah i'll get on it guys yeah mike reese is roasty but like he's like uh rich i don't know if you can fix this but homer looks terrible here uh that's the pain that's the pain of being a uh an animator around the writers i think or you just you learn to laugh i guess uh but yes the as margin homer go to the adult section lisa and bart go to the uh sunday school for the kids. And this is one of the best bits in the episode, I think.

This feels very graining to me. This is like a Life in Hell comic where it's just like kids ask questions about blank. And I've seen some of these. Some of them are about God. Will my dog Pepper be there? I'm sorry, but the answer is no. Why not? Because heaven is for people.

What about my cat Snowball? I'm sorry, but the answer is no. Will there be cavemen in heaven? for people. What about my cat, Snowball? I'm sorry, but the answer is no. Will there be cavemen in heaven? Certainly not. Um, ma'am, what if you're a really good person, but you're in a really, really bad fight, and your leg gets gangrene, and it has to be amputated? Will it be waiting for you in heaven? For the last time, Bart, yes.

So that is Miss Albright, who would lose her glasses and show up maybe like a dozen more times. Usually it's Maggie Roswell. That's true. Yeah, I think so. That's what I saw on the wiki. I had forgotten her glasses are really distracting because they're not lined up Flanders style glasses. Like they're usually askew in some way in her two two scenes in this episode like the i i really love how tress plays her though that she's just a you know a believer a true believer in christianity but she also is

just like yes no okay no i please please cavemen should be in heaven though i don't know what her problem is well they weren't uh they are before jesus christ and you can't get into heaven without his will. Hell is full of cavemen, I guess. I mean, like, correct me here, theologians, but I think in the view she's espousing about how it's also just the mean thing of like, no, they're godless animals. They can't be in heaven. That's the rules. I'm sorry. It seems to be the belief of like, if you do not, if you are not saved by Jesus Christ, then you don't go to heaven. So any person before the birth of Christ couldn't be saved because he didn't exist.

So then you're not in heaven. They got a grandfather of those people then, I think. That only feels fair to me. But I like that Albright just sticks to her guns. She's like, of course not. No, they're not there like it'd be so much easier for her to please the kids by saying like yes your kitty cat is in heaven isn't heaven great like but she's she's not lying to him i kind of like that this is like one of

maybe three or four episodes where matt graining has a writing credits yes so yeah the writers are uh gene and reese and gra granting and simon so that's very odd that many writers on the script yeah well it's also like against normal even then showrunner protocol like you just expect the showrunners who for season one you would say are graining brooks and simon they of course they rewrite everything but you don't put your name on the script because you want to it's it's just seen as like well the new writers the younger writers should have their own credit so they can make their way if you put your name on it too it kind of takes away from their ability

or their reputation so it's pretty whenever i see things where the showrunner put their name on the script i'm like did you just want an award or something like teleplay by yeah yeah i mean gina reese are very guilty of that on it which they totally copped to when they did it on round springfield they're like yeah we we gave ourselves the story by credit because we thought we'd win an emmy that's just it so there are only four episodes he's credited with writing uh and most of them are with somebody else so this one uh some enchanted evening with sam Simon, that terrible episode. Colonel Homer. Yes.

That's his soul. It's his soul, isn't it? Yeah, I thought so. And then 22 Short Films. I don't know which segment he did, but he's an accredited writer on that. I forgot he had a segment on that. We got to ask Bill and Josh which one he did.

I forget. But wow, that's a shocker. That his only soul writing one was that. I think that Colonel Homer one was him showing off like you said, oh, right here. I wrote a whole script. I'm not just I'm not just the cartoon dork. It's a good one, but I wonder how much it was rewritten. I mean, every episode is rewritten.

And in season three, I'm sure it was rewritten a lot, but most things were. So then we get another first appearance. Reverend Lovejoy giving his big old speech and pretty much ashir has always played him i do like his voice choice it's true i think he would like be a little more droning and deep later less effeminate yeah like yeah i do feel like there's a certain level of gag of like this effeminate voice from a man of god yeah what's interesting and he's not uh totally like an obscene hypocrite there is a funny like a funny sign gag where the entire sermon is about gambling and then when he's you

know saying goodbye to the parishioners he's standing by a science like bingo night monte carlo night las vegas retreat that's like the one joke about you know how churches be very you know hypocritical do you think that think that Christianity is hypocrisy? What do they have to gain, Henry? That's one of my favorites. Well, I also love... I noticed a Reverend Lovejoy thing recently that like his design, interesting, and it always stuck out to me

and I couldn't really figure out why. And then on a fairly late Simpsons episode that's probably from 25 years ago, I just saw him standing next to some celebrity really pointed out how season one he looks and continues to look he's he's got garfield eyes i don't know if you guys have ever noticed that he's got tall yeah thin eyes as opposed to the perfectly round eyes most characters have it's like him and lenny and like one or two other characters have those but they really stick out well lovejoy didn't get as um changed up as

say like otto or lenny did over the uh the years like he stayed more like he looks he and it's kind of the light bulb nose that a lot of guys don't have on there i i personally i love seeing season one characters next to someone created 30 years later that's much more flattering to that celebrity like i'm sure when billy eilish shows up and she will she will look exactly like bill billy eilish with yellow skin there won't be like a weird ripped alec baldwin is always the one i think of they're like totally jacked awesome looking alec baldwin yeah or even if it's not a guest star uh a newly designed character because they're being made in the hd era they have so many more accessories and lines to them because they are those lines will be visible on a tv while meanwhile you have you know the very simple

colors of barney or homer yeah it even it even stands out in that way but uh another one of those season one jokes i didn't get was a joke was gambling the eighth deadly sin which because of the seven deadly sins greed is one of them which would definitely cover gambling so it's it's a joke about bad writing uh but the lovejoy gives a big speech which really just lets harry shearer have some fun as a sports commentator one of his uh favorite roles to two i think today is, the Lord's Day, and yet at this very moment, millions of Americans are not in the Lord's house. They're in their own house worshiping a false idol

professional football. Oh, Lord! It's a beautiful Sunday, perfect football weather for this incredible game. And by the way, this game is being brought to you by the good people at Duff Beer. You can't get enough of that wonderful Duff. Now, they're lining up for this crucial kick.

One final tick of the clock remains. If they win, it will cap an amazing comeback. But it's a 49-yard field goal into the wind. Make it, make it, make it, make it. Oh, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please. Holy Toledo, it's good! It's good! It's good! It's good! It's good! It's good to see you all in church.

Please be seated, Homer. Now, sit down, Homer. Oh, Marge. But she's right to be embarrassed here. I'm on her. She's not being a stick in the mud. Homer just humiliated her. Did Marge realize he's listening to a personal stereo system unit so i oh also when she pulls the earbuds out of uh bart's ears it's such a cartoony

pop yeah yeah they again we talk about the sound design not fully figured out at this point but uh and rich more on the commentary as a funny note he's like we did not tell them to lip sync uh love joy to the announcer in fact he's not supposed to but uh he does for about like half the time of this yeah it goes in and out i i wonder if in just uh they did all the other changes in the edits i wonder if they desynced it a little bit you're probably right yeah and uh there's a shot of the parishioners which i remember from our live show bob you pointing out. Oh, yeah. The rare Mr. Krabappel.

It's crazy. In a very off-model shot of them all praying. Yes. Like, well-drawn, but not in the right style. Jasper and the Winchells are wrinkly as hell. Yeah. And yes, the only shot of Mr. Krabappel probably ever in the show. And now I know enough about football to know that is a very difficult thing to do a 49 yard

field goal i wasn't even thinking of that that's crazy so uh homer should be excited that such a good kick was done but uh i like that he's praying at the same time everybody else is praying but it's one of those things where season one they have a clever joke but it plays too long like it's it just sets it up too long. Then I have one more clip here from the kids ending their Sunday school lesson, which I really love, too. The ventriloquist goes to heaven, but the dummy doesn't. Oh, oh, oh, me. Bart.

What about a robot with a human brain? I don't know. All these questions? Is a little blind faith too much to ask don't forget next week remember to read nice uh twister mouth on robot that's so great yeah i uh they were bringing them back you can see their hate of them on the commentary like hey a twister we told him not to do that and uh then rich more i think even he comments like that rascally wes archer just puts him in there every one is a gift that we see in the series every

twister mouth is a gift i love tress's uh delivery of like he's a little blind faith too much to ask like that's good acting like she's she's a great voice actress though my theory now is that the kids knowingly waste time with all these heaven questions so the teacher won't teach an actual lesson they don't have to hear boring scripture readings or whatever that's that's my theory now as they leave love joy kind of guilts homer in a passive-aggressive way and i think i didn't see that bingo joke bob because there's this like angry man painting across from him are they like setting up like a relationship that did not exist like this is his boss or this is like the bishop

but he's not catholic like this is the man above him in the hierarchy of the church maybe i it's just so distracting it's very distracting like most photographs or paintings of regular characters it's just incredibly distracting in the background but it was all their their background choices back then but uh yeah i do like it's some classic lovejoy passive-aggressiveness like oh i think i really touched you today didn't i homer he's like what oh yeah yeah they then drive away we get to see a very wacky front-facing marge in the in the car ride and uh also she says like oh we're gonna fight more later homer like that it's weird like uh the sets up is still like this will be about marge and her

frustration with the family like that all goes away just like they just forget about it yeah she basically has no more lines after this except at the uh breakfast table radio thing in the third act like uh you think she'd have more concern about the mob trying to murder her kid later too but she's completely absent from it i i do like that homer hopefully wants to think lovejoy say gambling is good for some reason uh when speaking of graining style things the conversation between bart and homer about do apes go to heaven that feels very mac graining oh yeah i could i could see that could be his writing contribution on this episode it's a funny adorable little monkeys they smoke cigars and roller skates for our amusement yeah i uh and i think if they're tore if apes are tortured to get on roller skates and smoke cigars they deserve heaven they earned it that's like a preview of mr teeny you're right yep yeah homer

homer loves mr teeny and the teenies of the world. That's it's, it's a very short style exchange for sure. And yes, then we get a, another transfer from the shorts, but first for the series, the space mutants.

Very, very short lived. This would end, this runner would end in season three and actually it would not come back again until beyond Blunderdome. The episode we'll be doing after season one ends so that's the season 11 premiere which that just feels like one animator drew a joke in the background they're like i remember space mutants and i remember from going through the episodes from the beginning they're presented out of order the space mutants movies but this one is space mutants for the trilogy

continues that's a great joke i think it's a a Friday the 13th joke because it was supposed to be like the final chapter, the fourth movie. Yes, yeah. And then the fifth one's A New Beginning. Yeah, I think you're right there. I mean, even though it's called Space Mutants, the teens getting killed kissing, that's a slasher movie, not a space monster movie you know i think uh our generation of simpsons fans will never forget the spacemans because they were the stars of a video a rotten ass game that was the first simpsons game we could play and yep christ it's uh it's only looks better by comparison to the rest of the 8-bit simpsons games it's actually the best of those it's like

dark souls compared to uh bart i'm sorry bart man meets radioactive man yes yeah or bart in the beanstalk yeah at the very least in bart versus space beans they paid for the danny elfman song at least in the nes version that was the one released first but when you poor poor british people had to play it on the master system no danny elfman song they paid for a sound alike slightly better graphics sure slightly still a rotten game look but yes yeah uh and yeah the the space mutants first appeared in the 37th short scary movie that's the one uh where bark goes to a scary movie with maggie and lisa and he gets more scared than they do at the

space mutants i i did miss the runner of the space mutant numbers that i i didn't double check this on like frankie but the wiki said that in the 1980 flashback uh before bart's birth there is a sign for the first space that's true yeah so that was a joke you know it's like this is where it began yeah yeah but i also like when marge turns down the movie, she says, killing innocent people, eating human flesh. You just get a lot of bad ideas. That is funny. Lisa, Barb, what did you two learn in Sunday school today? The answers to deep theological questions.

Yeah, among other things, apes can't get into heaven. What? Those cute little monkeys? That's terrible. Who told you that? Our teacher. I can understand how they wouldn't let in those wild jungle apes. But what about those really smart ones who live among us,

who roller skate and smoke cigars? Oh, cool, man. Space mutants four. Drop me off! Drop me off! No way, Jose. Marge, they're only space mutants. I know what those movies are like.

Killing innocent people, eating human flesh. You just get a lot of bad ideas. Hey, Dad. Can I have five bucks? I hope you're not planning to see a certain movie starring certain space mutants that a certain mother didn't want you to see. Perish the thought. there you go son share the wealth that's what i always say i kind of just realized i've seen this episode a billion times

but like the entire thing is about homer being a bad influence on bard so yeah you're right like even up to the yeah like he tells basically tells bart to do what he does eventually so it's like in the beginning it's like it's your reverend attitude that is making bart bad you're right it's it's just not done very well it's like it's your reverent attitude that is making Bart bad. You're right. It's just not done very well. It's a very consistent theme, not pointed out enough, perhaps. But yeah, I mean, this is him completely going against his wife's parenting decision. Just like, eh, no, just go. Here's five bucks.

Boys will be boys. Five bucks to see a movie. Yeah. Well, I mean, five bucks goes even farther in one scene. I'm really going to point out when we get to that. Oh, Christ. Yeah. But yeah yeah the five bucks to see a movie also that seemingly that movies are rated so how's bart even planning to get into that without thievery like uh but it also seems very unhomer like how he's lying on the couch in full church clothes i feel like he would have changed out of it i think it's just too lazy i'm even looking at bowling ball prices right now and 50 bucks is not going to get you

one with a liquid center yeah no way i uh also homer homer sounds very walter mathoey in that certain movie a certain yeah i love his share of the wealth that's what i always say that's a fun saying i like that and uh then bart gets fully naked in the hallway which is a weird choice it just feels odd to me you know what i'm just realizing this like so homer says share the wealth right yes bart says that later yeah well it is very influential it's not like i'm only realizing this now this is the point of this entire episode 30 years later i think the the bart they just liked the fun of showing Bart's butt on TV because you couldn't normally do that on television.

But as a child and even now, it still bugs me. So did Bart fully take off his underwear with his church clothes or was he not wearing underwear with his church clothes?

An unfurnished basement. Oh, that's true. He does prefer that. It's been set up. I don't. It's fun animation, but like the scene of Bart being like totally radical and saying Cowabunga just presented sincerely like, no, Bart's radical. I almost feel like they were told by the people who were already making Bart toys like, we

need something for commercials. Put in a skateboarding scene like this. This is just an earnest skateboarding scene as real as it would have been presented in any teenage mutant ninja turtles episode and it also features a thing the writers and we even forget bart does say this in season one there it is he said it he was watching the turtles earlier, I guess. I can't believe they let him say cowabunga. Cowabunga.

The writers all think it is the lamest thing in the world to have Bart say cowabunga. On other commentaries, they're insistent of like, no, that was invented for t-shirts. We never had Bart say cowabunga. We are better than that. And here's the proof. No, you were not. You had him say cowabunga we're better than that and here's the proof no you were not you had him say cowabunga you you had to be the mascot of the of the extreme 90s we all remember i uh i just saw

the daily simpsons i think it was they shared like a 1989 bart halloween costume which i saw that which was you know the classic mask and then a t-shirt that features the character on it not an actual bark costume is that because like the show presumably would have been airing in halloween 1989 well uh i guess yeah that must have been their plan they're like well this will premiere in september so it'll be out in october like the the merchandise it's it's something to really consider when you look at the simpsons timeline that i didn't think of when we first did season one which is the merchandise wheels especially in 1989 they had to be turning before even january 90 like oh they were spinning in like spring of 89

so so they fully knew they were going to merchandise part mania did not it was what they wanted to happen and it probably was more successful than they thought but they were going to merchandise. Bartmania did not. It was what they wanted to happen, and it probably was more successful than they thought, but they were ready for it. Bartmania was part of it. It was not a secondary thing to it of it all. Oh, God. And the Halloween costume has the date it

was printed on the costume, and it says August 16th, 1989. What a weird thing. Is that because it was a prototype and just like well here's our here's what it looks like here's this version of it i i thought i thought the person the person who found it they they suggested it might be the date it was worn or uh but and by some scrapbooking mom who had kept it in that kind of shape or dad, but it's in the like Matt Groening font right below his name. It is.

Yeah. And I, and there's more and more questions about this Halloween costume. Like knowing how things are manufactured now, because my partner Nina Matsumoto does stuff for Fangamer. It's like, like China needs to know seven months in advance about what their factory will be making and sending to you.

So like they weren't reacting to barb's popularity otherwise the stuff would start hitting by like mid-season two yeah they they would have already known the popularity was coming from the shorts and that's how they they identified it i think that's something like that's a thing to remember about pitching doing a simpson show is that they knew the the toys were coming for christmas 89 even uh but yes as as bart is uh skateboarding around he runs into his three future bullies who will be tormenting him for the rest of his life jimbo dolphin kearney jimbo named after jim brooks dolphin kearney named after portland streets or kearney streets it's weird like i found out about jim jones the cult leader and mass murderer uh long after this so whenever i see him or read about him or hear a podcast about my i imagine him as jimbo yeah jimbo jones very

distracting yeah and who would have thought these characters would have such longevity like they're there i watched a recent season 31 episode and they're in it more than ever because they do a ton of jokes about jimbo and girlfriend, Chalmers' daughter. Oh, that's right. And, of course, Kearney has a son. Yes. He remembers the bicentennial, which would put him at about 60 now, I'd say. But who would have thought they'd stick around this long?

But let's hear the first meeting of the bad kids. Nice dismount, man. Didn't hurt. Oh, yeah? Well, do it again. Nah, might land on my face and end up looking like you. You little punk. Hey, man, leave the kid alone. I like him. You do?

Yeah, you're a witty. So what's your name, man? I'm Bart Simpson. This here's Kearney, and I'm Jimbo. You don't need an introduction. You're the worst kid. So what's your name, man? I'm Bart Simpson. This here's Kearney, and I'm Jimbo. You don't need an introduction. You're the worst kid in school. Thanks. Coast is clear. You guys are sneaking in?

Yeah, only saps pay to see movies. Hey, Bart, come on. But sneaking into a movie is practically stealing, man. Practically? It is stealing. Well, okay. I just wanted to make sure we weren't deluding ourselves. I guess it was pretty novel at the time to have teenagers talk like teenagers on TV. But in the future, they would do a funny take on a dumb teenager, like, you know, way to breathe, no breath. Or you kiss the girl that's so gay. They're just sincerely kind of dumb teenagers.

Like, whatever. Yeah. Which is a fun way to play them. But yeah, if you want to do sharper writing, you don't settle for how a dumb teenager just barks words. Did you realize, though, that Jimbo and Kearney are named? Dolph is not named until Camp Krusty.

Wow. When it's like, your counselor is Jimbo, Dolph, and Kearney. That's right. Yeah, they don't say it out loud until then. And Dolph is named after a classmate of Matt Groening's, but he was not a bully. Okay. All right. I thought Kearney's the only one who's a Portland street then.

Yes. I misspoke there. And Lovejoy. Oh, yes. On Flanders. I just made him. And Lovejoy. Oh, yes. And Flanders. I just met among the bullies. Oh, yeah. I'm in Portland a lot, and I never get tired of seeing those streets.

I mean, in San Francisco, we have Kearney streets as well. True. Yeah. I like how he takes the compliment of being the worst kid in school. And also, it is stealing. Okay, I just want to make sure we weren't deluding ourselves. That also feels very graining to me, too, kind of statement. Now, when I worked at AMC Theaters, I had to, I was assigned to guard exits from this very type of thing.

They put you in danger. That's so great. I know. I really, I wish I never had to do it. And also, it's like, who gives a shit? If a kid wants to sneak in and see a movie and have a little fun, who cares? But I had to be one of those guards. And I also got religious witness to twice while I was there because I was just trapped.

I'm like, leave me alone. But I feel bad that I was a narc just like the jerk in this episode who is preventing kids from seeing films full of nudity which now who cares they'll see that on the internet yeah instantly the sound that takes us out of it more of just the like overly dramatic uh music writing of the season too uh and then when they come back like uh bart does a fart sound and the audience behind him is really distracting because they don't look at all like simpsons characters yeah this uh pretty long scene not a lot of jokes it's like i guess the joke is like oh this is a pretty accurate parody of a

slasher movie yeah and that's it like yeah i think that's why space mutants didn't come back too much even after the last time they're like what if they're australian that was the best one that's the best one but even that it's like where do you go after that you know and i mean the best gag with the space mutants is when the space mutants in the movie grab the couple and then the usher grabs bard and jimbo in the same image style i guess that is a joke yeah that's i didn't realize that okay cool it's it's posed and laid out all the same. As they leave and walk away, I like that Jimbo brags like, you know, Bart, I've been kicked out of all four Space Mutant movies. So Jimbo saw the first one nine years ago.

Yes, yeah. Well, hey, who knows the age of Corky? We know Kearney's age, but I don't respect the Corky's Jimbo thing. What is that? That's when he signed his, remember when Bart had his checks? Oh, yeah. Oh, Jimbo's real name is Corky. Wow.

That line felt so ADR to me, and it was not respected after that I don't respect it either. It's continuity. But speaking of continuity and making history. Beloved character appearance for the first time. Apu Nahasa Pima Petalon. Everybody's favorite. Yeah, I mean, we've talked about it so much. Yeah, I mean, just a brief story is that on the commentary in the script, it was said, you know, not ethnic.

The clerk is not ethnic. Ethnic meaning not white. And they say on the commentary, Hank did this voice. It got a big laugh, so it stayed in the show. We found out later in history, Sam Simon put him up to it because Sam he remembers it as Hank Azaria. Mike Reese on a later commentary will repeat that same story. If you've watched the Harry Condableu film, The Problem with Apu, he quotes a Reese interview where he also tells the story that it was Hank Azaria's idea. The first time I had heard a different version of that story was in Mike Reese's book where he said, Mike Reese says, I always told the story that it was Hank mike reese's book where he said i mike reese says i always told the story that it was hey kazaria who came up with the contra now controversial apu voice but when i talked with hank about it he said no i was told to do it by sam simon yeah it was his direction to do

it and sam simon was fascinated with 7-elevens he was way into them in 7-eleven culture but also matt geraning was a big stickler for not including certain kinds of jokes that were very popular at the time on The Simpsons. For good reasons. Yes. Matt was right in time, I'd say. He was right. So I feel like part of it was like, this will really piss off Matt, because, you know, they hated each other.

And, I mean, telling that story for Reese, it's also a blame dead end for people who are looking for someone to blame in the Apu thing, where it's also a it's a blame dead end for people who are are who are looking for someone to blame in the apu thing where it's like well the the originator of the idea is dead now so you can't really be mad at a dead man like or i mean you can be i'm mad at lots of dead people but it it you can't ask him for any more information and uh and yeah i mean at the time of this recording his area says he's never going to do the voice again but in the 1990 i guess it did feel like ripped from real

life they're like oh an indian guy runs a convenience store that is it that's how it is in my neighborhood or whatever but it it was at the very least, a very simple stereotype. And Apu has no character here. They added so much character to him in the future. He doesn't even have a joke so much. No, he does. He's just like the, you know, this is not a lending library kind of overly watchful clerk. But I want to say that, not to go on too long about this, but I want to say that his reveal is supposed to be a joke like he turns

around but you see him before he turns around he's just facing a different way so i feel like in the animation he was supposed to like reveal the reveal was like look it's an indian guy ha ha but he's there the second bart enters the store and he turns around and we know he's indian the entire time yeah the animation does kind of blow it there, too. But I think you're right that that was the concept. But why don't we hear Apu's famous first words in the series? Three jumbo cherry squishies and one double jumbo original flavor, sir. Okay. Now, don't you kids take anything.

I'm watching you. I've got eyes in the back of my head. 452. Don't worry, guys. It's on me. Share the got eyes in the back of my head. Code 52. Don't worry, guys. It's on me. Share the wealth. That's what I always say. Ha ha. Guys? Guys? Hey, guys.

Where'd you get all that great stuff? Five-finger discount, man. You ripped it off? Yeah, thanks for covering for us, man. That also establishes Jimbo Dolphin Kearney's main character type, which is shoplifting. And having five fingers. Yep.

So I want to say there's a really weird animation thing happening that I just noticed, and it's on Disney Plus as well. As soon as Apu says, I've got eyes in the back of my head, watch him. Because for the next four seconds, they cut out a frame from earlier in the scene and paste it into the scene so it's like a very oddly frozen video still

of apu while the rest of the animation moves around him naturally it's very odd yeah it's uh clearly something was unsatisfactory with what apu was doing in that shot and to to avoid a retake, they're just like, can we just get a still frame of him and paste it over it? It's an unmoving shot. And your eyes are drawn to the kids stealing anyway. So I'm not surprised we never noticed this before. First time I ever noticed it. And it's on the DVD and on Disney+.

So yeah, really weird. I also love the idea of an original flavor squishy. Like what is that? What is this original flavor? Like they haven't really figured out background signs yet. So like I'm like face against my TV trying to read these things. And they're not even that funny. So the beef jerky display is, it says,

Nutritious beef jerky, have you had a stick today? And the flavors are mild and spacey Cajun style. So I guess not very funny. The sign above the door says your automotive headquarters, which I don't know. I don't get that one. And there's like the candy section, and I can't read the top line,

but the bottom line says a perfect way to start the day. Oh. So don't know what they're doing here. But I tried. Yeah. I appreciate your effort on a season to start the day oh so don't know what they're doing here so but uh i tried yeah hey i appreciate your your effort on a season where they're figuring out sign gags while animation is more rough it's it's a real challenge and yeah 452 for four giant squishies yeah three jumbo and one double jumbo are they like 80 cents each or something uh i think a dollar each and then tax yeah i think i think that's the situation yeah i mean 452 wouldn't buy you one squishy in universal studios i'll tell you that i had my first squishy or slurpee rather in like 10 years because it

came with a lynx awakening cup oh really and i think it was like five dollars where at a 7-eleven they were selling lynx awakening yeah for the for the new for the switch game yeah it's nice i didn't know this i in canada oh well that changes everything we didn't go to a 7-eleven but my husband so wanted the detective pikachu cups he bought them on ebay they were like the somebody flipped them the slushy cups like squishy that's a cute name for a a slushy i feel like it's just interchangeable to people now they just say like squishy or slushy but uh matt you come from the land of wawa oh boy i do i just yesterday in a car with uh in a car with five people in it uh two of us from the Jersey-Philly area.

We talked about Wawa for about 40 minutes while everyone else just silently waited for us to stop. I had Sheetz in Ohio. They were just popping up as I was leaving, but I did enjoy some Sheetz before I left. That actually came up as well. In the Philly area, Sheetz versus Wawa is usually the argument people have. I've never been to a Sheetz because it's generally in the Philly area, Sheetz versus Wawa is usually the argument people have.

I've never been to a Sheetz because it's generally in the Philly suburb area. I didn't grow up as much, but I would give up everything in my life for the opportunity to open a Wawa franchise in Los Angeles. Somebody please do that. We need it here. It would make this city so much better. You saw how much people went crazy for a Chick-fil-A that opened in Los Angeles. Let us have a Wawa now, too. I just, I swear to God. Oh, okay. So my roommate, one room over, just heard me talking about Wawa and messaged me about it.

I just saw the word Wawa come up on my phone, and I almost went insane just now. I was like, there's no way the universes are converging in this way. Also, we were talking about collectible cups. Another thing I just noticed for the first time is that the squishies come in Space Mutant 4 cups. Oh, no way. I didn't notice that. That's cool. So a nice tie-in.

And it actually makes sense of, like, yeah, the 7--eleven would have tie-in cups for a big movie like that also first appearance of play dude in the show too which uh is you know it's a good fictional porn magazine for the world of simpsons but it's no gigantic acid no that's much better that's that's number one fake porno name i miss you know now in the days of i guess the jokes and shows are now about funny names for porno websites but in the 90s and 2000s the jokes were about funny porno uh magazine name like the famous biggins good old biggins yes yeah uh or swank well actually no swank's real that's armin's copy of swank but yes uh another missed joke in the show comes in when they approach the Jebediah Springfield statue, which is that no person's last name is Springfield. Springfield just is the most bland name you name a town.

So the idea that the founder's last name is Springfield is a joke. It happened much later, but I think Shelbyville, Manhattan is a much funnier joke. Way better. Because his last name is the more popular town town name and his first name is the name of the town his name is shelbyville that's such a that's such a great show i love it's a great bill and josh style joke and uh the bear also uh with its x eyes i love that his his statue is just standing on top of a bear. I forgot that. Yeah. It's just a man with a dead bear.

That's all he's remembered for. There are good jokes in this episode, but I will say they try really hard to make bear with bear hands funny. Yeah. It does not work. And it happens like five times. I'm like, guys, come on, stop. Calm it down. Yeah.

And I double checked the photos of it at Springfield in the Universal Parks. It is also the dead bear, but not the season one looking bear with X's for eyes. It is a more normal looking bear, certainly from the current redesign of what the statue looks like. So sadly, he's not standing on a season one cartoony bear with x's for eyes and uh you know i i talk bad about the sound design but i really like the the hollow sound of the rocks hitting the bronze statues they throw rocks at jebediah yeah and this is also the debut of uh mr dandy who i've been talking about a lot in this uh season one revisiting it's so funny that dandy

is in the premieres in the same episode as apu but he doesn't have any of the staying power it's like for one episode apu and dandy are equals and in fact dandy is far more important than apu it's true yeah he's a force of authority in the town i i mean what he really is is just a character in a jimmy stewart movie who's just like hey hey you kids like that uh you little ruffians? Here, I got the clip. Ugh! Ugh! Ugh! Go on, Bart.

But that guy founded Springfield. He built our first hospital out of logs and mud. If it weren't for him, all the settlers would have died in the great blizzard of 48.

So? So? So. the great blizzard of 48 so so watch me hit him right between the eyes hey are you doing that show a little respect you insolent little thugs we're really scared hey hey you hey hey you hey hey that's what makes me laugh the most is they just play his hey you like three times oh yeah but yeah mr dandy like weirdly enough we have another oddball uh howard coming up at the end of the season from howard's flowers like his descendant would be in a future episode like recently oh really they never brought back dandy he appears a few more times in the background and like season two and three but then he's just out.

You would think a show like this would have a lot of reasons to go to a candy shop just for the kids. But yeah, nothing else of this guy. I also forgot until hearing it now, I was like, the dog's barking as he's getting yelled at? It's very weird. It's an odd choice. Yeah, and I don't know. I feel like a future episode would be like, honestly, who gives a shit about jebediah springfield it's it's not a big deal like actually when jessica lovejoy and bart are together that one of their bonding experiences

is throwing toilet paper over the statue and it's like treated like a sweet moment here it's like when the bart when bart's rock hits the statue this sting of music is like oh my god what has bart done this great man this i mean this is more of the insane reverence for him that we'd see in lisa the iconoclast you know like this but it's like the show itself is treating it like it's a tragedy like the characters also do but the show the way it's scored and the way the scene is set up and everything it's like this is a terrible thing bart is doing oh no i was thinking about this recently while watching uh Duncanville the the new Fox animated sitcom and for some reason animated sitcom writers like I don't know if they feel this way but they

love for their characters to love their hometown and really believe in their hometown and and the history of it and it's a thing that I've not only never experienced in real life, but like have only seen in adult animated sitcoms. Like it's just such a weird go-to for everything to like, well, we need something for these characters to care about and rally behind. And it's always like the man that founded this town had these tenants and we believe in them. And some teenagers like, well, I don't agree with that. And then they learn that everybody loving the history of their town is actually correct. And they become one of those fans of it. I don't understand why it's such a trope for this very specific genre.

Family Guy had an episode very similar to that in its first season. That's right, yeah. Well, that was when they lost cable. But the town comes together. I mean, as a branding thing, maybe it just establishes your fictional town in your show pretty early. And so it's useful i mean as a branding thing maybe it just like establishes your your fictional town in your show pretty early and so it's useful in that way but yeah king of the hill too like just all these shows pull on that thread yeah you know matt jay thanks for bringing that up especially the uh the duncanville one because i had forgotten when in that first episode there's a thing of like

old oaky the tree that is fully just being treated the way jebediah springfield is treated in this episode like it is it's kind of uh it's a very similar plot device in that episode i think because of springfield when you start a new animated show you're like okay what's the town like what's the story of the town we got to do the town and that's just the natural element of every adult animated tv show now yeah if your town's just a town or it's uh you know you're in new york city it it just feels different you know or yeah bojack gets around that by being like yeah this is los angeles los angeles and we're gonna have hyper specific references to every street in the show yeah when the simpsons was doing this it

was novel because like on a sitcom you're like okay here's the house set maybe there's a bar and maybe there's a workplace but that's it the simpsons was doing this, it was novel because on a sitcom, you're like, okay, here's the house set. Maybe there's a bar and maybe there's a workplace, but that's it. The Simpsons was like, well, here are the locations they can go to because people draw them. So it was very novel. No one in Cheers has a distracting Boston accent. It's true. But yeah, the kids then run off. They then look at clouds together in kind of a parody of the Peanuts shorts where they look at clouds, except they're hyper-specific clouds of violent things. Yeah. That also felt very graining, too.

It's a very long scene. Yep. That's why I don't have the clip here, because we'll just be listening for like a minute ten. But I like that eventually they come to see that that's where the idea comes from. Jimbo tells him, I think it would be a good idea if they cut his ugly old head off like that. That's Bart being, again, a very impressionable young lad. And when Bart resisted at first, they then all call him gay, which is eventually what happens if you hang out with a bunch of boys long enough. Yeah, it's very's very again a very like

accurate portrayal of like teenage boys of this era no in 1990 they would have said more slurs yeah in real life yeah but fortunately they didn't in this show uh that's that's why it was so shocking in that later simpsons one where they just tell tell nelson like that's so gay it's like yeah that's what an actual teen would say or a worse thing yeah uh but yes after bart is laughed away for caring about the kid for caring about jebediah we go back home homer is thinking about how to spend that is 50 bucks wow look at these bowling balls maggie can you think of a better way for Daddy to spend his hard 150 bucks? Now I've seen everything. Black, marbleized with a liquid center. The stealth bowler.

The pins don't know what hit him. Dad, can I talk to you about something? Sure, boy. What's on your mind? Well, I was wondering, how important is it to be popular? I'm glad you asked, son. Being popular is the most important thing in the world. So, like, sometimes you could do stuff that you think is pretty bad so other kids will like you better? You're not talking about killing anyone, are you? No. Are you? No. Then run along, you little scamp. A boy without mischief is like a bowling ball without a liquid center. I hope he ball really we're like bulling bull without a more of uh we covered this in our live show but like more of the season one bowling fascination yeah yeah homer again homer's love of bowling it's it's too much activity for him it is uh yeah he'd just be at moe's i stand by the

headcanon i made up that after losing his job at Barney's Bola Rama, he could never bring himself to go back there. You're probably right. But yeah, Homer, again, this was the first viewing where I realized, like, Homer has $50 to buy a bowling ball because he won that bet. And the Bowl Earth catalog is a reference to the Whole Earth catalog, which was a counterculture catalog slash magazine that was published in the hippie days. Someone I was dating, their parents had a few and I was looking at them. It's just like, here's how to grow your weed, man. And like things you could buy from there, like fun counterculture things. But yeah, a parody of that.

Matt Groening probably knew about that. Wow, I didn't know that. Well, Matt, it sounded like you did a little research on the price of bowling balls that are not 50 bucks. I was just looking on just a general Amazon search just because I have zero idea what a bowling ball costs because I've never had to purchase one myself. But 50 bucks seems on the very low end without any special features about it, like a liquid center. I'm not seeing any liquid centers either. I'm not sure how common that is, but generally around a hundred to 140 seems to be what I'm seeing for a decent one. I could see a standard bowling ball 30 years ago being 50 bucks. I could see that, but well, I mean that liquid center sounds non-regulation to me. I think Homer would get in trouble in his

bowling league, but well, also the joke about it being the stealth bowler like it it transported me back to just in my childhood how much the propaganda of that was fucking everywhere and it now is so weird to me like did that thing ever do anything or is it like those planes i can't fly in the rain and just like waste a bunch of money you know i don't think it's as wasteful as the f-35, I believe, is the very expensive, the trillion-dollar failure plane. It's why we can't have health care. No, why bother? Just look at the plane and feel pride in your country.

Put your hand over your failing heart and feel pride. And know that it's killing people. As you die of heart disease, it's killing people, too. But yeah, that stealth bomber they talked it up so much like i i think i probably had like stealth bomber toys because they just talked it up i'm sure i thought it was very cool like i probably imagine it was invisible like wonder woman's plane or whatever and that's why we had to have desert storm because we spent all this money on these fucking planes you got to stealth bomb somebody now the idea of like oh yeah

this will go by our enemies without radar like what and we're going against guys who don't have an air force what do you anyway yeah just the the stealth bomber bit here is it really took me back to like how much they advertise the stealth bomber uh and yes homer acting like the opposite of most sitcom dads by giving bart terrible advice about how being popular is the only thing that matters and if you have to do something bad to impress them that's good do that as long as you're not killing somebody it's sort of like the bart the genius thing where they're just kind of reusing that same idea it's like homer is the catalyst for the bad things bart does because of uh you know the bad advice and in bart the general he tells the general yeah

he gives him he gives him bad advice everywhere like that like yeah and in barth the genius he's like gives him terrible advice on how to go to school and how to put on a clip on tie like they they were getting a lot out of just the novelty of a sitcom dad who gives bad advice like now if you had a sitcom dad who gives good advice and stuff it's insane you'd be like wait that good that's why i like on duncanville that the the dad is just a mushy old rock fan who does want to do nice things like he's he's my favorite character on that show i think i i don't know how you feel matt yeah definitely the ty burrell uh his performance is really good i think he's really funny i like him and betsy sadaro are the the two highlights to the show for me i love that betsy sadaro's

character is just drawn to be betsy sadaro that's that's perfect i mean she is hilarious i i love her always funny and then we get a very long silent section of the show very shorts as well uh i mean ninja bart the video game should have ripped this off have a ninja level just would have meant an early stealth level we don't want that that's true they get how can they pull off stealth on an nes game like uh and then like about 12 seconds of a sawing noise yeah boy that's really i love on the commentary rich more is like boy what a great sound i love how snarky richmore is yeah the uh in good established geography this is another of the moments where this feels like springfield has

come together to me because so when lisa walked to meet bleedingham's murphy it's just a bunch of like tattoo parlor scary thing whatever when bart walks at night into the town he passes by quickie marty passes by candy most andy he he is going by the landmarks we've already established in the show you get a real sense of what springfield is here and uh he's lucky bart is lucky that's a hollow statue and not like full bronze too because he easily removes the head though in a way that the head can be placed back and stay in place yeah with no adhesive or welding involved and the second act ends and the first act begins with more of that video editing stuff of just a very distractingly artificial pause on an establishing shot like a zoom in on a still video frame not even like a still piece of art yeah and the still is again a

1990 still so it's very artifacted and just uh you know on an hd television incredibly distracting and then they uh have their first of many times they parody the godfather horsehead scene of bart waking up to looking at the head on the other side of his pillow the best one was in lisa's pony though where the impossible shot, so the pony was in bed with Lisa. And she never heard or felt at any point. But as Bart wakes up, he realizes the mistake he's made

as the news is breaking. Ooh, look at this one. The hammer of Thor. It will send your pins to Valhalla, Lisa? Valhalla is where Vikings go when they die. That's some ball. Good morning, everybody. We interrupt Mambo in the Morning to bring you this special news bulletin.

The statue of Jebediah Springfield, our illustrious town founder, was brutally decapitated last night in an act of senseless vandalism. We now go to Police Chief Wiggum at City Hall. Well, we have no witnesses, no suspects, and no leads. If anyone has any information, please dial O and ask for the police. That number again oh so another early wigum uh i i look in appearance yeah so the first one was like talking about albarto and which episode was that uh the homer's odyssey that's right that's right it's episode three and i forgot

i looked this up because it's not a great impression but his original voice was like a david brinkley uh voice i thought i thought it was walter cronkite but no it's david brinkley it's on the record but it would eventually change into edward g robinson edgar or edward i always fucked that up edward edward let's say edgar edgar g robinson okay uh when this was too slow it's kind of slow yeah i uh this is the first time the joke is that he's stupid i guess to like uh number again oh i guess he was too stupid to know who el barto is when he's sitting right in front of him that's true that's uh i guess this is just a new depth of stupidity for him but also it's him in the position of what an actual chief of police would do which is press conferences not driving around in squad cars answering everything a policeman would do in Springfield.

Oh, by the way, it's Edward. So I guess I was right. I want to see Edgar. I don't know why. Thank you for looking that up. Our listeners are probably shouting. There's already three comments. Delete them now.

And yes, that's Mambo in the Morning, the season one runner of Mambo Love. Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. At the very start of that clip, you can hear a little Mambo playing as they're talking. And so we're talking about the Hammer of Thor. Mjolnir, as we all know now in the popular billion-dollar films. All the kids know Mjolnir. Though I knew it in 1992 because I knew it in 1990 as well because I was reading the Marvel comics. So Valhalla, Mjolnir, very important parts of the Marvel comic book world.

I learned that because it was the name of the Something Awful content management system. Oh, really? Or CMS, when I wrote for Something Awful. Oh, God. I hate hearing even the word CMS. CMS gives me nightmares. Oh, God. Anyone who suffered in the content mines, no matter which place you worked at, i never heard from anybody that they're like i

love my cms nobody liked it everyone is broken in a very different way it's it's hilarious i'm glad i don't have to work with those anymore patreon cms is just like just pop it in there you're good yeah you wrote it down the end yeah it's it's even easier than wordpress anyways uh yeah the the everybody's sadness at it like the the town crying about it here, it shows you what Lisa was up against in Lisa the Iconoclast. And this is like early Homer sobbing in front of his family stuff, too, that I really like. Stay tuned to this station for further developments as they break. It's just a statue. It's a statue of the trailblazing founder of our town. It's a symbol of what we can all do if we put our minds to it. Just a statue. It's a statue of the trailblazing founder of our town.

It's a symbol of what we can all do if we put our minds to it. Just a statue? Is the Statue of Liberty just a statue? Is the Leaning Tower of Pizza just a statue? Uh-oh, school bus. Come on, Lee, school bus. Go on. We've all got to be brave, just like Jebediah when he killed that bear.

It's so awful. Okay, come got to be brave, just like Jebediah when he killed that bear. It's so awful. Okay, come on, come on, everybody. We've got to get on with our lives. Let's try and put this tragedy behind us. You're right, Moe. A beer, please, and make sure there's a hat on it. Ah-ha! I said it before, and I'll say it again. Hell in a handbasket. I hope they find the punk who did this,

and I hope they cut his head off. So, yeah, another instance of Homer getting a word wrong, Archie Bunker style, which they kind of dropped, because it's like, oh, that's not that funny. Leaning Tower of Pizza is something you'd hear on, like, Ninja Turtles or something. I thought that's what it was called when I was seven. Oh, me too.

Yeah. I was like, yeah, it's a Leaning Tower pizza. And I did a Homer, when I think about it. I think that's also an important moment there, the cutaway to Moe's, because I think in production order, at least, this is the first scene that is fully simpson free like even okay so in say the episode where they introduce monty burns watching homer it is a scene between monty and smithers but it begins as a zoom out from looking at homer yeah so homer still starts the scene but this is and this isn't like a commercial on TV. That doesn't count either.

This is just cutting to a scene somewhere where no Simpson family member is. I guess they trust you to, you know, know what these characters are. At this point, it's impressive that they're like, yeah, just cut to Moe's bar. Like, it'd be funny. And I, I mean, they cut to Moe's bar because I think it feels like a Reese joke of put a head on it or a Gene joke. Put a head on it. And then that reminds people about how the thing's got no head and people start crying. You know, Barney may be patriotic or, you know, believe in his town, but he's too much of an alcoholic to ask for beer with a head on it.

Yeah, it's a waste of money. Who asks for beer with a head on it? I get mad at bad beer pourers but i'm too much of a coward to be like hey you know what like pour this again it's like 20 head get out of here my local pub lane splitter in berkeley they are masterful at pouring a beer it's like riding the top of the glass you got to be careful with your first sip it's perfect oh yeah i've been there yeah it's uh you get your money's worth you not you're not losing a single cent of your expensive bay area get that foam out of here who wants a head on a beer i don't understand that at

all i though i i'm uh not a big beer fan either so i i'm the wrong person to make that pronouncement but mo's sobbing god it's so good the first time I think the first time Azaria could really chew into the role of Mo. It feels like he did it for the first time here, like really getting Mo. But I think that Mike, I want to know what Matt thinks about this too, because I think Mike Reese is right. Like this third act is not great. And it's just like, there's not a lot of humor to be found in like everyone is sad over something. And it's like, it's very sedate. There's no energy to it.

And if anything, it feels like the beginning of a second act. It's just kind of boring. Cutting it up helps start the beginning a little better, but this one it does. And it's also like, I think this episode looks pretty good mostly. I don't know if you guys noticed this, but all the nighttime scenes

aren't redesigned or recolored to be nighttime. They just animated them with the same colors and then tinted it. Oh, yeah. Which I think messes with the energy

of all this happening that like during these supposedly dramatic scenes, Homer and Bart about to be murdered by the entire town. Like, I'm just like, what am I looking at right

now it's like kind of money it looks like like in an old james bond movie when it's shot day for night and you're like this just looks like garbage this looks like nothing in the real world that's a huge part of it i think a smaller part of it is the fact that like so much of this fine of these final scenes are not lip sync correctly it just like using video effects to move mouths around to say things these characters weren't saying originally and just very swimmy not a lot of energy and uh it was a wise decision to just break up that third act because like it's uh i don't even like the resolution both versions of it hence we'll be getting at that soon yeah but the well the act pacing too it should be the the the second act is the mistake i think because you start the episode with a

traditional even at this point act one of the simpsons do a thing and this is the simpsons go to church what is the simpsons going to church like but then the second act of bart hanging out with the bullies moves so slow that the full second act is hanging out with the bullies in the middle of the second act is when he should cut off the head. I agree. And then deal with it. I'm thinking of cuts, and I think the first act could end with him going to the movies. Second act starts with him getting kicked out.

Save a minute. You could save an entire minute of jokes and storytelling. And they mention it on the commentary. In one draft of the script lisa finds out before the rest of the family and she's talking to bart about it and like that would center it more on the guilt like bart barely bart has 90 seconds to deal with guilt yeah this episode like it's yeah the balance is just too short especially like when you take out a minute of the chase and put that at the start of the episode. Then the third act's only briefer in the rage of the town.

Though, I will say, I do love hearing Krusty call for mob-style justice here. Hi, guys. What's up? We were just saying we'd love to meet the guy who cut off the head of that statue. Yeah, we wish you were here right now. Oh, really? Yeah, we'd break every bone in his stupid little body. Yeah, that's right, man. Limb by limb. Yeah, what?

But yesterday, didn't you say it would be cool to cut off the head and really cheese everybody off? Yeah, that was just cloud talk, man. Yeah, I mean, throwing rocks is one thing. But I would never cut the head off of a guy who iced a bear with his bare hands. So what's in the bag, Bart? My head. I said, what's in the bag, Bart? Your head, Bart.

Tell them. It's the head of Jebediah Springfield. I gotta go. I do like the... Sorry, that clip was before the Krusty clip I was going to play. But I like that Bart does learn the important lessons that your school chums have no consistency. And if you say, like, but you said yesterday, that doesn't mean anything. It's an important lesson to learn.

Yeah. People are not consistent. And if they have power over you it doesn't matter if you can catch them up in a lie we don't know that jebediah is a fraud yet though that's true yeah well there's a good joke later that he is modern historians are already judging the lies of his myths i know i caught it before i was like oh like from the very beginning they're like this is all a lie yeah this is all just founded on a lie but uh but that was just cloud talk man that's line of the episode that's

definitely line of the episode all right let's hear the jingle that's the joke good i mean that was just cloud talk man like they they understand the difference between a cloud between cloud conversations and regular normal that was like a like a weed joke like we were just we were just high man the cloud talk i like them sitting around keep off the grass uh sign yeah that's i'm just thinking of how all these things are in barb versus space mutants yeah you're right wow this this is most of the level design of that season or that uh first stage uh also oh yeah when when abe says hell in a handbasket another freakish woman the the the woman in the wheelchair she has a word she's she's earthworm jim she's

earthworm jim she was featured in our uh gallery of hideous characters at the live show uh and yes bart walks away while hearing the voice in his head like you said the voice the telltale head starts here but it's... But he talks very slow, Bart. There's not much comedy with it either. But we do get to see the unlikely pairing of Mr. Burns and Moe Sislak in this shot.

Two of the most hateful characters sharing a scene. I wanted them to like me. The child seems rattled. Can you blame him? No. No, I can't. There, there, Mr. Burns. Closer. Hey, Bart,

where are you going? To my room. Why don't you watch Krusty the Clown? There's someone out there in Krustyland who has committed an atrocity. If you know who cut off Jebediah's head, I don't care if it's your brother, your sister, your daddy, or your mommy.

Turn him in, and Krusty will send you a free slide whistle just like Sideshow Bob. That's a weird Krusty voice, but I kind of like it. Turn him in, Jebediah's head. I think Dan is doing an impression impersonation of a local clown named cookie oh yeah the clown i heard from a commentary because i'm cookie oh yes well uh cookie i i in my area growing up as a kid we got wgn on cable so i watched a lot of chicago bozo and they had a new bozo in my youth but cookie continued from the previous bozo that was dan's youth he was that old and so i knew cookie the clown very well there were no uh local

clowns in fact the woman who uh hosted the cartoon block was just like a regular lady oh like not even like with puppet just like a like a lady in a sweater, like a nice lady. On my Fox network in the 90s, we had, he wasn't a clown. He was a dude in a safari costume named Safari Sam. That was his name. But not a clown. I believe so. If you were in the Ohio area, let me know. It was Channel 43, WUAB, I think, the Cleveland station.

I think her name was Liz, just this lady named Liz. Damn Liz. DuckTales is coming up next. I'm Liz. What's up? That's my dream job. Just get something off the costume rack and just talk about cartoons on TV for five minutes. Just five minutes a day or five minutes an hour.

I'm sure she was like a production assistant on something else or just like an editor somewhere. She's like, hey, Liz, you want to talk about like Go about like uh goof troops coming up right get your behind in front of the camera yeah yeah uh no crusty is very much the regional cartoon host of the boomers and even even more so here dan hadn't fully figured out his voice at all he's pretty much it's very similar to the shorts voice he had done before like i am crusty i just love jimmy die's head so like there's a great there's a great uh story on something i would tell you about aljean going to a local bozo taping and then being sat on accidentally by bozo and crying he's detroit area bozo yeah that's uh yeah i and meanwhile like crusty was for matt inspired by rusty nails, who he grew

up with in the, in the Portland area, a Christian clown named rusty nails, put it together. Uh, Oh yeah. Okay. I get it now. Uh, so, which is why Krusty, Krusty is one of the best characters on Simpsons because so many great people cared about him. Like raining cared in the first part Castellaneta loved doing the voice David Silverman loves drawing him as did Brad

Bird and Silverman and Bird are the two best or most influential artists on Simpsons ever I'd say other than Matt Groening so you have all the top people who like they love crusty and then on top of that he can just be every johnny carson joke they wanted to make too or jerry lewis joke like he's the perfect vehicle for all of that oh god i love and what a humble series beginning for crusty here yeah bart never held this against him just like crusty was trying to leading a mob to murder you and calling for your death on live television. Well, I think Bart knew he had to come in. He did.

Bart knows he's wrong. So I also, it's very like childish the way Lisa says, why don't you watch Krusty? Like it's not with the intelligence Lisa normally says things. And of course we have the first appearance of a very important character here. Sideshow Bob! All right. course we have the first appearance of a very important character here sideshow ball right in fact they had the design they were going to use for crusty gets busted but they couldn't get it fixed in time yeah this is an older drawing an older version of him yeah i i believe it was when they do crusty gets busted brad bird has them redesign the character to be a much better looking

lead villain of their story while meanwhile you have like just the ridiculous like just coconut looking guy they have in this one who but he his his weird just puffy hair god it makes me think of just how great a design sideshow bob as we'll talk about it but uh nina i talked about her earlier she drew bongo comics for a long time and all the characters and because of her i know how many points there are on like bart's head and lisa's head but i was like how many points are there on marge's like how many bumps are there and she explained it to me i want to know if she's ever drawn sideshow bob that seems like a lot of bumps to think about on that palm tree head yeah but but here they introduce sideshow bob as a silent guy who only

speaks with his slide whistle. It's hard to remember a time where you're supposed to be surprised that Frazier's voice comes out of him, but that's why they're doing it. They knew that by the end of the season, I would guess that they had this, this character design and then a matter of weeks later, they redesigned him for the 12th episode. This is six. No, that's 13th. Sorry. So weeks go by. I would think by the time the animation starts coming back for this episode, they knew that

Bob looks different, but this episode has so many retakes in it. I would think there's not money in the budget to redo Sideshow Bob. Yes. Very important. First appearance of Sideshow Bob here in the sixth production episode. So we have Apu. We have Lovejoy. We have Sideshow Bob, Jim Adolph and Kearney, Mr. Dandy, Jebediah Springfield.

It's a whole like a murderer's row of memorable characters. All the most famous characters. And then all the characters we met beforehand are hanging out with each other too. Yes. So Bart is deciding he's going to bury his problems in the backyard, but Jebediah talks him out of it. They even give lip sync to the head talking him out of it. And these moments also just feel very like very special episode to me.

They feel too much like a regular boring 80s cartoon of like the kid learns a lesson yeah i mean i think they would subvert this idea later uh in a lot of great ways but it is very stock like well bart has to learn his lesson bart has to feel bad that he did something bad and then learn something they approach it at least a little bit where bart's like, I know you want me to have courage now, but I'm just too scared. And he just buries him and continues. And Jebediah goes like, well, okay. But if you change your mind, like, but then Bart does change his mind very quickly after.

Also because they are running out of time in this episode. So Bart reveals the truth to his family. Jebediah, Obadiah Zachariah Jedediah Springfield came west in 1838. Along the way, he met a ferocious bear and killed him with his bear hands. That's B-A-R-E, hands.

Although modern historians recently uncovered evidence that the bear in fact probably killed him. Mom, Dad. I knew it all along! Why, Bart? Why? Yeah, why, you little... Because I wanted some really bad kids to like me.

Somehow I got the idea that being popular was the most important thing in the world. Where did you get a ridiculous idea like that? Lay off the boy, Marge. He's a good kid. Quit giving him the third degree. Homer, did you have something to do with this? Well, maybe I am a little responsible.

Little? Come on, son. Let's take the head thing back to the authorities. The show already knows that why you little is Homer's catchphrase. You're right, yeah. I like his, I knew it all that's great it's also so distracting in this this is the third time in this episode if they're watching television and it's interrupted it keeps playing in the background same with the news

reporter kept talking while barge and homer were talking i'm mambo in the morning i guess so what was playing in the background i just wasn't noticing that for that clip. It sounded like more of the documentary. It was just more talking about the documentary. It's just, I could hear dialogue, but I couldn't parse out what it was. I guess at least it's not a loud cowboy show. That's just what's normally happening in the season. But when you're doing sound design, I guess it makes realistic sense you know, realistic sense of if a family member interrupts you with shocking information, you don't turn

off the television. You just start shouting at the person. But in the world of Simpsons, as a presentation of plot points, you just have the TV go silent, even if you're interrupted by something dramatic. So I they they did the better choice for telling a story i think also as long as we're giving notes on like bad animation or mistakes for most of this scene homer is looking like shrek to me because in third in three quarter views his his ear on the opposite side of his head keeps being visible. And I'm just like, what? No, stop that.

Stop. Homer's ear is not supposed to be visible. That's really weird. Yeah. You're totally right about that. He looked like Shrek. To quote We Hate Movies. He looked like Shrek.

That was a We Hate Movies reference there. But it was just very distracting to me how Homer's ear kept floating over. I mean, it was clearly just a mistake on the animation side. They read the instructions wrong on the character guide, but it really takes you out of it. where Homer recognizes his own words that were said before. Like he wouldn't remember them. That's true. Yeah. They, they, I mean,

there's many jokes in future Simpsons where Homer's like, who the hell said that? Like he could not remember what he said a day earlier because as he, as he recalls, he, uh, he likes stories. That's true.

Uh, so then we come back to where the episode started. I love the comedy of catching up to the flashback and the characters are like we heard this part we just have that it's been a while since i've seen this so i was like why are they playing this part again and then like crusty interrupts i'm like oh that's funny that's funny yeah and and they even get to play twice in a row homer saying i pulled a few boners in my day and uh and then we get back to the ending here i like that it's crusty and barney who are shouting to end this flashback too uh but and this is all adr right this is all like redone yeah i mean like

a most any line that is talking about the flashback that's entirely redone adr and and uh rock and roll voices some Some things are original. Like Krusty going, I don't feel like killing anymore. That felt like an ADR line. You know, I think that might be really the real line there. Okay. I think. It's hard to tell sometimes because it's a mess.

Well, in this ending, people have different memories of this ending because there are different versions of it. Oh, man. Yes. We got to get into this because like are different versions of it. Oh, man. Yes. We got to get into this because like 20 million people saw this one at first there. So we should all have memories of what it was. But the first airing is different than the airing that's on the DVDs. But Disney Plus has the first airing that was not available since it aired.

Yeah, it's really crazy. So my memory of this is the original airing ending because we taped it off TV. So if I was ever to watch a season one episode, it would be off of the original broadcast we taped. I think even its second airing, like in regular Fox primetime reruns, they had changed the ending because it's bad it's a bad it's a bad ending it's very distracting looking and it's so funny that that that mistake they made is now available to all on disney plus so yeah for syndication they they it was this uh briefer better ending on the dvd it's i would say the better ending and i think it was on fxx as well are the the simpsons now thing that they were doing pre-disney plus i think it was a dvd version too but somehow it is the original airing version in the hdified widescreened disney plus version which is crazy because like two years ago you sent me the link to this bob just so i would remember it i thought

this would where i'd have to source it was daily simpsons did a post of the original ending saying like yeah this extra 28 seconds here is cut out of dvds and itunes and fxx it's not anywhere so i'm posting the video which was what i thought the situation was so i saved the audio off of that but when i was getting the original audio off of disney plus to play on this thing that's when i was shocked like wait it's the original ending i couldn't believe that yeah it uh well well here why don't we hear the dvd ending first in the the happy ending to the episode you know bart when i was your age i pulled a few boners and i think you'll find that people are pretty decent if you give them half. Look, there it is.

The head. Kill him. We know this part. Oh, yeah, right. Well, that's my story And if you still want to tear apart this young Sunday school student As he stands on the brink of salvation I await your wrath Somehow I don't feel like killing anymore

Neither do I Forgive me, sir. No problem, Mark. Look, it's glorious. It's beautiful, man. I love you, Smithy. This feeling is more than mutual, sir.

Good going, son. But remember, most lynch mobs aren't as nice So that is the fixed ending And I guess what happens is I don't like either ending, but I guess what happens in this one is Bart's like, I made a mistake Now that I've told you the whole story Will you kill me?

And they're like, no, no we won't They just go, aww Now that we've heard the whole story. Will you kill me? And they're like, no, no, we won't. They just go, oh, now that we've heard the whole story, we won't kill you. The audience has the context of hearing the whole story, which is why they forgive Bart. The version we don't see is the script. And I want to know how Bart gets out of it in the script. Because in the script, in the original edit that we've never seen, that's never aired, this third act happens all in one chunk. And the audience is not being told the story so i really wonder like what was in that original script yeah i think maybe there's a little extra bart says but i think what originally turned their

minds was just his moral of the story speech that is is part of the original uh ending which i'll play in a sec but but then again his mouth movements are so off in that too that i don't think it's exactly right either if we get mike reese on the horn again we got to say like what was your script for this like how did bark get out of this because this is not super satisfying you only have the context of the people knowing the story which is why they forgive him, but that was also a fix. We can play the first airing version of this. Here's the original ending. You know this part. Oh, yeah.

Right. Well, that's my story. And if you still want to tear apart this young Sunday school student as he stands on the brink of salvation, I await your wrath. But I'd like to add one thing. It wasn't until I removed the head of Jebediah Springfield that we realized we were taking our heritage for granted.

That was a crime, too. One I think we are all guilty of. The kid's got us there. And I know that I'll always feel an inner shame far greater than any punishment you could dish out. Far, far greater. Far, feel an inner shame far greater than any punishment you could dish out. Far, far greater. Far, far, far, far greater. Somehow I don't feel like killing anymore.

Neither do I. Dad. Forgive me, sir. No problem, Bart. It's glorious. It's beautiful. I love you Smithers. Feeling is more than neutral sir and no line from homer no line from homer yeah like and they have like uh it's a wonderful life bells playing at the end there kind of and also rich more remembers a version of the ending that was

homer saying i can't wait to get home and start punishing you i bet that's what his original lipstick could have been yeah like the i mean what homer says there in the very like it honestly looks like he's green screened in over the ending on the credit they're kind of like floating by like muppets almost but it drove me crazy watching this on dvd the first time it was one of those like am i misremembering things thing because i didn't remember bart's corny ass speech but i did remember far far far far greater yeah me too just because it's just so awkward you know yeah so that really took me out of it i now as as daily simpsons uh said it the reason they had bart say the moral of the story was as he says quote fox requested the episode comply with the fcc's 1989 ruling that every serial animated show transmitted include at least 28 seconds of educational content but i think that's

kind of bullshit because no previous episode had that i think that could be conjecture on their part not to like throw mud or anything they do a great job that account but i'd like to see a source on that because i honestly feel like they realize like oh man bart has to learn something there's no satisfying way out of this again we don't know what the original script had but it's like let's have bart convince the audience by saying you know actually you're guilty too because you didn't care until i hurt the statue so in a way we're both wrong which is not satisfying in any way no it's not set up even slightly like yeah the way the characters just offhandedly go like well he's got us there it's just like it's it's really like pointing out how

stupid that is that they're like oh we all change our minds now we were going to murder a child together but now that you've said this and even that the way it's like but i like to add one thing it's just like here's the edit you know yes that's like uh jeff and i went back to his home planet matt uh which ending do you prefer it's it's very strange oh the more concise shorter one i mean i agree with you that i don't quite like either one that much but uh and yeah that whole like every episode needing that kind of uh educational content i don't think is that that's unfounded i think yeah yeah i mean look did every gi joe or he man or whatever end with one of those things like yeah they did but if this were true then every previous simpsons would have that and only really bartha general does and that was fully a choice by matt graining not forced on

them by fox and it's a it's an unsatisfying moral because it's a boy trying to get out of being murdered so he's just like how do i spin my way out of this that's the joke. Yeah. You know, I think the best version would be the one between the two, because when you take out all that stuff, Bart just says, and if you want to take my life, well, then you can. Aw. Like, that, it's such a hard cut. And also, the soundtrack just hard cuts. Like, Bart, no music's behind him when he says uh this sunday school boy but then music comes in behind them and they go oh like it's it's really distracting when you know that's where the cut is now i think the far far far far greater thing that's at least funny in that he's

saying like you could murder me but i felt a punishment even worse than that already way way worse so you definitely don't need to kill me. Like, that's kind of funny to me, at least. But the ending gag of having Homer walk by and say, Lynch mobs are not normally this understanding. That's funnier than just having everybody look at a statue over the credits. Just a happy moment. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it's a mess either way. I am just now so confused by why Disney Plus has the original version on there now. Yeah, and I also, so I know of another cut they made for later airings, and that's in Marge Gets a Job, where Bart pretends to have Tourette's in the original airing, but later it's edited to say he has rabies as the joke. And the rabies edit is in disney plus so who knows what they were given but they were given this version of this episode and i i'm fully confused by it yeah uh maybe they don't have the like masters of the altered

version and so if they're thinking about what looks better in hd it's the it's the original i don't know but uh oh i did forget to say at the start another weird thing they have the title of the episode on screen like it says the telltale head of the start it's an odd odd choice there the other one would be like episode 25 bark it's hit by a car right yes yeah i mean i guess if you have a christmas special but that actually isn't the title that's on the of the episode is really something rolls out of fire um and yeah we already talked about it but the uh smithers saying the feeling is more than mutual sir first gay joke for the character and sam simon's idea look let's quietly make him gay yeah yeah which uh as a kid did not get that at all i didn't i didn't even know the what the intention of saying the

feeling is mutual i didn't know that as an aphorism i'm sure i didn't either yeah so let alone the idea that one could be gay but uh what a fascinating simpsons mystery there's like three endings two of them aired uh to this episode and it's kind of a huge mess but yeah still brought so much to the simpsons world all these these characters and events. The Springfield history that this brings to the series cannot be overstated like this. There would be Springfield mob episodes multiple times a season after this. And I think it's because it works so well as a story device here and just showing all your wacky characters in one place. Even if this is a total mess of an episode. They continue punishing animators for years to come by making them draw giant moving crowds i'm a man any final thoughts yeah as far as season one goes it's uh i would say slightly

below average episode uh it created you know a big event that uh became a big part of simpsons history and and it can be commended for that. But I think you put a solid B story in with this and it's much better. It's weird that it's just kind of this A story and then a bunch of threads that don't get delivered on. I would just like to see, you know, what's going on with the rest of the family, because I think it's really thin to spread it over a whole episode. But it's it's definitely not the worst in the season it's it's just fine i think they should have shown homer playing with his new bowling ball yeah at least deliver on that or at least reacting in some way or at least dealing with the town in some way or even

you know to give marge anything to do you know it's just art kind of walking around for a whole episode it's true yeah so matt uh please tell us where we can find you online, Twitter and your two Patreons, which do a lot of great podcasts. Yeah, thank you. I'm on Twitter at MrMattJ. I make The Deep End, the show we mentioned earlier, where Steve Yerko and I are going through

every show ever aired on Adult Swim. The episode that we're about to do is Ballmasters, a recent show. We recently also did Joe Pera Talks With You Season 2. We did Neon Genesis Evangelion. We're trying to hit it all, so check that out. That also has a Patreon, patreon.com slash the deep end, where we're going through a Weave-A-Weekly show

where we talk about every episode of the Venture Brothers, our favorite show in the world. And a monthly show is also on that Patreon where we talk about different Adult Swim-ish shows like Archer or Golden Boy or Acceptable TV and TVs. We did Undergrads. We know you guys are big fans of Undergrads. I'm glad you did it so we don't have to now. Yes, never.

Yeah, it's a terrible show. But Friday the Series is also a terrible show that we did. We've done some really good and really bad shows there. And as we also mentioned earlier, I make cartoons one-on-one at patron.com says cartoons one-on-one where I, I've interviewed people who are behind some of your favorite shows like the Simpsons and mission Hill. Okay.

KO Steven universe, Looney tunes, all kinds of stuff there. And I go through their series. Like we mentioned the back sheet series, the Don Bluth series, Satoshi Kon doing the non-Disney Renaissance series right now. So please check that out.

And if you're in Los Angeles, come to Channel 101 at the Downtown Independent. The last Saturday of every month, people submit five-minute pilots and the audience can vote if it'll come back and get another episode. I am currently in the top two shows right now. Oh, cool. Nice. And yeah, it's great.

Everyone, please come to Channel 101. It's the best. Dan Harmon started it in 2003, and it's still going strong. Some of your favorite stuff has come out of that. Like I said, Dan Harmon, Rick and Morty. Lonely Island. Tim and Eric. Lonely Island, yeah.

And they also have a Patreon now that I help them start because I produce the podcast. Yeah. It's a lot of fun. It's really, we're going through every screening ever. So starting in 2003. Wow. Crazy. And Aaron and Adam, the two people that run Channel 101, we're watching everything from the screening, talking about it, talking about where everyone's careers were at the time,

like Jack Black and Dan Harmon and Rob Schropp. And hopefully we'll make it to the current screenings at some point. It's how the underemployed improvisers use their time

prior to podcasts is the main thing they did. Yeah, if you're fed up with the way that TV and film industries work, then come to Channel 101 and make literally whatever you want and put it on a movie screen in front

of hundreds of people. But thank you so much, Matt. It's always great to have you back on the show. Yeah, thank you, Matt. Yeah. Thanks so much. Yeah, it's been too long. Please have me back again soon. I agree. So thanks again to Matthew J. for being on the podcast. Be sure to check out all of his stuff. But if you want to support our stuff and get all kinds

of extra bonuses on top of that and all of our episodes one week ahead of time and ad free please head on over to patreon.com slash talking simpsons and if you sign up at the five dollar level you'll get just that but also access to all so many bonus podcasts everything behind the five dollar paywall including all of our miniseries most recent one was talking futurama season two part one but there will be a new one coming in april of 2020 and another one hitting in the fall so two new miniseries for the talking symptoms network but you have to be a five dollar patron to hear them and the next one is coming very very soon and in fact as of this recording people are still voting for it so who knows what it'll be we don't know yet but you might know by now i thought you the yes you will

know by now yes but uh we'll be surprised but yes henry can you tell everyone what's happening at the ten dollar level extra long podcast every month for our ten dollar patrons about a movie that's correct you get all that five dollar stuff but for ten bucks a month you also get the monthly what a cartoon movie podcast where me and bob talk about an animated feature film at length in the same Talking Simpsons style. But because it's about a movie, it's way longer, sometimes four and a half hours long. We have done so many great films in the past. The one that will be coming this month that you'll be able to hear if you sign up at the $10 level is the SpongeBob SquarePants movie

from 2004, the original planned ending of SpongeBob series. And you'd also get to hear all the backlog, including last month's The Great Mouse Detective and so many other great ones. So please consider going to the premium level, 10 bucks a month at patreon.com slash TalkingSimpsons. So as for me, I have been one of your hosts, Bob Mackie. You can find me on twitter as bob servo

i have another podcast by the way it's called retro knots it's a classic gaming podcast and we have a patreon too if you head on over to patreon.com slash retronauts and sign up there you'll get an extra two episodes every month that aren't available on the free feed wherever you find podcasts so please head on over to patreon.com slash retronauts and check it out if you want to get two extra episodes of that every month and you can follow me henry gilbert on twitter at h-e-n-e-r-e-y-g i'm sure to tweet about whenever new stuff happens in the world of talking simpsons network as well as lots of other thoughts plus if you're following me on twitter at h-e-n-e-r-e-y-g also follow the official twitter account of this podcast at talk simpsons pod It retweets when me and Bob have announcements about the podcast,

and you'll stay in the loop whenever new podcasts of Talking Simpsons or what a cartoon come out. So please, on Twitter, follow at TalkSimpsonsPod. Thanks so much for joining us, folks. We'll see you next week for Life on the Fast Lane, and we will see you then. Homer, you embarrassed us in front of the whole congregation. And today's sermon was one you should have really listened to.

What was it about? Gambling. Oh, he didn't by any chance say that under certain circumstances it was all right, did he? No.