Talking Simpsons - Talking Simpsons - Treehouse of Horror (Revisited) With Ian Jones-Quartey

Episode Date: February 24, 2021

It's time for our season 2 revisit to cover perhaps the most important Simpsons episode ever, and we're joined by our returning guest Ian Jones-Quartey, creator of OK KO and Executive Producer on Steven Universe. We discuss how Simpsons changed TV with its trio of Tales From The Crypt-inspired adventures, and we celebrate the trio of classic directors who made it all work, so listen now... if you dare! Support this podcast and get hundreds 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, a crowning achievement in entertainment technology. I am your host, the covered-in-space-dust Bob Mackie,

and this is our chronological exploration of The Simpsons. Who else is here with me today? Hey, it's Henry Gilbert, and consider this a podcast of forgotten lore. And who do we have on the line? I'm Ian Jones-Cordy, and come on, do it, man, the blood thing. And today's episode is the very first Treehouse of Horror. What a whole this year. I love Halloween. Today's episode aired on October 25th, 1990,

and as always, Henry will tell us what happened on this mythical day in real world history oh my god oh boy bobby evander holyfield defeats buster douglas for the heavyweight boxing championship in japan a wind named amnesia is released in theaters while in american theaters mystery science theater classic Soul Taker is released. And that overlaps with the actual run of Mystery Science Theater. It does, yeah. I never considered that it was technically contemporary of Mystery Science Theater. Joe Estevez, correct? Yes. And one of two Robert Zadar movies they did.

The other one was, I think, Future War? Yes, yeah. Fantastic. Zadar Zanel. future war i uh yes yeah fantastic zidar zano i believe i believe zidar wrote the opening to one of joe estevez's books of just like the introduction and just they they were they were good buddies uh wind named amnesia i remember being on the v the box on the shelf but i actually have never seen that one i might have seen it but i don't remember that's my little joke yeah i don't know if i've seen it i all i know is amano did the designs yes yeah i think yeah yeah but i don't think i've ever seen it i feel like i've seen a trailer for it on like you know i don't know central park media like another like

anime tape or something i can imagine seeing the trailer for it ahead of like Eiko VHS. Or Angel's Egg. Yeah. Exactly. That was another Amano one. I think that one looked more like Amano's designs than Amnesia. The hyper detail worked better in Angel's Egg. I think in Amnesia they had to tone down it a little just for budget purposes. And yeah, Vander Holyfield beating Buster Douglasouglas before the buster douglas boxing

video game came out for the genesis oh man bad timing yeah it's a shame uh but evander i well who knows what's happening by the time you listen to this but in the news recently was evander holyfield because people are talking like mike tyson in his 50s just had a boxing match and now people are like what if him and evander holyfield had an boxing match. And now people are like, what if him and Evander Holyfield had an exhibition match in the next year? Like, will people actually pay to see that? People will pay to see anything. Yeah, sure.

But hey, welcome back to Ian Jones Quartey. Woo. Hey, thanks for having me. Ian, of course, has been on the show a number of times, but obviously the creator of the great cartoon, OK KO, Let's Be Heroes, and just a fantastic legacy in the world of animation. Thanks so much. And yeah, I'm really happy to be here on this episode, which is such like an animation highlight for like an early Simpsons episode. Oh, yeah. And you I mean, on your shows you worked on, especially OK KO, I uh by your count had like three halloween episodes

yeah um i'm just like a huge fan of halloween episodes uh i love yeah just a chance to get spooky with the characters and i think simpsons is like the standard bearer i think uh i didn't work on regular show but regular show kind of uh tried to do like a treehouse of horror style thing as well um and i just always like yeah when uh you know the simpsons really sort of set the stage of like this is something you can do just to have fun with the world and stuff so it's cool to see like this tradition like start yeah your your buddy toby jones worked on some of those uh regular show halloweens i think those those were really great i and yeah you're the ok ko one with the characters from ghoul school was uh it was one of my all-time favorite episodes of the the whole series oh thanks so much yeah

it's uh it's another thing yeah similar to the simpsons it, oh, it's a chance to kind of like have fun with, you know, whatever pop culture, spooky pop culture stuff you can play with. And yeah, we were just like, we wrote some really nice letters to the Hanna-Barbera people. We're just like, can we please use these characters you don't care about but we do yeah you also ian really helped me and bob i think appreciate more the the early years of the show like we we talked about this on the uh the first episode we uh the season one we we did with you and toby and i think uh it's true for this one too because it's so early season two that they they're still you know finding themselves but this like visually this is such a great looking episode it's a huge step up and you could tell how much they've learned you know and the season two episodes really they benefit

clearly from the experience that they've all had in season one which they had a rough go at it yeah it's just uh you know i made the argument before that in the same way as comedy nerds we love to see comedic bits and uh timing improve from like episode to episode seeing it happen to the animation too is like a rare treat so like you know these early episodes are just like they're so fun to look at and three of the strongest simpsons directors are directing on this this is back when there was a director on each segment yeah yeah and and also i saw that like the assistant director on all three segments is jim reardon yeah so this is wow a packed show of directors and he'll be directing pretty soon

in the season too yeah yeah yeah this i mean this is such a a great looking episode when you compare this to you know the the roughness of say homer's odyssey it's it's it's wild to think this aired within the same year for the series yeah it's it's like it's very astounding and yeah all of the each of the segments you know and i have my favorite things within each segment but they all kind of have their own feel too uh which i really like and also and i know uh before we get into treehouse too i i know you really were a big fan of the bark gets an f episode i i was i was curious like what what what are your thoughts on that one oh yeah uh it's actually kind of similar it's like bark gets an f uh is like one of my favorite episodes just because you can really feel the show coming into its own.

They're like having fun with it being a cartoon, I guess in a way that's kind of free from them being scared about it being a cartoon, which season one kind of has a little bit of friction there. Bart Gets an F, it's like you finally sort of get to see them enjoy the fact that they can kind of do anything. And it's just like one of my favorite shows from The Simpsons. It's almost like a remake of Bart the Genius. Yeah, yeah, it's true. That's kind of what I like about it, though.

It's like if they could re-approach this bart storyline with the benefit of like knowing the characters better knowing the world's better knowing what they can do it just feels great and it's got a really good uh dream sequence part too yeah yeah and i i think silverman really is like took his game to the next level on that one too like uh compared to the well babysitter bandit he kind of had to do like a fix-up job on that but that those two episodes back to back uh him and his team really took a lot of uh took a lot of new approaches to the series in that episode yeah that that like pan across the uh this the scene in snow day yeah just like a new achievement for the show at that point

in its timeline just like uh you had never seen anything that beautiful or ambitious before on the simpsons yeah it's honestly just like gorgeous and amazing you can really feel that kind of ambition uh kind of follow through into this episode as well and uh yeah yes uh you know on the production of this one there's a story they have on the commentary but we got the inside scoop from jay kogan we got her old interview the dirt from kogan that interview is on our patreon correct yes yeah uh but yeah do you want to go into it henry uh yeah as uh as kogan said it and you can hear the whole thing in the in in our interview and kogan is funny because he's he still is in the entertainment industry but he really is just like hey you know and i'll just tell he he seems very free with his opinions i'll say uh which i appreciate it but so as he's told the story and kogan and walidarski

they wrote the middle act of this one uh he says that it began with matt graining coming into the writer's room one day and saying we should do a ghost stories episode i think that's how who shot mr burns happened too he just walks in says idea, and they have to make it. Yeah, he joked around that they love Matt Groening and he's a genius and all that. But they also said sometimes at the time in the writer's room, there was a frustration that he would drop an idea on them and say, well, you guys write this. I'm going away. And I think that he, as he put it, the late Sam Simon wasn't a fan of that idea of just being told like do ghost stories. And they also were worried that it would be too cartoony. They'd lose the groundedness of the series.

But Kogan says him and Walterski were really pushing for it. They thought it would be a lot of fun to like break format and do these crazy stories and kogan said a big reason they were able to sell simon on doing the show was that sam simon got into the idea of like well what if we did the raven like that's such a famous poem i love it and kogan who said like nobody knows the raven he doesn't particularly care for the raven but he's like yeah no the raven let's do it yeah it does feel like uh we'll get into it when we get to the segment, it does feel like they had something to prove with that segment, for sure. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's fun to see them, like, do something so earnest.

Yeah, which they, well, you hear on the commentary, though, they were, like, scared to be that earnest. They're fighting themselves the whole scene, I think, as it aired. This is really the first, like, breaking of the rules, right, that James L. Brooks put down. Like, no, real family, real circumstances, and then we have a crazy Halloween episode. And also, Kogan said they were, it's not a joke that they have the thing at the start with Marge. Like, they were legitimately concerned. They terrified children with it.

So, comparatively comparatively though when you see this one it is kind of like bart's joke later like the first the first one isn't very scary by comparison yeah that is really true and uh also though on the commentary i i really the next time if we're ever able to interview david silverman again this is another one on my list but like on the commentary he lightly touches on how incredibly stressful doing this episode was and i'd really like to hear more about it because they they kind of like gloss over it on the commentary they are like really punchy and actually kind of rude about the animation on this uh i don't i don't know what's their like last commentary of the day i don't know what was happening in 2001 or 2002

when they were doing this but yeah they're're just a little too snippy about this. Yeah, I mean, watching the Simpsons commentaries was always such inspiration for me when they existed. But man, it was always a bummer when you wanted to hear, oh, this is what the animators went through. And you just never got any of it i know like on a few times there's just like straight up insulting the animation and uh mike reese is like you know we were so impressed by this when it came back and he's talking about the portal in the in the haunted house segment he says now this looks like an ambitious washing machine and i'm like man like isn't david silverman in the room i know yeah i when i started listening to the commentaries

you know uh as a as a man in his 20s i i really just liked all the fun stories about the writer's room stuff and i just like man it sounds so fun to be a hollywood comedy writer all those things but now as i i listen to them for like the eight millionth time for the podcast i am thinking like the animators should have a separate commentary i want to i want to hear them just talk about their craft separate from the other fun stories that the writers are kind of dominate on the commentaries yeah i mean you know not to get all curmudgeonly here but you know there is like you know people have a lot to say about the division of writers and animators and who gets more spotlight and who gets more credit and you know who appreciates who and you know i think the thing

is you know writers and animators are both groups of creative people who feel uh undervalued and so when it comes down to it the writers are more likely to like dominate you know the conversation well they're usually outnumbering the the animators in the in the recording room too yeah but uh yeah as the story went that that it was a very difficult season two for for the directors because uh in silverman in particular he became official series director but also still had five episodes and so did wes archer and so to rich more and then they're told also you're going to direct a third of another episode as well and they only hired two more directors right they only hired uh reardon and kirkland right yeah and it it sounded really

rough like silverman just says like i don't know how we got it done, but we did. And I'll also shout out our friend Warren on his podcast. Simpsons is better than in his Wes Archer interview. Like Archer mentioned specifically the overwork that included this episode on season two led him to like briefly quit the series because he was just feeling too just way too much that casts a little bit of a shadow on treehouse that i think you know now now 30 years removed we can just appreciate it as just you know a great job done by all the artists involved but and now it's normally a uh holdover episode from the previous season so they have more time to work on it it's not like the first or second production episode for a season that factoid is really funny to me knowing that wes archer would end up directing on rick and morty maybe one of the most design intensive shows i've ever seen and he's like 30 years older now oh man uh maybe his heart's been hardened so much more since then but we do have one superstar

to talk about before we get into this so finally uh we have the debut of alf clausen on the simpsons so we all know alf uh it's going to be a little like mini corner for him on this podcast honestly we could do a series about him we could do an entire entire podcast about him we're not going to give him enough justice but he is essential to The Simpsons, in fact. So I had one of the DVDs in, and I was like, what are the extras on here? And one of them was, oh, The Simpsons get their Walk of Fame star.

And it's just like a cheesy PR thing with Matt Groening and James Earl Brooks giving a little speech. And they're getting little shots of people in the crowd, and Matt Groening comes up to Alf Klaas, and on camera he's like, this guy is the secret weapon of The Simpsons. It's all this guy.

So it makes me even sadder to think that he's not on the show anymore and hasn't been for three years yeah at the at the time of this recording there's like a very sticky lawsuit going on after alf's leaving the show let's say and yeah so richard gibbs is gone uh is it richard gibbs like yeah it is richard gibbs it. It's more than one. And then they would try out two other composers after him. And one of them will be back in the next episode because this is the fourth production episode. And the next one is actually the third production episode. Okay.

So like one, two, and three are not Alf Klassen, but four and onward is Alf Klassen. I mean, you hear the music in this episode like i especially in the second segment i just think like this is why he got hired the when you hear the like the scoring of stuff happening on screen like to so much silence it's just perfect his his instincts just fit for the show clausen was a an amazing hire for them i i mean the show the show would still be going i would think at least into many seasons you know production wise they'd get some other composer but his backing track of all these moments really do matter quite a lot and like especially in the raven the music is so good in that segment. It really sells it.

Yeah. Hearing this episode, it's clear why they needed Alf to sell everything about it. Honestly, yeah. Like you said, Henry, the second segment, it's like the fact that we got kind of like, we got Kang and Kodo's theme out of it, which is like so recurring and so important. You know, you just think of that music when you see the characters. It's a really good showcase of his skills. If this was his audition, I'd say he nailed it. So I can talk about where he came from. Like the composer on Simpson and Delilah, he also came from the TV sitcom composing trenches and his first work was composing cues for a few episodes of mod so that's where he began a few episodes of mod and his two

big jobs for the Simpsons where he was a series composer for both Alf yes Alf Clausen made worth the music for Alf and for Moonlighting so I want to say like the last guy was a guy like in the Mary Tyler Moore verse like he composed for Mary Tyler Moore and Lou Grant and Rhoda. A lot of Brooks work. I'm sure Brooks found him. But I want to say probably Gene and Reese was like, oh, we worked with Alf Clausen and he was great. Let's try Alf out. So I want to say there's got to be a connection there.

You'd think, yeah, the Alf connection of Gordon Shumway, I should say. The Gordon Shumway, I should say. The Gordon Shumway connection. And so outside of scoring The Critic, Bette Midler's short-lived early 2000s sitcom, and weirdly enough, the movie Half-Baked, The Simpsons was his life for the last 30 years. That is not an error. I double-checked.

Like, that can't be true. I did not know that Half-Baked thing. That's really an amazing career, but it makes total sense in a way and i don't want to rehash the lawsuit because it's ugly and it makes me sad and you know he's having some you know health problems that come with aging but uh who uh who scores the show now is a company called bleeding fingers music and han zimmer owns that company so essentially it's like a music production company i'm sure they do good work and you know know, their cues are fine, but you do miss like the singular musical vision of one composer writing everything.

So it just it's not this. It can't be the same and it won't be the same. Well, and Clausen had, you know, usually at least when I say full orchestra, I don't know, like the number of members of it but he had it was live instrumentation usually he was writing for which you know is was uh special back then and and still is and i that that the simpsons i believe with losing alf they also lost live instrumentation i think that i think i think that's true yeah it hurts it too but that's also it's a budget thing you know and budget crunch happens to all of these shows even one as big as the simpsons which i hope everything you know everybody just mellows out and things get nice between alf and the the company i it's it's it's a really sad like some

ugly ugly dirty laundry is coming out on what people i mean i hope we at least get an in memory of when he passes away if they snubub him, I'll be very upset. No, no, that would be, I would think they're classy enough to do that. Hopefully. But yeah, I mean, you just hear his music in this and it's like, it's a huge step up from season one. Like season one depends so much on these just, you know, big stings like, like just these. Yes, the famous gibbs things that we all screamed about oh that babysitter bandit episode can't deal with it anymore

yeah when i when i think of alf clausen i mostly think of like there's a bunch of like incidental themes that he added to the show which really kind of you know which really kind of deepened the thing like character themes there's like a nice rhythm to a lot of the uh pieces of music uh that kind of like get you in the mood for like here comes a joke you know like you know cutting to the simpsons and you just hear that sort of like you're like oh here we go yeah it's just this is the start of a scene kind of music and not to mention the show from season two on where really season three like it becomes a much more musical show just like songs songs upon songs that even if it is you know jeff martin you know writes it too like even uh martin would be i think the first to say like clausen's orchestration of his compositions really took them up a notch too and think of how many uh versions of the ending theme

he wrote the just instrumental versions all the different variants on those he was so talented yeah and they're all they're all amazing and you know it you feel like the reverence for like the original danny elfman song and trying to sort of like make it work in almost any situation it feels really good yeah he found yeah you're right he found like these tones of the elfman opening too and and expanded on those or use that as starting points for so many other themes in the show too yeah i just i think of like what's the the music sting for like burns being evil or even like his version of sideshow bob's theme which is just the cape fear theme but like it's uh legally

distinct yeah yeah yeah it always felt it always it feels weird that it's not there now or like you hear like some library uses of some of the stuff but like i recall like you know the simpsons movie has this completely different feel uh and it doesn't you know quite feel like simpsons music i think hans zimmer did the score for that movie correct i think so yeah i don't know it's uh it's good to see him join the crew yeah yeah it's it and it's a it's a really good like 25 years for him but yeah his last uh episode that he was credited on is uh season 29's whistler's father so i think like 27 28 years something like that yep the simpsons will be right back.

Thursday. Woo, what a ho this year. Welcome to The Simpsons Tales of Halloween. Hello. Something scary happening. From a haunted house. Do it again. No.

Do the blood thing. Come on, do it. Do it, do it, do it, do it, do it. To outer space. Yay! There's something not quite right about this. The girl's right. Let's get some applesauce out here for these portops.

You'll laugh till you scream. The Simpsons Halloween Special Thursday on Fox. 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. We 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 quote the raven nevermore on this week's episode and thanks so much to everybody for listening

and a big thank you to our guest this week ian jones cordy we always love having him on especially for such a landmark episode as the first treehouse of horror please if you haven't yet check out his series ok ko let's be heroes it's on hbo max and hulu currently and i think you will have a whole lot of fun if you like the simpsons also a big thank you to all of our supporters at patreon.com slash talking simpsons you see me and bob are able to do podcasts like this every week thanks to the support of the listeners on there who pledge five bucks a month and help me and bob do it as our full-time jobs those people also get tons of

extras every month you get a giant back catalog of amazing exclusive podcast miniseries us covering shows like the critic futurama king of the hill and mission hill and each month you'll get a new episode of our talking futurama podcast as we're going through season three and you'll also in march start getting our newest talking of the hill podcast where we cover season two and a huge back catalog of extras to go with it as well. Please sign up at five bucks a month to help me and Bob do this as our full-time jobs and to get tons of extra podcasts.

And you know something even fancier than radish rosettes? That's our premium level at patreon.com slash talking simpsons you get all of the five dollar stuff i just mentioned but for 10 bucks a month you get a big premium extra podcast each week we do our what a cartoon podcast on the free feeds but if you are a 10 subscriber you get access to our monthly What a Cartoon Movie podcast, where we cover an animated feature film in depth to the same degree that we cover The Simpsons. Recent films include the Studio Ghibli classic Whisper of the Heart, Dexter's Lab, Ego Trip, End of Evangelion, and coming this month, the DuckTales movie from 1990. We had so much fun, and you will too

if you listen to those over 100 hours of original What a Cartoon Movie content. You'll get behind that paywall for $10 a month at patreon.com slash TalkingSimpsons. So please, sign up today. last pre thing i want to say too as i i did find out there was one i do think graining came with the ghost story thing partially as an expansion of Tracy Ullman shorts right yeah in season two there was one called scary stories where uh it's Bart Lisa Maggie telling each other each other scary stories that involve turning off the light switch and I do think it came from I've

seen other interviews where Granny goes like he wrote a several Ullman shorts that were like and then the characters are in the dark you just have to draw eyeballs it's the floating eyeball show yeah but so i i think this is another one it's it's hard to even think of like oh yeah this is an expansion of a shorts thing because the shorts are just they're lost in time we thought that in our bill kopp interview that it's just such a sad thing that like they're they're not really archived anywhere just off of comedy central recording the best possible version were like mid-90s comedy central recordings after that like they're just nowhere and they deserve a blu-ray release there's nothing to be ashamed of this is where one of the most important cartoons of all time

came from you can't bury your past even the ktma episodes of mystery science theater are all out now yeah they stopped sitting on them i think you, when you're on the inside of a production like this, you don't value those, you know, those foundational blocks as much as maybe people on the outside like fans do. So I guess I can I can understand why they wouldn't want to sell it, especially, you know, but at the height of physical media, they really should have done it. They would have gotten us all to buy an extra DVD set that year. They could have sold like millions of them, just like the things you've never seen or they only aired once or whatever. Just like the last episodes. Call it that. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't care. In 2003, they sold so many. Oh, my God. Oh, man. There'd be an entire just a shelf at best buy just for that uh i want to go over two things up front about this episode that bother me about the halloween show so number one it's called treehouse of horror not treehouse of horrors and i see people write it the second time all the time including al jean when he was tweeting

about it this year special he even he called it Treehouse of Horrors. I mean, it makes more sense to me, horrors. It does. Yeah, I mean, Vault of Horror was the comic. Yes. So I think that's why it's named after that, or that's why the title is like that. So yeah, Treehouse of Horror, problem number one,

people get that wrong. Problem number two, this is the only one that takes place in the treehouse, so the title doesn't make sense. Problem number three is the title screen says The Simpsons halloween special yeah so it has to everyone has two different titles every year it just it frustrates me that's all for someone who likes things to be orderly i'm like everything about this is wrong i guess it's part of the horror right yeah it's uh it's a it's unnerving bob it's it's the nevermore for you i demand organization in the show uh well it does it does fit with their dual naming of the christmas episode as well it's the simpsons christmas

special and also simpsons roasting on an open fire it is interesting to think about that eventually treehouse just ascended to the official thing they call it on the show like they they stopped calling it the simpsons halloween special and they accepted like the internal name is known enough by the fans that they just call it that i can't remember do they actually put treehouse of horror on the screen now i definitely think on treehouse 30 they said treehouse 30 treehouses or something they talked about it on that yeah yeah it's interesting that they had like two titles for it, I guess, you know, these things happen. And then the fans started knowing about it.

And now you can't back away from it. It's like Snake and Jailbird and stuff like that. I mean, the thinking was like, well, no one will ever see these titles. Maybe the week it comes out on the TV guide, you'll see it, but that's it. But they didn't know about like DVDs or streaming or whatever when you're like scrolling through and looking at the titles we were supposed to just watch these once and forget about that and watch all the commercials pay attention to those don't be a freak like homer remembering old tv we actually yeah so when we talked to john vd who wrote uh did you write any segments in this one no but this one he's a writer

on this season in that like one of the king of the hill episodes is called John Vitti presents return to La Grinta as a joke on him for not being there during a rewrite but now that is preserved on Hulu on DVDs in every airing you see his name is there and it's an inexplicable and we found out what it was amazing this episode though begins with marge's disclaimer here i'll play the quick clip to also warn our audience that this will be very scary hello everyone you know halloween is a very strange holiday personally i don't understand it kids worshiping ghosts pretending to be devils things on TV that are completely inappropriate for younger viewers. Things like the following half hour.

Nothing seems to bother my kids, but tonight's show, which I totally wash my hands of, is really scary. So if you have sensitive children, maybe you should tuck them into bed early tonight instead of writing us angry letters tomorrow. Thanks for your attention. They don't do it every year, but it's fun whenever it comes back, the Marge warning. And that is a parody of the opening of the 1931 version of Frankenstein, and we have a clip of the important part of that opening. It is one of the strangest tales ever told.

It deals with the two great mysteries of creation, life and death. I think it will thrill you. It may shock you. It might even horrify you. Oh, no. So if any of you feel that you do not care to subject your nerves to such a strain, now is your chance to, well, we've warned you. I love that.

Well, we warned you. That's good. And he's in front of a stage with a curtain on it. Presumably it's a red curtain. Yeah. And yeah, this is just one of the examples of the show. Season two, they're really working through the controversy. And I think they're done with it by season three. They're just having fun with it but yeah like a simpson on a t-shirt i never thought i'd see the day right this uh this opening about getting

the angry letters uh the way the raven i think is trying to be like no see we're actually an educational cartoon we can teach your kids something i think that's part of it too and bart gets an f as the underachiever and proud of it. Yeah. Yeah. And they're they're writing this like probably in January of 1990. Maybe by the time season two, like they're partway through that. They're on Thursday. The ratings are getting lower. They maybe they're all thinking like, ah, we worked on Alf.

Now the the fads over. We we can relax. Yeah, I guess you can feel them kind of uh responding yeah or like maybe almost over correcting to what they think the audience is gonna think but uh it just comes off as so so quaint and cute now yes yeah i well and also them putting marge in this position to be the warner and like a prude almost it it fits with the itchy and scratchy of march yeah uh which will come later this season too i will say when i watched as a kid like i it didn't scare my mom off from letting me watch it and i think actually my brother and i took pride in that like oh we're like bart and lisa she says that it doesn't bother her kids and it doesn't bother us either we're just like the cartoon character that's funny I mean did your parents

Bob see this and worry that you'd be scared by it or something I think we watch it together I have memories of watching the uh at least up through like season five or six watching them all of my parents when they were alive there's no way my parents would have approved of this at all they were like against me watching the simpsons in general i don't know if i saw this until probably not syndication it might have reran uh like shortly after i don't think i was there live for this one i think by the fourth year that when they had enough for a two hour block, they would just do a marathon of it. I think so. Maybe maybe that was it in the in the rerunning of it. And we're talking about how this show almost killed all the directors.

One of the super ambitious things I noticed up front is just it's a bunch of zooms into the house. I mean, it's broken apart. The cuts are when the lightning flashes. So there are cheats, but still just the constant zoom across the landscape to the Simpsons house passing tombstones and whatnot. Way, way cool. Super stylized and awesome. Oh, the zoom in and then with Snowball 2 hissing at the screen. It's such a cool shot.

Yeah. All the camera truck-ins and zooms are really impressive. And the only digitally aided Zoom is like the title, Simpsons Halloween special title. Like around the same time, like I think like Hanna-Barbera was doing this digitally, like all like Zooms and stuff like that. So to see them do it all like in camera is like very, very impressive.

And yeah, no, no scaryeen names at the start of this no you still have the hideous green font that just takes up the entire screen and henry how did you feel about uh garfield being listed amongst the dead i don't know why they they got something out for garfield there is it that they hate garfield and want him to go away is that is that it garfield and friends was huge in 1990 uh yeah and and I thought of them as equals in 1990. Eight-year-old me was like Garfield and Simpsons, the two best shows on television. They both hold the mirror up to society. Yeah.

It seems kind of, yeah, it's just sort of random because like all the other ones kind of fit the theme. And then it's just you have Garfield, which is great. And I don't think we mentioned no creepy names either. No parody names either no parody names either one oh and you know in two years Garfield animators would be doing Simpsons episodes when they go to film Roman for season four right that's true I Homer is basically a taller Garfield uh and Casper the friendly boy that was a good that was a good job I like it better in the disco it's like we get a disco's dad got it but it made me think of how the casper movie which i remember liking actually went into

the backstory of the child who died to become casper yes yeah that was so weird like yeah it's christina ricci asks him like how'd you die or what what did death feel like that that was heavy for me as a tween watching that i was just looking at christina ricci as a tween uh and written by sherry stoner that movie that's right yeah honestly yeah if you're if you're gonna do a casper movie like where do you go i think that's it you how did casper die that's what we all want to know they're the questions we've always had just like yeah i which this casper joke presages the better casper joke at the end of this season. One of my all-time favorites.

A dark joke, to be sure. And even Marge is like, lighten up, kids. Yeah, would you lighten up a little? I also noticed Cornelius V. Simpson, which seems like a reference to Cornelius Vanderbilt, the great-great-great-grandfather of Anderson Cooper and Timothy Oliphant. Oh, wow. And vanderbilt fortune uh i guess he's the start of it there but the episode then begins properly with homer going trick-or-treating which this even as a child did confuse me i thought did the kids go trick-or-treating earlier and then homer went alone or are they going to do it later like why

would the kids not go trick-or-treating to get free uh candy i've always had that question they're missing out on valuable trick-or-treating time i like the idea that homer went on his own yes he didn't he didn't chaperone the kids he's like and we have like three so we have uh they have more time to kill because the shows were longer back then but we have the intro with marge we have the credit sequence and then we have the uh the wraparounds with the treehouse so like a lot of time is passing from the beginning until the first segment i like how they had the time to do uh the wraparounds which you know they they drop really really soon in these in these uh halloween shows but it is fun to give you know it is fun to give like a little bit of context to what's going on but the

way you mentioned the uh shorts you know the way that the wraparounds kind of end up it is kind of evocative of the simpsons shorts maybe like the good night uh simpsons one yeah well anytime the kids hang out together and just be kids like that that's when it feels more shortsy too and i as and also you do have wes and silverman directing these segment two of the three segments and they they are the shorts originators i also i think of homer remembering that uh the christmas special he called described himself like i'm just a big kid like i love christ Christmas so much. So he also still loves Halloween? Homer the holiday lover. That's what he's known for.

But yes, Homer wants to see what the kids are up to. What a whole this year. I love Halloween. Wait a minute. Let's see what the kids are up to. And the policeman on the other end of the phone said, We have trace to call. It's coming from the floor below you.

Get out of the house! But it was too late. End of story. Yawn. I heard that when I was in the third grade. It's not scary. It's too. It's not. It's too. It's not.

It's too. It's not. Fine. Then you tell one scarier flashlight please here's a story that's really scarifying oh brother i call it bad dream house great music yeah the first just hearing the music there yeah the uh but yeah actually thinking more about the shorts the way lisa says like oh brother like that is a real like end of a short scene kind of thing too uh but i i also noticed that like edgar allen poe gets like writer credit in this it's not adaptation like he's so it seems like sam simon decided like i

am i'm sharing credit with edgar allen poe on this he's being cute about it very fun yeah and uh yeah obviously there's a lot of poltergeist in this segment but i think uh it's more amityville horror yeah and uh like it's a that's a series that nobody even thinks about but the fifth movie came out the summer before this episode the fifth amityville horror movie and there's a series that nobody even thinks about. But the fifth movie came out the summer before this episode, the fifth Amityville horror movie. And there's a tiny bit of shining here, too. Yeah, I noticed. Yeah, there's a little bit of shining in there. So it's weird thinking about this episode.

In my memory, you know, the shinning always kind of like slots in there, too. Yeah, it's I mean, you did get Homer with an axe, though, right? Yeah, it's pretty much the same shot as as before yeah the the the poltergeist stuff always struck me more in this because i i even watched amityville horror eventually like in the late 90s because i as a simpsons mega fan i was like i probably should know this one since it's such a key reference to it but it's such a forgettable movie and it's also like based on it's one that it was like one of the first like based on a true story horror films but it's all bs based on a famous hoax yeah yeah uh but like yeah some p the based on a true story

is like a family said their walls were bleeding all right well let's make that into a movie i'm sure it happened this one's written by swartzalder, which I definitely can feel that in like the Marge is a real nag and Homer is just like, come on, don't be. It's also a great crazy episode for sure. But yeah, they also animate the titles on these. It's not in post like for all three segments, which is an impressive choice, I guess.

Well, let's talk about the big guest star in this episode and i will play the always respectful anti-death jingle here so james earl jones and he plays a character in every segment and it's very distracting when he's not serek the preparer yes yeah uh james earl jones a living legend at 89 right now i mean he's not Sarek the Preparer yes yeah uh James Earl Jones a living legend at 89 right now I mean he's it's it's redundant to say but he's an incredible talent like one of the best actors of his generation with a voice that is unforgettable and I think he was one of the first uh actors to actually be credited in the credits with their real name yeah Harvey Fierstein I think is the first he was the first and then Jamesames will jones right after yeah he's a great like addition of texture to this whole thing you know you feel you feel like this is an extra special episode because

of that and he gets the joke like he's a really good like he's especially in the third act a second act he is uh he he's a good at playing along with along with them for the comedy of the scenes. Oh, yeah. I'll say the only distracting one is when he's the mover. Yes. This mover sounds like James Earl Jones, Marge. It is very distracting. Yeah.

I mean, yeah, we all grew up with him as Darth Vader and Mufasa. But I also say if people haven't seen it, his Oscar winning performance in The Great White Hope, which was a film adaptation of a Broadway play he originated, he's amazing in that. Also, if you – it was filmed for the Tonys. He originated the role of Troy in Fences. Right. Which Denzel Washington would then play in the film adaptation and in a uh 2010 broadway revival he is a mate like look up his tony performance of it it's incredible like he's yeah i and he's still still active he was darth vader just a couple years a few years ago and in

rogue one i guess he was mufasa in the live action lion king live action in quotes lion king as well they kept him okay cool yeah see i believe he was the only guy that came back i mean you can't really replace him that would be impossible uh but uh yeah so the family's moving into a brand new house uh homer stiffs the james earl jones jones voiced uh mover on a tip Google says you should pay a mover $5. You should tip $5 for every hour they work for you. That's what Google says about tipping movers. Yeah.

I have nothing to say about movers except hire movers. If you're out there and you're like, I can move without movers, just do it. If you're not in your 20s anymore, hire a mover. Yeah. movers just do it if you're not in your 20s anymore hire a mover yeah i uh my last move i did like three years ago i when i did finally pay movers i was like what have i been doing my whole life i would to save 200 i like broke my back and just like and a lot of your things yeah and tortured my friends by being like i'll get you pizza just help me move it's like no i if if you can afford it get get movers it's it's worth every dollar is worth it whatever you pay and so yes they're

moving in homer mentions that it was a motivated seller that got them in there and there's some great visual gags i love the get the books putting themselves back in the box as soon as bart removes them uh though i did notice a weird shot and when mart says like what on earth was that like a table leg fully obscures her i it's an odd choice on the framing of that shot marge heads into the kitchen she sees the bleeding walls and that's when they see the vortex which i think it looks good it looks good it looks really good i don't know what they're on on the commentary uh it's got like this uh it's got like this in camera sort of shimmer over it it's a cool effect it's incredibly like difficult to do it looks awesome and it's got this like gradient as it goes in it's very impressive

and the way the orange like turns into a flash of light that disappears like that that's like an anime explosion effect it's so cool looking uh yeah i the i think the vortex is a poltergeist reference i think that like they open it there's a door with a vortex in it after the little girl gets eaten and yeah i was getting i was getting poltergeist from that and uh yeah i also like that the gets something thrown back saying don't stop throwing the people in the other end they know vortex exists and they just don't want crap they're not interested in figuring out who's on the other side of it they just stick up all the littering and uh and so yeah they come back into the room bart is floating in the air being choked by

floating things i like that that makes homer angry he's like let's see you talk your way out of this one boy i love that which there's no way you can blame bart for what's happening there but homer is ready to be like this is obviously bart's doing that feels like a very swartzwelder uh touch yeah line oh man swartz welder is totally understanding homer this one i also i i think this is the episode maybe the episode where dan really figures out homer like he has to scream so much in this that i think he really gets homer in this one yeah the homer voice felt like you know like almost fully formed i would say you know definitely in the raven segment it's like it it definitely gets

like pushed uh as far as it'll go at least for like a while and it all feels like the character we know homer especially i think the the nuttiness of the treehouse gets homer to scream so much more that i i i wonder if that's what push castle and added to be like walter matthau just has to go away entirely from this voice i i can't do it this much screaming and keep that no more jackie gleason either yeah yeah uh but yes marge isn't liking all this and homer homer is trying to convince her to stay i can feel an evil presence in this house evil hi at least you're scaring your mother children get your coats we presence in this house. Evil? Quiet, Lisa. You're scaring your mother. Children, get your coats. We're leaving this house right now.

Now, wait a minute, Marge. It's only natural there be some things wrong with an old house like this. It's a fixer-upper. What's the problem? We get a bunch of priests in here. I'm not going to live in a house of evil just to save a few dollars. Don't be so stubborn! We evil just to save a few dollars. Don't be so stubborn! We're not talking about a few dollars. We're talking about a few thousand dollars.

It's got great high ceilings. Tell you what. Let's sleep on it, okay? All right. But if anything happens what could happen i think this was the one that creeped me out the most as a kid it didn't scare me but just like how the simpsons almost kill each other and also the music i remember that really creeping me out as a kid because i never never heard anything like that before yeah yeah also one of the best things about these like uh earlier simpsons is like seeing the characters

suddenly become like uh three-dimensional like you get so much of that in this in in this segment too with them all floating around you really kind of get to feel like homer go like towards and away from camera in like you know a fun way that maybe they wouldn't do in a normal episode it's like it's really fun to look at they're having to figure out a lot of new angles to portray them from because they've never floated before in the series i i love and also like it is a very swartzwatery touch of homer is literally flying through the air like it's already metaphysical but homer's still like ah you know what could happen? Nothing's going on.

Let's just sleep on it. I especially just love his like, he gets up to the top after saying there's great high ceilings. Was that so ADR? But it's just like, just full on scream and then fall. So funny to me. And especially like very Wes Archery like mouths on him as he's screaming. It's so funny to me and especially like very uh wes archery like mouths on him as he's screaming it's it's so funny uh also and i also think it's another poltergeist reference of lisa feeling

the evil presence the little girl doing it i guess really maggie is more the little girl from poltergeist in the as the youngest sister but yeah i just homer and homer saying like don't be so stubborn like god also good but uh but yeah oh and another like great cartoony drawing like after homer hits the ground his face squished into the ground yeah such a funny drawing too yeah it feels like um it feels like the way his uh head squishes back to normal maybe happened a little slower than it was supposed to. But it looks amazing. That's part of the curse of the house that's doing that. It's affecting physics.

But yes, it's night in the house. Everything's getting scary. When you see in Lisa's window the tree outside's that's another kind of poltergeisty reference just the scary tree outside but not that it does anything but uh there's another one that's like clearly adr but i really love it of when the house is talking to bart and he says are you my conscience that's really great i really want a cell of just like lisa holding the knife oh yeah just out of context it's very funny just her point when he says the butcher knife lisa and she just pulls it all out like

it was in this giant butcher knife was sitting by her bed just running her finger along the blade yeah yeah and her eyes are just like completely dead the the animators now it's uh we've seen the simpsons and hallow Halloween specials do the craziest stuff, but imagine the animators who are just in the second season. They're like, we get to draw Lisa holding a knife and trying to kill someone. That is fun. That is a very new experience for them. This show debuted less than a year ago uh yeah so you feel like the organic fun

of them blowing off a little steam yes but you know it's it is mandatory fun because they were told to do all this stuff you know you see them have fun with it and uh yeah there's even a bit of maggie walking around with a knife in her mouth. Oh, that's great. Yeah, a little knife. Yeah, and that's where Homer is holding up the axe in a shining or shinnen reference there. And I also like the silliness of Marge. Marge is, I'm in the kitchen, Homer. Why did she say it like that when she's not crazy and she's making a sandwich i love that mislead especially like as it cuts to all of them i mean just amazing shots of all of them laughing and

cat like walking in a circle like stalking each other that's a great shot and then it cuts to marge bringing a knife down and then being a sandwich like that's a good that's a really good joke. But yes, Marge has to prevent a knife fight. Die. Die. Everybody die. What's going on out here? Homer, Bart, Lisa, Maggie, stop it. Sorry.

Sorry, Bart. Sorry, Mom. Sorry, Maggie. That does it. Children get dressed, we're leaving. Oh, come on, Marge. You said you Maggie, stop it. Sorry. Sorry, Bart. Sorry, Mom. Sorry, Maggie. No, that does it. Children get dressed, we're leaving. Oh, come on, Marge. You said you'd sleep on it. I don't care what I said.

This family has had its differences and we've squabbled, but we've never had knife fights before, and I blame this house. Mom, Dad, look. I like how out of nowhere that is. Yes. She just suddenly finds it in that scene, the Indian burial ground, as they call it. She opens the door and just like, oh, you know, let's look down in the basement. I just love their very conversational getting out of killing each other.

Just being like, oh, sorry about that. Once the spell is broken, they're like, oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. You know, in Poltergegeist the realtors do a lot more work to hide the native burial ground 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?

It's just there with headstones, like Christian headstones. Yeah. Which that leads to a funny thing on the commentary, my favorite reveal. We talk about the stress between animator and writer on this. Mike Reese tells the story that, so there's crazy horse and not so crazy horse tombstones in there. When the animation came back and other producers saw it, they were like, these animators adding these bad jokes, we're mad. And then Reese on the 2001 commentary reveals that that was actually his joke that he had sent to the, as requested by the animators to put a sign gag in there. He sent him that. And when it came back and they blamed the animators, he just let it happen in silence and did not take credit for it and on that commentary he finally confessed it's 18 years ago he made it clear

at last and you could tell their story was insane uh and also the joke it's fine yeah it's cheesy but yeah like i feel like they're also learning what a sign gag can be and how it should be displayed because you're like some of these you can't read because the the people buried in the in the graveyard are tonto mahatma gandhi and then we did crazy horse not so crazy horse but the camera scans past two cochise and hiawatha are also buried there oh man i didn't even catch that but just like the camera pans across the graves really quick and then freezes so like you have to catch it in the pan you have to like freeze frame yeah they i think they they definitely were learning better i mean we're past the you

know barely legible signs of candy most dandy they're they're getting better at it but but yes that leads to what a dead dan is just uh he's an emmy winner this whole episode i think i want to meet mr plute yes yeah this one-sided phone call here is is fantastic He's an Emmy winner this whole episode, I think. I want to meet Mr. Plute. Yes, yeah. This one-sided phone call here is fantastic. Mr. Plute, Homer Simpson here. When you sold me this house, you forgot to mention one little thing. You didn't tell me it was built on an Indian burial ground! No, you didn't! Well, that's not my recollection yeah well all right goodbye he says he mentioned it five or six times let's go children oh gee mark

yeah that's great yeah yeah he's really stretching in the homer voice yeah oh god this is like it did barrel uh and that that one's a direct reference to poltergeist right yes isn't it like poltergeist is like you son of a bitch you only moved the headstones or yes yeah yeah like you moved the cemetery but not the headstones and they just uh yeah that he it's an actual reveal that his his boss lied and didn't uh but in this case homer when he was touring the place was told many times that what he was buying and he's and how he wasn't listening i love i that's what i love uh when they write homer is this like for this whole segment he's a he's a dumb dad who's proud of this uh who's proud of this deal he got and as his deal falls apart and it's clearly not

as good as he thought he is defending it at every turn i that's a funny place to put homer in for the whole sequence uh as the house reveals itself and just starts like full-on talking to them there's some again great animation like of the backgrounds like the house oh yeah different like it's like split level backgrounds and stuff the house is kind of like breathing yeah oh yeah the um the although like palette changes on the uh walls as they like start moving and stuff it's like really really fun yeah and to do again like to think that there be notes on this animation when you think like a a com overseas is doing so much with with this in their their second year on the show and their first real full season on the show it's it's incredible

they pulled this off uh but yeah as the the house is straightening up and this uh we you know i'm complimenting dan but also julie kavner really brings it in this uh next clip you will die you will die slowly your stomach will swell your intestines will rise and boil your eyes will burst and some horrible stuff, possibly your brains, will start coming out through your nose. Shut up! Quit trying to push us around! Stop saying those horrible things and show some manners! Look at me. I've never been so angry. My hands are shaking. Runners! Look at me. I've never been so angry.

My hands are shaking. Better than your eyes bursting. But yeah, just her like scream, like Julie having to scream that much in the Marge voice is another big push for her. You've never heard her that angry before. Yeah. Maybe since. Yeah, it's a nice fun. It's a nice fun turn on the story with that

she like tears the house a new one kind of and the house actually like a pot like kind of draws back like he's he got scared by marge and i he i also like that he's he's the house is kind of making up things as he goes like probably your eyes it's just so so good i and then as they as the house kind of calms down i like how bart and lisa play with it in different ways like bart wants him to just do tricks for him while while lisa is trying to get in touch like analyze the house and the house refuses to be analyzed leave me alone i like how it goes from trying to scare them, just being annoyed by them. And also then Marge is like, hey, don't call me lady.

And also another great pose as she threatens the house and says they're going to have to live together. And then she goes with like, please. There's really good posing. Her looking up at the ceiling and her uh when she

says please like you can see this little pause and her like please like yeah it's really good just uh posing on him there yeah and i love how we're getting into the whole uh you know early uh series uh joke of you know the simpson family is so horrible which i think is also kind of playing off of some expectations that uh you know they thought the audience would have too oh yeah yeah you know this is kind of they expand on it with the monkey's paw like that yeah the the monkey paw is that is the last big thing of them talking about how the show is is annoying and people hate it they give the house an ultimatum they head outside and the house says i feel like there's some hard cuts here like there's there's so much adr and i think that's really in one in three that bitchin is an adr

thing like what if bart swore more it's great yeah it feels like a bitching out of nowhere it feels like it was cut from another episode or something like an existing bard clip it might be i i mean i it taught me the word hearing bart say it did teach eight-year-old me that that's a word you can say uh and and yeah that it's again another i i don't i think the house in amityville doesn't disappear the poltergeist one definitely implodes on itself. And in the movie is a really good bit of like just special effects. But in this case, it is like self-inflicted death by the house on itself rather than be with the Simpsons. And again, our choice team, they should be so proud of what they did with that like house implosion.

Like whoever animated that like above and beyond there. It's so neat, yeah. Yeah, the segment is gorgeous. And yeah, like Bob said, it is kind of creepy. And I think a lot of that does come from you really feel like you're in this setting and it's very atmospheric. And Lisa wraps it up with the moral of the story which he does for the first two acts but not the last one that's funny the both acts uh like the first story the second story end with disappointment like oh boy i guess we suck don't we yeah as it sucks like it and in

both cases it's like i thought it'd be a sad ending but actually where are the monsters like both are the we're the monsters kind of ending uh it a very, it's a weird feeling to leave on the first segment with Lisa, them just going like, can't feel a little bit rejected. And then they just walk down the street. I mean, too, I feel like in my first viewing of it,

I didn't know it was a series of scary stories. So I think I had some level of confusion in my first viewing of like, oh wait, this, this, it's over now and then i i didn't know it was going to be a trio of stories as we come back from the commercial homer is actually very scared by that last story like he's just shivering in fear uh but bart not

so scared that wasn't scary at all bart oh. Oh, yeah? Well, how about this severed finger? Ew, baby spit. Well, that last story was just a warm-up for this mock-up retail, which I call... Hungry are the damned. And I just got that that's Bart mispronouncing macabre with macabre. It's actually macabre, Henry. And here I am fucking up. The severed finger trick as a kid that did scare me just briefly.

I had never seen that before. The whole when you can take off your own thumb kind of thing with your two hands. Yeah. That's a pretty cool trick. You can put some up in there or put it in some cotton or something uh but maggie called his bluff there it's although his ew baby spit is also very adr i like but uh but yeah so hungry are the damned is uh it's quite a parody it's the first twilight zone parody the show would do but hardly the last yeah and i mean the series was in constant reruns from its original airing so it was very relevant and i think like that is why the tower of terror was allowed to happen just because people just it

was in the cultural memory in the early 90s it was like it was relevant enough for people to want to go on a ride even though there were no new twilight zones currently right but the new year's day reruns you'd watch him all the time i it was it was always kept on in my house just to see him because well also like i as a kid finding out about the twilight zone and finding out there were seemingly an endless number of episodes of it and i felt like i'd never run out of them even though i still don't think I've watched all of them. I actually did watch the To Serve Man episode ahead of this recording. And, you know, it's not as good. No, it's not very good. It's kind of a weak episode, honestly.

It's interesting to see a young Richard Keel, though. Yeah, you got it. Yes, I was going to say Jaws, but you're right. He's Iga. That's all he is to me. Yeah, like I didn't watch it for the first time until until like our last time we did this episode i had no idea like what the parody really was although i did appreciate this but yeah in the twilight zone episode yes the aliens are going to eat the humans and that's why their book is a

hilarious pun yeah uh which is very stupid but in this one it's like the setup is just like yes it's so obvious they're gonna eat them but then they don't yes so it is a very fun're going to eat them, but then they don't. Yes. So it is a very fun parody. Sorry to over explain things, but if you haven't seen the original Twilight Zone episode, you might not know what they're doing here. I like how labored it is within the episode, too. It takes it from being just a reference to that to getting to be its own joke, which is really fun. I think Coke and Walidarski are really good at one of my favorite things I like in comedy, which is a very well-written, intentionally poorly written story. Like, if you read this in the kind of EC comic that this is evoking, you would think this is badly written because it heavily, terribly heavily foreshadows a thing that then doesn't happen and then gives you a

moral of the story that doesn't make sense and and then writing it so specifically the in that way is great and and rich more the director of this one this is another his best like yeah would you say these parodies are now more popular than the original source material like people know these more i think people know kang and kotoos more than the Twilight Zone now, I think. But like the It's a Good Life parody with Bart as the magic boy with brain powers. I think like every parody they've done has now supplanted the original source material in the cultural memory of all of us. Yeah, for sure.

And I think even, you know, Kang and Kodos are so much more famous than like the EC Comics monsters that kind of inspired them, even though there isn't a particular EC Comic cover that inspired them. But it's like, we know those characters so much more than we can think, oh, these are like a specifically old timey EC Comic character. I will say, if you look up the cover for weird science number six from 1951 uh the al feldstein drawn cover it's a bit kang and kodosi like they it's not like one-to-one but they are green aliens with like you know space helmets on i think they are based on a doodle by jay cogan like he couldn't convey what he wanted with writing for the

animator so he kind of like drew a doodle like no do it like this yeah there seemed to be like a few different weird science uh covers where it's like yeah the number six one kind of has the tentacle sort of thing and then i saw there was another one that was number 16 that kind of had a alien in like a bubble headed outfit yeah it's kind of just like a mashup of like this is what aliens look like and also you know we had space mutants by this time too yeah and they kind of feel like the the bigger brothers to the space mutants yeah as soon as king and kodos were invented the space mutants were forgotten about it's like no we have our space mutants now it's king and kodos yeah they look so much more specific and cool than just like the blobby aliens of the

space mutant films i i think too about things replacing stuff it's like in our childhoods we got to see the revamps of things that uh the gen xers and boomers uh before us had like we knew the crypt keeper and tales from the crypt because there was the hbo show made by kids who grew up with it and we knew at least the term weird science as the name of a movie and then a TV show because the people who loved those comics as a kid then made movies but it kind of ended with us like there's not more weird science and I don't think there's been a new Tales from the Crypt in a long time there's a new Twilight Zone but but it's buried on cbs streaming sites yeah right right yeah i think the uh kind of anthology

series is just not popular right now especially because you're expected to be able to catalog every single piece of media and go back and watch it again so why would you make a show that's all one-offs you know when you can make what like one long mini-series uh that everybody has to binge i think black mirror was the last one of those and i don't know if they've done a black mirror parody on treehouse yet i think they did okay they did yeah i I think last year, I think 30 had a Black Mirror parody or a parody of a specific Black Mirror episode that I had to look up. I haven't watched it either. It seems like a real bring down, honestly. I'm looking in the Black Mirror every day and checking Twitter.

I just, yeah, I just know it as the joke people say about like, what if your phone was watching you? But yes, so this section here begins with a joke that I'm glad the commentary was there to explain, because I always forget that Homer's mafia staff apron makes no sense otherwise. But it is a reference to when the Godfather was new, they made merchandise merchandise for it or people may knock off merchandise like i'm the official mafia chauffeur or whatever and bumper stickers like mafia staff car yeah yeah so wow so now it's explained it makes no sense the mafia was a new idea when the godfather came out it was a fairly new idea people didn't know about the mafia until like fairly shortly before that

sopranos just killed it then like it just we we knew it too well after that and i do like this gag with the uh the lighter fluid but it makes me think of the heightening of this gag from lisa the vegetarian and i watched the clip again and it is funnier because homer squirts all the lighter fluid out of the bottle and then when you think he's gonna light it he gets another bottle squirts all of it out and then when he lights it it lights nicely but this takes like 40 going to light it, he gets another bottle, squirts all of it out. And then when he lights it, it lights nicely. But this takes like 40 seconds to do. It's so great. And I love that gag so much.

Yeah, it's fantastic. And yeah, it's setting the stage for our expectations for this gag. They could do this gag once a season. I feel like this giant fireball gag was in like every clip package they put in for a time. But yeah, until Kirkland mark kirkland's vegetarian episode which that one i like it it's also the embellished my favorite embellishment of that one is how homer when he squeezes it he's hitting he's coating the sides of it too and how the spray comes out like in like a triangular fashion it's great uh but i mean

this is a good joke but then it just leads to a giant fireball but um uh and yeah there's there's also a really great shot of as as they're all relaxing with the uh oh yeah is there is it supposed to be a fly joke when there's like a scream from the fly that hits the bug zapper is it a is that a reference to the original fly it's just very it's very odd yeah it's it i don't know what it could be but that might be it because it's just like it's just a bug zapper joke and it's not it seems kind of lame for this for the simpsons even in 1990 i think uh but the shot of lisa like chewing on a hayseed and then looking up and seeing the saucer like that's just great it's like just

really good space aliens arrive kind of shots. I love it. And the design of the saucer. Oh, so gorgeous. Yeah. You've got that great, uh,

Dolly zoom effect into Lisa that, you know, totally, totally worth, uh, shelling out, uh, whatever posts they did to,

uh, to, to get that to work. And we were talking, we were talking about the lighting in the first segment there. I love how many different colors of light, the family is bathed in throughout the first part of this alien segment yeah i think lisa especially goes through like eight different colors in this segment uh just from all the lighting choices it's very like it is the kind

of bold stuff that even like 10 years later i care they wouldn't have this kind of crazy lighting changes on people uh and uh yeah so the the alien the spaceship arrives it picks them up one by one the music cues on the tractor beam just like oh god that's that was the moment i really was like alf clausen like this is what got him hired i i felt like you could see why they didn't go for like a fourth composer this year like no he's our guy uh no more auditions i mean yeah the the scale of the of this segment especially like when they're flying through space and stuff like you know alf his music totally sells it it's it's like the thing that makes it feel like oh shit this is really happening yeah he goes from like the 80s uh you know poltergeist music parody to like the 50s sci-fi flying saucer like

theremin music and then to like the more like i guess victorian era music for the the raven yeah you're right yeah his like that just shows his adaptability of style which really helps this series that can just satire a different thing on a dime of just like it's gonna be this kind of movie parody now could you write music that sounds like this film dime of just like it's gonna be this kind of movie parody now could you write music that sounds like this film and he just does it he can just handle it all uh i you know you talk about what scared you as a kid as a kid i'm fine with it now but i actually was really grossed out i didn't like king and kodos when i first saw them because it actually did gross me out how much they drooled the constant drooling

like seriously disgusted me yeah the drool totally bothered me too but like and now they have to drool yeah and they'll just be drooling all the time forever yeah I love how the fun mislead of like you think they're drooling because they want to eat the simpsons that's just something baked into the joke of the character now they just drool forever for no reason i think that was like a really smart choice because in the commentary they mentioned that oh we'll just have them drool once at the beginning and then no more and then the animators went through the trouble of having them always drool and i feel like that that was a really good choice i think without that it wouldn't feel as unsettling as it does and yeah seeing them i i just chuckle

now thinking like how they so quickly became institutions like keng and kodos there and not so much their their third mates but seeing them in this as just this one-off crazy thing i then think about how like in 2015 i went to universal orlando and you can ride basically a parody of the dumbo ride that is that's right hang moving uh sorry kodos moving you up and down in a spaceship it's it's crazy to think there's just this giant light actually bigger than life size uh kodos uh it just sitting around in universal orlando yeah it's crazy and it's like it's a relatively minor simpsons thing when you think about it but yeah the fact that it's it's so recognizable it's just you know hats off to you know the character design specifically it's just

very striking uh but yes king and kodos introduced themselves in this next clip greetings earthlings i am kagan do not be frightened we mean you no harm you you speak english i am actually speaking rigelian by an astonishing coincidence both of our languages are exactly the same. Well, what are you going to do with this man? Kodos and I are taking you to Rigel IV, a world of infinite delights to tantalize your senses

and challenge your intellectual limitations. Look, I know that to you we Simpsons are a lower order of life. We face that prejudice every day of our lives. But we are happy on our little planet. We throw ourselves on your mercy. Please return us to...

Hey! Get a load of that bread! Here you go, earthlings. Take all you want, but eat all you take. Well, thank you very much, mister. To pronounce it correctly, I would have to pull out your tongue. That's the old Sarah act. The one Dr. Spock That's old Serac That's right

James Earl Jones there with Serac He found some Fleminess Rip out your tongue He's really going for it With this alien voice he's doing I love the joke about Rigelian sounding exactly like

english uh just because uh that's that's like a nitpick that i just like you know have to roll my eyes at when it's like well star wars is on an alien planet so why is there english it's just like all right come on how come why are they called x wings there's no letter x in their language come on that's true yeah now it's uh it's been fun to see and i've been watching you know mandalorian as as i am told as society demands i do but i also like it it's good show but see when they have to show like well here's the note they left it has to be written in the blocky alphabet all right that is was later established by to me it still looks weird i i just assume like the language of basic in the world of star wars i just it confuses me when it's

spoken english but it's not written english too yeah too much too much thought if you ask me just make it english it's fine and lisa did a lot of these kind of speeches back then like about she in uh dancing homer she makes this kind of speech of like we're a simple people who can't leave this town like i i think of this uh the kind of speeches they gave to lisa back then and also hearing the the sound design though they've got elf the sound design is still uh like the first season a lot of wriggling tentacles in the background yeah and and maggie's pacifier just over dialogue and also some loud shoes oh yeah they have not silenced the shoes yet in this uh timeline i think it was the first time i as a kid heard the phrase take all you want but eat all you take that's uh an important like remember that when you go to uh

well i guess buffets are over now no more they're not gonna happen anymore yeah and then yeah it just won't go anyway yeah it's fine it's not very good and then we um we we get another like pork chops and applesauce thing for homer which will disappear after like season two but that was an early run here for him we saw that uh when he was captured as bigfoot and eating pork chops, he was like, more applesauce. That's right, yeah, yeah. His pork chop stuff goes away in season three, I think. I do like how impressed they are that the aliens made the most pedestrian of dishes

when you'd imagine they could make anything. So fried shrimp, sloppy joes, and pork chops. Marge is impressed by the radish rosettes. They're a very advanced race. I watched a YouTube video on how to make them. It does seem very difficult. I don't think I'll give it a shot. But also just all of their daring at them, like the licking of lips.

Your wife is quite a dish. I know that. Which I guess really is Sarek thinks that Marge is very attractive and is telling homer that uh that's that's a extra when you know the twist that it's it's even funnier they're all being super genuine it's nice even though they're laughing to themselves quite a lot at how genuine they're being but also some fantastic interiors to the spaceship yeah it's great the design uh amazing uh but yes the aliens are uh showing them around their ship uh that includes uh a gamer joke that i did get

as a as a youngster not every reference i got at aj but i did get i got that because i had an atari 2600 that was my first gaming console and i was like that was like five or six years ago i'm playing nintendo now we're so advanced yeah i i couldn't imagine that pong uh anything could look better than megaman 3 back then uh but yeah i i like this little exchange here it is our great pleasure to provide you with unlimited entertainment on your intergalactic journey on this cable system we receive over 1 million channels from the furthest reaches of the galaxy you get hbo no that would cost extra and over here is our crowning achievement in amusement technology an electronic version of what you call table tennis your primitive paddles have been replaced by an electronic that's just pong get with the times

man margie and i played that old game before we were married. But we did build this spaceship, you know. Anyone from a species that has mastered intergalactic travel, raise your hand. All right, then. Sorry. Your game is very nice. I love how embarrassed Marge is. Like, your game is very nice. That love how Barris Barge is like, your game is very nice. That alien was just quoting George Meyer.

Yeah, this has come up so many times on their commentaries where it's just, this was George Meyer trolling the writers where if a writer said, I don't like this movie or I don't like this album, he would say, number of Oscars won by person, number of Oscars won by you, zero. That just came up in the Bart to the Future episode of Marge saying, that's right. Treasure chest found by Homer, zero. I mean, I guess it does shut things down, but also it's like you don't have to win awards

or sell a million albums to have an opinion on a on a record well now they're all i mean as of like later in the year they would all be like gold record or platinum record winners yeah for uh sing the blues al jean can legitimately call himself a platinum recording artist as a kid i knew that it looked worse and also though the idea that like my it did confuse me as a kid, the thought that, like, oh, my parents could have played Pong before I was born. Like, just thinking about what did my parents do before I was born? Like, just putting that thought in my head was kind of mind-blowing then.

But, yes, we then get the shots of them talking about them being guests of honor. Like, them saying they want to chew the fats. Like it's so I, I, oh my God. Then picking up the plates. Sorry. Yeah.

Yeah. Just the way the, the, the shot is frame where the, the camera is sort of like on the ground looking up at the table. And when they pull the, the, the lids off of the plates,

the Simpsons heads are behind them. Yeah. It's, it's such a stagey shot, but I the Simpsons' heads are behind them. Yeah. It's such a stagey shot, but I like how funny it is as a sight gag. Yeah, that got a huge laugh out of me. It was really fun to look at. Because when they pull the lid off of Homer, I think he goes, ooh, a feast.

Yes. Because they're asking, like, why do you guys never eat? And they say, oh, there'll be a great feast on Rigel 4 when we arrive. Well, it looks to be they're, like, you know, severed heads on a tape on a platter is and they're just so happy as they say i it's the smiling of homer and marge as they say that

makes it 10 times funnier uh but when but again when you know the twist why are king and kodos and sarah all laughing at this why why are they weighing them yes uh which which that's straight out of the twilight zone they do yeah yeah that's true yeah uh yeah it's great i mean the whole segment is a is a huge screw you uh to the audience so having having to watch it again is just like so many questions here it it doesn't have the replayability of other kangen kodos ones I guess which also they're friendly aliens in this one but they're evil every other time they're in the show I think this turned them they're like humans we can't trust them we should have just eaten them they said yeah and another

just great moment of like Lisa going into the room and seeing Serac just say like this will give them the perfect flavor he just means that he wants them to have the nicest flavor they could have but lisa finds the book uh and this uh i'll just play the original uh clip from the twilight zone this is how the reveal goes uh of it's a cookbook mr chambers don't get on that ship the rest of the book to serve men it's a cookbook. No! No! No! And they get shoved up an escalator. Like, a bunch of stairs just move up and shove them in the ship.

So they translate the alien language. And apparently even in their language, serve has two meanings. Yes. Yeah. I mean, it's incredible localization by these translators. But yeah, I mean, it's such a labored thing to get to. But it's even weirder in the Twilight Zone. Then it ends with like the guy on the spaceship then just talks directly to camera like are you gonna be eating it'll it'll happen to one of us something i was like all right we got it i'd rather be uh

rod serling yeah talking to me was rod serling busy that week or something why couldn't he be on camera for that uh but yes it uh it's funnier when yardley uh says all these lines and she discovers a very dusty book you big stupid space creature nobody but nobody is deception i beg your pardon don't play dumb with me we found your book you mean this it's a harmless cookbook. It's just a little dusty. Wait a minute. Wait, there's still more space dust on here. Let me get this straight. You thought they thought we were going to eat them. Good God.

Is this some kind of joke? No, they're serious. Well, why were you trying to make us eat all the time? Make you eat? We merely provided a sumptuous banquet. And frankly, you people made pigs of yourselves. I slaved in the kitchen for dust for you people. Well, if you wanted to make Serac the Preparer cry, mission accomplished.

You aren't the only beings who have emotion, you know. That's so great. And I just heard an audio joke I didn't pick up when I was watching this. Do you hear that squeaky noise? Serac is crying and he's wiping the front of his glass dome with the tissue. That's why you hear that squeaky window cleaning noise. It's brilliant.

I love the term space dust. Yeah. But just the line, oh, look, there's more space dust. Oh, God. Yeah, and they have a little panel for blowing dust off in their thing that they can open up i god i they they said that they credit john vd for coming up with a the continually blowing off the dust thing but but the color change when lisa blows off the dust it says how to cook 40 humans every it was like bathed in red light you know the light

transition is so cool oh god yeah that like it's it's the red and blue against each other it's like such a uh stark shot like especially also when right at the start of the scene where kang comes in and says like humans you have stopped eating like the coloring on that shot too is gorgeous in its boldness i wish they hadn't moved away from that kind of like extreme coloring in when a moment calls for it. Yeah. Again, the lighting throughout the show is one of the things that really elevates it. It's like you, you have the music, but definitely like you're seeing like more complicated camera

angles and, and colors that you've ever seen on the show. And it really, really turns it into something different and i love king and kodos becoming like the good god uh just these these put upon hosts too are just like make you frankly you're acting like pigs uh just being passive aggressive like it works too is just a great like end of a sketch like this could just be a sketch if you replace the simpsons with just random family in an snl sketch it would work just the same and i like how they're like the twilight zone always has a lesson or moral and this one it's just like you should trust people even if they're acting very suspicious yes yeah no i i uh yeah i have

that clip too here we offered you paradise You would have experienced emotions a hundred times greater than what you call love. And a thousand times greater than what you call fun. You would have been treated like gods. And lived forever in beauty. But now, because of your distrustful nature, that can never be. For a superior race, they really rub it in there were monsters on that ship and truly we were them lisa see what we mean when we say you're too smart for your own good way to go lee yeah thanks lisa lisa ruins everything lisa man even over being like yeah thanks lisa i missed the march at the end yeah lisa's pronouncement you know makes that the moral of the story but i think it could just

end with marge going like they really rub it in like that that's so great because you've there's so many twilight zones that end with a person saying well you could have had paradise but blah blah it'd be so great in all of those if the character's like all right i get it you know you don't have to rub it i'm talking to the audience now not you yeah even as a kid even today as a kid i was like kind of bummed out by that and i still am just like oh they totally missed out on a fun time yeah to be immortal basically heaven they were denying heaven i love the scale of uh what is it a hundred times greater than love and a thousand times greater than fun oh yes yeah it's been quantified that love love is at a certain level fun at another and it's the the one is 10 times greater

than that i yeah uh there there is a little a slight animation mistake but i can see why they didn't you know retake it because it's the big pan up at the end oh yeah marge has white pearls instead of her usual red ones but it's like that that's such a complicated one that a retake on that's going to cost you a lot more i bet yeah i'm sure they were just like it's a miracle it's this good let's just go and then we get to the final segment which yes i think when we first did this we bagged on this too much it's just like we said it was uninteresting or like hey just read the raven like i really appreciate the acting in this and also like silverman made basically a warner short in Yeah. I forget what I said about it,

but I do think now it's really cool. But I do think they have something to prove. They definitely have something to prove. Like, we're not that dirty show your kids won't watch. We got this classic poem, and we're going to tell it to you with our characters. And James Earl Jones is going to read it with this beautiful animation.

I feel like they are really trying to prove something with this. And that makes me wish they wouldn't have cut away to the treehouse with recycled animation so often. Because as it stands, I feel like that adulterates what could have been a little bit better. I would have liked to see this presented as it was intended originally, just the reading of the poem with the animation. I definitely had a cool English teacher in high school that actually played this in class when we were studying. Oh, that's Ian. In my notes, I said English teachers everywhere can thank the Simpsons for giving them a way to teach this poem for like 15 years. Absolutely.

I mean, but yeah, I can kind of agree that watching it again i was actually kind of bummed out that they seemed inconfident in uh the audience's attention span and being able to just watch this whole thing i honestly do wish that the simpsons would more often just try to just do like genuine things without giving themselves or the audience an out to say like oh it's just stupid who cares and the cutaway jokes are not like funny no they're not they're not funny or worth it it just is distracting and uh yeah i i just feel like well when they got on the commentary they talk about when we got this back from you know overseas we were like this is going to be the worst thing we've ever made it's so long it's not funny this could make our show look. So we got to like spice it up a little bit.

And I wish they should have had the confidence at this point. I can understand where they were coming from, though. You know, are we just going to weird out the whole audience? Because this is like. When you really care about someone, you shouted 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. We care about you.

We 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. Care, care. Did I mention that we care? Too educational. I don't know i think they had something really good here i i think i think through bart they express what they fear children

at home are thinking of that they worry the kids at home are getting as bored as they portray bart getting and they're like all right we'll cut to Bart so you're not bored of this long scene. And here's your favorite Bart. He's here. He's still here, guys. Whenever I revisit this, I always think it's going to be much drier than it actually is.

Actually, it goes by super quickly and the animation is so amazing. This is David Silverman's segment and the storyboards are by him and Jeff Lynch. Jeff Lynch is one of the greatest directors on the show. For sure. Like theatrical quality animation that he could bring to it in his apps like the i i think we've said that probably one of the top three best episodes animation wise they ever did was who shot mr burns

part one and that's lynch like and and same the hellfish episode is like animation wise a tour de force i'll say to after a kogan interview saying that the raven was so important to sam simon and then hearing on the commentary graining say that he was so worried that this was too artsy fartsy and that he that it would be seen as over the top that to me and sam simon is not mentioned once on this commentary yeah i wonder if this was like a sticking point that for graining and maybe other producers too when it came back they're like we indulge sam too much by the time it came back sam simon is kind of moving out of power in the series because season three production is beginning and maybe that's why they're like you

know what this is what sam wanted but we we need to cut this down it's it's too much i guess i can yeah i can totally believe that because yeah it does feel like you know they they solved their problem by making bart the raven uh so they didn't need to solve it further but i can definitely see you know your fear getting better than better of of you and just wanting to make sure that the audience has some hard jokes in there, even though the jokes aren't too hard. And I love the Bart Raven. It's such a cute design. It's so adorable. But here, let's hear the start of the Raven.

Hey, Poindexter, it's Halloween. Put the book away. For your information, I'm about to read you a classic tale of terror by Edgar Allan Poe. Wait a minute. That's a school book. Don't worry, Bart. You won't learn anything. He's called The Raven.

Once upon a midnight dreary While I pondered weak and weary Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore While I nodded, nearly napping Suddenly came a tapping As of someone gently rapping Rapping at my chamber door To some visitor I muttered

Tapping at my chamber door Only to sing a more are we scared yet lisa is right to say that like bart shut up yeah like all these interruptions are annoying and uh god but alf clausen score i wish i could just get the score for this isolated because it's so so good in his first episode too it's amazing the score, I wish I could just get the score for this isolated because it's so, so good. In his first episode, too, it's amazing, the score. Yeah, and honestly, just all of the artistic choices made, not only the boarding, but the background design is really great. And I love the design of Homer's chair as well. It just gives everything this nice focal point.

Yeah, yeah. everything this nice like focal point yeah yeah it's this uh just the the interior design of it all just feels like this perfect like stately old study and homer's character design in his like smoking jacket is so great too and and dan's performance here that he you know uh the james earl jones is doing just a great narration like just reading of this poem in a scary dramatic way but then dan has to say like they don't change any so they do cut about three or four stanzas from the raven but every word that said is from the poem and so dan has to say things as homer without changing the words i love when he says quaff yes yeah i i do love the little gags they stuck in just visually a forgotten lore volume two is is what he's reading that he has a

miniature cask of amontillado that he's drinking out of like that's uh there's there's some good little gags there and then oh man is he as he starts to remember that bleak december and the chair like floats through the air that's so ambitious silverman and lynch and their team wow just to pull that off a dream sequence within a story that's being just it's full of the most amazing angles you've never seen before in the show yeah it's really it's really uh hard to forget that you know the show never really looked like this before and so seeing it you can feel sort of like the clumsiness of them feeling it out but the characters feel so solid and i love that it kind of all takes place in this one room which which you know feels really good to me yeah it's just fun to watch even it's not

like the funniest uh silliest short of this series but uh it's really fun to look at yeah that's a great point it does take place in one room and because of that they have to get as creative as possible with like as many different kinds of shots and all of these like you know homer floating through the chair floating on the chair through the air and things like that and uh yeah they make they make the most of this in this, like, what, four or five-minute segment? Yeah. Oh, man. And the shot of the smoke touching his face, like, becoming hands and pulling at it, like, it has kind of the feel of, like, you know, scary Disney shorts, too.

Like, I guess when I said this is more of a—I said it was a Warner short, but this actually feels like more of the when there'd be a horror short uh in the disney shorts era i think it has more of that feel yeah i can i can totally see that and just overall the whole thing all of the like character acting is really great you know it's fun to see you know uh david silverman like flex his muscles there this is a little bit of a sidebar but i I will say to stick up for current Simpsons, the character acting in the show has never really faltered. I feel like they, from the stiffer, you know, there is sort of like a middle era of Simpsons that is very stiff.

But if you look at like kind of like recent episodes, you can see that there's like a lot of thought put into character acting to try and make sure that like it's on par with this like silver mini stuff yeah yeah i just i did watch some recent ones uh that the recent when we recorded this in uh in december uh in a bleak december uh but yeah i uh there was in the road to cincinnati one like chalmers has this like big just like shouting speech at at skinner and i do think he takes on like the the acting in that is very well done i uh i in this bit here too one they bring back the the old shorts era gag of a picture being not big enough to contain marge's hair right right I did like it to see it return in this way and just

the the one most egregious interruption of this story I find is when they literally put the words eat my shorts into the into the Raven's mouth which were it was not there originally you could tell he's saying never more and then they cut away to Lisa going that's not what he says Bart and then they go back to the

story just like you interrupted the story to give us the t-shirt catchphrase I I mean, I guess it's slightly funnier the right before that where like Homer opens the door and it goes darkness there. Nothing more. And then Bart says, you know, be scarier than that. Anything that's at least like not shoving in a catchphrase. It is a critique of the Raven poem. At least it's a little smarter. They had such little animation to work with in that treehouse that like it is so obviously reused.

Nothing matches. And like it's like you often get just the exterior shot of the treehouse, right? Yes. As they talk to each other. But also with those rock and roll mouths, like it stands out even more next to these like amazing like Silverman drawings. Homer's screaming is such a great Silverman drawing. mouths like it stands out even more next to these like amazing like silverman dry homer screaming is such a great silverman drawing and then you then just go back to these same three shots you've seen before it it really takes you out of it yeah and like you know the way that uh silverman is

drawing the characters it's like you really feel like a master at drawing these characters at work uh making them work in three dimensions i i feel like the bart raven you see a lot of like dimensionality to its head and stuff too as it's like flying around it's like it's really nice to look at uh but yes the bird will say nothing more than nevermore then we thought the air grew denser, perfumed by some unseen scent. Oh! Stupid censure. Swung by seraphim, whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor. Rich!

I cried. Thy God hath led thee by these angels he hath sent thee. Respite and depend thee from thy memories of Lenore. Quaff! Oh, quaff this kind, depend thee, and forget this lost Lenore. Quoth the raven.aff this kind of penthe and forget this loss, Lenore. Quoth the raven. Nevermore.

Do be that word I sign of parting! Murder fiend! I shrieked up starting. Get thee back into the tempest and the night's plutonian shore! Do leave no black plume as a token of the lie thy soul has spoken. Leave my loneliness unbroken.

Quit the bust above my door! take thy beak from off my heart and take thy form from off my door quoth the raven nevermore take thy beak from out my heart and take thy form from off my door quoth the raven nevermore this is just explaining my life during quarantine with my parrot. Stop mocking me. But all he says is... Well, he says other things than nevermore, though. It's true. Actually, you should never teach him nevermore,

or else he will go insane. He calls me a bad boy. I'm saying right here on this podcast. I also, right before that, in Homer's big speech to him, when he's being friendly, like the way Homer says, I sure knew Craven. And he gives like a little wink. I love that.

I have to say that I didn't read this poem until after I saw this because I was eight when this aired. And now when I read it, the few times I have read it, I just hear Homer and doing these line readings too yeah uh just his and to hear Homer just shout like quaff oh quaff uh leave my loneliness unbroken like his screaming of that like Dan is just acting it up here he is I think he had to also just raise his stature of these lines because James Earl Jones is such a you know weighty actor that he has to keep up with that in in it there's some quick little like basically tom and jerry gags of him chasing the bird around and getting books dropped on him and i think all the books are

are they all poe books yes okay yeah yeah yeah that's there's some good uh sight gags in the whole thing and i think you can see poe's bust uh behind homer yes in in in some of these scenes too and even the very looney tunes gag of the nevermore birds uh going around his head after getting hit like that's that's a great little shot uh but i guess yeah the in the actual poem, the man in it does not physically chase after the raven. He just kind of gives up and lays on the floor. Well, they spiced it up. Yeah. But yes, the ending here. Oh, I got to say the music in this part gives me goosebumps every time.

It's so, so good. Mm-hmm....even though he's never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting on the pallet bust of the palace just above my chamber door. And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon that is dreaming. And the lamplight o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor. And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor shall be lifted, never more. Lisa, that wasn't scary. Not even for a poem. Well, it was written in 1945.

Maybe people were easier to scare back then. Oh, yeah. Like when you look at Friday the 13th, Part 1. It's pretty tame by today's standards. Children, bedtime. I guess I'll have no trouble getting to sleep tonight. Homer is so scared by that. It's kind of crazy.

I love that. Not even for a poem. Yeah, that's a good line. To go back to that music, I was just thinking, like, did they wheel a harpsichord into that studio in an organ? Like, did they have access to all these things? It's just so amazing. God. Yeah. Yes, the way it builds up to the last, like, evermore, like, just boom.

Like, yeah, it builds so perfectly. I think you're right. This is the best bit Alf does does the whole episode and friday the 13th part one only a decade old when this episode was new so yeah 1980 wow i i think i wanted to watch the first friday the 13th just so i could know uh bart's reference here like is it less scary than other ones and i mean well the friday the 13th doesn't even feature jason and there's nothing magical or metaphysical to it it's just a serial killer movie and all the kills are like someone being filmed going oh it's you what are you doing here wait no put that down it's kind of boring and stupid

but there is a game of strip monopoly in it yeah but you don't even get no one gets naked nobody even takes any clothes off sleepway camp is the the better camp movie. I've said it here. But I didn't get the joke as a kid that Bart, as a 10-year-old, should never have seen this R-rated horror film like that one. And so him being able to say it's not as scary is pretty funny. I guess by 1989, they were already at part eight. Jesus. It was like one a year.

That's too many. From 80 yeah uh and uh it cuts to all the kids in bed uh you get to see maggie sleeping with a a binky doll which is a little cute but i guess uh homer then saying he hates halloween i guess he forever after does hate halloween because it scared him too much that uh uh and i can see why they cut these kind of you know all the wraparounds are not necessary and once i think they only were here to not to keep it grounded to some extent and also because they were they wanted it to still feel like a real episode that had scary stories in it yeah yeah they would drop that by what season six season five had the night gallery parody and then that was it yeah yeah right that was the last one yeah and and even then the night gallery one isn't taking place in reality so by that point it's like yeah who cares yeah in that

one they're just talking to the screen anyway i think i think too it was that like talking about how they amped up the violence so much like murkin seasons oh yeah made it so the the zombie apocalypse thing in season four is also pretty violent but the blood there wasn't it was murkin who's like this has to be blood everywhere david silverman was there for it like for five but we've we've said it before but the season five one is oh it's so gorgeous amazing but i mean this this is a start for it is uh it sets the tone so much for what their halloween specials would be and they'd they'd be so much more ambitious after this but this this started a halloween an american tradition honestly that is that has now gone on for 31 years in a row so pretty pretty impressive yeah it's pretty cool uh to see it all start here oh i also wanted to

mention uh the the bongo comics treehouse yes um because those are really fun. There are a lot of them are guest edited, uh, like, and they really are kind of trying to go do like full on EC horror, uh, style things. I think one of my favorite ones was, uh, this is from a few years back now, but I think it's number 15 that, um, I'm pretty sure it was, uh, Sammy Harcum guest edited edited has has like the whole thing is uh really hilarious i think that's the one with the paper rad story where all the simpsons bootlegs come to life and finally like you know it's like a off-model homer and black bart simpson like killing the real simpsons it's really really good i gotta check that one out i i i've read a few of them and they are like some of the best they really they take it even a step farther because of what they can do in comics and that is how my now wife i can say it now because at this point in time we are married that's how she won her eisner with her death no parody that's right in triosophora comics god yeah it's it's they're they're all really really fun reads and congratulations

and uh and their covers are great too like i think and i think uh you know morrison bill morrison the uh then editor-in-chief of it i i remember the first issue of simpson comics number one the reverse side is just a full-on tales from the crypt parody comic where homer goes crazy and he's actually the character designs the same as this one and it's about him going crazy in his vault full of comics as he has to burn them all for warmth it's a story of comic collecting gone mad oh by the way the artist's name is nina matsumoto she's not just bob mackie's wife yes that's just one of her many skills. But yeah, I think I know that for a lot of Simpsons fans, the comics are like an acquired taste. But I think it's absolutely worth picking up some of those Treehouse of Horror issues because they're a lot of fun. Yeah, we don't know the fate of Matt Groening's new comic label as of this recording.

Like there were seemingly going to be disenchantment comics but those never came into being and he did start a new comics label and there are like stories about it but there's been nothing at least that I've found yes right yeah actually oh man they're gonna make me I'm gonna have to order some treehouse collections on the Amazon

soon or something because I could they go out of print like bongo technically doesn't exist anymore does it I don't think so yeah i think uh some of some of the back issues of the comic are like starting to get expensive so yeah i have an inside connection uh but ian thank you so much for being on the show uh please let us know where we can find you online and anything else you want to promote do it here please hey yeah uh follow me on twitter at IanJQ, I-A-N-J-Q. I'm just, you know, a nice guy. I love cartoons.

Maybe I'll be making some new cartoons soon, but you can check me out there and say hi. And it's always a good time to watch OK KO Let's Be Heroes on HBO Max. That's right. But that would cost extra, right? Or Hulu if you got it. But thank you so much, Ian. It's always a pleasure.

Thanks for having me. So thanks again to Ian Jones-Cordy for being on the show. Please check out all of his stuff. He does great work and we love having him on here. But as for us, if you want to check out more of our stuff,

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audience and we'll see you then Thank you. Homer! What's this thing in the corner? I don't know. It looks like a vortex, a gateway into another dimension. Ooh, a vortex. Catch! Hey, pretty slick. Quit throwing your garbage into our dimension.