Talking Simpsons - Talking Simpsons - Worst Episode Ever With Nick Prueher

Episode Date: July 28, 2021

For this season 12 episode we're joined by the returning Nick Prueher from Found Footage Festival/VCR Party Live, and this story is eerily similar to Prueher's career. After Bart and Milhouse save Com...ic Book Guy's life, they run the comic store and start a found film festival. Meanwhile, Comic Book Guy tries to grow as a person which leads to him sleeping with Agnes Skinner. Listen now to this week's podcast and learn all about discovering videos of newscasters picking their noses! Support this podcast and get hundreds of bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! Check out our new shirts on TeePublic! And please follow the new official Twitter, @TalkSimpsonsPod!

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Starting point is 00:00:00 attention talking simpsons listeners we have a new podcast miniseries exclusively on patreon right now for five dollar and up subscribers at patreon.com slash talking simpsons you get talk king of the hill season two part one that's right we're returning to king of the hill once again putting out 11 new episodes covering the first half of the show's second season. Again, that is patreon.com slash TalkingSimpsons. Be there or be not right. I heartily endorse this event or product. Ahoy, ahoy, everybody, and welcome to Talking Simpsons, the friendliest place in the rum district. I'm your host, the nitwit nectar drinker, Bob Mackie, and this is our chronological exploration of The Simpsons, who is here with me today as always.
Starting point is 00:00:57 Why, it's Henry Gilbert and we're just exhibiting these clips for profit without permission. It's true, and who do we have on the line? It's nuclear whipping boy, Nick Truer. And today's episode is worst episode ever. My mom doesn't believe in fabric software, but she's not around. I'm picking the next thing. Today's episode aired on February 4th, 2001. And as always, Henry will tell us what happened on this mythical day in real world history.
Starting point is 00:01:29 Oh, my God. Oh, boy, Bobby. We've got some history that we've covered a little bit before in another Futurama. So don't be surprised that I've said these things before. But Kelly Ripa takes over for Kathy Lee on the Live with Regis Morning Show. Paper Mario is released for the nintendo 64 and the wedding planner is number one at the box office at the same time the album j-lo is number one on the charts a first ever for a performer and uh and i i know nick you are in the
Starting point is 00:02:01 uh you you know the new y New York entertainment talk show scene somewhat. Like, what, have you ever had any interactions with Kelly Ripa? I have, yeah, because I was working at the Letterman Show actually this week when the episode aired. And I would produce the guest segment. So she was a guest many times, as was Regis. And I remember when she was first coming on the show, I tried to find old embarrassing footage of celebrities. And I found she was a regular on a Pennsylvania regional dance show called Dance Party USA. And at one point does a routine to abracadabra, like a lipstick routine where she's dressed as a magician.
Starting point is 00:02:40 And it was solid gold. Not the show Solid Gold, but it was really good oh that is amazing well okay i had a separate piece of news i set aside in case you confirmed that you were working in letterman at the time because another bit of news i saw during this week was there was some minor controversy at the letterman show where apparently there was an anti-cbs this was reported by the entertainment weekly in february 2001 there was an anti-CBS. This was reported by the Entertainment Weekly in February 2001. There was an anti-CBS top 10 list that was filmed but was scrapped. And then they instead did a J-Lo focused top 10 list because she was the guest on that
Starting point is 00:03:17 episode. Yeah. You know, I don't really remember that. But occasionally that would happen where you would do a top 10 and then you'd shoot a backup one and i think that if i remember correctly because i remember jayla was on that week and i think anthony hopkins and it was a busy week so much so that i didn't watch this simpsons episode live on that sunday i think i was working to prep for that but yeah i think um after the audience had let out you know word came down from the network.
Starting point is 00:03:45 And then, you know, you kind of had to go back and cheat it as if it was a live top 10. So that happened occasionally. Wow. And you know what? J-Lo hotter than ever. Ben Affleck, he is the most divorced dad on the planet. He is sliding into the DMs of everyone who is 20 and younger. Look out for him.
Starting point is 00:04:01 He's dangerous. He's like triply divorced now. Yeah. That much divorced energy he's the kirk van houten of the entertainment world it's so great the dunkin donuts uh you know coming outside of his his house with the i mean i'm loving all the the viral photos of him now i mean throwing out a cardboard cutout of his ex-girlfriend or wife whoever that was oh yes yeah the girl i think it was a girlfriend yeah meanwhile kelly rippa rules television to this day she is like the i think her show is still the number one morning
Starting point is 00:04:30 show or as far as that goes you know team tv ratings aren't what they used to be yeah she's very likable i think that was key and i know they auditioned to quite a few people when um kathy lee left and she was the the clear front runner and now she's been probably on the show as long as regis has yeah i think so i did like she fully took over the show like that you know was the last time i saw her in the news was when michael strahan left the show and she felt she was not uh treated respectfully by the producers to let her know he was leaving and uh and now he got replaced by ryan seacrest that's who i believe that still who's hosting it together to this day what are your thoughts on ryan seacrest kind of
Starting point is 00:05:10 seems like dead weight to me yeah i i feel like it's just a dude to just fill a seat like yeah i mean i feel like he shouldn't be as wealthy as he is because a lot of it a lot of uh i guess uh personalities could fill that role i don't see what's so special about him. He's a hard worker. I mean, he's like doing like five shows now and flying to New York to shoot the morning show and then back to LA. And so I'll give him that.
Starting point is 00:05:36 But it just doesn't seem like much of a personality to me. Yeah, I mean, I think he understands he's a joke and I respect that. Because he's not like, no, actually I can act and I can write a book and look at all the creative stuff I'm doing he is none of that he realizes he is an empty shell and that is what he's paid to be you know one thing i missed with kathy lee was when she was on the show when they would have on pro wrestlers because like regis
Starting point is 00:05:57 for real was a pro wrestling fan like he had lots of friends in that world he'd bring on people from the then wwf and the funniest ones to me were when Kathy Lee, maybe she was playing it up, but, like, her tongue would, like, fall out of her mouth sometimes. She was like, oh, you're looking pretty good, Ravishing Rick Rude. Like, she... Those were funny moments. Yeah, that was a big part of her. I don't know if it was her real personality or a character,
Starting point is 00:06:22 but horniness has always been a part of that. Yes, yeah. And I guess finally, the Paper Mario, the final Mario game to come out on the Nintendo 64, a pretty good role-playing game. Yes. I like it quite a lot. We won't belabor this.
Starting point is 00:06:36 Not everyone in the audience is a gamer, but the first two are great. Stop buying these games. They're not good. You're going to play one for three hours and be like, this one's great, and then you'll immediately stop playing because the battle system will not be good. Cannot sustain an entire game.
Starting point is 00:06:49 That's all I'll say. You know, with Origami King, I played for 10 hours and then I stopped. So it did a little better average-wise. I saw another friend make the mistake of starting and being like, this is great. And I'm going to check back in with her later to see how much progress she's made. I would bet she fell off. I was going to ask if you'd played the Origami King i'd heard some good reviews but again they probably only played five to ten hours of it so but it's a good five to ten hours and if you're like you know what i paid 50
Starting point is 00:07:13 bucks i got 10 good hours out of this thing it's it's fine it's good i mean if you're you don't have as many gaming options right now of uh mostly the games coming out are re-releases in 2021 but uh but welcome our big guest welcome back nick pruer and uh this is an exciting episode for you uh indeed yeah i couldn't believe it that i hadn't seen this episode because when you explain the plot that barton millhouse find a secret stash of bootleg videos in comic book guys basement that is exactly my story it was uh i mean it's it it really hits so close to home my partner joe and i you know do this show called the found footage festival and uh it really it started almost exactly like it happens here that's i was very curious about that because i i know the story of uh you know vcr party live in the uh the the plot of that of that theme song but uh but yeah
Starting point is 00:08:06 how much the reality is of like you guys have at found footage fest a collection i'd say more vhs tapes than comic book guy has in his secret stash we recently counted them and we had um 10 778 wow not including doubles not so we have about a thousand doubles as well uh that we're gonna do something with but yeah we and these are just the ones we've deemed worthy of keeping of course the ones that are you know just kind of boring we back to the thrift store but um yeah it was very much like this so joe and i um have been friends since sixth grade we were you know 10 years old i think when we met each other so around bart and millhouse's age and instead of finding these in a comic book store we started in our small town in wisconsin going to
Starting point is 00:08:52 thrift stores and uh we'd find all these you know mr t educational videos uh workplace training videos um you know the hair club for men video you got for free for more information you know and because there's nothing going on we would have screening parties in our parents basements. Now, we didn't charge admission, like Bart Milhouse, too. But it was just like, that was our main pastime. We had a running commentary of jokes, when there was a new find, it was a big event. And we would try to track down the people in it. So it just kind of became and then that kept going through college and then post-college.
Starting point is 00:09:27 And eventually we just took it out of living rooms and basements and put it into a theater. So, but it really, it was a very similar journey here. I was never that cool. All the found footage that I encountered was because people like you found it and then uploaded it to the internet. Yep.
Starting point is 00:09:40 Until the age of YouTube, you'd only hear about these things or you'd see like sketches like mr show has a sketch basically about you guys with the the underground uh video railroad like there's you so you'd hear about these things and only once youtube really started i was like oh now i can finally see dumb ass gets hit by train as as mr show called it yeah there was this especially like in the late 90s there was a tape trading circuit that we became more tapped into where you would you know you'd meet other weirdos who had footage and that you would sometimes get like a 10th generation dub
Starting point is 00:10:16 of this news blooper and it was the colors were washed out and the tracking was bad you could barely hear it but it was like rare footage so it was like something that was prized and then maybe you'd put that on a compilation of stuff you'd found and pass that around and i think a lot of bands too they ended up on tour buses and you know there's like heavy metal parking lot made its way on nirvana's tour bus and in the comedy scene too yeah it was uh the mr show guys david cross is a big collector we've traded tapes with him paul thomas anderson and john c riley would have um you know like festivals of footage like this and that would try to outdo each other and um i remember doing a show with janine garofalo
Starting point is 00:10:58 like i just one of these local new york comedy shows we were talking about David Cross's, you know, tape traded stuff. She goes, Oh yeah, David would, you know, make me, she, he made me a dub of a, a video dating tape, which we've shown in our, in our show, you know, guys from 1987 pitching themselves for, for video dates. And, but at the end, without telling her, he put the Arbud Dwyer committing suicide on live TV. Oh, Jesus. She's like, I did not consent to that. But that was like the big shocker at the end of that. So, you know, we didn't get into that kind of found footage as much.
Starting point is 00:11:36 But, you know, it was sort of a mixed bag. Yeah, apparently Harry Shearer is into this as well because he was way into collecting satellite feeds of news broadcasts in which you would actually see what happens before they go live. So I think he actually contributed a lot to a documentary about that. Yeah. And from The Simpsons, we recently, well, I guess pre-pandemic, got to hang out with John Vitti, who was a fan of our show and reached out, or his wife, who's George Meyer's sister, reached out to us and said, hey, John's shy, but can we hang out with you guys when you're in Edinburgh, Scotland? So we hung out with John Vitti. We talked all about found footage.
Starting point is 00:12:15 And I believe Ian Maxton Graham, too, knew about our show and was sort of tapped into this world of found footage. Yeah, well, I mean, that's how you very nicely pointed John Vitti in our direction. And that's how we interviewed him. So thank you again for that, Nick. Yeah, it's just so weird. You know, you do these like little hobbies that you do in your basement or, you know,
Starting point is 00:12:40 or to entertain yourself. You know, I'm sure when you started talking Simpsons, you had no idea what it would become. And then to be actually talking to these guys is pretty incredible. I wish, you know, it's one of those things that you don't... The things get famous, that's how viral things happen. But I wish there was a way to go like, well, the reason you all shared, you've probably at your office shared, oh man, have you seen the Winnebago Man video? Or similar ones like your logo can't be on it but that's the reason people share those things because you guys found
Starting point is 00:13:12 it and there's there's much more than just you know winnebago man's the most famous one i'd say because it even had a whole documentary you guys uh participated in but there's there's so many things that wouldn't be shared around board offices without you guys having discovered it. Yeah, I think it has to come from somewhere. And we are just the type of, I guess, ne'er-do-wells who like hanging around in thrift stores and getting our hands dirty and watching just tons and tons of tapes, sometimes unlabeled and sort of separating the wheat from the chaff. And, you know, if we bring any value beyond that, I think it's to curate it. You know, like I said, it's usually a mixed bag.
Starting point is 00:13:54 And a lot of those mixed tapes that were around in the 90s and 2000s were pretty some really terrible things you wish you didn't see. So I think if nothing else else we provide that service of like okay here's the funny stuff here's the good stuff here's our take on it there's a fine line between picking noses and death on screen yeah oh yeah exactly and i think people like a lot of people sharing the he's almost got off on the fact that they would shock people oh no david cross the yes no i mean i had friends who sent me some awful videos i was like no i don't want to see that i'm sorry i i guess i don't have the stomach that you have or i'm a wuss or whatever but i don't want to see that no no thank you i think it makes a big difference too and, in how you present it, because like I mean, in most cases, we've found this stuff, all this material ourselves and we have a genuine affection for it.
Starting point is 00:14:52 So it's not a sort of a sneering, cynical presentation. I mean, clearly we're having some laughs at this, but it's it's it comes from a place of like, hey, we've all got VHS skeletons in our closets. And why can't we laugh at this? I think part of appreciating found footage is the sincerity behind it, just like the sincerity behind a bad movie. There's some kind of good intent there that went horribly wrong, usually. Yeah, the best kind of found footage, I think, has a genuine pathos. And like here are people really trying. They're not trying to be funny.
Starting point is 00:15:23 They're not doing something ironic. They're trying and usually without the resources that a professional production has uh the the passion that one man had for his penis pump in that video we saw like uh it's a story of like it's about people really that's what i i like to yeah exactly i think like we always try to do like little mini documentaries about the people we track down from the videos it's like every piece of fun footage is a human interest story and and yeah sometimes the mystery is more intriguing than the reality but we've met tons of like fascinating characters actually before i talked to you guys i was talking to a guy named martin carlton who is uh we played this video at our last touring show. It's called the Martin Carlton
Starting point is 00:16:05 stunt special from 1988. He climbs up a really tall tree addressed in like three sweatshirts and a bunch of sweatpants, like probably three stories high and just tries to jump from that tree to another tree and fails colossally. Just this is like way before jackass or anything. He's trying to do this. And you see the whole thing thing it's mostly the aftermath and brother having to get him water so he doesn't pass out and i just tracked him down today talked to him on the phone and um we're we're making plans to do the second annual martin carlton stunt special 33 years later but it'll be this we're calling it the second annual and uh and yes we're gonna go interview him and this is another tape that bobcat goldthwait found and he spread it around to his hollywood friends pen gillette is a fan of it and uh it's just made
Starting point is 00:16:52 made its way uh brian posain knew about it and has been in touch with this guy too so just crazy stories and and it turns out we just found out this is a talking simpsons exclusive we just found out that martin carlton what he did after that was he he moved to hollywood tried to make it as a stuntman and actor and he ended up as the high fall guy in the universal uh wild west stunt show for about seven years wow in california that's amazing so he somehow transitioned from making this homemade tape in his backyard. And he said he put that on his resume when he applied for the job. That was his audition reel. Oh, that's amazing. Exactly. Yeah. I'm seeing now just what an
Starting point is 00:17:36 amazing web of tape trading there is. That's just so beautiful. And i bet in your travels you've met uh a number of comic book guys who who have these collections as well absolutely did any of the comic book stores you guys grew up at have sell bootleg vhs or dvs usually have cartoons or comic book shows at one particularly dingy one yes that uh but i definitely remember i went to a number of comic conventions and they would be selling the like they just have it right at their table like here it is all of the like pilots for shows that never air anymore lost tv shows and also there there would be some of the found footage type content there too yeah i did not start going to comic book stores until after the bubble burst for the comic industry and like, what, 93, 92, Henry?
Starting point is 00:18:26 Yeah, 94. 94, okay. I guess I started going in 94. And the one comic book store in my town was called Rainbow Comics and Cards. So half the store was sports cards and sports memorabilia. The other half was the comic books, but they also sold lottery tickets at the store. So most of the people in that store were guys buying lottery tickets.
Starting point is 00:18:49 And that's where I bought comics growing up. It always feeds into some addiction. Now it's Magic the Gathering, right? I mean, you get the addicts there. But yeah, the Androids Dungeon also was Androids Dungeon and Baseball Cart Shop, right? That's right. Yeah, yeah.
Starting point is 00:19:03 Our hometown in Stoughton, Wisconsin had a baseball cart shop with a's right the whole yeah yeah um our hometown had um in stoughton wisconsin had a baseball card shop with a guy like comic book guy but it also had a shop that me and joe were obsessed with called wayne's bargain store which almost seems like a fake you know sign gag from the background of a simpsons episode but this guy wayne older guy and the store just had like lacquered elvis clocks you know wooden elvis clocks they had like those tapestries like with like harley davidson riders on it saying like born to ride and and as a kid we were just fascinated about all this just crap in the store and the funniest part about wayne was he hated kids first of all like all these shop
Starting point is 00:19:43 owners do and especially our age kids and he i just he was always just chain smoking smelled awful in the store and uh but right behind him he had a sign that said no smoking and never commented on it never saw the irony of it just uh yeah just smoked smoked away wow my comic shops growing up the ones that stand out to me in my memory where it's like i knew one that wasn't run by a comic book guy type figure like i i went to several comic shops growing up uh most of them were run by a comic shop type guy like comic book guy uh the only one that wasn't was a uh a relatively fit guy who his thing was he wasn't like an old metalhead he had an anthrax long style goatee when i say anthrax i mean the band not the
Starting point is 00:20:33 poison um but yes when i moved to berkeley california one of my favorite things when i first moved here was that it had like the dream comic book store like in 2004 now if you're a comic book fan collected trade paperbacks they're sold everywhere you can find a giant library of them you go to any bookstore you can buy them for like a nickel on amazon or it's available digitally in 2003 2004 very few comic shops had a library of the collections they were about just selling you your weekly books but comicief was the opposite of that. It was just shelf after shelf of all these books I could never find at my local shop.
Starting point is 00:21:11 When I visited here, I was like, I have to buy every single one of these. And when I moved here, I really enjoyed having that comic shop. But the person who ran it was a Comic Book Guy style figure as well. And the health issues that happened to comic book guy in this episode sadly affected him as well. And he died about a decade ago.
Starting point is 00:21:36 And the comic shop, it couldn't continue after that. Very sadly, the comic shop just became a shell of its former self after he passed away. So I've known a number of comic books uh book guys in my life and i'm trying my best to not be a comic book guy these days at least in in physical activity and and weight i did want to talk about comic book guy and who he is and where he comes from because this is the first episode that's truly about him correct yeah yeah so he made his debut uh a decade earlier almost in may of 1991 this is february of 2001 and yes this is the first time he has his entire story he's not just a background gag or you know a one-liner in a scene and he would later be named
Starting point is 00:22:18 in 2005's uh i think it's called ned and homer's hail mary pass his name is jeff albertson which the joke is that they just suddenly give him a name and it's very Ned and Homer's Hail Mary Pass. His name is Jeff Albertson, which the joke is that they just suddenly give him a name and it's very boring, but that's his name. And now as of 2021, one of the last new episodes I saw was, I think it's called The Dad Feelings Limited and it's about him and his wife coming to terms with having a child.
Starting point is 00:22:39 That's where this character has come since his debut in season two. Yeah, and he has a japanese wife now named kumiko as well yeah he's he's grown quite a lot over time and in surprising ways for him but he began as just the idea of like this is the comic book store guy you see who is you know this small business tyrant who has nothing else in his life but is an asshole to you at the store when you just want to buy a spider-man comic uh but but then as the writers of the show got to know some online fans more and more he instead became a personification of the people who go onto the message board after every episode and say worst episode ever I'd say it was probably season six onward is when he became
Starting point is 00:23:27 the angry internet guy and not just the guy who owns a comic book store. He was one of my favorite characters for that reason, because it was sort of the writer's chance to kind of make fun of their own diehard fans. And I don't remember seeing that archetype on tv before of the comic book shop owner they sort of the alpha nerd that i mean i'm a big board gamer and there's there's you know i board game shop owners are in many ways comic book guys as well oh yes and uh but i think like this is the first time i remember seeing that anywhere in movies or tv yeah you would see it like in uh let's say clerks but clerks comes three years after comic book guys invented so that's a later invention toby and american splendor maybe you know and yeah things like that but yeah that was all post of
Starting point is 00:24:15 comic book guy and i think at this point in time in 2001 we are just at the tail end of comics being uncool not mass market things because the next year will be the Spider-Man movie, which will kick off basically all entertainment forever until the sun burns out. Everything's comic books now. Yeah. It's funny in this episode that they can't even have like a comic book writer as the guest.
Starting point is 00:24:38 It's instead a horror guest. Yeah. Tom Savini shows up. Yeah. Instead of, you know, Stan Lee or Alan Moore that they had in the future. The Simpsons will be right back. I'm detecting luscious bite-sized gooey things. I will trade you this rare chocolate radioactive man for the box.
Starting point is 00:25:06 Quite literally, mint condition. Not anymore. Oh! Ritz-Bitz Sandwiches S'mores. Fudging marshmallow graham crackers. Now with Simpsons faces. Fine. I will throw in radioactive man comment number one.
Starting point is 00:25:17 Deal. Hello, this box is empty. You said the box. Worst trade ever. Oh, dear. Ritz-Bitz Sandwiches S'mores. With the Simpsons, it's s'more fun. You said the box. Worst trade ever. Oh dear. Ritz Pet Sandwiches S'mores. With the Simpsons, it's s'more fun.
Starting point is 00:25:33 How we use electricity can be smarter, cleaner and greener. At Electric Ireland, we can help guide you there. You see, our new Net Zero Hub has all you need to know about smart meter plans, EV tariffs, solar panels, and much more. Making your usage clearer, your trips greener, your home cozier, and your world brighter. Find our Net Zero Hub at electricireland.ie. Welcome to The Break, everybody. welcome to the break everybody it's henry gilbert and i promise you this is not secretly a blood pack and i want to say a big big thank you to our guest this week nick pruer he is such a cool dude co-host of the found footage fest who gave us so much insight into uh the world of found footage
Starting point is 00:26:23 that this episode is all about. You should definitely follow Found Footage Fest on Twitter. They have a Patreon and I'm sure they'll be back on the road real soon. Their live show is so much fun to see. Please check them out. They have been such cool friends to me and Bob at the Found Footage Fest. Also, if you enjoy this podcast, Talking Simpsons is brought to you by wonderful subscribers at patreon.com slash talking simpsons the subscribers there for five bucks a month not only help me and bob do this as our full-time jobs but they also get access to so many amazing extras you get every
Starting point is 00:26:56 episode of talking simpsons a week ahead of time and without ads like this one you can hear next week's right now and you also get access to tons of exclusive podcasts once a month we do talking futurama we're into season three of futurama we cover it in the simpson style but you can only hear it if you're a patreon subscriber and there's a giant back catalog of other ones where you've covered the first season and a half of king of the hill the entire series of mission hill and the entire series of the critic plus tons and tons more please sign up at that five dollar level to see tons of cool stuff that you get in addition to this podcast early at patreon.com slash talking simpsons but if you want to make photos of shelbyville's really jealous then you need to sign up at the
Starting point is 00:27:48 ten dollar level at patreon.com slash talking simpsons that is the premium level at the patreon where you get all the five dollar things i just mentioned but you also get our monthly often over four hours sometimes even over five hours long. What a cartoon movie podcast for me and Bob go as in-depth as we do into The Simpsons into an animated feature film. This whole summer, we are doing the Summer of the Disney Renaissance covering films like Hercules, The Hunchback of Notre Dame,
Starting point is 00:28:17 and coming in August, The Lion King. And there's a giant back catalog in addition to that. Over 140 hours of us covering movies is diverse from Akira to a goofy movie, Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse to Kiki's delivery service, and many, many more in between. Go to patreon.com slash TalkingSimpsons to see all the things you're missing out on by not yet being a subscriber. Once more, patreon.com slash talking simpsons it was also funny hearing uh hank azaria's on the commentary because he won the emmy for this
Starting point is 00:29:03 episode or an emmy and they joke about how like he got it from an old college acquaintance of his named f uh who talked in that same way and it was uh i'd heard it before but it was especially because we just covered the film cool world it was funny to hear that that's where azaria got the voice from but the animation folks who worked on the show who know Ralph Bakshi they're like oh you're making fun of Ralph Bakshi with this right like no no we don't know Ralph Bakshi is I think this is one of Hank's best voices I it's just so funny and perfect he was saying on the commentary it was hard to make comic book guy say things sincerely to Agnes
Starting point is 00:29:42 because everything he says is just sarcastic so he's like how do i make this character seem sincere yeah i do wonder about some sometimes when the simpsons takes a background character or sort of a one note character and forces them into sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't you know i mean i love knowing more about skinner and his relationship with his mom and stuff but but other times it's like i think this character just be a better seasoning in the soup than a complete episode and i'm kind of on the fence about that with comic book guy this one i think does it pretty well just because they found a disgusting place to take it and they could have you know gross not year 2001 um grandma makeout humor that you'd got back then they're age gap lovers yes yeah it's harold and maude but they also are two you know probably the most anti-social people in springfield so it
Starting point is 00:30:34 makes sense yeah it is it is a funny combo but you know i i like this as a lead comic book guy one i think the the only notes i'd say are really at the ending where they just kind of they they do a fine little episode and then at the end they kind of want to just go like yeah no it's not as good an episode or let's we're we're missing something here well why don't we begin with our first clip here uh we said it on our previous podcast listeners uh heard but it is still again so eerie how the episode that preceded this that we did from season two also has a farting bottle joke at the breakfast table that's right and one other preamble thing uh larry doyle's on the commentary and he says this episode originally meant to be called the fiver he won't explain
Starting point is 00:31:15 why or what that means yeah he's larry doyle is so weird and sheepish on this commentary like he seems kind of unhappy he's also phoning in yeah he's phoning in he just feels weird i think it's tom gamelan there he's like hey you wrote the pogo strip for a couple years didn't you he's like yeah i guess yeah i worked in comics yeah it's like what the come on larry what the hell talk about that yeah did you read pogo at all my dad was a huge fan no that was that was a real parent thing i yeah pogo wasn't in my local strips i i read everyone who would influence like uh jeff smith's bone comic and bill watterson's calvin and hobbes but i never actually read pogo itself i like the art my dad had the books growing up but i i it was kind of over my head i think yeah and um a friend of mine
Starting point is 00:32:02 caitlin runs the uh billy ireland cartoon library and museum in columbus and i know they're doing a big um exhibit of pogo i kind of want to check it out oh that's pretty cool i'd check that out well yeah i i just think of pogo as one of those things when i was reading the comic journal like it would say oh you really need to read pogo to know what cartooning is i was like i guess it felt it always felt like homework i never i never bothered yeah it might be worth revisiting but uh yes this starts with a farting bottle joke as well this time it is uh a parody of the in 1999 or 2000 i do remember the premiere of the bisquick shaken pour bottles of pancake mix everyone remembers
Starting point is 00:32:43 where they were it was it was a real has it come to this kind of joke where the same thing i would see with the peanut butter is with the jam now in the same container has it come to this yes uh it's too yeah the bisquick shaken pour bottle was instead of doing the hard thing of having like measuring out uh the mix and then an egg or whatever it's just put an amount of water into this bottle shake it up and it will then be the pancake liquid and pour it in the in the griddle that's all you got to do uh but uh but yes marge embarrasses herself with it in this first clip good pancakes mom well thank you honey they come in a squeeze bottle now clip. It is, Butterworth. Let's have a breakfast meeting. Ew, how long has this baking soda been in here? I don't know. It came with the house.
Starting point is 00:33:49 Hey, Dad, bet you five bucks you can't eat the whole box. Five? Why don't we make it 50? Oh, you're gonna regret this. I'll call poison control. Fran, it's me. Just a heads up. Wow. friend it's me just a heads up wow the absorbed odors of a million meals you know i was thinking is miss butterworth being redesigned i i had looked into this okay thank you because isn't she a mammy style character well there is some discussion about that okay because i don't believe this was always the case with her but definitely in in my entire lifetime mrs butterworth is played more as an old white
Starting point is 00:34:33 grandmother type character there was a real retcon at some point i think definitely aunt jemima always was a black woman uh but mrs butterworth uh definitely this joke seems to be about like the pc changing of a mascot then 1999 at the time mrs butterworth the only change it went through was that uh it went from a glass bottle to a plastic one i know no because it was my favorite one but uh as a kid but in the last year the whoever it is that owns mrs butterworth when the stuff was happening you know with uh cream of weed and aunt jemima them changing their mascots mrs butterworth's company was like we're looking into it and apparently their answer is uh no we don't need to change it mrs butterworth is fine it looks abstracted enough now i'm looking at a picture
Starting point is 00:35:21 of it and it looks abstracted enough that i i think you can get away with it if you want to see a weird commercial a few years ago they did they did a mrs butterworth uh meets colonel sanders ad because they were doing chicken and waffles stuff at kfc so you can watch a eerie cg colonel sanders dance with a mrs butterworth bottle and it's uh it's disturbing one other Larry Doyle thing I forgot to mention sorry this is more preamble stuff after the first clip but this is his last episode of the show he only wrote during the Mike Scully years and he would go on to uh have a feature film writing career and also he would uh pen a lot of the Looney Tunes shorts
Starting point is 00:36:00 that didn't actually get released in theaters as they planned on doing because he is the writer of Looney Tunes Back in Action. Right, which did so poorly that it mothballed the Looney Tunes for years afterwards. Also writer of the film we all love and remember, Duplex, the Ben Stiller, Drew Barrymore comedy. And also based on his novel, I Love You, Beth Cooper, is the movie I Love You, Beth Cooper. Maybe Larry Doyle was having a bad time on the production of that movie when he was on the phone. Maybe that's why on the commentary
Starting point is 00:36:32 he's very muted and mumbly. But, you know, I just put a new baking soda box in my fridge. And every time I look at it, I think of this joke. I think of like, what would it taste like what are the dangers inherent in it i did look up a poison control website says although
Starting point is 00:36:51 baking soda is helpful in many ways too much can be a problem if a large amount of baking soda is ingested expect vomiting and diarrhea quickly after the ingestion because it raises the sodium levels in your body too much sodium in the body can lead to serious symptoms so that's an imitatable act showing homer eating that he just he does have an antacid trip as lisa calls it yeah does baking soda actually absorb odors in a freezer because i've just i've been to friends places that that have that and they they you know give you ice cubes and it tastes like whatever frozen food was next to the ice cube yeah i don't know how effective that is you know i think it is that
Starting point is 00:37:30 people don't change it out enough like the joke in here i think people i've i was guilty of this in bachelor dumb as well like well i put this thing in there uh baking soda box is good forever it can absorb uh scents forever but eventually it does it gets old and stops working yeah uh there's got to be a better way or is everybody there's there has to be a in the year 2021 we must have a fancier solution than just an open yellow box of arm and hammer baking soda put a man on the moon but you can't make ice cubes not taste like hungry man dinners you know it's also uh this feels like a very al jean thing of having homer eat something gross as a plot point uh and they there's a bit of funny jokitude on the commentary
Starting point is 00:38:13 of mentioning how matt selman and al jean both have done food-based dares in the simpsons writers room but then matt selman won't say what he ate although al jean does confess to biting the or licking or biting the caramel on the ceiling i think he said it was about people said it was a lick he says it's a bite he seems deeply ashamed of himself yeah it's it's so fun i think he only took credit for it because they were saying oh yeah didn't conan do that i bet gene was like i don't want conan o'brien to this to be on the record that he did it so i'm gonna have to say it was me. I think that's a thing because I remember among comedy writers, because I guess they're eating disgusting food all day and they don't want to
Starting point is 00:38:53 work. So anything to sort of, you know, I guess stave off having to work and, and disgusting food challenges, especially when it was like an all male writer's room, I guess ritual torture is just part of that environment you know it turns into lord of the flies fairly quickly it becomes a frat brotherhood very quickly yes bill oakley has talked about it but because there were no smartphones or other distractions at the time you would gain like 50 pounds writing for a sitcom because food was the only stimulus that you were looking forward to outside of just writing jokes i could see that i
Starting point is 00:39:24 remember um rob burnett who is the executive producer at Letterman. He was working on that show Ed with Tom Cavanaugh and took place in the bowling alley and all that. And they would have, they would go out to eat together and have those challenges. They'd go out to places where you had to finish the steak, you know, like from the movie, The Great Outdoors, the old 96er, you know, and just get extremely sick, but I guess that was just part of the fun. Man, the writer's room, at least, if you're working at a place like Letterman and you're in Manhattan in the writer's room,
Starting point is 00:39:55 that has to be at least a little better than being in a Hollywood writer's room and having to be like, well, send out the intern. They got to drive an hour back and forth from the one from the eight places we want yeah it was just getting i mean you could get really good food delivered but i think you know once like places that had milkshakes would deliver you know then the floodgates were open i think the matt selman one i think he's the guy who got who got dared to eat the berries that grew outside the writer's room that's right yeah that was his one uh so i'm not accusing anyone of foul play here but this opening feels a lot like the opening to
Starting point is 00:40:31 boy scouts in the hood in which bart and millhouse have money taken from homer to go on a jag slash spree except it's not a a bender they go on but they do start at a poos so very similar yeah it's i was i'm glad you said that i was uh considering the same thing because it is like getting you they have 20 in 1994 now it turned into 50 that's inflation i guess but but they don't see cats yeah they don't go to see cats there's not i mean david merkin hated cats more than mike scully i guess that's part of it too it also reminded me of let's go crazy broadway style with the all syrup squishy oh yeah you're talking about yeah same episode yeah okay same episode got it it has an awful name i uh the the way homer has his
Starting point is 00:41:17 antacid trip too it's a surprising thing to me because i know in the past when they would say have nixon say a thing they would just have har Shearer pretend to be Nixon and say the quote. But this time, they play Johnny Cochran. They play Nixon. They play Neil Armstrong. It's just the direct clips. It was surprising to hear that use. But yes, they go on a jag.
Starting point is 00:41:40 This time, when they go to Quickie Mart, i do like that apu becomes a personal shopper like that yeah it's some good uh good comedy there like just let us shop and like you know i'm not about gum but i'm into the whole chewing thing like that that's cute i like that yeah that was a good bit and and having 50 makes them like a a millionaire who walks into uh tiffany's or whatever to get a private viewing of it. And that's when we get also right after that, they use some fabric softener, which we get to see Milhouse still wearing
Starting point is 00:42:12 his My Little Pony underwear. The second Milhouse loves My Little Pony joke of the season. You know, it's just like baking soda. I don't know if fabric softener works, but I still put that little sheet in with my drying. And you know, it's like magic. It smells slightly better. Could be a placebo. We'll never know well no one will ever find out i never feel like the clothes feel different when i forget to put them in there but yeah it's that scent of it
Starting point is 00:42:34 it's really special uh but of course the the kids then do the next thing you do if you have ten dollars uh to burn and that's go to a comic book store and i definitely misspent uh so much money in my childhood at comic book stores uh though i did want to say uh they they talk about issue 1000 and uh the price is a bit higher but uh it is when they charge more for a comic when it's at an anniversary issue kind of thing for example 2003 saw amazing spider-man 500 that comic was only three dollars and fifty cents 2018 saw action comics hit issue 1000 just as radioactive man does here that 100 page comic was eight dollars so still not a 2525 comic. But then again, those didn't have the technology of forever mint condition that Radioactive Man 1000 has. That defaces Bongo Comics.
Starting point is 00:43:32 That's so good. No more Bongo. There's no more Bongo Comics around. It's sad. Oh, yeah. I love Bongo Comics, like the early Simpsons comics. And it's probably too old to be reading them. But just any Simpsons content at that point,
Starting point is 00:43:48 I was desperate for. Yeah, MacGreining has a new comic label, and I think all they've released so far is a disenchantment calendar. Yeah. Bapper books. We need to see more of it, though I wonder where the, you know,
Starting point is 00:44:02 Bongo Comics existed because Greining did have the comic publishing rights to simpsons i wonder what that means you know in a post disney buyout world does disney want to publish simpson comics on their own uh from their own publishing labels i i would certainly wouldn't think they'd want to give that up to mac raining but uh in this world bongo comics are not simpson comic books they are comics starring bongo from the life in hell comics this is uh just the simpsons writers hating the comics that's all it is i know that's all it is to the comic writers but you know i'm also glad they're buying a radioactive man comic that is the continuity of the world in there they're not buying you know i they could have just been
Starting point is 00:44:46 a batman or spider-man comic but to have it be bart's favorite fictional superhero for their world radioactive man i appreciate that i appreciate the continuity because mrs prince comes in a rare spoken appearance by mrs prince and martin is at fat camp which is where he went for camp crusty so a lot of continuity is happening in this episode the surprising amount and we rarely ever hear uh mrs prince talk because they both just sound like martin yeah and she has the season one blue hair to show she's this lost character like but yes uh the purchasing of uh radioactive man 1000 doesn't go so well in this next clip. Radioactive Man number 1000, please.
Starting point is 00:45:28 $10. I laugh at you. Please do note, this is no ordinary comic book. It is in permanent condition. If you spill soda on it, it drops fly off harmlessly onto lesser comics. Whoa. Yes, you are quite correct to gasp. Also note the price, $25.
Starting point is 00:45:46 We had to buy lunch for that homeless guy. While my son's at fat camp, I cleaned out his room. How much will you give me for this? Probably nothing, but let us see. Who? Handwritten script for Star Wars by George Lucas? Princess Leia's anti-jiggle breast tape? Film reel labeled alternate ending, Luke's father is Chewbacca.
Starting point is 00:46:05 Oh! Oh! I'll give you $5 for the box. Sold. Don't do it, lady. That stuff's worth thousands. Yeah, he's ripping you off. Well, if this is valuable,
Starting point is 00:46:21 then back to the leaky basement it goes. Smile, please. She sounds like she's Minnie Mouse's mother the character it's a real Minnie Mouse voice yeah uh but yeah we're out of it we're in a weird time for Star Wars too because we were right between episode one and two and I think the enthusiasm was pretty low but there was still time for uh slave girl leia costume jokes as well like actually they don't call her slave leia anymore it's now like captive leia all right sorry sorry i don't apologize to me henry no i uh i need to respect the disney branding exactly now the well yeah because that joke was because you know i think around 97 or so during the 20th anniversary,
Starting point is 00:47:06 that's when it was getting more popularized. Carrie Fisher telling stories of the tape she wore during her performance and guys taking it off at the end of the day. So that's why people knew about the breast tape that she wore. A little ashamed to admit this, but do you remember Premiere Magazine? You know, the movie magazine? Oh, yeah. So the Return of the Jedi issue came. My dad got the magazine,
Starting point is 00:47:31 and it had, you know, the cast on there, and it had Leia, who's kind of like squatting down in her captive Leia outfit, but the address label was over where her butt would be. So I got back from school, and my parents were back from work yet and kind of tried to steam the label off so that I could see more of Carrie Fisher's butt. And it, it didn't work. So I'm like, I'm just going to, you know,
Starting point is 00:47:56 try to carefully peel it. And it ended up ripping the magazine. And I was like, Oh no, my, my parents are going to find out. I wanted to see that. And, and so I just kind of carefully put it with the rest of the mail and it was not expecting much. And around five o'clock, I went in my bedroom. My dad's like, who tore my premiere magazine? So I don't think I was ever implicated. But you heard it here first. I was going to carefully peel off the butt sticker.
Starting point is 00:48:24 Exactly. I had the solvent carefully peel off the butt sticker. Exactly. I had the solvent. Leave that for me. You know, the pre-internet age, that's what you had to do to see a sexy picture sometimes. That's so funny that you have to so carefully remove it. I mean, that's a mistake on the shippers that they put that label over there. Put that over, you know, Chewbacca's head or something. I agree.
Starting point is 00:48:48 I agree. But isn't that interesting, though? It feels like, you know, Clerks was out before this, right? Before this episode? Yeah. And they get really deep into the woods with theorizing about, you know, Star Wars. So, like, Chewbacca was Luke's father. Just seemed a little pedestrian for star wars
Starting point is 00:49:05 references no they could go deeper it's uh you know some of these star wars jokes feel like writers not wanting to admit they know enough about star wars to make a more accurate star wars joke right or at least a fear that like we could lose the audience meanwhile you know family guy is doing very specific jokes about just like a single line. Like, it's a trap. Like, Simpsons wasn't ready for that kind of meme mockery of Star Wars at this point. Yeah, but if there was ever an episode to do it, it would be worst episode ever with Comic Book Guy.
Starting point is 00:49:40 But this is about how, you know, the thought was in someone's basement somewhere is a crazy thing you've never heard of or that will be worth a million dollars and the comic book guys of the world get to profit off them because of parents that sell off their comic book collections. I mean, I also think I think Al Jean and other comic nerds on the writing staff had gone through this experience in their like 1970s childhoods though my mom actually is the opposite of that she is saved there's comic books that i wouldn't have been that offended if she threw away because i'd be like i understand you moved across the country you didn't have to keep all my comic books but she did and i think i think it's jokes like these or that it happened to her brothers growing up she's like i saw how much that hurt my brothers when my my mom threw out her comic uh their comic book collections so i'll be nice and keep my my sons
Starting point is 00:50:36 but one of these days i'm gonna rent a car and drive them back here so all 2 000 issues of spider-man comics that are sitting in my stepfather's garage we can finally can finally be in my apartment collecting dust wizard magazine does not lie those are worth a million dollars oh yeah yeah my parents recently sent back all my sports cards i had basketball and football cards from the 80s and um they i think they just finally got tired of you know having them collect dust in their basement so they send them back and i look through them like i don't want to go through and look at the the beckett guide and see and like who's buying sports car i mean i guess now there's
Starting point is 00:51:13 a bit more demand but for newer ones like these ones are just all worthless now if those are nfts we'd be talking yes yeah yeah no the advent of ebay really hurt a lot of that stuff because a price guide can tell you one thing but you know what the actual price is when you go on ebay and see that like even comics i thought were the most collectible of my childhood if i could get 50 dollars on ebay for them i'd be like oh awesome man 50 whole bucks like you're you're lucky to get five for most which it's a it's a buyer's market on ebay for collectible comics right now uh if anybody wants uh uh if anybody any listener out there wants a uh 1988 don mckowski rookie card for the green bay packers uh clear i believe just uh you know where to find me i only want cards that are referenced on the simpsons like the carly
Starting point is 00:52:01 kastremski card yeah give me that one it was big sideburns you know mill uh martin should have sold some of this stuff when he was trying to buy radioactive man one if he he'd gotten a hundred bucks for just one of these things that's that's my question how martin had any of these things really but uh i i do like that what puts him into the ban areas that as revenge they prevent comic book guy from basically becoming a millionaire off of that stuff like i i like that they punish him for that and that the mother still make sure they don't get rich off of it either and she just seemingly will destroy them and puts him back in the leaky basement and on the ban for life walls a photo of macarading but it doesn't really look like him it's not the greatest drawing even on the commentary they Lifewall is a photo of Matt Groening, but it doesn't really look like him. It's not the greatest drawing.
Starting point is 00:52:45 Even on the commentary, they're like, who is that? Is that George Lucas? Like, that's Matt Groening. You know, I think it'd be another year before they formalized the true Matt Groening look that he'd always be after that when he's at the comic convention during the next comic book guy-centric episode when he's about to marry Edna, if you recall. I love when he says, says like tug on my beer i mean when i was a little kid i had one comic shop within 30 miles before i could get but and this was when i
Starting point is 00:53:11 couldn't drive so if i'd have been banned i'd be pretty heartbroken too absolutely it was like a social center before you know you could hang out anywhere legally on your own you could kind of be unsupervised in a comic store yeah though then you get to know the the other regulars there you're like oh i can i can kind of see why comic book guys are driven nuts by some of the regulars who stick around all day and say like uh hey you ever read this comic it's pretty good right right people low on the social skills ladder yeah tend to congregate there yes yeah now they have the internet for that so they don't they don't have to talk to people uh but yes homer then tells bart that he knows how it is to be kicked out of a place too and we go back to so look i'm not saying that gallagher
Starting point is 00:53:58 wasn't performing in the 70s because he was but this gallagher mocking gallagher comedy it just feels too easy for the show i don't know yeah i was a little dated and i wonder if they thought we could get gallagher but he obviously has no sense of humor about himself as we've all learned in recent years so uh yeah it's um it feels a little like i don't know gallagher jokes had been done i do like gallagher's own frustration about not being in movies though that's a good joke yeah i i on the commentary they joke of like oh do we ask gallagher nah no we didn't you know i like uh how i i have you ever met gallagher yourself nick now it's on my bucket list oh the clock's ticking but i know well some some friends from The Onion, when it was still in New York, decided to go see Gallagher in New York.
Starting point is 00:54:49 He was playing somewhere, a smaller comedy venue. And they're like, oh, this would be kind of funny. Go see Gallagher. And, of course, I knew him from the VHS tapes. Those are some of the first things you could rent at a video rental store. And they went and saw him. And I guess at some point he said something racist and kind of got some groans and then he goes oh i forgot i'm in liberal new york you can't even say shit like
Starting point is 00:55:11 that anymore and and the audience turned on him and like he just started shouting at the audience and they they had they were recording this too and it's just very uncomfortable well i mean we are a decade out now from the come on gallagher come on yeah the mark maron yeah gallagher storming out of wtf oh god and then like a decade later obama would be on the show uh i love that one because he's like i came up with letterman you know we were at the same time i didn't i have a tv show there or he's like yeah i had a piece of the teenage mutant ninja turtles you know like he's he was just so combative and that's how reactionary he was in like a decade ago like i i can't imagine he could even perform comedy at this point without like two seconds in just exploding with rage
Starting point is 00:56:00 at the audience for not laughing properly at something but uh but yeah just in this case it's like oh homer it's just kind of an easy food monster homer joke of just him he went to the front row so he could eat the watermelon before he gets smashed like i at the very least say i do appreciate the joke that homer thinks he would ever be in a movie when he never would be it's surprising there was never a gallagher movie, though. At the very least, you think in, like, 87 he could have scored one. Like, direct-to-video, at least. I mean, it might have just been that, like, he literally was impossible to work with,
Starting point is 00:56:34 and even filmmakers were like, oh, no, no, no. This man is undirectable. I at least like how long Homer is sobbing. That's pretty funny. Cut from him in the flashback sobbing to him in the present sobbing and i think i've seen that uh gift a lot homer sobbing at the table i forgetting it was him crying about being kicked out of the gallagher show no me too it's it is a memed image quite a lot and then lisa is reading the daily setup which i wish they'd use more often because it's just such an obvious like lisa just says what the next scene is
Starting point is 00:57:05 going to be like you know in the newspaper here yeah i like that they still still do meta stuff and uh and tom savini was an interesting pick then like if you if you were a you know cult movie fan you've you'd probably heard of them i did when this episode aired i did know tom savini i'm not even really for his makeup work. I knew him because he would appear in like from dusk till dawn. Yeah. Like random roles in films. And in this episode, he says there's always a place for practical effects.
Starting point is 00:57:34 It's actually not true. He retired because there was CGI was taking over everything he used to do. I think he retired from doing makeup in 2012, but he is still acting. Yeah, that's cool. And that's I mean mean that is so sad like our our friends on the choppo trap house podcast talk about this a lot but it's like squibs man squibs i miss him so much just physical fake blood exploding off of a person it uh it i sound like an old man too complaining about complaining about it. But when you see digital blood, it doesn't feel the same in most cases. Yeah, absolutely.
Starting point is 00:58:09 I mean, and I think people are starting to go back to it. The pendulum is spinning or is going the other direction now where people are starting to do more practical effects. It'll never be what it once was, but you can appreciate it when people do that. Like when you see Hateful Eight, the Tarantino movie, how much work he's like, no, this is some real ass blood. We're covering actors in blood for days while we film them. And it's like it does add something. I also respect the actors for being covered in, you know, corn syrup or whatever for days on end while having blood explode out of them but like that's another reason they that it stopped happening in movies as much because it is much harder to film and actors get uncomfortable in it so if you can just have digital paints be
Starting point is 00:58:57 put on later uh for most people they take that easy way out plus it was fun i mean we did a our first short film um out college. We just wanted to rig somebody up in squibs. So we kind of did it ourselves where we took condoms and filled them with fake blood, taped them to a board and then put little explosive devices behind them. And I had some friends rig them up to like electronic like pad that would, you know, complete the circuit and set off the thing. And it was the most fun we had on set. We spent all day rigging it and uh it's just fun like guys like tom savini i mean they had it they had the best job in the world that's awesome man that's uh no and then and he was friends with dana gould the writer oh yeah so that's how they got any kind of guy or lady from the world of horror
Starting point is 00:59:39 dana gould probably knows from back in the day yeah famously vampyra uh he helped her you know live out her uh final days in better conditions than she had been like he he took care of her and uh yeah he's dana gould is a freak for those things he he loves it i mean and planet of the apes he he loves him so much i believe her name was mylon nurmy How we use electricity can be smarter, cleaner, and greener. At Electric Ireland, we can help guide you there. You see, our new Net Zero Hub has all you need to know about smart meter plans, EV tariffs, solar panels, and much more. Making your usage clearer, your trips greener,
Starting point is 01:00:26 your home cozier, and your world brighter. Find our net zero hub at electricireland.ie. He was the Peter Bogdanovich to her Urson Orson Welles in their pairing. Yeah, I was going to say, yeah. Although Urson Welles
Starting point is 01:00:40 is the bare version of Orson Welles. He is quite Urside in his later years. I'm not even a horror mega fan but dawn of the dead and day of the dead the makeup triumphs that uh dom savini has in those alone it's like he deserves uh every makeup oscar every year he made a movie for what he did but but often he didn't get celebrated uh the he would because of, you know, it's horror. It's lesser. It's cheap and gaudy.
Starting point is 01:01:09 But it was cool that he came on the show for this. And Bart is told not to worry his spiky little head because Homer's got a plan. Bart says, how could you have a plan? How could you have a plan down? You just heard about the problem. Oh, you're right. And then Homer actually makes his plan. When you know that homer actually is
Starting point is 01:01:25 just selling them out it's even crueler than he makes them walk all that way with him on his shoulders it's both to feel tall and to get paid by a comic book guy i love him selling him out that's great yeah this also you know really takes me back to the times i miss of when comic shops existed and you could be indoors with stuff and I hope it comes back soon like that same local comic shop I talked about they would host guests all the time often more from the indie comics world than the you know major publications and it's how I learned about a lot of cool people like one of my favorites was seeing Chip Zdarsky the uh a very funny comedy writer and artist uh who on the Sex Criminals comics.
Starting point is 01:02:09 And it's a really good one. Just seeing Chip Zdarsky live and getting to interview him or getting to see him interviewed was really cool. I miss things like this. I hope they resume in the surviving comic shops of the pandemic. During this era, i was pretty big into alternative comics and i guess i guess it would have been earlier than this but like hate and angry youth comics and you know stuff like that so i remember going to comic book shops to see like peter bagg and johnny ryan and and see them you know sign things give a little talk
Starting point is 01:02:42 they're accessible yeah yeah same uh around here the the artist adrian tomine like lived and you'd be he made you couldn't keep him away from the comic shop he'd be showing up all the time there and there's a little reference to barnes and noble i love i love his mr barnes and noble the way he says it but this is also a time when the brick and mortar bookstore was huge and for me it was peak going to a bookstore and not buying anything times for me just like where do you want to hang out it's the middle of the day let's go to barnes and noble let's go to borders and just walk around boy there sure aren't a lot of books let's look let's look through some of them maybe buy a coffee
Starting point is 01:03:17 and then leave so that's why there are none of these anymore and if you go to barnes noble now there's one that's kind of biased but it's mostly about selling you games and toys and the books are somewhere in the back oh yes yeah yeah though there used to be one across the street from where i live and that one shut down it actually the wow it was across the street from an independent bookstore and that one survived it's still around pegasus books but uh i bet they thought oh oh, when Barnes & Noble shows up, we're screwed. But really, Barnes & Noble was just a shoplifting center and a place to just hang out all day. There's a Barnes & Noble, a big, I think, four-story one in Union Square here in New York.
Starting point is 01:03:55 And the reason I know it and why I use it mostly nowadays is they have a public bathroom. And those are a commodity in manhattan so sometimes you'll plan a trip you know you're like okay if i'm in the union square area i know there's a bathroom on the second floor you don't have to buy anything so it's still good for something yes very important for city life is to know where the public bathrooms are yes so yeah he taunts barnes and noble and uh he's a lot about his competition i wonder how did he score tom savini when he's such an asshole to him like how did he how did he get him i mean i bet i bet savini has had his times of having a host at a place be like oh you're kind of a jerk to me or you're
Starting point is 01:04:37 trying to like big time me in your store i'm your guest actually that that that new Adrian Comina comic really hit close to home. I don't know if you read it, but it's about kind of doing tours and being in comic book shops and like just kind of what that life's like. And the person who booked you no longer works there. And you just kind of show up. I guess we can put a table out and they didn't promote you. I bet that happened all the time. Oh, wow. heard about i gotta read this i i've gotten behind in his works i need to check this one out yeah his old optic stuff i love that but okay i'm gonna check this it's not yeah it's really good it's called uh the loneliness of a long distance cartoonist
Starting point is 01:05:20 and it's not it's it's not quite like what we do with found footage festival at least we have each other there but imagine being you know on your own on tour like at a small town comic shop and and nobody shows up you know it's that kind of thing that's so man that sounds uh that sounds awesome i'm buying this after this but uh maybe for my local comic shop i don't know but i i another thing i love about reading his comics is that at least when he lived in berkeley california i would just see that you know he would use backgrounds from like you know local photo references and i could just like oh that's my bart station and that's this place like yeah that's always kind of cool when when you can uh
Starting point is 01:05:59 you know recognize something drawn oh well and also i was just watching uh my husband he grew up in queens but he hadn't watched this 2002 spider-man movie in forever and when a shot just a random shot of peter parker running down the street is in queens like we paused he's like i lived there like that's my apartment right there but uh but yes tom sav Savini is having some fun up on stage, even though Bart and Milhouse are watching from the window. Oh, please. I saw Paul Lynde do that same hackneyed trick on Bewitched. Try to explode this out of my belly.
Starting point is 01:06:40 That's not a cookie. That's a time-release blood pack. You, sir, are a perfect patsy. Let me shake your hand. To the gag I will give a D+. As for the workmanship on the hand... That's not right! You mocking me?
Starting point is 01:07:03 That is rich. It's all me! You mocking me? Oh, that is rich. Stop your laughing. You're all banned. Banned, I tell you. Breath short. Left arm numb. Can't go on describing symptoms much longer i think he's had a heart attack what a weird act break yeah it's it's just on pure emotion you're just supposed to go get but that's the one deleted scene on the disc though there actually is
Starting point is 01:07:42 a joke right after that i thought so yeah uh and the joke was tom savini after he says he's had a heart attack then he says and our ponytails got tangled up and his ponytail is stuck in comic book guy's ponytail oh they should have kept that that's good and it doesn't like pretend that you actually care about comic book guy's health, you know? He's just a joke character before this. Now, does he have an age, Gary Albertson? Well, I do believe when that girl hits on him in season eight, he says, what do you think of 45-year-old virgins who still live with their mother?
Starting point is 01:08:18 Yeah, and because of that, he is on Wikipedia as 45. Well, there you go. Okay, man, so that's the new age we've soon will surpass the age homer is in the show but and once we are 46 it's like crap we're older than comic book guy now oh no i'm i'm currently comic book guy's age oh wow not sure how i feel about that the the comic book guy freak out is funny i though tom savini is not a magician like this it's it is kind of a big jump to be like well because he's very good at doing you know movie special effects live in person he can do literal magic like and i don't know how these wizard hats
Starting point is 01:08:57 uh got i mean they got onto his breast comic book guy why did what was he selling wizard hats yeah it's just a display of wizard hats just sitting to the side that also doesn't make much sense no it's so gross the animation like they do really good animation on just fat guy acting madnastic in his team they did like him wiping the pulling up his shirt and exposing his gut as he wipes blood off his face it's just so gross and like i don't think he's ever been drawn heavier than when he has his heart attack. Like it's shocking how big he is. And yeah, also again, I'm thinking of this episode and other ones. I was like, I don't want to have a comic book guy type moment on a podcast.
Starting point is 01:09:40 I've lost 40 pounds, guys, in the last year. Hey, congrats. That's's outstanding thanks i i'm sticking with it and i i need to just keep the scene in my mind of like i can't i can't die of a heart attack on a podcast stage someday i mean unfortunately at least one of the comic shop owners i knew this did happen to them i believe even in the store it happened it is called the widow maker yeah but this this man also did not leave a widow unfortunately it's uh and then a whole thing happened with like his parents ignoring his will and keeping the song it was a mess i don't i don't want to get too into it but it's it's sad that's
Starting point is 01:10:23 that's why these jokes like if you allow comic Book Guy to age or if you treat it too realistically, it's not funny anymore. It's tragic. And you're looking at a man who greatly decreased his lifespan because he is immobile all day and only eats garbage. He got 100 tacos for the Doctor Who marathon. who marathon is there going to be a 2022 episode where comic book guy becomes a active on 8chan or you know what if it gets too close to the uh the q kind of thing the insult thing then it yeah it gets kind of icky yeah they have not done a q episode yet i think i think south park has oh yeah correct well they're usually faster than that uh you know the they did do the 699th episode which some may know because it controversially made homer a hip-hop loving teen in the early 90s uh that big change to continuity
Starting point is 01:11:13 the other half of that episode people talk less about is homer gets mad at jj abrams for making a movie based on a thing he loved in his childhood and And comic book guy teaches Homer how to be a hateful fan on the internet who attacks J.J. Abrams. So they have gotten within range of that, of comic book guy being it. And so we come back from the commercial break. Hibbert is goofing around with him, but it's clear you almost died. And he tells him not to have stress, but he doesn't say the obvious thing he should say you need to drastically change your diet right now uh but but that's not very funny for an episode uh but instead a comic book guy has to tell him it's time he
Starting point is 01:11:57 closes down the store you saved my life yeah after you were so mean to us. So now we're even. My prognosis or diagnosis, whichever. You need to avoid stress. What kind of work do you do? I run a comic book store. Oh, dear lord. We call that profession the widow maker. Oh, we would if any of the
Starting point is 01:12:19 proprietors were married. You should close down the store for a while. But I'd lose all my business to Frodo's of Shelbyville. Then get a friend to run it for you. You do have friends, don't you? Well, super friends. Well, you should get some friends who aren't printed on paper. What, you mean action figures?
Starting point is 01:12:38 We'll run the store for you. Two ten-year-olds running my store? I mean, what is this bizarro world calm down don't make me put a dog heart in there yeah and in uh and i really like the joke it was so subtle but uh them saying yeah after you were so mean to us so now we're even that's great uh but we are in uh february of 2001 the word frodo is just a silly, goofy word. What is a Frodo? People will find out in December.
Starting point is 01:13:08 They'll know all about Frodo. Because you would, like in the 90s and 80s or whatever, you'd see the Frodo Lives shirt or bumper sticker. Just like, what is a Frodo? I don't know what this is. But we will have complete Frodo awareness soon as Americans. Noah, if you look back, when I rewatch old stuff like i didn't read i read hobbit as a kid but i never read the lord of the rings until after the movies came out and then when i would watch back things like simpsons or mystery science theater has so many lord of the
Starting point is 01:13:37 rings references but it's only for the mega heads who read the books like most other people when i heard kevin murphy do a thing like oh it's the about a big tree i had no clue what that was then like and now now everybody knows it i also think of that when i was working at a bad job and was single i often thought about like the line of saying we call this the widow maker as if any if any of the guys were married but yeah that's a good joke i like that joke uh and in case you're curious about the difference between a diagnosis and a prognosis i've got the answer straight from webster's so a diagnosis is an identification of a disease via examination what follows is a prognosis which is a prediction of the course of the disease
Starting point is 01:14:21 as well as a treatment and results a helpful trick to remember is that a diagnosis becomes a prop becomes before a prognosis because that's how they are alphabetically as well so i believe he is giving him a prognosis or just think of diagnosis murder yeah and prog rock exactly that's a good device you know i do hope after jokes like this in the show though i hope it led some comic book guys out there to live better lives like i the the comic shop owner i knew like he was an award-winning comic shop owner he won awards like the eisner award they made it up for like to honor great comic book stores he was the first winner of it and i was at the the only eisner awards i ever attended was the first one after his passing and the winners of it that year which were a married couple actually uh so it actually would be a widow
Starting point is 01:15:17 maker but they were healthy and they had this very sad speech about how they they wished he was still with them and then i wished other people took care of themselves better and could learn from it i i hope comic shop owners are in better shape these days i think they are and i just because we always go to comic shops on on the road with found footage festival it's how we spend our days a lot of times and there's good like uh there's one called vault of midnight in um uh grand rapids michigan um There's Quimby's in Chicago that are, I think, I think part of it is also just being more welcoming to people of all types, you know, and so you see a lot more women at these shops and they're just more inviting in general than
Starting point is 01:15:56 they used to be. Yeah. I will also say that comic shop in Berkeley that I loved so much, it was the first place I ever saw women working at a comic shop. That was not the case in any other comic shop I had been to before. I hope it is in other places that maybe I was in very repressive areas, but the comic shops are very, were famously pretty unwelcoming to women
Starting point is 01:16:19 for the longest time. I would hope a lot are working more on that these days. Seem to be, seem to be seem to be and i i also do like the comic book guy becomes the complaining fan on the internet of like two 10 year olds running a comic book store like he's he's complaining that it's a dumb plot twist premise makes no sense yeah uh but uh i mean as a kid you dream of running your own comic shop like that is that is one of those childhood dreams fulfilled that always makes for a good Bart story.
Starting point is 01:16:48 That and running a factory. You know, running your own factory. Bart and Milhouse get to do both. You know, there are several jokes in here that are basically the same as when Bart owned his own factory. Bart is the patronizing boss in both cases, but I guess they naturally fall into those roles. It's what Milhouse is born to be.
Starting point is 01:17:04 He is to be the supplicant at all times. That's Milhouse for you. But I like seeing Bart just walk around the comic shop and shaking everybody's hands. But at first we get a very, I like this joke a lot. On the commentary, Mike Scully's confused by it. He's like, he thought he forgot to write a joke. But as an anti-joke I really love this. Okay, here's Comic Book Guy's instructions.
Starting point is 01:17:28 A carton of malted milk balls, one box confectioner's sugar, a can of chocolate frosting. That's just his shopping list. No, it's his instructions. Well, we're gonna make some changes around here. This store's gonna be run by kids and for kids.
Starting point is 01:17:43 You said it, partner. Oh, nice to see you. Hey, how about that bloodzilla? Vampire dinosaur. Oh, you can't make that stuff up. The death of sad sack. This better not be another fakeout. Uh-uh. You gotta be 40 inches tall for the adult section.
Starting point is 01:18:06 Please? Okay. But get on your tippy toes. Everybody's hugging! Okay, so I have to say this. They cut out a much better joke. Ralph's original joke was, he goes into the room.
Starting point is 01:18:24 We don't see what he said we don't see what he sees but the line is she's hungry that's a way filthier joke but i think it implies the specificity of the sex act that ralph is seeing so i think everybody's hugging you're not putting as much of that onto ralph and his his innocence i guess but she's hungry that is very very funny that is very funny, yes. It's too bad they couldn't keep it, but at least it gets to live on in the commentary. We can now know that joke.
Starting point is 01:18:52 Oh, that's good. And I'll admit, even I, the biggest comic nerd on the podcast, I had never heard a sad sack before this joke. I didn't either, yeah. I had to Google him. So I got to give it to the the creators on this one that they they found a very deep cut like sad sack was a beetle bailey
Starting point is 01:19:12 type he's a comically bad soldier invented for world war ii era comic books who continued being published into the early 80s by harvey uh but now he no longer exists as they say so having him on the cover like the sad sack comic that's that's such a deep deep pull is that cover a parody of a comic cover i'm glad you asked okay thank you yes yeah there's well so there have been many many many many comic book covers where the cover is implying if you buy this you'll see a character death and it's one famous character holding the it's one famous character holding the body of another famous character cradled in their arms in a similar fashion but the most iconic one would be crisis on infinite earth number seven drawn by george perez uh where
Starting point is 01:19:57 supergirl does die in the comic it's not a fake out and superman is crying holding her dead body in his hands so that's the one they're parodying and that has been redone in countless comic book covers since then oh yeah i'm looking at it now it's definitely a direct parody of that and uh funnily enough comic book guy got his own comic book in 2010 and one of the covers parodies this cover except it is comic book guy is dead and he's being held up by a bunch of people because he's so heavy you see and uh and that comic is written by friend of the show ian boothby he wrote it did nina draw that one uh she is not the credited uh artist on the internet okay no hi i uh correct me if i'm wrong nina but i'm uh the websites say that it was a different artist but that comic cover is has been referenced quite a lot uh though my
Starting point is 01:20:52 comic shop uh so the local one here they'd have the adult stuff if something was a purely pornographic comic that actually was behind the counter and you had to ask for it but comics like sin city or sandman that had r-rated elements those are just loose in uh on the floor like you could just uh read them same with my store yeah we did not have the big clacking uh doors in my store that was more of a video store thing and there are two really dirty jokes back to back there's ralph walking into the porno area of the store and then bart telling Milhouse to unstick the Supergirls. Yes, that was very gross. I couldn't believe that.
Starting point is 01:21:32 It was shockingly graphic. I can't believe, I feel like they must have told the censors, like, they're covered in chocolate. They spilled their sody pops on it. You know the kids with their sodys. And thinking of those R--rated comics too i want to say the the only other comic shop i knew that didn't have those books was one that used to have
Starting point is 01:21:52 those books but then the guy became a hardcore christian and he's like i can't have any more japanese comics here like getting rid of all the comics that have even PG-13 content in it. And that store went out of business. So he needed the filth. He was running out of money without the filth. Also, there's a lot of Poochie jokes this season, by the way, too. There's so many references to Poochie. Like that he's marking down the Poochie merchandise.
Starting point is 01:22:24 You know, we had Poochie gets run over by a car a season ago in a Halloween episode. I appreciate the Poochie callbacks, even though Krusty said he will never appear again. There's a signed contract. That's true. Though I guess this could be out-of-print merchandise that they're trying to get rid of. I have to say, we've been watching a lot of videos on our internet show, VCR Party, lately that have been... We call them Beakmans because the show beekmans world is what i think of as the ultimate like dutch angle like it's been a hair raising experiment and then
Starting point is 01:22:52 a wig comes down you know just like that forced wackiness of the 90s yeah a lot of mtv style editing yes and we recently watched maybe you're familiar with with this one um it was a post serials promotional video about sega games like tips and tricks and it was hosted by a dan cortez style host with long hair and basically we just kept calling him poochie the whole time because it was just like sunglasses and he has you know the rastafarian. And he's a surfer. It was just everything thrown together. I know the man you're talking about now, yes. I recall seeing that video in my video game life. That guy is a poochie.
Starting point is 01:23:35 There's so many poochies. He calls Sonic like a radical blue dude. And I'm like, he's poochie the rocking dog. And Sonic is already a poochie anyway. And they kept giving him poochie oroochies as part of his cast. They had to Poochie it up each time. More Poochie each video game. I really like the idea.
Starting point is 01:23:56 This is a great scene. I like the idea of putting Comic Book Guy into Moe's bar because the Comic Book Guy, I know in my life, Henry Gilbert, he is a girl drink drinker. And the real Comic Book Guys of the world, they like fruity drinks. I am a fruity drink man. I didn't know this. When I saw this, it was before I had started drinking and wasn't old enough to go into bars. So only after when I started going to bars
Starting point is 01:24:21 and feeling uncomfortable in some bars ordering something that wasn't beer, I thought back to this scene many times of like, oh, I guess I can't order a raspberry schnapps or whatever like a wuss. But I am a girl drink drunk. I miss being able to order a fruity drink in a restaurant these days. It's like when Weird Al is dejected in uhf and goes into the dive bar and says banana daiquiri and they hand him a banana daiquiri i mean this this covetous made me miss tiki bars a lot that's the girl drinks i go in for those are fun oh man and the the new orleans style place near here i miss having like hurricanes in there those are so good well
Starting point is 01:25:05 and our friends on the podcast sloppy boys they they talk about mixing their own drinks all the time and it makes me very thirsty for misdrinks uh mixed drinks as uh they go into the bar sam the barfly is murdered on screen one of two characters shocked this episode it's it's insane he would appear later, but Mo kills him at the start of this clip. Get out and take your sack of Jouia dollars with you. I'll give you till three. One.
Starting point is 01:25:34 Hey, Homer, who's the manatee? Oh, now be nice, Mo. This guy just got out of the hospital. Oh, sorry. Let me buy you a drink. Very well. I would have a shot of cranberry schnapps. Ha ha. These, uh, they're just painted on.
Starting point is 01:25:52 Your choice is a beer and, uh, egg soakings. I'll pass. Beer is the nectar of the nitwit. Hey, you knocking beer? Nobody badmouths Duff. Ah, piece of crap. Come on on you're here to make friends oh please if i wanted to hear mindless droning i'd befriend an air conditioner oh now he's ragging on air conditioners hey they keep us cool in the summer pal get him and stay out is there a word in Klingon for loneliness
Starting point is 01:26:28 oh yes there's no word in Klingon for loneliness I looked it up me too I'm glad you they just made this up they didn't even consult a Klingon dictionary but you're right I didn't hear it until the audio was isolated but when Mo fires at the bar fly you hear his body hit the floor as in the famous song you know
Starting point is 01:26:50 my favorite joke in this episode is Carl coming to the defense of air conditioners that's great I just hey they keep us cool in the summer I mean that for some reason that really got me the cruelty of moe of saying that he'll count to three and then shoots on one two it's just just because he's using dollar coins
Starting point is 01:27:10 he probably got from the post office yeah that's uh that takes you back doesn't it sack of jewia dollars i've had clerks refuse those back when i would get them at the post office and they're like we don't take those but it's money america says i can spend these here oh man i i when i worked in the cashier world in florida i rarely got paid in in uh coin dollars uh in california i got it a little bit more probably if i worked at a place by a post office i'd get them all the time but in 1999 they launched the new dollar coin which you know i think they also wanted to try to normalize dollar coins and get rid stop printing paper dollars. But America just didn't want it. You know, I I prefer coin money.
Starting point is 01:27:53 I like one of my favorite things in Japan is like, oh, this is a five dollar coin or a 500 yen coin. That'd be kind of useful to just walk around with a five dollar coin instead of having to pull out a fiver all the time the problem with it is because we every summer before the pandemic we spent a month in edinburgh scotland problem is you just get so much change your pockets get so godly heavy you know after a couple weeks you just have so many coins left over and they're just all just you you have to just basically have your dresser is just covered in coins and uh and so and it's kind of unwieldy to take anywhere to buy things with that happened to me in japan uh by the end of my trip i had a
Starting point is 01:28:36 lot of one yen coins left i just left them with my uh host that i was staying with and he was just like why did you do this i didn't want any of these you can just bend them they're so flimsy uh they float on water i've been told i've uh no and i've uh one of my times leaving japan i counted i was like i have seven dollars in coins i can't change these out so i went to a convenience store and bought something and then very apologetically like okay 700 yen i was like sorry i have this many i just shove a bunch of coins at them and they i recall the cashier just laughing and having to count out so many coins but but also the sacagawea dollars became a thing because you know uh people some people were didn't like it is so pc is uh what happened to what happened to presidents on coins you know and
Starting point is 01:29:26 and sacagawea is a funny word it's a comedy word i mean it's a it's a real person's name but if you're a comedy writer in the late 90s that's a funny word just sacagawea so uh and those coins got uh they started in 99 they got discontinued in 2008 uh though i don't see dollar coins all that much but yearly they have been updating them as the native american coins and so every year a different native american figure is on those coins but i can't tell you the last time i saw a dollar coin and we honor them by never circulating the coins yes yeah by refusing to to even handle their cash oh god in the sound of him being tossed out like a beached whale and his just like body is slippery somehow and the sound effect of it like oh i like that homer tries to befriend him because they're like
Starting point is 01:30:20 well we both have heart disease so let's let work together. We should both drink together as we both have heart disease. So I hear it's good for that. The scene of Moe's Tavern violence comes right after Homer, the brain crayon episode. Which it's like, it's kind of close up together here. But yes, we cut back to the store. Milhouse is feeling, you know, lesser than. He's trying to show off for lisa and that leads to a poor business action tough break toots i need a man who answers to no one
Starting point is 01:30:55 a full manager i can help you, sir. And I answer to no one. Well, then, you'll want to stock up on our new superhero. Would you say he's the ultimate superhero? Oh, very ultimate indeed. Point your peepers at Cyclops. Oh, a superhero with glasses. Oh, yeah, thick glasses.
Starting point is 01:31:26 Kind of like yours. So how many do you need? 500? 600? 600 sounds good. Oh, that's too bad. There's a price break at 1,000. Oh, man.
Starting point is 01:31:43 I'll take 2,000. They don't mention on the commentary i wish aljean had mentioned that millhouse says jay sherman the critics catchphrase of hachimachi that that gave me the i think my biggest laugh in 2001 i think so for me too as well i didn't recognize that that was his catchphrase okay now that makes more sense it makes millhouse even lamer that in his dream that was his catchphrase okay now that makes more sense it makes millhouse even lamer that in his dream he says the catchphrase of a completely forgotten character of jay sherman yes and i always like a joke uh when a character's having a fantasy or having a flashback like what's happening in reality and i love millhouse referencing something he only saw in his fantasy and lisa being confused yeah that's so good oh his weird what a weird fantasy he has too like that lisa is a femme fatale and he's a
Starting point is 01:32:32 detective movie guy and she calls him toots yeah that's uh i guess you know there's a lot for uh a therapist could deconstruct of millhouse's fantasy here so this guy from plan nine comics he is a lens crafters uh plant right totally yeah plan nine is a lie he works for lens crafters and i i believe he's one of the power sauce execs as well it just it was a real exec era on the show the ponytail right yes yeah i worked at a blockbuster and was some i was made a manager even though i didn't want to be i didn't want any more responsibility but um i was put in charge as the manager of like ordering you know what new what releases we were gonna get every uh every week and so i'd go into the
Starting point is 01:33:15 catalog and be like oh you know what i'm gonna do because it was this was in a college town i'm like i'm gonna get a bunch of jim jarmusch movies like stranger than paradise and down by law and and i'm like that i think like people start you know this doesn't have to be the video store for dollars we could start getting interesting movies in here now and they never got rented it was it was basically like having 2 000 you know copies of bike laps yeah bike laps oh man i i'm jealous that i've uh i think we've talked about this before i was a blockbuster employee too but our place was such a corporate one that it was just the videos showed up that day and it's like you know once a week and it's like well it's the shipment of videos this is how many we have like it i couldn't i couldn't have specialty ordered uh
Starting point is 01:34:06 my manager wouldn't have either but also i was i was the only i was never a comic book guy i was a video store guy i was one of the guys respected yes yeah i the the film i think it was i watched clerks at a young age and i was like i want to be that type of guy who yells at people to rent a video and say that they're not good enough and both places have a lot of loiterers uh videos we did at our blockbuster totally yeah we've so people you know people need places to be it's uh people are lonely in this world but we also had a lot of shoplifting at that one but often i would just tell myself like who cares this play like steal for blockbuster this is a this it's owned by a giant company they're not gonna miss it uh but i i love that millhouse is so susceptible to all upsell tactics and that he also doesn't realize that they the guy's like oh hey kind of like yours
Starting point is 01:34:58 and also that not only is bike collapse like a comic book about a guy with glasses it's also that he's a loser like he says that's for making me cry as he's punching a guy he's beating up a football team yeah i had a friend of mine last year gave me a comic book it was like a mini comic book called combo man oh i know it i know it you know combo man yes yeah yeah combos the you know pretzel based snack uh tie-in and marvel actually put this out as a promotional thing i guess uh that's right i believe combo man is all superhero it's like he's he's tiny parts of a bunch of different marvel superheroes yeah it looks like it like he's got all the, and then there's copious combos advertising in the mini comic as well.
Starting point is 01:35:47 Oh man, I did, you know, I remember the ads for that one, but I never got that one. The one I got was Charleston Chew. It was like Charleston Chew. Send in two wrappers of Charleston Chew and you can get a Spider-Man comic book. And boy, did I.
Starting point is 01:36:03 It was Spider-Man on one side, Wolverine on the other side and uh though i didn't charleston chew is a garbage candy bar like it's just children are right to not like it yes yeah uh i think i think i just was like mom you can take these to work i don't it just buy me the two candy bars and bring back the wrappers i don't want them then we definitely get a thing of the era in the next scene which is grandma's having sex comedy of the late 90s it was she's a funky grandma she's gonna haul ass to lollapalooza yeah uh i mean also it's just the gross out comedy days they get
Starting point is 01:36:38 they get so much out of how disgusting it would be that either of these characters would have sex let alone have sex with one another we are in the gross out movie craze i mean i think freddie got figured comes out in a few months after this episode goes live so i mean that is the peak of gross out movies of the late 90s early 2000s and all the jackass uh things as well like yeah there's the american pie movies all of the the movies that the cover would have, like a hot girl, a guy making a weird face and then a dog. Like all those all of those same movies. But yes, it's a real meet cute in this next clip. Human contact.
Starting point is 01:37:17 The final frontier. Out of the way, tubby. Pardon me, oldie horn. Why, you ill-mannered sack of crap oh goody now i know whatever happened to baby jane you are the rudest man who ever bought me dinner correction i do not believe i have ever bought you oh uh the smile on his face it's like you i in general this scene i feel i briefly feel pity for comic book guy when he reveals like meeting new people is what actually terrifies him and that's why he's such an asshole all the time like i've i felt that feeling of shaking hand on like on a door of like, do I have to meet new people?
Starting point is 01:38:05 But but then afterwards, I did not fall in love with an 80 year old woman. Not not that. You actually you actually went in the door. Yes. You didn't meet an old lady in a hallway. Yes. Yeah. I think they also fall in love because both were about to do something challenging for them that could have needed personal growth.
Starting point is 01:38:23 And instead, they're like,'re like oh wait we don't need to do this we can both just be negative together we don't have to grow as people yeah let's retreat into our misanthropy yeah exactly uh so then we cut to millhouse failing to sell by klopp's comics he even has to admit that the character is scared of girls uh and they don't even smack good yeah love that line bart just can't take it anymore he wasted what seemingly was all of their profits on the books a comic book printed by lens crafters how could you spend all our money on a comic book published by lens crafters we'll never sell these birds won't even use them in their nests. Okay, so I made one bad decision. It's my fault for leaving you in charge. Sometimes I forget how young you are. I'm only three months younger than
Starting point is 01:39:18 you. Oh, look, you're getting cranky. You haven't had your juice. Well, my straw broke off in the carton. That's not the point. We're supposed to be partners, and you're pushing me around like a play school corn popper. It's a vacuum cleaner, Milhouse. Whatever! I demand respect! I have feelings! I'm a human boy!
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Starting point is 01:40:14 Making your usage clearer, your trips greener, your home cozier, and your world brighter. Find our Net Zero Hub at electricarland.ie. Well, I got to give it to Pamela Hayden for that screaming Milhouse line. It's the most realistically played anger and sadness in Milhouse. It's great. She did a really good job.
Starting point is 01:40:35 She isn't often asked to do that with Milhouse. And I also like the taking off glasses to get in a fight and then realizing he is blind. And so he's like, nope, better put it back on though uh i have to correct bart's correction here while in function it may be a vacuum cleaner fisher price officially calls it a corn popper that's the name of the toy itself so maybe that has changed and that's only how it is, and they weren't on the box called a corn popper. But if you go to the Fisher-Price website now, that toy is called a corn popper, which I liked those as a little kid, but not at 10. Not like I had put them away. That's more of a nine-year-old's toy. I also, I will say, I really identify with Milhouse here because Bob knows from experience
Starting point is 01:41:25 that when we worked at some other place, a boss treated me in condescending ways like this that were like, oh, come on. It's a baby man. I'm like, you mother. It made me. That is one thing that makes me incredibly angry. It was hard not to just be fully hating bart the rest of the episode after seeing how he treats millhouse in this way bart was not hands-on enough yes yeah he's blaming
Starting point is 01:41:52 the guy for like you know i guess millhouse did make the decision without consulting bart but bart left early he's leaving it all to millhouse to do it you know but yes it also i do love the cuts uh like the the end being a big comic book uh style page like the the artists do such a good job with that and then when they come back they have transformer toys for their fights and they're really well designed to be actually look like toys that then turn into an axe and a watering can some great drawings i was actually thinking these would be good cells if they exist somewhere. Oh, man.
Starting point is 01:42:29 I was looking for cells. I've been trolling around the cell market lately, and I would buy almost any comic book I've seen one if I could see it on there. But, yeah, their fight is really well done, and they bring back their Star Trek-inspired fight music, like da-da-da-da. Their fight is really well done, and they bring back their Star Trek-inspired fight music. Like, da-da, da-da.
Starting point is 01:42:47 And they then crash through a She-Hulk poster, which is meant to look like the Rita Hayworth poster that hides the hole in Shawshank Redemption. Oh, you're totally right. I totally forgot about that. I didn't realize that either. Good call. And, yes, they then tumble down and discover secrets. Whoa! Comic book guy's secret stash!
Starting point is 01:43:09 Look at all these bootleg videos! Alien autopsy. Illegal alien autopsy. Godfather 3, good version. He's got the tape of Kent Brockman picking his nose! Look! He's picking his nose! I think of that joke too whenever
Starting point is 01:43:29 I find a video of like, oh guys, have you ever seen the one where this guy falls down? Look, he's falling down! Look at it! News bloopers are some of the greatest found footage though, and I think a lot of times we've met editors who are you know the the job's kind of miserable you don't get to be creative you're an
Starting point is 01:43:50 editor on a nightly newscast a lot of times but you keep a private like tape a private reel of all the bloopers and you either show them at the christmas party or just use it as your wrench and give it to us. Or blackmail. Oh, God. Yes. There's a famous one tape-traded version of news bloopers called The Tapes of Wrath, which a bunch of editors from Washington, D.C. put together, and it was actually shown at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
Starting point is 01:44:24 So the president actually saw news bloopers sometime during the Reagan sometime during the reagan administration oh that's amazing that yeah there's there's something about news bloopers because the the people on it are so you know sculpted and precise and they're like i i live to be a news anchor that anytime they you know fuck up or uh they say a stupid thing or they constantly, they can't stop laughing or they embarrass themselves by saying something like horribly insulting to a co-worker. And you can, those are some of my favorites when, especially often it would be a male host saying something that deeply offends the female host. And she's like, what? And the guy has to then try to talk his way out of it. Like, no, no no i meant like those are
Starting point is 01:45:05 some of my favorites yeah they have to have this um gravitas so when that veneer goes away it's so satisfying and yeah news bloopers are some of my favorite that's like one of my favorite genres of sound footage are the news bloopers that reveal the hierarchy of like this guy thinks he's above the weather guy and the weather guy's kind of sick of it like that's the thing there's always ego involved like in england they they literally call them news readers because that's what you're doing you're not you know there to be a personality or be or have fame you're there to deliver the news but america it works yeah you're not even casting the news someone else is doing it for you you You're not a newscaster. Yeah. Yeah. Well, those guys aren't journalists.
Starting point is 01:45:50 It's something that bugs me, especially during the Trump administration. There were some people who appear on 24-hour cable news that are not journalists. They are people who read teleprompters. But they take on the veneer of like, oh, and I'm the who's who's learning all about this evil new administration but it's like you haven't done journalism if in 20 years if you ever did it this this collection of tapes we we talked about before it's uh it's it it's eerily similar to your guys's collection seeing uh in the background in old vcr party lives. We do have Alien Autopsy, too. That was a special, you know, that aired and supposedly was undebunked for a while and then, of course, got debunked.
Starting point is 01:46:32 But it was, you know, one of those Fox specials that was promoted and was released on VHS. Yeah, we talked about it in the 138th episode Spectacular podcast we did because Troy McClure mentions he was the host of alien nose job right and we played the clip it's jonathan frakes giving a disclaimer and basically the disclaimer is like we're not sure if this is real but if it was real wow
Starting point is 01:46:53 who's to say incredible we leave it up to you to decide i i bet that's why he then did those other believe it or not specials after like well you did alien autopsy you know god god bless whoever made those compilations of him from that episode from that show because I laugh every time it's funny not this time no way we got you not a chance not this time it
Starting point is 01:47:18 never happened it never happened we made this one up it's fiction we made up this one we made it up. Not this time. Wrong. Not this time. Not this time.
Starting point is 01:47:29 You're wrong. Not this time. It never happened. Yeah, and there were things that people would notice, too, like tape-traded videos. Like somebody just put together all the freeze-frame endings from the show Chips, and that made its way around. And sometimes you'd find that at the back of comic book stores, too book stores too they would have a bootleg version of that oh good oh man well also they mentioned harry sheer's collection of tapes too in there and that reminded me that you know he's one of few people who have can claim they've watched the day the clown cried like one of the
Starting point is 01:48:03 most prized lost films of all time isn't there a countdown as to when that will be available i know he said it would be released posthumously but i don't know if there's an actual year counter on it it's someday we're gonna get it but but not yet yeah there was a story about how long after his death that it could be released so i yeah i don't know when it is but i feel like it's coming up somewhere um oh i'm reading it now june 2024 so we're not that far off in our lifetimes we will see it it'll be really boring and not worth it at all but we got to see it gotta see it no i i i'm i i hope it can live up to the hype. Now, of course, that joke, illegal alien autopsy, that's very dark. Much darker than it read to me the first time.
Starting point is 01:48:51 And the Godfather 3 thing, that's more of a critic kind of joke. It's okay, but he's picking his nose. I just love that so much. Then in the next scene, Skinner meets comic book guy. I'll be right down. I'm just putting on my witch hazel. Ow, ow, ow, ow. So, your mother tells me you go to Springfield Elementary.
Starting point is 01:49:19 Exactly what is your interest in my mother? She makes me laugh. Here I come! Good lord, mother, I can see your...figure. Oh, you see a lot more when you do my daily mole check. What I do for my allowance money is nobody's business. He's not nobody's. He might even be your new daddy. Oh, God.
Starting point is 01:49:56 The sandpaper sound of her sliding down that banister is haunting. She is dressed like a 20s flapper, her 110 years old oh god the just the the joke that that's the sound makes when her butt goes down the or her uh her seat goes down the banister the implications of that are horrifying like it's yeah and also skinner's gonna later lose edna to comic book guy so they they do a lot of Comic Book Guy and Skinner stuff. But that Daily Mole check also is very horrifying. But I like Comic Book Guy identifying Skinner's like, so you go to Springfield Elementary, right?
Starting point is 01:50:39 Trying to find common ground here. Yeah. But, yeah, I also, you know, a lot of guys wear a blazer with a T-shirt. Are you telling me that's not good fashion now? That's the height of fashion for me. They then cut back to the boys watching some things, including police confessional tapes. How many of those have fallen into your laps uh in at found footage festivals i will say we haven't found any confessional tapes but we were at a place called the bins and portland oregon which is a goodwill outlet basically and and they call it
Starting point is 01:51:16 the bins because they just wheel out unsorted garbage um that's been donated before they've had a chance to like put it into categories and these vultures just hound over the bins waiting for the new one to get wheeled out. And so we went to experience this, and luckily no one was looking for VHS tapes. But we found about a dozen tapes all labeled courtroom evidence. And we picked them up. They're pretty boring, but definitely should not have been for sale at a thrift store no and this thing with ned it does feel like uh they're making fun of themselves in a way where this would be a really bad homer b plot where homer has a radioactive ape yes yeah yeah you're right it's a little it's it's a little monkey cheese for the show but that is them saying like ned it at first is more about
Starting point is 01:52:03 just ned is sick of a b plot it's like a bad b plot happened in another episode and ned's pissed about it and yeah i kind of wish we didn't actually see the ape at the end you know yeah then it gets into fully on full-on like wackyville it's a bizarre ending and i don't know if there's a deleted scene that explains this but for some reason bart is just eating cheetos there's not a joke about it it's just the delightful snack for him yeah there's there's not a it's there's only one deleted scene on the dvd so i i guess you know in other shots bart is sitting in comic book guy's stool and uh drinking a soda so i think it maybe they're also just saying bart is becoming comic book guy like he's in danger of it
Starting point is 01:52:45 it could have just as easily been chippos though you know like it wouldn't have to be cheetos i think by the year 2001 cheetos was the designated snack for filthy nerds i mean in toy story 2 if you think of the scene with al when they're creeping across his body his fingers are covered in the cheese dust and he's got the bowl on his stomach when he's asleep yeah yeah cheetos cheetos had already gotten that moniker but yes the boys are enjoying some other classic clips and come to a realization police informant tape these are never supposed to leave the station i really hate to be a snitch don't worry your yellow-bellied ratting will be held in the strictest confidence. Well, in that case, my neighbor Homer released a radioactive ape in my house.
Starting point is 01:53:31 It's, uh... It's taken over the whole top floor. It wasn't Dad's fault. The ape tricked him. What's next? Mr. Rogers drunk. Well, what do you mean I can't take off my sweater? I'm hot!
Starting point is 01:53:50 You know, I'll bet kids would pay to see this stuff. We could have a midnight screening right here in the store. That's actually a great idea, Milhouse. Really? Well, I was due. I'll say. Partner. Really? Well, I was due. I'll say, partner. And apparently, Al Jean ran into the widow of Mr. Rogers at some event,
Starting point is 01:54:12 and she kind of gently ribbed him about this. Although, they had done him on the show previously, when Homer was being chased by all the PBS people. Oh, yeah, yeah. And he was being violent, but not drunk in that scene. Yeah, apparently, he had somewhat of a sense of humor about that, Mr, yeah. julia child or something oh yeah i i do recall in the documentary very popular documentary from a few years ago it did show that he at least that he liked the um mr robinson's neighborhood yeah the that right he he liked that one i he was definitely aware of it but but also it is i mean
Starting point is 01:55:02 i can see why he would understand he had mocked a lot because he was just such pure earnestness that it's the easiest thing in the world to make fun of. What if the most innocent man on television was secretly dirty? I mean, it's the easiest joke that writes itself. Like, what if thing but opposite of thing? Yes. Yeah. The famous drunken outtake is Orson welles doing the paul masson wine yes have you seen that one yes yes the french there was like a recent oral history of that
Starting point is 01:55:35 or something i forget where i read it but it turns out that he wasn't he wasn't drunk he was just extremely jet lagged and uh tired i have to assume there was a little bit of wine in his system though i i find that i think so yeah i i read that too the uh it was like the camera guy he talked about how he got the part how he agreed to do it he was doing other ads at the time and then came in and yeah i think probably overtired probably a little bit inebriated i i mean too like orson welles already did the frozen peas commercial which is one of the most famous tapes ever like yeah it's that to think of a time when that was just a thing i'd hear described when i couldn't just pull it up on youtube and watch it
Starting point is 01:56:16 same same with a casey casem dead dog uh outtake yeah uh to me it kind of loses something when it's on youtube because the whole fun of it for for us was like having this communal aspect to it you know gathering around in a dark room or you know i guess with our show as a movie theater and being able to sort of collectively talk about this and laugh about it and when it's something somebody shows you on your phone at a party or you know or you watch by yourself on a YouTube link. You just you kind of watch it and forget about it. Yeah, it's it it it loses some of the pomp and circumstance of it and the specialness. I though the the the great, great comedy show, I think you should leave.
Starting point is 01:56:59 They had this awesome sketch about, you know, being in an office and, you you know you're in the meeting room and then what your boss leaves you're like okay let's pull up videos on youtube like who's got a funny video like that that that is the version of it to me that i'm most familiar with and and also you never if you think you found a good one and everybody's just like meh it's like there's less uh there's hardly a worse feeling in the world for me. Or even worse if they're like, I've seen that forever ago. Old, bleh. It hurts.
Starting point is 01:57:31 Yeah, and I think context is important, too. And that's one thing that we try to do is, like, you have to be in the right frame of mind. You have to set it up a little bit. And then, you know, people are framing it in the right way. So maybe sometimes the conference room isn't the right place to watch it. Yeah. Also, Bart and Milas, they kind of with four minutes left in the episode, resolve their plot points like early. They're just like, no, we are friends again. Shake hands. That's the end. I guess it does resolve that that issue. They have their schism.
Starting point is 01:58:01 So then we go to the Squidport, which I forgot how much they went to this season. Like they go to squid port a lot i i wonder scully's like you know what we invented that squid port in season nine let's let's just keep heading to it it's the joke is just like all the meat is just coming from a giant tub underground regardless of what uh what kind of food you're getting and homer says something like i'm at the whims of the food court something like that yeah the mercy of the food court the mercy yes i i also think these jokes are a little bit hollywood comedy writers complaining about restaurants their wives make them go to in hollywood i think it's a little i think it's a little of that a lot a lot of cheesy uh a lot of cheesy restaurant names uh i like iraqi cheeses that's one of the ones in the background but all the meat comes from the same place like it's just all purpose meat that's a funny that's
Starting point is 01:58:51 a funny box yeah it's like the three different kinds of duff damn you're right it's just the same joke man they're just uh but it's about meat so it's funnier and then we get into herald and mod territory which they don't say it on the commentary but I do wonder if this hit the same problem they had on the critic when they did Harold and Maude which is they wanted to use the Yusuf Islam Cat Stevens songs but he doesn't license it and so they end up with a music scene they're like well crap we can't use the song from Harold and Mara. All right, let's put in something else. Yeah. When I sat down to watch this, I was like, oh, yeah, the Harold and Mara parody.
Starting point is 01:59:31 But then I watched it and I said, oh, all the parody is is just the premise. And comic book guy is not a young boy. No. Either. So, yeah. Or like enacting suicide or anything like that. So comparisons end there but i i do like the uh using the heart like awful song puppy love over it for these two horrible like malcontents who
Starting point is 01:59:54 are just hideous uh you know now you don't see as many visual references to the film manhattan these days but all right that is a reference you saw him a lot back then. And I also like him saying we finish each other's insults. But one note I have is I couldn't believe it was just a random child who was the sailboat kid. Like, why wasn't it one of the recognizable? Yeah, Martin. He's still at fat camp, I guess. And a real Chandler line. Could it be any more orange?
Starting point is 02:00:25 That's right. Yeah. And of course we all know that Hank Azaria is friends with Matthew Perry. That's right. Yeah. He mentioned before that he wished he had been on Friends and co-starred with him, but he never made it. For him, for a time, for Hank Azaria, The Simpsons was a lesser gig for him than being on just like
Starting point is 02:00:46 any old sitcom like and who remembers Mad About You now like nobody well there was that reboot season and no person watched that that's right yes there was a new season of it not one person watched it was on Apple Plus Plus it was on something that nobody
Starting point is 02:01:02 got right it was Spectrum Plus Spectrum right it was the Spectrum nobody got right it was spectrum plus spectrum right it was a spectrum cable network there was even a joke in seinfeld while mad about you was still airing about how like i guess i i guess unremarkable that sitcom was where george finally gets the woman back he wants to marry and then it ends with him in bed and you hear that boom boom yes boom boom and he just looks miserable. That's right. He's like, oh, God, what did I work for?
Starting point is 02:01:29 That's right. It was the Grey's Anatomy of its day of like the show that you have to watch as a couple and you hate watching it. Yes. But, yeah, they're closer than ever. Then we head to even called Forbidden Film Festival. So not too different of a name from a found footage festival. Hey, they got the FFF alliteration. But you guys weren't starting yet in 2001, right?
Starting point is 02:01:55 No, we started. I mean, we were collecting videos and doing these shows for friends. But April 2004 was our first show for the public. But Bart and Milhouse need to get a little better in their showmanship. You guys, me and Bob have seen you guys live. You do a much better job at presenting these. Oh, thank you very much. Yeah, I think of myself as the Milhouse to Joe's Bart in many ways, though.
Starting point is 02:02:21 I mean, Milhouse also loves Alphpogs. It's true. Yeah, I see a lot of myself in millhouse actually uh we all do we uh no i think this is also the last time you could do jokes about a vhs tape as uh just a thing the kids would know in the year 2001 very true yeah now we do a lot of shows for colleges and we we have to explain at the beginning and actually hold up a tape. And it kind of feels like if somebody was doing an eight-track show when I was in high school or something. You know, like you kind of recognize it, but you've never actually had physical contact with one of these things. I know it is a joke on a show, sure, but I've never touched one. I looked it up, and the last uh major commercial vhs
Starting point is 02:03:05 release was five years later after this episode according to this article uh the movie a history of violence was the last major vhs release yeah i've heard that too weird one to be like the the final you know gasp of a format but uh yeah now of course there's a resurgence with people putting things on vhs especially in the horror community people there'll be a new movie and they'll put it on vhs one and one of my favorite comedy things right now is the character of greg turkington on the on cinema videos who is a collector of vhs's and espouses that they are the best way to watch film. Yeah, it's crazy to me. Even like we're friends with a lot of other people who are in this community and we're kind of like, the format sucks, really. I mean,
Starting point is 02:03:54 it's clunky, they break, they get caught in your VCR. But like anything, you have a nostalgia for, you know, your entree into watching weird forbidden films i'm i'm really happy and surprised to see that dvd is hanging in there nearly 25 years into its lifespan because i bought uh frankly too many dvds i learned a lesson then i bought about uh five percent of those on blu-ray and now that there's 4k dvds sorry 4k blu-rays i have not bought one i took three generations but i learned my lesson i'll just stream it i will only stream it it's fine but i want to see the moles on robert de niro's face and my casino 4k thing that i did i did buy that you better see a doctor uh that was my mole check
Starting point is 02:04:39 on him really mole check is so yes they've warned that uh they cannot stop this tape because the play button is broken uh i guess you know nick i'll ask too have you guys ever played a tape where the reaction was so strong in the room you're like we have to stop this we can't we won't put you guys through this anymore absolutely um usually it comes from like we had a uh a video we found. It's called Wound Rounds Live. And it was, yeah, it was for wound doctors by wound doctors. And, but they tried to get cute and funny with it by showing like they had a wheel of wounds to find out what wound they were going to talk about. And they're like diabetic foot ulcer.
Starting point is 02:05:20 Let's talk about that. And, and, but it was just so gory that we had to find where that line was to cut away from it so we still showed it but we were judicious in how we edited that one i i had to look away during that section of your show i had that was i think that was the too far moment for me even the the the live birth was also quite a way to start. The filmed live birth was also quite a way to start. We all got to learn sometime. Yeah. Part of a police training video, that live birth.
Starting point is 02:05:50 This woman had her birth on camera, gave birth on camera for cops to make for a cop video. It's insanity. Yes. And a friend of ours tracked down that baby who was born in that and did a little mini documentary on him. Wow, man. Well, in this case, they discover a video that is also a snuff film because another man is killed. But it identifies that Springfield's not going to do too well in World War III. I must warn you that once this next tape starts, it will not stop because that button is broken. Let's watch. War 3. has been classified NWB, or Nuclear Whipping Boy. In the first moments of a nuclear war,
Starting point is 02:06:45 Springfield will be bombed at will by all friendly nations to calibrate their missiles. Yeah! Now, for total security, I will terminate the cameraman. Thanks a lot, Steve. All right, this is a raid. Well, well, well. This place has got more pirated tapes than...
Starting point is 02:07:11 Chinese Kmart. That'll have to do. Are these yours, son? No, sir. We're just exhibiting them for profit without permission. Fair enough. But the owner is in more hot water than... A Japanese teabag? Why don't you lay off the asians a little i like any joke about about pitching jokes
Starting point is 02:07:33 yes and at this point in the episode i think when i first saw it i thought i mean there's only like a minute left in the show i thought oh no bart and milhouse seem to tell everybody about this or that that's where the plot was going to go it did they stop caring about it immediately but i like the nuclear whipping boy uh project for springfield i also love how all the children cheer at the idea not only that they will be nuked into oblivion instantly but also like they cheer the man being shot the cameraman being killed on screen the kid's like yay like that's also pretty screwed up yeah see these these tape trading like i guess what do you call them tape trading you think how i want to say this okay yeah these uh tape trading purveyors the you know the
Starting point is 02:08:18 guys in charge they they wield a lot of responsibility and how they present it and uh you can see how it could be misconstrued here yeah yeah they think that they think they're gonna have to show snuff films to people like well so that i you know this is why the cops should rate it it's like oh this is messed up to be showing this to children you know it's a busy night for uh wigametti and lou they've got to go to complicate's house right after this yeah yeah uh this is most effective they've ever been i i also do love the joke that the other kids think that the other posters are escape holes that they just bounce off the wall yes uh that's a good joke uh but you know wiggum it's easy to criticize jokes why don't you come up with a pitch then if you're gonna just tell them
Starting point is 02:09:03 lay off the asians i wonder how many times in the pitch room though you'd be like that'll have to do you know we'll come up with a better joke later oh wiggum's just going i'll have to do like he's he's saying he wants a better joke uh and then we cut to thankfully you know on futurama they wouldn't be wearing robes for a scene like this it's just the nude skin of say Farnsworth and mom on the show and I think this is where the Cat Stevens song would have went not bread's baby I'ma want you yes yeah that's a deeper cut uh that bread I mean it's a that it's a fine 70s makeout song I suppose which I guess puts you gives you an age range for comic
Starting point is 02:09:44 book guy though though the fact that he even have makeout music it like no way this is this is the first woman he's ever kissed in his life i i have to assume he lost his virginity to agnes seemed like it the way she grabs his face like it's like a giant beach ball and kisses the center of it is is also very well done but but horrifying you know they could have went much grosser oh yes yeah it's well i mean the angle it is also assumed that when they come into the room they are seeing up his robe yeah yeah yes they're they're seeing quite some there though you know wig um you're you're no prize pig yourself buddy you don't i just i love the animation the way he throws his hands up like whoa whoa like it's it's just such a funny drawing
Starting point is 02:10:29 but yes comic book guy is in trouble in our final clip all right oh oh dear god cover your eyes boys it's okay man it doesn't affect you. You're not human. Comic book guy, you're under arrest for the possession of illegal videos. But we'll reduce the sentence if you put your pants on. Fast. God! Come on, Romeo. They can't lock me up for long, Agnes.
Starting point is 02:11:01 Will you wait for me? Are you crazy? My bones are half dust. Well, we may not have the store, but at least we're friends again. Yep. And we haven't been to school in days and days and days. Oh, well. Looks like everything's back to normal. Look, if you want me to turn just point that's a weird ending scully even admits like boy when did that come in that's kind of late like he's i think he regrets it i think maybe ending on we have been to school in days and days would have been a nice little sweet line to go out
Starting point is 02:11:49 on yeah yeah maybe it might do that a little too much for they kind of like knowledge the fact that they don't play by the rules they're supposed to like homer not having a job and but you know it's i think it's funny when it's you know the ending the just the very end yeah it also although it is all it it ties it up too quickly. Like, how does comic book guy get out of jail? How does he ever reopen his store after all of this? Right. Those are questions for another day.
Starting point is 02:12:15 So do you think Agnes's bones are normally all dust? Or is her saying that her bones are half dust is a result of sexual intercourse with comic book guy? Oh, I didn't read it that way. I thought she was so old. Then let's keep it that way. Not think that her bones got turned into half dust through the physical action of love. It's a PSA about osteoporosis.
Starting point is 02:12:35 We all need to worry about it as we age. Talk to your doctor about it. Also, the funny thing with Larry Doyle is is at the end he says you know i'm actually writing a book that has a talking radioactive ape is one of the main characters and and that book came out in june 2010 go mutants and apparently it's soon to be a movie really yes oh wow good good for him man that guy can sell he can sell movies that guy he's uh man and we're still talking about duplex no yes yeah uh and the thing he got started is like co-writer of pogo for a few years crazy uh but yeah that uh bart and millhouse are still friends at the end that's that's a
Starting point is 02:13:17 sweet enough ending you don't need a green monkey slapping him and also it's not too different from him befriending the uh the gremlin either in that uh treehouse of horror but this is canon that was a fantasy that's true this monkey exists i guess that makes it worse really i suppose comic book guy only did like a month or so for uh since he put pants on i guess at least i hope they let him put pants on it's gonna be a tough night in in jail if he's only wearing that. A fun episode that has a real wacky ending out of nowhere. But I like comic book hijinks and especially like the similarities to Bound Footage Festival is just so fun to explore that I really like coming back to this episode. Yeah, it was truly strange to see this and the parallels.
Starting point is 02:14:05 And I'm so glad you had me on for it, because I don't know that I would have gone back to a mid-season 12 episode. But yeah, it was good. It spoke to me. Yeah, I liked it, too. One thing I noticed upon doing all these notes is like there is for a season 12 episode, there's a surprising lack of Homer, which is why I think he came back from one scene with Marge in Act 3. Otherwise, he would not be in the show after the first act but yeah it's it's very funny and i like them exploring more of these characters again they will do a lot more with comic book guy in the future we'll learn about his struggles with parenthood soon so look forward to that in uh
Starting point is 02:14:38 2050 when we covered the dad feelings limited uh me for boy you know it's uh for the episode called worst episode ever this is in the same season as tennis the menace so no no no this is not the worst episode ever they kind of couched it they made themselves critic proof basically by calling it worst episode ever yeah that protected him that evening on the no homers message board but it won't always but yes nick pruer thanks for coming back to the show please tell us all about found footage festival and where we can find you online and support you foundfootagefest.com uh we have a youtube channel where we do i think four shows a week now including
Starting point is 02:15:15 my alf rewatch show that's been a endeavor and madness really has uh but um yeah and we're gonna get back out on the road in the fall in a limited way and doing some outdoor stuff so trying to uh get back to touring eventually here nice man we we got to see you guys right before all touring shut down and i i'm so happy to hear that uh it's it's starting to open back up for you guys yeah i think like you know our show plays best in small cramped theaters and that's probably the last place you want to be during uh when there's a pandemic but i think slowly we'll get back there but thank you so much nick we can't wait to see it again thanks for having me so thanks again to nick pruer for being on the show ask for us if you want to support us what we do and get
Starting point is 02:16:00 all these episodes one week ahead of time and ad free please go to patreon.com slash talking simpsons sign up there you'll get just that but also access to everything behind the five dollar paywall that includes over a hundred miniseries episodes our most recent miniseries was talking to the hill season two part one that was 11 new episodes of our talking of the hill king of the hill retrospective only on the patreon only behind the five dollar paywall and there will be another miniseries coming up in the fall of 2021 only for patrons and there is a ten dollar level as well at patreon.com talking simpsons you sign up for that you get all the five dollar stuff but also access to one mega long podcast once a month only for patrons of that level or higher and what is that henry that is the what a cartoon movie. You may know that we have a sister podcast we release twice a month, and that is What a Cartoon.
Starting point is 02:16:49 And we also do What a Cartoon Movie. All of them go deep into the history of animated series, just like we do with The Simpsons. With What a Cartoon Movie, often for over four hours, we talk about animated feature films, super in-depth. We've covered films recently like Shrek, Cool World, Hercules, the Disney 1997 film. This month, we're going to be doing Hunchback of Notre Dame, another Disney film. It's Disney Renaissance Summer for our What a Cartoon movie. You sign up at the $10 level at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. You can hear those and all of our previous ones over 130 hours of what a cartoon movie
Starting point is 02:17:30 podcasts on top of all of the $5 stuff Bob mentioned, plus a giant older back catalog of videos that me and Bob did like us watching the original Simpsons shorts and tons of other cool stuff. You get so much bang for your buck at that $10 level. So please consider signing up for that today at patreon.com slash talking Simpsons. So as for me, I've been one of your hosts, Bob Mackie. You can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. And my other podcast is Retro Knots, the classic gaming podcast about old video games.
Starting point is 02:18:00 Find that wherever you find podcasts or go to patreon.com slash retronauts sign up there for two full-length bonus episodes every month henry what about you get all your henry gilbert updates on twitter at h-e-n-e-r-e-y-g that twitter account again at h-e-n-e-r-e-y-g i'm always having some fun on twitter and by the way if you're following both of us on twitter you really should be following the official at TalkSimpsonsPod Twitter account. Anytime new stuff happens in the Talking Simpsons Network, whether on Patreon, on the free feed, if there's news going on in our world, you stay up to date if you follow at TalkSimpsonsPod on Twitter. So please follow the Twitter account at TalkSimpsonsPod. Thank you so much for joining us, folks. We'll see you next time for the latest episode of our community podcast, Talk to the Audience, and we will see you then. So how many issues of Biclops would you like?
Starting point is 02:19:12 Biclops? Who's his girlfriend? Lois Lame? He's kind of afraid of girls. It doesn't even smack good.

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