Talking Simpsons - Talking Simpsons - Treehouse of Horror X With Jason Sheridan

Episode Date: July 1, 2020

The Simpsons celebrate Halloween for the tenth time, and we're joined again by Podcast: The Ride's Jason Sheridan for some scary fun! We go into the many plot holes of a late '90s horror parody, the comic book origins of Stretchboy and Clobber Girl, and go back to the fun days of Y2K. Listen now before a wizard does something! Support this podcast and get dozens of bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! And please follow the new official Twitter, @TalkSimpsonsPod!

bling blong everyone our new podcast mini-series talking mission hill is now exclusively on patreon put on your spicy pants every friday with a new podcast covering each episode of the cult series from simpsons legends bill oakley and josh weinstein five dollar subscribers at patreon.com slash talking simpsons can hear every episode plus plus all of our previous mini series about Futurama, King of the Hill, and The Critic. So don't be a beardsley, sign up for Talking Mission Hill today! I heartily endorse this event or product. Ahoy, everybody, and welcome to Talking Simpsons, a podcast so hackneyed it would make Stan Lee blush. I'm your host, a big guy who's good at knots, Bob Mackie. This is our chronological exploration of The Simpsons. Who else is here with me today it's henry gilbert your goofy roofie and who do we have on the line this is

jason sheridan of podcast the ride uh and i am a regular man who has been screwed by ivory tower eggheads yet again and today's episode is treehouse of horror 10 yeah well whenever you notice something like that a wizard did it. I see, all right, yes. But in episode AG4. Wizard. I'm reclaiming it. Today's episode aired October 31st, 1999 on Halloween.

And as always, Henry will tell us what happened on this mythical day in real world history. Oh my God! Oh boy, Bobby. Being John Malkovich is released in movie theaters. The crappy Avengers cartoon series Avengers United They Stand starts on Fox Kids. And I picked out this news especially for our guests. At Halloween Horror Nights 9, it's the closing night of it. And at the Bill and Ted show that year, they are facing the combined might of Dr. Evililyn manson and jar jar binks no mr burns this year no mr burns this year at least in the in the wiki write-up i read about the the bill and ted

adventure of 1999 i love a lot of mileage out of dr evil i'll say that i love your episode about that jason uh because these halloween horror nights were these like i guess elaborate plays with different characters but it's mostly illegal fan fiction is happening on stage. Oh, yeah. Parody. Parody. Satire. Parody. Though what is not in satire is

their hate for people who are different. That's very real. Yes. Yeah. No, the Bill and Ted show, I believe, either us or Brad Evans said, these are pretty much a hate crime. It was a different time in 1999. I mean, there's some jokes in here that I'm like, boy, that was 20 years ago. It certainly was.

And being John Malkovich, I don't remember it being in theaters. Oh, I saw it in theaters. Okay. Because I'm a dork whose mom took him to the cool movies. And so when I saw that this was getting all the reviews as this neat cult film, I was like, well, I got to see this. And I think I was aware, or at least the reviews told me who Spike Jonze was. And I was like, I remember the Sabotage music video. Yeah.

This movie taught me who John Malkovich was when I was 17. I as well. Jason, I know you're a comic book fan did you see the any of avengers united they stand i do yes i uh remember watching avenger united i remember buying a few issues of the comic too because um some of them were written by ty templeton who did a lot of the batman animated series and the animated series comic book tie-ins. The Batman animated series comics were some of the rare media tie-ins that were like very good.

Oh yeah, I've talked them up a lot when we've done Batman podcasts. I've told people like, if you really like the Batman animated series vibe, the comics from the 90s captured them perfectly. Yeah, there's a sequel comic to the Mask of the Phantasm movie that we

read for that uh podcast yeah um the superman adventures one's pretty good too but i think more notable for being written by um scott mcleod and also mark miller oh mark millar i don't know how to pronounce that i think millar i think it's millar scottish so it's like that throws it all off yeah and so and this is this is i mean, it was he was popular back then. This is well before like Kick-Ass and Wanted and everything. But like, I believe also very solid, like kind of just sort of the core character stuff you want from like Superman and Batman comics, those animated tie ins. When when I was 17, I was not above watching a kid's cartoon of superheroes, but I didn't watch Avengers United.

They stand because I didn't like the designs. They were very much like the the pre heroes reborn designs of the characters, which is like two 90s for me. And also, this is incredible to say now, but then they're like, no, we don't need Captain America, Iron Man or Thor. Like none of those three are in that cartoon. Yeah, absolutely not. No, the Avengers were kind of like, oh, who gives a shit?

They stopped making X. They're like scraping the bottom of the barrel at this point. X-Men ruled the 90s and the Avengers just had to take a complete backseat. It's crazy. And what a world now. I mean, the one segment in this episode is like wow this is some of these jokes are just like i i novel for the time and now we're just like uh kind of pat you know a lot of the superhero stuff and nerd stuff in this one uh but uh but yes welcome

jason sheridan officially hey yes you might have heard. I've already talked everyone's ears off well before my official introduction. No, no. You might remember Jason from our episode about They Saved Lisa's Brain. We had the entire Podcast the Ride crew on in LA when we were allowed to travel and talk to people in a room. But he's here remotely, and thank you so much for being on the show, Jason. Oh, thank you so much

for having me. Do you recall watching this on Halloween night of 1999? I think i did or at least i taped it off tv i think so in 1999 halloween i think this was this i was a freshman in high school i think i begrudgingly went trick-or-treating even though i knew like i didn't really want to i pretty much never i wanted the candy but i didn't want the act of trick-or-treating so i think i did like a really quick loop of like the coldest of like my neighborhood i lived in a neighborhood that was

like had one entrance and ended in a few cul-de-sacs and so i just did a quick uh loop but i i definitely remember watching this i remember a lot i was looking at the episodes that came before it um because i don't want to spoil my thoughts too much but like i was like i have to i haven't seen in a while but i have to think the tamaco episode holds up a little better than this treehouse of horror i don't know that this is one of the a-list treehouse of horrors i was thinking so we were doing a lot of season 10 and season 9 before this and i'm thinking this is uh probably scully the scully era's best trios of horror i i like all these segments for 12 yeah i think it is i it might be his best i think it might be the best i i believe i just watched recently the season 13 one which has

a harry potter parody in it and that one i feel is weaker than this one it's true i will give them harry potter because season 3 had like a king kong parody and even in this one lisa's like what do aliens have to do with halloween so they they're revealing like they don't care what the topic is they could just make fun cartoons it wasn't bad i mean i like the there's a few things i i like it it's solid and you know i some very topical stuff in here you have to be in touch with the xenomania which which has ended. Yes. I have a very specific memory of this episode and where I was when it aired. I remember I had to record this one. I don't know why I remember this because it's such a frivolous bit of information. But I had to record it because my friend's rich dad was in town.

He took us out for a steak dinner. So I was eating a steak dinner on Halloween night of 1999. And all the waitstaff were dressed up. Maybe that's why I remember it. Oh, that's pretty cool. Yes. Wow, man. And the waitress was one of those, like, she had, like, the inflatable horse around her, like, midsection with, like, two little fake legs dangling off.

That's cute. And I fell for that illusion. I'm like, how's she doing that? But, yeah, not important for our listeners to know at all, but I have that memory. The power of having a divorced dad friend a friend with a rich divorced dad baby that divorced dad needs to have money that got me out to california for the first time do you remember uh was that steak dinner was that at like an outback steakhouse or like a morton's uh it was actually a local steak place yeah i totally

forget the name but it wasn't like a big box steak restaurant. It was a step above an Outback. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. I only ask because I feel like both varieties would dress up, but I feel like the Outback Lone Star variety would be a little roundier on Halloween. It seems like the tyrant business owner made them dress up for that night and they didn't want to we have fun here damn it yeah i did want to compliment jason first on the their father of the pride podcast recently it saves us the trouble of having to do a what a

cartoon about which i hope to never do yeah after hearing that i knew it was bad i didn't know how bad it truly was yeah i don't i don't recommend anyone doing i mean we had talked about it for a while because you know as this show is going on like any podcast we start to branch out or find like connections and like odd cgi and especially like early attempts at like big budget cgi are very funny and i think father of the pride came up in in one our Griffin Newman episodes. Griffin Newman has become one of our regular guests in his area, his lane for when he comes on our show is usually like 3D movie attractions. And so he had done the Terminator ride, which was terrific. And then we did Shrek 4D.

And once you start going down the Dreamworks katzenberg rabbit hole especially because like we were still that was a pre-quibi uh we're now post-quibi we've all been we're in the quibi era we're all sitting at home holding our phones uh uh getting getting the uh damage to our elbows and shoulders that i had a physical therapist work on from holding my phone too much. Wow. But yeah, so we started going down that rabbit hole and I had a very specific memory of Father of the Pride. Not really watching it, but just the lead up to it because they spent so much money marketing it. There was Olympics in the summer of 2004

and they were advertising that nonstop with commercials of just like, these animals are bawdy. These animals are crass and horny from the people who brought you shrek i know on a simpsons commentary matt graining tells the story of siegfried or roy coming up to him and saying like oh father the pride we look to the simpsons we want to be just as good as you guys oh jeez i i feel like there is some simpsons dna and more of the siegfried and Roy, like, B stories.

It's funny because when we were talking about it a little before this, like, it's just, you know, like most comedy of the time, there are a lot of jokes that have not aged well. But the show is surprisingly respectful to Siegfried and Roy. Like, they are never the butt of the jokes. And the way they got around that was they just made them like, like Looney Tunes, like funny because it's random, like wacky characters. Well, that's funny because the Simpsons handle celebrities in that kind of light gloves way of like, well, we won't actually be mean to you. But if we make it random, like, say, I guess it's in the same way that Johnny Carson learned how to juggle cars. Yeah.

That kind of joke. Yeah. And it may be surprising, but adding money to a thing does not make it funnier. No. So when I heard that the head writer for Conan O'Brien from 95 to 2000 worked on that show, I was like, oh, my God. Well, I mean. That poor bastard. I would think his main job was to be yelled at by Jeffrey Katzenberg.

This isn't a joke. This isn't funny at all. Katzenberg has the creative by credit on father pretty amazing really incredible i the other thing we learned i i talked about this because i put myself through further torment by um on our twitch stream i watched the original pilot which was i bought the dvd i bought the dvd because I thought we were original plans where like, we'll sit around and watch this together and then record. And then when we started quarantining, we're like,

well, wouldn't it be funny if we watched this full season in one day? Because the episodes, there's not that many and they're not very long. But there was extra stuff on the DVD. And I was like, well, I'm a completist. So I should sit down and watch some of these. And I don't think it paid off.

I don't necessarily, I don't regret doing it, but it did not have a huge payoff. We know your pain is being a completist. It's a curse. Yeah, I don't want to suffer for my art all the time, but I do think it's good to suffer occasionally. And so, yeah, the other thing we learned, like the day it came a friend

of scott's i believe let him know and and then we found a people magazine article um roy after being attacked by manticore his first public appearance was like a live uh video feed interview uh on stage at the up front for this show and everyone was kind of horrified like why you didn't have to do this well i i mean after that i believe he did a performance one more performance with manticore just to prove like it's not don't blame the tiger everything's fine like he uh yeah i was i was glad that he was always you know of the don't blame the tiger argument because they always kill the animal when that happens. The animal is just doing its job. Yeah.

He didn't want to even be there. I think he's doing okay. He's doing okay. That's good. I mean, as we mentioned before, we're in a post-Quibi world and Quibi launched at the perfect time because I don't have enough time to watch TV shows. Who has the time? No time at all. I can watch two minutes of something and then i've got to go

outside and talk to people and be in rooms i had always been wanting to watch under 10 minutes of content of reese witherspoon talking over nature documentary footage and now i have that uh yeah i mean we all had a good laugh about the golden arm that was one of the quarantine highlights oh yes uh bury me with my golden arm we can talk about this one off mike but there was one of the quarantine highlights. Oh, yes. Bury me with my golden arm. We can talk about this one off mic, but there was one that I saw clips of that literally made me go, no, no. Like when I realized what I was witnessing. I think I might know which one you're talking about. But yeah, you know, on the subject of magicians, before we move on too far away, before we we stay on topic i want to go off topic real quick so listeners heard last week uh your co-host on podcast the ride mike carlson we talked a lot

about david copperfield his las vegas show blue and my theory that mike reese uh wrote the stuff for blue simpsons former co-executive producer showrunner mike reese since then i have done a little research on public tweets one i can confirm that mike reese spent at least one birthday on david copperfield's private island oh yeah he tweeted out like because him and david copperfield have back-to-back birthdays in september and so he the they've spent multiple birthdays together and this one was him even saying like i'm on his magic aisle he put it and so it's funny mike reese in both like appearance and demeanor is the anti-copper field he is yes there's that other picture did you see the other picture where they're backstage at the show well

so yes my other theory is that i couldn't confirm that but my other theory was that mike reese at least was a co-writer of the show and had a lot of stuff he is the author of all the blue jokes in it uh for the character blue i should say and the tweet tweet was him and his wife with Copperfield after one of their shows. And he said it was like, everybody should see this show. It's great. And then he like has the alien emoji in there and like him specifically shouting out the alien. That feels to me like a Mike Reese brag that he wrote Blue. My girlfriend and I saw that show a few months ago, and then we went back and started watching

the Copperfield specials on YouTube, and a lot of the illusions are reworked from the TV specials. Oh, that's cheap. That's cheap. Kind of, but he's changed it. He's evolved the show so much over the years. Some of the stuff that he talked about,

he doesn't talk about his grandfather as much anymore. He talks about his father more, et cetera, more etc etc the one tweet of him saying like check out the show that the thing that struck me was just the fit like his outfit his fit is so norm is very funny especially next to the to copperfield in his whole black ensemble reese loves his polo shirts he loves them loves or sorry his rugby shirts rugby shirts and cargo shorts yes yeah cargo shorts and the white the the long white sock like i mean he i think all of that actually has kind of come back around in a circular fashion in the way that it often does in fashion i've said mike reese lives the life i wish i could lead of like you can always you're

a legend who can just say the rest of your life like yeah i wrote on the simpsons in the best years that was me and now i'm a millionaire and retired i don't have any kids and i just fly around the world and do what i want and get paid probably quite a lot of money to do one day of work uh in a writer's room a week when simpsons writing is in production like that's pretty awesome figure it out but they gotta i mean how long is disney gonna put up with like i've already talked about like when companies are getting back up to speed you know places to trim fat and some of that's just craving like you know late capitalism but like how long is until a disney accountant is like hey did you

know we have like 20 guys who work one day a week and each get millions of dollars a year uh i i think me and bob we've we've talked about it before that i think the when the season 32 broadcasting deal is up fox will not renew it and disney will change a whole lot of stuff that's that's what i expect yeah i believe that uh but uh but yes i just wanted to give a copperfield update there so i i i think you know you think of the tone that which blue is written i think it just really fits with mike reese's writing style like quite a lot definitely like the uh the quips the body quips yes yeah i have one bit of shocking information in that. So this aired on Halloween.

And for the next 10 years, these Treehouse of Horrors would air after Halloween. The next one to air before or on Halloween was Treehouse of Horror 20, season 21. Holy shit. So airing after Halloween would be the thing for these for another decade to the point where they make jokes about it. Like, why are we doing the Halloween show after Halloween?

Because of baseball. Terrible. Because of baseball. I mean, fall ball baseball, yeah, would preempt this stuff a lot. But when I think of animation and sports, I was explaining to someone, like, yeah, Family Guy and Futurama, like, didn't do as well as they could have, at least on the East Coast. I remember when I was growing up in their first runs because they'd always get preempted by football games. Yep. Yeah, King of the Hill would barely make it. That was a 7.30 show on the East Coast. It'd be like Futurama 7, always preempted. King of the Hill, 7.30, maybe not. You'd always get the

Simpsons. Oh, man. Now living in the West Coast time zone for as long as I have, I can't believe I was a fool watching the Oscars on the East Coast time zone. Like, it's hell. Yeah, you can watch the Oscars on the West Coast and then go do something else. Well, actually, I mentioned it last week. Now I remember why I brought up the World Series. It's because this year the World Series ended in four games.

The Yankees swept the Braves. If they hadn't swept the braves i bet this would have aired on november 7th instead of october 31st as well it would have been the inaugural post halloween halloween show so you should be we should all be thankful that we got to watch this on halloween because the yankees were so good they beat the braves in four games i'm more of a Braves fan, so that makes me sad. The Simpsons will be right back. Halloween night. Someone knows their secret.

It's definitely dead. Someone knows what they did. Oh, stop that. It's the biggest Simpsons Halloween special ever. Uh-oh! I think I'm having a heart attack! An all-new Simpsons, part of a full-hour

8, 7 Central, Fox Sunday. Hope you guys aren't chafing in your beetle boots while listening to this week's podcast. A special thank you to our guest, Jason Sheridan.

What a cool dude. You guys really got to check out Podcasts Arrive. We love that podcast, too. Please be sure to check it out. And you know, this podcast, Talking Simpsons, comes to you every week thanks to the support of subscribers on Patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. Subscribers for five bucks a month at patreon not only support me and bob doing this full-time but also they support talking simpsons sister podcast what a

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But okay, why don't we start the episode proper here. So Treehouse of R10, it's again them kind of celebrating themselves. Like now, they just had their 30th one. So seeing this 10th anniversary one is really crazy. Yeah, I guess they're still counting. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well the 30th one was also the 666th episode. Wow. yeah they uh yeah well the 30th one was also the 666th episode wow and i believe on the 31st one that'll be this october or should be i believe uh co-friends of our shows uh julia prescott has uh

as a writing credit i believe she did a segment yeah i'm looking forward to that but yeah see why don't i play the clip of king and Kodos welcoming us to the show? Live from fabulous Centauri City, it's the Simpsons 10th Halloween special. Now, please welcome your hosts. If you haven't been probed by these two, you haven't been probed. Kang and Kodos! Thank you. Thank you Thank you Yes, thank you, ladies and gentlemen

Welcome to our 10th anniversary show Oh, we've got a great gig Kang, what are you doing? You said we were going to warm up the audience Ladies and gentlemen, I have to apologize for my partner. He had to borrow a human brain. What do aliens have to do with Halloween? Silence!

I noticed those are all designs from Mike Scully's Halloween episodes, except for Homer. Yeah, that's true. Homer's from Treehouse 2, but I think all the rest are from the Scully's Halloween episodes, except for Homer. Yeah, that's true. Homer's from Treehouse, too, but I think all the rest are from the Scully one. Lisa with the axe in her head is from nothing. Yeah, I'd assume the axe in her head is from being axed by Homer, but Homer threatens to axe her, but yeah, I don't know where that axe head thing is from.

Homer is from the Twilight Zone. Yes, yeah. Yeah, when Bart turns him into a jack-in-the-box. where that axe head thing is from homer is from the twilight zone yes yeah great yeah yeah when bart turns him into a jack-in-the-box that one also homer's a little off model his nose is kind of a circle nose which i think is probably just because they were left with an old ass model sheet they didn't uh know how to rework i also i like the reference to century city with centauri city okay i got it and i like the uh sort of glitzy 70s variety show version of the King and Kodos music was nice.

And I mean, Jason, you're a SoCal resident. What is the significance of Century City as far as an LA local joke? Century City is a place, it's one of those places where you can't really park. Like it's one of those places I don't go to a lot. It's where a lot of the agencies are and a lot of um office buildings it's sort of like near westwood where ucla is that's what i

think of it as although i think there is an eataly somewhere around there now so that's where it's going to uh so is it is it bad to film in century city or is it something you wouldn't brag about? No, I think it's adjacent to the Fox lot. It's all kind of near there. Most of my memories of that area are early PA jobs on rough reality show, Writer's Strike Filler. Oh, boy. Doing runs before everyone really used like dropbox and we transfer like there's so much shit i i remember one of my early pa jobs was printing out physical casting

pages with physical dvds and putting them in overnight fedex envelopes and dropping them off at fedex to send to andy cohen back when andy cohen was just an executive now you could just stick that crap on vimeo and just send an email oh wow i forgot andy cohen got his start as a producer of things not a guy who gets to be a late night show host yes actually jason how close are you in your hollywood travels i mean how close have you gotten to the the productions on the simpsons that's a good question probably i've never been on the fox lot now that i think of it but i would like friends worked on like some of the birthday boys had mike mitchell i believe right mike mitchell um i think tim kalpakis i think maybe Paul Rust work for Gracie um Joe Saunders the

writer um so I would I would get stuff about that and then friends have worked on I mean the Simpsons have spawned so many people who have had other shows and written on other shows so friends have worked with guys who worked on the on the classic years of the Simpsons that's cool that's cool yeah oh so uh I I do want to give credit to thumbs up to Pete Michaels for, and his team for the design of the jack-o'-lantern eyes of Kang and Kodos being each eye. Yeah. So it has a very good direction.

I think it's very well done. Yeah. Kang and Kodos, they're supposed to be like Rowan and Martin or Lewis and Martin, like those, those guys. Uh, but I thought at first,

like Kodos was going to be the lewis with his like kisses to the audience but then kang becomes the dumb one and i also think it's sexist oh wait no no it's not no no yeah actually kodos is a sister you're right um also like in three years earlier in treehouse seven they make a joke about how probing jokes are played out, and then they just do a probe joke on this. So I was hoping we'd have no more probe jokes. It's 1999. We have like two more months of probe jokes. God, yeah.

Well, I guess actually we're not that far removed from Homer making up the story that Ned was gang probed. Oh, that's right. From Viva Ned Flanders. What a funny, funny joke. Wow. Forgot about that one. And did you spot all the sci-fi folks in the audience there?

I think I recognized one of them. There was definitely a Battlestar Galactica-style Cylon and a Metalunin from This Island Earth. Oh. Kind of like that. Yeah. And then there's a little green alien who i think they just pulled out of their character pack from uh the membership of the stone cutters but i think he also looks like the roswell

alien from bill morrison's roswell comic that mac grating was publishing at the time yeah oh yeah also we get to see maggie in alien form and she kills lisa in the same way that uh kang kills springer's entire audience and in the previous year so good deal of uh continuity there and uh so yes then we start the first segment written by donna kakari a parody of i know what you did last summer and the sequel because they came out two summers back to back so summer of 97 summer of 98 and this is fall of 99 so we had just lived through two summers of knowing what people did i forgot they made that that fast that's crazy and every grammar person was like it actually should be i know what you did the previous summer excuse me instead of i still know what you did

there are bigger problems with that movie but i will say donna carrie uh left the show before the rewrite happened so the third act of this rewrite of this segment was different it was going to be grandpa was going to be the killer. Would have been way better, honestly. I have a lot of Wizard Did It style notes about the second half of this. I do like how it turns into a different kind of genre entirely, a horror genre. But Donna Carey left The Simpsons in spring of 99 to work on the Austin Powers animated series for for hbo that was never made oh man it could uh

that would be right up there with father of the pride if that had come out man yeah i would kill i would kill to see that oh yeah yeah me and 99 would have killed i was a huge austin powers fan especially after the second movie came out and i was so excited to know that there was going to be an animated series by a simpsons guy on the staff. But I think HBO, that's quality stuff. Yeah, yeah. I think probably what it was is Mike Myers is very precious about his material. That does not excuse things like The Love Guru, rather. But he is very precious about the things he works on.

So maybe it didn't fit his standards, but it just was never made. It seemed like a sure thing. There was never an Austin Powers cartoon. Yeah, that's surprising. HBO would have been the place where they could have like gotten away with stuff too i i could see myers just killing it because he's like uh he didn't meet his standards or maybe it was more time intensive than he thought it would be but uh though i mean this kind of stuff happens all the time you know there was a howard the duck cartoon that was coming to Hulu that I think they wrote all the

scripts for and it's just not coming out. I'm still waiting for the Fartman cartoon that Howard Stern was going to make. Wow. I think they were still, they announced the casting for the MODOK cartoon. MODOK's the only one they kept going. Yeah. The other three got killed. MODOK. I'm looking for, I'll give it a try. I like Patton Oswalt. Yeah, sure. Yeah, but I was really looking for that Howard the Duck show. I'm kind of bummed. Yeah, that feels pretty easy.

I mean, all the original Howard the Duck stuff you can pull from, and then the Chip Zdarsky Howard the Duck stuff. Yeah, just fully rip off Chip Zdarsky and don't give him any kind of money for it, and just make a good show. Yeah, no, they'll give him like any kind of money for it and just make a good show that yeah uh that yeah no they'll give him a consultant so you know they'll make him an associate producer title maybe a consultant or an inspired by credit that's what i'm looking forward to for the next phase of marvel is them starting to get into the weird like 70s stuff that's why i figured they killed the howard

show because they're just like ah we got we got a disney plus plan for this we don't need an adult swim adjacent hulu show for it i mean marvel ran a comic called what if which was like all ages parody of their own work for ages oh you're thinking of what the what the i'm sorry what the what if was the um the alternate you know timeline stuff yeah what the was uh it wasn't alternate timeline stuff? Yeah, what the was the, it wasn't that funny. You don't like the adventures of oiving Forbush? I think that Forbush man is probably the only thing that I might hold up. Sorry, this is getting too nerdy for the, not the second segment of this podcast. But yes, Homer and the family are driving home after another adventure.

I still can't believe we escaped from those horrible vampires. But it was worth it to get back our super sugar crisp cereal. Can't get enough of that sugar crisp. I'm having a hard time seeing. Homer, did you remember to put the fog lights in? Yes, I forgot to put the fog lights in. I better pull over and play it safe. Please be a dog.

Oh, no. Ned Flanders. He's dead. He's definitely dead! Oh my god, we killed Ned Flanders! You mean you killed Ned Flanders? Oh, it was an accident! An accident! We've got to go to the police!

They'll never believe a Simpson killed a Flanders by accident. Even I have my doubts. Don't worry, I i got a plan okay ned first thing we have to do is to make sure that no one knows that you're dead and if anyone has you to say that you are not dead oh i love that uh dan whispering is a little powwow with that ned his whispers are supposed to be like written as like you're not supposed to hear it but so hearing his terrible plan actually said out loud pretty great independent of the visuals that eyeball squish is even grosser yeah it's funny here at isolated and i did some uh because when we were kids it was a golden crisp yeah so i went back to the sugar crisp things that

homer was remembering the the song never changed but the original concept of sugar crisp was sugar bear lived in the woods didn't have a shirt on we all know him with the classic shirt design i know him with a shirt and he would trick a witch into giving him her cereal so that was he had like a villain like a granny good witch like a nice witch that he would still have to trick to get the cereal so that's how it happened uh so the cereal changed from uh sugar crisp to super sugar crisp to uh super golden crisp to golden crisp and i i don't think i've had i think i've had like one bowl i didn't like it yeah i was not a golden crisp eater uh jason had thoughts uh yeah that wasn't one of my go-tos and well and scully misremembers it wellully misremembers it. Well, not misremembers it, but he treats it like it is still called in 1999 Super Sugar Crisp when after, I guess, after Mike Reese stopped eating it, it became known as Golden

Crisp because of, you know, parents didn't, they realized how sugary cereals were. So the response wasn't to actually cut down the amount of sugar in a cereal, but to remove sugar from the name of the cereals and talk about essential vitamins and minerals. But Homer's golden bear or sugar bear imitation, pretty great. I do love that. It feels a little bit them getting away with stuff because South Park did it, all the eye poke stuff. Yeah, they really- It feels like a South Park response. They lean into it. But I like how it goes from I Know What You Did Last Summer to Weekend at Bernie's to a werewolf movie.

Yes. Throughout this six-minute short. The most I Know What You Did Last Summer-y stuff is the start here with all of the driving on a dark road, and especially on the cliffs. I remember that from the original original movie i saw both the first movie and second movie in theaters did not know they did a third movie until today oh 2006 is yes yeah i'll always know what you did last summer none of the original cast members yep yeah well buddy back uh but and now in the i believe in 2020 well the who knows now

uh amazon's gonna have a know what you did last summer tv series so you know yeah everything's better it'll it'll be prestige it will be it'll be well you know i feel i feel like i've been programmed to see amazon is as as prestige as a netflix thing i feel like i feel like it goes netflix amazon to hige. Well, the original movies were just a vehicle for breasts. So I imagine the TV series will follow the same tack. It all just seems like chattel, like chum. Like I can't tell. I think HBO is the only one that I think of as like higher end at this point.

But even who knows what that'll be once hbo max rolls out although their their marketing has been a little tamer than some of the other streaming sites that all seem like money laundering uh they're all about spending on the uh constant debt somehow yeah well though hbo max i call that because you'll max out your credit card on the high price of them yeah have you heard about whole foods i got a joke for you buddy i think it's also very mean to marge that the only reason she hits ned is because she's pulling off to the side of the road to be safe like it's it's punishing her for being a safe driver but they usually make marge the butt of a joke like that yeah i liked hom Homer's little song about the fog lights. It's so good. They play it a second time in the episode. I love it. Yeah. So here's my wizard did a complaint. So I'm going to put them up here. Okay, just know that Lucy Lawless is making fun

of you. I know. I know. From New Zealand. Okay, she's Skyping in from New Zealand. But all right. So Homer is using Ned like a corpse. He is fully a dead body seemingly. So is Ned dead right now and he is brought back to life and resurrected by his werewolf powers? Or is Ned acting dead the entire time to fool them into getting his revenge? Which is it? I think Ned is dead for a period of time because he's also, he's sort of like an undead werewolf, right? So I think like he does not become... Well, he says undead, which like werewolves are not undead. Well, this is like an undead werewolf right uh-huh so i think like he does not become dead which like werewolves are not undead well this is a special kind of werewolf henry uh where i think that he was dead for a period and the werewolf magic took over and he reanimated

okay well i mean i have another note on the timeline if that's the possibility there but donna carrie shouldn't have left the show i Well, also that Ned's clothes are in tatters in the flashback, but here when they hit him, and for this whole Weekend at Bernie scene, his clothes are intact. You have transcended genius at work territory. I know, but it bugs me. It's been bugging me for 21 years.

I got the world must know. But yes, Homer, his plan starts going into action here. Hey, Maud, look who's helping me clean the chimney. Neddy, where have you been? Hi, Maud. Diddly, I've been having fun with my pal Homer. Diddly. Oh, I'm so relieved. Whenever you go on one of your late night fog walks, I get so worried. Relax, I'm fine.

But when I do die, I don't want any autopsies. Well, come on down, you goofy roofie. Wow, it sure is slippery up here. My pies are done. Oh, she missed it. Hey, Maud, I'm home. Uh-oh, I think I'm having a heart attack. And that's the end of that chapter.

So I know that was the first non-Maggie Roswell mod performance, right? It always stuck out to me as a viewer at this time. It is incredibly distracting, but in Air Order, we did hear in Brothers Little Helper. We haven't recorded that one yet. Oh, okay. In that one, she does the reenactment for the fire drill thing. Oh, that is her, yes. But it is so distracting, yeah, this fake Maude.

So briefly, while she's alive in these final episodes, she's voiced by Marsha Mitzvangavin? Mitzvangavin, yeah. And also, all this funereal stuff with a fake Maude, it only makes me think more of Maude's incoming death at this point. Oh, actually. Sorry, Jason.

In case you were wondering. It's so odd. Yeah, a lot of grim death stuff like like very like kooky but also sad death stuff connecting that and this apparently she and maggie roswell both voice mod in that brothers little helper episode but this is the first one where it's just her it's fully her yeah. Oh, okay. All right. I knew she did her. I only think of the bad Maude lines in there, but that's even more distracting. The Maude has like two voices in the same episode. Just re-record the Maggie Roswell stuff if you're going to replace her. And she does Miss Hoover like twice before Roswell comes back.

It's in Hell and Lovejoy, I think too, right? Yes. Yep. Late Night Fog Walk walks is a good turn of that's a very simpsons turn of phrase i love that phrase i like that a lot i've been going on morning fog walks these days i've been pushing myself to uh so as to not just stay indoors all the time early in the morning i'll put on my mask and go through a very contactless and at a distance walk from people but are you making record time uh you know not not every day but it's it's a it's a challenge that you get better at over time uh yeah mike and i were were kind of anxiously noting recently like people in la getting a little too comfy taking the walks without the masks.

Oh, that's bad. I think people keep going back and forth on like, you need them inside, outside. You don't need them outside. But like, oh, let's just all stick to wearing them. Let's just try that for a little while, you know? Yeah. I mean, we're in California. We're supposed to be better. We have to lead by example on this stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. All the sound effects on ned's corpse very funny uh and i'd say homer is only 10 percent meaner than he is in a normal season 11 episode here i guess dumping the dead husband into the wife's doorstep is uh step a step above his normal meanness though he would hear a person scream in pain and then you'll just walk away wipe his hands of the whole thing that's definitely a season 11 homer move and he's using the the cut trace from police cops oh yes you're right he's just pulling it from police doesn't even do like the fake like twirl of the

scarf i think he does maneuver yeah what season was that one uh just the previous one yeah the previous one yeah uh i guess yeah just uh just a few like five months six months earlier in 1999 i think it aired i believe it was an april 99 episode not that far removed but i can't tell if it is just in the writer's room they like saying that phrase so they put it in homer's mouth again or they did a specific reference to homer saying that from police cops yeah it feels like a very soon callback on the on the simpsons timeline of the late 90s yeah it feels too back patty for them in that way yeah yeah different from how gil would come back all the time that wasn't them celebrating like aren't we funny for making up gil like hey they just thought gil is funny and dan is very funny

as him but in that case just referencing yourselves that that doesn't feel like what the scully team would do right so we head to the funeral and the simpsons are all smiles try not to look too sad it'll seem suspicious and now ned's best friend will say a few words. Homer. When I think about Ned, I can't help but remember the look on his face when Marge drove over. Shut up, shut up, shut up. Oh, wait. What I'd like to say is we're still looking for the real killers.

Anyway, in conclusion, a man cannot be forced to testify against his wife. Stop winking. We'll miss you, buddy. Hey, we just got away with murder and it was so easy. You know, I've never liked that little wiener millhouse. No more murders. But you got to kill... No. Someone saw us. By who? It's very visual, but the pan across the neighborhood ending with Homer pointing at Marge. It always makes me laugh.

That's really great. It's such a long pan, too. In just the first act,'s like two really long pans like again the animation team really did a great job on this one and i always love hearing homer describe millhouse as a little wiener that's always great and but they they say on the commentary they're like we thought it was dated in 1999 to do a real killers joke but there's still he's still looking for those real killers it's never dated because they won't be found you know that oh i mean that oj doc that it pretty much spells it out the 10-hour oj doc that's a good one uh also i remember a whole episode of sopranos poking a hole in the theory that a wife can a spouse can't be compelled to uh testify like that that's not

true i know there was a joke about that made in Arrested Development. Oh, okay. Maybe I'm misconstruing it. No, I watched The Sopranos. I finished it like a year ago. But I believe that is a thing Christopher and Adriana like very wholeheartedly believe until the end of the episode when either a lawyer or the FBI is like, that's not true. That's not right. Yeah, that's right. I think Adriana goes to a pro bono guy who's just like, he explains to her what a RICO lawyer in the fbi is like that's not true that's not right yeah that's right i think i think adriana

goes to a pro bono guy who's just like he explains to her what a rico case is and how he she can be compelled yeah i just remember from uh rest of development uh it's jeffrey tambor is telling um jason bateman like uh he's very smug like a wife can't testify against her husband in court and jason is like that's not true and he's like i got the worst fucking lawyers that's a good joke yeah that's a good i don't want to celebrate jeffrey hey he was playing a character we can all appreciate a monster like george bluth and not the monster of jeffrey tambor it's true sure okay here's that timeline again for you guys all right so ned is resurrected then a well seemingly the Simpsons are driving home from a funeral that just ended. So did they just bury Ned and then Ned instantly dug himself up from the grave?

Yes, that's when the werewolf curse happened. In the daytime? And then he wrote on the door? It takes a while. It takes a while. Listen, they pulled this werewolf thing out of their ass because in the original, there was going to be a confrontation at Spooky Roller Disco with Grandpa being the killer. I think the rewrite was a mistake because this ruins the mystery.

It doesn't make sense. And it annoys me. I'm sorry. But the timeline on it doesn't work. Doesn't work. He would have had to dug himself out of the grave instantly the second he was buried. What if he waited? No, because the Simpsons are driving home from the funeral it's over like unless they unless it took them eight a full day to drive back from the funeral that we you would assume happened in

springfield i think maude uh was in on it okay she's the one who wrote all over their walls i'll buy that sorry jason i'm subjecting you to a lot of bullshit. No, that's okay. Yeah, the werewolf stuff doesn't make a ton of sense. The werewolf, this is what the comedy term hat on hat, where it's like, well, werewolf rules, and I know what you did last summer rule, like, it's too much. I think you're not supposed to look back at the evidence

before the werewolf reveal. I think you're just going to look back at the evidence before the werewolf reveal. I think you're just going to be like, Oh, what a fun twist, a werewolf. Well onto the next one. Yeah. I think,

uh, I think too, it is almost intentionally bad. Cause as, as a joke that it's a bad twist. Uh, yeah, it does not land like some other sense since non sequiturs like,

like the, Oh no, here comes that gas that turns everyone inside out it's so funny to me i love that one yeah yeah then the simpsons go in and they're waiting for a phone call they get a a threatening phone call from mo that he seemed to uh meant for maude which they bring up on the commentary like why does maude why does mo think homer is maude when he answers with the yellow doesn't make sense but uh see they're picking it apart just as much as me on this commentary it's true so yeah and uh then

there's a great the great reveal of the huge turnaround of seeing like i still know i still know yeah that's a great like uh in-camera animation of the couch like rotating you see all the walls almost similar to the the shinning yeah it's kind of stolen from themselves on the shinning honestly it's a cool piece of animation though and now i think about just the line weight of that shot like all the lines of all the words on the wall spinning around and then it cuts to the guy who looks like the fisherman who is the killer from the what you did series okay it fits that it's Ned because the person who is the killer in those movies is the guy they hit with a car as well. So it does fit in that regard.

And we're also thinking of the line weight as the Simpsons run from the guy chasing after them. They then get in their car, which also has I Still Know written all over it. And I think about how hard it was for the animators to draw a car moving that's covered in writing. Yeah, it's a big challenge. Which is easy to write down on a script, not so easy to draw. It's not our modern CGI cars that come with writing pre-installed. It's now so distracting to me. Every even 2D show like the DC Universe Harley quinn show which i think is a good show

uh but every car is to is a 3d element which is just it's it seems like an easy time saver because cars are hard to draw yeah where where do you watch that show where is that show uh well you have to sign up for dc universe online okay yeah but it's good or go to the pirate bay.org i mean or whatever yeah, that's true. Though, hey, at the time you're listening to this, maybe it's also on HBO Max? I don't know. It seems weird. Yeah, I would think a lot of that stuff gets shuttled over there.

Teen Titans. It seems weird that Warner would expect you to subscribe to $15 HBO Max and $8 DC Universe at the same time. Yeah, I mean, they got a much later start because DC Universe gives you some of the comics archives too, right? That is, yeah, I actually do like that. It's pretty cool. I like that, but they're years behind Marvel Unlimited. Like, I don't have it now, but even a few years ago, Marvel Unlimited was pretty solid.

A little buggy, but pretty substantial. So the car breaks down and they've got their own plans of how to escape. He's getting closer! Okay, Marge, you hide in the abandoned amusement park. Lisa, the pet cemetery. Bart, spooky roller disco. And I'll go skinny dipping in that lake where the sexy teens

were killed a hundred years ago tonight. Now, Flanders, I want you to... It's impossible. I killed you. You can't kill the undead, silly. He's undead all right. Are you a oh i wish you see that night when you hit me with your car i'm making record time on this fog walker better pick up the pace great little strut on ned i love that sort of a feminine strut he's got with his like shoulders out that's how i like to walk like his elbows out just a proud fog walker it also the the joke pacing of that i always forget that homer has a fourth joke because you know it should be uh you name two things and then spooky roller disco is the last thing you say but then homer has a fourth thing of like i'm gonna go skinny dipping in that uh pool and the teens were killed in 1899 and

there's police tape there still a lot of skinny dipping for 1899 yeah and realistic police tape uh but the spooky roller i i wish we had an ending where abe confronts them at the spooky roller it's true i want to know let's let's email donna carrie and uh i i want to ask him about so many things uh but yeah they also they poke ned's eye through his glasses another you know that wizard really maybe the frame fell out when he was being buried sure okay well so now this man was buried then hey i didn't i never said he wasn't okay i and when he says you can't kill the undead again i'm going by white wolf uh tabletop role oh that doesn't apply to all reality all werewolves everywhere werewolves

aren't undead though i don't you can kill a werewolf the thing is werewolves are fictional so you can just do whatever you want with them and it's fine fine fine i think are you just warming up for the to set up the uh professor fring question to lucy law yes i'm playing a character here with being annoyed yes i mean it's just it's all a character And yes, Ned's clothes are torn apart when he's hit by the car in the flashback. But I like that at least you can hear Homer repeat his, I forgot to put the fog lights in. And yeah, Homer, in this last bit here,

Homer gets murdered. It's just a very long bit of just Homer dying. Guess I forgot to put the fog lights in. I better pull over and play it safe. So you were gonna kill us. Yeah. Hey, homie, I want the news, not the weather. Mars, did you hear me sing Werewolf Flanders?

Deadly. Flanders, stop that. oh it's a lot of things they don't have to animate yes yeah good homer screams though great delivery on that flanders yeah line yeah yeah that is good i like yeah there's a lot of funny stuff in this even if it doesn't make uh full sense but i i like just how long they're like you know for 30 seconds you're just gonna watch homer be chased by a werewolf and then he'll die like that they uh they spend a lot of time with that and i also like that homer homer does the sitcom thing of, like, doing a joke. And his family's like, we're not standing around for a joke.

We're running. They just leave him for dead. Yeah. I want the news, not the weather. Classic being spit upon joke. But yes, that's the end of the first one. They even point out it's ADR lines on the commentary. Like, boy, we indulged a lot there.

It's easy to fill some time with that. But now we go on to the comic book one uh which like yes jason i wanted another fellow comic book nerd on here to uh to silence bob and we can just talk about comic books yeah my my big thing with this segment is that um it's it's very funny to look back on because this this is pre every other movie in theaters being superhero movies. But like 20 years later, these jokes feel very packed to me. Like even in 99, some of the nerd stuff was like, all right, we get it. We're a few years past like the comics bubble, the boom and bust.

And like a lot of comic shops closing and like, um, Marvel and DC kind of shrinking their lines down. And I feel like even just Simpsons alone with comic book guy, like had done so many of these kinds of jokes. Yeah. It's different. It's so different. 20 years later,

we just did an episode of a mission Hill for a talking mission Hill mini series. And it was also a fall of 99 episode. And it also was like can you believe they're talking about star wars on tv like that was such a novelty in 1999 now we just that that's what entertainment is for everybody now it's no longer niche yeah for sure uh yeah there's this uh very cringy chunk of chris hardwick stand-up where he's like i'm a nerd i like nerd stuff i like lord of the rings star wars and i just complain so it's like yeah

i love those billion dollar entities like i love those hard to track down those books you can find in like any church thrift store you can find a million copies of them now well you can't argue with hardwick's delivery of like what's up nerds uh so, so great. What a great guy. And a nice guy. On the Mission Hill, how often does the name Dan Klaus come up? Oh, he is not mentioned, probably because they don't want him to know. They're kind of borrowing his look a little bit. Me and Bob mentioned him a few times.

No, I meant on your guys' Mission Hill. We brought him up a few times, but also Peter Bagg. He also got ripped off pretty bad. Peter Bagg, yeah. Definitely. This segment called Desperately Seeking Xenaena i don't know if the the zoomers need to be clued into this xena warrior princess very popular syndicated series from 95 to 2001 i think it was popular for the same reasons baywatch was popular pornography hard to access in the 90s but also it told some cool fantasy stories and there was like a lesbian angle that

they couldn't really delve too deeply into on the show but they could hint at that was tantalizing for men and women and uh my theory about this was and i was talking uh about it with henry before the recording is that they did not get the permission of the xena people so this is lulu lawless she has to say that she isn't xena and they can't ever say xena warrior princess or like that show from TV. They never mentioned her TV show. So I think Lucy Lawless can do this on her own and they can dress up her as the character,

but they can't say this is Xena from the Xena, Warrior Princess TV show. And just parody law covers their asses in a way. Yeah, it's so funny, those syndicated shows. I feel like I remember references to them more than the actual shows, like Hercules and Xena, Baywatch, these sorts of things. And it was just because there was just less stuff back then. Yes.

Well, yeah, I mean, a geeky, mystical, a show about nerdy mythology that also had like a continuing story arc or it'd be you know it was an episode well it was kind of episodic but i i was a i actually was a regular hercules xena viewer i was for a time and they would call back to stuff in ways that a lot of shows wouldn't so they definitely appeal to nerds and yes like like jason said things have changed so much in 20 years that you have so many choices for nerd content that Xena and Hercules would just be lost in the pack right now if they debuted. Yeah, for sure. And you also had a nerd culture that was just like kind of a boys club, kind of misogynistic. Not necessarily now where it is misogynistic and like i'm going

to murder you with a gun that's very true there's more meek the nerds are bad in this the in male and chauvinistic but they're written as more meek than uh than outright violence like a potential massacre yes yeah doer i guess i guess they wrote this came out after, but this was written before Columbine as well. So you're missing that aspect of it. Those kids weren't even nerds. You're taking away the nerd cred of these murderers? Yes, they were not true nerds. But yeah, I don't want to spoil this for anybody, but Lucy Lawless, awesome name, right?

For Lucy Ryan. Oh, you're ruining the magic, Bob. So her name truly is Lawless. Awesome name, right? For Lucy Ryan. Oh, you're ruining the magic, Bob. So her name truly is Lawless. Wow. Well, so I was a big viewer of it because I liked the shows and I liked orky shows, but also because I had just gotten into Evil Dead. One of my best friends loved the Evil Dead movies, loved Ash a ton ton and here we find out that bruce campbell is a regular appearing character on xena and hercules because sam ramey is like an executive producer on it ted ramey is like a glorified regular on xena and hercules as well and he's a good actor i don't want to speak ill of ted ramey and just say he got the job because he's

related to sam ramey but but i mean that's why he's in every spider-man movie also wasn't there another show wasn't there like a squash buckling show that bruce campbell was on uh i believe it was like master of adventure or the something like that yeah he tried to make briscoe county junior work but uh right i love that show it was like it was a western show meets Twin Peaks. Lord Boyle on the show, who was Shownuff in The Last Dragon, he fucking ruled. Like, that was, you see, now I'm just falling down this type of show rabbit hole. Like, I watched a lot of Baywatch, even though I was not watching it for prurient interests like you guys.

You're watching it to learn about ocean safety. Yes, yeah. like you guys but you're watching it to learn about ocean safety yes yeah this also really captures a certain you know it's batman 66 but it also really captures the kind of like bad superhero cartoons of the 70s and early 80s like especially super friends but uh i don't know how intentionally they made it that way but it really reminds me of spider-man and his amazing friends too the kind of pacing of it. Yeah, I like that show. I mean, I would dig at video stores. And a lot of those were released three or four episodes at a time in no particular order on VHS.

And I would find those oddities every now and then. Yeah, good times. I owned a tape that had the X-Men crossover episode from Spider-Man and his amazing friends and watched it a million times. Oh, yeah. I mean, and the X-Men pilot. Like, that I always got from Blockbuster. The X-Men pilot, which they did not make a series out of, but they made an incredibly popular arcade cabinet video game out of. Oh, yeah.

Me and Bob did a full commentary for that on our Patreon. Check it out. It's Pride of the X for on our patreon check it out pride of the x-men right yes yeah pride of the x-men that's right yeah before i play the first clip though i have one more axe to grind and that is tim long on the commentary says a shitty thing uh which is he says that uh a lot of quote bad simpsons comics came out of this sketch and uh he is very negative towards the simpsons comic books the official simpsons comic books which i think that is a mean shot and i think the i think was caught well i guess we're friends with people who worked on simpsons comics i should say we take it personally

but i think they were doing good stuff at bongo like was every comic good maybe not but if you are a simpson writer like tim long who has worked on Simpson seasons 10 through 31, maybe you live in a glass house and you don't want to throw stones at Bongo Comics. I can see that argument. You know, that's all I'm saying. Yeah. There's some problematic stuff on this commentary. Matt Summons has the R word.

I was like, oh, this is 2009. He really does. He says the not the R-E-T-A-R-D. Well, now you ruined it him now you practically said it and we're gonna get canceled oh i just wanted people to know it wasn't the word for sexual assault there you go that's all but yes it's why do we hear a superhero it's i'm sorry i mean to tim long there but because this is a good scene i this is my favorite of the full of the three uh segments so why do we hear the superhero origin?

Well, well, well, if it isn't the cutest police officer in Springfield. You know, we got feelings too, Chief. Just dump your candy on the x-ray belt, Ralphie. There's a good boy. Safe. Safe. Razorblade. Syringe.

Oh, white chocolate. Check it out, Lisa. I'm Radioactive Man. I don't think the real Radioactive Man wears a plastic smock with a picture of himself on it. He would on Halloween. Get in there, you stupid pillowcase. Stop it. You'll jam the machine.

Uh-oh. Radiation! Duck and cover! Whoa! Fire! Oh, my God! Lisa! She's been crushed, and so have the hopes of our Mathletics team. Hold the funeral, Poindexter. Poindexter! Oh, that's a great joke.

He's not amazed that she's alive. He's disgusted he was called Poindexter. Poindexter. My favorite joke in the whole episode is the joke about those terrible costumes. Yeah, that's good. Well-observed, like, 60s, 70s Halloween costume humor. In the late 80s, when I would shop for costumes at Walmart or whatever, I still would see those.

It was the Hulk. I specifically remember just a Hulk plastic smock with a mask. I guess you don't have to explain your costume that way. If the logo for the character is on the front. I guess so. Yeah. Seeing this scene of the candy being x-rayed back when I was 17 gave me my real first like snowflake moment. Like, look at these snowflakes, because that was happening.

Kids are getting their candies x-rayed on Halloween for looking for things like that. But really, if you're going to get poisoned on Halloween, it's one of your family members is going to do it. Just like every other sort of harm that can befall you as a child. It's a family member or a friend. I think there's like only a few documented cases of this kind of tampering. And it was always like a relative. They ruined there's only a few documented cases of this kind of tampering, and it was always a relative. They ruined Halloween candy for 20 years. It's probably worse to irradiate

your Halloween candy. Like modern Treehouse of Horror episodes. When they want to do something topical, do they do the act? Do they do Munchausen by proxy? Lisa and Marge do a Munchausen by proxy storyline.

They did do a storyline where homer ate himself and that's a truly horrifying it was disgusting if uh if you want to see what has to be the grossest and most unsettling treehouse of horror watch that one yeah they were gonna hit body horror eventually yeah And it's not a direct parody of anything. It's just horrifying. The risk now in hippy-dippy California is what if they put weed gummies in your child's bag? You know what? Those cost like $16 for 10 of them. If you're going to prank the world by getting children high, that's not worth the cost.

I agree. You're not going to see them get high. Though, I mean, kids buy prepackaged candy so much now. They're not going to eat a cheap thing anyway, aren't they? I don't know. I think it's overdone. Also, seeing Ralph in his cop outfit stood in front of Eddie reminds me of that fan theory that Eddie is... About 9-11? No. me of that fan theory that eddie about 9-11 no that eddie is ralph's real father because it

looks so similar with their string hair especially in cop uniforms and nelson is barney's son we understand that absolutely is true wow bart and lisa like i also like they're told to duck and cover which actually does save every other child from being irradiated like it actually works the duck and cover thing yeah really and uh bart and lisa then get the powers of uh bart becomes mr fantastic and lisa the thing basically especially i mean she could be any strong character but the fact they call her clobber girl feels like a ben grim reference, I thought he was more like Plastic Man. I guess he kind of, maybe he's more into, yeah. Okay, Jason, is he more Reed or Plastic Man?

I think Plastic Man does, seems to have more fun, like usually a little more horrific. I think the eyes, the stretching eyes seems more Plastic Man to me. Yeah, I mean, I'm not a superhero guy, but Plastic Man, everyone always told me, the comic folks i knew

like man he is so funny this guy's the most hilarious character ever and then i would try to read some of stuff like this is all right i guess i'm not like falling over and crying with these plastic antics yeah again comedy and comics is very strange um i guess the kyle baker ones yeah those are good those are good yeah funny guy yeah at this time in the comics plastic man was a member of the justice league of america and they were doing some jokes about how he's actually more serious than he thinks and it's actually all an act yeah i this that would have been like the grant morrison justice league right well there's some weird humor in that like there's some weird moments in

that well and then when wade took over they did a whole thing where he like got frozen and shattered and then he's like kind of fucked up about it oh god it's uh it's weird it's he's like i can't i can't forgive the person who did this it took him a while to recover this happened around the same time there are a few years apart this reminded me of the futurama superheroes episode where lila is clobber ella uh i think uh clobber girl is a funnier uh pun name because it's a parody of the baking powder clobber girl oh i didn't know that really yeah i would see that in my grandma's like uh cabin all the time so i immediately got the pun but yeah clobber girl is a kind of baking powder so holy shit yeah it's a it's a smarter pun than clobber ella but it's not as funny as super king it's super oh yeah this is basically that yeah the futurama kind of ripped this off even with the theme song and everything i i love both of them

now they're both perfect captain yesterday is fast also he is from the past a clobber girl i didn't know that was a parody i didn't look look into it because Stretch Dude is just such a name Bart would make up that I didn't even think to investigate that the other one could be a parody. And then we get a fun theme song, which I'll just cut in here. Bart, with these powers, we can become superheroes. Okay, so do it already. Stretch Dude and Clabber Girl. He's a human rubber

man and she's the hunk in pearls he's a limber lass she's a powerful ass he'll wring your neck and she'll kick your ass there's stretch dude and clobber girl stretch dude

clobber girl tonight's episode enter the collector and uh in the theme song i like that lisa punches that gangster and he explodes that's that's my favorite thing and bill clinton gets assaulted yes yeah it was tight he you know he deserved it looking back on it i at first didn't like that now i think he needed to be shaking a bit harder that's what gave him his heart condition oh god and gave him all that pressure that made him cheat you know uh and also the title card uh of them and their poses like it's such a kirby pose too like especially bart's like kind of reach forward like i think the animators at least were really pulling specifics from the uh from comics and that's a

real like hannah barbara title card very much so yeah yeah yeah which uh also seeing the collector which they joke about it on the commentary they did not mean for it but there is a sim there is a classic marvel character called the collector who did these things who would it was unknown in 1999 now you can see him on a ride and in films played by benicio del toro tim long yeah that's wild not a comics fan not a bongo comics fan but i didn't know about collector is it again uh jason it's it's just so crazy to like i really like the guardians ride even though it's honestly almost a little too strong for me but i brave it for the marvelness of it but then to be in there and be like wow i'm just in the collector's place i never i was reading like thanos quest in 1992

and never thought i'd see this in in real life is it's the collector like in canon isn't he a isn't he purple like wasn't he a purple dude well yeah but i mean so yeah i will also like jeff goldblum's character the game master like he's he's a blue guy so yeah they they kind of just drop any blue skin color stuff unless you're uh in thanos or one of his contemporaries i think that's true yeah i i think that's one of the weird things about mcu is they i i really like their character designs and adaptations in most cases but a lot of color can be removed over time for sure the they also beat up saddam hussein to really uh date things

but uh how were they to know we'd be invading them in like three years four years four years after this uh so then we get to our big guest star of the episode, or I guess one of them, Lucy Lawless. But I'm sure that once girls get to know the real you, you'll get plenty of dates. Next question. Yes, over here. Hi. Hi. In episode BF12, you were battling barbarians while riding a winged Appaloosa.

Yet in the very next scene, my dear, you're clearly atop a winged Arabian. Pleased to explain it. Ah, yeah. Well, whenever you notice something like that, a wizard did it. I see. All right, yes. But in episode AG4... Wizard.

Ah, for glabing out loud. Behold! I am the Collector, and I'm here to add you to my collection. Must remove? to add you to my collection must remove my breastplate is this the first time that comic book guy gets a story yeah i think it is not just a joke so they're really this is his moment to shine he'll get like entire episodes in the future pretty soon yeah but uh yeah i think you're right this is his first like major role since uh really three men in a comic book i think i feel like i've been to a lot of

comic-con panels uh and comic-con sorts of panels i honestly have never seen that kind of like deep continuity question i've seen a lot of guys make statements that they think are questions, but are just statements. Yes. Yeah, I have seen that. I would kill, at all the panels I've been to, I would kill for somebody

to ask a good question at one of those things. I would want to just yell at everybody who's in line, like, while you're waiting in line, pull out your phone and Google that question and if it's been answered don't ask that yeah for sure i the breastplate joke that that feels real to me

because i mean there's been a long-running discussion in the like comics world of like hey at conventions when you're walking around you see people in cosplay um don't be a creep yeah you know if permission for photos like don't don't ogle don't be a media yeah don't don't sneak pics or try to like or also this definitely feels like uh in the realm of the very late 90s internet phenomenon of like celebrity skin or like nip slips and all that too oh that's true which uh what a gross time in uh american culture as well the phrase nip slip yes uh we do see gary and i think doug the nerds that's what i love that yeah so the wizard did it is pretty much just the genius at work xylophone gag previously seen in the poochie thing but uh it's a funnier encapsulation well it's a more memetic

interperation of it because you can say a wizard did it just to explain any of this stuff i think that picture of gary and doug next to each other are just us yes it's a character of us you're right you're right and we would nod like that too if someone was asking a question like yeah maybe about dragon ball i think though actually talking about these questions i did asking a question like, yeah, that's right. Maybe about Dragon Ball, I think. Though, actually, talking about these questions, I did ask a question like this at a Comic-Con panel, at least once, I can recall, which was, I asked Dan Slott, the writer of The Amazing Spider-Man at the time, who now knew Spider-Man's secret identity

because it had gone back to nobody knows it, and now he's starting to unmask all the time so are we to believe that even jessica jones daughter knows spider-man secret identity were you removed from the building uh no i was given a uh a slight answer that's like yeah look people know secret identity now it's how it is like that's uh dan slott was very nice and understanding of my question i have read very few like you know uh please put this aside for me, like Spider-Man comics. I think I read like there were some anthologies or some some like older throwback ones. But the month to month Spider-Man stories are just so impenetrable to me.

The Spider-man family like i like i think every like major like avenger spider-man batman superman x-men there should be one title that's like here's here's the gist of it you know here's this is when someone walks in across the street here's a one and done comic or like a two-parter comic that you can hand to anyone and they it is amazing that these companies these publishers that are now owned by massive media corporations are so bad at that most of the time yeah i mean that's why japanese comics got so popular in america it's like okay i want to read this i'll start with the book that's labeled one and then i'll read the next 19 and i'll be done and i'll read another book well if i may counter

that guys if spider-man comics weren't impenetrable then they wouldn't appeal to people like me who've read 2 000 spider-man comics you can decipher them yeah so so think about which audience you want um countless people who aren't like me or the 80 000 people who are like me. It may also be like whatever family of books first hooked you. Like I'll give any excuse under the sun for X-Men comics. Yeah. And to some extent for Batman comics. But yes, Spider-Man, I think maybe it just becomes, it will always come back to Spider-Man wins the day,

but Peter Parker has to suffer. And like I can only take so much of that bummed you out too much i can see that yeah uh but though i gotta say an x-men fan calling spider-man comics impenetrable like you know x-men comics are pretty tough well that's true but they were just so you could just like throw a rock and hit them in the 90s like there's another one that's true yeah uh so lucy lawless kidnapped she is then offered a rollo care for a rollo sweet zina all right collector stick this in your tweezers i'm not zina i'm an actress you lunatic oh please i'm not insane i simply wish to take you back to my lair and make you my bride. Oh dear God.

Clobber girl? Thank you. Help! It's Xena. She's been kidnapped. Come on. Remember, you're vulnerable to kryptonite. Jeez, Marge, tell the neighborhood.

Why would they be vulnerable to kryptonite, which only affects people from the planet Krypton? There's some things you don't know about Bart and Lisa, Henry. Mysterious things. Yeah, for crying out loud. But yeah, I just remembered listening to that clip. It's like, oh yeah, twice in this episode, she's like, I am not Xena, the licensed character. I forgot she said that earlier in it, yes. And I have to say that Lucy Lawless took a much different route than Kevin Sorbo, notable direct-to-video Christian movie crank.

She's like an activist for Greenpeace. She's pretty great, yeah. And she was just on the new Evil Dead show they did. And she's pretty great yeah and and she was just on that new uh the new evil dead show they did and she's uh she's really good i like her i don't think i've yet to hear a bad thing about lucy lawless was she the love interest for ron swanson too on parks and rec yep yep yeah he married her yeah uh i don't return to that show too much but yeah she was really good in that yeah by the way lawless is not is not is not a made-up name it's the name of the man who got her pregnant at 19 when they had like a young like shotgun wedding or whatever so she stole his name just like how susan sarandon stole chris

sarandon's name and they both got way more famous than their loser first husband jack skellington uh yeah i don't want to be mean to chris sarandon here but uh uh rolo i am uh i'm a pro rolo man i like i like a role i've been a role on like 15 years man really you're missing out it's caramel it's like a little disc of like caramel and chocolate it's a wheel of caramel it can be uh sometimes you get a chalky bit of chocolate not yeah the best i've moved beyond that chocolate i need like 80 dark chocolate oh you and your dark chocolate yeah wigum likes the white chocolate here you would hate that uh yeah i i mostly think of there's an early tim and eric oh yeah rollo tony brown town rollo tony brown town um where they're trying to pitch that as a

song and then they make it a song um i feel like that's a good choice for like a comic book guy to like because those like get gooey and melty very easily it's also fun for him to say rollo that's true yeah and apparently tim long says they were just eating a lot of rollo at the time too in their in their treat room at the but they got sent a lot of rollo for this for mentioning it they better get some free rollo's for bringing it up they normally just were chomping down on butterfingers all the free butterfingers that got sent so everybody gets uh kept in a mylar pouch in the uh the base of uh the collector which is apparently beneath the comic book guy store they don't fully make that clear but uh but i do like he calls her uh he's totally a he mentioned

stanley later he is totally a classic marvel villain with his many alliterative threats, calling her a syndicated sweetie. There's a real diss against Stanley before he became the beloved grandpa of movies. Yeah. I mean, in 1999, it's not like you didn't know who Stanley was. But to hear Stanley's name said on a tv show was a surprise for me to hear yeah i mean you gotta think this is before the like that first wave that like the x-men movie kicked off like i think there is a 10 year or so nine year block of like x-men to iron man and batman um oh god what's called the dark knight um and then from there it's like iron man to avengers endgame

where it just like heightens so much yeah the the summer after this airs is when the first x-men film is released so that that pretty much gets the ball rolling and then like two years later spider-man yeah yes and uh this is a few months after episode one came out. If you had seen Mallrats, though, you would know who Stan Lee was and how he lied to Jason Lee, unrelated. Stan Lee lie? No, that's unardo. You know, in a Wizard Did It kind of way, too, that scene pissed me off because he names an issue of Spider-Man that does not exist. And I'm like, Kevin Smith can reference a real issue of Spider-man and not make up a fake one about the vulture interrupting a date just more reasons to get mad at tim long yes well i can't that's a kevin smith one i can't blame him for that though it's kind of dickish of collector to call lucy lawless near mint that's uh that's a mean thing it's

because uh she's been soiled by another man. We're getting into incel territory. Well, I mean, that is what the collector is. They're making jokes about kidnapping a woman to make her your bride, but there's darker intent here in what the collector wants to do. Bart and Lisa arrives. They bust in. They are then zapped with the only functioning phaser, which leads to kind of a lame joke about William Shatner singing badly.

I don't know i felt by 99 that was played i think society was learning about his rocket man performance at that time it was no longer like a tape trading thing where you had to be there to see it and you like you had to see the tape getting passed around i mean family guy would do a similar joke with stewie where they just did the entire scene like the whole song year 2000 so yeah and then a few years later we get the uh ben folds produced uh william shatner album oh right wow where he does common people that's oh my god they uh to see somebody should have used that phaser used on ben folds the uh the kids get captured it's funny that

they are constantly dodging the phasers barred in such fun ways with stretchiness but then when he collector throws the gun at him, it just smacks him in the head and he's unconscious. That was a good joke. But yes, the kids are about to die. Good night, wretch dude and slobber girl. Sweet screams. Ha ha ha.

I'm unbelievably amused. Soon those bratty butting skis will be encased in Lucite for all eternity. While we're waiting, here are some names you may call me on our wedding night. Obi-Wan, Iron Man, Mr. Mix's Pitlick, and of course, Big Papa Smurf. What do you need me for? You could have your choice of any of the women in these bags. You would think so, but no. Really? Well, I mean, maybe we are meant for each other.

Growing up, I was always tall for my age, and the other kids made fun of me. I always hoped for another misunderstood soul to share my pain. You could be that soul, collector. Ooh. Come here, you. Xena needs sex. And the pummeling begins at that point yeah she grabs him i like grabbing him by the lips and punching him in the head over and over that's really good and also apparently this is not xena it's lucy lawless but she walks around talking in an american accent oh she's not talking her new zealand accent and at any point even when not being filmed uh i

i didn't even think of that that That's a real plot hole, too. So we have Mel Gibson in one episode and now Lucy Lawless in another one, disguising their similar accents. I also like the... I think that's good acting by Lucy Lawless there. She fakes vulnerability of trying to trick him into thinking she cares about him. I like her tales of being too tall for her age. It's cute. I also really appreciate her, she really goes for it with the silly line

of Xena needs Zex. That's a good line. But yes, as she beats him, we also get to hear a good Xena yell. You tricked me with a ruse so hackneyed it would make Stan Lee blush. Shut up. That was not a Xeniel.

That was Lucy Lawless doing a parody of the popular licensed character Xeno Warrior Princess, unrelated to this episode in any way. Okay. How dare you? Do you unrelated to this episode in any way uh okay i how dare you do you want to get sued and calling out stan lee blushing yes again that is stan lee did have a lot of hackneyed stories it's uh but he had to he had to like plot eight comics a month give him a break yeah that's true maybe he could have written them a little less flowery it's either like really sticky or like the most grand flowery dialogue uh well you know for stan lee in the 60s he was a writer who dreamed of being you know faulkner hemingway and here he is on all these comic books and so he just wants to show off with all this incredibly florid dialogue that almost is like saying to readers like i'm smarter than this i'm better than these

copies have you seen the size of my thesaurus yes it's exhausting to read some of those old comics like so much of the art is so good and that it takes forever to read less than 20 pages because it's just so much text i uh i read through them all in like my first readings and stuff but yeah if i'm if I'm picking up my Spider-Man omnibus of the Liam Ditko issues off the shelf now, it really is just appreciating art pretty much. Not having Spider-Man go like, I don't know if I can catch this. Wait, I did.

Okay, well, will I beat Dr. Octopus now? I think so. Show, don't tell, Stan. Well, but then the comics go so so fast it won't feel like they got their 12 cents worth that is true yeah the final battle uh reaches its end while bart and lisa are tied up the entire time they do nothing they don't save the day at all it's all xena that's right all lucy that's right yeah and you better say that and uh they have a phantom menace joke which they bring up on the commentary they had to do some tough research because they were animating it before the movie came out yeah

and uh this is a period in which i mean the pre-release period me and a lot of other people including adults were buying the merch thinking like oh all star wars merchandise goes up in money but no they simply made too much of it because it was for a very popular movie they knew how to merchandise so around 2005 i got rid of all my episode one stuff i thought would go up in value yeah i remember being at the mall uh going to a mall and uh they had a display of shirts out and i was like oh right like i had forgotten i think i was busy graduating eighth grade i got a lot of stuff to do i was like oh wow i forgot there's a star wars comic mom's like well get a shirt with all the characters and she's like look they have the soundtrack here let's get that and that is probably the

thing that's one of the thing that's held up best from episode one i mean duel of the fates is such a great song yeah the john williams stuff is the only salvageable uh element of that whole trilogy i will defend a lot i mean i think e think Ewan McGregor's performances are good. Um, yeah, yeah. I like Liam Neeson. And I think Ian McDeer,

uh, McDeer, he does a good job. Some actors resisted George Lucas's direction and I, I commend them for that. Ewan was at the level that he can just be like, yeah, yeah.

Do a jerk off motion and then just act how he wants to act. I really wanted them all back at the end of Rise of Skywalker. Apparently there's green screen. Like, I don't think it was ever finished, but like they did have some of them. I wanted Hayden and Ewan and like just the voices. That wasn't enough for me. Like it was so insane at that point. Just have them all show up.

The audience would have cheered if you're going that ridiculous anyway and having her say like all the forces with me and then it basically is a dragon ball ending then just have the ghosts appear on screen yeah i mean i like that's such a deep cut to like pull the voices of freddie prince jr. and the other actor from like the cartoons. But like, I don't know, just have the big ones show up. Just have Samuel L. Jackson and Ewan McGregor and Hayden. They're like, come on, just go for it. It sounds like this episode nine movie made some mistakes.

It sounds, yeah. The first I'm hearing about this. The dead speak, but they don't show up. Come on, show about this the dead speak but they don't show up come on show up the dead uh yeah god and well i guess we have to well the book explained it all so we there's no questions left there you got to play that fortnight event to really understand it yep yeah oh the book the twitch streams you know all the goods all the stuff we love all the stuff normal people definitely seek out

It's why we all came to love Star Wars as kids For this kind of tied-in merchandising Anyway, why don't we get to the happy ending here As Xena is triumphant What a nerd Lucite, heartening Must end life in classic Lorne Green pose From Battlestar Galactica.

Best death ever. Wow. Thanks for saving us. No problem. Now let's get you kids home. Wait a minute. Xena can't fly. I told you I'm not Xena. I'm Lucy Lawless. Oh. Stretch dude and clover i guess originally they wanted him frozen like han solo but they thought that was too obvious so good choice even in 99 too much okay yes but i'm saying that that's what the writers pitched

originally for him to be frozen like han solo. Okay, it is too obvious. But oppositely, Captain Odama, which is the character that Lorne Green played in 1970s 8 Battlestar Galactica, he never had a death scene. This is referencing nothing that exists. But did he have a classic pose? He wanted to be frozen in the classic pose, right? So I will not say I've watched every episode

of the classic Battlestar Galactica, but in my Googling, Battlestar fans on Reddit said this is a reference to nothing. That is not his pose. Sometimes with comedy writing, not every joke has to be a home run. Sometimes you just need to make the obvious one, the carbonite one just so for clarity's sake you know yeah i think uh but i guess you know if they'd done the han solo thing maybe i would have just said like god i'd seen a million han so we're building the case against tim long look i like tim long he's written good stuff i don't want to be mean but i i probably came at this from the angle of he was mean to bongo comics

and i like them this is again this is my favorite segment of it i love seeing lucy lawless fly away because apparently in real life lucy lawless can fly i'm not xena that's a funny gag yeah and uh and yeah that she defeats him by defeating his collectoriness of pointing out that he, by taking his dual lightsaber out of the box, it now is no longer mint. And that shock destroys him. I like that. Though this joke about lightsabers couldn't possibly imagine the incredible $200-plus experience of building your own lightsaber

in Batuu at the galaxy's edge. Yeah. I, I still have not seen that show. I was, I thought someone I knew by this point would be going and I could tag along. Cause you can bring a handful of friends with you. If one person is going to buy one,

you can bring some guests. I think that's such a shitty show. I think that's such a stupid, but like anyone can watch the wand show at Harry Potter. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I like the privacy of it, though. Me and my husband did spend that stupid amount of money.

Don't look at my wand. It's not done. Yeah. I mean, that's fair. I mean, for the people who get it and are excited about it, like, I think it's great. Look, it's dumb and I feel shame. You don't have to, don't humor me. No, look, it was a fun time and now I can remember when I used to get to go to Disneyland.

And when I look at that. Oh, that's, yeah. Okay, so why don't we move on to a happier subject here. Y2K. A disaster that was averted. Yes, yeah. It's hard in the time we're recording this, on May 1st of 2020. It's hard not to view it through the lens of current times. But I've heard people mentioning it as this thing of like,

everybody treated it like we overreacted when it was perhaps instead us correctly reacting and preparing accordingly. But because nothing bad happened, we think we overreacted to it. Well, it was a time- time based scenario so we definitely knew when it would happen instead of having like oh your city will be locked down in 12 hours get groceries now yeah this

was probably the most flack I've gotten for speaking flippantly on a podcast I believe it was on mine on one of the millennium probably the millennium village episode where I was describing like Y2K. Like I was so nervous about Y2K and my dad and she worked in computers at the time assured me that they had fixed it and all. But I made it sound like it wasn't a big deal. But no, I recognize and I knew at the time it took quite a lot of people working very hard to get everything right and figured it out.

This is one of the three primetime fox cartoons they did a y2k episode so lord yeah there was a family guy one and a king of the hill one i think the king of the hill one is the best one out of the three yeah yeah both the family guy one and this one are like treehouse of horrors and that they don't take place within the reality of the show i think they both have the same jokes about plane crashing even though though this simpsons doesn't end with a reference to Dallas. That's true. Oh, yeah.

For me, Y2K, I mean, I worried a lot about things. I was an anxious child or teen. So definitely the run up to Y2K made me worried. My dad worked in telecoms as well at a company called Altel, which I don't think exists anymore. He knew the guys working on the wise uk team he wasn't uh working specifically on it but he was telling us to not worry but he also did tell us that at all tell they had like dug a well in the basement and had generators set up just in case oh good yeah so that that worried me hearing that information i think my family didn't care

and i thought it was bullshit because i was a 17 year old who knew it all and the night that happened i was not i was 17 so i wasn't like out partying or anything although i could have been if i was cool i was talking to my first girlfriend over the phone all night while playing the playstation game brave fencer musashi at the same time yes Nice. Very cool. I was definitely alone and single on New Year's Day 99. Well, Fox made living single cool again, right? That's true. I wasn't having as much fun as those ladies were. But yeah, I think I was definitely worried.

And then once it passed on the East Coast time zone, which that was the real test, we really should have just told ourselves, well, it happened in Japan 12 hours ago, and and they're fine so i think we're okay but uh yeah i think once it passed on the east coast i i could relax then yeah yes these though the rest of that day i definitely was thinking about we gotta storm that all tell office if it if it comes down to it they've got a well we'll be okay okay. But yes, this opening gag here, we got Dick Clark rocking us into New Year's Eve. And oh yes, I guess actually I need to play

our death jingle, don't I? Death stalks you at every turn. There it is, death! So there were a lot of these jokes about how Dick Clark is an ageless person or a robot. He's a robot in this one. He was in Futurama as well this year. But the thing about it is, we make jokes about how dick clark is an ageless person or a robot he's a robot in this one he was in futurama as well this year but the thing about it is we make jokes about old people not knowing they'll one day die and that's what happened to dick clark because he had a stroke

like in the early 2000s and then he became the age he truly was yeah it's uh so that it's just a bummer to see it now yeah but in 1999 it was a fun joke to be like, oh, Dick Clark looks the same in 1999 as he did in 1969. I think his name was like America's youngest teenager or oldest teenager, rather. Yeah, yeah. And he had been hosting The Rock and Eve for decades at this point. Yeah, I like The Rock and Eve. I like this segment. This might be my favorite of the three segments.

Oh, you like the speculation about the y2k i like the y2k uh the celebrity the rapid fire celebrities at the end i have a lot of thoughts on oh me too and i like how this briefly becomes maximum overdrive the yardley smith movie you're right yeah it does oh the stephen king car movie one of the stephen king car yeah that one not only cars but like vending machines come to life and kill people an atm says fuck you to somebody great uh yeah so why don't we why don't we hear a little bit of dick clark rip this is dick clark rocking down to the year 2000 and that was white snake we're not white snake dude we're poison i thought we were quiet riot which says here we're right man alive what a stinko thousand years blimp teenagers and again we had two tv shows with

and eleven with robert yurik Super freak, super freak, I'm super freaking, yeah Oh man, what'd I do now? Wonderful So, is him saying super freaking, does that protect him in a Lucy Lawless Zena kind of way? I think so, yeah, and the music is a little bit off, but we also get, before that, reference to Matlock Like, one of the last Matlock references, even then it's kind of vague Yeah, you're right, I didn't even clock that as a Matt Locke reference. Matt Locke and the Andy Griffith show. Matt Locke and Diagnosis Murder,

my grandparents' favorite shows, pretty much memory hold entirely by the current culture. People love Murder, She Wrote, and I think it's part of that universe, but they don't remember the other things that were in that world. Or the one with Sammo Hung. what was that

martial law oh martial law i get it i i really like that show because i i was i was a hung head i liked uh but i really did as a as a jackie chan film viewer you also become a fan of his uh compatriot sammo hung and uh his i watched a few episodes that but martial law was like adjacent to walker texas ranger yes uh but uh by mark so boy robert eric shows uh if you count miniseries and extended guest spots on shows robert eric in 1999 had actually appeared on 14 shows oh man if you count like lonesome dove as a tv show and if you count that sure it uh then he's really up to 14 also you know he's not in every episode of soap but he's in a lot of the first season as uh and and robert uric would pass away in 2002 but he'd be in one

more tv show as a regular emerald he's on the emerald oh yeah was he bam dad on that show is that why you died i think he is bam's dad okay bam's dad the bam dad uh that's right up there with father of the pride of shows that yeah i wonder how emerald i mean i remember watching it we were a big fan of emerald and certainly emerald had um multiple restaurants at the universal orlando resort both which have closed at this point uh i'm gonna go ahead and guess he had a 20-year lease because that's about when they uh all switch they're shut down that makes sense that makes sense yeah but they're just like matt besser with that long lease there oh sure uh sorry that's a very inside joke i think emerald a little better with with his uh LLC's finances and that joke about rick james being arrested it's because

of the 90s he got arrested for a lot of things uh when i googled that and looked on his wikipedia page what they were uh his accusations and arrest for they're not funny and not uh fun to talk about so just a bummer. And they really make me feel bad that he kind of got, you know, rebuilt as a cartoon character. People are like, oh, I'm Rick James. Like, no, he did a lot of bad stuff. I thought he was a fun sketch comedy cartoon. Yeah. Yeah. Then Dick Clark thanks a bunch of super geeks. And we find out that Homer was in charge of preparing for Y2K. He's got his Millennium Penance.

It's one of Homer's many penance. I do love Homer's line when Lisa points out like, well, did you not? What if you didn't prepare? He says like, well, that can't be true. If it was, I'd be terrified. I think of that line a lot, actually. Yeah, it's like, well well i'm not scared so everything

must be fine yeah because i'm in denial if it were true then i'd be terrified that by not being terrified it's not true uh but in this case it was true y2k happens dick clark is revealed to be a robot and uh disintegrates uh we get to see uh we hear an evil version of old lang's eye playing over the many y2k mishaps which include like uh nelson broke into the school at midnight to photocopy his butt and get hit by the photocopier classic new year's eve prank yeah and uh there the spinning restaurant happens which uh spins off into space which same one appeared in the previous episode of the about the food critic and uh then we got some very pre-9-11 jokes about planes that crash in. Well, those ivory tower eggheads have screwed us again. Let's just have some milk and go to bed.

Hey, this milk's broken. It's got a computer chip in it. Everything does. It's a very Simpsons touch that the planes are falling out of the sky completely intact. Yes, yeah. Yeah. That just drops straight down instead of like, you know. Again, it's one of those jokes that after 9-11, you what plane crashes actually look like and it's uh you can't imagine this joke anymore it is like prescient everything

pretty much does have a computer chip in it now or at least a qr code and i do love that line about ivory tower eggheads have screwed us again i feel like that's a very funny running segment of like the simpsons is talking about like getting screwed by the elite. But looking back, there's a very funny friction of like, didn't a lot of you go to Harvard? Yes. And very quickly become very wealthy from this show. Yeah, yeah. I mean, they are the ivory tower eggheads Homer hates from a certain point of view.

Yeah. That's a good point. Yeah. homer hates and from a certain point of view yeah that's uh that's a good point yeah uh well also i think it's funny that homer homer takes the of all the things they hate he hates the eggheads not uh and also he's the one who failed this is all homer that doomed the world here yeah i mean at least at this point like the criticism of the elites have have morphed we're a little more mask off in 2020 of like pedophiles we're talking about rich uh uh billionaire pedophiles yes yeah we can be more direct now about that yeah uh so then we cut to love joy he's giving everybody a pronouncement of the end times i love

that he's he's like yeah this is the end times finally i can get my end time speech it's those plotting goes it's weird that the first and last segment both have extended scenes in the church with love joy oh you're right and ned is a part of it too but uh i don't think i've ever seen a beetle boot in the wild either i haven't either but this this sort of this is the premonition of uh ned's uh beetle obsession that he has a secret beetle's room i forgot that secret beetles room he has uh it's uh homer does a joke about michael jackson owning all their music in that scene as i i recall now the church scene ends with wigum telling everybody it's time to go a looting which homer

excitedly runs off to do including uh getting some stuff for marge and then we get the planet of the apes music which we just heard on the last one Jason was on. That's right. That's right. Which, again, is a nice reminder that Disney owns the Planet of the Apes, among the many things they own. Homer seems to forget that all the appliances are coming to life when he goes out to buy Margin Appliance or loot her an appliance. Still very strange. The second time I've had to hunt out a specific Simpsons episode and I have to go to Disney Plus. Still very odd. i broke out my dvds for this i actually re if you i think the dvds might be going out of print soon i don't

know i could be i could be wrong but there's they're fetching a high price on amazon new copies they're going for retail price now when they used to be like 12 get these out of here my conspiracy theory is that i think disney wants them to go out of print to release their own maybe with changed or expanded perhaps extras but the old dvds there they're running out what a world marge gets a lady chick which uh buzz a lady remington which buzzes her neck and almost kills her and the world is seemingly at an end and homer homer has the in this scene of him correcting lisa i love this it has the spirit of people who reply with the same joke you just tweeted in a twitter a joke well look at the wonders of the computer age now wonders lisa or blunders i think I think that was implied by what I said. Implied, Lisa, or implode. Mom, make him stop.

Oh, no. Krusty! My pacemaker. It's stuck on hummingbird. Nectar, nectar. I need to drink my way to nectar. Krusty! Hey, a note.

You have been selected for Operation Exodus. They're evacuating the Earth! We're saved! Thank you, sweet clown. In death you saved us all. I'm not dead. I can still hear his voice on the wind i think crusty was going to be put on the other rocket though you know i think you're right i think you're right when they tried to present

crusty's letter in the next scene they should have been like oh no you're on the wrong rocket the uh the hummingbird heart thing that's pretty funny too but i i just love homer's like useless uh additions to lisa's statement you're right that is when you make a joke on twitter and someone replies with a lesser version of the same joke yes yeah which i have to remind myself sometimes to be like you know what is this am i restating this person's joke in a reply and if that if that is what i'm doing i i hit discard and delete that tweet uh but yes the crusty we were talking about the elite earlier it seems that crusty is in the club the kids invited to like the david the david geffen yacht except the yacht office space and uh yeah so on the commentary or all right a lot of previous

guest stars are in the lineup of the people who are on the good rocket and that includes or they just reuse some old designs they had from before. We don't actually hear anybody talk on the good rocket. But I would say, all right, let's talk about the occupants of these rockets, both of them here. Mel Gibson, Mark McGuire, Bill Gates, they should not be on the good rocket. No, no, no. Yeah. And Spike Lee should not be on the bad rocket. Yeah, that I find.

Yeah, that's weird. I guess it's because he was outspoken for all of these white writers. I guess. On the commentary, Ron Hauge even points out, like, I disagree with that. It shouldn't be Spike Lee there. I mean, I think Mel Gibson and Bill Gates is running this rocket. He's not invited on the rocket. Yeah, he's driving it.

Yeah. What do you need a baseball player like Mark McGuire for in this new planet? Was he in the previous episode we're recording these out of order he's on the riddling episode yeah yeah very timely reference in the late 90s uh but now he's been proven to be quite a liar the entire time but uh though i mean his crimes less compared to mel gibson and obviously from what we know bill gates a certain other person would be in this line with him I think would be invited along. His best pal. His best pal in the world

his favorite research buddy Jeffrey Epstein. Hey let's hear this clip of Lisa being invited on board Wow there's Bill Gates Stephen Hawking, Paul McCartney Michael Jordan, Michelle Kwan. They must be starting a new civilization

on Mars with our best and brightest. That's us. Name, please. Certainly. I am the piano genius from the movie Shine. Uh-huh. And your name is? Uh, Shiny McShine. Actually, he's Homer Simpson. That's Bart. I'm Lisa. Lisa Simpson? Oh, you're the ship's proofreader.

Welcome aboard. Now, before you enter, you're going to have to make a very difficult choice. You're only allowed to take one parent with you. Mom. Love you lots. Goodbye, Lisa. Remember me as I am, filled with murderous rage. Well, son, I guess this is the end.

But we've both had long, full lives. Oh, right. Hey, look, another spaceship. And there's nobody guarding it. Let's go. God, how quickly and flatly Lisa goes, mom. And then walks away. So good.

I love that delivery. Yeah, really good. It's what Homer earned. And also the way Marge just goes, love you lots. And then happily abandons Bart, too. She's like, yeah, I'm abandoning you. And Lisa's given the, I guess, valuable job for the new society of Proofreader. That's a funny specific they got her for.

And Maggie really lucked out there, too. She gets to be saved all the same just because you can carry her in her arms yeah shiny mcshine is the link is the only like lingering memory people have of the film shine oh yeah which uh star jeffrey rush and was about uh i had to look this up david health got that's his name an australian pianist who knock on wood still with us at the time of this recording so whenever you guys think of shiny mcshine the man's real name is david health got that that's the pianist and i i only watched it because uh me and my mom were very invested in that year's oscar race and we're

like well how good is jeffrey rush you know, and he was really good as old shiny McShine. All right. We're on the death ship. First of all, pretty silly of the world government to spend all this money to send them on a ship into space when you could just like shoot them in the back of the head. Yeah. Mass grave. I mean, they could just have abandoned them to be killed by machines on the earth, but they wanted to make sure that none of these people would breed with each other. If anything lives, then these people can't be there i guess i guess that is a good intention no wait that's not a good intention

what am i saying so they fly off honestly seeing all the nukes going off from space is actually like really fucking me up right now i don't like seeing that scene it is very dark uh but uh homer realizes that this uh is not the trip to paradise he thought. I can't believe I destroyed the Earth. Are you still talking about the Earth? You're right. I gotta let it go. All that counts is we're alive and rubbing elbows with the greats. Oh, there's Ross Perot.

Dr. Laura. Spike Lee. Wait a minute. They're not so great. Okay, but there's Dan Quayle and Courtney Love. Tonya Harding! Al Sharpton! Ah! Tom Arnold! What the hell's going on?

Wait, only that ship is going to Mars. Ours is headed for the sun. Yeah, ain't that a kick in the teeth? I mean, my shows weren't great, but I never tied people up and forced them to watch. And I could've, because I'm a big guy and i'm good with knots so we're all gonna die afraid so but hey the grub's pretty good huh chugging the can of peaches that's a pretty great joke too yeah good at knots it's funny that for 20 years rosie o'donnell holy sure and tom arnold have been shorthand for like

annoying person yeah yeah i've seen tom arnold in some stuff and i think he's was good oh he's in the movie happy endings which is an all right little movie lisa kudrow is the best in it but uh but it's it's not bad and he's good in it but i mean tom arnold also like uh the last five years he's just been a kook. He keeps promising all this stuff like, oh, I've got the dirt on Trump. That's right. He said he had the pee tape or whatever. And he said he had like the tape of him saying the N-word.

And it's like, nah, put up or shut up, Tom Arnold. I'll tell my Pauly Shore story real quick. Oh, boy. Let's hear it. He was a judge at Tournament at tournament and urge a show we used to uh we do at ucb uh every month um ucb you know it's too long to explain um it hopefully will exist at some point in some better form uh again but so paulie shore was a judge and i forget what character i was debating in favor of but um when it came time to judge my round he went uh let's hear it for

this guy huh he did a great job and he's weird looking whoa and i was like all right paulie sure that's big of you that's a lot coming from you yeah and then shortly thereafter he went to the bathroom for a while and then came back on stage with a lot more pep in his step than before so make of that what you will classic comedy store trick classic comedy store shenanigans wow boy if like he just had like a really good dump and he just i guess so it's also i think a little uncouth to leave the stage in the middle of a show that is still going on that is true yeah i would say like if you're gonna make fun of my appearance uh make a good joke not like you're weird looking and then yeah like punch it up you're probably sure

that's uh that's uh that's pretty shitty to do honestly i would not debate against paulie short being on this plane he should be on that plane, for sure. But equating Dr. Laura with Spike Lee, though, I don't like that. Yeah, she would not like him on that plane. No, she would refuse to get on. I'm going to say, Henry, you've been pointing out a lot of errors in this episode. You did not point out the error of how long it would take you to travel to the sun. Yeah, okay, you're right. That's a real problem.

That's a real issue. They'd all starve to death before they got to the sun. Or just die of old age if they were fed peaches constantly. That too. Until they died of natural causes. Or from dysentery from eating canned peaches that much. And also, you know, a little too mean to Courtney Love. She's got her flaws, but I don't know.

I feel like there's a lot of sexism and the hate on Courtney Love. Would you believe that Pauly Shore and Tomnold have still not appeared in a movie together but in 2019 they did co-star in an episode of celeb family feud against each other so if you're dying to see a real tom arnold the paulie shore team up there you go uh but yes uh steve harvey officiating all uh over it. But yes, so these Rosie O'Donnell jokes, there's many eras of jokes about Rosie O'Donnell, many of them about her weight, certainly. I'm glad they didn't go there. It's like she sings a lot and then fires kush balls at you. daytime talk show of the rosie o'donnell show which i was a regular summer viewer of it because i am gay and i liked all of it i liked all the broadway things they did and it was a lot of fun likes tom cruise were you were you a daytime viewer of it too jason i would catch it a little i think an aunt went to a taping once oh that's so cool uh i believe tom cruise might have been

the guest because the audience had a choice between a VHS of Jerry McGuire or Mission Impossible that's how I saw Mission Impossible for the first time uh wow that's amazing you get she had been talking up her love of Tom Cruise for like three years before she finally got him on that show oh yeah and look we all know why she did that platonic love yes well I mean it's not like Tom Cruise is going to reciprocate either. But she's shooting kush balls here on the plane, just as she did into her audience for years on the show, which was still going strong. 1999 wouldn't end until 2002. And once the show ended, that's when Rosie could come out of the closet and everybody could know. Become the hated villain of Donald Trump.

Yes, yeah. Oh, God. Anyway, why do we hear a happier ending of characters committing suicide? Son, that's the hottest place on Earth. Gonna work on my tan edge, buddy. Pauly Shore? Wow! Hey, we should do a show together, man.

That's a sure cure for the blues. Hey, turn those frowns around. Oh, no. Rosie O'Donnell! Come on, everybody! Sing along! Clang, clang, clang with the trolley. This side only! Zing, zing, zing with the bell. Zing, zing, zing with my heart strings.

From the moment I saw you, my bell. Clang, clang, clang with the trumpet. Don't worry, Dad. We'll be dead in five minutes. Not fast enough. Zing, zing, zing with my heart strings. From the moment I saw you, my bell. Zing, zing, zing with my heart strings.

It took 11 years. That was the first on-screen suicide of Bart and Homer. That I remember being very unnerved by. That said, I love Meet Me in St. Louis, and I don't think that song's annoying. Mr. Burns hated it. No, that's true, yeah. He kicked Martin for that.

You know what, though? Ron Hauge wrote that sketch or that segment. He was a Ren and Stimpy writer. So many Ren and Stimpys end with them killing themselves or dying. That is true. Wow. That's a good point. I just watched the, there's this Martin Scorsese three-part history of film that goes up to like the 1950s or 60s um and he points out meat man st louis is one of the first um if not the first

movie musical where the people the characters don't work in show business like the characters just live their lives and burst into song they don't have to be in show business i didn't know that that's uh that's pretty that makes me like that film even more i I mean, I'm a Judy. I'm a Judy Stan for sure. Oh, sure. Yeah. And Rosie would sing these kind of songs all the time with John McD and the DLTs as her backing band. Yeah. I mean, also this kind of joke.

This felt weird for the Simpsons then to just list silly celebrity or not silly, but like to just takes so many direct shots at specific celebrities in a row it uh it feels a little critique i think it does i would have asked all of them to be on the show for their five second role before we murder them uh they i mean they joke about how tom arnold was a real good sport and he knew like he was making fun of them in between recordings like specifically i think they said he he mocked Matt Selman and how Matt Selman looked. But I mean, they also say that he's a bad singer on that. But he's not. I mean, he's not particularly in tune there now.

I like hearing him in the mix. But yeah, Homer and Bart's heads exploding, especially the way Bart's smiling, expanding head is drawn. It's so memorable. It's yeah. It's yeah expanding head is drawn it's so memorable it's uh yeah uh it's yeah this is a fun this is a fun tree house even if it's full of inaccuracies uh but and it gifted us with you know things like a wizard did it yes like yeah it's hard to hard to dislike an episode like this this is and this is the first in production of season 11 a season i'm sure will

stay quality the entire way through ups and downs uh jason you've been with us for a very long time thank you so much for all of your time please plug podcast the ride and all the great stuff you do oh sure um yeah i am one of the hosts podcasts the ride it's a comedy podcast about theme parks which i mean our log line for years now has been hosted by three childless men in their 30s. Scott went and had a child in the last couple weeks. You have to let him go now. We're working on, I believe we have settled on for now, two childless men in their 30s and one child full men.

Or three men in their 30s of assorted levels of childishness. There's no celibacy vow yet on the podcast. Yes, that's right. So, yeah, you can find us wherever you get your podcasts. We're on Twitter and Instagram. We're starting to fuck around with Twitch streaming, too, watching specials and just chatting on there and uh you can find uh the second gate or our sort of like deep dive into the otter areas of theme park history and also

our own personal interests like the father of the pride and some of the more um odd things on disney plus although we don't give them too much publicity, at patreon.com slash podcast the ride. Thank you so much. Yeah, your Father of the Pride one ruled, your The Fuzz Buckets, another great one on the Behind the Gate, and your Truthorism

about the seagull that hit Fabio. That was a goose. you were not paying attention you thought it was i thought you were a stickler you're right i i'm hoisted by my own petard here that's all right but thank you so much again jason thank you guys thank you so much for having you so thanks so much to jason charred and be sure to check out podcast the ride we love it uh but if you want to support our show and get all these episodes one week ahead of time and ad free please go to patreon.com slash talking simpsons and if you sign up at the five dollar

level there you'll get just that but also access to all the podcasts behind the five dollar paywall that includes over 100 bonus podcasts that you haven't heard yet but most recently behind that paywall has been talking mission hill the currently unraveling talking mission hill our talking simpson style exploration of the entire mission hill series and you can only get that at patreon.com talking simpsons at the five dollar level but henry can tell everybody out there what's happening at the ten dollar level one super long podcast once a month just for patrons at that level or higher that's right that's the what a cartoon movie our monthly premium podcast only for ten dollar and up subscribers at patreon.com slash talking simpsons me and bob cover a different

animated feature film once a month we have over 60 hours in the back catalog there um recent ones include toy story 2 and lupin the third castle of cagliostro we have a ton of fun on these and there's going to be a brand new one in j June as well that you want to look forward to so please get all the five dollar stuff Bob talked about plus our monthly what a cartoon movie 10 bucks a month at patreon.com slash talking simpsons so I've been one of your hosts Bob Mackey you can find me on twitter as Bob Servo my other podcast is Retronauts, the classic gaming podcast. You can find that wherever you find podcasts or go to patreon.com slash retronauts and sign up there and get access to two exclusive episodes every month that are just as long as the regular free ones. Again, that is patreon.com slash retronauts. Henry, how about you? Please follow me, Henry Gilbert,

on Twitter. H-E-N-E-R-E-Y-G. I do tons of fun stuff there. Plus, you should really be following the official Twitter account of this podcast, at TalkSimpsonsPod. Do you want to know when new stuff goes live on the Patreon or the free feed? Or when we have cool things a-brewin' behind the scenes? You need to follow at TalkSimpsonsPod on Twitter. Thank you so much for listening, folks. We will see you next week for EIEI Annoyed Grunt, and we'll see you then. And at the end of the chapter...