Talking Simpsons - Talking Simpsons - Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo With Maddie Copp

Episode Date: January 8, 2020

Our professional artist friend and hardcore Simpsons fan Maddie Copp has returned from spending much of the year in Japan, making this the perfect time to discuss the season 10 finale! After the Simpsons live a thrifty life, they head to Tokyo for some hijinks that have aged better than others. Learn all about dangerous game shows and wasabi (among other things) in this week's international 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 TalkingSimpsons and you'll get Talking Futurama Season 2 and all of our limited miniseries, including the entirety of Talking Futurama Season 1. That's 13 episodes.

That is patreon.com slash TalkingSimpsons. Now please enjoy the rest of this podcast. I heartily endorse this event or product ahoy hoy everybody and welcome to talking simpsons where the knife goes in and the guts come out i'm your host the pig in a mud beehive, Bob Mackie, and this is our chronological exploration of The Simpsons, who is here with us today. That's right, you fat cats. It's me, Henry Gilbert. And who is our special guest? Product of the American education system, Maddie Kopp.

It's all very sad, but today's episode is 30 Minutes Over Tokyo. Welcome to Japan, folks. The local time is tomorrow. Today's episode aired on May 16th, 1999. And as always, Henry will tell us what happened on this mythical day in real world history. Oh my God! Oh boy, Bobby. The Moby album Play is released

and it'll ultimately sell 12 million copies. The Dreamcast and the PlayStation 2 were the big talk of the Electronic Entertainment Expo and the world is on the edge of its seat waiting for the release in five days of Star Wars Episode I, The Phantom Menace. Wow wow what a time to be alive and i was there baby day one for phantom menace no me too i was there uh well yeah the day after release uh actually it's uh sadly connected to the passing of an uncle of mine he just died suddenly the pod racing was too much for him i'm sorry uh no but

i unfortunately will always associate the premiere of seeing star wars the phantom menace with knowing like well tomorrow we're driving to arkansas to go to be there for a whole week but uh today we're watching the phantom menace was your uncle cremated with blue flame uh no boom i'm sorry i'm sure he was a very nice man he was a fine guy yeah yeah uh but yeah the that moby album every commercial every car commercial for five years was a song from that i'm drawing a blank but i'm sure i'll know it if i hear it it'll probably be under this as we talk yeah yeah it's uh you know he took old like spiritual songs and then put wavy uh mixes over like uh you remember the video with christina uh reachy reachy and it's the yeah i'm sure i've seen it i'm sure yeah but he was busy very busy dating

natalie portman at this time i'm guessing they were besties yeah yes as he tells it he really they were really close those two uh he was he went to the star wars phantom menace premiere with her they were so close i'm sure those photos exist somewhere uh but yes e3 1999 it happened in may back then it was the week before that and yeah the the sega dreamcast system was already out in japan but this was them pumping up the game for its debut in America that coming September. Meanwhile, Sony is killing the Dreamcast just by saying, next year we're going to put out another PlayStation, so don't buy this Dreamcast. With a DVD player.

Yeah, DVD, DVD. Going back to home movies. Speaking of home movies, our special guest today is Maddie Kopp, who was last on the show, I think, for Lost Our Lisa. Yes. So was that the last episode of season 9? Yes, yeah. They were recorded at the start of season 9. So Maddie is now our end of season

guest. Oh, that's true. Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, she was out of town when we did the sequel episode to Lost Our Lisa. Found our gaslighting.isa finally learned her lesson that she's too mean to homer that's uh but but yes welcome back maddie thanks for having me again and of course maddie's an old pal she does some of the work for our patreon and she has her own patreon as well if you want to plug that up front oh sure yeah

my patreon it's um patreon.com slash maddie's art club i you can get stickers and postcards every month and actually simpsons just won this month so i don't know if it'll be in time by the time this actually goes out but you can always order back order stuff so check it out if you guys go to our patreon and see the art for each patron level that's all baddies yeah's work right there. And the Talking Futurama and Talking of the Hill frames for the podcast art. So all very cool stuff. Yeah, and in case folks don't remember your last appearance on the show,

we recorded that one so early because you were about to leave America for Tokyo and not for just 30 minutes either. For seven months. That's so great, yeah. So you were there until like august right yeah yeah so i was there this year from february to august um i was studying japanese at university so it's exciting to come back from japan and get to talk about it all over again yeah now you're living the uh the dream of many a weeb to learn japanese and move there well it wasn't an exchange student thing yeah no it was yeah well i guess yeah i guess exchange

kind of you tend to think like someone else goes there but like it's through the university so yeah it's exchange okay that's cool man and yeah so you're you must know a lot of japanese by this point then i know a decent amount it's definitely one of those languages that takes a long time for it to really sink in. But I'm like intermediate. That's what I tend to brand myself as. And yeah, so this was a great fit for you to come back on the show to talk about this episode covering The Simpsons going to Tokyo too. So I have two things up front. So number one, most exciting thing.

I like to announce how long my Google Doc word count is for the season. Oh, at the end of every season. So yeah, I do a different Google Word doc for every season. This is my season 10 doc. 24,877 words in my doc just for season 10. That's a couple books. It really is is like just publish my notes all of my work in the bob mackie library but the so nina matsumoto friend of the show was

a potential guest for the show so she did a little bit of work for season 10 so previously when she was on she talked about uh she translated some of the japanese simpsons titles so she did that all for season 10 and i have them right here if you want to hear them. Yeah. Let's say, yeah, since this is the season 10 finale, this is a perfect time to hear them. Yeah. So thanks again to Nina for translating all of these. So I will read them.

And this is in the order of the season. So you can probably guess which ones they are if they're not obvious. So episode one, the precocious transfer students lard dance. And OK, so number two, the invention is an introspective dad. Whoa. That is Homer. What's the Edison episode called again? Oh, yeah.

Miracle on Evergreen Terrace. That's right. Oh, no, that's not it. No, no. The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace. There you go. There you go. Bart's baby diary.

Okay. Wait, that's for when he kills the bird that's the okay is that it i think that's it yeah oh yeah i don't really understand that one um uh so uh halloween special nine door to the future okay i forget what the uh what were the segments in that one we just did it like three months ago so in the japanese one do they just give like a whole title for the entire treehouse it's not just like treehouse of horror it's treehouse of horror blah blah blah there's a subtitle yeah interesting yeah i don't know why so the next one is uh candid camera the secret lives of stars which is uh when you dish upon a star okay and

apparently um nina has a note that it's a parody of an old show where they'd prank celebrities mostly by waking them up when they're sleeping so probably similar to our candid camera oh that's fun yeah I've seen pro wrestlers be on that where they wake them up in the middle of the night the uh and that door to the future doesn't make sense because it's the one where the hair controls Homer the Jerry Springer one and them going into the itchy and scratchy cartoon that has nothing to do with the future maybe nina can follow this up with the comments but i'm not sure what that means either so uh we also have homer in it's tough being a hippie so that's like an old like mickey mouse

cartoon or something apparently uh it's a parody of the uh it's tough being a man film series there are 48 films in all i think nina brought this. There's like another title that's a parody of that film series as well. Okay. So going on, we have Honor Student Lisa's New Experience. That's Lisa gets an A. That's right. Quotation marks. This one is definitely a Dragon Ball title.

Kidney Explosion, A Narrow Escape. That's extra funny because that one is homer simpson in kidney trouble so that actually is like that the bart one from a couple ago we also have uh bodyguard wars oh i like that's because it's a star wars yeah it's like a parody that's pretty that's pretty funny what's the what's the actual mayor to the mom to the mom. That's right. So we also have Flanders 60th birthday debut. Wow. I like that one. I'm forgetting all of season 10.

They all sound so much more exciting. That's Viva Ned Flanders. Yeah. We then have Our Secret War. Oh, that's Wild Barts Can't Be Broken. So I guess it's the hour is the kids a secret war i guess so yeah that feels like it's a reference to but uh yeah the next one is mania the super crazy tour of dreams whoa that that's that's the super bowl episode that's sunday sunday yeah tour of dreams

i can't even like yeah you should make a quiz show of this of just listing off the japanese titles and people have to figure it out there some of them are obvious some of them are not yeah the next one is uh detective homer i'm an oaf that's uh that's homer to the max with the police cops yeah detective homer like this one is this one is very obvious a poo's grand lovey-dovey scheme that's a good i like that one wow that's fun i mean uh i guess that episode it keeps more in uh like they know valentine they have a valentine's day there right oh yeah they have valentine well they have valentine's day and white day like it's

even more than ours when the girls get it back right or wait no it's it's girls for girls give to boys on valentine's and then boys give to girls on Wednesday. That's right. Traditionally. I got another obvious one. We have Marge, the reckless driving housewife. Goes forth. Screaming Yellow Hawkers is a much crazier title than that one. We also have The Bumbling Dad's Tale of Parental Love.

Wow. They even take the title. That's Make Room for Lisa. They even take the title away from her be a man and drive homer oh hey that's a good maximum homer drive that's good one cinematic sorry charismatic homers artsy days what okay this has to be mom and pop art right okay then it's going out of order because that's not simpsons bible stories should be next but that's definitely mom and pop that's that's not on Simpsons Bible stories should be next, but that's definitely mom and pop art.

That's not on here. So maybe that one wasn't localized. Oh, interesting. Bible stuff is just like not that relevant to them. It could be. I mean, this one wasn't localized because of the emperor stuff. I'm pretty sure. I don't think they were kidding about that on the commentary.

So there's a few more. We also have save them, the seniors in the sea. Oh, that's good. Save them. Save them. The old man in the Sea. Oh, that's good. Save Them. Save Them. The Old Man and the Sea. It's on me to save them. We also have Mr. Burns in Please Give Me Love.

And apparently Please Give Me Love was a popular 2000 J-drama series. Oh, that's clever. I like that. And I love this title. A Dream Like Utopia for mean people? Does it have like an actual question mark? It's an intro bang. So it's a question mark and an exclamation point.

So yeah, there you have it. Those mean people did get their dream like utopia. No substance Bible stories and no 30 minutes over Tokyo because it's deeply insulting to the Japanese people. Also named after a movie about a bombing of Japanapan oh that's yeah 30 seconds over tokyo was a 1944 movie about uh the do little raids yeah so a pre-nuclear bombing of japan they they said they were on a different commentary they say they originally considered calling this one fat man and little boy which i'm really glad they didn't call it that.

I think they called a future episode that, but it wasn't about Japan. I mean, the pun is right there, but just don't do it. Well, and it's like, too, I mean, they didn't really, you didn't know the episode titles before, right? Like before the DVDs or anything. I think by this time they were. Actually, they were the episode guys.

People knew them from then, yeah. And we're just two years away from the first DVD now in this episode air, which is crazy to think we're almost entering the DVD era of The Simpsons. Man, that was great. Thank you, Nina, very much. Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, that was hilarious. Oh, God.

I'm sure she also gave us a couple more insights later in this episode. There'll be more coming up. So thanks to Nina for doing the legwork of knowing all this stuff already. Man, so when I saw this episode there'll be more coming up so thanks to nina for doing the legwork of knowing all this stuff already man so when i saw this episode as a kid i never i dreamed of the magical world of japan where everything was perfect and just like all the animes i watched and that's this uh i love this episode just for the dream of going to tokyo that i had then and uh now we've all lived the dream in this room yeah i i wouldn't i wouldn't fulfill that dream for 12 years it'd be 2011 when i'd get to visit tokyo for the first time and this episode really shows what the american perception of japan was where uh 10 years earlier it was uh terrified and uh you know skeptical and uh 10 years later after that in

1999 it's like oh these are very cool people like in a slightly patronizing way like cool and wacky innovative super high tech like this definitely shows where we were thinking about japan in this time period it's very like crystallized in time oh and i was wondering too when the when was the king of the hill japan episode that was 2002 i think when was the King of the Hill Japan episode? Oh, that was 2002. I think it was the season six finale. Okay, so still kind of in the same era. Yeah, yeah. They have like a similar vibe, I think.

Yeah, I think the King of the Hill one is a little more well observed as to what happens in Japan. Because we talked to Dan Graney, the great Dan Graney, by the way, who co-wrote this episode. He said up front when we asked him, he's like, we didn't go to japan to write this we flipped through like a catalog of japanese things yeah it wasn't until he had since gone to japan uh but he hadn't at the time uh yeah folks should listen to our dan grainy interview for a few little things in here uh i mean he also talked about how like you know the simpsons he didn't think it was that well known of a thing in japan anyway i mean i think japan knows the simpsons but yeah even i mean when i was there there was like a one of the kind of more popular department stores had like a simpsons thing going on where they're selling

like a bunch of simpsons merch so it's i i mean i don't know how recognizable it is but it's definitely people generally i think know what it is yeah that's what i think grainy thought it was less famous in japan than i think it is i mean at the very least they know them as the pitch people of cc lemon the delicious uh lemony drink in japan i like cow piss yeah this is just kind of a short side story but i went to a um fan convention and it was actually it was actually one that um ian jq was at as well because it was for japanese well they're like different parts of it but part of it was for japanese fans of western animation so obviously like he went there because they were like fans of ok ko there was one simpsons booth and they

were selling like all stuff with like carl and lenny together and like they just had like key chains and like everything and that was like their whole booth and i was like that's fantastic that's amazing i love it man i really love all those geez but i think this episode um it is really just like what most you know pop culture aware americans knew about japan in 1999 like of course like square and watermelons paper doors sumo wrestling seizure cartoons you know everything just the very like checklist at a certain point yeah yeah i think we had a little more informed view of japan in 99 compared to say 89 or if you you know you chart just the history of american perception of japan through simpsons

in 1991 they have an episode that's just like sushi what yeah so that's the name of the japanese title uh but but so this one is an improved it improves upon that but yeah re-watching this now i'm both impressed with the work they put in that other shows wouldn't have bothered with in 99 about going to japan but also i'm still disappointed by some of the broader stereotypes that that do still appear in it yeah we talked a little bit about that king of the hill episode up front uh i think it's called returning japanese uh part one and two it's like basically a mini movie and what i like about that one was it plays into the characters uh ideas of what japan should be and they're often wrong like one of my favorite jokes is the reveal that they never actually entered their hotel room they were like staying in the characters uh ideas of what japan should be and they're often wrong like one of my favorite jokes

is the reveal that they never actually entered their hotel room they were like staying in the foyer or something just thinking like well of course this is japan everything is so small and cramped but they actually had a luxurious room waiting for them behind one of the sliding doors yeah i love that i was thinking of that joke when there were sliding door jokes in this episode i was just remembering like man that great joke when they they slide the door and see this spoiled uh fruit basket it's so painful though because it's just like you thinking about their their emotions in that state and you're just like oh yeah well that fits more with the that definitely feels like the King of the Hill version of a trip to Japan too, because it's, King of the Hill is so much about, oh, your preconceived notions are wrong. Or sometimes they are right, but in a weird way.

And like, more so in this one, it's like, this is about how the Simpsons, it's the Simpsons wacky view on wacky Japan. But also the jokes are, Homer is the most boorish american in the world too and he fucks up a country by being there that's true oh uh but i mean i also impressed that they like they got at least you know people of japanese ethnicity to play i think brace i think every japanese voice in it is an actor uh not one of the actors on the show doing an asian voice yeah outside of george takei there are four other japanese character actors doing just random voices sometimes it's like oh she's the stewardess or whatever but i think you could tell like they made a choice like do we want tress mcneil to do this or do we want a japanese person to do this

and i'm glad in 99 they were savvy you have to be like let's not do an apoo thing for this uh this entire country yes yeah yeah i mean bra so maddie did you see this one when it uh it first aired or i actually don't really have a memory of seeing this one when i was a kid um again i was you know i was eight when this came out so my my memory of simpsons when i was a kid is kind of splotchy. Um, so yeah, unfortunately this one I know through like my various rewatches over, over the years, but yeah, I,

I don't, I don't have a memory of this one from a kid being a kid as a, well, I guess as like a young adult growing up and getting into Japanese stuff to this, did it, you know, spur you on to be more interested in Japanese stuff or did it make you go

like, Oh, they didn't, they get Japan wrong here? Yeah, probably the latter. I mean, I think I was a weeb from early on. I was into Sailor Moon by like 95, 96, and then into Dragon Ball. So I think at this point, it was just kind of like, oh, these are kind of easy jokes. Seizure joke.

And yeah, I think know the time i actually saw this i was like oh this is kind of cheap shots but what do you expect yeah yeah i uh well in this episode directed by jim reardon it's his only director credit this season i think he was he's full series director uh at this point so he only has time for one episode a season i think i wonder if he picked this one because you know uh the season two seasons before his only episode was homer versus uh new york city so maybe they're like oh you did such a good job with that travel episode and getting everything correct like they put him on the the big job of the next simpsons go someplace episode yeah it made me

think that when they when the simpsons travel to different locations they can just pull characters from you know past scenes to put them in the backgrounds and i was thinking while watching this they probably had to create like 50 new japanese uh extras yeah to put in the background like 50 new designs at least yeah well i think some of them are kind of weird looking too like that you can tell there wasn't like there's not the same amount of effort put into like usual background characters because a lot of them are really like funky looking especially in the sumo uh scene if you look in the background they're almost like season one extras yes yeah yeah yeah and also in the commentary it's fun because they have on reared in calling in from oakland california because he's working

on wally at the time of the recording mack reigning said oh wally gator he's about due for a comeback little did he know jim reardon would win a goddamn oscar for that and then now he's the you know he's the big man to those guys and we also uh we always talk about how uh the writers are very up front about at the end of the season we're just so worn down we don't think the shows are as good and in this episode there's definitely evidence of that where the chalkboard gag is just bart writing i am so very tired it's like a cry for help from the writers like this is the last episode we just want to take a break now uh the commentary too they say like uh you know donna and donna carrie and dan grady were not writing partners normally but uh donna carrie

dan grady's not on the commentary carrie is and donna carrie is like uh yeah it was late in the season and we were given like uh three days to just jam it out and get a script ready and then uh scully says uh sarcastically that doesn't sound like us no like i love it i mean compared to the other short order episodes i think this has more effort in it than um they saved lisa's brain i think this is a better episode than that yeah me too yeah uh though they also say this was like heavily rewritten to this episode like so uh maybe they were i don't think they have like full-on senioritis like they maybe had in a couple of the other late season ones behind the laughter old man and the sea student that is a little bit yeah

the sentence will be right back Welcome to the break Whether you're listening to this in Tokyo or America town we thank you so much For listening and a big thank you to our Guest Maddie Kopp we really appreciate All of her knowledge about her Recent stay in Tokyo and her Translation skills all of that knowledge about her recent stay in Tokyo and her translation skills.

All of that. And we love her art, too. You should definitely check her out on Twitter as OhThat'sRaspberry. Just the letter O. That's Raspberry. And her Patreon, Maddie's Art Club. Please check those out, especially if you love cool Simpsons art. As for this podcast, it's supported by listeners like you who subscribe at patreon.com

slash talking simpsons this is me and bob's full-time job as 2020 begins and we're only able to do this thanks to the five dollar and up support of people like you that five dollars a month gets you access to every episode of talking simpsons one week ahead of time and ad free the same goes for our sister podcast, What a Cartoon, where we talk about a different animated series once a week. And you also get tons of exclusive podcasts that are only for Patreon supporters, like the recently finished Talking Futurama miniseries, where we went through the first 10 episodes of season two of Futurama, and you could hear the entire back catalog of those. That's only for patrons. That's every episode of the first season of Talking Futur that's every episode of the first season of talking futurama every episode of the first season of talking of the hill and us

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kiki's delivery service a goofy movie akofy Movie, Akira, Toy Story, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Aladdin, Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse, and more. Please check that out at patreon.com slash TalkingSimpsons. Oh, yeah, so we come to our first clip of the episode, which is Homer reflecting on his favorite magazine. Hey, why didn't you tell me the new issue of Weird was here? I love their hilarious send-ups of hit movies. Dad, it's not... Gigabytes! They've done it again.

Gigabytes. Wait, this isn't Weird. Why, there's no magazine called Weird, is there? This is Wired. It's about computers and technology. Hey, look! There's a cyber cafe opening right here in Springfield. Will you take me, Dad, please?

I'll show you how to order pizza over the internet. The internet? Is that thing still around? I know a website that shows monkeys doing it. Bart, the internet is more than a global pornography network. It's a... Come on, Lisa! Monkeys! This was long before the pizza tracker which was that revealed

to be a fraud i i still want to believe in the pizza tracker i've well look the i don't know about the domino's pizza tracker uh i've used the papa john's one before after they fired that guy still bad pizza though he's it to order 40 pizzas. I've had 40 pizzas in the past 30 days. The day of reckoning shall come. At the time of this recording, the day of reckoning isn't here yet. He has not gone on his spree yet. But in that, when it says, like, oh, yeah, your pizza's ready, it is ready. I at least trust their technology on the pizza tracker.

Every Domino's hires an IT guy to run the pizza tracker. Well, I mean, what, like five years after this, or a few years after this, it was what, EverQuest? You could order pizza within EverQuest? Yeah, slash pizza. I mean, I'm sure you would have to then be sent to a web page where you put in your address and everything. I don't think it just sent you a pizza.

Yeah, and now you can just say, Alexa, order pizza. Oh, God hope you're not playing this uh oh i guess if you are playing live alexa order 50 pizzas there amazon echo wait don't you're activating breadsticks don't say that these wired references uh in 1999 i you know i thought wired was a very hip magazine i i also was like it says 350 on the cover. I double checked this. 1999 prices of Wired was like a $5 magazine. It was a prestige magazine. And it's still going, that Wired.

The only reason I read Wired was when me and Bob's mutual friend did their game section there. Chris Kohler. And after he left, they're dead to me yep oh yeah the way they let him go fuck them i i'd rather read weird and that's not even a real magazine it's no uh crazy i like that homer just makes up the magazine weird yeah like apparently he's been reading it like multiple times because he knows like the sections they have uh that it's it's just a copy of mad or cracked and that it's always existed. You know what the actual cover for the May 1999 Wired was?

Oh, God, no. It's related to a thing I talked about in the news. Moby. No, it's the Phantom Menace. The cover is simply a photograph of George Lucas lucas and it says believe the hype oh i think i remember that if she was cover yeah it's uh and we all did believe well we did believe the hype because they told us to i mean when i saw this is going backwards to star wars talk but when i saw it the first time i thought this is my this is the greatest movie i love this movie that's

lightsaber fight was so cool there are no flaws in this movie and within two weeks i saw it a second time and that was when i was like i'm very bored waiting for anything to happen in this movie until the lightsaber fight i had the exact same experience where i saw it the first time and i thought i liked it i'm like yes they made a star wars for my generation now this is so great and then i saw it again the next day with a friend i was like I don't know what's happening and I'm bored and the pod race is coming up and I can watch that and that'll be fun yeah I think it also was hurt by like Matrix was way cooler than it and it came out like two months three months earlier we have to grill Maddie because Maddie is a true millennial and they're rewriting history currently

by saying you know the prequels are actually good what is your stance i have no opinion yes i um i think i've seen all the star wars once phantom menace only really sticks out because my sister's name is annika and so she's like oh she like bought like anakin stuff that's fun and uh that's about it that's that's my star wars opinion that was a test if you said episode two is actually the best one you would have been out of here well when we were on the internet as teens or late teens uh the commandment was you had to have a star wars opinion then like that was the that was the commandment of the internet uh which i like that homer thinks the internet was ever going to go away he's like that's thing still around speaking of wired covers by february of 2000 matt graining would have a wired cover of his own uh for it was a futurama i was gonna say yeah

fry and bender with a matt graining head in a jar though it doesn't look like how the the matt graining head it doesn't look like the normal matt graining drawing it's uh his beard is like thinner i don't know it uh usually the way they draw matt graining is very specific that it felt but it looked like it was drawn by the normal like a professional futurama artist like not draw by by Bill Morrison for free. I mean maybe. Maybe they just hadn't quite figured out the style like 100% for like guest celebrity kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. Or if they maybe they're like oh we draw Matt

differently in Futurama than we draw him in Simpsons. Right. Well there's a slight different style so. Yeah. Yeah. Do you have it in front of you here Bob? Yeah. Is this the one you're talking about or is there another one? Yeah, well, that is how he looked in the other cover I saw. That doesn't look like Matt Groening at all.

It looks like a weird homeless man. He looks like, I guess he was 20 years younger, but he looks a little too young in that. Yeah, but I'm used to his goatee. Yeah, he looks like a weird teenager. Yeah, no, the beard is super weird because it's like the mustache and like the beard part are drawn like stubble. So we just. And that's another one, too. This is not helpful for our listeners.

Oh, that's the one I was thinking. Yes. Yeah. That is the February 2000 cover. Yeah, but no, definitely it does not look like like if I saw that, I wouldn't think it was Matt Groening. Yeah, but it says Matt Groening in the like Matt Groening's new show or whatever. So, I mean. Ooh, what AOL got for 4.2 billion.

I'm going gonna read this now and the other wired thought i have is that the front cover i can't tell if it's supposed to be a pale a general pale nerd or if it's supposed to be bill gates because it doesn't look like the bill gates they had in the show before though yeah but i guess i guess when i saw it i thought it was bill gates like that was my immediate it could have been like whoever designed that prop not checking the model sheet for their bill gates yeah you know it's a little too i mean he's got the bad haircut the the look i think it's bill gates well it's also like an angle it's supposed to be an angled photograph so you're not seeing him from the normal simpsons angle either cyber shorts feels like an end of season

joke wedgie proof cyber shorts for nerds yeah well and also like the coloring on him too is more caucasian than yellow i'd say which also i i wondered if that was just like a miscoloring or that they're like no he's a pale nerd so he's very pale yellow like i i can't tell i this again puts it in a very 99 thing of, like, going to a cyber cafe to experience the internet. On your iMac. Yeah, all those iMacs. I mean. Candy colored.

Like, the internet was mentioned on the show in previous eras. Like, the earliest internet reference on Simpsons I can think of is in season six with, well, I guess really it was air seven but the radioactive man episode i'm thinking of uh season five homer goes to college oh yeah that's right that's the first they're arguing about uh shatner shatner and picard yeah yeah yeah but despite all those previous internet references i definitely think of the scully era was when they're like this internet is now known well enough that the simpsons will go online not just the biggest nerds they know going online these aren't jokes about news groups like those last two jokes these are jokes about the actual internet everyone used yeah yeah yeah though i think they're still i think they had them go to a cyber cafe as well

because i know for the longest time they're like the simpsons don't have a laptop they shouldn't have a computer they they were still struggling against like this is a boomer generation family uh distilled in the 90s so they didn't want them to have all that tech which yeah now today there's many stories where episodes are like the kids pull out their smartphone phone and do a joke well the space coy said, you don't even have a computer. I mean, did you guys ever go to a cyber cafe? It's it seems like such a it's like a piece of technology or like experience that I've like never had. Oh, I've been to a couple Internet cafes.

Yeah, the closest I would be one of these would be like in college, like almost 20 years ago now when I went. There were computer labs where it's like now I feel like everyone just has ago now when I went, there were computer labs where it's like now I feel like everyone just has a computer or the functionality of a computer in their pocket. So I'm sure there are still computer labs, but when I was in college, they were much more popular

because you would need to check your email there and write papers there and stuff like that. Yeah, no, a lot of it is, I think at least like my recent experiences in college is you go to the computer lab to print stuff. That's basically it, yeah. I just went to an internet cafe to print something uh last week yeah but it's like i always had a home computer so and then like computers at school so i just never had like i i don't know i just could never understand exactly what a internet cafe was for

the only time i used an internet cafe was out of necessity when i first moved to berkeley in 2006 i didn't yet have my own computer here like i'd always use my parents computer at home i didn't own my own computer and i didn't buy one when i first moved here but i obviously desperately needed the internet uh both both for entertainment and for uh uh for work purposes so when i uh there was an internet cafe like two blocks from my apartment that i would go to to check email apply to jobs and also to watch the new season of venture brothers that was premiering on adult swim.com back in oh yeah yeah it was finally season two it arrived but uh so and then also funnily enough when i did get my first computer living here in 2006 i was buying somebody's 2003

imac just to have and it was the monitor imac like it was the old school version well i'm thinking like what did you do in a computer lab you would go and sit down and then go to all your favorite websites nobody goes to websites anymore all the functionality that you need is via apps like twitter and facebook and reddit that's all like delivered to you via an app on your phone so there's really not a huge reason to go out and do this anymore but yeah i think i mean if you can't afford a computer or you need to appear for another reason i just don't see uh too many computer labs around here anymore. Not labs, but cafes. Well, it's like libraries have free computers as well.

So it's like if you need a computer with internet, go to the library. Yeah, if you're in that kind of financial situation, then just go. Why even spend the $4 to have a coffee or whatever at that place? Just go to your local library, unless you don't have a library. But yeah, I mean, the only reason I paid the extra to use the internet cafe instead of the

library was just for the immediate use of it and to be able to print stuff. I had waited in that library line a couple of times. I was like, I can, I can afford the better than this. And this is going on a bit longer, but back then there weren't like Chromebooks or eBooks where just like just like okay here's a very cheap computer that just does the internet and that's it there's mail there's word processor and internet that's all you need and it's like 200

dollars so that was not happening in 1999 no no uh i also it's tough line for them to straddle with these jokes with the joke here of they want to do a joke where lisa insists the internet isn't just for porn but bart can't just suggest like a porn website that would be wrong so he just has to pull in the silly idea of watching monkeys have sex uh which you know homer of course he learned about sex from watching monkeys the zookeeper i'm sure they would have referenced the monkey drinking its own pee video that was going around at this time oh yeah yeah uh i wonder if they'd heard about it then i i would think that you're watching in a in a in a late 90s writer's room they're watching all the videos of monkeys with uh with defecation insects there's gonna be a fox sitcom about that monkey sorry maddie i was

just trying to think of like what were the big internet things in 99 i feel like i was probably on i think neopets was around so i was probably on neopets hamster dance uh oh definitely hamster dance i mean uh ally mcfeel baby yeah dancing baby so it's like the really early internet memes yeah there were just like so so many web pages too yeah i don't think you're the man now dog was there yet. I don't think not yet. I feel like a lot of those things, I don't know, like Something Awful and stuff like that.

I feel like that's like maybe 2001 and onward. Something Awful, I guess technically is 99, but not until the early aughts did it really take off. Right. Not until I started writing for them. I think I read Penny Arcade then too. I think probably in 99. Yeah.

That was 98. Okay. Yeah. And it's still very funny today and everyone still loves it uh so before i play the next clip i did want to like upskirt websites that's uh i i guess those are probably still around but i'm glad they're not like mainstream anymore those are crimes like it's to like to photograph somebody's upskirt like that is a sexual offense to do that now well we we

learned a long time ago that scottish people love filming strangers oh that's true yeah every scottish person does it so okay uh i also like the double entendre of that's willie yeah oh you know what just got that yeah yeah that it's it's upkilt.com buddies so he could either be saying i recognize my own genitals here or i thought this was a woman but that's a willie under that's kilt okay that's uh so hey it's a smarter dick joke than you than you first think this is the only kind i appreciate i was wondering why i was referring to himself in the third person like that. So it could be either, I think. But yes, let's hear all the jokes about the internet that 1999 had to provide. This loss needs a bit of groundskeeping.

Ah, that's Willie! My name is Mary. I'm 45, heavy, and willing to settle for less. Wow, this Mary's got the whole package. Wow, Dad, you're surfing like a pro. Oh, yeah. I'm betting on Hi-Li in the Cayman Islands. I invested in something called News Corp. Dad, that's Fox!

Undo! Undo! Dad, do we have any money left? Well, let's check the old bank account. See? Even after all my cyber squandering, we've still got $1200. All right, dorks. This is a holdup. Oh, yes. Download to papa. Yoink.audios. Backslash losers Oh We were robbed?

You seem to know an awful lot about this For an innocent person So we just did like a talky Futurama with a catfishing story in it Oh yes, yeah So that idea was immediate in the late 90s, early 2000s I'm thinking the writers on these shows Got catfished i think

that's what's that no they didn't have the term for it back then but uh yeah of course bart's first thing is to catfish somebody that's uh that's the kind of prank he'd be drawn to instantly yeah news corp stock fluctuates a lot these days yeah i i think homer would have been right to invest in it in 99 because it would take off like with the bush administration right oh yeah yeah with uh with the fox news really taking off in 2001 the last five years have been kind of all over the place for news corp stock it's uh currently at the time of this recording it's 13.84 a share which is slightly below the average of the last five years so uh you know i i wonder would disney today let them make a joke about disney stock and homer not wanting to own

disney stock i wonder that joke is retained after the credits where it shows the 20th century fox logo which is still in the disney plus version and homer says no undo undo at the end of the episode so maybe they're speaking to the quality of their work or just the quality of the Fox Network. Yeah. And I'll be sad if, you know, on some Disney things I've watched on Disney Plus, like Lion King, for instance, I think it is. Definitely it was in Toy Story. They changed out the old blue Disney logo from when it first came out in theaters for the crazy overdone one they have now yeah and so i fear like there could come a day they just put the the simpsons logo at the end or the disney logo at

the end of the simpsons yeah i guess technically it's always 20 cents it'll still be 20th tv producing the show uh for the next couple seasons but yeah the actually friend of the show jason sheridan i heard him on a podcast talking about how he's like disney is getting choosy where they're like what movies will we pretend we would have made and they put their they put their stamp on the end of it uh i'm impressed the simpsons even saved up twelve hundred dollars, that's an incredible amount of savings for this family. But in 1999, could a family of five really do much with just $1,200? I would doubt a vacation. That's not even enough for plane tickets. Yeah.

One person couldn't get a plane ticket to Japan with $1,200. Yeah. It's also funny to me in this episode, they have two yoink jokes. Like, they have two jokes about the word yoink. The first one here is a snake doing it. Like a cyber yoink. Yeah. Even he mentions backslash, not forward slash there.

A lot of real, like, clunky backslash dot com jokes in this opening. Like, the Java server is an okay joke. Yeah, it's okay. But then it's like, well, dot com jokes in this opening like the java server it's an okay joke but then it's like well.com yeah just the the idea of something having a dot com at the end is funny isn't it it's like a dennis leary routine oh yeah uh give me cigarettes dot biz huh that was terrible i'm sorry it's better than what his was uh and then homer again real jerk ass homer in this episode or mean homer let's get rid of you have to retire jerk ass it's a not nice homer in this one not nice homer uh that he instantly is accusing marge of helping rob him even though he just told her the story and uh and marge i bet she's wishing she'd kept

that big jar in her hair instead of letting Homer put money in the bank. I was thinking of the hair jar after our episode a few weeks ago. So it's like, where's the hair jar? That's maybe after Homer finally caught it one day and he realized where that jar was. But yeah, Homer then says he's going to get a second job to earn back that money and i like that bit because it feels like a brief moment where they're like oh this is gonna be a homer gets a job episode right he's getting a second job but of course because this is a dark time for homer he's his second job is robbing ned flanders well. Well, again. Again, yes. Which he apparently does quite often.

Evening, neighbor. Low on funds again? Yes, sir. Now, Homer, we can't have you burglarizing us every time you got a bill to pay. I know, sir. I'm sorry, sir. It's just that you and Maude live like royalty

in your fancy castle, while I got Marge trapped over there like a pig in a mud beehive. Oh, we're not as well off as you think. We'd give to eight different churches just to hedge our bets. And the leftorium's business has gone way downhill since Leftopolis moved in next door.

Well, if you're not rich, then how come you have a new refrigerator, an electric can opener, a milkshake machine? Oh, we picked those up cheap. They were evidence in a murder trial. Sweet. We got that tip at the Chuck Garabedian

mega savings seminar. Go on. He taught us how to live a Burt Reynolds lifestyle on a Mac Davis income. We've already got tickets for his next seminar. I think you'll find

living thrifty a lot more satisfying than stealing. Maybe you're right, Ned. Maybe you're right. And then he steals the tickets and there's no yoink they were under yeah could have had a dual yoink on that had a third yoink in this episode there's a weird like bible quote in the background of ned's uh kitchen yeah just the verse yeah one corinthians six nine

i i only saw it because like i was 69. I think that was existing in a previous episode somewhere. Did we ever read that quote? Because I have it. Yes. I think we did read it before. I forget when, but let's hear it again. I'm always waiting for more Bible study. Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers homer should learn that right there he was being very immoral in this sequence but he wasn't going after mod that's true he only has so much time uh i mean when you talk about how punchy the writers are getting they are definitely having a lot of fun of like homer is stealing every other line to ned he's not just listening

they're like well homer doesn't need to just listen to ned he should be stealing silverware or eating his food or stealing one more thing when he leaves like this is really selling out homer's character for sure oh and also talking about how uh this calls back to old podcasts we did interview wise when we talked to mike scully the first time he talked about how his view on homer and ned's relationship was like one of envy like homer is angry at ned because he's the type of man homer could never be and he knows that like this speech here of homer's like envy of ned i think sums up that viewpoint that scully has calling marge a pig in a mud beehive what a weird uh metaphor yeah homer like he he referred to her as the pig is in the poke as well

like he which is weird because like homer is the pig she's oh hey maybe it's a term of endearment homer loves pork products so much that there's those pig cufflinks too from the wedding oh yeah his beloved pig cufflinks so this don garabedian is that his name uh chuck garabedian yes i'm pretty sure he is based on don lapree who had a very famous infomercial in the early 90s like if you look at this guy's face and head and hair in the simpsons it looks like him. I don't know why he's wearing a tuxedo. In his infomercials, he'd always be wearing like a polo shirt and shorts. They'd always be like on a beach. And I think they referenced these in Bart's Inner Child, the Brad Goodman, the Brad Goodman

infomercial. It's in the same sort of setting as the Don LaPree infomercials, like in front of a beach. So let's play a little bit of Don lapree and his money making schemes the second way to make money that i stumbled onto was placing tiny classified ads in the newspaper if you create and test one tiny classified ad in the newspaper that makes just 30 to 40 profit in a, it could make you a fortune because the secret is learning how to take that one tiny classified ad that just made $30 to $40 profit in a week and to realize that you could now take that same exact ad and place it in up to 3,000 other newspapers around the country.

That's what I did. I found tiny classified ads that made $30 to $40 profit in a week, and I placed those ads in around 1,000 other newspapers around the country. That's how I generated over $50,000 a week out of my one-bedroom apartment. Okay, he goes on a long time. That's so painful he's just saying the same thing over and over again but you could tell like uh hank azaria is kind of doing that guy's voice and like there are snl parodies of this with david spade playing that character or that guy remember that real life guy and um you don't want to read about how he took his own

life it's uh very very sad uh not not a good end for him. Obviously, you know, wanted for massive amounts of fraud. But this guy is such a success. It all sounds above board. It's just 3,000 classified ads. I mean, like, I would watch these as a kid, and it would either be, like, buying 1-800 numbers or classified ads, but they would never tell you, like, what the ads were for, what the numbers were for, like, what you'd be doing with them.

Yeah, I don't understand what he is, trying to explain at all yeah like am i selling something why am i getting 30 for this classified ad yeah how can this ad get you 40 profit a week by well what are people paying you for like it's it's it's not that it's a classified ad that it's must sell something or do something i don't know if it's like a pyramid scheme where you're buying ads from people above you who are buying ads people above them who are buying them from don lapree i would definitely assume it's a uh a sale like that yeah i would think it's a giant scam multi-level marketing uh and i mean he's making 50 000 i mean that's well that's also why like Chuck Garabedian is that same type

of guy. The money he makes is from getting people to go to his seminar and pay him money. It's not that he knows how to make money secretly and he's going to share the secrets with you. It's that he knows how to trick people into paying him for secrets about money. I'm sure this guy did seminars too, but I mean, it's weird to see a parody of him in 1999 because the time to make a parody of him was 1993 when Bart's Inner Child aired and when SNL was doing them. So it's weird that they would pull back to the early 90s for this infomercial Huckster parody. I do remember seeing this guy. I think I remember seeing him. He's like, he is on the beach, but he has like on a yellow windbreaker. Like it's like it's a windbreaker was his outfit in that one. Yeah, there was a windbreaker involved. Yeah, don't record commercials on the beach.

The audio is terrible. He's got to show off all the luxury he afforded. I have access to a beach and all I had to do was, yeah. Which is like, it means you like live in Florida, like big deal. I would assume he lived in Florida because that's a lot of like tax scams can happen there too. I mean, to many people, beach adjacency is equal to like power and wealth. Now it's the people who like do a selfie walkthrough of a McMansion that they live in. No, I was just going to say, I was thinking like, what a more modern reference.

I feel like the guy with like the question mark suit was like the current like crazy money making scheme guy of this era. Matthew Lesko. And I feel like if they were going to parody him, it would have been like way over the top and more obvious. Like I get a little bit of that from this guy, but they would have put him in like a crazy suit yeah so it's just like it's like weird that they chose like such an older reference yeah no i totally agree with you let's go was the way to go but seeing that one of don lapree like his the hair is garabedian's hair like it's very

directly that reference and just like this this sleazy like crinkly smile like lionel hutz has yeah i mean i do think the energy of him is very uh is more matthew lesko is a little matthew lesko too just like and these washington fat cats won't like that does feel yeah a little matthew lesko but he's got the same like kind of coke energy as don lapree he's going through your garbage you know you mentioned hutz this also feels like a character that hartman would have played but you're right he's still with us or it just would have been troy mcclure's money seminar and he would just give this kind of speech they'd they just hand it to him but uh season 10 is their search for the next troy mcclure which they they never really find when i return chuck arabian is canceled for his transphobic comments.

Yeah, I mean, I guess. Oh, there was one more thing about the Ned scene I did want to mention first, though, that I love. One, I want to see an episode about his battle with Leftopolis. Like the new. Why didn't season 11 have that episode? But secondly, I never caught this joke before, but the fridge, milkshake machine and can opener all being part of a murder trial.

You imagine that those, I think it's the joke you're supposed to put together is the first two things were used to kill him and the person was stored in the fridge. Oh, I think you're right. They have to be connected in some way. That's like, there's no, there's got to be more of a joke there, right? Yeah. They have to be connected in some way that's like, there's no, there's got to be more of a joke there, right? Yeah, I think the man was murdered. Someone was murdered with a can opener and a milkshake machine, and then he was stuffed in a fridge. I like it. Maybe it's a Jeffrey Dahmer joke.

If it's a list of three items, I think it is a joke. It's not just a random assortment of items. It's funny they say that Mac Davis is their poor reference when it's like, Brad Reynolds is going through a lot of money troubles in the 90s like he almost fought mark summers on the set of the tonight show oh yeah oh he's so mad in that video but anyway yes it's the mega savings seminar and there's a bad joke in this but we gotta hear the whole thing yeah yeah are you tired of missing out on the good things in life? Family vacations, jet packs, solid gold dancers?

There's only three left in the world. Well, stick around, because I'm going to tell you the 12 saving secrets Wall Street won't tell you. Then I'll show you the three ways to get back to the highway, including one shortcut those Wall Street fat cats don't want you to know. Here we go with the fat cat bashing. Well, what do you expect? These yokels are pure Baltic Avenue.

Uh-oh, I'm late for the short line railroad. Let's start with mega secret number one. You gotta squeeze every penny. You see this tux? I got it cheap because Roy Cohn died in it. That fancy yacht? A bargain because it smells like cat pee. And those beautiful women?

They used to be men. The point is, you gotta squeeze every penny. Then Homer squeezes a penny into his skin. That's a good gross joke as it goes up his arm. And Mark's like, oh, Homer, not again. I think he'll die when that hits his heart. Like, he's dead. I guess Homer

got resuscitated after the in-between scenes here. Maybe it's just like not in an artery. Maybe it's just in the flesh. Embedded in the flesh. It travels up his bloodstream. That's truestream it's bizarre uh but yeah so that was a bad transphobic joke yeah i remember that joke but i totally forgot about the audience just like almost vomiting and disgust it makes it even uglier yeah like i mean they all used to be men like that's that's very much in the it's a she's a man baby yeah austin power's bad joke but like

it could have at least gone to a less negative place if the audience reaction been like oh smart or whatever a funnier but still don't do it joke would be applause after that or something like that like it's a very accepting crowd or something but instead they're all disgusted like they all are grossed out by it and i mean also the i also like the valuation of like a transgender woman is obviously worth less than a real woman a real woman like that it's all it's ugly we've talked about it before there was the quote she mails joke on yeah like two episodes we're getting into that era of humor it's not just the simpsons i mean this is like okay we can't really make fun of gay people anymore it's not subversive now we have to accept them who are the new targets and

it's usually trans people in this era of comedy mainstream comedy yeah yeah it sucks but uh well then the roy cone joke i i is the joke that nobody would want it because he was such a horrible person or because it's an aids joke oh boy yikes uh i thought i was i was thinking maybe it's like well you don't want you normally would not want clothed clothing somebody died in but also especially if it was roy cone the one of the most hated men in like american history so yeah i want to take it as that and not just as a joke about aids yeah i didn't even think of that wow man sorry i'm taking these all to darker chuck garabedian uh is on probation i mean he's a bad man also like he's uh uh he died of red

tide poisoning i only knew what solid gold dancers were because they're in scrooge like it's the solid gold dancers who are the dancers in the movie scrooged a real holiday favorite that's right yeah i love that movie when homer says there's not there's only three left in the world many solid gold dancers are still alive they they haven't died only only one had died in 1996 actually very very sad homer sources are wrong i mean i guess what he's really saying is there's only three left because it's a very dated reference solid gold dancers i like the solid gold tv show had not been on in about 11 years at the time this joke i figured it was the late 80s and that monopoly guy joke that's just a lot of obvious you said everything people know from monopoly

but them being mad about fat cat bashing that just is the mike bloomberg campaign yes isn't it just as racist as discriminating against billionaires i think it's a different kind of racism and in fact like they paid more taxes than anybody so society couldn't exist without them they're true they're pretty great those washington fat cats as soon as we get one billionaire patron we have to change change our tune. Yeah, yeah. Hey, I'll do it. If you give us $10,000, $20,000 a month. Yeah. If you were like a mega rich weirdo like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, wouldn't you just choose one Patreon and give a million dollars as like a publicity stunt or something like that? Oh, man, so much.

That kind of thinking is why we're not billionaires. I also do like that it's a bring your own chair oh yeah station too that's how they save money they're not renting expensive chairs uh so they are now learning the mega savers way and that takes them to not the 99 cent store not the 66 cent store but the 33 cent store store. Look, Mom, they have your dress. Oh, 33 cents? I paid almost double that. Whoa. Wow, this plankton's only 33 cents.

Um, according to the Mexican Council of Food, this expired two years ago. Sure, by their standards. But we live in America. Oh. this expired two years ago. Sure, by their standards. But we live in America. This also says it can cause red tide poisoning. But it's so cheap. A few years ago,

I bought food at a 99 cent store and I lived to regret it. What was it? Can you tell the story? Just tell the first part of the story. It was like an apple pie, like little slices of apple pie. I was like, oh, this seems nice. And yeah, I had some tummy troubles after that.

I think you might be okay if it's like canned food because it's like so processed. But any like produce and anything like that. Ooh, they're making sushi today. I wouldn't buy it. Just shopping in the freezer section in general seems like a mistake in a 99 cent store. Yeah, which I think though, they're making a joke about it here, but in reality, it's a sad thing that like people have to,

who buy cheaper food because they can't afford it, that often will lead to a health issue that will cost them a lot more in the future. Homer goes through that in a very fast way of getting red tide poisoning instantly. Eating a can of plankton, which is really bizarre. I think one of my favorite things that they pass by in the background is there's cans of Cool Ranch soda. Ooh, that's a good one.

I do like that. Or onions. in the background is there's cans of cool ranch soda oh that's a good i do like that or uh onions and that they're all just dumped into the roof of just like in there the nice touch was the that 70s show mugs which oh yeah they might have assumed like by this point oh that weird tacky show is not gonna work and they just made a joke about presumably it being canceled but it's a mega hit now on fox yeah 99 when did it start it started just the previous like that season like so it started in the summer well it aired on the same night as lard of the dance right yes it did yeah yeah it uh or lisa's

new friend and the dance of lard the lard emerges the lard lisa's new predicament uh yeah they i would have predicted 70 show was going to be a giant flop like uh they yeah they tell the story about uh scully going to some fox function and he said that 70 show co-star was there and he was like oh funny joke about us in that 99 cent store famous cool guy chris masterson a danny masterson i didn't want to name him he's uh chris has no crimes to his name as far as i know okay yes yeah both scientologists though uh yeah yep yep uh so they shop at the 99 cent store they uh then count their their pennies saved in the piggy bank i love the design on the piggy bank the the monocle wearing pig. The top hat monocle

pig. More fat cat bashing. Fat pig bashing. Literal bashing. Yeah, they do indeed bash it in this next scene. Well, let's see what's in the old vacation fund. Homer, you could have just unscrewed the bottom.

A little late for could-haves, Marge. I don't think there's enough here for a vacation. There is for a mega savings vacation. Chuck Garabedian says you can fly mega cheap if you don't care where you go. That's right. Just go to the airport and wait for some no-shows. Then you can buy their seats for a fraction of the price. Are you going through our garbage? That's right. You fat cats didn't finish your plankton. Now it's mine. That's close to my line of the episode.

I just love how- That's right. That's right. That's the energy that feels like Matthew Lesko. Yeah, that's true. And also just how he pops into frame like, that's right. And warning him like that you fat cats didn't eat your plankton but eating that garbage probably killed him i'm guessing i have to

assume that's why he never returned yeah he got i mean he definitely has red tide poisoning from eating garbage plankton out of a out of an opened can uh it's great animation on the smashing of it too and uh homer again just so crappy to mar. And just like a little late for could-haves. From my research on this in a post 9-11 world, it's kind of iffy. You can get late flights for cheap, but you can't just wait at the airport to find out. Yeah, I was going to mention this is a very pre-9-11 joke. Because we're not in the era of, you know, you used to be able to just like wait and see people come off the plane and just be that close. And now it's like, gotta get there three hours early so you can get through security.

You could run onto the plane for fun if you weren't a passenger. Jump onto the seats. This is like a little, we're not quite in Japan yet, but I did fly locally in Japan, which is one of the weirdest experiences I had. They don't check anything. One time, they didn't even check my ticket. I walked through. And you leave on all your clothes, all your shoes. You can bring in full bottles of anything.

And it's like living 20 years in the past or something. It was a very bizarre experience. That is insane to me. Yeah. I mean, they are so lucky. And shockingly, there hasn't been any terrorist attacks there. So it would seem that it doesn't matter. Though I guess there are stricter gun control laws there than in the United States.

So maybe they can trust the weapons won't be around them so much. But man, yeah, I've only gone through, you know, international customs in Japan. But even then it's like, the first time I was there, I took off my shoes and then I noticed no one else

was taking off shoes. Though now when I fly with Bob, I get a taste of the pre-check privilege. It's good, folks. It's worth it. Still, according to websites I checked you if you want to risk it and get a day of flight somewhere you if you're not if you don't care where you're going you might be able to find super cheap tickets but it's a real gamble well but i mean and one of the issues with flights nowadays is they oversell so it's like they sell more

tickets than they have seats so you're more likely to not have a seat on a plane than you are to find an empty one I guess that's true actually what happened to me I worked out in my favor was I was leaving a place a few years ago I forget what it was but a pretty early flight so I got to the airport early and they're like oh this flight has been oversold if anyone wants to give up their tickets we've got a $500 gift certificate to Amazon i was like the first one at the desk i'm like gimme i only had to wait like three hours oh that's not bad and then it just showed up in the mail like the next week i'm like i have 500 because i waited three hours it's the most money i ever made for doing nothing that's see that there's there's your money making scheme yeah just get

all your flights overbooked uh yeah the well we had like we also had an opposite version of this where when we flew down to los angeles for the table read boom mentioned the table read on the episode again can't pass one without it but when we flew down uh i booked our tickets in the morning of i got a terrifying email that was like your flight has been canceled like better book new tickets. I was like, what? And it turned out that it was just that flight had so many open seats. They just canceled that flight and put us on the next Burbank flight.

But like, they just deleted our seats out of nowhere like that. Yeah, I just hate the announcement because it's on every flight. I've taken over 30 flights this year because I've been traveling a lot. So all of my jokes are going to be about planes from now on, by the way. I'm turning into a bad stand-up comic. But I just hate the announcement. This is a full flight today, so there's not going to be any room anywhere. It's like, it's always a full flight.

It's never not a full flight. We had a lot of grumpy people on our last full flight, let me tell you. Well, that Southwest open seating kind of uh puts everybody riled up but unfortunately it's the only direct flights we got out of and they save a good like 20 a flight by having to their guests duke it out for the aisle seats but this episode's in the glorious pre-911 days where they can literally just wait at the terminal and hear where there's open seats and so while they're waiting at the airport they find where they're going flight 605 to tokyo is ready for departure and has four available

mega saver seats yeah come on homer japan no no japan jamaica i want to pass the duchi on the left hand side never mind looks like theers are going to get those seats anyway. Oh, so Flanders thinks he can steal our vacation, huh? Come on! There, there, suckers! Yay! The Simpsons are going to Japan! Hey, watch the gong jerk It's a good joke Yeah I'm glad they made a joke about how hacky it would be

Just to hear the Simpsons going to Japan Yeah and I'm sure they must have used that In the promo for the episode Oh yeah I think they did I mean Lisa says that line So it can be used in commercials Yeah exactly I wonder Lisa At first was hoping they were going to go to France I mean, Lisa says that line so it can be used in commercials. Yeah, exactly.

I wonder, Lisa at first was hoping they were going to go to France. I wonder if she's jealous that Bart got to go to Paris and learn French. That's no fair. Bart is fluent in French, by the way. Always remember that. He forgot it all after one of Gene's scratchy cartoon. But the Flanders are real weebs. They were wearing all matching kimonos or yucatas whatever you call them yeah they're going to sit in an airline seat for like 17 hours in full

yucata like yeah it's uh but apparently the rules are you have to dress where for where you want to go if you're a mega safe that was pre-911 rules airplanes. You had to dress like the area you were flying to. I like to. I didn't catch it until this viewing that the cities they all do a joke about, that is listed on there. They have Hawaii, Paris, Transylvania, Jamaica, and Tokyo in a row written. So that's why they think they're going there. Oh, I was going to say, Homer got used out of his hat again, his Raffaello hat. Oh, that's why they think they're going there oh it's gonna say um homer homer got used out of his uh hat again his his oh that's right yeah he didn't have the too cool for this planet

button anymore though no that's true but he's yeah you're right he's been safarian again he's he traded that in for the one love pendant the too cool for this planet button they say on the commentary they really liked rasta Homer in The Office. I mean, I think it's funny that Homer finally becomes the Rasta redesign. He's been on many a bootleg merchandise. Though, I mean, I'm not so into Homer doing Jamaican accents. Jamaican. Like, it takes me, it reminds me too much of Adrian Brody's wonderful Rasta man character from Saturday Night Live.

He's not going back there anytime soon. His wonderful Rasta man character. His surprise sketch. He surprised them with... Some things are fun when they're spontaneous on Saturday Night Live, but not if you decide to be a Rasta man. Who did he introduce as a Rasta man? Oh, that's right. He was like, oh, he'll appreciate my Rasta man character if anyone will.

Very respectful to Sean John. I also like the Dracula posing on Bart when he like hisses at them. But Homer should have gone to jail earlier in this episode from just driving through the gates with a stolen truck. He would have been tased by like atsa agents even pre-9-11 yeah to jail for that but uh instead they get to go on their air japan flight which that reminds me of my beloved jail flights japan airlines i that's my preferred airline i've taken for for flights to tokyo they they their economy class, or like their lowest seat is close to first class Delta that I've experienced. Like, it's so, so nice.

You get like two freaking meals and a warm hand towel. There's a warm handshake. Welcome to our flight, sir. And also like all the movies that you'd pay $10 for, like, they're just all free on there, too. It's really good. And Japan Airlines, because they partially sponsored the film Porco Rosso, they always have Porco Rosso on every flight. The movie Full Plane Crashes. Nah, there's not one plane crash in it that was there.

Okay. You got me. But, yes, the characters. The characters. Okay, you got me. But yes, the characters, the characters, the family is on their long flight to Japan and we get a lot of flying to Japan jokes. Come on, Homer, Japan will be fun. You like Russia, Mom?

That's not how I remember it. Besides, if we want to see Japanese people, we could have gone to the zoo. Homer! What? The guy who watches the elephants is Japanese. His name is Takashi. He's in my book club.

Look, Mom, the safety instructions are written in haiku. Fasten seat belts tight. Your seat cushions float gently. Headsets, $5. Sir, it is not safe to use electronic devices yet. You're the waitress. Turn it back on! Turn it back on! Oh, I never knew Jim Belushi made so many movies.

Yeah, isn't it amazing? They're filming one right now in the bathroom. It's going to be on towards the end of the flight. Toga! Toga! Toga! 2000! March! They stole my idea! Animal House 2000 taking place on a plane. I guess Blues Brothers 2000 was in 98, right? Yes, yeah.

Though I have misstated all this time that Jim Belushi's in that film. He is not. He was filming a television show at the same time so they couldn't get him it was dan akroyd and john goodman yes and baby blues yes yeah they whatever his name was but uh so i guess the joke here is that he finally got to do his 2000 sequel uh of recreating his brother's scenes and something i i tweeted about this the other day but did you see what bart's game boy looked like up close it's like a big shutdown button the one button on the face of the game boy is like shut down and giant text above the button so

i don't know what game he's playing that's not what your game boy looked like yeah i that it's a weird bootleg i guess but i guess it guess it was not as effective visually to show him shutting off the top of a Game Boy Switch. Yeah. Yeah. I could see in animatic there's just an accurate Game Boy switching off drawn in, and they're like, that doesn't play well enough. We need a shutdown button. Yeah. Well, there's like a weird subtle joke where he calls the flight attendant a waitress.

Waitress, yeah. Yeah, which is like, I don't know he calls the flight attendant a waitress. Yeah. Which is like, I don't know. That's part of being very condescending. I mean, I think the joke comes from the place of writers who take flights a lot who are mad that they're told they have to turn off their laptop. I think that's where it comes from. Nowadays, like you don't have to turn off anything. Right.

We finally won that battle. I got so much more reading done when i couldn't play with a switch or a game boy for 20 minutes i got like at least like 50 pages of reading done per flight yeah now i think what happened was that enough people had electronic devices on planes basically everyone that they couldn't enforce it anymore that they're like they couldn't tell people you can't turn on your cell phone they eventually in america just let it go like fine just have your cell phone yeah just put it in airplane yeah it's still like the radio transmission stuff you can't do i don't know if this is true i heard that it was never like an issue with like electronics it was an issue with distractions that they didn't want you to be distracted and they wanted you to like pay attention to the flight attendants when they're doing their whole spiel but i don't i don't know

if that's like true or not but i always heard that makes more sense yeah it does make more sense it's probably a mix of both yeah well and i think they did a myth busters on whether cell phones would like affect yeah that was an early myth buzzers i remember i don't know what the outcome was but i think that myth was busted yeah but i like this joke in the show saying, like, if you were to turn it off, it shuts down the plane and it will crash. I mean, also on the detestable show Newsroom, there was a whole bit of this of just one of the newsroom men yelling at a flight attendant, telling him to turn off his phone. And he's just like, actually, you can't keep your phone on. And it's fine. She's like, please, sir, turn it off.

He's like, no, actually. And he just gives a long, sorkiny speech about how he should be allowed to have his phone on the whole time. That sounds absolutely miserable. I mean, and it's just all because Aaron Sorkin was told on a plane by some woman that he had to turn off his phone. Who never wrote for television and uh well i think actually he's he's had real airline problems like i believe sorkin got arrested for like drug possession on an airplane i do believe that happened but uh anyway that clip there at the very start is my line of the episode actually which. Which one? The Rashomon joke.

Oh, yeah, very clever. That's the most clever joke. So I'm going to play the line of the episode jingle if that's cool with you guys. Go for it. That's the joke. We were talking about King of the Hill earlier in this episode.

That had a very funny Rashomon episode about when they were volunteer firemen. So it was part Three three stooges parody part rashomon parody which is so good the joke to overly explain it is that rashomon the classic japanese film collectible monsters that you fight it's about four different people telling a story that they all remember differently and so of course homer, that's not how I remember it. Like, that's just so clever. I love that. Meanwhile, they had a real have your cake and eat it too kind of joke with Homer's, like, see Japanese people at the zoo.

Where it's like, they tease that Homer is, like, racist. And then he's like, no, my best friend in my book club. But it is weird that Takashi, his job is just to wash the elephants that's true he's got to do more than that maybe that's all homer sees of his job and that's that's all he knows i mean he could be like you know a zoologist i would assume the guy that's washing the elephant is like a zookeeper but yeah also though you know we make fun of jim belushi in his uh many bad films like canine cop or whatever oh the canine trilogy yeah yes but uh you know this year he was just in or last year season three of twin peaks like he's as as james belushi he was credited uh like andrew

dice clay in a star wars born yeah oh andrew dice claims in a woody allen movie which we'll talk about him later uh oh right but it's funny that uh they're saying he's in kangaroo mates like that's pretty mean but you know what else he was appearing in in 1999 oh uh well there was a canine sequel in this year yes he was in a direct video canine sequel but also he was in a direct-to-video canine sequel. But also, he was a recurring character in Hey Arnold. He was the gym teacher in Hey Arnold. Oh, yeah. He's great as that character. Yeah, he's just this sad man who's just like, please, Arnold, help me.

I don't know. My son's bad at this. Like a product of toxic masculinity. Which Jim Belushi, that's Zia Cash. He's great at toxic masculinity the belush speaking of uh rastaman he's a he's a blues man oh yes yeah he built many houses of blues he's the cousin of the rastaman with his blues man character also like right before this episode aired he was uh doing a voice in the blues brothers animated series as well no kid cares about that which film roman worked on too like it was uh it was tied in those awful like platformer games

uh i bet you he did i mean you can't keep the baloosh away from the blues man then the simpsons land in japan and uh that's uh the time zone joke is pretty accurate. It's usually tomorrow by American time in Japan. Yeah, I mean, from the West Coast, it's usually 17 hours ahead. It's one of those things that's really awful because they don't have daylight savings time there. So it's like it changes how many hours ahead it is depending on what time of year it is. That's right. It's either 16 or 17. Yeah, something like that.

From California. But yeah, you usually are there tomorrow so it's it's a good joke i'm used to the um yeah i'm used to 16 hours because i always say like it's when i'm trying to do math on tokyo time to california time i'm like add eight hours but it's tomorrow so it's eight hours from now tomorrow like i remember doing work from tokyo time and it was one of the most confusing things because this was for an international website with a california office and a england office oh so weird things the time stamp to greenwich meantime oh well i mean england is the worst because england has daylight savings time but it's like three weeks off of ours so it's like yeah the hours are like completely different like

for three weeks of the year and you're just like oh it's awful when we had on our irish friend super eyepatch wolf we got him only six hours behind ireland because it was our, his daylight savings times, but not ours yet. It was also weird to like be in Tokyo and get the end of the British people's day and the start of the American day. Like it was, it was like to be up at 1am and to talk to people who were like starting work or ending work. That was always fun. i would just sleep through their work day when i was in tokyo and then your work day sorry henry uh what else the simpsons don't suffer any jet lag in this episode either no and where's their luggage yeah well homer throws it through the door oh you're right i just never saw them with it at the airport manny what was

a jet lag like after like seven? I've had real troubles correcting to jet lag from like a three-week trip to Japan. So seven months. Yeah. Well, the interesting thing, jet lag, I always am fine going places. But returning is when it hits me. And especially like if you go somewhere and it's like the trick is always just stay up and go to bed when you're supposed to go to bed but yeah returning i would i mean i was messed up for probably close to a month wow where and it's like i tried like i got home and i went to bed at night but then i

would just like sleep through the whole day and i'd be up in the middle of the night and i was yeah it was it was a lot of adjusting it took a long time i only went there once and it was only for like eight days, but I did not suffer jet lag at all when I got there. It's probably just like that was short enough. Yeah, I think so. I'm not sure how much of it is psychological, but I do get jet lag when I go to the East Coast

and that's only like three hours behind. But I think if the time difference is so drastic that I can't immediately do the math in my head and tell myself, well, it's actually nine. Well, it's actually 10. Well, it's actually midnight. I won't think about that and be fixated on that and put myself in that state. So I think that was part of what helped me in Japan where the math was not like

as immediate or easy to do to like get me back to what time it is in Pacific time. The worst return to America from Japan jet lag experience I had was from like two trips ago when I was working an office job. So I stayed up all night or I like woke up at like three in the morning, two in the morning, couldn't go back to sleep. Then I worked a full day of work and I'm like, I'm definitely going to be so tired. I will fall right asleep. I couldn't sleep all night. And so then I went to work the next morning and my brain was just fried. Like I hadn't slept for like 36 hours and it was still uh i think i was not normal again for another week like yeah it uh it can be tough that coming back uh time yeah but but you're all back to normal now you know i as an artist i tend to stay up until seven in the morning sometimes working on stuff.

I don't really know what normal is at this point. My podcasting brain shuts down at around 6 p.m., 7 p.m. So the Simpsons go to the Royal Tokyo Hotel, which does remind me of the many hotels with like Prince in the name of it that I've seen in Tokyo. Like the Sheridan Prince, the Grandidan prince the grand prince the sun prince like yeah i i normally stay in cheaper hotels than the ones with prints yeah see it's like i was i mean i lived with a host family while i was there and then when i travel i stay in really cheap like hostels so i don't really know that much about the hotels i did uh well i got to stay in a nicer hotel when it was the game website paying for it twice

but other times i either stayed in like cheaper places on hotels.com or one time i did a hostel but i was like 33 then and i was like i am too old for this shit i felt at it quick quick side story i stayed in one of the nicest hostels, though. Really? Like, it was, like, private rooms. Like, you had, like, your own little room with a bed and a TV. Wow. Wow. And then they had, like, these really amazing baths. Like, they had a big bathroom where they had, like, four different types of baths.

There was, like, the green tea bath. And there was, like, the blah, blah, blah bath. And, like, you could go and try all the different baths. And there was, like, a sauna and stuff. And I was like, wow, what is this place wow that's i mean look the the hostel i stayed at in osaka was really good by like compared to hostel stories i've heard from friends who went to ones in like europe or south america but uh it still was like i shared a room with like three strangers i had to like walk by men and women in their underwear in the shower to take my shower like it how cheap was this

it was like uh 40 bucks a night wow it's pretty yeah well i mean the bath thing is different in japan because public baths are you know a thing there but um. And I stayed in awful hostels there too, though. The worst, I was near Mount Fuji, and I stayed in the worst. I don't even want to think about it. I stayed with a friend of Retronauts for free. Oh, lucky. And that was a good house guest. He told me so.

Well, did your fancy friend have a fancy Japanese toilet that talked to you? Oh, wow. And a Japanese washer slash dryer, which is the same machine. Whoa. Which is nuts. I think, you know, yeah, I think England has a lot of those too. Yeah, like the safe space. But they don't dry very well.

No, they don't. And he was like, let me show you how to use that. I'm like, I know how to use a washer. He's like, no, you don't know how to use a Japanese washer. I'll show you how to use it. And I didn't. He how to use a washer. He's like, no, you don't know how to use a Japanese washer. I'll show you how to use it. And I didn't. He was right. Japanese people don't use dryers very much.

They tend to hang dry all their clothing. And they really only use dryers if the weather is bad. Okay, yeah. I mean, they don't know the joy of pulling a bunch of hot laundry out of the dryer, though. It's like you're being hugged by your laundry. Yeah, and generally, their dryers, they just don't work that that well so you tend to take your clothes out while it's still kind of damp and then like hang it like in your house yeah environmentally it's probably for the best to not have everyone having a dryer in their uh in their house or apartment but it's so humid there

how does anything dry the humidity yeah exactly that's why everyone has like very loose-fitting clothes they're just like drying their clothes as they walk. As a sweaty American, my number one tip to folks visiting Tokyo is to pack your own deodorant because Japanese deodorant is not strong enough for my sweat. And also just don't go to Japan in the summer. Yeah, I try to never do that, ever. Oh, the poor people who are going to be going to those Olympics next year. Oh, my God. I am in fear and panic.

Because when you think of the trains in Tokyo that are already packed to death. And then you think of all the people that are going to be there for the Olympics and all the foreigners. And it's just like I am like scared for people's lives. Yeah, I'm wondering about all the death by heat exhaustion and things like that. Yeah, well, and you should like Japanese people are so adept to the heat and you'll see them and they'll walk around and they have like their sun parasols and then they have their little like electric fans and they have like their little neck wraps like they're like so prepared and they know how to deal with the heat and but if any foreigners you know you go there and you're just like it's too hot how am i supposed to survive i could i couldn't stand it in like

early september i was like oh yeah well the summer the thing with the summer is that it lasts a really long time it goes through september and even into october yeah i guess you were there for most of the summer then yeah i mean i left at the end of august i left like right in the middle of the summer so it's it's some of the worst hot like the humidity there is just unimaginable it'll be like 88 degrees and it'll feel like 112 it's it's rough but uh toilet time yeah this uh this fancy toilet uh there's a fancy toilet store in san francisco so i've used a similar fancy toilet to this one i mean we made so many jokes about bidets in the 90s and 80s but it's really the way to go i mean i don't do tmi here but it's really it's not even the way of the future it's the way of the present and past we should all not be doing the paper thing let's

move on i know but americans are growing even though it's the cleaner thing to do like just the idea of a thing will touch your b-hole uh i think for a lot of americans that's too much for them nothing is going in the b-hole it's water and air it's a sensation that scares some people they make some question their uh sexual preferences it's definitely that was one of the hardest things coming back from Japan is like not having fancy toilets. Because they really are. It's like a whole other experience. And two, it's the bidets.

There's sound effects if you need your privacy. There's also the winter. They have the heated seats. They really are the wave of the future and one thing that's really cool about the toilets too is a lot of them the water that fills the toilet toilet bowl comes out of a faucet on top so they use you can wash your hands with that water so they save water that way and they're just like and they're also like everywhere like you go to the train stations or airports or any public area and they generally have fancy toilets it's

only like if you're out in the countryside where you're seeing like a standard toilet like the squat toilet yeah did you see any of the squat toilets there yeah you see a lot of places um especially older buildings tend to have in each bathroom they'll have one squat toilet like when i was there 10 years ago it was even more um uncommon or the first time i went to japan that was like i got to the airport and the entire bathroom the first one was all squat toilets and i was like oh boy here i'm in japan now um but like they keep getting less and less common but yeah like again like my my school the university i was at it was you'd have you know like four toilets and then a squat toilet and that's that's

i feel like pretty standard now i i don't like public restrooms in general i try to avoid them as much as i can uh but i never i fortunately never experienced the squat toilet in my trips to tokyo like i've i every time i go to a public restroom there, I'm like, am I going to get the squat toilet? Oh, no. But fortunately, that has not happened yet. I forgot this is a joke about the kids accidentally watching Homer use the bathroom into a camera. But yes, let's hear our next clip. Look, there's the Imperial Gardens. The Meiji Shrine.

The Hello Kitty Factory. Who's up for some exploring? I'm still checking out Japanese TV. Isn't this that cartoon that causes seizures? Bart, what are you doing? Hey, what are you doing? Hey, what the... All right. We'll be right back.

Woo! All that teasing made me hungry. Me too. Let's go to an authentic Japanese noodle house. The toilet recommended a place called America Town. Dad, we didn't come halfway around the world to eat at America Town. Then a very topical reference to Pokemon Shock Syndrome, which we talked about go back to our what a cartoon from november of 2019 right yeah yeah it was just a month ago we we talk all the history about pokemon but the the short version was in late 1997 the pokemon anime series did an episode where flashing red and blue lights uh which the anime has a ton of flashing

lights in it or did back then that these flashing red and blue lights caused hundreds of seizures across japan when it aired on television they only aired the episode once and they took pokemon off the air for four months and way before americans heard about pokemon they heard about the cartoon that gave children seizures and so that's the reference here but in the reality is japan never aired that episode again they're all anime got like darkened and there was a big broadcasting laws changed for pokemon shock syndrome they certainly would not have a cartoon that advertises itself as the seizure robot show no no and for about like i'd say at least 15 years after that happened there would be disclaimers

before every anime saying you know uh sit far away from your screen and turn the lights on yeah basically just so that would never happen again as As far as I know, it really didn't, at least to non-people with epilepsy and things like that. Yeah, I have a lot of notes for this section. There's a lot of signs we passed by. I was going to mention real quick. So in Japan, they don't tend to say Hello Kitty. They say Kitty-chan.

Oh, okay. So that's just a small note there. So the show is like it shows the Japanese title of the battling seizure robots and it it pretty much says what it says it says sento roboto shija which that's not how they would say see like seizure in japanese so it's like katakana for yeah but it's but like sento is battle. So it's, it's basically the same thing. A lot of the signs they pass are, they just have like kaiju names on them. Like there was Mothra. There was, what is his name? Oh, Anguirus.

Anguirus, Ebida. So that's a large percentage of the signs in the background are just like, they just say like kaiju names on them. That's weird. I didn't know that is it like i i don't understand why other than just to like make you go oh that's crazy kaiju name yeah i don't know i guess they just needed something to put on signs so they're like okay we'll put these it feels like inside jokes because they they're coming up in this episode those those kaiju at the end so yeah and i guess i don't know again it's one of those things that what do we know about japan oh you know godzilla and all they're coming up in this episode those those kaiju at the end so yeah and i guess i don't know again it's one of those things that what do we know about japan oh you know godzilla and all

those guys yeah the america town i when i was in japan my host family we'd go to this restaurant called bronco billy's which i think is like kind of the equivalent of america town but the funny thing is so it's like it was this restaurant and they have like american flags all over um and they would play like kind of like i don't know i guess like 60s music kind of um it was all very that kind of poppy americana garbage but the thing is is it was a hamburg steak restaurant which is not something we eat in america which and like if you don't know a hamburg steak is basically like ground beef kind of it's like a hamburger patty kind of like a meatloafish yeah it's like a fancy hamburger patty kind of thing i've had that with like curry on top of it yeah and it's so it's like they think it's an american food but it's not and so it's like let's go to the american hamburg

steak restaurant and it's like oh like i told my host family that. And they're like, wait, really? Like this isn't American food? So, yeah, it's good, though. If you go to Japan and want a good Hamburg steak, go to Bronco Billy's. I'll have to remember that. And I also love the name America Town for a Japanese restaurant. And my friends and I still call America America Town, like the country of America. That's a good name for it. Yeah.

Well, also, can you, from the same window, can you see the Imperial Gardens and the Meiji Shrine? I'm going to guess not. I don't think so. I like the Meiji Shrine. I think it's the one that's really close to Harajuku, from my recollection. Oh, yeah. I have been there. I thought I hadn't been there, but I have been there.

It's a really cool place to go because it's like you have this really really modern crowded crazy harajuku and then just right across the street there's like this big forest with the meiji shrine which is really it's like a really intense contrast yeah well harajuku uh station is really cool too like yeah old-timey it is um but i don't remember what area the Imperial Palace is in. I haven't been there. Like, most of my palace sightseeing, the historical sightseeing I did was in Kyoto. Yeah. I saw many a shrine in a palace that day.

Let me tell you. One thing, on the TV, you see the guy interviewing the cow, which is from the Mr. Sparkle. But the cow had, like, two heads in this, right? Yes, yeah. It was a two-headed cow that shattered in the Mr. Sparkle commercial too. Yeah, yeah. That was a cute little reference. But that is like a missing piece of this episode.

They couldn't do one Mr. Sparkle joke? Yeah, you would have thought they would like, I mean, you would think that would have been like the premise or something. Like he goes to Japan and they're all like Mr. Sparkle. But I guess I don't know. Maybe they did that enough already.

They didn't need any. It's a long on ramp they take to Japan of just like, oh, the family saves all this money. That's how they do. The Simpsons go to Japan. Yeah. So it's a weird opening. Like when I was watching it, I was like, wait, is this the right episode? You think they could have done like a, oh, Mr. Sparkle, come to Japan.

We like celebrity guests. Or at least Homer can see Mr. Sparkle like a box of it or something. Yeah, like anything. But I guess the one reference is we get the newscaster in the background. But the logo of America Town is based on the painting, The Spirit of 76. And I like that it is Kool-Aid Man, Uncle Sam, and Elvis. And if you can look at the photo, or sorry, the's like the exact yeah yeah that's great but instead of a drum uh uncle sam has a bucket of fried chicken instead of playing a fight elvis has like a submarine

sandwich so it all makes sense oh that's uh that's really great yeah the design of america town rules i love like muhammad ali fighting buzz aldrin robots too i mean it has it has a little style of like the robot restaurant that in tokyo that everybody tells you you got to go to i heard recently in a podcast it's not a restaurant at all oh really what is it i've never been there i never is it really a strip club or something what's going on whenever people say you got to go to the robot restaurant i'm like it sounds too expensive i'd rather just eat you know ten dollars of sushi i haven't even heard of this so i don't know the robot oh i hear it from every to every tourist uh who goes there they tell me like oh you got to see this but uh no i mean i'd rather go to like the capcom

restaurant or the dragon quest restaurant there's like eight million themed restaurants you can go to so all the cafes i love a themed cafe man the uh but yeah americatown lisa's statement here of complaining is what i did with co-workers on my trips to japan when they were just going let's just go to mcdonald's i'm like you are surrounded by like if you want to even go to a chain, go to a Japanese chain at least. Yeah, but the thing is, though, McDonald's in Japan is different. Sure. I'm not going to say I never ate there, but I was taken there by people. I never ate there by children. I was taken there, yeah. I think it's fine if you go to McDonald's once, but if you're just hitting up the American restaurants, then that's kind of missing the point.

Yeah, yeah. up like the american restaurants and that's kind of missing the point yeah yeah well i also had a i had a co-worker a cool dude who he went to an outback steakhouse in japan and i was like why would you do this but he did it because he worked as uh for years in an outback steakhouse in america so he just wanted to see from a worker standpoint how interesting yeah well it's it's weird some of the chains they have there like um big boys is a big chain oh yeah like the like which bob's big boy doesn't really exist anymore here i guess there's like to the one in burbank yeah historic yeah but there's like over i think over 200 big boy restaurants in japan and it was really weird because i saw one for the first time like in a mall.

And I was like, why is there a big boy here? And then you find out it's like, oh, it's a really big chain here. He looks like Astro Boy, like a fat Astro Boy. Yeah, I mean, definitely the things they adapt. And of course, I'm sure a lot of people have heard like the KFC Christmas time thing because Colonel Sanders looks like Santa Claus. And, you know, it's the KFC is in like the red and white bucket. So during Christmas, Japanese people, a lot of them, they have all these Christmas specials at KFC. And you have to like reserve it in advance and everybody gets their KFC for Christmas.

It's very romantic. It's a romantic holiday, Christmas, right? I mean, most holidays in Japan are. They do very, like everything becomes like date stuff. It's like Ferris wheels. Like Ferris wheels are like a boyfriend girlfriend thing in japan so yeah i uh i always love i learned that from enough animes of like oh the two the the otp of this show is going to go to a disneyland stand-in because it's a date i'm like but disneyland's for children yeah well that's i mean that's the whole disSea thing. DisneySea is like the couple park, and Disneyland is like the family park.

That's why there's good grown-up food at DisneySea. Yeah. I understand that. Oh, by the way, robot restaurant, not a restaurant. I can't confirm. Oh, okay. Wow. Don't go there expecting a meal.

Go there expecting an experience. I mean, I want to go. There's so many restaurants I want to go to or bars. The next time I'm there, there's a bar run by the pro wrestler Bull Nakano. She does it. And it's in Nakano Broadway or near it. Okay, cool. Because I believe she took her wrestler name after where she's from. But anyway, yes, Americatown.

Let's give it a listen. I can't believe they stuck us at Taxachusetts. Hey, you know, I once knew a man from Nantucket. And? Let's just say the stories about him are greatly exaggerated. Howdy, gangsters! I am average American Jewel Salaryman waiter. These prices suck.

10,000 yen for coleslaw? Don't you serve anything that's even remotely Japanese? Don't ask me. I don't know anything. I'm product of American education system. I also build

poor quality cars and inferior style electronics. They got our number. That's Getty Watanabe. Yes. We talked a bit about him in uh the mr sparkle episode did we find out his name is actually gary yes that's right yeah i uh again he i believe does not speak japanese i don't think he knows the language but um so wait what he goes

by getty uh yeah because i think it's what his parents called him, even though they named him Gary. I think that's the story that we were told. So one thing that's weird about Japanese is Getty means diarrhea. Oh, wow. So it's always a joke with, like you've ever had like a kid named Gary in your class. They tend to, I think, do Getty, like they extend the E sound

so it doesn't sound like diarrhea. So I don't know if that has anything to do with it but that's like anytime you hear the name gary and associate with japanese like that's the first time you that's like the first thing you always think about wow i'm gonna think of this actor differently from now on but how did he come up in the last episode uh he was a voice in the mr sparkle as well yes that's right he was nina talked about it she had not seen long duck dong before i don't think the uh that yeah character now he was the guy i was like hello let's talk why not yeah yeah yeah which again though they you know the he is he is a japanese

american like they at least hired a japanese actor to give these lines instead of having harry or dan or hank do the voice which that's good yeah thumbs up on that i also think that they they feel like they bought themselves the right to do jokes about japan by having early in the episode saying america's way worse and here's jokes like homer saying he's got our numbers he's saying like yeah this is all the ways america's inferior to japan i think that was them saying like okay see we attacked ourselves now we can make fun of japan it is of the equal opportunity offender school of comedy which doesn't always pay off but i understand i feel so bad for the animator who had to draw a table for all 50 states i was thinking that like the reveal shot of how every state is a unique table that's

like in a space yeah it's insane yeah i mean the spectacle of that to take up that much space in a restaurant in tokyo like i would go to americatown to see that honestly like that's pretty cool but yeah that the homer gets to complain about taxachusetts like a conservative of the 90s would i did see uh his shirt says ucla yankee cola yeah and i was like well that's kind of an outdated stereotype that you know uh japanese people wear wacky shirts with like nonsensical or often offensive american words on them but i've just been watching terrorist house lately and they still do oh yeah it hasn't changed yeah if you go in japan and you go shopping and you'll see you just nonsense or like swear words and it's it's interesting and too even

things like i have to i have to bring up one piece but like a lot of times when oda like does english words he'll do them really weird and it's like you know they have access to people who speak english but it's like they still tend to just like kind of go with whatever they feel like no it's true like one piece characters have a good fashion sense or they have like modern fashion sense where they will wear t-shirts with like american or english words yeah yeah and so yeah it's definitely i don't know you know why you know they don, you know, they don't, no matter what, they have, you know, they have access to like good translations, but they still just kind of go for it, which is great. I mean, that's a lot of character. I mean, it's a fun fashion state.

In general, like when I've, I talk about how sweaty I feel in Tokyo, but I also feel incredibly unfashionable. Like everybody is just at the height of or everybody is dressed so hip there at least in the big city anyway i yeah you feel even if i am dressed like if i'm wearing a button up even when i'm there i'm just like i am a hick i'm a pumpkin spit out that piece of hay henry come on uh okay though one thing they really get wrong in this is the idea that everything is way more expensive in japan it could be just because we live in the most expensive part of the galaxy right now but things were like food especially for me was much more affordable there compared to the bay area the san francisco bay area i felt tokyo food and also like you know uh buying tchotchkes there like toys or or comics or whatever it all

felt way cheaper and it wasn't just having a favorable exchange rate at the time either yeah and i mean part of it too is probably a lot of stuff like figures and things you generally are paying like import rates and things like that to cover it there is a lot of cheaper food chains but certain things are more expensive like starbucks is more expensive in japan so it kind of i think it i don't know it's it's weird because some or like things like fruit like fruit's really expensive in japan i noticed that yeah that's true you can't get a good like salad there usually and you're just like looking for something green or something like uh you know that came off a tree to eat and just like where do i find this

yeah it's like it's like an orange cut up in a box for like four dollars something like that exactly i did buy the very a very expensive peach one of my times i was like oh that was delicious oh it was the greatest peach one i i you know i i love my georgia peaches but that was a pretty tasty peach yeah so the the rates like the prices of things are kind of confusing because some things are cheaper, some things are more expensive. Yeah, like T-shirts and clothing can be a lot more and things like games and CDs and movies are very expensive. Paying 30 bucks for a CD with three songs on it and things like that. So, yeah, it's kind of, it's a weird exchange rate. Like it's hard to say like, oh, it's always cheaper.

Oh, it's always more expensive. It's a weird mishmash. In 10,000eslaw that is a hundred dollar yeah that is that is not that is very expensive coleslaw but that is the joke speaking of kfc again though they don't have coleslaw kfc in japan actually like i every other kfc i've been to like england as well it's chicken and french fries i mean coleslaw is disgusting if you ask me so no no thank you but though that also really surprised me because japan loves mayonnaise like do you think they'd be and yeah chopped up lettuce with stuff so they have even better mayonnaise with the msg in it it's so good but yeah no it's weird i don't know what it is about kfc because i mean one of the reasons i like it here is that it has sides but in england and in japan it's like yeah chicken and french fries i'm like that's it well i know

i mean i you know i've never had kfc in japan but i mean japan knows fried chicken like they fry them some good chicken uh chicken tempura uh you know so there's a joke there's like two types of jokes they miss in this episode for doing all the uh you know checking there's a joke there's like two types of jokes they miss in this episode for doing all the uh you know checking off the boxes of jokes about japan one they don't go to like a convenience store and two no train jokes yeah they don't get out of like a crowded train joke so easy to do i'm sure they miss that so there is one cut train joke about the bullet train where it's when Homer and Bart run off. The cut joke is Marge pulling out a spool and saying, don't worry, Lisa, he's on the spool. So Homer's attached like a spool of string and then Homer ties the string to the bullet train that takes off.

And it's like, well, this hurt mom. And he's like, no, she's got a one-way ticket to something or other, like some city the bullet train goes to. That's right. Okay. So they did do at least one train joke. Yeah, but not like what it's like. I mean, these are all jokes written by people who haven't been there. Like, if they lived a life, there would be convenience store jokes, and there would be crowded train jokes and things like that.

I mean, man, a joke about a Japanese quickie mart? Like, going into that? Yeah. What wonderful accents could they pull off there? Oh, Hank Az azaria do your magic no i will say that like it would be a great joke now if they did this episode where homer goes into the japanese wikimart and is just like weeping like by how great it is like all the food is so fresh and everything is so cheap he would just fall in love with it i you know my trashy

uh 7-eleven japan favorite is the pre-packaged pancakes that just have like syrup and butter in between the two. There's even better. The 7-Eleven sometimes, there are two pancakes and then there's like a piece of Japanese pudding in the middle.

Which is like, if you haven't had Japanese pudding, it's kind of like flan. And then there's like whipped cream around the edges. That was like one of my favorite things I ever ate. Oh man.

All right. I'm getting that next time. I ate like a bag i know i i would go to 7-eleven and for breakfast i would often have like a bag of salmon jerky and a black coffee like really good really simple uh i mean all the and all the onigiri they have there too oh yeah it's uh i'm so sad right now thinking about it yeah you're stuck in america what's funny is if you ask japanese people generally they don't know that 7-eleven is american oh really um and also they don't know how crappy our convenience stores is because they'll be like oh like what do you have like stores like this in america i'm like yeah they're scary like you don't want to go there at nighttime and there's a lot of homeless people and the food will make you sick and so it's like i feel so bad when they ask about

them i'm like they're not great i mean like all the jokes in the simpsons are they sell bad food and are famous for being robbed yeah yes and then only a pig like homer would even want it like oh yeah that their their hot dogs are encrusted with phil and a band-aid yeah yeah then we get the the square watermelon joke which um i've never had one of those i don't think i've even seen them around japan well and if you do they're like a hundred dollars so if even if you see, and even like I've seen normal melons that are like 40 bucks. So, you know, it's like I'm sure it's great,

but like is it $100 great? But like generally those things are given as gifts. So they're like a really nice gift to give to someone. Oh, that's why. Okay, I understand how the price

for a melon is. Oh, I'm going to buy this like $100 melon for me. It's more like you give fruit as a gift a lot in Japan. so square watermelons are ornamental you don't eat them they're picked before they're ripe so they're just for display like a display item of luxury like look what we got we are rich enough to have a square watermelon

and they don't sproing into size into normal watermelon size either i would guess no they do not yeah and this and this scene too, it had a lot of more signage jokes. There was a pretty funny one in the background. It says like best Eastern capsule hotel, which is like a best Western joke. Oh, that's cute. And then like below that,

there's a sign that it says like five centimeter wide honeymoon suite. Oh, that's funny. Yeah, so that was pretty cute. Yeah, the fruit is like labeled wrong some of it for some reason i think that's just maybe probably an animation error because it says like tangerines and there's like a bunch of pears um the watermelon is labeled melon which actually refers to a different type of melon um it's like i don't know the thing i think of is like yoshi story like the melon like a little stem yeah whereas because so they call that melon

whereas they call watermelon suika so it's i don't like i don't know what happened there exactly like the cut like the train car suika or like oh um yeah actually i yeah i guess it would be like pronounced the same way it might have a different intonation i don't um yeah i i yeah i guess it would be like pronounced the same way it might have a different intonation i don't um yeah i don't actually know but um and then the the only other one that i thought was really funny is there's a sign that says osake dake which means only alcohol so yeah that was pretty cute i caught a subtle joke underneath the unclean father spray which i do like that joke. It said, price of a Tokyo golf membership, and the price was going up.

And I Googled that, and there were a bunch of stories from the early 90s, late 80s about, can you believe how much it costs to get into this golf club? It's crazy. So I think somebody on the staff remembered those stories from that time, was like, that could be a sign joke. This golf membership costs so much well i mean i think not that golf isn't seen as like bourgeois in america but you know with real estate it's such a premium there too in japan like i think it is seen as even fancier to have a golf membership there back to king of the hill i'm thinking of a joke uh dill gribble has a lot of misconceptions about the world one of them was there's no room in japan for golf courses so they golf across rooftops

uh i uh oh and then we get a joke about well so homer and bart just run away which it feels like it's the writers saying let's have fun with the boys now no more margin lisa uh stuff let's leave them like it reminds me and like when they're in new york it just feels depressing to be with lisa and marge they're just sad so this time they don't even do like an egg magic joke with them they're just like abandoned margin lisa time for homer and bart sillies there's no joke about how marge can't buy another pair of shoes yeah uh also they mentioned on the commentary that um one of the animators from for the show tomy amaguchi who he's he worked in the anime industry and then moved to california and worked on the simpsons he was seeing them lay out this scene and corrected

them of like cars drive in the opposite direction and so i had to relay out the scene and he's given a technical uh advisor credit on it because he corrected them that's nice uh so you know we could correct some things in this episode but that the the cars are driving on the uh their side of the road the incorrect side because the american side's the right way i say then we get a joke about uh celebrities doing commercials in japan which i the late 90s i, was when we really started to find out about that. I mean, Mr. Sparkle already covered crazy Japanese commercials pretty well. Yeah, and you'd find these on the internet. Like, can you believe Arnold Schwarzenegger was in this commercial?

They were starting to leak out thanks to the internet. Just these very odd. And like Woody Allen was in a bunch for the seibu department store in japan and i would have pulled a clip but they're all like they're not silent but he doesn't talk in them right he just is looking very awkward in them and a lot of them i've seen they either say like one word or maybe they make uh there was a classic one i saw of hulk hogan from like the late 80s singing a children's like a song in in japanese but clearly quite phonetically but uh yeah i uh and boy i i really actually like that woody allen joke just his what i do to deserve it oh right yeah i love that it's uh i mean it's a great joke about how woody allen is

an awful person who deserves the hell of his own making like uh and honestly deserves to suffer far more than he has than being in a cracker commercial yeah the references to interiors and bananas i didn't even get i wasn't uh pithy enough to get those jokes about his films at the time of the first earring bs he did a film called bananas and a film called interiors but did you get the the ultimate sign joke of the two sumo competitors that I just got as a joke this time? No, I didn't get this. I just got it upon this viewing because it's a big groaner. The two sumos are

Sakatumi and Nakadouna. So Sakatumi and Nakadouna. Yeah. And it hurts too because Nakadouna isn't pronounceable the way it's spelled in Japanese. Like, the first one works because it's Japanese phonetics, but the second one is not. So it's, like, even worse.

Oh, that sucks. Honestly, the sumo section is the low point of the episode for me. It's the worst jokes they did about Japanese stereotypes. And they do kill the emperor. So, yeah, I i mean first they must have spent so much money to get front row at a sumo show then they do like uh oh homer it's such like a first drafty joke of like homer would see a sumo wrestler spreading salt around he'd ask for salt on his pretzel that he's eating like at least like 50zel. That's at least a fun thing. Yeah, yeah. It's not the best stuff in this episode.

And I guess it is funny that Homer thinks it's professional wrestling, you know? Yeah, yeah. But that's about it. They mention on the commentary that, like, Bart really does smash him hard in the face with a chair, that sumo wrestler. Like, it's really rough. But, yes, why don't we hear some of the sumo wrestler scene here if only so we can check the accuracy of the Japanese spoken here

hey what's baby Huey doing says here they throw salt before they wrestle to purify the ring spare some salt tubby tubby that name hurts my heart I'm fat like a baby

you want some hey that's mine That name will hurt your heart. I was born with a fat stomach. Want some? So the one part of that I do like is that Homer thinks he's a wrestling character called the Emperor. And then when he beats him, he takes his title. Oh, yes. he takes his title oh yes yeah i mean that definitely it looks like at least drew what the emperor looked like at the time in 1999 and we previously had uh i'm not fat it's glandular or whatever joke which is really just like a sort of a taste like chicken joke where it's just like come on do that do something else but it's said in japanese so it's yeah like so how accurate were this was that language i mean as far as i can

tell you know with my level of japanese it seemed accurate um i mean this is obviously a native speaker that gives credence to it uh the only thing i mean one thing like i pick up on is the the nuance was like a literal translation is that he says like my heart hurts which is which means you know it hurts my feelings but like literally like the actual like wordage is like oh it hurts my heart um but yeah as far as as far as my understanding goes it seemed accurate oh i have a list of the japanese actors who were cast especially for this and in addition to gary watanabe and George Takei. There's also Denise Kumagai, Karen Murayama and Keon Young.

Those are the, uh, those are the actors, uh, in addition to the bigger name stars, uh, Karen Murayama. She, she was used previously.

I believe she's also Mr. Sparkle. She's like, if you saw her face, you'd be like, Oh, I've seen her in a million, uh,

shows playing or movies playing like a nurse or a parking attendant. But she's a really funny actress. If you're a Larry David fan and Curb Your Enthusiasm, she's the parking attendant who was mad he didn't tip her. And she was demanding a $20 tip. Or if you're a hardcore fan of Pulp Fiction, she's one of the people looking over Bruce Willis' character after he got in the car accident. That's Karen Mariyama there, too. And all you Night Court fans out there might recognize Denise Kumagai, who played the immigrant Vietnamese wife

of the character Mac, the court clerk. Oh, she was Mac's wife. Yeah, and a lot of the series was about her getting her citizenship i think yeah yeah i remember that now yeah she was she was one of like three there was the episode where her and three other women were having babies right that's right yeah and it's weird i don't know why but often you get uh different sorts of asians playing japanese women but this is a case where a japanese woman was playing a different uh race of asian person yeah i mean a lot for american casting back then and i i think still now occasionally they just go like you know japanese chinese they can play whatever yeah i mean like it's it was a lot of chinese actresses in the um geisha movie the geisha film yeah yeah geisha town? The Geisha film. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Geisha Town. The old Geisha Town.

But yeah, Homer just, Homer spinning the emperor over his head and throwing him into a dumpster of used Sumo thongs. It's not their smartest joke, I think. Have you guys, have either of you watched Sumo at all? No, you know, I never have. I never have. I'm more of a pro wrestling fan than a

sumo one it's it's it's a good show it's it's really intense um too while i was there i don't know he's probably still popular but my family was really obsessed with this one sumo wrestler who had like this like really cute like baby face and i think like that's one of the reasons he was like super popular because he was this adorable-looking sumo. And I think he was also kind of smaller as well, so everyone was always rooting for him because he's kind of this adorable underdog. That's cute. Henry was a big fan of Yonazuka.

Yokozuna. Yokozuna, sorry, damn it. The WWF champion. Which is actually just like a title in sumo wrestling. Yeah, it's like the highest title in sumo. It's like Grandmaster of Chess, right? Yeah. But yeah, I know I should go to a sumo thing,

but usually, again, I'm like, well, but I could spend that money on a pro wrestling show. Or just watch it on TV or something. It's a really unique sport, and it's a lot of fun to watch. Then Homer and Bart go to jail, which jails in Japan are not fun. You don't want to be in jail

in japan speaking of geisha they're here oh yes yeah they're in prison i mean this is very silly joke i at least like the design of the cop is very accurate with his white gloves i like that like yeah but uh and i mean also the joke that in the prison cell they have the sliding paper doors as well that you can just walk out of that it's a cute joke and then apparently homer and bart got indoctrinated into japanese culture uh while in prison which uh that's that's very odd uh i mean like uh the the times i hear of americans put in japanese prisons it's usually of uh for drug yeah yeah they the japan does not joke around even like marijuana they do not oh yeah well and certain things like vick's body rub is banned um there's certain

things that you wouldn't expect but i guess i don't know if it can be used to make meth or something there's certain methamphetamine basedbased prescription medicine for ADHD is totally banned. You can't even get in with a prescription. Wow. Yeah. So their substance control is really extreme. And yeah, it's like every few months you'll hear a Japanese celebrity, if they get caught with marijuana, and then they have to do a big public apology.

And so yeah, the drug culture there is very different there was i mean there was recently a controversy in a video game that i was thinking of that judgment where a character had to be completely recast at post-release or like maybe right before release in japan no it was post-release he's patched out uh he was an actor playing a major role in it but he got busted for cocaine which like in america you now we just shrug like oh i mean you assume yeah you assume they do it right you assume every celebrity is on coke or coming down from coke or there was also a pro wrestler i really like matt side l he uh in america he is like a known super pothead, which the secret of pro wrestlers is at least half of them are high all the time

because they are in incredible pain and stressed out. So he's a big pot advocate. He also performed in Japan a lot. And he went over there without stuff in his possession, but he had his jeweler there with his jewel, you know, vape pen with him. And the tubes had residue in it. And they're like, this is pot residue in this thing. You're under arrest.

Like he was in jail for a month. Oh, my God. And barred probably for life from every country. Yeah. So fortunately, Homer did not have any drugs with him in this scene uh they leave the jail they take a walk through the park which that reminds me of like uh the park in shinjuku i walked through which was really i think it's yo yogi park i i think i hate that it's called that because i think of that stupid cartoon every time my brain is poisoned

uh well it's a nice it's a nice park though yeah yeah and no 90s hannah barbaric characters are there and i actually brought up the pod in japan thing i'm surprised because um paul mccartney got busted in japan for marijuana possession they could have done a joke about that because that's like another touchstone like what do americans know about japan paul mccartney got arrested at the airport like in thes. You're right. They didn't go there either. But where they do go is to the park, and Homer shows off his Japanese language skills and origami. So I guess now Bart knows French and Japanese at this point.

It's canon. Now can we do something Japanese? Oh, I'm sick of doing Japanese stuff. In jail, we had to be in this dumb kabuki play about the 47 Ronin, and I wanted to be Oshii, but they made me Ori. Then we had to do two hours of origami, followed by flower arranging and meditation. Honey, I know you want to see Japan, but we're down to our last million yen. Don't worry, Ichiban.

I'll show you something Japanese. Oh, it's beautiful, Dad. It's a crane. The Japanese believe they bring good luck. Be careful. We need that money to get home. No!

You motherfucker, me! So what is Do? What is he saying he saying um i mean he's just like kind of just like like it's weird because japanese has really mild curse words so he says which is just like it's like the same as saying like crap or something it's just like a yeah so i mean it's a pretty good equivalent i would say it's just kind of like a you know oh rats kind of curse word yeah like japanese curse words are so mild because like well my pants have lied to me right i know shit goku but you know like fuck um i think like one of the probably one of the ones that like maybe americans tend to know is is kuso which is like it's like a literal it's like

similar to crap it's like a literal, it's like similar to crap. It's like a literal excrement word, but it's something you'll hear in like children's programming or like in, you know, like young boys manga and stuff like that. So it's really probably better translated as like crap, like a really mild swear word rather than like shit or something, you know, a little more intense. It's not like a, it's not like something that needs to be like bleeped. It's something that like, you know, a person can say without huge consequence. And they have like words like, like, so Majime, which is like, you, you would say that about someone Majime is like really serious, like serious. So you'd say like, like they're, they're, I don't know how to like properly say it.

It's like, they're really serious. They're like crappy serious. So yeah, it's's just like he's just throwing out some mild curse words the one that gets me is that what bart says he's it's translated as foreign devils yeah so that that sounded like the long version of gaijin right he says gaikoku gene which is like the polite way to address a foreigner a lot of you know probably people are fairly familiar with gaijin which is kind of a more like crude way to address a foreigner it's like an outsider or something kind of like that and so it's weird that they they subtitle that as foreign devils because it's like he's actually using like a really like normal polite

word rather than something um you know that that would be like the more informal negative version right though dan and nancy's accents on that are pretty good yeah they did they did a good job maybe one of the japanese actors was there to coach yeah i was thinking that because you know they have at least some kind of uh proper tonation going on yeah it's it's better than when nancy in nancy in a star is burns says you know tapu stars no chizu mapu like that uh i think i'd ask nina to translate that for me and she's like wow i didn't even like it's so garbled she didn't even read it as here it is japanese the first time she heard it like yeah i they definitely are saying japanese better in this yeah for sure i love the animation on marge like scratching her neck anxiously yeah yeah that was

really good uh but uh homer also lost those origami skills he forgot those as well after this episode yeah but they lost about nine thousand dollars usd there's no million yen note either like there's a ten thousand is the biggest it gets which that's a hundred bucks you know but uh yes they say they call that a million yen bill there that they lose yeah which uh is insane like that the simpsons are walking around with 10 like after all the money they've spent so far, they have $10,000. Right. Like five times, 10 times as much as they had for the trip. I was unlucky the first time I went to Japan and it was one of the rare times where the foreign exchange was bad for the US dollar. Like it was like $1.20 to get 100 yen instead of the better opposite of experience of like

80 cents to get 100 yen like uh yeah that's uh that's the time to time it but uh yeah it just flies away uh the simpsons are screwed i think also the the mega savers thing at least makes sense at this point of like since they bought when there was an empty flight they apparently didn't buy a round trip one because they just got whatever seat was open on their flight to japan so that's why they haven't purchased their plane tickets back yet so that actually does make sense it's not a plot hole that tracks yeah so yeah uh they head to the u.s embassy at the start of the next scene uh where it sounds like they're going to help homer but

they're actually just helping him out of the security scanner. I wonder if the U.S. Embassy isn't helping Homer because of all he did in Australia. They're like, we remember Australia. You're not allowed. We're not helping you again at the U.S. government. I would also think that it's actually really hard to get a job in Japan if you're not a legal resident or don't have a work visa. Yeah, I mean, I worked part-time job at my school, and I had to, like, well, it wasn't necessarily a work visa. Yeah, I mean, I worked like part-time job at my school and I had to like, I had to,

well, like it wasn't necessarily a work visa, but I had to like, for as part of my student visa, I had to fill out like a separate form that was like, oh, I might want to do a part-time job. So yeah, you can't just go and get a job there. I mean, fish cutting is so low skill that it wouldn't be i guess that might be they ask fewer questions at osaka fish concern but uh still i i feel like they couldn't just have any

job there uh but yes it's it's time for gutting fish every truckload of fish we got brings us 31 cents closer to those tickets home and i think i finally found what i was put on this earth to do knife goes in guts come out knife goes in guts come out spare my life and i will grunt you three time for the company loyalty song knife goes in the guts come out. That's what Osaka Sifu Concern is all about. This sucks. What else is on?

Thank you. You have fulfilled our dreams and dreams of our ancestors. Tune in tomorrow when another lucky family tries to win their dreams on the Happy Smile Super Challenge Family Wish Show. Family Wish Show? Hmm.

That gives me an idea. I think we all had that idea. I didn't. What is it? Lunch? More shitting on Marge. Marge is like, I have an idea. Everybody knows it, Mom. Except for Homer. Yes. Now we're about to launch into the Japanese game show parody section of this episode. on marge for like marge like i have an idea like everybody knows that mom except for homer yes yeah now we're about to launch into the japanese game show parody section of this episode

and i was clued into this uh whole phenomenon as a viewer of saturday night live yeah the classic 1994 sketch japanese game show which uh i don't know if i would think it was funny now but i thought it was so funny uh back then basically it is all in quote-unquote japanese meaning they they throw out a few japanese words but i think it's mostly gibberish i haven't watched the entire sketch again the check but what i liked about it is it play uh chris farley plays mr sweaty guy uh he does not speak japanese and the punishment for getting a question wrong on this game show is they hand you a knife in a, in a rag,

you cut your finger off and you give it to them. And the end of the, um, the end of the sketch is like basically final jeopardy where they hook electrodes up to his nipples and testicles and ask him questions while they electrocute him. And it's, uh,

it was very funny when I was a kid, but it was a joke about this idea. But I, if you want to see Chris Far farley screaming uh this is a good sketch for that and mike myers is playing the japanese uh oh yeah he sure is yep it's and alec baldwin and uh janine groffalo are on the sketch too yeah i mean uh it's always fun to see uh he's not exactly matt foley but he is matt Matt Foley. Yeah. I mean, like you said, he's Mr. Sweaty Guy. As I recall, his screaming is funny.

Yeah. Him just screaming, Lord, help me. I don't speak Japanese. Very funny. Sorry, I blew out the mic there. No, yeah. But yeah, I guess in the late 90s, it became just showing us clips from crazy Japanese game shows just became a joke. And they were popularized to us then i

well i didn't want to say real quick about the fish cutting thing but also the commercial for the game show it's funny how they want to be accurate sometimes and other times like look it's english on the tv they just hear english everybody speaks english in the game show later the jingle for osaka this osaka and company is in english too yeah and it's like robots be right back for the robot cartoon yes yeah so they there it's stuff's in japanese until they decide it's funnier to just have somebody say stuff in accented english yeah well and as far as Japanese game show exposure, what was the show that they used to have on TV that was, like, dubbed

over in English? Oh, Most Extreme Elimination Challenge? Yeah! Was that around at this time? Because I feel like that would have been people's... Yeah, that was, like, Takeshi's Challenge or something. Oh, so I have a note about this from a friend of the show, Nina Matsumoto. This is a comment from Nina Matsumoto, a friend of the

show, who wants to talk a bit about Japanese game shows. So she says, the condemnation of LOL wacky Japanese game show is very important to me. Like every single one of these games are played by comedians and or celebrities on a variety show. They don't subject civilians to this stuff.

And of course they're nuts. They're meant to get extreme reactions out of comedians and many of them are downright hazing rituals, which are veteran comedians, subjecting young amateurs to weird physical stunts. Takeshi's castle had actual civilian contestants, but that was only on the air for like a few years in the eighties. So a lot of these clips in America,

you were viewing out of the context of who these people are and the purpose of the sketch or the bit you were just viewing them as like, Oh, they must make everybody do this. And like normal people are being tortured, but really they were all stunts often you know people wanting to be famous yeah yeah or just already famous people like the variety shows you'll see on japanese television a lot of times you'll see the same actors on like different variety shows i think probably like a gift that a lot of people recognize is the one of the guy like biting the

oh what's chocolate yeah it's like the guy like biting the handle off the door and so that would be yeah that would be a show that it's it's like celebrities playing it and i watched like i remember watching one when i was there that was like i think there were like four people and they had a bowl of ramen and one of them was really spicy and the four of them had to try to make people guess which one was the spice like guess incorrectly so it's like if they had a normal one they might pretend that it was really spicy or if they have the spicy they tried to pretend it was normal so it's like just like these really i mean they're silly and like yeah like like nina said they, they're entertainment value.

They're not American game shows where these are people trying to win something. Yeah. And I mean, like a few years later, we had basically the Eat Bugs Challenge game show. Yeah, it's Fear Factor and Alternatators. Those were way crazier. And those often, yeah, they were with regular people who were doing it, who were just like, time to eat every part of a bull you would never eat let's all eat or like yeah just the penis challenge of eating different

animals genitals i mean yeah and this falls into the sort of like wacky japan thing that i still see occasionally but it was really like hitting home around this time where uh i i certainly fell for it a bit too but i think it's patronizing in that a lot of it is people thinking like well they couldn't possibly know this is funny like we're looking at it ironically it's like no they're making funny things for you to laugh at it's not like they're not in on the joke but a lot of this was viewed like ironically like oh they think this is serious but it's like no they're up front they want this to be funny and to entertain you yeah i think i mean that's we talked about it the japanese commercial one too it's just a real kind of xenophobic viewpoint of just like these these funny commercials couldn't possibly be funny on purpose like when

they they're as entertaining as as an american funny commercial and intentionally so i think it uh that it comes off as like infantilizing a foreign country in those cases yeah like describing like super mario like yeah he eats a mushroom and he stomps on turtles that's fucking insane man who thought of that shit like it's just a fun whimsical idea i mean you could reductively explain superman in that same way yeah like a guy puts on red underpants and jumps around that crazy country america they yeah i think yeah again we've had a million worse shows than anything they've done to comedians on that that takeshi katano did to any comedian we've done far worse they just had that netflix game show I don't even know if it's still on Netflix,

but it was basically the We Electrocute You game show. Yes. Yeah. Yep. I think there, what was it? Don't Flinch? I think that was it. Something like that.

Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. Well, not to mention all the prank shows that weren't even like you win something. It's just like. They made you think someone was dead. Yeah.

But yes, they head on to the game show it's also funny they just like the instant the simpsons learn of the game show they can get on it they're like oh we know about this game show time to get on it but i wonder if that's really where this came from they're like you know what the simpsons should be on a wacky get japanese game show that's the episode i'm sure that was the idea they started with and uh george takei is back on the show last time he played akira was that really that long ago i gotta be forgetting something right uh yes there is one in the middle this is his third appearance on the show oh yeah yeah he was akira in the sushi episode and yeah he was also going to be on the marge versus the monorail episode but uh

leonard nimoy took the role instead because george takei did not want to badmouth public transit even like in a goofy comedy like the simpsons uh i love the joke about how he's uh i yes i love the joke about how they're like oh we traded up for spock from sulu there uh but yes in an old man in the key actually he's in another one as a chinese waiter in that one interesting sorry yes this is his second of three appearances yeah yeah and uh but then he'll appear in two more but as himself he'll be in that one and i guess hank azaria plays him when george the k is busy yes yeah doing a good doing a good sulu yeah that it was uh it was him playing akira in uh mr sparkle episode doing the the translation yeah is hey that looks like you

line which i uh did very flatly there and this character is named uh skip oh sorry wink yeah you're getting the skunk in the face now, Bob, for saying that. Just imagine Marge is just covered in skunk juice. That digital puppet news team, that's funny. I like that. I want a digital puppet instead of the real puppets

of the Republican Party we see. Look at those clowns on the news. But yes, the game show has begun. Thank you, thank you. And welcome to our contestants from America, the Simpson family. You honor us. Don't patronize me.

Now, Simpson family, have you picked a wish? Well, I haven't talked it over with the family. I think we'd all like a free dinner at America Town. No, no, no. We want plane tickets home to Springfield. Now, our game shows are a little different from yours. Your shows reward knowledge. We punish ignorance.

Ignor-what? Ah! Okay, let's begin. Our categories are, Ow That Hurts, Why Are You Doing This To Me, and Please Let Me Die. We'll go with Ow That Hurts, Skip. My name is wink i was able to overhear more of the murmuring with this audio clip and marge was really trying to go for number two she's like i don't know i like why are you doing this to me uh that doesn't necessarily mean pain i suppose i one maddie how accurate is that text on screen there yeah no again

it looked uh it looked accurate to me. Definitely the second category is the funniest sounding to me. Like in Japanese, it's, It's like, why are you doing that? I don't know if it necessarily has that implication that means like to me, but it's, yeah, that one definitely makes me laugh um and i was gonna mention too um the like japanese title of the show so in in english it's the happy smile super challenge family wish show and it's basically the same thing in japanese you can see it like on

the wall behind the host um it's something something show so it seems like they just kind of did that word for word and put that on the wall. Yeah, it sounds like a word-to-word replacement there. And again, this is a Japanese game show that's all done in English. They even have a plummet sign that's written in English. And I guess the first Owl That Hurts is basically beating Homer as a human piñata. And there's like this crazy story on the commentary that Donna Carey tells. I don't know if he's just

bullshitting. I wonder. But he talked about hiring a human piñata for like a birthday party. And apparently it was for children and one of the children had like you know, taken the foam off the stick you hit the man with and he was actually hurting the man. But I guess the human pinata thing was a magic trick

in that he's supposed to escape from the pinata. Interesting. And Candy, like, it felt like he was just making it up. This sounds like a drug trip or something. That's really bizarre. No one called him out on it. Like, it sounded maybe plausible until you got to the magic trick park,

and then like, oh, okay. And the thing about, like, the kids taking the foam off the bats i'm like that's from no disgrace like home yeah you're just using a simpsons joke i uh i you know yes i don't believe i wasn't too incredulous just hearing it said on the commentary but i think that's totally fake yeah i think you're just trying to like distract them i i love the design of homer in the pig pinata that's such a funny just a funny drawing of homer covered in pink paper mache with a sombrero even on him like that's though i i

think i get why they did it but homer is gagged the point is you don't know it's him but he is fully shouting like ow ow like oh yeah oh it's like not muffled or anything i think they wanted to have funny dan screaming noises so instead of him doing like like but the the joke is they don't know it's him other than bart who does when they ask everyone but homer to hit somebody in a pinata like who do they think it would be the family that's why this was like oh my god dad i didn't know it was you actually lisa's the ignorant one there she should be punished for it but uh homer yeah homer being beaten with sticks was pretty funny also that he wants his hernia to be whacked back in. That's a funny idea.

And then Homer gets asked a question that he actually gets correct. Sorry, Dad. We didn't know. I had an inkling. Could someone please whack my hernia back in? Sure thing, Dad. Mr. Simpson, we'll cut you down as soon as you answer one question about Japan. Is the answer Japan?

Actually, it is. That means you move on to the lightning round. He seems okay, but he is being burned in tennis. Hey, isn't that Homer on the Japanese channel? If that's Homer, then who the hell's been putting beers

on his tan? Oh, woohoo! Um, that boy ain't right. I thought we were bringing up King of the Hill

too much on this episode. So, a few hundred feet below homer is one piece tokyo tower the one piece park that maddie briefly lived in during her eight months in japan or you at least went there like seven eight nine i think at least 10 times 10 times yeah um it's yeah i think it's one thing that surprises people about tokyo tower is it's like, it's like the Eiffel Tower. Like you just like go up. That's what I thought. And it's a tall thing.

But there is two One Piece restaurants. There is a three-story One Piece theme park. There was also two stories of just like souvenir shops. It's like a building stuck in the middle of a tower. Yeah, it's like five floors of a mall at the bottom of the tower. Wow. I've walked near it, but I've never been to Tokyo Tower in all my trips there. That's crazy.

Well, you walk right in and there's two one-piece restaurants and a one-piece store. All right. Well, now I'm going to hit there. I wonder if this joke now would be Homer on the Sky Tree instead. That's definitely like the cool lookout now. I mean, it's taller. It's taller than Tokyo Tower. My favorite, though, I actually went to,

Japan loves viewpoints. They're all over the city, and they're all over in different cities you go to. My favorite was actually in ikebukuro the um sunshine city which is the big mall oh yes yes did you go up in there it's like the sky circus and it's like super like cheesy and like all these like mirrors and like all these really it's like really crazy decorated but it's really fun and i went there with my friends and i was like this is actually my favorite because like skytree I went to and I actually have never been up Tokyo Tower because

I'm always too busy in the One Piece part but um. The day's over by the time you're like oh they closed the top of the tower. They're kicking her out. Um but Skytree like it's taller and I guess it's cool because you're really high but it's mostly a lookout there was like a there's some like hello kitty history there when i went there but the one in ikebukuro like i would definitely recommend that one i thought it was the most fun yeah no i did you go to namjitown while you're in sunshine city i didn't so when i was there j world still existed it doesn't anymore which was like it was like a shonen jump theme park that lasted for about three or four years and so uh that was my favorite one to go to i'd actually prefer that to namjoo town like namjoo town it's got nice food but it's it's not the greatest yeah and um the one of my favorite

parts about the the shonen jump theme park is they had a photo spot of the crater that Yamcha dies in that you could go take a photo in, which was really, really great. That's a great poll. I love it. But I do love just the drawing of Homer in his electrocution outfit with his lightning. He's actually burning internally. That's the best line Takei does. Yeah.

That's so funny. But yeah, Homer with his lightning rod hat. It's just such a cute design too. Very lucky that Mo even has a Japan channel on his TV for that joke. And I love, well, like the thing too, I love when a character has to voice themselves mimicking another character they do. Oh, yeah. It's like such, a meta reference. So, like, yeah, having Dan Castellaneta having to do Barney doing Homer.

Yeah. That is a fun challenge for him. Yeah. Oh, and I was going to briefly mention the game show host, what he says, like, after the answer is revealed to be Japan. When he peeks behind the curtain, he's like, oh, like, you idiots, like, who wrote this? Yeah, I like that it's almost a Japanese tourism question of like, I think it would be like,

did you know Japan? But what country has the most blank or the best blank? It was really funny because when some of my friends visited me while I was in Japan, and we were just kind of walking around the city city and we went by like Nihon University. And I like asked my friend, I'm like, do you know what Nihon means? And he was like, is the answer Japan? Damn it. Barney's Homer disguise is pretty bad, too. I'm surprised it convinced them for that long. That could be

another episode that and uh ned's competitor we have two other plots coming out of this episode but uh yes then homer uh they then are given their final round which they go to it is apparently a very convincing fake volcano that like the simpsons thing is just a real volcano somewhere it should reek of oranges and wasabi that volcano well so how far that has to be like, the Simpsons thing is just a real volcano somewhere. It should reek of oranges and wasabi, that volcano. Well, so how far, it has to be, like, on the roof of the TV station or something, because they just fall through a tube back into the place. But, yes, the final challenge begins. Congratulations, Simpsons. The airline tickets are yours.

All you have to do is to pick them up from inside that volcano. Why are you so cruel? This vacation really blows. Well, at least we're past the lightning round. Hmm, I see. I sure hope they don't have an ice cream round. Homer's dead after that second one.

He was getting hit by lightning in this episode. It almost, like, meta-wise, it's the gods punishing him for questioning the joke writing structure. But I wonder if in-universe, they own a lightning machine and like a tv station is literally electrocuting it there i like that explanation uh but yeah they uh they get to the bridge it is uh there's some really great animation of how they walk on the

bridge they command lisa to go on it because even though maggie is lighter they make lisa do it instead uh And yeah, Lisa's like, you know, walking on the thing is really well done and she pulls it off and then wink presses a button and the bridge breaks in half. Yeah. The human bridge scene is very funny, but also just a lot of stage direction.

Yeah. Yeah. But a very well done animation wise. Yeah. Each family member grabbing the next like homer marge to save lisa then homer to save margie's other shoe and then bart realizing that the tickets could fall in there so he like jumps over the rest of the family to get the tickets and the animation of the them wiggling is that are the

waves in it as they as the bridge shakes is really good too yeah i uh and then one of the biggest cheats like when i saw this the first time i really did think like how do we get out of this like and when they actually when march says i think this is the end and they really do just splash into it i was like what the what the fuck i didn't know what to think in first viewing so 10 great seasons of the show come to an end i mean it's a real fu of an ending afterwards but at least it does work for shock of value of like they really did that well obviously the simpsons family is not dead don't worry that lava is just orangeade made by our sponsor osaka orangeade concern it's loaded with wasabi kudospsons. You have won your freedom.

Before I go, I want to say something. Game shows aren't about cruelty. They're about greed and wonderful prizes like poorly built catamarans. But somewhere along the line, you lost your way. Poor shame. Coming up next, a Canadian company who say they are deathly afraid of scorpions. Ooh, that stings, eh? Ooh, God! Sting those Canucks.

I love this show. Take that, you stupid hosers! Ooh! Homer immediately back on board with this show. Take that, you stupid hosers. Homer immediately back on board with the show after lecturing the show. Well, once he sees somebody tortured who isn't him, he's fine. In the commentary, they say there was a big cut there. Homer's speech was much longer. You can see in the 80s, can definitely see it's like stitched together lines like homer's lip sync is way off in his speech and he mentioned like different products they

probably couldn't clear to have oh yeah yeah and though i guess it's poorly built catamarans like he's talking about the gag prizes you'd win on uh you know what's behind door number three yeah like a goat yeah whatever. Yeah. Which, you know, I guess that isn't torturous. It's just, like, mean. Also, I bet you didn't even get the goat or any of the joke lines on those things. But also, I don't think I'd want a orange drink floated with wasabi. I don't think there's, I don't know. Were there any wasabi drinks there?

I would think that it's not common. Yeah. I mean, at least they know what wasabi is, the writers of the show. They know that. Yeah. But it's weird because it's burning Homer's clothing. Yeah, that's true. And his flesh.

Yeah. I mean, I guess. It seems like the joke is that he thinks it thinks it's lava but he's and but he's like overreacting but then you're like wait his clothes are actually there's like holes in his clothing yeah march too and also like it also at least had to be boiling because it's bubbling under them even if it's not lava it is bubbling well also they should know that i would think by smell you would know you're hanging over lava and not orange drink orange and wasabi hey you guys don't know what lava smells like i i guess not maybe it doesn't like oranges uh well uh and for homer's speech to work too with the audience for

them actually to feel shame it's just this is a fluent in English audience that came to this show. But also the Canadian man who's being stung is designed to look like director Neil Affleck of The Simpsons. Yeah, famously Canadian. And also an actor. He's been on television before, right? Yeah, like in the 80s. He was like a teen actor. I think they probably just cut that Homer thing down there. Just like this episode's getting long. We need to make a time cut and this this speech isn't as funny as we thought

it was so let's just speed it up yes the family gets on the plane uh clearly very exhausted and so we get our final joke to you know again another joke they failed they did this joke about japanese drinks but no japanese vending machine jokes either again if they'd have been if they'd actually gone there's tourists they definitely would have made a joke about that oh yeah yeah for sure but yes the simpsons are leaving japan goodbye japan i'll miss your kentucky fried chicken and your sparkling whale free seas folks we're experiencing some moderate godzilla related turbulence at this time sees. What's happening? Folks, we're experiencing some moderate Godzilla-related turbulence at this time,

so I'm going to go ahead and ask you to put your seatbelts back on. When we get to 35,000 feet, he usually does let go, so from there on out, all we have to do is worry about Mothra, and we do have reports he's tied up with Gamera and Rodan at the present time. Thank you very much. You know, Alf. That's a good, you know,

Alf Clausen did a good version of like Toho music there. And they're like, and they just use the Godzilla sound. They didn't worry about copyright on that. No, no, no. And at least, you know, I'll give it to them too from what I know of Kaiju films, and I'm not a super

expert but i've seen a few the the flying ones they all name are correct mothra rodan and gamera they all fly so they would be the ones they'd meet at 35 000 feet there are a lot of like big weird endings in this half of the season where i can think of three so far where it's like two are monsters are real endings where uh the loch ness monster is real also all the godzilla monsters are real and then the rapture one was a treehouse of horror episode but still it was like it ends with like oh the rapture happened and the simpsons are going to hell so i think they were getting kind of punchy with uh endings like you know what there's no status quo we're gonna make sure monsters are real or hell is real or everyone is now dead this ending joke is like 20 seconds so it didn't bother me i know

i'm gonna sound like a giant hypocrite that i complained so much about the loch ness monster and there are like six monsters yeah there's six monsters all on screen in a normal episode of the show but it happens so quickly at the very end unlike the like four minutes you spend with the Loch Ness Monster in Monty Can't Buy Me Love so that's why I this doesn't bother me as much it's the only way it bothers me is it's just like it is such a boomer idea of Japan of like oh what do I think of I think of old Godzilla movies like at the very least they didn't do which the Simpsonsons did do in Marge and Chains, they didn't do a dub actor joke.

Yeah, it's way, way too late for that. When they did it was the time to do it. Yeah, yeah. It was okay then. Dubbing technology by 1999 had thoroughly improved by that point. I do like that they just straight up use the toho designs and sound effects without any fear of the very litigious company yeah well and i feel like i someone must have been like a big kaiju fan because there's all of them at the end and then like before i was

mentioning all the signs in the background or just like kaiju names so i feel like there must be a kaiju nerd somewhere in there i would bet on in the animation field there are a number of knowing what i know about mystery science theater like boomers grew up with these movies on there i would bet on in the animation field there are a number of yeah exactly draw simpsons knowing what i know about mystery science theater like boomers grew up with these movies on tv like in the 60s and 70s they were just on tv on saturday afternoons so you get to know all the monsters yeah i mean at the time it was the cheapest of programming you just uh you know get a bunch like three non-union actors uh one woman and two men, and then they talk over a film you paid very low amount of money for.

And it was easy to fill television time with that back then. We've good old Prince of Space. Thank you, Sandy Frank. And then the true final shot of the episode is meant to induce seizures, which I think that, again, that's another joke. I doubt Disney would do that just because that does open them to lawsuits.

Yeah. I mean, I wonder how many times they had to run that to make sure, okay, this is completely safe, right? I feel like they just assumedensitivity and the emperor joke using toho designs like as is that would open them up to at least like legal problems in japan and on top of that the seizure shot actually wouldn't be allowed on television trying to replicate a seizure shot yeah would not be uh not be kosher there so i could see other problems with this airing in japan too this is a fun time capsule for me to remember what it was like as a person who dreamed of going to japan but didn't think he ever would compared to a person who's now been to japan a few

times and has a slightly more informed view of it at least from a tourist standpoint not like resident or fluent in the language or anything but yeah yeah so the episode feels a lot different to me than it did then there's still some funny stuff in it but some other stuff i'd get rid of especially the transphobia boo yeah at least there wasn't a panty vending machine joke in this episode oh thank god we received that but i think it is uh it's really dated but it's 20 years old so of course it is but it's also a very good just like snapshot of what americans thought of japan in 1999 before the turn of the century so i think that it's useful in that context just to see like how both enlightened we were and also unenlightened

about this uh this fun new country called japan i'm sorry maddie oh yeah no i think i have a pretty similar viewpoint like yeah there's some good jokes, but it definitely is. It's what you would expect for an episode about Japan from 1999, I think. So, Maddie, you've been our special guest for this episode. Thanks for coming in to Berkeley to record with us. So, please talk about all the stuff you're doing. You've got a Patreon. You're on Twitter.

You do art for the One Piece podcast. You do a little podcasting yourself on your Patreon as well. Yeah. you do art for the one piece podcast you do a little podcasting yourself on your patreon as well yeah um so you can find me on twitter at the letter o that's raspberry where i um talk about a lot of various stuff cartoons one piece games i post a lot of artwork there and you can find my patreon i mentioned it before patreon.com maddie's art club where i do a sticker sheet and a postcard print every month um i also mentioned i just did simpsons this month um before i've done uh let's see lynx awakening ok ko um dragon ball and oh mario rpg so um yeah so if you want to check that out and i do like mini podcasts on there i also post sketches um and then i'm also every week you can find me on the One Piece podcast

twitter.com slash One Piece podcast I do the artwork the episode images for that so if you're a One Piece fan and you're current

on the manga I would just recommend checking that out because it's a lot of fun awesome thanks so much thank you for being on the show with us today

can't wait to have you back again this very thorough exploration of Japan wait what time are we at? I'm just curious. Close to three hours. Oh, wow. So if you're not on board with Japan, we apologize for going on so long, but we love Japan

and we love all of you out there. And if you want to support our show and get every episode one week ahead of time and ad-free, please go to patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons and for the low price of five bucks a month, you'll get just that, but you'll also get access to everything behind the $5 paywall. That includes too many things to list in this wrap-up, but that includes all of our miniseries, the most recent of which, Talking Futurama Season 2 Part 1,

just wrapped up. So it's over 100 bonus episodes free to listen to, and if you enjoy talking about cartoons, there's so much you haven't heard at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. And Henry, please tell everyone out there what's happening at the 10 level extra long podcast for our patrons yes if you're a fan of this podcast or our sister podcast what a cartoon then you'll want to listen to our monthly what a cartoon movie podcast where we talk about a different animated feature film once a month but but only for our $10 and up patrons. Sometimes the episodes go over four hours long, our longest podcast where we go in depth into a different animated feature film. This month, we did Iron Giant for December of 2019, closing it out. It is such a cult classic,

wonderful film that employs a whole lot of Simpsons animators who left after season eight. So if you're wondering like, oh, did the animation get a little worse between eight and nine? It's because a lot of people quit to work on Iron Giant. And you'll learn a ton about that, but only if you're a $10 and a patron at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. So I've been one of your hosts, the Bob Mackey. Find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. My other podcast is Retronauts, a classic gaming podcast every Monday and occasionally on Friday. Check us out at retronauts.com or go to patreon.com slash retronauts to support that show. Henry, how about you? You can follow me on Twitter at H-E-N-E-R-E-Y-G. Every time there's new stuff out, I am sure to tweet about it. Same with when we do any live shows.

And be sure to follow the official Talking Simpsons Twitter as well, at TalkSimpsonsPod. We talk about whenever new stuff goes live right there. Plus, there's even some fun viral content about Twister mouths you'll see from time to time. You want to be engaged in it, we just redid it. So please, follow both of those accounts at H-E-n-e-r-e-y-g and at talk simpsons pod thank you so much for joining us this week next week we'll see you for our continued exploration of season one and that will be bart the genius and we'll see you then Shhh.

Undo! Undo!