Talking Simpsons - Talking Simpsons - ...Three Eyes on Every Fish (Revisited) With Briahna Joy Gray and Virgil Texas

Episode Date: March 17, 2021

An extra-electoral podcast this week as the show gets political with the hosts of the awesome podcast Bad Faith, Briahna Joy Gray and Virgil Texas! We get their insight into the politics of Mr. Burns' self-financed run for governor in this iconic episode, we discuss how it compares to modern politics, and dig into tons more history and tangents in this mutated podcast, so listen now! Support this podcast and get dozens of bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! And please follow the new official Twitter, @TalkSimpsonsPod!

Good news everyone, Talking Futurama is coming back for Talking Futurama Season 2 Part 2. Fresher than a summer ham, this podcast comes every Friday and if you sign up at the $5 level at patreon.com slash talking simpsons you can hear each episode as it goes live. That's right, sign up today at patreon.com slash talking simpsons for $5 to hear Talking Futurama every Friday throughout the rest of 2020 and also all the previous episodes we've done so far. So head over to patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons now or we're gonna clamp you! Shut up and take my money! I heartily endorse this event or product. Ahoy, ahoy, everybody, and welcome to Talking Simpsons, the podcast with the momentum of a runaway freight train. I'm your host, Average Joe Sixpack, Bob Mackie, and this is our chronological exploration of The Simpsons, who is here with me today. Hey, it's Henry Gelber, and I wouldn't mind having a third eye with you.

And who do we have on the line? Rihanna Gray. And Virgil Texas. Virgil, I was just trying to think of a thing, but I didn't realize you put me on the spot there. I thought you'd invent one for me. We're from a podcast called Bad Face.

I guess that's the other important thing. And today's episode is two cars in every garage and three eyes on every fish. Please stay tuned for a paid political announcement brought to you by the friends of Montgomery Burns. Burns, change the channel. You change it. No, you change it. I changed it last week.

Fine. Be a jerk. Then we'll just sit here and watch it. Today's episode aired on November 1st, 1990. And as always, Henry will tell us on what happened on this mythical day in real world history. Oh, my God. will tell us on what happened on this mythical day in real world history oh my god oh boy bobby the sometimes referenced but rarely watched film jacob ladder debuts in theaters the classic star trek the next generation episode reunion airs and the 1990 midterm elections happened and a young independent vermont mayor named bernard something or other is elected to the House of Representatives. Well, I don't see anything worth talking about today. Really, this episode came out on Election Day.

Yep. Yeah, it was. Well, it was Thursday. It was not. But it was during the week of it. Huh. I didn't realize that. I mean, I assume that the staff had planned this like, hey, hey, fellas,, hey, fellas, we got to do an Election Day episode. Yeah, I was so happy to see that it was not only the midterms, but the midterms where Bernie Sanders was elected to the House of Representatives.

That was quite a surprise. Yeah, and I'm over here getting caught up on which episode of Star Trek this is. This is when Worf meets his son. Yes, yes. It is the is when Worf meets his son. Yes, yes. It is the one where Worf meets Alexander. I thought it was Worf Jr. The kids call him Worf Jew. The most disappointing offspring

in the history of the canon. He tries his best. He's a failed son for the millennials. He's a failed son. I just like seeing little kids in Klingon makeup. It's very cute there is a uh you know i'm sorry sorry to cut that off but i'm just i'm still just still thinking about the fact that the simpsons did an election day episode before they did yes super level fox

wasn't getting the elect uh the super bowl then well also they that's a good point they worked they did have exclusive rights to the election well it's it's funny for the 92 election they again aired on the week of the election because they're like ah but nobody's gonna pay attention to this yeah they aired the itchy and scratchy movie episode that night but uh yes do you guys remember where you were in this day in 1990 i was on a midterm election day 1990 had you voted yeah i vote i vote in every election often multiple times no i guess i was a kindergartner in north carolina uh did you see jacob ladder in theater i i only know it as a reference to every fan theory is just that everything's a jacob's ladder i don't even know what that movie is i'm i'm afraid. I'm the influential movie in terms of video games,

at least. Okay. It's a good, I only know of it as something that gets mansplained to me periodically by movie buffs. But welcome to our guest, big time guest this week for such a political episode. Yes. Virgil Texas and Brianna Joy Gray of the Bad Faith Podcast. Virgil's been with us quite a few times. And Brianna, you are new to the show. Welcome. And thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be able to talk about something that doesn't directly impact the lives of millions of Americans. So you're excited to talk about a TV show that was a formative experience for a lot of people growing up. That's not Star Trek Next Generation. It's true. Although I will say as I watch this episode, I remembered that The Simpsons was considered spicy.

And I mean, we were allowed to watch it. You were one of those kids. I was a young kid when it was coming out. And I remember thinking it was completely unreasonable on the part of my mother until I listened to this episode. And Bart really is quite rude. There's so little Bart to be had, i guess he is pretty rude every in every appearance we see him in this is interesting my parents had no compunctions about me watching the simpsons but once my mother told me to not watch duck man because it was too lurid which

in retrospect it was that's absolutely not a show for children but i watched it anyway and it just gave me this twisted view on the world so uh secrets about virgil secret duck man fan yeah i'm learning so much. I want to ask a question for Brianna up front though, Brianna, you are a Harvard graduate. I want to know why you decided to not write for the Simpsons because I assume that's a job offer when you graduate. What's really funny, there was a guy in class. I mean, there's always like a crew that goes on to, I think he was going SNL. No, SNL is all the Yalies.

One of the comics. No, there's some Harvard guys. No, there's Harvard guys. Colin Jost. Okay. Were you talking about Colin Jost? No, I did not go to college with Colin Jost. There was this guy, he wrote for the Crimson and he wore a bow tie. I'm blocking his name now.

It's not important. But he famously got one of those gigs and everybody was really jealous and thought he was going to be the cat's meow. But none of us knew who this person is or what their name is he wrote for the crimson not the lampoon you so you didn't even go into the orbit of any lampooners no one of my block one of my roommates was actually the president of the crimson and so like that was more the orbit that i was pulled into i remember going into into a Lampoon party, I think probably my senior year. And the president at the time was God, what's his name at the New Yorkers kid?

Oh my God. He just, he wrote a book like shortly after college about like ants or something. You guys are like, you're killing me here. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Okay. Okay. I can do this. I can do this. I'm picturing like the discovery kids books about like different animals. Anyway, the head of the Lampoon, he knew that he knew the big wig at the New Yorker. I can'turing like the Discovery Kids books about different animals. Anyway, the head of the Lampoon's dad was a big wig at the New Yorker. I can't think of the guy's name now. I can't think of anybody's name. I'm sorry. His name was like Adam Ant.

Adam Ant. Adam Ant. Adam Ant. Adam Ant. Whatever. But I remember being at a Lampoon party and I had never been to one before and thinking, oh, this is actually kind of a cool vibe. I probably should have.

Was it at the Lampoon office? Yeah. I did editorial cartoons for the Crimson. And I remember only later in my college tenure, it occurred to me that, oh, well, Brianna, you draw. Maybe you should have considered drawing for the Lampoon. But honestly, culturally, what was understood about the Lampoon and their brand of humor and who they were typically accepting into

their ranks it really didn't even occur to me that that would be a place for me but it arguably would have been better product well i find that i find that really interesting you had two tracks and you could have written for the crimson which is like the main newspaper and it's pretty prestigious or you could have written for the national lampoon and you chose the crimson uh in college i actually i also did cartoons i did for the National Lampoon and you chose the Crimson in college. I also did cartoons. I did it for the Humor Magazine. Did you really? Yeah. So I picked the other track and I feel like I made the right choice on that one. Actually, if you had gotten on the Lampoon, who knows, you'd probably be the next Conan. You'd be hosting a late night show. Well, I didn't really do either

track. To be honest, I was not the kind of college student who was very thoughtful about the decisions that were being made in college. I was just trying to keep my head down and get through it, to be honest, and was just hanging out. So it was only as I was like a junior and senior and reflecting back on the experience that I realized that there were options and choices and lectures I should have gone to and classes I should have taken. And I probably should have thought about what I wanted to do in my life. And that's how I ended up in law school. Well, I'm happy my smart ass question led to this discussion. Yeah.

Brie, how much Simpsons did you watch in your youth? Did you eventually, you know, overcome your parents' rules on watching it? So we left the country in 1992 and didn't have the Simpsons. We didn't have it like on TV. My brother, one of his friends, parents worked for the American embassy and used to get VHS tapes and stuff. And I think occasionally some Simpsons would come through. It was mostly episodes of Star Trek, but I really didn't, I think, catch up until I came back to the States in 2001. And then the fact that all these shows just got put on like all the streaming services enabled me to catch up in the subsequent years i love this idea that you had to get content airdropped to you in a foreign

country so this is what i just took for granted like you know oh god a box of cheers classic i mean not so much airdrop but they used to get all kinds of things through the the commissary i know his friend always had jiffy peanut butter. And my brother was always very jealous of that. I'm not sure what the allure was. There were plenty of lovely local things to have that weren't peanut butter, but yeah, there was definitely a pipeline of VHS tapes that kept us in the know, but what that also created was a dynamic where we put a weird emphasis on

certain cultural products, just because we happen to have them on like VHS or betamax and not because they were actually very culturally important like you you made like a cargo cult for frazier we got ally mcbeal so we were big heads um we had junior on tape uh the classic arnold schwarzenegger joint and we watched that to death obviously we had coming to america on betamax and we watched that to death it's a had coming to America on Betamax and we watched that to death. It's a little on the nose. I mean, I'm glad we had it because otherwise we would have been completely culturally

deficient and yeah. And lots and lots of Star Trek. I'm going to say, I, we don't normally say what episode of Star Trek aired the week that we did Simpsons, but I wanted to, to be welcoming in our history.

Well, I appreciate it. I feel at home. Picturing something like the, I don't know. You ever I appreciate it. I feel at home. Picturing something like the, I don't know, you ever see the Mr. Show skit, the underground video railroad?

No shit. They'll watch it with you. Well, I guess the last like preamble one I wanted to ask for you was, did Simpsons at all influence your, you know, left-wing or, or it sounds like it came a little later in your life. Yeah. It's funny. I don't, this, this episode felt very progressive in a way that I frankly don't really associate with the Simpsons. I don't associate it as not progressive. It's just a show, you know, and it made me reflect on the way that the show

has potentially changed over time. I watched one of those YouTube, I was on a YouTube rabbit hole recently, and it was a clip talking about why The Simpsons isn't funny anymore. And they were contrasting the kind of jokes and the structure of jokes that they used to do versus now and talking about how all the contemporary jokes are the kind of jokes you would expect if there were a laugh track

and only really work if it's really telegraphing this is a funny point. Whereas Old Simpsons had more artistry was the argument being made. laugh track and only really work if it's really telegraphing this is a funny point um whereas old simpsons had more artistry was the argument being made yes and now i'm wondering if i go back and watch more early simpsons episodes instead of whatever like hulu was funneling out to me on a given day or whatever i would have a different view of the show oh yeah but you don't have to like catch up after season 10 this is an early episode it's the first one written for season two and it is actually written by i think the most for the most part written by one of the more right wing writers on the staff

john swartzwalder although i think a lot of this is softened by sam simon the late sam simon interesting i didn't realize this was a swartzwalder john wait how right wing could this guy possibly be in a pretty right wing yeah i mean he is not he was a famously reclusive man uh we people have not heard from him in i don't know a decade on the commentaries they lovingly refer to him as a libertarian crank like they're like and he wrote this episode an episode about environmental pollution and and bribery he wrote 57 episodes of this show well yeah bob bob mentioned though this is co-written with sam simon who he was a pretty left-wing environmentalist especially when it came to animal rights yeah yeah he like literally gave millions of dollars to greenpeace like that that's

where his simpsons residuals went also like the extent of like at in this period seems the extent of like swartz welder's right-wing views is kind of a pox on both their houses. You know, both liberals and conservatives are full of shit. I also think with Schwarzwalder, they as a joke, gave him episodes like this sometimes. And Wacking Day? The Wacking Day is the big one. They gave him Wacking Day, which is such an anti-animal abuse thing, which he's like not. I don't think that's what Schwarzwalder believes in.

But yeah. Well, I i mean it might be i mean you know there's libertarians who are very like pro animal like famously rush limbaugh did a thing with peter but i think all the old timey stuff comes from him the citizen kane parody and the in the opening of course with the old timey reporter beat reporter and bart and lisa literally at the old fishing hole yeah that feels very swartz weldery this was the first to my knowledge i mean i don't want to get ahead of ourselves here but this was the first time to my knowledge that they

like did like very specific Citizen Kane references there's a bunch of them in this episode but they they did that many episodes oh yeah they're very on the nose down to specific parodies of scenes in this episode yeah somebody made a cut once on somewhere

on YouTube that's like all of the simpsons citizen kane parodies uh but in the order that they would appear in the film and it's actually it's a coherent watch uh it's interesting to think about this is the first one of season two because they're not only are they using this as like a jumping off point of like oh they saw they saw three-eyed fish as a one-off joke in the first season and they then wrote a whole episode around it and then on top of that after season one they're like we love mr burns let's write a mr burns episode and also they're just showing off all artistically like in season one they do a

somewhat brief full metal jacket parody right and i think that taught them like we could just do a whole film parody let's really go for it with citizen kane yeah yeah i mean i you know for as long as the show has been on i kind of wish they had continued that meta narrative and like by season 30 done literally every scene in citizen kane just simpson fight every single scene dispersed on you know 100 or so episodes something must have been in the water i was looking this up earlier today and tiny toon adventures aired their citizen kane parody two weeks before this and i i had no idea what this was as a kid wow i think most simpsons fans from our generation when they then go to like their first film class in college and see citizen kane the light goes on you're like oh my god this is every reference now it's going to

a simpsons class and you can it makes sense of all the simpsons references and other things you guys are saying that and you know i took film classes and i watched citizen kane and i honestly have no idea what you're talking about like i don't i don't remember and i don't uh i didn't catch him so you're gonna have to flag him for me as we go we'll zero in on them definitely Definitely. It's not in this episode, but the one that finally unlocked it for me of like, as a kid, I'd seen the big ones they do in this. I sort of knew like, oh, if a guy has a big picture of himself behind him, that's Citizen Kane.

But in a later one of Simpsons, Streetcar Named Marge, there's the bit of Homer tearing up the program and flipping it over and over which is what the theater critic does when he's born in citizen kane and i didn't realize until i saw citizen kane that's when i was like oh homer did that very specific motion because they they were referencing that you know i don't streetcar named marge i don't want to get too off track here but streetcar is one of those episodes that i watched as a kid i just did not understand in the slightest did not get it all but as an adult i have a new found appreciation of it i don't know what i thought of this one as a kid because again very little bart very little of the kids it's all political stuff yeah i mean i to the as far as

season two episodes go i liked it because i mean it is about mr burns who is like one of the more interesting characters on the show and i i also find it interesting that their first like this is really the first non Simpsons, you know, our favorite family episodes. Right. Yeah. And it's interesting that they chose Burns for that one. It shows how fascinated the writers were with Mr. Burns when the rest of the world wanted more Bart. So the first attempt at season two was let's do an entire Mr. Burns episode. The family is in it very little. Yeah, there's this kind of, you know, the family almost feels like a B plot here that maybe in an earlier draft, they wanted to explore this Marge Homer tension. But it doesn't it takes a backseat to all the Burns stuff, which in my mind, I don't know, maybe it's because I'm politically inclined.

I find more interesting. And I also I mean, I also love just Burns and voice acting. That's funny, because I thought that, I mean, the part of the episode that resonated the most for me that I liked the best was the Marge Lisa dynamic and Marge telling Lisa, if there's anything that you can learn from this evening, it's to give your mother some credit or give her the benefit of the doubt or something. Don't sell her short. And then it's Marge who, you know, can sometimes get overwhelmed by the force of the other characters like the strong the strength of the other characters who who hatches the plot that ultimately foils mr burns's gubernatorial aspirations well

this episode i think they have to work overtime to get the family in there they're like okay well let's we can't spend all day mr burns's Burns' office with all the people. Let's cut back. What if Homer finds Mr. Burns and they have a scene together? Sure. You know, The Simpsons had an all-male writer's room. Some episodes were written by women, notably the very first one,

but by and large, day to day, it was all men. Yeah, not until season six was there a woman in the writer's room. And at points, you know, there's been trouble writing the central female characters of the show and often they just have a uh they just become like kind of one-dimensional and just instrumental to the plot like you know homer's gonna do this crazy thing and marge is gonna nag him and that's gonna create the kind of tension here but this is one

where you know it seems very deliberate that marge is the smart sensible one that's like a clever one yeah and even that being the case she ultimately doesn't contradict or kind of challenge Homer outright he says your job is you know you can express yourself through your cooking and homemaking and she says yeah oh yeah okay all right let me use this loophole uh wait who is it who's the right was it Schwarzwelder who said I just don't want to write Lisa in? It was in Mike Reese's book. He made it very clear that often Schwarzwelder scripts would have no lines for Lisa or Marge. And also in these all- That's the libertarian coming in.

In the all-male writers room, it was punishment. The new people write the Marge episodes. Yes. Because no one else wanted to. Wow. Also, a fun bit of trivia to go back to the harvard stuff the one freelance woman who wrote this season in season two uh is actually a crimson vet as well oh yeah oh what do you know you know that's i mean a lot of them were i mean the monogamous

lampoon you know crimson but yes harvard generally yeah uh i mean that's a that's a shame hearing that about the marge episodes because i mean some of mean, Marge episodes have been some of the better ones. Oh, yeah. The Simpsons will be right back. When you really care about someone, you shout it from the mountaintops. So on behalf of Desjardins Insurance, I'm standing 20,000 feet above sea level to tell our clients that we really care about you! Home and auto insurance personalized to your needs. Weird, I don't remember saying that part.

Visit Desjardins.com slash care and get insurance that's really big on care. Did I mention that we care? Cheaper? Cheaper, cheaper, cheaper, cheaper. How could you realize that playing with guns is an obvious cover-up for your male inadequacies? Yeah? Well, why would anyone play with guns? Why would anyone play

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With the momentum of a runaway freight train, it's the break for this week's podcast big big big thank you to our guests this week the returning virgil texas and first timer brianna joy gray what a pleasure to record with both of them about such a political episode uh you listeners should definitely check out if you haven't already, their podcast, Bad Faith, both wherever you find podcasts and on their own Patreon. Bad Faith Podcast with Breonna Joy Gray and Virgil Texas. It's a lot of fun. And if you enjoy our podcast, Talking Simpsons, thank you because we can only do this thanks to the support of listeners like you who subscribe at patreon.com slash talking simpsons this is me and bob mackie's full-time jobs and it's only possible thanks to five dollar and up subscribers at patreon.com slash talking

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slash talking simpsons and there's a gigantic back catalog over 80 exclusive podcasts you can listen to if you sign up right now and you get all the new stuff so please five bucks a month patreon.com slash talking simpsons but you know a deal even charles darwin couldn't say no to our ten dollar a month premium level at patreon.com slash talking simpsons all that five dollar stuff i just mentioned is included but at the ten dollar level you also get our premium extra long once a month podcast what a cartoon movie see each week in addition to talking simpsons we cover an animated series on our separate podcast what a cartoon and if you're a patreon subscriber for 10 bucks a month you get to hear what a cartoon movie where we cover an animated feature film

as in-depth as we do the simpsons often for over four hours sometimes even five hours recent ones have included ducktales the movie Treasure of the Lost Lamp the end of Evangelion Dexter's Lab Ego Trip and coming your way next month if you're a $10 subscriber our discussion of the 20th anniversary of Shrek we are going to have a ton of fun and you can only hear the full thing over a hundred hour back catalog of what a cartoon movies if you're a ten dollar enough subscriber at patreon.com slash talking simpson so please consider signing up today okay so this episode begins with a regular ass chalk gag though i did want to bring up that

when this episode re-aired in june 1992 they changed it to a very new at the time joke a rip from the headlines joke it's potato not potato with an e at the end of it so we got a syndication change when i just watched it on disney plus it was it was like something more mundane a little in season two or three they finally start going like what what if we change it for the for the news that's going on this one's about xeroxing his butt yes okay yeah uh so yeah the episode begins with a uh a very ambitious opening shot of just this like long long uh tracking shot down to them at the swimming hole like that's not easy to do in animation and like yeah you can bear this to

homer's odyssey and how rough that one looked in season one this is a big change and i also like how you know anachronistic bard and lisa are this episode swimming hole barefoot fishing with sticks twine wrapped around it and they get visited by Dave Shutton who is his voice is modeled after the late actor Mason Adams do your own work Shutton that's the thing Shutton very rarely

appears like sometimes if they're at like a news thing you'll see him in the background after season five it's very rare to see him. I think he was covering Bart having fallen down the well. Yeah. I remember him having some speaking roles there. Yeah.

He's I remember the shot of him at his laptop with. Oh, yeah. Then he finds out that the Abraham Lincoln squirrel has been shot and he drives off. Yeah. He said Shun seems very competent here. He's really going for the story and in later seasons he's he's played as a dodo i didn't realize it was a recurring character and when the reporter showed up out of the bushes talking to the children i thought it was a little

bit of a stranger danger moment we were waiting for well that's your that's you looking at it from 2021 there are all these things we got to be on guard for in 1990 you know it was a more peaceful time for america and you know you could just be a reporter and just go up to children ask them how's it going i'm looking for a story i'm a freelance reporter too don't worry i but i i looked it up his last key role in an episode was in season 14 and i you'll you'll find him as a cameo here and there but i think two shutton is relegated to that you look he looks too much like a season two guy and if you see him walking around in anything after 10 he looks weird his hair is blue yeah don't do that anymore i miss i miss that i miss i miss that animation style i don't like it when things get

you know standardized to such a degree that it's all you know you lose those like weird little touches uh especially i noticed that when uh burns meets his campaign staff and you get some very non-standard simpsons background characters there uh with dave shawna he's not really that much of a background character but i mean i don't know i don't watch every episode of the show anymore so maybe he's moved in with the simpsons at this point you know some hard times print mediapsons at this point, you know, some hard times. Print media died. And, you know, I was doing a blog and then it was sued by Hulk Hogan. And now I are sued by Rainier Wolf Castle. And now I got to move in with the Simpsons before I get back on my feet.

Dave Shutton's on Medium now. Not big enough for Substack. And then Lisa teaches him how to make a podcast come on this is a great episode i i remember as a kid i really loved hearing bart like mouth off to him with like well this is my day and we do sir that was a fantasy of mine to mouth off to an adult like that the show was about influence yeah and that that line is precisely when i thought to myself well mom was right hell in a handbasket uh i just loved there was something for me as an eight-year-old watching it hearing him go like well this is my day and i'm like yeah

this is my day bart's rights but yes we then get a joke of uh them catching the fish and revealing the three eyes on him and uh really great how slowly he counts the three eyes and uh and so yeah it's all the stuff about nuclear waste it was very ripped from the headlines in 1990 when the simpsons that's i it's why originally they made homer a nuclear technician like uh i i mean there were tons of you like in the united states a lot of toxic dumping stories and on top of that you're noble too yeah you're chernobyl a three mile island uh yeah during the carter administration and there toxic dumping stories. And on top of that, you have Chernobyl too. Yeah, Chernobyl, the Three Mile Island. Yeah.

During the Carter administration. And there was, you know, I mean, I guess it was like 10 years ago, but, you know, the anti-nuclear movement was pretty potent in the 1980s, not just against nuclear weapons, but against nuclear power.

And there was a lot of direct action around that. And part of this is influenced by the China syndrome. Yeah, we forget that. I part of this is influenced by the China syndrome. Yeah, we forget that. I mean, Homer is so associated with the nuclear power plant. We forget that what is in season one,

the reveal of him working there was a joke. Yes. Yeah, right. Because it's this thing that was, you know, well, weird. People don't really understand the science behind it. It was also like broadly unpopular

because of these, you know, big nuclear slip ups. I looked this up in 2010 there actually was a viral news story of a three-eyed fish being found near a nuclear plant in cordoba argentina and that's not very cute not as cute as blinky no no it was not cute it was weird nuclear power a correlation is not causation uh there's no liability here What did it taste like? You know The HuffPost article That stole it from wherever its original source was

Did not mention that unfortunately I would have eaten it Just because of the meme I don't know You have to pay for being governor It was 1990 I was learning most of my science through Ninja Turtles episodes And this all pecked out to me The idea of mutants was very interesting.

And so, yes, Bart catches the fish, and it leads to a front page news story, which I love. Again, they're already into their own history at this point, because Bart cuts out that news story and puts it in a scrapbook next to El Barto and the stealing of uh of springfield's head and i like the headlines too of like their subhead of like count the eyes mr burn and uh sister was just there for the tranquility i love that uh but yes we first hear of mary bailey here the the still canonical governor of the simpson state i just put it together because mr burns was patterned after mr potter from it's a wonderful life and. And Mary Bailey is literally a character and it's a wonderful life. So that can't be a coincidence that that's her name. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Okay. I know. I never made that connection. Is there a real life politician that Mary Bailey

might be based on? You know, I was thinking Ann Richards. Yeah. Yeah. Was she was governor of Texas by then? Well, cause she loses to W in 94. So she must have been at least running in 90. I don't. Yeah. And she might she might have been a tutor. I don't remember. It was 91. She was governor of Texas. But with her, with with Mary Bailey, there is no joke.

She is not corrupt. She I guess the joke about her is she actually trusts the the intellectual capacity of the citizens. And that's a mistake. She's very honestly, you know, I hate to say this but she's very elizabeth warren vibes i could see that yeah i uh in well in general she's just like boring i think that's why she never came back she's competent she's not flashy you know and very like also just very well liked too i i saw the wonderful life references like a way of saying this is too big like he's citizen kane this is like two visions of 1940s politics battling each other i like to think like this is how uh liberals viewed the 2020 primary this is this is bernie versus warren

or bernie versus hillary clinton you know his bernie's very mr burns like he's got all those houses and who knows what kind of nuclear waste is, you know, he's got cooking up there. Similar haircuts. Yeah. Yeah. And he's got all this pie in the sky promises. And Mary Bailey's just, you know, we're going to just have some normal structural change. The most anachronistic part of this episode, I felt, was when the bribe was offered and wasn't taken.

The 2020 version of this episode ends felt was when the bribe was offered and wasn't taken the 2020 version of this episode ends after about four minutes uh yeah the these these same inspectors show up in a later episode and are successfully bribed so that the box the box yes but i mean but just again like just i mean just the idea of mary bailey is just just a very interesting character because you know everyone in the Simpsons world is stupid or corrupt. And here is a politician that you're just supposed to think is unequivocally, you know, a decent person. And to boot, a woman at a time when there were not very many women elected to governorships or Senate. Oh, yeah. Actually, here in our first clip, this is where the politics come to the breakfast table.

And it's every every act starts with a scene at the breakfast table, the family talking about it. So, well, leave it to good old Mary Bailey to finally step in and do something about that hideous genetic mutation. Mary Bailey. Well, if I was governor, I'd sure find better things to do with my time. Like what? Like getting Washington's birthday

and Lincoln's birthday back as separate paid holidays. President's Day. What a ripoff. I bust my butt day in and day out. You're late for work, Homer. So? Someone will punch in for me. Try not to steal anything, Dad. Keep those mutants coming, Homer.

I'll mutant you. He's right about that. holidays more paid the holidays we have very few in this country compared to other countries libertarianism i'm hearing it now the idea that the worker is just lazy and just wants more time off and doesn't actually earn what they you know any you know their salary and mr burns is kind of righteous and wanting to cut corners in some respect that's a hundred percent the duality of the show in these seasons because at times they did episodes that were very pro-worker right yeah the uh last exit to springfield for instance and which you know many people say that's the favorite episode in the entire series and yet there's always this kind of satirical bite to it which is you know, you know, many people say that's the favorite episode in the entire series. And yet there is always this kind of satirical bite to it, which is, you know, we you know, the workers that, you know, they they're organizing for, you know, for for time off or health insurance and things like that.

But, you know, they're also lazy slobs. But, you know, from my position, I don't see a contradiction there. I think it's great to be a lazy slob. I'm a lazy slob. And I, you know, gimme, gimme, gimme. And that's and that's fine. That's that's how it's great to be a lazy slob i'm a lazy slob and i you know gimme gimme gimme and that's and that's fine that's that's how it's supposed to work you know yeah i want more because why should the lazy slobs on top get more than i did i demand handouts and in 1990 the lazy slob can support three children in a three-bedroom house a cat and a dog a car that works most of the time a cat cars as yeah as a single income earner too like marge

uh does uh she's not uh working a job too yeah it's well i will say in later canon and simpsons his parents do help him buy a house so it's uh it's it's not that he didn't just buy the house with his money but yeah but but it's uh you But it's not like his dad was very rich. He only had, to go back to the canon again, he only had that house because he was on a crooked 50s game show and he ran it out on everybody else. But this version of Marge here, who's very politically engaged,

like reading the newspaper at the table, I don't think there's a version of Marge ever existed again. No, in the future, she'd be like, politics are none of my business. And that would be that. But I do like this politically engaged Marge in this episode. The fact of Mary being this flat character who, you know, is not supposed to have any guile, who is supposed to believe is honest and trustworthy.

It almost seems like an extension of naivete. And then all of these women characters, including the mayor, the governor herself, are just supposed to be a stand in for how simple minded and naive and, you know, basic kind the governor female in this and to intimate that, well, because she's a female politician, she you know, she's not going to be corrupt and she's not going to have any kind of personality other than being like a good organizer and an honest politician. Like you're not going to she's not like a Mayor Quimby type. She's not going to be one of those corrupt Kennedys or, you know, like a sex maniac or something like that. And I mean, I have to imagine, you know, that's a pretty deliberate choice because I honestly can't view this episode working the same way if the governor, the good governor had been male.

Yeah. Why else would Marge be interested? Well, another wrinkle, too. Yeah, I think, too. You know, you see in Sideshow Bob Roberts in season six, you see what they do when they have two funny sides. Like it's the when the Democrat and the Republican are comedic figures that like that's why there's not a debate in this episode, too. I figure is because it's like, well, Mary Bailey's not funny. She's just supposed to be the good politician who obviously should defeat burns which is again why i just i'm trying to rack my brain but i'm sorry my knowledge of female governors in the late 1980s early 1990s is a little lacking and i apologize for that i know you invite me on the show for a certain

purpose and i feel like i've not done my homework which is why i just keep wondering if there is a specific you know a politician she's modeled after and like nobody really comes to mind like not even ann richards uh i don't know if she's modeled after diane feinstein or something i don't think schwartzweller would have done that no i wouldn't know schwartz well i i mean i don't know i could i could see sam simon giving her a bunch of money over over the years yeah i also the interesting thing with bailey is that clearly after doing this commentary al jean the head writer on the simpsons realized like oh mary bailey exists because yeah in a 2002 episode she returns for a one-off thing and this uh this commentary was recorded in 01 so that now the commentary is 20 years old i feel i feel very old eventually you're gonna have to do a show about the simpson

commentary we partially do with this podcast i i do like that homer is just very selfish with his vision for politics like he just only wants the thing for him and that i i believe it was uh from looking up it was like 71 when it officially became President's Day and not two separate holidays. But it did used to be two paid holidays. Wow, that's a real scam. You know, I think it also was done in conjunction with Martin Luther King Day being established. That was my memory of it, but I couldn't find it. Oh, that was in the 80s?

Wasn't that Reagan who was object wasn't that yeah reagan yeah objecting to that we just had martin luther king the third on our podcast and he brought that up i stand corrected uh but yeah like uh so homer heads off to work we see the disgusting break room full of plain only plain cake donuts are left it's it's cute that homer was intentionally late and then is mad that because he's late he has no donuts uh but yes burns then gets on the intercom it's also very early in the series thing where like this scene written in season three would just be burns would walk up to homer and say now all employees do this but they're thinking more realistic of like no burn you have to go on the intercom to tell everybody it's the same reason that uh wigum is not on every you know

call because they're like well no the police chief would be back at the headquarters and you know doing other things but now yeah burns will just walk up to homer and say you and and so the inspectors arrive there's a momentary weakness and burns asking for smithers to hold him i thought that was cute i couldn't unfortunately smithers gets really pushed to the background with all of these new you know consultancy has there's very little smithers and burn stuff in this yeah yeah that would have been more interesting tension there uh you know particularly in light of the uh uh some of the character development in terms of wayland smithers uh and uh you know i mean some of the more interesting episodes i always i always liked were uh ones where uh smithers was alienated from burns in some way and resentful of it they they finally play up on that in the

in the later politics one where smithers becomes deep throat to yeah out of uh his uh yeah voice of lifestyle as smithers put it but uh but yes the inspectors arrive everything's wrong with it that their geiger counters go off instantly. They're using an inanimate carbon rod as a paperweight. This one is radioactive, though. Yes. A funny thing I saw was Energy.gov did an entire article refuting this of like, this doesn't really happen in nuclear power plants. Don't worry. Yes.

Well, it mainly referenced, it was like seven things that Simpsons gets wrong about nuclear power plants. Really? Don't worry. Yes. Well, it mainly referenced it was like seven things that Simpsons gets wrong about nuclear power plants. And at least half of them were from this episode. There's not a basement full of knee high radioactive fluid. When was this? You know, I think it was like in the aughts public Obama years or it was very it felt very Obama era listicle writing to me. I didn't. Yeah. Yeah. Must be. Yeah.

Yeah. I am. I've always been curious exactly how much just The Simpsons as a show has moved like a pin on nuclear power. Yeah. I wonder if it's made it less popular just because everybody thinks of the of all the jokes on Simpsons about it. This is irrelevant. Sorry. But the guy's name is simon rich he was hired by snl oh man oh all right and his his dad is oh shoot now i just clicked off the thing but rich rich at the uh mark rich uh frank rich frank Rich from the New York Times.

So all my facts are half wrong, but that's what I was talking about. So the whole sequence of Burns acting shocked is very funny, too. I just love is like, well, that shouldn't be. I put that into my own use in life. Yeah. If a landlord is like, hey, what's that? Like, oh, I'm just noticing this it's always delightful when burns is out of character and just acts like this dandy they get the animation

correct and like there's a hole in that uh clipboard and it stays there like it does not go away this is when you're going to queue up but i always love when they uh drop in for surprise inspection on homer oh yes yeah i do that uh burns fail if burn should have fired him right after that you would think he's he's uh that just resting his eyes this was another one from the energy.gov thing it's like no no no oh there's not just one person manning a monitor station it's at least two so okay so for so that one guy can sleep when the other doesn't like with pilots yeah exactly uh but yes then came the very great scene where i as an eight-year-old learned what So that one guy can sleep when the other doesn't. Like with pilots. Yeah, exactly. But yes, then came the very great scene where I, as an eight-year-old, learned what bribery was.

In 20 years, I have never seen such a shoddy, deplorable... Oh, look. Some careless person has left thousands and thousands of dollars just lying here on my coffee table. Smithers, why don't we leave the room? And hopefully, when we return, the pile of money will be gone. Look, Smithers, the money and a very stupid man are still here. Burns, if I didn't know better,

I think you were trying to bribe me. Is there some confusion about this? Take it, take it, take it, you poor sch you poor schmo mr burns i'll ignore the felony yes i'll ignore the felony also thousands and thousands that's where he messed up that he didn't offer enough money should have been a little higher yeah even well you know in 1990 dollars it went a little farther. Five thousand bucks to ignore a potential nuclear meltdown. So my reading on the end of this episode is I always thought to myself, well, eventually, after losing the election, Burns just found a corruptible inspector and bribed him and never did any of the fixes. Yeah, I guess this problem is never solved. Yeah. I mean, the plant is worse the next time you see it.

So it's not like you fixed everything. But I love that about that. When Burns finds out how much the improvements are going to be to like 56 million, which according to an Internet inflation calculator, that's 112 million today. But even then, it's like Burns. It's a pittance to Burns. He's a billionaire. But he is so upset that he'd have to spend that money on the company he owns.

I don't know if he's a billionaire yet. You know, OK, they started him off pretty small on the on the rich man scale because rich men were not as rich in 1990. So I think he's still like a multimillionaire. Also, that is even if you are a billionaire and have to defend billionaires, that is quite a bit like 10 percent of your net worth. If I had to spend 10% of my money to sub the Bad Faith podcast, I'd be pretty pissed off. You know, we won't defend billionaires. After we get inspected by the podcast regulatory agency.

Fingers crossed. We only need one billionaire patron to change our lives. Yes. So we will defend billionaires in this case. Well, luckily, we have nine times as many billionaires today as we did in 1990 so it's looking up for your potential patronage there's more of a chance yeah a bigger goal to go from brie bringing the stats i also love that smithers like burns decides not to hit smithers only because he lacks the strength he's like what did i have the strength to take it out on you yeah i i mean also like as a kid i think it was influential on me to see how burns this obscenely rich man man man he thinks that he is now going to be broke if he has to

spend 56 million dollars singing his depression era tune yes yeah yeah he's singing brother can you spare a dime co-written by yip harburg the blacklisted writer of the over the rainbow yeah the the writer and the composer of the song were both socialists sorry i didn't know that so there's so there's a very smart kind of irony to doing that so do you have a clip of that because i love this song that to me is the highlight of this episode just the the voice acting on the singing is uh it's just like warbly it's just like it hits both burns which is a weird voice to do and uh but the fact that he's drunk once i built a railroad made it run made it race against time once i built a railroad now it's done brother can you spare a dime

half a million boots went slogging to hell i was a kid with a drum empty no it's burns is so pitiful when singing that song though he's just this sad like you but i don't want to feel bad for such an awful old rich man but he's so uh i mean also as an eight-year-old i don't think i understood what drunk was so i didn't know why burns was being so like mopey and or what a brandy snifter was well there's just a great irony of this you know plutocratic asshole singing a socialist depression era song yeah it's a problem that he caused he'll still be rich no matter what but it's this moment where we have to feel pity for him and i also like the uh the reaction of homer realizing like he grabbed some overtime while sleeping i really like that good good on homer the the sad song ends with

homer walking down the hallway and uh he calls home there's a good little gag of him pressing the one button to call his uh to call home and it's like a quick speed dial i i think in the animation they realized like oh he didn't dial enough buttons all right we'll just make it speed dial just do that they also made the phone made a weird noise oh like the coming off the hook you mean yeah it was like a future phone homer then it has a he walks down the hallway that's where we see a character not as popular as old blinky that it's the glowing rats oh glowy yeah glowy the red uh not as much blinky has freaking like tons of i had a stuffed blinky i had gotten from universal studio yeah yeah i saw you could even buy your own blinky lure for fishing if you want to go

fishing with the simpsons they didn't make a blinky fish restaurant at universal studios though no major problem trading car the pulling rat did not i think i have a blinky pog right behind bob and i was just off camera there uh but yes homer confronts that old mr burns there's such a a really good shot of just homer like in darkness looking over mr burns and poor mr burns like the scared animal darting away from him though they're they're i will say their cars have never been this close in the parking lot ever again no no and the idea of mr burns driving home is very funny yeah i'm a motorist he would be uh out of control if you know he had to drive his own

car but yes homer talks to burns and uh he realizes burns doesn't have to just take this lying down working late simpson uh uh yes sir you and I are a dying breed Simpson I'm going to share something with you hop in oh cushy Homer they're trying to shut us down they say we're contaminating the planet well nobody's perfect can't the government just get off our backs you know I was just telling the wife that if I was governor, I'd do things a lot differently. Don't get off your soapbox, Simpson. Do you realize how much it costs to run for office? More than any honest man can afford. I bet you could afford it, though.

Don't get me wrong. I mean, you're an honest man. I mean, that just meant that you could afford to run for governor if you felt like it. Of course, I'm just rambling because you keep staring at me like that. But it's true. I mean, if you were were governor you could decide what's safe and what isn't where are we going sir to create a new and better world if it turns away could you drop me off at my house it's not really clear where burns is taking homer or how he gets his car back i know it's a very small point but i was just like where are they going i was thinking about it like he's gonna take a taxi to work tomorrow uh so so it occurs to me i never really made the mr potter burns connection uh i think

because burns's voice is more this it's more snake-like it's more reptilian isn't it you know this is a kind of nasal sibilance to it that you don't really get with mr potter who's more snake like it's more reptilian isn't it you know this is a kind of nasal sibilance to it that you don't really get with Mr. Potter who's more of just like a big hollering guy yeah I think Harry is doing a bit of his Reagan voice oh yeah yeah wait

did Harry play Reagan on SNL he did yeah and in the future Burns would sound older here he's got a lot more life because he's only 80 and not 104. Yeah, yeah. He doesn't sound as much like Reagan as he later would, but it's not a straight up Reagan impression. He plays it a little bit more, so yeah.

Yeah, that's a good... Okay, so it's Mr. Potter crossed with Ronald Reagan. That's great. That's great. I like this a lot more than later season Burns, to be honest with you. That's why every animated sitcom after this has to

have the town rich guy like every everyone because burns is just such a compelling figure that you can launch any story off of really yeah you do with i mean uh mr burns walks so mr fish holder could run yeah yeah i just also love like burns connecting with simpson like he again doesn't recognize him. This is like the fourth time Burns has interacted with Homer. I also, they have MB on the thing, but they're going to have to set up that he's Charles Montgomery Burns later in the episode for the joke.

Yeah. Charles Foster Cage. It is the biggest cheat that they occasionally remember. His name is actually Charles. Yeah. Because we had to have him say the line once. I also like when the the conversation ends with Homer it's a really good animation bit that like you are the camera is like stationary

as the car backs into it and so like it goes through the windshield and like into Burns's uh hood ornament like that which is like a neutron or I guess an atom, I suppose. I'm not a scientist. Just like Homer pointing out, like, well, you could afford it and accidentally making a witty reference to Burns without intending to. So obviously there are many examples of, since 1990 of rich men running for office. mean it's funny because we covered this originally in 2015 and we were chuckling to ourselves about this man with uh comical hair i forget his name but uh yes it's happened a few more times since then but i can't think of any like i i couldn't think of a i was trying to find a prominent one before 1990 because like in 92 there would be ross perot which you'd if you think like oh

it's a reference to ross perot but he's after this there's a lot about this episode that reflects things that happened uh in the next four years for instance yes the idea of this uh plutocrat running for governor which feels very ross perot but this was pre-ross perot i mean i'm sure that's that's you know plutocrats have been running for governor for a long-ass time, but I don't know if it's a specific reference to a specific candidate. Mary Bailey being

the opponent, the year of the woman was 1992. Called the year of the woman because something like four women were elected to the Senate. That's how dire things were at the time. And also, you flagged this which i i had not realized every act opens with and we talk about politics around kitchen table and you know that's not too crazy a thing but i that to me is reflective of uh i i get echoes of the famous harry and lou Louise ads that the health insurance companies ran in 1993, 1994 to oppose Clinton's health care bill.

And it was just, you know, this man and woman sitting across a kitchen table saying, oh, damn it. Hillary Clinton wants to take my doctor away. Can't believe that. And, you know, those that propaganda widely credited with sinking hillary care yeah well and also you think about like you know who's what i think of who's the most burns like of people who have run for offices i think of mike bloomberg like that's that's oh god yeah absolutely he's right down to the weird voice harry scherer could play mike bloomberg On our last episode of Bad Faith Podcast, we ended up talking about BoJack Horseman briefly,

and you mentioned that you did not like the conceit of Mr. Peanutbutter running for governor. And I'm curious how you feel about it in this context and what the difference is. You're asking me the tough question. I am getting put on the spot and talking Simpsons right now, getting put in the hot seat. Okay, well, okay, okay first off i'm like

vaguely i'm just like look i i i watched those episodes and i just remember not liking any of that crap because i thought it was not a sharp edge satire it wasn't particularly smart uh it doesn't mean it was like bad it was like fine i guess there were gags in it but it didn't really go to like an interesting you know smart commentary smart commentary on politics, which this episode, when I think about the Simpsons political episodes, I mean, the gold standard is a sideshow, Bob Roberts, you know, the ones that are specifically about electoral politics. This one, I think there's, you know, there's a little less bite to it. It's just a pretty straightforward story of a rich plutocrat trying to buy a political office.'s a satire of money in politics and this

was before the mccain fine gold campaign finance bill when and this was also coming at a period when money was getting really pumped into politics the this was also at a time when campaigns were being professionalized in a way that they had not been in the past uh like to give you some idea of that you know in the you know 1970s or so senate races could be run for i don't know five thousand dollars something like the amount of money that mr burns might leave on conference table to bribe yeah yeah and and this was you know by the late 80s you know they're and the realignment of the parties had a big impact on this this is when it became necessary to hoover up all of this money from wealthy donors from corporations uh political action committees you know that was uh they started to have a very big

influence on things and it's just been an arms race since then up to the last election cycle where just senate candidates were raising amounts of money for losing races that would have been unimaginable for a bill clinton to raise in 1996 i i think you know if they can get to 200 million to defeat mitch i think they'll finally do it i think 200 I think they can do it. Seemingly Burns is not doing any fundraising. It's just all his own income. Very Bloomberg-like again. Yeah. I feel like I

didn't answer the question. You did not. I can pretend that I did. Okay, wait, wait. So what's the question? Why do I like this episode and not the Mr. Peanutbutter episodes of BoJack Horseman? Because, I mean, Mr. Peanutbutter was just, you know, just like goofy and facile and didn't really say anything about politics. And it also seemed like it would have been written by people

with a distorted view of politics. And this one seems to be a more focused. I mean, it's simplistic. I don't know, at the time it might have been a little more spicier. It seems to be a very specific criticism of money in politics and the wealthy oligarch purchasing a political office. And the way that

the Mr. Peanutbutter episode, I'm sorry, was there a satirical point to it? Yeah, well, first of all, it wasn't an episode. It was like a B-plot of an arc. But I think that you and I have a fundamentally different understanding of Mr. Peanutbutter as a character. And you, it's a conversation for a bojack horseman check it off right here yeah i think that i think that you are such a bojack that you kind of are dismissive of the idea that there could be depth to a character that presents

superficially as optimistic and you take him at face value and i think that's a mistake but we can plumb that death elsewhere so this podcast is no longer profitable we will invite you back for the bojack debate but hang on as i understand it your argument is i am so much like bojack horseman your orientation is to that darkness, yes. That I also dislike Mr. Peanutbutter in the way that BoJack, the character, dislikes Mr. Peanutbutter. No, that you like BoJack, like a lot of people,

a lot of creative people, can get the idea of having, you know, being depressed and complicated as being more interesting and complex. When you can be happy and optimistic, I think the part, I think that Mr.

Mr. Peanut butter's character wasn't intended to be just a happy go lucky stand in that. He, the show did work to give him depth and complexity as well. And if I recall correctly, his whole guttural run was fallout from the inadequacies of his relationship with Diane. and then there was

a whole thing where his ex-wife was introduced as the character that was running his campaign and there was a lot more there than like mr peanut butter is a happy puppy but again i'm not trying to derail this whole simpsons podcast there was more to it by which you mean uh that he his relationship was on the rocks that was the that was the political complexity yes and bojack horseman's complexity is that he's an alcoholic he needs to get over it okay all right no i i preferred the birthday dad arc of mr peanut butter that was my favorite one i mean it's great which one the birthday dad i don't remember that one what was that art uh well it was what it was what wasn't one of many shows where he was in direct

competition or basically stealing stuff well yeah it was he got a birthday card that was for addressed to a birth happy birthday dad and he pitched a show of like i'm the birthday dad i save all the problems and uh that uh that somehow was the most popular show on yeah he just keeps failing up oh i don't oh, I don't remember that. But to be honest, I only watch BoJack Horseman when I'm blackout drunk and on ketamine. Very BoJack of you. And I'm boycotting all the Larnet shows.

Until he answers for his crimes. He broke Amy Poehler's heart. Okay, so back to the simpsons we've lost half our audience uh so act two begins again at the kitchen table arguing about it marge is upset to find out that homer is supporting burns they say they're a mary bailey family i i do uh like homer has no political affiliation anyway. He doesn't say like, I never voted for Bailey before anything. He's just like, I'm doing what my boss tells me to do. Mary Bailey isn't going to fire me if I don't vote for her.

Yeah, there's a little bit of, okay, I've got a compulsion to support Burns because my child. But he doesn't really make that argument so much as I'm a dumb guy and I like Burns. Well, I mean, it's very like MAGA kind of view. Well, later in the episode, Marge, when she puts up a sign, it says independent voter. So they are very much trying to not label a party for either either side of this. Yeah. Yeah. They didn't want to say Marge Simpson is a Democrat or whatever. It feels like Homer thinks Mr. Burns will know if he doesn't vote for him, though.

Yes. Well, I mean, I think I never read the episode in that way because he's defending mr burns in the the beginning of the first act before mr burns even runs for office and saying oh it's a lot of bullshit this mary bailey stuff this oh we gotta investigate nuclear power i don't know you could argue that okay well that's because he knows that that's that's what side his bread is buttered on but it might i mean it also kind of gives off this little vibe and you know this is this is another kind of um you know maybe this is a prescient thing it also kind of feels like do you remember you ever read our dumb century oh yeah yeah yeah there was this one from around now around this time maybe in 93 94 that was the ignorant truck driver to address nation on rush

limbaugh program and he kind of has the political views of like just some dumb jerk who calls into rush limbaugh yeah yeah well i mean homer does end up being a rush limbaugh fan in just a few years yeah true or i should say birch barlow i read i read homer is supporting burns one just because he's a company man you know he's just i'm gonna defend the power plant i'm gonna defend my employer which there's something kind of human about that absolutely and then on the secondly it's not so much i felt the episode concentrated less on what homer actually does at the poll than the idea that he has to be perceived as publicly defending yeah or supporting his boss or else he'll get fired so he has to

play nice around the dinner table in the you know the final scene he has to put the yard sign in his front yard to like publicly convey that he's supportive of his boss and i think that that is a less ridiculous um belief to held yeah i think also he thinks maybe that if mr burns wins he will prosper as well it will trickle down to him in some way. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I can see how it's one foot in both. Also taxes. They want to lower taxes. It's about the taxes.

All my love meets the taxes. I also, you know, it's a mini arc in the episode, but when you really care about someone, you shout it from the mountaintops. So on behalf of Desjardins Insurance, I'm standing 20,000 feet above sea level to tell our clients that we really care about you. Home and auto insurance personalized to your needs. Weird, I don't remember saying that part.

Visit Desjardins.com slash care and get insurance that's really big on care. Did I mention that we care here at the second act opening with lisa at the dinner or breakfast table saying like oh i feel like a kennedy like she's so excited lisa has this like youthful excitement for it and you get to see that break yeah this episode too yeah and i was actually surprised i know i don't want to hop ahead but i was surprised that when they direct her to ask burns a question at dinner she doesn't push back she asked the the simplistic you know give you a free gimme question that they gave her to ask or as i feel like later season, Lisa absolutely would have foiled it

or, you know, objected to participating at all. It's shades of the marriage counseling episode where Homer pulls a similar whack thing on the family and they all just walk out, maybe because they've learned from this experience

not to go along with this kind of crap. Yeah, I think this is, in this episode, it's writing Lisa more like, you know, a smarter than average, but a precocious eight-year-old instead of you know a more grown-up person like in sideshow bob roberts she is campaigning for quimby by saying like this time he's the lesser of two evils like she's actually very informed uh much more informed politically she's very prescient of uh of how some socialists treated the

2020 presidential election. She is being written more like a kid in that she is just saying, you know, an adult told me to do something, so I have to do it. She's not as, you know, idealistic as she would be in the future, I think. And so, yes, we then cut to an evil boardroom full of political hacks, meaning to take down a very popular politician. You know, thankfully, that never happens in real life. You never have to worry about that. But I do enjoy this, this meeting of Burns's team in this next clip. Now, here's the problem as I see it. While Governor Bailey is beloved by all, 98% of the voters rate you as despicable or worse.

That's why we've assembled the finest campaign team money can buy. This is your speech writer, your joke writer, your spin doctor, your makeup man, and your personal trainer. Their job to turn this Mr. Burns into this. Why are my teeth showing like that? Because you're smiling. Ah, excellent. This is exactly the kind of trickery I'm paying you for. But how do we turn your average Joe six-pack against Mary Bailey? With this team of investigators, your muckraker, your character assassin, your mudslinger, your garbologist. Hello. Their job is to turn Mary Bailey from this into this.

The visual aids help so much. Thank you. But first, there's a burning issue that we need to address and neutralize immediately. I hate that fish. I like that he gets a deck. He's presented with a slideshow, but it's pre-PowerPoint. Interesting note, Garbologist is a real term. Really?

Yes. It means exactly what it sounds like. Yeah, I love how thankful Burns is at visual aids. He's like, visual aids help so much. He's being so friendly. Normally, he's trying to bash people's brains in with a baseball bat at these boardroom meetings. You're right. Yeah, Burns is being more receptive to help from a area he doesn't understand not not normally how burns is it's a

you know it's it's a good satire just political consultants and you know pretty early on you know like i said i was at a period when you know this the deep madison avenue the the consultancy and the money going into politics was accelerating. Obviously, that's that's been there throughout the 20th century. But, you know, it really started to take off since the 1970s. Yeah, this this I mean, I also think to get back to Bloomberg, I did also think when they said 98 percent of voters rank you as despicable or worse. i feel like that's a discussion they had to have 2020 offices honestly if uh you know if if they made the simpsons today i think really think mr burns would be more modeled after michael bloomberg it would be a a cross not between reagan and mr potter but mr potter and michael bloomberg i also appreciate just how many times

they find a variation on the word joe six pack. They just like they start from there and then they have to keep making up new ways to just insult the common man. When did that term come about? I only know it from The Simpsons. Yeah, I only heard it from Mr. Burns. Maybe even they made up Joe six pack. But I would assume that that would be. Well, honestly, so much of this is pulled from the 70s. Yeah, Joseph's fact dates back to at least the 1970s, used in political context for the average male voter.

Well, there we go. It sounds like a William F. Buckley-ism. Johnny Lunchpill feels like it's earlier. Or they created it. Or that's something that's on the Nixon tapes. You have to, I mean mean burns canonically his friends with nixon he had visited him that's right i i was like well monty they're gonna eat me alive this this whole meeting like this definitely is a kid informed me of like oh this is how dirty

politics can get like it i'm sure it made me more cynical on politics younger than I would have been. They are making their plans to take on Mr. Burns, to take on Mary Bailey. I even love their just term of like neutralize, like that's what they have to do, like that you can't go forward unless you neutralize that fish. And so, again, another thing that feels so ahead of its time is the buying of time on television to get like this is what ross perot did but yeah later people must have done it but before but yeah just basically buying an infomercial i don't know i mean famously ross perot did that in 1992 which we all remember because of the great snl parody of it uh but before that i mean maybe it happened on the local level but uh i mean i only remember the Ross Perot part. So maybe just, you know, chalk this up to another Simpsons predicted the future.

This actually is based on a thing that Nixon did in 1952 in which I don't know if he bought time or was allotted time on a station, but he had to get out in front of this scandal about him receiving illegal gifts when he was a candidate for vice president. And a line in this scene in this commercial or this infomercial burns is doing as a direct reference to that and his acceptance of a dog named checkers as a bribe a supposed bribe 56 and he was he didn't buy that time he was uh allotted it oh wow okay yeah i uh but there's like a 30 minute uh video of it on youtube he was all quite an amount of time for that. Well, he was the vice president at the time. Oh, yeah, and we actually have a clip of the original here.

You know what it was? It was a little Cocker Spaniel dog in a crate that he sent all the way from Texas. Black and white, spotted. And our little girl, Tricia, the six-year-old, named it Kep. You know, the kids, like-old, named it Checker. You know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog. And I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it,

we're going to keep it. There you go. So yes, that's when Burns is saying, why would you blame it all? A little blinky here. It's a reference to the Nixon thing. But yes, that's exactly where this comes from i had to have the checkers thing explained to me later but not because of this because homer says checkers is in doggy hell right i i had to ask my mom probably well who's checkers what and again glad that

wasn't a syndication cut i also i i think i recall like in 92 when perot took over the airwaves i probably did think like oh it's it's like Mr. Burns did. It's buying time. We were in the era of Millie, I believe Millie, the dog. Oh yeah. That would have been very controversial if they had said, you know, who's in doggy hell. Well, you know, Millie. There.

And while the Simpsons are just like a few months away from George W. Bush, HW referencing them uh when this aired but okay so yes campaign commercial starts uh we get a reference to closing bars on election day which like that was over by 1990 right or maybe was that a real thing i didn't know it was a thing it was a real thing and i don't know if really my thing but it definitely wasn't like county by county it was i mean uh i mean i think it's obvious but it was so nationwide thing but it definitely was in like county by county it was I mean I mean I think it's obvious but it was so people would not get drunk and then vote they would have to make a sound decision that was

the I guess the factory I cannot imagine voting sober that's the way to do it you make it a party you got to make a nice pattern on your little voting sheet I the closest I could find to like a timeline on it I found a Philadelphia news story about like oh when, when did this stop?

Oh, that stopped in 1973 in Philadelphia, like as a rule. But that's just one city. Is the idea that people don't drink alone? The only way you could possibly get drunk is to go to a bar? I guess they figure, you know, back then in the 50s, it's like you'd only drink if you were in a bar. You wouldn't drink in your house. Or atgi fridays like you can drink anywhere maybe that's with the right attitude you can drink i agree with that brie you can drink in the voting booth yeah you can be like bojack horseman with all his flats you're hidden you know it's a private area anything is legal

there you can vape there. You can drink there. As long as they don't take a picture of your ballot. Yeah, no, well, don't do that. They can't make you leave. Until you finish voting. There's also a rather mean joke by Homer of saying that Marge didn't know how many eyes a fish had until it was in the news.

Like, that's a real... He is repeatedly dismissive towards her throughout this, and it does come back to bite him in the news like that's a real yeah he's repeatedly dismissive towards her throughout this and it does come back to bite him in the ass in a sexist way yeah yeah too uh and uh yeah so burns is forced to smile uh he does a little bit on air of of messing up and saying what he really felt but then it begins the real ad and i really do love that the it's a really good approximation of how these ads frame arguments like how political ad can frame an argument that he just goes like oh well everybody hates this fish don't they well like i i think it's a really well done satire yeah the act of playing most chill star being authoritative on evolution yes yeah i well i will here's something that's changed since uh when we recorded this like

in 2015 for me i think i made the point of saying oh a republican like burns wouldn't use darwinism to prove something because that's like science proves it but i feel like now though like now they're pro-science when it comes to hatred of people so i i wonder if they would use what well i mean we've we've heard all about like well science says about gender bullshit from from conservatives i think it's very selective so if they wanted to use as a proven argument they probably would yeah i got it selective i i gotta say you know all the people who were aghast for four years straight during the trump administration and 2016 2020 elections like how can he lie like this how can he how can he say untrue things as a candidate running for public

office uh they just were not properly primed for this reality by watching this episode of the simpsons i saw those ads and thought oh par for the course there's also going to be said for the fact that there's like no commentary there's no perspective of pushing back you know the idea is that she lost because she's bland and good but honestly it sounds like she just is running a poor campaign you know you can be good and interesting you know she could have come back with ads that actually said real things about montgomery burns and him poisoning the entire town and wanting just tax cuts for himself and all the things that we know are probably the case.

But maybe the libertarian put the kibosh on that. Yeah, no, that's a good point. I mean, she's an incumbent governor. She should be able to run a competent, well-funded campaign. You didn't mention this, but Breonna Gray has a little bit of experience in this field.

Maybe the audience should know that she was the national press secretary for the Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign. So she might give you, she might so my esteemed colleague. Now here I am. How the mighty have fallen. I'm giving campaign advice to a

30-year-old cartoon character. I think the problem is, though, it is just so much fun to write for mr burns that when you're presented with a character like uh mary bailey you don't really care about her or putting her in your show it's just like no i want to have mr burns talk about old timey stuff and be a crazy villain but yeah well maybe who knows what kind of character mary berry would be that kind of presumes that it's impossible to make her into a similarly interesting character. I think it was they didn't they wanted her to be just pure class and like the bland, perfect politician. I think that that was just their choice there. Yeah. Yeah. Just to be the and it is kind of disappointing, but like just to be the and it is kind of disappointing but like just to be the foil of burns i don't know

how well the episode would function if they had done a weird thing to bailey like i don't know there's a lot of directions you could take and maybe she's uh maybe she is just like this the pie in the sky kind of hippie character or maybe uh i don't know maybe she has some other weird quirk but i don't know i mean that is a pretty good distinction between like very early simpsons and you know golden era simpsons where okay later on they're willing to do an episode like size show bob roberts where okay everything is a joke and everyone has something crazy about them well yeah i i think too it is that in this moral universe of the simpsons i think they view more that evil can only defeat itself. Like you can't succeed in defeating evil unless Burns like slips on a banana peel himself or it's his own error.

Well, but ultimately Marge did do it, right? Marge is the one who foiled the plot. And there's even a simple addition like Marge went to go and consult with Mary Berry. What's her name? I keep wanting to call her Mary and Barry. Mary Bailey. Mary Bailey. Oh, that's who she's based on.

Thank you. She was smoking crack in a few scenes. Well, like Marge could have gone in and consulted with Mary Bailey's campaign. And there could have been an implication that they were hatching a plot together. You know, there is a way that it could have not just come down to the whims of one housewife. Well, the political strategy of an entire an entire administration. She's she's been in office for many years, apparently. You know, they do this. They do this thing at, you know, they do mock trials.

Yeah. I famously won my firm's mock trial, by the way, for first and second year attorneys. And the case was about nuclear power. So this girl became an expert. I know that. I know. I know. Like Supreme Court justices participate in these. I forget the exact context, but they'll do like mock trials for like fictional characters. Right. And like, you know, we're going to litigate the merchant of Venus trial trial, right? And I feel like a new genre, a new version of that should be political consultants like Brie doing mock elections for fictional characters. And I feel like we should do this where, you know,

like, Brianna, you could run Mary Bailey's campaign. And, I don't know, we'll get Frank Luntz to run mr burns's campaign and then and then just play it out i i you know i think in the world of this show like the shutton and the others in the media like they really fell they did not do their jobs very well here they i mean once burns is rising in the polls they just repeat or report on burns like hey he's doing pretty good like it's just horse race uh reporting yeah that would be irresponsible in real life but fortunately doesn't happen it is kind of you know i mean i i like i personally don't think this is a great episode and i think there's a lot of missed opportunities and there's not that much unity

of action in it and uh you know one of those missed opportunities is wait shudden just doesn't show up anymore when he was an interesting character that we met at the very beginning. At the very end, he's one of the reporters on the phone about Burns, but that's it. I think they're learning with this how to tell big stories. This is their biggest story to date after really just family focused things in the first season. So they have a lot to learn. This is just them stumbling a bit in this first production episode. But yes, in our next clip here, Burns' message is reaching is reaching the people the truth is this fish is a miracle of nature

with a taste that can't be beat so to summarize say what you want about me i can take the slings and arrows but stop slandering poor defenseless Blinky. Good night, and God bless. Only a moron would cast his vote for Monty Burns. Wow, super fish. I wish the government would get off his back. That Burns is just what this state needs, young blood. I hope Burns and I can count on your support, honey. Homer, I'm a Bailey booster.

Oh, yeah? Well, I'm a Burns booster. Ow! Congratulations, Mr. Burns. The latest poll show, you're up six points. Giving me a total of six. But we're on our way. I think in that last scene, we do see Smithers,

and he's just fully decked out in Burns gear. It's very cute. I love that shot of him covered in all of the Burns stuff. Yeah, that's great. And that was Jeff Martin who wrote that jingle for Mr. Burns. That's one of his first, I think it must be his first written thing for the show. I think so. A render of songs from this era, like the Monorail song.

He wrote that. Any little jingle you hear. monorail song he wrote that any little jingles yeah uh but you know seeing the winos get uh really into this like propaganda uh that you know government should get off his back that's i mean that you know that absolutely cannot be a swartz welder thing because he genuinely believes that yes yeah it's very much so like a specific critique of reaganism and that that neoliberal uh you know we're going to drown the government in the bathtub stuff well i just think to me that the first three seconds of that ad during which burns was you know castigating the working people had absolutely no effect on the perception of what followed that should have been the bigger gaffe not these fish

spitting out right he even and that pinata thing that happens later like that he just looks so foolish you'd be like no he'd fall in the polls just from that like that to do jokes on burns they have to have him do gaffes that would make people lose elections most other times burns well so burns has the elephant there too and they reference on the commentary that that was came back with the tusks were gray as well and they had to like argue over who's gonna have to pay to redo it like back now i think it'd be much easier for them to change colors in the computer programming but yeah i mean all for an elephant that shows up for i don't know eight seconds of this episode why does it come back gray uh just a mess up on the overseas animation side

when they were getting it animated in yugoslavia or whatever uh south korea yeah but just also i noticed that abe is like covered and he's in his white outfit uh grandpa simpson like he's he's very season one and is all white get up but but yeah to oh yeah to go back to like the government get off our backs thing i do think it could be an example of as a joke on the show they would have homer or other characters say the insane stuff swartzwalder would say as as a bit so as like um when homer complains like and what do poor people do for you nothing who'd ever give to charity like that was just them having him say what swartz weller said around just quoting him something

he said in the writer's room uh but yes uh there's a long montage of uh getting out the vote march does some grassroots efforts on her candidates uh we get a ducacus tank photo reference which is works for birds he moves up in the polls for it and I will come back in uh Homer's mom episode yeah he's he is invading wearing in the same tank and I wonder if this whole episode is just very specific satires of Dukakis that we're just like not picking up on because we were all like three years old well aside from bob roberts a lot of it is about the dukakis in bush election yeah they do the kitty dukakis question joke in that one and uh which i would figure simpsons and this they're just like that that's too extreme we're not going to do that joke on the show you also see lisa and bart have these shirts on they

can barely tell what their shirts say it's it's a lot of words on one shirt uh but yes they they try to find some dirt on mary bailey it's just that she got felt up by a guy and or tried to feel her up and that was it and i feel like burns would have used that to just go like i'm not good enough that i i feel like the garbologist would use them right also the idea that that even if it were quote-unquote worse even if she slept with a guy is a negative reflection on the candidate the candidate had a boyfriend in high school it's not even a sex scandal or not even like sex is not even involved yeah it's just the second base the teenager i this was probably the sharpest edgiest joke of the show of the episode yeah uh i was kind of shocked they did as a kid i didn't understand the what uh felt

her i tried to feel her upline was but that again this is also trying to make mary is you know not toothless but like is unobjectionable as possible There's not one piece of dirt they could find like that. Not one like nephew. She got hired someplace or, or unpaid taxes or anything. It's again, it's a, it's a surprisingly woke joke for a Schwarzweller episode. Yeah. I feel like more I credit that to Sam Simon not to take it.

Well, of course. Yeah. I mean, we can read it. Yeah. I don't see it as a woke joke. I think that the joke buys into the idea that if someone tries to feel you not to take it well of course yeah i mean we can read yeah i don't see it as a woke joke i think that the joke buys into the idea that if someone tries to feel you up unless you think that they're just being like they're very self-aware there and i'm not giving them enough credit but it still

feels like even if the joke is that if he tried to fail her up if he so the fact that someone would try to find you to be sexually desirable and try to have some kind of sexual exchange with you but that would reflect poorly on you in the first place well i i read it as uh more straightforward than that that like the like here's uh the worst we could find was this thing about his relation about a relationship that she had and it's like well what happened when he tried to feel her up uh that these are the kinds of things that like female candidates have to deal with the sort of double standard yeah i'm giving them way less credit than that i don't in 1990 i think that i think the reality is that if a

candidate if a female candidate had just slept with someone in high school and then that person talked about it a consensual normal thing then that would for that would be a strike against that female candidate i think that's that's a real thing and that the the joke here is that oh they didn't even sleep together they just he he tried to feel her up she being a pollyanna or whatever like this like church mouse this this perfect person this pure pure person didn't even let him and that's why they couldn't use it not because you know the fact of her having any kind of sexual life wouldn't have been a slight against her oh i see what you're saying the way i read it was uh saying it as if he groped her

like that's that's how i read the uh but that's the thing if he groped her why even if he successfully groped her why would that in a world where we didn't have sexism why would that reflect negatively on her well that's well that's the idea that that they acknowledge that oh we didn't have sexism. Why would that reflect negatively on her? Well, that's the idea that they acknowledge that, oh, we can't use this because it doesn't make sense. No, I think they didn't use it because it wasn't successful. Not juicy. They say not good enough. It wasn't good.

He didn't go far enough. After this, we get the most explicit Citizen Kane shot in the episode of just the rally, the Kane for Governor rally, which was Kane at the episode of just the rally the Kane for Governor rally which was Kane at the height of his powers. Is he even quoting the character too? Those fat cats in the state capitol? Yeah definitely

the fat cats. Paraphrasing kind of. He doesn't talk about boss Jim W. Geddes. I just rewatched that over the holidays. It's great. One day you're going to have to do an episode just about Citizen Kane. I know it's slightly outside your wheelhouse, but it's just impacted every show that you guys cover.

I'm up for it. We both love it. And it's still on HBO Max. Sign up today. I'm going to watch Mank. I'm signing up for hbo max now uh though underrated in the reference here is not only the burns part but when it goes to bart and homer that is what happens after that speech in the movie kane's son and wife are watching it and the son says mom is dad

governor yet not yet son and that's that's what homer bart says to homer thank you for pointing that out i had no idea that part of it was part from the movie as well it's uh i i had forgotten it too i had also just recently watched it so but yeah i just it sounds like we all need to subscribe to hbo max for a month and unlock the entire hbo max library including Citizen Kane on demand 24-7. You'll get every reference after that. You can watch Wonder Woman 84 and Citizen Kane same day. Good. What a great-

Just watch them back to back and it'll just give you this totally weird outlook on life. 10 hours later. Citizen Kane is definitely shorter than Wonder Woman by by like 30 minutes but if he had a magic stone his life would have turned around he should have had that wish stone man he could have got everything anyway so uh so yes burns is getting closer but he needs to and i'm just so surprised they just skip over any debate they're like what happens in uh what the plan that is presented is on the night before the election so i guess there's never a debate or if there was a debate they never talk about it maybe mary bailey didn't want to platform mr burns yeah yeah so no election night debate none of that

kind of clash of the titans kind of climax yeah this is actually a really good point now that i'm thinking about it you have to go out of your way to write marietta the story like truly arcadian efforts to write marietta the story i also think of these jokes about him like not being in touch with a common man it kind of presages more like in 1992 the apocryphal tale of hw bush doesn't know price scanners yeah yeah which you know would not have happened uh up to that point though bush was you know he was uh attacked as a patrician in 1988 though i can't think of anything uh specific about that clinton uh and his team they made it they made that way more of a uh an issue in 92 uh and you know you know another thing uh about you know simpsons predicting reality you know when we meet burns's war room i do get a vibe from the famous documentary about the 92 election called the war room yeah i also get you know a few

shades of primary colors the john travolta romana clay about uh the 92 uh bill clinton 92 election as well which you know i'm sorry those are the uh uh references that i know i don't know if there's something from you know if there was if someone made a documentary about michael dugakis in 88 and it's just nobody watched it because he freaking lost and it was just kind of the same you know idea of like a deep campaign documentary yeah i was actually thinking bagala in carville must have watched this for some of these plans here but uh yeah you know bagala was clinton's garbologist uh that's a mouthful that's a bojack horseman joke there it is uh yeah so they come to the only conclusion they can in a sitcom that obviously the main character

homer simpson has to be the common man that they have dinner with uh and i love that burns frames it is like well i knew there'd be sacrifices he is the most common man and that he is eating garbage scratching his butt and belching yeah in the footage that we see of him what if they just made it lenny oh the way the episodes end it's episode ends it's just lenny we don't even resolve we don't resolve the simpsons subplot we'll see more of lenny's house yeah you know i finally googled garbology because when you said it sounds it is what it sounds like i definitely was thinking someone who dresses you in garb oh that's a good that's a yeah that's a good point that's a good point it sounds weird i thought it was about uh the study of greta garbo you know burns didn't spend much time with

that personal trainer he was assigned either he's skipping days there i like the personal trainer that's what i mean when i say i like the the i love the wonky animation on the background characters in this part because he's one of those rare early season simpsons characters that does not have white eyes it's just two dots they're very close together i think his hair is the same color as his skin as well yeah he's breaking all the internal rules on character design the next scene opens kitchen table one more time and this is when homer just drops the bombshell that he has agreed to this, which I, you guys are right that the media really messed up here.

The, like this story is that the wife is working. If she's handing out stuff, she's on some level working for the Bailey campaign, right? You bite into that there. The that's the, that's the media's fault there. This is a real, uh, Kellyanne and George Conway type situation. Oh, God. Well, that would make Lisa their destroyed daughter. That's Maggie.

I mean, when they age it up in the future, right? Isn't Maggie the one that's kind of hot to trot, a little bit of a wild child? Well, she is a singer in the future. Oh, right, right. Yeah, you do that episode 15 years on and maggie's a tiktok celebrity uh but i've uh but yeah this uh funny uh funny enough joke of the kids zipping off like in a very cartoony way and then homer implying that he's gonna like yell and march but he actually drops down and begs her for it. But either way, it's just incredibly,

Homer's just an insensitive guy this whole episode. That's Homer. Did you say yell at Marge? But I feel like the implication was a little stronger than that. Perhaps so. It felt a little anachronistic again. Like, you know, the kid's like, oh, I don't want to have to see this.

Like, I'm going to give you one right in the kisser situation. Well, you know, Homer strangles Bart, but he doesn't put a hand on Marge. Well, actually, he does knock her out with chloroform in the season 12 episode. Oh, Lord. That's a decade later. We don't have to talk about that. Oh, goodness. And in season nine, he knocks her out with a nerve pinch.

He does do that, too. But doesn't strangle her. That never happens. You know, Bree, you alluded to this earlier but you know what i what i do like about the this climax is marge who is you know again written by male writers uh you know her role is firmly domestic and firmly subsidiary to homer despite no we're being a moron and using these constraints of domesticity oh you can express yourself through your cooking uh she cleverly manages to express her political views in that way and uh you know i i henry i think you brought this up earlier like you compare this

episode to homer's odyssey which showed a very out of character Marge as a lush and she was like that was the episode where it was Homer trying to keep the family together and trying to have a normal family existence and Marge was like who cares let's just get drunk and watch TV and this is where I mean maybe this might be the first episode where we get

kind of like a fuller idea of Marge's character before that's you know fully that's, you know, fully explored with the, you know, the flashbacks flashback episodes, which I think the first one came in this season. Yeah.

I mean, right. Where it's like, she was smart in, in high school before she met this guy. Yeah. We see Marge as someone with a lot of promise whose husband has clearly held her back for over a decade.

That's a great way. That's a great direction that that's a great uh direction that they took that character in a smart direction i think i think there's like a very like a very clever satire there something a little a little inconsistent for me that she didn't feel like she was able to just assertively say no burns can't come here for dinner she didn't feel like she was in a position to say lisa don't ask him this perform a question asking what you really think she didn't feel like she was in a position to say outright across the dinner table mr burns i support your opponent and i don't agree with

your policies but somehow it's okay for her to do this like not very subversive pretty blatant thing of feeding him the fish and i i struggle a little bit not to i'm sorry i know i'm not supposed to be picking apart this episode in this way that's why we're here but i do find myself thinking you know in these kind of domestic narratives as they're typically written there is some sense of like threat that keeps the woman from speaking out like i mean i have to listen to my husband because he's the man of the house or he'll take my own way and i don't have anywhere else to go or threat of physical violence or threat of verbal abuse. There's something that says the woman is going to be subordinate.

She's going to sit there and take it. Yeah. But then ultimately she does the thing, which is just as it's not like she she did something that couldn't be attributed to her. Right. It's not like she sneakily taught the dog to attack old men while nobody was looking so that, you know, he got tackled up front, but nobody could trace it back to marge so she didn't get the blowback from her husband no she obviously cooked and served the fish yeah well you know i i think a lot of uh

james l brooks especially i went as a person who shapes this there's a few lines of margins that sound very much like james l brooks he often does a lot of stories about um domestic women who are more passive aggressive in there and like in their actions especially when they feel like they have no other option i think and if we with a domineering man that's that's a lot of the stuff he's written i think yeah i guess my point is that it's that was pretty aggressive the fish was yeah pretty aggressive yeah but it's also it's also clever i mean know, you didn't say you can't do that. Did James L. Brooks produce 9 to 5?

I don't think that's one of his. What do you refer to? Oh, I never saw it. Broadcast News. Broadcast News, yeah. Never saw it. Well, you know, Virgil, you were referencing earlier the way we was, and I forgot too in that one that Marge is like, she's in debate.

Like, she's very politically informed. So this is, you could read it as this is her reengaging with that while being, you know, this homemaker she's expected to be. There is this idea that Marge is like, she's uh subordinate to homer but as well i mean the you know part of how i read it is uh she is primarily concerned with the stability of the family which puts the most strain on her to be as to be you know flexible and keep things together and this is her way of being, you know, creative in that task, while also being able to promote her political views in a way that's, you know, being denied to her throughout the episode.

Well, so this next bit here, I want, I have a new clip of the them being prepped by the, the political team here, which I really love this bit. We're hoping that one of the children might pop up with a question about the upcoming election. Little girl, do you think you can memorize this by dinnertime tomorrow? Mr. Burns, your campaign seems to have the momentum

of a runaway freight train. Why are you so popular? Very good. Well, as long as I'm asking something, can I ask him to assuage my fears that he's contaminating the planet in a manner that may one day render it uninhabitable? No, dear, the card question will be fine.

Well, I think the non-card question is available. Marge! Don't worry. My daughter's very bright, and I'm sure she'll be able to memorize your question by dinnertime tomorrow. And finally, Mr. Burns wants you to appear very affectionate to him. But we must remind you, he hates being touched. Boy, Bree, when Homer said marge there i was really thinking of your the implicit threat line this is what i'm saying guys like i'm not trying to

impose my you know 21st century values on the simpsons but the joke these jokes land the idea of subservient wife lands because of the load the simmering threat of physical violence that's part of the joke it's all it was part of the joke and i love luc's part of the joke. It was part of the joke and I love Lucy. It's part of the joke here. When you really care about someone, you shout it from the mountaintops. So on behalf of Desjardins Insurance, I'm standing 20,000 feet above sea level to tell our clients that

we really care about you. Home and auto insurance personalized to your needs. Weird, I don't remember saying that part. Visit Desjardins.com slash care and get insurance personalized to your needs. Weird, I don't remember saying that part. Visit Desjardins.com slash care and get insurance that's really big on care. Did I mention that we care? Now I have to agree because the Simpsons

at this point in history, this is still 30 years ago, but at this point in history, they're written to be anachronistic, this family. They're supposed to be like out of the 50s or the 60s. So they have a lot of these older values why else would she listen to them yeah are they are they written to be anachronistic i never got that impression yeah the bunny ear tv and stuff like in in like the first season homer likes mambo he doesn't know who michael jackson

is later about a year later like uh that would drop away as they would need to write different jokes, but they're supposed to be kind of out of time. I mean, I view them always as, you know, not like Ralph Cramden types. I mean, though, Ralph Cramden is one of the inspirations for Homer Simpson, who's a man who engaged in threats of domestic violence very frequently in one of the more popular TV shows in the 1950s.

But I always view them as just very much so just working class, you know, boomers enjoying the fruits of the post-war economic boom that are over the course of the show, especially earlier seasons, like increasingly they're losing access to that either because of economic changes or, you know, because of this, changes or you know because of this you know

exploitative boss you know what's interesting is that in these seasons like there would be many episodes that would be driven by the fact that yes they can they can have three kids they can have a house on one income but they cannot at all suffer any kind of unexpected expense period that's it yeah they they're ruined by most uh what like one seven hundred dollar dog bill yeah destroys yeah then that's that's the whole launch pad for an episode and that like that stopped happening around the time homer got an iphone uh well uh brie i was curious what do you think of the framing of a of that momentum of a runaway freight train question that's not the best question.

Yeah, it's also weird because they're kind of like, if you're setting up a question for a child, and the joke with Lisa is kind of always that she's a precocious child. Why is the joke, I mean, sorry, why is the question written as though they know that Lisa is a genius? Like, it doesn't sound like something that's coming out of a child's mouth.

You know, you could just have her ask, wow, you're so successful, Mr. Burns. I mean, drawing the contrast between the complexity of her question and not just the content of the easy question, but the simplicity of it was kind of where I expected them to go. But they gave her also a very complex question,

just one that helps Mr. Burns out. Yeah, I guess in the future in Sideshow Bob Roberts, Lisa would come up with her own canned soundbite where she says, Uncle Mayor says us kids are the greatest natural resource. And it was more like done in a childish voice. So she was a little more savvy than this campaign manager is. Right. I mean, I think the campaign manager was married to the phrase momentum of a runaway freight train. They like yeah we got to get that in there yeah i'm not sure i will confess that i was distracted um i was jamming out to uh carly simon in the album earlier today and there is a lyric um it's a song about a romance that has it talks about

wanting a runaway a freight train in a in a sexual situation and i remember thinking to myself oh there's a lot of freight trains going on today in my life there's just another thing that the simpsons predicted was the hit 1990s song runaway train by soul asylum all those all those missing kids it's real bummer oh the uh i i also i like how dismissive homer is of just like my daughter's very smart she can ask the question she knows how to read a card uh and i also think most very rich people have handlers that go ahead of them to say don't touch this person don't don't look them in the eyes don't look in the eye they'll get in their elevator uh if ellen is gonna leave the parking lot you get out of her way yeah we are talking about ellen hey it goes for lots of people i'm

just i also i also uh agree with the idea that you as a candidate should not say or intimate that your campaigns are a runaway train on route to victory because that's a good way to depress turnout is saying yeah we basically already won so So nobody worry about it. You're right. And poll wise, they're by razor's edge. They're one point. Also, they're trusting the polls too much. Like a one, like when they say at the dinner, when he says like, congratulations, Mr. Governor, when they're just at 51% in one poll. Right. I also just do want to clarify the song is all I want is you in the lyric is all I want is you and your freight train whistling over my track. That's where my mind recalled when that lyric, when, when that quote came out.

Well, well, speaking of intimate situations, Homer tries to initiate one with Marge doesn't go too well. I think that really was pretty stupid of Homer that ahead of a very tense evening, he is trying to snuggle with Marge. Yeah. I mean, we see the dynamic here. I don't feel like snuggling. What's that got to do with it?

That was an edgy line too. Yeah. Yeah. Again, I'm not trying to Gloria Stein in this this whole episode but that i mean there's you could you could probably teach a whole class in feminism on some of the subtexts i gotta say you know i i don't necessarily completely agree with brie but she's making some good points here uh and uh now i think about it homer is far more loudish in this episode than he normally is yeah well he becomes more and more of a kid as the series goes on but yeah well then uh it comes

to the family being prepared there's a really good plan a panning shot across everybody getting dolled up uh there's a line they had to change so uh before airing so homer's getting made up and originally the line is uh you know he's supposed to be having dinner with a common man not rex harrison but uh rex harrison died four months before the episode aired so by the time it aired they're like i have a change into somebody else so he changed it to tyrone power who's been dead since 1958 so it was at least a dead man that nobody worried about well there's a virgil virgil uh the argument that it's supposed to be somewhat anachronistic. They bring up Tyrone Powers.

That's a Burns line, right? Well, no. His campaign manager says Tyrone Powers. They also mentioned on the commentary a funny thing that in 01 when they recorded it, they said well, we try not to make jokes about people who might die by the

time it airs. And they said they had just done a Strom Thurmond joke and they said they had just done a strom thurman joke and they're really rolling the dice but uh they're died in uh 2002 i think yeah i i looked it up they did their joke in late 01 and he died he lived another 18 months after that so they uh it worked out for they've had a lot of screw-ups in that one, like the visual joke where Homer steals the Oscar from the guy from The Killing Fields. That's one of their most unfortunate coincidences. It aired once with that name on it, right?

Before changing to Don Amici. Yeah, I'm just going to come out there and say I just hope The Simpsons never references me. That would be very disappointing. You should have been mad that you weren't in their podcast episode they had other they did they actually did a podcast episode can't uh it was about true crime podcast so you know oh not my genre well when they get to the political podcast then i can be pissed off uh i mean i like my man i've interviewed mike reese and he's still on the show so he's

familiar with my work. Hey, we have to, we have an in. Yeah. Yeah. They should talk an itching and scratchy talking itchy and scratchy joke. I, okay.

There we go. That's my spec script. But yeah, so it's the next day they're set up for the election. The night before the election, they think the corn ball stunts going to put them over the top. Burns arrives with a, a dish of noodle i always thought it was noodle koodle the way he pronounced it i'd never had noodle koodle the dish koodle growing up but important important note that they didn't eat the noodle koodle because it's knocked out of his hand so that's why there is

no backup food he must eat the fish and maybe there was a plan with the dog then to attack him to get rid of the food they cut the scene where marge is training the dog but also in the animation it looked like the pot was empty and i thought that the gag was going to be it's all for show well you know burns couldn't carry something whole a dish that's true it's too much effort i love when he gets tackled both times that like they you can really see in burns how he is getting helped up and he doesn't want to pretend he hates that homer is touching him but he is going like that's fine and then trying to pull away from him and yeah so uh after that attack he's told that the statesman

like way you handle the pet incident puts you over the top. Congratulations, Mr. Governor. That's his mistake, celebrating too early. You can't do that. They've got like a Frank Luntz focus group just watching TV this entire time, like watching the dials. And phoning in the results, apparently, because this is a pre-internternet kind of a pre-smartphone kind of a situation we're talking about here yeah you know this is a pre-1990 is the 1990 were polls that quick then like uh i mean i'm sure they were good but or quick enough i mean i've been watching

the west wing for another podcast and i feel like the poll pulls in the context of that show are still very much someone a bunch of guys and women in the room on the phone calling for hours at a time couldn't get together i mean it's a plot point frequently that they aren't going to be able to get poll results within a certain amount of time and everybody's rushing to figure it out and that's shows filmed in like the early 2000s yeah uh a lot of this is played for humor where like they find out within seconds and then everyone just leaves yeah that's true i guess that is the joke yeah but bart gets to say grace in a very blasphemous way which i i do love burns uh recovering from like only an innocent child can get away with such blasphemy and a lot of conservatives at the time underline this line

as a way to show the simpsons are ruining America and Christianity as a whole. I mean, for Falwell, if say a Jerry Falwell took that out of context, it does make the show look pretty bad. Yeah. As a non-religious child, I thought Bart has a point. Yeah. Yeah. I definitely agree with him as a kid. Like, yeah, we paid for all this. What'd you do for me, God? Nothing. Yeah. Bart is personally responsible for the creation of new atheism uh you're right but bart would definitely be in that he'd be unfortunate they haven't done a bart goes to 4chan episode yet but uh but yes home uh burns is asked a question by homer after he's aghast at how they all eat together too i love that just is just hearing them wolf down food and after complaining about uh taxes

and instructing homer not to reveal that this was all planned beforehand uh then he's given a tough but fair question by lisa in this next clip lisa do you have a question you would like to ask your uncle montgomery yes sir a very inane one Burns, your campaign seems to have the momentum of a runaway freight train. Why are you so popular? Oh, a tough question, but a fair one. Lisa, there's no single answer. Some voters respond to my integrity. Others are more impressed with my incorruptibility.

Still others buy my determination to lower taxes, and the bureaucrats in the state capital can put that in their pipes and smoke it. Oh, Mom, that felt awful. I'm sorry, dear. It will all be over soon. But, Mom, we've become the tools of evil. Lisa, you're learning many lessons tonight, and one of them is to always give your mother the benefit of the doubt. Or fair shake, or even a square deal smells delightful all right behind this can i have your plate mr burns so there are multiple blinkies at this point right there's the one that bar catches

there's the one in the commercial with mr burns did marge get another blinky are we to believe there's a third blinky on the scene here uh i i always assumed it was bart's blinky he caught but then if again if he did that it had to be a month ago like i wouldn't think the blinky kept too well but maybe that's the point that it it's a disgusting old-ass bitch. I guess, yeah, I suppose. But it's still moving, too. I think that canonical blinky is dead. And any other

blinkies are false blinkies. You can read more. You can subscribe to my newsletter at smh.com and hear this debate in full. That's because the Burns really set himself up in the in the darwin clip where he was trying to rehabilitate the existence of blinky because he didn't have to say it was edible i mean blinky looks like a modified goldfish nobody's eating goldfish he could have

just said blinky is healthy and fine and superior to other goldfish and evolution's heading in the right direction without rounding out his comments with, and he tastes great too. It's an odd comment, but I think he wanted to say, oh, also this fish is good for the economy because we can sell them to people for food. He should have stuck with selling them as pets. Then he'd be governor of a

nameless state. When I watched this as a kid very young, I never understood why Burns couldn't just eat Blinky. Maybe it's me maybe it's because i internalized his message it's like yeah it was a normal fish who cares i mean one bite obama did take the sip of a flint water you gotta commit to no he didn't he didn't take the sip well he wet his lips that's not taking a sip no he could have he could have put the fish he could have put the fish in his mouth obama literally did the mr burns thing he was he just was like yeah i'll take

his oh yeah flint water it's all great you know i'll just put it on your lips and pretend to take a sip it's all right virgil are you saying it's not bloomberg it's uh it's obama i mean it's like that was a pretty messed up thing that obama did was after giving this whole damn speech about how great the water is now not taking a sip of the water. That's very Mr. Burns. Well, that's a statement on Obama's ability as a politician. He didn't drink it, but looked like he did. And Burns did eat it and failed.

Like, that's really the test there for him. I can see why Lisa is so cynical from this point on in the show just broken by this question she has to ask and uh i mean i also i do love how burns responds to the own his own question he asked is tough but fair uh that's an extra rubs it in and he doesn't even care that she asked it he just walks away but but yes one other bit of animation that's so weird in this, they do a thing they would never do on the show, which is that dropped jaw that goes down to like his stomach. That is so cartoon. They're very weird.

Yes. It doesn't really fit on this show, but it wouldn't really happen again. But when the animation goes like a tracking shot, like from Marge opening to like up and down over blinky like that is such a great bit of animation and so is the spit i really like like how slowly burns choose it and once the the trajectory it flies across the room like i it's really well done for for season two of simpsons very good animation yes as it flies across the room they say that he was it was over before it hit the ground

ruined before it hit the ground get me the city there here's your headline phil burns can't swallow own story the latest polls indicate burns popularity has plummeted to earth like so much half-chewed fish. You must have no tricks left on your sleeve. Smithers, boil some coffee. We're not late yet. Yes, we are. Come on, boys. The old guy's finished.

Wait! Come back! You can't do this to me! I'm Charles Montgomery Burns! Okay, so one thing... If you were working for bailey uh would you like that headline about burns burns can't swallow own story you can't pay for coverage that good right right that's smooth yeah you're right the the media is uh the springfield media is pretty fickle they were all on burns's ascent and now uh after the uh the spitting of the fish incident they're all they've just turned

completely on him which yeah he should have just bought the springfield shopper like that's what burns should have done they're free bezo style yeah if they are that fickle it does seem to me that he should be able to turn this around and that the goombas all gave up on him that quickly i'm not like who's paying the good like if ifombas? If Burns wants to keep paying you to run his failed political campaign, the consultants, in my experience, stay around as long as the money tap keeps flowing. Yeah, those Bloomberg consultants getting paid ungodly amounts of money, they weren't like, ah, my guy's finished. Right.

Don't worry about my last invoice. I'm just leaving and uh that's when we get his fake first name charles montgomery burns yes and uh you know first one yeah i think that's the first time he announces it right yes yeah because it's to set up the room trashing scene parody from citizen kane and where though in the movie when he says you you get is me i'm charles foster kane he says uh doesn't he say that at the love nest when the uh yeah he's screaming at the reporter going down the stairs but yes it's a similar scene an old man just trying to trash a room but what i love

is that when lisa eventually stops burns burns is struggling with the piano as if he's going to tip the piano over it's very improbable and i love it i like that lisa is the homer can't stop him and in fact joins in and destroying things uh but lisa is able to pull it off they decide they're gonna just destroy something tasteful and i think comes to what i wish was the final line of the episode because i think it's uh i they don't i know why in season two they wanted to end with the uh with margin homer in bed but it's much funnier to say ironic isn't it smithers this anonymous clan of slack-jawed troglodytes has cost me the election and yet if i were to have them killed i would be the one to go to jail that's democracy for you are graceful and defeat sir yeah the sweetness is fine but it's it's a

much better uh ending you're right to go out on. I love hearing Burns just say out loud, I want to murder my political enemies, and the only thing that stops me is the law. That's such a great, just evil thing for him to say at the end. That's a good contrast to Trump, who said, yeah, if I shot someone on Fifth Avenue, nobody would care. That's true. That's the difference in time.

Burns seems to take it as a fact of like obviously it would be the end of my political career if i killed somebody like he can he agrees to that reality but this ending is there's a real specific i mean this is a palatable difference between politics in 2021 and politics in 1990 where uh you can imagine uh plutocrat running for office saying what if i did kill someone? Burns should have just spun that to be like, my fish was poisoned by the Mary Bailey woman in this house. Like, arrest Mary Bailey. Yeah.

There you go. That's the perfect spin. I'm better at spin guide than their team. They're ready to hire you anytime, Henry. Henry and the ending of this, of this episode is very similar to a lot of the endings of these early Simpsons in which it's finding success through failure and that they might have lost, but Homer's ambitions are so low that he'll win no matter what. Yes.

Yeah. I hardly see what destroying our meager possessions is going to accomplish. She's right. Take me home. Smithers. We'll destroy something tasteful. Ironic, isn't it, Smithers? This anonymous clan of slack-jawed troglodytes has cost me the election. And yet if I were to have them killed, I would be the one to go to jail.

That's democracy for you. You are noble and poetic in defeat, sir. Simpson, I shall make it the focus of my remaining years that your dreams will go unfulfilled. Uh-oh. You're busted, Dad. Oh. My dreams will go unfulfilled? Oh, no. I don't like the sound of that one bit.

That means I have nothing to hope for. Marge, make it better, please. Can't you make it better, huh? Homer, when a man's biggest dreams include seconds on dessert, occasional snuggling, and sleeping till noon on weekends, no one man can destroy them. Hey, you did it! It's a sweet little moment, though, especially from Bree's reading on it. Marge being this quickly forgiving of homer feels a bit cheap on that level but i guess it's her taking the high road i i suppose that's how

they're writing that always works it always works yeah yeah back then they wanted to end it with the family so i get that but it's similar i guess in the end i i i like this episode as a political statement but as it's their first big politics episode yeah the show would be so much bigger politically uh and and braver to in instances yeah i know so i mean you know aesthetically better i think you know i think when i i think you know what makes the golden era the golden era is because it was just like joke every five seconds and the jokes pretty much all hit and like that's the that's in my mind is the real contrast between this episode and sideshow bob roberts which to me is still the gold standard uh and you know i i know we're not talking about sideshow bob roberts yet uh you know there's an

interesting contrast between that one and then the later season ones when they were satirizing things like Fox News. And it just did not hit as well because it did not have that same kind of surrealism. It became much more literal, for lack of a better word, liberal kind of humor. I think they were following Daily Show style too much. They were following the pack on that stuff. What do young people like? This Jon Stewart. All right.

Let's get some of that. I mean, lately I've been seeing a lot of the season five episodes, Democrats versus Republicans next by back to back. Like Democrats, we hate life and ourselves. Republicans, we're just plain evil. Yes. I've been seeing that referenced a lot lately for some reason. I couldn't tell you why, but that's a more,

that's a more just like piercing political statement than the sort of drawn out you know approaches that are found in this episode i think well yeah uh brie any any final thoughts yourself as someone who is obviously not as regular as simpson watcher as you fellas here i actually was pleasantly surprised by how political this episode is because the more recent episodes that i've watched more recently feel less like political commentary to the extent that there's anything political in them at all and more of just a narrative depiction of like politics this isn't there doesn't even seem to be anything as as sharp as the idea of corruption being presented as a norm right, I was, I was like thrilled to see that sort of a thing. And I'm

struck by the extent to which in Washington, you know, the idea of a narrative that says your politicians are corrupt, and you should get money out of politics is perceived as being too high falutin and difficult to understand for the average man. So you got to, I don't know, promise them an income tax credit or something. When it's that sort of thing that resonates so deeply that, yes, you can find it in a 1990s episode of The Simpsons and everybody gets it. Even the kids get it. So I really liked it. This made me want to go back and watch more early Simpsons. Have you not seen all the early Simpsons, Brie?

No, I didn't. No. I thought you caught up when you got. I mean, I watched episodes, but I didn't encyclopedically go through and watch The Simpsons. Watch through. Well, you know, maybe we can cut a deal at some point where I'll watch through Next Generation and you'll watch through Golden Era seasons. No, that's not a bargain. There's no bargain there.

You've already committed to watching Star Trek. That's not how negotiations work. You sound like a Democrat coming in here. Whoa, let's have a $15 minimum wage when it really should be $22. Sorry, Virgil. I'm not as dumb as that political party. You've already committed.

But wait, I expect you to adhere to norms and do the right and fair thing. No, you're talking to a mansion. I know what my worth is. As a parliamentarian, I say that it should happen. He's banging his gavel, folks. Guess what?

I ignore the parliamentarian all the time. Because you can. I'm just trying. I mean, there's a lot to chew on here. And I actually think Brie's starting to convince me on some of her points. But I'm trying to think of other episodes we could do and come back on. Because again had a wonderful time oh thank you i'm sure brianna gray did too i did this is a blast maybe so much do i don't have you gotten to the simpsons are going to africa you're coming up on that close you know brie might have a uh you know she might have a personal

view on that one i personally i have lived in africa i have nothing all of it at the same time i have nothing to do with it if you want to do brie as a solo but i mean i would be happy to hop on no matter what well sure i i let's i i'm gonna pencil that in right now simpson safari i think it's at the end of this season we're doing season 12 so well brutal it's not the best one brie i'll just tell you now but another perspective would help though oh also it's an anti-union episode because homer's mad at the uh shopping bag yeah the bagger union which is based on a real strike that happened in la oh right right i forgot it's that was from the era of cold opens that had

utterly nothing to do with the rest of the episode. Thank you guys so much for doing the show. Yes. And where can everybody find you guys? You can find us at our podcast, Patreon, Bad Faith, at patreon.com slash badfaithpodcast.

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see you then. oh no an election that's one of those deals where they close the bars, isn't it? Sorry, Barney. I wonder if he's going to say anything about that horrible fish. Oh, Marge, what the big deal? I bet before the papers blew this out of proportion, you didn't even know how many eyes a fish had.