Talking Simpsons - Talking Simpsons - Treehouse of Horror IV With Ian Jones-Quartey

Episode Date: November 20, 2024

We welcome back Ian Jones-Quartey, creator of OK KO and Executive Producer on Steven Universe, for arguably the best-looking Simpsons episode ever. We discuss Satan, gremlins, vampires, and scariest of all, dogs playing poker. How did the writers and animators make such a ghoulish gallery, and what amazing moments were cut from the show? Learn all that while enjoying all the donuts in the world on this Halloween classic! Support this podcast and get over 200 ad-free bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! And please follow the official Twitter, @TalkSimpsonsPod, not to mention Bluesky and Instagram!

This podcast is brought to you by patreon.com slash talking simpsons head there to check out exclusive podcasts like talking Futurama, talk king of the hill, the what a cartoon movie podcast and tons more. I hardly endorse this event or product. Ahoy, ahoy everybody and welcome to Talking Simpsons where the only monster is a lack of proper respect for the rules. I'm one of your hosts, the blouse wearing Poodle Walker, Bob Mackie, and this is our chronological exploration of The Simpsons. Who is here with me today as always... Sweet, trustworthy Henry Gilbert.

And who was our special guest on the line... Ian Jones-Cordy and... But I'm not dead yet! And this week's episode is Treehouse of Horror 4. They become portals to hell, so scary and horrible and gruesome that- Bart, you should warn people this episode is very frightening Maybe they'd rather listen to that old war of the world broadcasts and NPR. Hmm. Yes, mother This episode originally aired on October 28th

1993 and as always Henry will tell us what happened on this mythical day in real world history Oh boy Bobby the nightmare before Christmas tops the box office, River Phoenix passes away at 23, and Mike Nelson debuts as the full host of Mystery Science Theater 3000 with the episode The Brain That Wouldn't Die. Oh we have much to talk about this week, but if you want to hear our thoughts about The Nightmare Before Christmas join our Patreon at at patreon.com Talking Simpsons. I believe we have a four or five hour episode about the movie on the $10 What a Cartoon Movie level, but it was a movie I was afraid to return to in my late 30s, and I found it delightful and now I appreciate it even more

And I've finally had a chance to see it in theaters again And I really like seeing it in that format where you can just look at background characters and see what they're doing in certain scenes and figure out the amount of planning that went into that. Now, Henry Selig's movie has been in theaters so often. It was just, again, playing as a fathom event and I was like, yeah, I saw it in theaters a couple years ago. I'm taking it for granted that it's getting replayed in theaters now. I think it holds up pretty good, especially for like, you know, a 1993 stop motion thing.

And even though it tops the box office, like it kind of slips down the charts and it doesn't become something like Disney wants to like canonize as one of their movies, even though it's technically a touchstone. It's a touchstone, yeah. And Disney doesn't really start merchandising this movie in America until the 21st century. Yeah, not until Hot Topic really took off. Exactly. Things over Hot Topic. And I'll tell you, we covered Corpse Bride on what a cartoon movie last year.

I just watched Frank and Weenie. Tim Burton, stay away from stop motion unless Henry Selick is involved. Boy, those are some huge misfires. Not even the art of stop motion got me interested in those movies or kept me interested in them. There's a really good fan made blu-ray of Nightmare Before Christmas, which is a 35 millimeter scan that's open matte. So you kind of see some of the stuff

that's behind what should have been cut off, like the edges of the screen, the tops and the bottom. And you can kind of see like more of the puppets than were really meant to be seen. It's really fun. That's cool. River Phoenix passing away of an overdose-related thing in the Viper Room, definitely seen as a tragedy

because he was supposed to be like the next big thing. Like, as a kid in 1993, I think my mom was only able to tell me like, you know, in the flashback of the star of that Indiana Jones movie, it's that kid. That's all I knew him from. But since then, I've seen my own private Idaho, and he's amazing Jones movie. It's that kid. That's all I knew him from but since then I've seen my own private Idaho and he's amazing in it. It is a tragedy. Hey, we still have Joaquin

Yes, he's making us all laugh as the Joker I mean, it's not his fault but now I feel like we were all becoming Joker fine Now we all hate the Joker and we're saying go away Art the clown. He's our new guy I guess the Mitchell episode must have aired the week previous to this then or you know I wasn't watching it live I didn't become a regular misty watcher I was watching when it was on but I did not become an appointment viewing misty until season 6 I think so I did not see this one live when Mike

took over. Definitely didn't see it live yeah me neither. Oh when I entered the Mystery Science Theater landscape, there were already two hosts. The Joel had left and Mike was the new guy, so I was never caught up in the infighting or the arguments online. It's sort of, they had their own Picard Kirk kind of thing going on there in the fan base,

but when I walked into this program, I thought, oh, well, this episode, it's this guy, and the next episode, it's that guy. I just took it at face value, and I'm one of those fans who doesn't have a preference. I just it's whatever mood I'm in it's like well, I'm feeling grumpier So I want a more mean-spirited Mike episode or like I'm feeling sillier So I want to do a Joel episode so I guess it's like they each have their own moods

Yeah, when I came into MSD 3k I it was sci-fi channel, and I think I was watching mostly Mike episodes and I would see Joel every once in a while. Yeah, I don't have a horse in the debate, but I do feel like Mike is the robot's brother while Joel is their dad. Those are the different moods, I think, for me. I prefer the brother to the dad thing. Well, I also personally prefer Mike's more like active energy. Joel's

character he is very laid back like and he'll just go huh that is fun but Mike is more engaging to me but I do sort of like the combative spirit when Joel is the dad like I was just putting on that Mystery Science Theater shorts channel and the here comes the circus one where it's Joel keeps telling the bots like don't get too dark please stop study like he's trying and then he does the darkest joke of the whole short I love Joel remembering the 60s that was like one of my favorite bits like people openly smoked on the tonight show yeah we all know what happened now. It all came out in the aughts when Joel was kick-starting Cinematic Titanic. He was willing to tell

the story. The infighting between him and the show's co-creator, who was more of the business guy who also could work a puppet from time to time, but then since this Joel has come to terms with his legacy as part of the show. He did a revival with Cinematic Titanic. He did a revival of Mystery Science Theatre. Now it's kind of in limbo because the newest season couldn't get funded. And I imagine we'll see some form of it again in the future. Even though Rift Tracks continues and will continue for the rest of time, I feel like there will still be more Mystery Science Theatre.

Somebody's gonna do it. I hope so. Man, that old Kickstarter, that's now like almost a year ago. That's nuts Oh and the brain that wouldn't die I watched it a million a million times because that was one of the Rhino VHS's I owned as a youth Well, I mean you've worked on a classic cartoon with Joel Hodgson. That's right He plays Mayor Dewey in Steven Universe and that was super fun. He's really hilarious He would always phone in recording from somewhere. He just had a friend who could record. It was like he was recording in a shed or something.

But it was always really fun being on the phone with him and he would do like a bunch of weird improv. He's great and he's very funny as Mayor Dewey. Oh yeah, I love him as Mayor Dewey. But anyway, that's what happened on this few days before Halloween when this episode of The Simpsons first aired. And joining us once again is our friend Ian Jones-Courty, Ian I believe last joined us for Simpsons Safari. Welcome back to a much better episode, Ian. Thanks for having me.

And yes, much better episode here. I think we've talked about this before. I've definitely expressed that I think this is one of the like, probably the best animated episode of The Simpsons ever, though I don't know how you guys feel about it, but I feel like we've chatted about this all together before. I feel like this is a really beautiful episode. You guys I think recently covered Homer Goes to College, which is to me another one of my favorite like in terms of just character acting, but this one is really up there and as far as Halloween episodes go, it's maybe my second favorite one. Five just about edges it out for me, but I really

love this one. It's another Halloween episode where all three segments are good, which is like hard to do in an episode with three segments. Yeah, I agree with Ian. Five is funnier just by hair. This one though does feel like the best animated episode of the show ever. Mostly because of David Silverman, also because of rough draft and you know lay out people and everyone else involved. They get a lot of credit too. This was one of the ones where I didn't get to record them all. Unlike Henry I did not have infinite VHS budget for all those blank tapes. This is one of the ones I did record and it was one of the ones that I would wear out the tape by pausing and doing slow-mo

through certain scenes, just like I would do with episodes of Ren and Stimpy just to see, oh my gosh, all of these really cool drawings that you could barely see are just zipping by. JAYLEE I had this on a tape, too, and I think it was from maybe a couple years later, Fox actually just played all of them on Halloween or maybe leading up to the new one or something. And I remember being like, oh my gosh, I have to tape this block of a ton of the tree houses in a row.

I think it might even be this one and listeners maybe will hear it. I haven't yet dug up the classic commercials, but it's either this year or next year where I believe Bruce Campbell like hosts, because he was Briscoe County Junior at the time, he hosts a night of Treehouse of Horrors, two-hour marathon of all of the ones up to that point. Of course, now there's enough Treehouse of Horrors to play for, I guess, 14 hours with commercials? No, wait, what am I saying? No, more like 17 hours with commercials. Oh, geez.

Yeah, I guess so. Or you could watch one a day for all of October, as well as a little bit of the end of September, depending on how spooky you're feeling. Or if you wanna have a spooky November. Yeah. Start on October 1st. That's spooky enough for me this year.

Well, Ian, too, I know like you in your career, like you've worked with the Overseas Studio that animated this one many years after they did it. But I know Rough Draft Korea, that's the Overseas Studio we're talking about. They definitely worked on some Steven Universe as well as Adventure Time. How much have you worked with them? Oh, yeah, on both of those shows. And I visited Rough Draft a couple times also, you know, begged them to just let me go into where they're animating The Simpsons, just to look at all of the layouts.

I remember going and they were just like, oh yeah, see this giant stack here? This is like all Simpsons layouts. And they just like gave me a folder and let me paw through it, which was really fun. It's like, I don't know how much paper they're going through, it's insane. But yeah, they did an amazing job on this episode. The designs are great. There's really fun camera angles.

And a lot of the animation is just really inventive and fun. It's great. I think David Silverman was really feeling himself. This is the start of season 5 I believe also this is when he had become pulling a little of this from when we interviewed him I literally asked him why is this episode look so good? But I believe he was feeling a different sense of freedom and control by this season because he was fully the series director But he wasn't getting you know, the four episodes a season assignment.

So he could focus a lot more on this. And then on top of that, he gets to work with rough draft, which, you know, the Vanzos, especially Greg Vanzo, like he had known before he moved to Korea, like before the Vanzos even started up rough draft. I think there was like a level of trust and history that they executed Silverman and his team's designs and layouts. So like Amazingly, yeah and everyone who worked on this episode went on to become huge in the field of animation and TV movies, etc His ad was Clay Hall who would come a king of the hill guy and be when Wes Archer left or I think he might have Split duties to be supervising director with Wes Archer on King of the Hill And if you look at the storyboard credits for this episode, it's David Silverman and someone else

So Silverman also had a lot of control over the storyboards Which was I got some more common back then the director could do storyboards on their own episodes and often did No, I think it's his co-boarder on at least one of them was Dominic Pulcino who'd go on to be also a direct on so many major shows as well. And when we interviewed him in 2018, he also shouted out Mike Anderson, who was doing a lot of the great layout on it, as well as Ysvan Majaros, the Hungarian draftsman who he really likes. Like it was a great team of future animators.

We've said it before, but a thing that did kind of like spread thin the Simpsons by the end of the 90s is you say that list of names, like this is such a concentrated collection of talent and once more than one primetime animated series is being produced, it does kind of spread out. A new generation can't instantly take up those positions at the same, you know, talent level. 1e and 2 on your show OKKO, Let's Be Heroes, you did at least one, like, true Halloween episode, but you did several, you know, scary, horror-y type episodes. Like what do you think about the balance of, like, comedy and scares in animating a horror thing like this?

I mean, I think with Simpsons, they made the right choice of setting Treehouse of Horror outside of continuity because anything could happen. And you know, obviously we'll get into the whole Twilight Zone, EC Comics sort of thing. But I think that is absolutely the right way to go. But I also think that yeah, animation, it's like a perfect medium for like creepy stuff. Even when you go back and look at like classic cartoons, so many of our favorites, you know, skeleton dance and whatnot, you know, it's a great medium for just scary stuff. You know, like Nightmare Before Christmas, we were just talking about. I think too, Merkin really, really embraced

terrifying people more in his episodes than the previous Treehouse's. Like, he really did. There is some scary imagery in this episode. Yeah, with the next episode especially, he wanted to make the most violent episode of The Simpsons ever, because they were telling him, make it less violent.

And of course, David Merkin is not going to listen to you. He's gonna do the opposite. Yeah. Your best bet would be to tell him to make it more violent and then he tone it down and make it nice. I have tons of thoughts on, especially the, the rough draft, you know, what they pulled off in this, but we have several great podcasts on the history of rough draft that Bob did a great one like on when we covered Sam Keith's, the max because that was like their first, I think American production.

Or I forgot I did that. Yeah. And when we covered Homer the Heretic as well, which was the first rough draft Simpsons, I did a bit more on the Simpsons stuff, but well, it's funny too, because recently we just talked with somebody who worked on Futurama,

who mentioned how like rough draft and film Roman were kind of like competing over Futurama and their rough draft like There was just a question of rough draft could be the a studio for a sitcom like this because they they are like a four times a year Team on the Simpsons most times I think because their quality level is so high But maybe there was a question for a long time of like, but can you deliver, you know, 22 or whatever episodes in a year at that level? But they could, that's the answer.

They are so productive even now, like, it's still, I think, Bob, you've said on the most recent Futurama, you can tell when it's a rough draft and not a rough draft on the newest season. Oh yeah, usually I can, and I think I ran this time in 93, they were in demand among hot new shows, like The Simpsons, Ren and Stimpy. They would eventually make Beavis and Butthead a show that wasn't wildly inconsistent from episode to episode. They would really lock that in and be a major force on that show as well.

So I feel like they're being split between a lot of different shows as a growing animation studio at this time. And I think Merkin had a real learning curve on this one. He's still very new to animation at this point and this one definitely seems to have suffered from it's too good for the time they are given because this has some of the biggest cuts of good stuff that you've seen so much so the like on the DVD they do not include the deleted scenes that are in 138. I pulled out the clips here, but, and those are awesome. And then there's like seriously 90 more seconds of stuff that's cut out that I also grabbed.

Yeah, it's great. And watching the animatic too on the DVD, it's like there's alternate jokes on the tombstones and like it's crazy how much work went into it. And yeah, everything that got cut and changed. I think he learned, you know, you can't, if you overanimate on it, you lose good stuff. Now I think this taught Merkin a little bit about timing things, though. I mean, Ian, how often does it come back even, you know, in more modern

cartoon situations where you're like, Oh, this was 30 seconds longer than we thought it would be, or you need to trim more than you thought when you timed it out. Yeah, you always have to cut stuff. I think you're never going to get the timing of everything exactly right on the first go. And sometimes you notice some things need a little bit more time than they have to. And then yes, it's heartbreaking. The things that you have to cut that are good, and you're like, this does work, and it is really good, but we just don't have time for it. And then you have to lavish that time on something else, maybe. And in order to make that work, you have to cut other things. It's a real balancing act, though. I don't

know if I've ever had to cut something to the extent of, yeah, like this episode where they're cutting major scenes. That could be a whole new scene in the episode. It was weird watching some of those cut scenes and feeling like, oh yeah, wait, this is definitely in the episode, right? And then realizing it's either the 138th anniversary special or the other one that's just cut. It just fits perfectly. And the commentaries on this are really great. And I say plural commentaries. The main one is fun

because I think it's star studded. You can tell when James L. Brooks makes the time to be there, when it's like, oh, well, Conan's here here and Greg Daniels time to show up for this commentary. And the commentary extends past the episode and there's just some fun small talk where Conan's like, oh hey Bill and Josh we haven't talked in years. They have a little mini reunion. It's sweet. You know they've been talking for the past 20 minutes. Yeah. Though also I did the painful math that we're now all older than Bill and Josh

are on that commentary track when they were. Oh, wow. So I completely forgot to look into the second commentary for this viewing. I feel bad. Who is on the second commentary? The animatic Ian mentioned earlier, they do an animated commentary on it.

So it's just act one. The special feature got it. Yes. Which is a hilarious commentary. Also a piece of evidence for not letting the animators talk ever because it's just full of complete bullshit made up by the animators. They're just having a lot of fun drawing on the screen.

It's really funny. At first I was like, they're having fun, but I got really into it by the end of watching it. I really enjoyed it. I wondered how much the animator humor in it would touch you in if you watched it, because yeah, they're like it's so it's Wes Archer and David Silverman. They're the main people and you can actually hear Matt Groening in the background laughing along like he's holding himself back from it. But like Wes is asking stupid questions intentionally, like dumb people ask anime, it's like, well, why is it four fingers instead of five?

And then they just draw fingers and then they're like, oh, hey, let's draw Maggie drinking alcohol. And then they start drawing that. It's really funny. I love it. Or Wes Archer challenges Silverman to draw a run cycle on these 2003 like digital tablets. It's very funny. It's like the same technology John Madden used to draw on the screen. Yes, basically. It'd be amazing to see what they could do with a modern tablet today with these anime,

but that's not a priority for the Disney Blu-ray releases of the seasons that don't exist, but maybe someday. And like the panels, I went to the D23 panels and you can see I went to one D23 panel and when they do other panels with Silverman there, even to this day, they're a lot of fun because Silverman just sits there drawing a thing and then he just shows you his progress like, okay, here I drew Mr. Burns on a hang glider, or I drew Eric Goldberg's genie, except it's the comic book guy, stuff like that. There are several deleted scenes in this.

I clipped even the alternate lines that are in that animatic, I clipped them out. So this is a complete deleted scenes collection, I think I have here. This is a definitive podcast, until we return to it in eight years. Yes, yeah. And we hope you'll come back for that one too.

Sure. So, okay, And we hope you'll come back for that one too. Sure. So okay, we start with the Tombstones, a second to last real appearance of the Tombstones. They get killed next year, right? That's where funny Tombstones die on screen. The amusing Tombstone rings in the end of Tombstones. And this is at the time when like, oh yeah, is Elvis still alive?

I feel like I saw a Fox special around this time that was very corny of like now things that are just a YouTube video You can make that like primetime television on Fox or other networks. It is like well, is this an alien autopsy? Is Elvis still alive? Let's kill some time and talk about it That a balanced budget is really one of this era's most biggest concerns because we never hear about that anymore. I'm fine with that because it's all fake. Money is fake and they just invent it when they need to pay for things, but we never hear about the deficit, the deficit.

We heard it the most last, I feel like during the Obama years. And I feel like we haven't even heard it that much in the Biden years. Will we hear more about it in some future Democratic presidency? I wonder. But then at least saying that subtle political satire is dead is the next thing. That made me laugh more than a balanced budget. Yeah, I guess the balanced budget was just the setup, but it wasn't a concern. Then we get a zombie couch gag. Before zombies are the hot thing again. Zombies are in a lull now in 1993 they're not as cool back give it 10 years so we get into the episode and i noted it on twitter the other day but like it's not the most writers on one thing but because of comedy halloween names the six named writers on

this take up the full screen for a couple seconds oh yeah yeah, by the way, we have three new writers on this episode, but we're going to wait until they're full of respective episodes to cover them. They are Dan McGrath, Greg Daniels, and Bill Canterbury. So they're all going to get their own writer's corners when we get to their first full episodes. Or else this podcast would be over three hours instead of I'm assuming three hours. So it's Conan. We talked all about it on Homer Goes to College, which was the official last regular script Conan wrote, but he did write these Knight Gallery wraparounds. I would bet this is when he was getting hired for Conan, his late night show, and his Halloween names are both jokes about watching him on his new show, which had just debuted with

this aired. Though the framing device of this that Conan wrote is a parody of Night Gallery, the lesser-known kind of sequel series from Rod Serling to The Twilight Zone. Yeah, never on a streaming network. It wasn't ever playing in syndication where I grew up, so I never saw this. It's the directorial debut of Steven Spielberg though this series So it has some reasons to watch it But it's available if you want to buy it a la carte But I guess there could be rights issues or just a general lack of interest

It's not like the Twilight Zone which got rebooted three times so much Twilight Zone. Yeah I didn't know this was a reference as a kid because it's the Twilight Zone Walk and talk like I just thought this was just Bart doing the Twilight Zone walk and talk. Like I just thought this was just Bart doing the Twilight Zone man. Like that's what I thought as a kid, even though I guess the clever framing of Night Gallery to make it different from just, the framing of the Twilight Zone as an anthology

is like some magical man outside of time. It's like this guy's about to enter the Twilight Zone where crazy things happen. Well, meanwhile, in the Night Gallery, Serling goes, hey, look at this painting. It's kind of like this story, well, I'm about to tell you. Yeah, Twilight Zone is, hey,

let's watch this guy get screwed with. Knight Gallery is pretty cool painting, huh? Well, there's a story behind it. Yeah. And Silverman loved working on that because his dad was a big fan of Knight Gallery, so he liked working on that framing device of it. In the animatic, there's one of the first thing they lost, which each one of these background elements

is a poster. Like they could sell all of these. And in the animatic, there's a Roy Lichtenstein style Homer one that also rule it's in the place of the van Gogh Lisa. I feel like I definitely saw some of these on my yearly Simpson's calendars. They reused. I don't know if Bill Morrison like did these. He, I suppose he would have been credited in like art design or whatever in this episode if he'd done them, but they're really amazing. Yeah. A lot of thought went into, I don't know, a dozen parodies of famous paintings that just kind of fly by on the screen.

Some of them are just going on the background layer and going behind other paintings so you don't get a really good look at them. Yeah. They're all really nice and yeah, a fun break from sort of the regular style of the show to see like fully painted, you know, gorgeous versions of parodies of these paintings. And we've got Bart hosting it, but I love that was the opening clip. Marge, you think, okay, Marge is not going to be warning us this is too scary, and then boom, she butts in there to be like, no, now Bart, let everybody know

this is maybe a little scarier than usual. I like that it's part of the framing device and not this old animation they're recycling to get Marge to say something else. Right. I feel like the way Bart rolls his eyes at her, like that is David Merkin mad that he was told he had to warn people something is scary. Like he's like, fine. Yes. Nowadays

you don't have to turn on NPR to listen to the replay of the war of the world. You can pull it up on YouTube whenever you feel like it, which I think we've talked about it before, but it was very overblown. It was a story of like, you know, a handful of people thought it was real because they tuned in in the middle of it and sent letters in. It wasn't mass hysteria and people were cracking each other's heads open to feast on the goo inside. TG. The same prank was pulled in other countries and I believe, I can look this up later, but it did get more violent, but in America it was overblown. It just became a tall tale based on the broadcast right it aired almost to the day 55 years before this episode of

Simpsons aired it was October 30th 1938 on the Mercury theater on the air was the Orson Welles dramatization of the war of the worlds and now this episode is 55 years old. I was doing the math on the time between segment two and the thing is parodying. And it's more of that scary math. We love to fill this podcast. We'll get to it. The Simpsons will be right back.

The Simpsons will be right back. And now, back to the Fox Halloween bash. Hi, folks. I'm Bruce Campbell from the Adventures of Briscoe County, Jr. Don't go away, because there's two full hours of Simpsons coming up. Universal Studios Florida. You don't mind if I jump in here? No, no, please. Jump right in.

And then jump right out. I'll give you a pulse. Thursday. I'd sell my soul for a doughnut. That can be arranged. Get ready for the scariest part. Okay. Oh! Thursday. I sell my soul for a doughnut. That can be arranged. Get ready for the scariest.

Bart, stop pissing Satan. Spookiest. Parties of vampires. No! And wildest night of the year. Today he's drinking people's blood. Tomorrow he could be smoking. On an all new Simpsons Halloween special.

Then you're invited to a haunted Halloween party. Can't we all just get along? Martin, on a special night in time, it's all part of Fox's Halloween Bash Thursday starting at 8-7 Central. Climate change, a problem so huge, how could I ever make a difference? I'm Marco Chiaunovet, climate reporter for the Toronto Star. I meet a lot of smart people doing really inspiring things in this space all the time. Small things that add up to big climate benefits.

Small things, big climate, wherever you get your favorite podcasts. The Climate Solutions podcast is brought to you by SmartFlow from Enbridge Sustain. flow from Enbridge Sustain. Welcome to The Break, everybody. It's Henry Gilbert, thanking you for reading my new article in Redbook. And a big thank you to our guest this week, Ian Jones-Quartey, for coming on the podcast and talking about one of the best looking and best episodes of The Simpsons ever.

We really appreciate Ian's time. You gotta follow Ian J.Q. on Twitter. If you haven't already, please check out his amazing show. We still love it, the OKKO Let's Be Heroes, which we did a few episodes about on our What a Cartoon podcast as well, where Ian took us through several of his favorite episodes that he did on that show. Thank you so much again, Ian, and we always love having you on the show. And if you enjoyed the Talking Simpsons podcast,

you should know that it's only possible thanks to subscribers of Patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. Subscribers there get ad free, no ads, episodes of Talking Simpsons, and they get it a week ahead of time. Not to mention a ton of bonuses. Each month they get an episode of Talking Futurama, and an episode of Talk King of the Hill

Us covering those shows just like we do the Simpsons and you have the entire back catalog all the previous times We talked about King of the Hill and Futurama Not to mention us covering every episode of the critic every episode of Mission Hill and many of our favorite episodes of Batman the animated series Please sign up today at patreon.com Slash Talking Simpsons to see all the awesome stuff you're missing out on for five bucks a month And do you like doughnuts, huh? Well, how about our premium podcast service because at the $10 level at patreon.com Talking Simpsons you get all the ad free bonuses. I just talked about before but then you also get our monthly premium podcast What a Cartoon Movie

where we cover an animated feature film as in-depth as we do a classic episode of Simpsons. That means talking for four, five, or even six hours about an animated feature film. Basically it's three extra podcasts you get each month. We just last month stayed in the Halloween spirit talking about Hotel Transylvania which was a whole lot of fun. And this month we are starting out the holiday season with 8 Crazy Nights, the second Adam Sandler animated feature film that we are going to have a whole lot of fun talking about. We have done six full years of what a cartoon movies that you can listen to if you sign up and get access to that back catalog. You can hear our in-depth history on Disney classics like Bambi and Dumbo

The entire Disney Renaissance. I'm talking about Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, all of that. Multiple studio Ghibli movies, every Toy Story movie, even a bunch of crap like Shrek or Cool World and our longest podcast ever Six and a half hours of going into every single detail of who framed Roger Rabbit You got to sign up right now to hear all of that at our ad free premium tier at patreon.com slash talking Simpsons to get hundreds of hours of podcasts that you are missing out on. This segment, The Devil and Homer Simpson, written by Greg Daniels and Dan McGrath, normally not writing partners, but they would team up for Halloween segments. So they wrote this season's The Devil and Homer Simpson and then the next year's Time

and Punishment, which is my favorite Halloween segment. And then Dan would go on to work for Greg on King of the Hill for a number of years. So they never were officially writing partners, but something between them seemed to gel. Yeah, we interviewed Dan McGrath back in 2018 as well and chatted with him a little about this. And I'm glad we could because he is one of the guys who's not on these commentaries, which is it's always too bad when they miss out on one. But yeah, Dan mentioned that like him and Greg like knew each other in Harvard. Cause of course they're both Harvard graduates, but they knew of each other,

but they were not a writing team. Like Daniels and Conan were a writing team up until like Saturday night live. They would just get partnered together on this stuff. And I listened back to our 2018 thing with McGrath and the way he remembers it is Conan pitches the core idea of Homer selling his soul for a donut. And McGrath says it was he who made the instant connection that, oh, this is just like a classic short story. Yes, The Devil and Daniel Webster. It's a 1937 short story by Steven Vincent Benet. And it's about a man who sells his soul to the devil and he Webster. It's a 1937 short story by Steven Vincent Benet.

And it's about a man who sells his soul to the devil and he's defended in court by a fictional version of the famous lawyer Daniel Webster. More people might know it from the 1941 version of the story, the film version, All That Money Can Buy. But there was a 2007 version of this called Shortcut to Happiness. The scariest thing about it is,

directed by Alec Baldwin. Uh-oh. Uhc Baldwin. Uh oh. Uh oh. Oh no. I can see why nerds love that story or the adaptations of it, and I do too because there is just something to be like, as a fiction funny, where you take a biblical character like the devil and then put rules on him in this case like

the US legal system to be like well okay so you sign this contract what is a contract what does that mean like if he I believe it's in the story I had it on without the sound so I think I got the gist of it but in the original story I think he proves like well you're not a citizen of America devil So your contract is null and void with this man when I think you know that you've got the Harvard guys pulling from this classic short story and telling a story of like well What if Homer was on trial for his soul and then meanwhile you've got silver men Who grew up on all of these classic cartoon visions of hell that you know scare children for forever And he I feel like he's channeling a lot of those from he names a couple specific scary cartoons these classic cartoon visions of hell that scare children for forever.

And he, I feel like he's channeling a lot of those from, he names a couple specific scary cartoons in here. We just covered an episode of Rocco's Modern Life where the character Heffer goes to hell and this is the nineties felt like a real period of let's send our characters to hell, even in children's cartoons and see what happens. There's also pigs is pigs, which that's like a 37 color Warner Brothers cartoon where Porky has a, it's not Porky, it's Piggy.

Piggy has a dream. Piggy Hamhawk, a character that like no one remembers, that you think is Porky, but it's not. He doesn't go to hell, but he has a dream about getting force-fed, which is where that machine comes from. Even with the little strap on his nose, it's even the same there.

I'll take Gabby Goad over piggy ham hock any day. It's a merry-go-round. I feel like all of those things in reruns, like they did mess me up as a kid to some degree because like I was not a regular attendee of any church. So I wasn't getting, you know, these guilt trips or like, oh, you're going to hell type things in that regard. But these harsh morality tales of the thirties, forties and fifties that were in these cartoons, like they were being showed to me as a kid of characters like Sylvester being pointed at and being like, you're going to hell, Sylvester, you're on trial here.

Yeah, I mostly went to Catholic school and I think at that point they were not taking hell literally or teaching it as, you know, it's this place where people poke you in the butt with pitchforks. I feel like that was not on the agenda at all. So when I would see things like this, I would think they were funny because in my head as a little kid I would think oh this seems fake But it's funny that people are afraid of it Yeah, I just thought it was a cartoon thing I had no like idea that like that was what people really thought that that's what hell was like I just thought oh, this is like a funny way to show how the idea of hell because I don't know

We didn't really discuss that I went to church but it was Presbyterian so there was no real fire and brimstone. These things stressed me out well because I just what not all of them but I was looking for one of the ones that stressed me out the most as a kid to rewatch it and it's a Disney one the 1935 Pluto's Judgment Day. Oh yeah. Where he is a bully to cats, and then he has a nightmare where he is, you know, taken into basically cat hell and chained up,

and they are going to like sentence him to everlasting flame for how he treats cats. So it's not that he's a cat bully, he is a cat murderer. Like you're hearing stories of him killing cats in this. This is not the- Does he get baptized at the end of the cartoon? Is that how it ends? He wakes up, well I guess he does land

in a wash basin of water, so in a way it is a baptism. I swear. Maybe. Yeah. Though of course in the version I saw on the Disney channel as a kid, 30 seconds of it is not in there that is in the complete version on YouTube. And I know why they cut it.

Let's just say that one of the cats Pluto killed is not just a Tom cat, but an uncle Tom cat is his name. And yeah, but anyway, so McGrath and Daniels, they got this story here. Homer starts off with his dream of donuts. It's funny that act one and two both start with a dream sequence in non-canonical stories to begin with. Right.

This is too crazy for a Halloween episode, this donut fashion show. So it has to be dismissed as a dream. I basically do this donut fashion show every time I visit Portland, Oregon. I just go to multiple different donut places and I just had that for the, when we went there earlier this month and went to the Blue Star, I was like, ooh boy, which of the new

fall selection am I going to try here? And the apple butter one was my, you know, the apple crumble was really good too. It's hard to pick. I chose the vanilla cake pumpkin spice donut. It was delightful. But then Homer wakes up from it. Oh, and another cool thing on the DVD sorry is because it's a Silverman one and he saved a lot of his drawings I definitely think he's the one who put them on the DVD or shared them you can see like his personal like layouts for specific poses and Homer's like pure genius like you can see how close it is in animation to like his layout drawings that are on the

DVD. Then we see that Homer wakes up. He fell asleep standing up in front of the donuts long enough for his friends to steal all of the donuts and eat them or throw them at an old man. Just Abe teleporting in for the sake of a joke is always good. Why was Abe in the parking lot? In a darker time on our podcast, we used to use Abe's I ain't dead yet

as our anti-death jingle back when we did death jingles, but enough of the guest stars on Simpsons have passed away that it stopped being fun, I think we felt. Post-COVID death wasn't funny, go figure. Yeah. That's true, yeah. So Homer, he's freaking out here. He runs into the room and this, it feels like they could have started the episode just with Homer rushing into the You know in a panic into his workstation and pulling out his emergency book

That could have also been the star of the episode if they wanted to make room for other things But the doughnut fashion show is so funny I'd hate for them to lose that too but Homer is both smart enough to save himself an emergency donut, but also to eat it and forget about it, and then view himself as a person separate from himself who's always one step ahead of him. So Homer then says the magic words that he would sell his soul for a donut in our first clip.

I'd sell my soul for a donut. Well, that can be arranged. What? Fenders! You're the devil? It's always the one you least suspect. Now, many people offer to sell their souls without reflecting upon the grave ramification.

Do you have a donut or not? Coming up. Just sign here. Careful, hot pen. Mm. Who's that goat-legged fellow? I like the cut of his jib. Uh, Prince of Darkness, sir.

He's your 11 o'clock. Phew. Oh. Oh. Now remember, the instant you finish it, I own your soul for. Well, hey, wait. If I don't finish this last bite you don't get my soul do you technically no but I'm smarter than the devil

likely Yeah, likely. It's such a great choice because he has still as the demeanor of Flanders, but he's also the most helpful guy who's trying to steal your soul. He's giving you too much information, frankly, upfront. He's telling you to think about it. When you ask him a question, there's nothing hidden, no hidden meaning to his answer. It's not like the monkey paw. That's true.

He's being very upfront with Homer that he's like, well, technically no, but you really should finish it. It's funny cause I liked that, you know, Harry Sheer, he played that other devil, right? The first one. Yeah. Yeah. The little wormy devil. Yeah. So it's fun. It's like another take on the same kind of thing. There should be a history another take on the same kind of thing

There should be a history of Satan on the Simpsons because I feel like there's been several different ones The Simpsons go to hell a lot. No, was there a devil on the Simpsons ride or was it just that? Yeah, there was you go to hell. You go to hell in that ride. Yeah, pretty sure. Yeah I was getting it mixed up with the other joke where Homer jumps off a roof to kill himself and falls into the center of the earth and meets a mole man who is Hans Mole Man. I was mixing those two up, yeah. Satan does have an entry on the Simpsons wiki

as a character. Oh wow, well there you go. It is very varied, you're right. Well even in Air Order, Rosebud already has the joke of Byrnes in a headline is giving a check to Satan. So here again, Byrnes is like, oh yeah, I know Satan. We meet all the time. I love that Ned is like, oh, it's always the ones you least suspect.

Like, that's his explanation for how he's been the devil this entire time. It's great. Yeah, this episode is full of characters with secret identities. Flanders is the devil devil Marge is the head vampire Yeah, that's good. Well, and it's funny they hit you know Normally, it's like oh one segment is a Marge segment or there's like varying leads in it But this one it really is like Bart and Homer are the leads in like both of them

I guess technically in the third Lisa is sort of proactive in a poochie sense But she's really just telling other people to do things. But yeah, I also just love the smart alecky kid thing of like, you know, how poking holes in gremlin rules perhaps too, but I'm just saying like, Oh wait, so if I don't finish this donut, then you don't owe my soul. Like I have to finish the donut. Like just pointing out of like, Oh, when I said sell my soul, I meant I'd sell you my shoe or whatever, like things.

That ways to try to get around genie rules. Yeah. And man, oh man, when he gets so pissed off at Homer, like they decide like, oh, let's parody Fantasia. And they draw it perfectly, like as a perfect Chernobog. Just within 10 seconds, just shoot that image

onto the screen, transform Flander. A lot of characters transforming in this episode as well, especially in the vampire segment. Yeah. Yeah, honestly, just really great shot, yeah, of double Flanders turning into Chernobog and then like disappearing in that cool like flash where you see Flanders face for a second.

Very fun. It's so creepy. That feels like, you know, they're trying to F with the kids. Like same with there's also like a momentary shot of Bart as a skeleton when he's freaking out in in act two. I feel like they want to have like near subliminal messages in these moments here for these frames. I think Silverman says that was a Brad Bird touch in the flash of Ned's face in the goo that teleports back down. Also great design on the Hell's Kitchen chef. I love that little guy. He's just a fun little guy. But of course within 30 seconds of that scene, oh mere seconds later, Homer eats his forbidden donut. Which, you know, when I went to, speaking of Universal, The Simpsons, right, when I went to Universal,

I bought a Simpsons hoodie that says, mm, forbidden donut on it. It is one of the nicest fitting, it's a quality hoodie, which is great because that overruns that it is used out of context because it's Homer eating a giant donut, which is hardly the forbidden donut he's saying to here. Henry, you're supporting misinformation by buying that hoodie.

I know, Homer's forbidden donut is not a giant donut. Believe me, I said it to the person at the register, or I was thinking it out loud, but it is a really good hoodie. Is it in my top five Simpson hoodies I own? Yes, because I think I own like eight. But Homer eats it immediately and the road to hell is opened up. This portal is amazing. Marge's hair being pulled and as this wailing is happening, like it's just so damn good looking. And then

there's this camera turn, like there's a turn in camera to resituate with Homer stuck like isn't that great, huh? Yeah, I noticed in this episode probably because they're dealing with horror. There's so many shots looking up at the characters So you can see the ceiling in a lot of shots, which is not usual in the show Yeah, it's fun seeing the camera and the angles be so active because they're dealing with, uh, you know, really fun, you know, material. So yeah, they trust Silverman with this stuff and Silverman in our 2018 interview as well. He had a funny story about that camera turn because he said when he assigned the layout of that scene to Mike Anderson, Mike Anderson replied to him like, thanks a lot, David. He has signed him

a very hard job, but he did it great. And Homer is told his wide behind won't save him this time. Homer, did you eat that donut? No. Your wide behind won't save you this time. Hey Bart. Hey. Wait, doesn't my father have the right to a fair trial? You're wide behind won't save you this time. Hey Bart. Hey wait Doesn't my father have the right to a fair trial? Oh you Americans with your due process and fair trials This is always so much easier in Mexico. All right, very well

We'll have the trial tomorrow at the stroke of midnight till then you're going to spend the day in hell till then you're going to spend the day in hell. The plunger that magically appears and he flushes Homer down is great too. Like it's so everything is great there. But so here's where two different lines come in. Though also I forgot to play one before. So when Ned hands Homer hot pan, this is what he says in the animatic.

Ram of the cake. Do you have a donut or not? Hey I'll certainly certainly do. All I need is your John Q. Han cookie. He says cookie instead of cock in Hancock. That's the joke. Maybe worth cutting that. Yeah. Instead of Lisa demanding the fair trial it's actually Marge who does because Lisa has a different line in the animatic which I think is good Hey, Bart. Hey, wait, you can't hold my dad to that deal. He doesn't understand abstract concepts I saw him sell his freedom of speech to an ice cream vendor once besides don't we have the right to a trial? Oh So that's fun that Homer has a history of selling concepts to merchants

The lease is basically saying like he is too stupid to know what an abstract concept that Homer has a history of selling concepts to merchants. Yes. But Leese is basically saying like, he is too stupid to know what an abstract concept is. After Ned says you're gonna spend a day in hell, Homer has this reply in the automatic. All right, very well. We'll have the trial tomorrow at the stroke of midnight. Till then, I'll take you to hell!

Woohoo! You did say Taco Bell. So there you go. No free ad for Taco Bell on this one. They didn't get free Taco Bell out of it. Shame. This was the year of Demolition Man. Taco Bell was never bigger.

Homer sent to hell and man, fall oh it's so good man all the spinning things around him the Dutch angle on it the way he bounces off of it like it isn't theatrical quality but this is so a step beyond like I don't know fish police on a year before this or yeah a very complicated camera move the camera is not just going left to right, right to left or up and down. I'm not sure the instructions were very complicated as to how to shoot this effectively.

Yeah, it's like spinning around and Homer's also like twisting and falling at the same time. It's just a lot of fun to look at. And I love that they do a bit about deconstructing all the pieces of Homer. Like this feels like it's somebody who wrote the art guide for The Simpsons going like, well, here's Homer's eyes, here's his nose, but they're chopping it all up into distinct bloodless sections. Yeah. Next year there will be blood if they made this following season. Treehouse Five

is so bloody. Right, that's true. Of course, the Simpsons anti-hot dog agenda comes in, which is a little boy who loved eating his hot dogs. I was like, why does Simpsons hate hot dogs so much? Was my feeling. I don't think they hate hot dogs. They just want to show you the reality of that they're mystery meat. And this is where there are the big cuts that are in 138, because they are some of the funniest scenes they ever didn't air up to that point. One is very visual. And if you've seen 138, you've seen it, which is Homer's head is a bowling ball and it crashes into pins and his head breaks.

The pins don't move. But there is one other joke there. When Homer's head is in the ball return, he meets two other heads. Oh, sorry. So what'd you do? I owned a rifle and worked at the post office. Put it together. Hey, hi, fellas. Oh, great. J. Edgar Hoover. Got an effeminate J. Edgar Hoover joke there. And a postal service worker killing Pete. You got a going postal joke and a J. Edgar Hoover joke. Back to back. Very 1993. But then comes the amazing scene. We get a reference to Lytle Hutz before we see him in the

episode, which I get why they cut this at least for plot telling purposes because, you know, storytelling, you can assume they hired Lionel Hutz. They always hire Lionel Hutz. He's terrible. But here's the explanation for why. Lawyers, lawyers, lawyers. Oh, Lionel Hutz. Cases one and 30 minutes are your pizzas free.

I'd sell my soul for a Formula One racing car. That can be arranged. Change my mind. Sorry. Cool. Bart stop pestering Satan. And that's the pure animatic version of it instead of the color corrected and sound corrected version that's in 138. Right. But I love that they set up that in this world if you just say out loud I'd sell my soul for something Satan will appear and believe that you're not just taunting him It's good way to browse products We'll just show up now. It's Amazon. That's our new Satan. It's true

You can even put it in your room with your phone and see what it'll look like So or Satan is like the people who work at Best Buy when you check out the TVs there and you don't buy anything But then we have another of the like the greatest scenes ever in Simpsons Which I briefly had a t-shirt of this but no longer do because it was printed Incorrectly and so it faded like on the first wash and I got rid of it, but Homer gets his dream come true So you like doughnuts a Homer gets his dream come true. I don't understand it. James Coco went mad in 15 minutes. I didn't know who James Coco was then, but I got the joke.

It must be some fat guy. Now I kind of know who he is. He was an overweight character actor. I think he was most famous for playing Sancho Panza in Man of La Mancha, the 1972 film version. But he passed away at 56, like very young of a heart attack. So he passed away in 87, I guess, but that's him. And I remember one year, my wife and I watched this in Japanese because it's one of those episodes

on the DVD that has 30 languages. They would do that, like here it is in Polish and here it is in French. And they would just do a bunch of languages on one episode. And the joke in Japanese is Elvis, it's not James Coco. I think that's kind of funnier, but maybe they were going for the more obscure big dead guy for a better joke.

I can see why they wouldn't. In localization, I mean, when they did this joke in America, they didn't count on probably half their audience knowing who James Coco was. In Japan, I feel like nobody would have heard of James Coco. I looked up anything else I might have known him from. And I mean, as a kid, I watched all of the Muppet Show and half the time I didn't know who anybody was. And he did do an episode of the Muppet Show. Oh, okay. His big closing number is he sings short people,

the Randy Newman song. It wasn't also that he got jokes about being fat he also got jokes about being short so there's James Coco was getting it from all angles back in the 70s I thought you're gonna say gay because I also found out through research that he was gay oh well okay well I assume in the closet I would assume too yes that's too bad for old James Coco that's sad and also this is like a joke about a recently dead guy being in hell, so I don't know, it seems kind of mean to his family too. What did he do? Dave I guess South Park would eventually take the mantle of making the hell jokes about people who just died. So.

Justin Just died. Dave Yeah, so I guess this is Simpson starting the trend. Justin You know, that song line about we've got to make room for Andy Dick. That song is like getting near 30 years old now. You said it before, but Pigs is Pigs. I pulled that up, the I-Feeling-Mary Melody, and the Porky-like guy, it also even works like Homer in that he never suffers while he is strapped in

and being fed. He loves it every second of it. He wants more when it's done too. Yes, it's a really funny ending to that cartoon. He learns nothing. This is the first time I've heard anyone call Frizz Freeling eye-freeling. Well, I- Are you a stickler Henry? His name is Isadore! Frizz was a nickname for friends.

I guess I'm going by what the Looney Tunes wiki says where if it is credited as eye-frieling on one they write it down as I instead of frizz. The joke is for him once he stops eating and he gets unbuckled from the thing and he's like well see you later Mr. Doctor. He then stops to grab like a turkey leg off of the table he's like yeah you know what I'll eat one and then he explodes and that's when he wakes up and realizes his foolish gluttonous mistakes or I guess I don't think he does I think he just liked it and he goes down for breakfast and eats a lot that's you know heifer in Rocco's modern life learned a

better lesson than piggy ham Hamhawk did. Well, Piggy Hamhawk was never seen again, so. No. Though, I didn't watch closely, does he eat actual pork products and that? I can't remember. He ate like pies and spaghetti and turkey. I can't remember if he had a big fancy ham. I think he like dreams about what could be like pork sausages maybe.

Pluto eats a big delicious ham. Like as a kid, the cross hatching on a classic Disney ham looked like the most delicious ham of any ham I saw in a cartoon as a kid. Homer being force fed also is them having some fun with the internal Simpsons rule of trying to not make Homer a food monster and that they instead feed him to the point that he grows like five times in size and he wants more. We then go to Lionel Hutz who says,

one of our favorite lines, me and Bob, I feel like we've said it every five podcasts or something. Yeah, when we don't have time to fully watch something or we didn't pay attention to something, the thing about the sound being on But I got the gist of it or I think I got the gist of it Mr. Simpson, don't you worry I watched Matlock in a bar last night the sound wasn't on but I think I got the gist of it The court of infernal affairs is now in session. Very well.

But first some ground rules. Number one, we get bathroom breaks every half hour. Agreed. Number two, the jury will be chosen by me. Agreed. No, wait. Silence! I give you the jury of the damned. Benedict Arnold, Lizzie Borden, Richard Nixon!

But I'm not dead yet! In fact, I just wrote an article for Red Book. Hey, listen, I did a favor for you. Yes, master. John Wilkes Booth, Blackbeard the Pirate, John Dillinger, and the starting line of the 1976 Philadelphia Flyers. Ah! Now that I've been to bars for 20 years of my adult life, there are several movies where I have watched between 20 to 40 minutes of it with the sound off, and I feel like I have the authority to now talk about that movie. Ha ha ha ha ha. Like The Martian, oh yeah, I saw Act Two of The Martian,

it seemed pretty good. Yeah. There is something magical about a muted bar television. I think some of our previous podcast guests I saw, like Chris Wade, was engaging in that discourse on Twitter of like, what's the perfect muted bar movie to put on? Or one I'd throw into the ring, though this more is a very memorable one I had

at a house party, not at a bar, but it still was TV on mute background thing that completely stole my attention at this party was I had never before seen The French animated film fantastic planet. I think it's called. Yeah that one The way it starts is just in credit like five minutes in I just broke my Conversation with the person and they did too. We're just like, okay,, I just broke my conversation with the person and they did too and were just like, okay, we're just watching this. I think eventually we found the TV remote and turned on the sound. Yeah, that's a fun one for a party for sure. Yeah. It's a trippy one as well. So good at a house party for, you know, we were having a lot of rotisserie

chicken that night. I'll say to the way he says that while combing his hair with a fork, he certainly stole from a restaurant is also great. Hutz is really, we're about to see him at an even lower point in the very next episode. He wasn't in a great place in season four, but his life takes a nosedive quality wise from four to five. Yeah, I think he relapsed because he was in A the last time we saw him. He called David Crosby when he was being tempted by the

brown liquor so I think he's off the wagon again. Also this bathroom breaks every 30 minutes. This is for him to do drugs right? Like that's the joke. Definitely. This time I read it as that yeah. He's got to get some wake- up powder in the bathroom. And I love too, I just was like, agreed. No wait, like just a little break. He chooses the jury of the day and it's full of people including, yes, Richard Nixon, his third appearance in the show in three episodes.

They love this Nixon guy. April of 94, I believe. April of 94. They're doing this six months before he's dead. So Nixon's saying, I'm not dead yet. This joke doesn't work the next year when this airs. I mean, I just love, it's such a great nerdy detail that like, I just wrote an article for Red Book.

And yes, it's a good commentary on how history's greatest monsters are eventually welcome back to society and then trusted and given platforms. Yeah. There's a lot of articles for Red Books these then trusted and given platforms. Yeah. There's a lot of articles for red books these days, right? Yes. Yeah. Sure are.

The Philadelphia Flyers of the 70s, they were a rough team known for being rough with fans. This is partially because Rurken grew up in Pennsylvania and Philadelphia. That's why there's the other Pennsylvania thing. If you want to learn all about it, for free on YouTube is an HBO sports documentary that's an hour long called the Broad Street Bullies. You can learn all about the history of violent Philadelphia players. That was their nickname in the seventies. They had a real reputation though.

It's funny watching that doc now. It reminded me what an incredible rebrand the Flyers have had in this last six years guys like a lot of teams introduce new mascots and nobody cares. But when the Philadelphia Flyers in 2018 created internet darling Gritty, that's all people think about when they think of the Philadelphia Flyers, I think. Forgot that he belonged to them.

Well, I'm a Canucks fan, and I have to be. I mean, I need a reminder that Gritty is a rep of the Philadelphia Flyers. I just think of Gritty independent of sport. I just think of like, oh yeah, Gritty, that guy. No, he's a hockey demon. It does feel like they honestly just copied, like they already have the Philly fanatic

for the baseball team. So they're like, well, that's a green monster guy. what if we had an orange monster guy the opposite color green and he's like the hockey monster for a fashion the Cleveland Indians had slider who was an a similar monster just a capital city goofball style what's it you know when I was a kid in Atlanta they introduced Izzy the mascot of the Olympics and he's a great what's it as well. He got a video game He got an animated special Wasn't he originally called what is it or something? That's right changed it to Izzy

I watched his live reveal to a bunch of poochie like huh on TV as a little kid. Yes, I Thought he was great. I remember watching that reveal on TV and being like, wow, he's amazing. Learning much later that everybody hated him. My parents were quick to, I think we would listen to the, the, the morning drive time radio and the next day they were all dumping on old Izzy is the problem with Izzy is he's not a furry, you know, muppet style monster. he's too sleek and clean it's true yeah too smooth I don't trust him with gritty you want to hug him well also speaking of monster mascots that ampm thing like that is horrifying have you seen this guy who's

like made out of snack foods Tungus I or something. I think it's something like that. Tungus or Tungus. I can't remember. He's terrifying. Are they trying? It feels like now they're just being ironic about mascots. Like, what if we made a horrifying creature and wanted you to love him?

There's a level of irony to the gritty marketing, for sure, with his, you know, the dirtbag embrace of him on Twitter, I'd say, is part of what people love about Gritty, for sure. Oh, I'm looking up Tugus, I don't like this guy. Search his house. Well, fortunately, I only see him when I travel to places where AMPM is prevalent. I don't see him like Hotel TV.

I don't normally see Tugus. Also, after the jury is seated, there's a little gag here because, and you can see it in the shot, John Wilkes Booth is sat behind Nixon in the jury box. Now look, I don't want Booth shutting behind me. There it is. That's good. Yeah, I guess it still exists as a visual gag, but very subtle. Really subtle.

Yeah. I think Booth doesn't even have any lines, which is too bad. They could have done, well, there's no time for anything in this for the characterization. And I get why a silly pirate takes up more lines than John Wilkes Booth. This chair be high says hi is another of my favorite lines too.

Yeah. This is one of the quotes I use the most because it can be applied so broadly. Whenever I'm with my wife and something is high off the ground, or if we're sitting at a restaurant and we're high off the ground, this quote immediately comes into play. Those chairs are high at the bar seats. And it's a great gag and like it's a house party bit too of like when you invite people over and you realize like

I really don't have enough chairs. You can sit on the corner, right? You don't mind standing, do you? Though this interpretation of Blackbeard is before he became everybody's bi-con zaddy on TikTok in Our Flag Means Death. Oh, that's what's going on? Yes. Yeah. As played by Taika Waititi, he's a Blackbeard becomes a sexual pansexual bad boy in the Our Flag Means Death in that series.

It's fun, if you ever wanted to watch Reese Davies make out with Taika Waititi, then I've got a show for you guys, not to spoil the show for you. Sorry, Reese Darby, not Reese Davies, a different guy. I'm getting my Reese's mixed up here. Well, he's the one I wanna see make out with Taika Waititi, so I'm gonna veto this idea. I'm sorry.

So Ned makes his case to the crowd and it is pretty great. And he's just like, this is a contract. It says right here, he signed it for it and it's freeze frame again. Rough traps wrote out text on that. Like that's just them showing off the light. We're not doing Lauren Ipsum here. We're writing out real text. I noticed that.

Yeah. It's like, it's incredibly detailed. You can even see that they put in a space of like, write in donut, because like, it's a form contract of just like, there's a blank space for Homer to write in his name, and a blank space for what you get for your soul. So when it's time for Hutz to reply to this, he's got quite an argument too. This chair be high, says I. I hold here a contract between myself and one Homer Simpson, pledging me his soul for a doughnut, which I delivered. And it was scrumdiddlyumptious.

I simply ask for what is mine. That was a right, pretty speech, sir. But I ask you, what is a contract? Webster's defines it as an agreement under the law, which is unbreakable. Which is unbreakable! Excuse me, I must use the restroom. Uh, Mr. Hatz? I would think, do you think he did coke first and then thought like, this will get me straight, and then after he's like, nope, there's no getting out of this and just jumps out the window?

Yeah, the drugs didn't help him, they just made him more paranoid and anxious. just jumps out the window. Yeah the drugs didn't help him they just made him more paranoid and anxious. I also love his set up like as a right pretty speech like he actually has a good comeback and then all he does is support the claim by reading Webster's and then gives up. We see that Homer is about to be sentenced to hell but right before it comes in Marge saves the day with a non-canonical photograph I will not complain about because this is not a regular episode But obviously when they got married across the border Homer did not eat their entire wedding cake But Silverman's team did make sure the designs are consistent with so I married Marge

I don't think we get the fudgy the whale cake until season eight That was not introduced as an element of their wedding until I believe a millhouse divided Right was that what we did with Ian and Toby Jones. That's right. Yeah to a whale of a wife season eight that was not introduced as an element of their wedding until, I believe, a millhouse divided. Right. Was that what it was? Which we did with Ian and Toby Jones. That's right. Oh, that's right. Yeah.

To a whale of a wife. Where Ian very nicely put up with my nerdy question of, is Cookie Cat Cookie Puss reference? Oh yeah, yeah. Which you confirmed, and I hope, that some diligent Steven Universe fan added that to the wikis. Sure it's on a wiki somewhere So Marge saves Homer's soul by proving that he already gave her his soul meaning it couldn't be owned by the devil Which is such a funny legal loophole

They got through there and I also love that Blackbeard just thinks it's a treasure map Implying that he always thought things were treasure maps because he couldn't read. So he's called many things treasure maps before. It's a good odd couple between him and Benedict Arnold. Yes. Like, give me that, you idiot. And also I like he's illiterate, but he can psychoanalyze himself enough to say, tis true, my debauchery was my way of compensating. The Maymian Halley's just had a lot of time to think about that, and he's realized

what his mistake was. This is where the last deleted scene from this segment is. Lytle Hutz makes a triumphant return, which I'm so glad that this has been archived because every Phil Hartman line must be heard, no matter if they cut it or not. Well, I didn't win. Here's your pizza. But we did win. That's okay, the box is empty.

A great sign off from him. I say leave that scene in. What are we doing? It was like, seriously, that clip I had there was five seconds. Like, you know, this is so funny that a month earlier in broadcast for Cape Fear, another amazing episode with

fantastic animation, in that one, they have to find a minute in it. They have to like, we need a minute of animation and this has 90 seconds too much. If they could have just brought it together and shared that minute. Yeah, they've remarked that Merkin's issue was his episodes were always too long. And Al Jean and Mike Re race always came in too short Homer is then cursed by the devil to have that donut forever on his head And I look at a drawing of that every single day because in my laundry area I have a framed poster of our our 2018 live show. Oh, yeah, you're looking at it right now. I forgot that it's in front of me

I'm actually looking at it right now. I forgot that it's in front of me. Where Nina Matsumoto, the amazing artist, drew you as the devil, cursing me as a David Donut head as I'm eating some classic Portland donuts. A real theme in our live show posters is me injuring Henry. And the latest one, I am cutting through him with a chainsaw. Yes. And there's the Mortal Kombat one. I am Sub-Zero and have been through with a chainsaw. Yes. And there's the Mortal Kombat one.

I am sub-zero and have been stabbed with the get-over-here spear. I like the consistent theme. It's fun. I mean, You as the Devil is such a funny drawing. It's so great, too. But this, in Homer's case, he can't stop picking at it. Homer will be dead very soon from eating his own head. This is quite a curse.

Well don't they then an entire Trios of horror segment where he cooks various parts of his body after cutting them off? That's right. One of the grossest things they've done. Yes. Yeah. Hey, it was memorable. They just remember it. That's for sure I don't disapprove Interesting idea. Yeah, I've gotten over my body horror that I think to any extent I believe when I first watched it I talked about on the podcast many times as being like I was so chilled to the bone I've relaxed a little about it And of course the cops are waiting outside and Silverman said they posed it to look like a bunch of birds waiting for a feast So after that we come back from the break and we've got another Conan written interstitial.

And I say that because Bart's flopped sweat of saying, well, there's nothing scarier than having to go to school. That feels like Conan trying to recover from an intentionally flopped joke in a monologue to me. But yes, the school bus leads to a nightmare at six and a half feet, which, or five and a half feet, ah, I should have wrote it down. Five and a half. Thank you.

Which is a parody of the Nightmare at 20,000 feet, which I rewatched both of them yesterday, so I'd be fully, fully prepped for it. I hadn't watched the original in a very long time. I had seen the movie version the last time we did a tree house, because that one, parody, the segment that precedes it, the Dante Bill Mooney one. I watched both together. Well yeah the Shatner one aired on October 11th 1963 so the Simpsons

episode aired 30 years and two weeks later and now we are further out from that than they were from the Twilight Zone episode. The Scary Math has returned. Though it's also fun to know that Twilight Zone is 63. They do the movie in 83. And then they do The Simpsons in 93. And both versions of the segment were written by the man who wrote the original short story, Richard Matheson. So it's a pure version of it. And you mentioned how Night Gallery had the first thing directed by Steven Spielberg. watching it. I was like, Whoa, I didn't know who directed the original 63 one. Oh yeah. Richard Donner. And then George Miller, he directed the segment in the movie. That's the first non mad max thing he ever directed theatrically. And it rules. The Shatter

one is a classic too. And the 63 version is great for the budget of a TV show where they have, you know, one set and TV budget and only like five actors are going to get to speak in the whole thing. That's good. It's really good for that. The 83 movie is the big budget reimagining of it. Like it is so great. It's why multiple shots from it are used in this instead of from the, the Twilight Zone, the TV version. and it is easily the best segment of that movie too. Oh yeah, it freaked me out as a kid, but I loved it. And then, last time we did this, I went back to the 63 version,

and I love it as a time capsule that shows you what flying used to be like in the 60s. Everyone is dressed up when they're flying, people are smoking during the flight, and one guy just has a gun on him. Just has a gun. Yeah, my dad still wears like a nice suit jacket like to fly that's just like what you do Yeah, looking this up. I didn't know that there's a third version of this now from that newer Twilight Zone

So there's three I haven't seen that one, but I've seen the other two. The Twilight Zone reboot is kind of a secret show. Yes, yeah. Well, I did actually watch The Nightmare at 30,000 feet because when I read the synopsis I was like, alright, I feel I must watch it because guys, there's no scary monster in it. It's a podcast. It's a scary podcast that makes him freak out. I heard podcasts hurt people. It's fun, but it cannot hold a candle to either of the previous versions. But yes, basically Adam Scott, he's kind of a guy who writes articles called like the end of civility for newsweek. Like that's the type of guy he is. And so I get that all three versions of it

are about the stresses of that particular time of flying. What stresses you out when you're flying at these different times? You know, at 63, these are the things that stress you out. In 83, this is stuff that stress you out. In 2019, you're in a transatlantic flight and you're worried, is there a terrorist on this plane? What hap- like that's kind of the core fear they're dealing with. But basically he listens to a true crime podcast that's hosted by the hardcore history guy, Dan Carlin does the voice. Oh really, wow, okay.

So it is a true crime podcast about a plane that crashed once and then he realizes it's the plane that I am on right now and he's trying to figure out how it happened. And I won't spoil the ending for it. it gets to the end there is a line that just made me groan in it that made me turn I thought it was okay and then there's like a really dumb obvious line at the end of it that just makes me go like that's stupid like that's bad rewrite that how did you watch this

Henry because it seems like this show is unwatchable it's not it was a CBS all access and it's not on Paramount Plus and they made two seasons with Jordan Peele who is still pretty hot. Well the answer Bob is freebie. Freebie. Oh thank god. Yeah it was originally CBS All Access and even though the start of it will make you think it's on Paramount Plus, no it is on freebie with ads. That is where it is. Interesting. Well we were talking about that new Noir Spider-Man, Spider-Noir, whatever show No, it is on freebie with ads. That is where it is. Interesting. Well, we were talking about that new Noir Spider-Man, Spider Noir, whatever show that is,

and it sounds interesting, but it's on something called MGM Plus, and my takeaway was you're just making things up. That's not real. No one is watching MGM Plus shows. Name one person, name one other show. I can't, I can't. Ian, sorry, we're joking about your livelihood here.

I think that's what streaming services is. We're just inconvenienced. Ian, sorry, we're joking about your livelihood here. I think that's what's going on in streaming services. We're just inconvenienced. Yeah, no, it's crazy. And also behind the scenes at these streaming services, it's like all the people who work at them, eventually they get jobs at another one and then they cycle in people who worked at the last one. It's crazy. I have no idea. Honestly, we're very close to reinventing cable. So I feel like that's just what's gonna happen. Yeah, that's totally what 2B and Free V and Roku channel and all that are.

Pluto? Yeah, Pluto. Pluto too, yeah. All of the two syllables. If it's two syllables, it's freemium. No, wait. Yeah, what do they call it? Is it freemium streaming? They're fast channels. That's it. F-A-S-T. Yeah. So actually when I put it on freebie, it was actually even funnier because

technically I'm viewing it through the Prime Video app, which I pay to not see commercials. But when you hit play on a thing that is technically freebie within Prime, they then have a thing up that says, sorry, you're going to see commercials. This is freebie. We don't care what the tier you're paying. Right. Well, I think nobody remembers that 2019 Twilight zone. I mean, I don't remember many people being like that excited about it, but also if anybody talks about any show like it, they talk about Black Mirror. That's the show they talk about. Right, I guess that is,

they really did pick up the mantle, yeah. Yeah, nobody had CBS All Access, even with the new Star Trek show. I feel like more people got Paramount Plus because they, brand recognition brought them there, but not CBS All Access. Oh yeah, but so the Twilight Zone movie version, I do love that one the most

because George Miller directs it like so claustrophobically. Also, John Lithgow plays it beautifully and he is an unmarried weirdo. I think that makes it even more like he can't constantly go, my wife doesn't believe me. Nobody trusts me. Instead, he's like, I'm alone and surrounded by the freaks who are on a 1983 airplane, like a fat cop with a gun, a jerky kid with a Polaroid camera. That's actually it. Sorry, one more thing I love about the 83 version is that it's answering like a nerdy question of like, well, man, if this guy had a camera on the plate, he could just take a picture of the monster and show everybody and prove it's real. John Lithgow steals the little

girl's Polaroid camera and tries to take a photo of the monster like, okay, this is going to prove it. Everybody will see it. And there's so much tension of him just waiting for it to develop. He's like, come on, come on. But then when it develops, all it shows is him reflected in the window from the flash. It's so good. It's answering the nerdy rule. And that Gremlin scene comes right after the Joe Dante segment. So you've got the director of Gremlins going into the Gremlin sequence. This version is also really great because I think Bill and Josh bring a whole lot of fun to it

with their, a lot of boring specifics that we love Bill and Josh for. Yeah, despite the levels of anxiety in this segment and how fast paced it is, they work in a lot of, isn't this boring and therefore funny kind of jokes? What like with the trading cards up front? Yeah, that's so, the trading card bid is so great because this was like the year the Skybox launched

their Simpsons trading cards. And I was collecting them all as a kid back then. And to see this anti-trading card comedy of just like crusty poses for trading card photo. Though Ian, am I correct that you, Annapolis, Maryland was like, you've been there, you grew up near there, right? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah, I've been there. Yeah, I grew up pretty close. Yeah. In Columbia. So yeah, I got to say nothing really exciting about it just as advertised on that trading card.

Well, and Bill and Josh also grew up in the, I guess, Delmarva area, which is a term I never heard until Steven Universe, because I didn't grow up there. So I never heard of Delmarva. Bill and Josh like, I know Bill is from an area near Baltimore and they both went to school. Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein met up at a high school in Washington, DC. So yeah. Is Annapolis the most boring town in Maryland,

Ian, would you say? I mean, it's also the capital, I'm pretty sure. The capitals of any state are pretty boring. Yeah. Sacramento for California, right? Oh yes, I've been to the Capitol building there. Yeah. Oh, brag Henry, come on.

Why don't all have Sacramento money to throw around. I had time to kill while waiting for a baby shower. So I was like, well, you know, I never been... It was either that or the Railroad Museum. And you know what? I think I should go out with the Railroad Museum. If you want to watch Lady Bird, you could point out all the Lady Bird filming locations.

Next time, before I go, my next Sacramento trip, I will plan a viewing of Lady Bird, but right before. Also, the gum in a baseball card pack really can slash your cheek, like it's some strong gum. But then Bart, in his dream, the bus crashes, he has this terrifying vision, and he wakes up from a scary dream. Homer's was a happy dream that turns bad.

Bart's is a scary dream, and that's where you get the flash of the skeleton too, which is really fun. I thought this episode had some amazing mouth movements or mouth flaps, I don't know exactly the skeleton too, which is really fun. I thought this episode had some amazing mouth movements or mouth flaps. I don't know exactly the right term, but like when Bart says, you know, that he had a vision of his own horrible fiery death, he says it flatly and the way his like eyes plus his mouth move, like it makes it so funny. I love the work they do with like the eye bulges in this episode. I feel like for emphasis, it's really, really nice.

On Frinkeac, I'm going through some of these frames. I definitely notice the eye bulges. Also, they're breaking their own rules by making the mouth extend beyond the head for emphasis sometimes, which is a big no-no, but it looks so cool. I wish they would still do it. Also another no-no I noticed is Bart especially has a big squishy nose. Nose rules are being broken here too. This is how they set up that he basically has had his own nervous breakdown like Shatner had had right before his flight and that Bart you know Homer then comes

in with an air horn that just blasted Bart here because you can just steal all this stuff from the marina which I wonder, our Marina's is rife with free life jackets these days. I really don't know. I just went tubing and they offered up life jackets, but obviously they expect you to return them. You can't just, though then I put on a life jacket and I felt like a dweeb the entire time because everybody, I was like,

oh, everybody's gonna be wearing life jackets on this. Like, everybody's getting drunk in their inner tubes and I'm wearing a life jacket. I felt like a dweeb the entire time because everybody I was like oh everybody's gonna be wearing life jackets on this like everybody's getting drunk in their inner tubes and I'm wearing a life jacket I felt like a dork. You didn't have floaties on or maybe you did I don't know. I can swim too I know how to swim but it just was like other people in the group are wearing life jackets so I thought oh this is the right thing to do but Bart is spooked they get on the bus and this is when Lisa and Milhouse are both playing like kind of the concerned wife character, I guess you'd say in this. Concerned slash disturbed. They see that Skinner is riding the bus too, taking away his car keys because he talked

to a woman on the phone and she was right to do it. Like he's that destroyed by his mother. He's on board with the punishment. And as they get on the school bus, this is where they plead for empathy. Whoop is a sweat. Marge, what's wrong? I just had a vision of my own horrible fiery death. And?

Lisa, your brother's obviously had a nightmare. Don't worry honey, the scary part's over. Ah! Marge, look at all this great stuff I found at the marina. It was just sitting in some guy's boat. Hello, Simpson. I'm riding the bus today because Mother hid my car keys to punish me for talking to a woman on the phone.

She was right to do it. Excuse me, Bart's a little upset this morning, so could everyone please be extra nice to him? Hey, where's your diaper, baby? Thank goodness he's drawn attention away from my shirt. I have been the boy wearing a proverbial Wang computer shirt hoping for distraction. I have been in Martin's place as a child. Can you name any specific shirts?

You know, a far-side shirt that I thought was very funny. People made fun of and actually got stolen out of my locker at gym class. Whoa, which far side cartoon was on it? I want to say it was the one of the cow grilling burgers. I think it was, but I honestly think it was just, they're like, look at this geek in his far side shirt, and then I forgot to lock my locker. And of course any slight weakness is going to be, you know, that my I think it was just, they're like, look at this geek in his Farsight shirt, and then I forgot to lock my locker. And of course, any slight weakness is going to be, you know, that my jeans were stolen

too. So I just had to walk around the rest of the day in my gym clothes. Yikes. Yeah. Hey, but no flares were put in my pants. At least that was good. That's good. Well, I found out that Wang computers filed for bankruptcy in 1992.

Some part of it lives on, but they were essentially dead by 93. So they were getting their Wang jokes in down to the wire. And Oakley is talking about on the commentary that they were like promised Wang computers, but then they were lost to so much money. The person who called them who said it never got back to them of getting a freebie. Shame. Bill Oakley always wanted all those freebies and he was missing out on them. Like we've heard it before. He had all his friends who were writing for Seinfeld, they got all this free stuff. And he said, Strydek's Peds. That was it.

I think Schnapps as well. Oh, that's right. Yeah. From Marty Ingalls, right? That's who said it too. Yes. Yeah. Are the freebies flying at all in the cartoon world these days for references?

I don't think I worked on anything that would get us freebies, I don't think so. I think for like kids' cartoons, people just don't care. Also, because it's a kids' cartoon, we're not allowed to mention brands by name. So even if we get close, I don't think anybody would care. Like Steven Universe can't literally eat like a Taco Bell or

No, because there's all the kind of those kid vid rules about like not actually having advertisements or products on kids TV. So yeah we've gotten close we're not allowed to do it though I hear hear, for instance, like on Netflix shows, even kid shows, you're allowed to mention stuff. They're just like, oh yeah, those rules don't apply to us. They're voluntary anyway. So Wow, I didn't know that. It's the wild west on Netflix.

Exactly. So Bart is trying to settle down on the bus and then he looks out the window and sees that there's a gremlin on the side of the bus. And I love this gremlin design. I think Silverman says he designed it. It looks a lot more like the 83 version, which is like a long haired green monster, though in the 83 version, he seems to be human sized. This is more like the size of a Joe Dante gremlin as opposed to the movie version of the gremlin. In a 63 version, it's Shatner who says, you know, it's like that thing.

Remember they talk about it in back in the war. It's a gremlin. It's a gremlin. Like he names it as a gremlin. I can't recall if in the 83 one, they literally say the word gremlin. I mean, it's a great creepy design they got there. And as Bart is pleading for Milhouse to look out the window, he won't because it will leave him slightly vulnerable

from any angle of bullying. This is, again, as a bully child, these are the paranoia you have of like any wrong move and I'm open for an attack. They invented the rear Admiral, leading to a lot of speculation. I would assume it's a mega wedgie like the super jocklock that I learned about from Mystery Science Theater. Double jocklock right? That's it. That Crow is placed in. By the way Crow is my favorite of the bots. Like he's my

favorite character because he is the biggest nerd. I assume you won over lots of people with your Crow t-shirt too, right? Oh, yes Yeah, I wore that you have Well, I had both of them actually I had bite me and you know, you want me baby I had both of those and wore them until the text was illegible Yeah, look I get why I was bullied they shouldn't have bullied me, but I get it I get I actually had to stop wearing the Tom Servo I'm Huge one because as a heavy kid,

you're really opening yourself up to it. Right. Didn't think of that. Yeah. See, you as a thin boy, Bob, you could wear Tom Servo I'm Huge all day. I'd still get shoved, I think. Sure, yes, yeah. Bart tells Otto there's a gremlin on the side of the bus.

Otto sees that it is Hans Mollmann driving an AMC gremlin, which he then totally understands and he runs it off the road and kills him. Very Simpson style explosion where it gently comes to a stop next to a tree and then explodes. Yes. Isn't it nice to remember a time when like, this thing randomly exploded in a primetime

cartoon felt like a fresh joke? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Instead of like, oh, this exploded for some reason is just it's a genre of joke now that I feel like most primetime sitcoms wouldn't bother with because like it is become hack. You basically expect it now. Yeah. Then Bart tells everybody to take a look at it on the side of the bus.

Everybody screams and goes to take a look, it on the side of the bus Everybody screams it goes to take a look which that is much more the 83 version. I and what I noticed in the 63 version Everybody else is a silent extra in it who has not given lines probably for like cost-saving purposes Nobody else on the plane reacts but in the other one It's the freak show of people in the 83 plane They're all looking at it, which I like too that Ralph is established as dumb enough now that they can give him a line about how he's deceptive and that's too smart for him to say. It does feel like the first true Ralph one-liner.

Yeah, you're right. We're getting close to season five is when Ralph really becomes the one-liner machine, right? Yeah. Also, when I've had to say, oh, just a second, or like, I've taken Otto's tone of Uno Memento, por favor. And I wonder how late in the game Kang and Kodos came into this, because they've talked before about how they've had to like use retake budgets to get Kang and Kodos in there to not miss their traditional appearance.

If it wasn't for the gremlin showing up in that scene, maybe they could have done it with some reused animation. It could have been reused from their previous time of like, honestly just from a shot of them watching from the monkey's paw scene. Right. By the way, that reaction noise is an imitation of Charles Nelson Reilly, who is not Paul Lin but very similar. Hmm. It's extra fun to see a

space alien who doesn't even have a collar to tug is doing the collar tucking. You know what if I'm complimenting everything Rough Draft does here, I gotta say they have orange drool on their face when it should be transparent so you know like Rough Draft owes them a retake at their own expense for that. And then we get another bit here of Skinner. Merkin loves to write Skinner as the enemy of all imagination. I just love that he's mad that Bart is using his imagination at all. And that the only monster on this bus is a lack of the proper respect for the rules. He does not have his independent thought alarm that's under his desk.

He can't hammer that button. He's too far away from it now, unfortunately, on the bus. Also this is when we get the classic staging of the tension of the, oh, should I look? Should I look? Should I look? And then Bart opens it and we have the 1963 shot of the face right up against the window. And I love how they can play with Willie's design that his design isn't unrecognizable But like they made it like five or ten percent closer to the 1963 monster

Yeah, it does the head tilts Yeah, curious head tilt it really sells it and of course Willie is just freshly shot his mule 17 times to kill it I would guess that means Willie is packing a gun in this that Bart could have used like in the other versions. Right. Now, after all these other firsts we're talking about, it's time for the first appearance of a character who, surprisingly, goes on to be used quite a lot after this one-off joke.

Now, I've gotten word that a child is using his imagination and I've come to put a stop to it. No, no, it's true. There's a monster on the bus. The only monster on this bus is a lack of proper respect for the rules. Hm. No.

Oh. Oh. Ah! My mule wouldn't walk in the mud, so I had to put 17 bullets in him. You believe me, don't you? You're my friend who believes me. Sweet, trustworthy millhouse. Actually, Bert, you're kinda creeping me out. I think I'm gonna go sit up with that foreign exchange student. Oh Good and talk. Oh, would you care for a bite of my finger? Oh, I also have a bag of mouth deep on joy choice Gooder it's a door

Who would die and then come back to life? Oh, yeah, I was gonna ask about that What is the state of odor is he dead? He didn't die, right? Seemingly, I think murdered by Civil War reenactors in the PTA disbands, but he's alive and well, I guess. It's right now in season 15, we're in the middle of Uter death and rebirth because he's... But it's because, yeah, he stopped being used. They make the joke in season 11 of like that his parents are saying, we just want closure. Like they don't know where he is. But then for that Evita episode we just released when we're recording this. In that one, Uter is back for a line and being used like normal.

So in season 15, Uter has returned. Though I think they realized like how many jokes can we do about like a little fat German boy who loves eating chocolate? It was only later in life that I realized these jokes about foreign candy were true because early on in the very very young days of podcasting there were many video game podcasts and it wasn't just Giant Bomb where they're asking themselves what do we do on a podcast? I guess we eat things and drink things and then tell people what it tastes like. So there were several podcasts where they would eat weird candy. People would send

it to them and these are not candy podcasts. These were video game podcasts. So I learned about how much candy had salt in it because of these podcasts. Man, you're right. Yeah. It wasn't just Jive Bomb. I definitely think on the one up one as well. It was like the send in foreign candies segments where we're kind of a regular deal. Yeah, if you weren't there, the question was, what is a video game podcast? The answer was four guys in their 20s get incredibly drunk and then eat candy. And this is the future of entertainment. And some may

say things they come to regret later in life. And then they tell you what they think of the newest Xbox 360 updates. That's what they tell you. Are there any other characters that debuted in a tree house of horror that made it into canon other than Uter? Oh man, that's a good question cuz it's like, you know Say that well, no, actually I was gonna say that leprechaun But no the leprechaun was the one Ralph imagines first. Right. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's actually I'm coming up blank on another one who got to transcend Canon into the real world. Yeah, I'm sure there's something there's got to be one someone put it in the comments, I guess You know and if this Simpsons was written if this episode was written at the time

The Simpsons was a union show Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein would get a character payment every time Uter appeared. Oh, man Right sucks for those guys Well, that's also I mean as Bill Oakley said with us on stage a reason He doesn't want to buy any of these latter-day poochie collectibles is he feels like he should at least be getting them sent to him for free. They really should. It's really annoying that they don't do that. Well, especially because you know they have, like, they're sending them for free to, like, press and stuff for unboxing.

They're sending them to people who don't care about it, so they should at least, like, give them, like, the creators of it something. And if I'm on the PR team of people who are selling poochy shoes or poochy action figures I should be aware that Bill Oakley does have a social media imprint and if you send him free poochy shit he will unbox it and show it for you on his like Instagram. It's true everybody get on it. Also start sending things to us again. That was fun. Yeah. During lockdown, we got some free vans

and any free shoes at the very least since then. And it went from Vans to Adidas. And I'm disappointed that Adidas didn't want to send us free stuff like Vans did. But also the stuff about German candies, the only thoughts I have on it really is just that I went to the Germany Pavilion in Epcot recently and all I ate there candy-wise was caramel

things and I loved everything I ate there at the Caramel Kitchen, otherwise known as Caramel Couché. Did they offer anything unusual or out of the ordinary for the American palate? No, you know, I think they did have some of imported like packaged candies and stuff, but basically I just wanted freshly made caramel like worth his caramel drizzled on to like a cupcake or popcorn like live in person. So that's what I ended up having there. I didn't look too much for marzipan. I should have.

I've had marzipan. I think it's gross. It's too chewy and not flavorful enough. Maybe there's some good marzipan out there I haven't had. When I said I hadn't had any good Turkish delight and I was wrongly told that Werther's Originals is like Turkish delight, I was directed to good Turkish delight in Seattle and it was very good. So if people have suggestions of good marzipan to get me to change my mind on marzipan, I'll give it a shot. Though how much iodine is in it in marzipan these days? Then I love how Bart's nose is squished up against the window like that stuff they don't animate normally.

And when Bart freaks out and gets in the headlock, mentally I always thought that happened in the 63 one, but no, it's only the 83. Like the shot is the exact shot of when he super freaks out and the big fat sheriff guy grabs him and puts him in the headlock. It's opposed out just like in the 83 version. So Bart is strapped to the seats and as he's held in place, this is when we get our second appearance of him, which is where he gets named, which I also just realized like at the core of Uter, it's them like zigging and zagging when they say weird foreign exchange student you know who knows what you're calling up in your mind and it's just it's a big

silly cartoon German in leaderhosen like he's out of a cartoon. Would you like another lick of my flavor box? Uh sure. Well now that we're friends Uter, how about loosening these straps, huh? Yeah, that's just good. And they point out on the commentary how Uter leaves for that, but I'm sure that is so, in case they wanted to edit it out, Bart needs to be sat by himself again for the next shots to match up. Right.

Yeah, I like him leaving. It's fun. Where does he go? I don't know. He's like, my bit is over. Yeah, it's so crazy, Bob, you mentioned in the 63 one that like there's just a loose gun he just takes out of a guy's holster. Like you can just be on a plane. I mean too, in the start of the episode he's about to smoke and he's told like, nah, nah, you can't start smoking until takeoff. It's after takeoff. Until the air is being recirculated, put that cigarette away, sir. Yeah. Though in the 83 version, that's why they have to introduce this fat cop who can't

stop him from having his revolver taken off of his ankle when all the chaos is happening in it. But here Bart doesn't get a gun. He merely has some emergency flares, which the great reveal that they are in Martin's pants. Bart accidentally takes both of them out and puts one back in Martin's pants. And Martin doesn't seem to notice either. He doesn't want to interrupt the bullying. Bart knows where he is in the situation we hear. If he stops the bullying here, then he will be the bully. And then just like in the bigger budget 1983 version, the school bus is impossibly pressurized. So when the window is open, air's flying everywhere,

Bart's being sucked out the window. I love that. Yeah, and earlier in this short, Skinner pulls down the shade and it is the airplane window shade that slams down. It's great. And Bart is being dragged out of the window, which is great too, they have to put in a light of like,

how is it so hard for two adult men to pull a 10 year old boy out of this window? And it's animated with like genuine drama, like Bart so narrowly hits him with it, like is posed very dramatically. Basically it's almost an accident how Bart like drops it and it bounces off of the gremlin and lights him on fire.

I love the way that looks. It's great. That's a big difference in 63 and 83. In 63 Shatner successfully shoots the gremlin and it dies. In the 83 version, John Lithgow misses twice and then the gremlin just kind of walks up to him and eats the gun and rams his face like, oh, aren't you cute? And then he flies away. Off to another adventure. But in this case, this gremlins the next adventure is he is saved by Ned Flanders and I love the discomfort on his

face as he's being held by him. It's like, oh, he's trying to claw my eyes out. The Twilight Zone endings are interesting because in both of them, it's implied the truth will eventually be found out and the guy won't have to be in an insane asylum for his whole life. Yeah, the Lithgow one, I don't like the ending because it references the intro segment. And by the way, if you haven't seen this movie, the intro segment is, it would be the worst segment

in the movie of three people. That's a different segment. So that's the worst segment. This one is kind of bad because it's just a podcast between albert brooks and dan ackroyd just remembering twilight zone episodes and then eventually Dan ackroyd turns into a monster And kills albert brooks. He shows up later as the ambulance driver. Presumably. Well, he will kill john lithgow It's so strange. The ending works perfectly fine with like, the guys react to the mechanic show up.

They see that all of the damage was real on the plane. It proves John Lithgow wasn't crazy. All of that. Like, that's a good enough ending, but instead they cut to inside the ambulance and it also feels wrong because I don't think George Miller maybe directed it. It feels like a different director too. And I wish it would have just ended with them playing the Creedence Clearwater song and John Lithgow going like, huh, that's Creedence. I love them. And that should be the end of the movie. Instead of Dan Ackroyd

saying, boy, it sounded like you had a real scare, but you want to see something really scary and then do do do do do. And then that's too corny. It takes you out of this good ending Dan Aykroyd saying, boy, it sounded like you had a real scare, but you want to see something really scary? And then, do, do, do, do, do, and then that's too corny. It takes you out of this good ending of this movie. Climate change, a problem so huge, how could I ever make a difference? I'm Marco Chiaunovet, climate reporter for the Toronto Star. I meet a lot of smart people doing really inspiring things in this space all the time. Small things that add up to big climate benefits.

Small things, big climate. Wherever you get your favorite podcasts. The Climate Solutions podcast is brought to you by SmartFlow from Enbridge Sustain. I guess they felt like there needed to be more connective tissue between the different stories so yeah they just threw that on there. But that's why Bart being in a straight jacket, that's the 83 ending. In the 63 one he just has a blanket lightly placed on top. No life in a madhouse for John Lithgow.

And yes Bart's getting a life in a madhouse because even though everybody knows he's right, in typical adult fashion, nobody cares. Oh dear lord, it's some sort of hideous monster. Oh, isn't that cute? He's trying to claw my eyes out. Get Zoot! Look at the bus. I was right, I tell you, I was right! Right or wrong, your behavior was still disruptive, young man.

Perhaps spending the remainder of your life in a madhouse will teach you some manners. Meow-meow! The madhouse will teach you some manners. Ah-ha! Ah, at least now I can get some rest. I will be home, Art! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh uh Nancy has some great screams there, right guys? Yeah. It makes me wish the movie segment ended with that reveal. It's a better ending than Dan Aykroyd, though I guess it got Dan Aykroyd another payday.

Yeah. Is that shot of the ambulance redrawn from, where is that redrawn from, Barth the Daredevil? It was in Homer's Triple Bypass, which was another rough draft one, and Silverman directed. So you're right, it's a redraw because they did put the new Bedlam logo on the side of it in that shot. Yeah. So see rough draft

being lazy I take back all my confidence. While this being a great layout I love that the way Skinner is in the left side of the screen to admonish Bart, and when he moves his head, that reveals Nelson pointing for the ha-ha. It's so... that's such great layout, right? Yeah, it's fun. That drawing of Ned with the severed head like his spinal column and veins sticking out like that is scare-y. The spine sticking out there is great. And yeah, that he can still talk also. It's fantastic. Mortal Kombat was out though I think we were ready for that. Sure you and I were yes. Kids today who watch this after watching a blue-e on their on their Disney Plus. Gonna mess them up. After that ending it's time for part

three here and we start with another of the most like amazing animated moments in the series here David silverman was so inspired to do it because of this line reading that dan castellaneta does We come now to the final and most terrifying Painting of the evening to even gaze upon it is to go mad They're dogs! And they're playing poker! Ah! Ah ha ha ha ha!

Ah ha ha ha ha ha! Ah ha ha ha ha ha! We had a story to go with this painting, but it was far too intense. So we just threw something together with vampires. Enjoy! Silverman said in our 2018 interview like you don't need this confirmed it's easy to see but he animated that whole freakout to us

he even said he did the in-betweens on it that's how much he wanted to do it. It's great. In this segment if you couldn't tell by the title the segment is a parody of both Ram Stoker's Dracula the Coppola film that came out the previous year and also the Lost Boys the light horror film that came out the previous year, and also the Lost Boys, the Light Horror film that came out in 87. This is written by Bill Canterbury. And I wanted to talk about the Dogs Playing Poker painting because there's a weird history behind this. Not super weird, but worth noting that this is not the first one. I believe the first one was 1894 by the same artist. But this one is called A Friend in Need, and it's one of 16 oil paintings

by Cassius Coolridge, originally commissioned to sell cigars. So all of the dogs doing stuff paintings were painted for cigar ads, and out of the 16 they're playing poker in nine of them. So the dogs playing poker were the Joe Camel of their day? Oh I guess so, I guess so. Wow, I had no clue it was a cigar commercial. Yeah, I thought it was just a cheesy painting cliche, like sad clowns, but I guess it became one. Yeah, notably it's one of the first examples of kitsch to ever exist.

So that's how it's secretly a conspiracy theory by the tobacco industry to advertise it to children Whenever I see that painting, I'm hungry for a cigar And he is a professional animator who has been in Silverman's, you know episode director position You know, he hears this line delivery by Dan Caslone and he's like I am taking on myself to animate this whole thing Like if you feel so inspired to be like I'm'm going to do this scene or I'm going to do this moment here. Is that like a tough, you know, just time of balance thing and a work balance thing to do in an episode? Yeah, for sure. There's definitely been times as, yeah, supervisor and director where I'll

just be like, oh, I really want to do this scene because I have like an idea of how this is going to go. When I was animation directing on Venture Brothers, I was lucky to get a lot of scenes that would have like really good line reads on them. That was a show I really liked hearing the line reads and then really trying to do specific acting for them. But yeah, I would say it's all down to the time that you have and how many people you have working with you to kind of split everything up. And yeah, sometimes there's like some line reads or some like kinds of action that are so fun

that you just want to do them yourself. And by the end of the season, Silverman will do it again at the end of the production season. He'll do it again with the big sugar speech too. Oh, for sure. Yeah. But that freak out is like pure Silverman and also in that it breaks Simpson's rules too, but who cares? It looks perfect.

You know, I have yet to see Bram Stoker's Dracula. I was going to watch it before this podcast recording, but it's about to play at the Rio in Vancouver and I want to see it on the big screen for my first time watching the movie so I apologize to all of our listeners but I get all the references are you gonna do it as a double feature with Megalopolis no next I'll be watching Twixt remember Twixt it's the movie he made before Megalopolis he made another massive failure that is weird it is funny Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula so many possessives I watched it as a kid because of this to

get all the references and obviously like the amazing cinematography totally wasted on me as a kid and same with like all of the Psychosexual elements to it as well flying over my head too, but you can say look it's head movie. It's Ted Theodore Logan Did people like his portrayal in that now I wonder I definitely know it was made fun of back then No, I mean for a sympathetic as we are to Keanu and how much we like him to tell us to buy a video game I think we can look back at this and say it was a huge mistake and I think there have been on the record interviews where the director or even he has said I was concentrating so hard on doing the accent that I forgot how to act. Oh no. That's rough. I don't think there has been a reevaluation of his performance it It doesn't ruin the movie

It just it's what a lot of people take away from that movie. Hmm. Winona Ryder though. She's I remember her being good I watched it a while back again like in the last decade But I've got a 4k sitting on my shelf that I also intended to watch before this But I watched three versions of that Twilight Zone thing. There's no time for Bram Stoker's Dracula. I Have seen Dracula dead and loving it though. Does that help? That's funny but I watched three versions of that Twilight Zone thing. There's no time for Bram Stoker's Dracula. I have seen Dracula dead and loving it though. Does that help? That's funny. Yeah, it has parodies of the Bram Stoker's Dracula in it,

I'm pretty sure. Yeah, I think Leslie Nielsen is made to look like Gary Oldman in Bram Stoker's Dracula, right? And multiple other characters too, including the Renfield in it is made to look like the Tom Waits Renfield from the Francis For Coppola version Which I mean Ian did you was this one of the ones that maybe Simpsons would have drove you to watch as a kid? To get references. I didn't watch it as a kid

I watched it way later like in college and it was like, oh, yeah Oh, okay, like it suddenly you know, things hook together. But yeah, I think this movie, I don't know, it was a live-action movie, so as a kid I wasn't excited to seek it out, but yeah, I did enjoy it once I did see it, but I feel like as a thing I watch in college, now I have to watch it again. I have to re-watch all the movies I liked as a kid. You rewatch them in college, and then you have to rewatch them as an adult and be like, okay, my college brain thought it was this,

and now I think it's that, you know? That's very true, yeah. I find myself rewatching a lot of movies I really liked in my 20s and thinking about them as someone who actually has life experience. Yeah. Last thought on Bram Stoker's Dracula, the other thing I remember it as a kid

beyond this parody was long before I saw it, I feel like it got advertised very heavily in like comic books because I remember that theatrical poster of just like the statue or wall sconce, whatever you call it like that. Yeah, right? I totally remember that ad. Yeah, I feel like it was in every comic book at the time.

Yeah, absolutely, and video game magazines, because I think they were honestly advertising the video games to us, the kids who couldn't see the movie. Right. That's right, yeah, I think, maybe because they thought like, hey, we've got Keanu Reeves,

and we've got Winona Ryder in this, like teens will go see this movie that I think they were feeling. So in this version of it though, we begin with a news story about a business deal. Another local peasant has been found dead, drained of his blood with two teeth marks on his throat. This black cape was found on the scene. Police are baffled.

We think we're dealing with a supernatural being, most likely a mummy. As a precaution, I've ordered the Egyptian wing of the Springfield Museum destroyed. That's worth it. No, no, they're wrong! The creature they seek is the walking undead! Nosferatu, the swamp here! A vampire! Hehehe. Lisa, vampires are make-believe, just like elves, gremlins, and eskimos. In a completely unrelated story, Montgomery Burns has just closed a deal to buy the Springfield Blood Bank.

Oh, I'm very excited about this deal. We... Oh. Precious blood. Hmm about this deal. We Precious blood hmm business deal David Merkin's era is also the cops are as stupid and useless and garbage as they ever will be in the show And I just love it the cops can never Wigament is the other cops can never be too stupid for me like they jump to the conclusion that it's a mummy after seeing a cape that says Dracula and then they're burning like Renaissance paintings too. I think part of the joke behind this segment is everyone's IQ has absolutely bottomed out. Nobody understands that Burns is a vampire. The cops don't but Marge also doesn't

despite all the warnings and so many jokes are built around how obvious Burns is being, but only Lisa can understand it. Though maybe with the twist ending we have here, Marge is just playing dumb, huh? Oh, you know what? You're right, because it doesn't matter. I forget, oh, this entire time Marge is in league with Burns. No, I mean, it's meaningless.

I don't think that's why they're writing Marge that way, to be honest, but it's fun to imagine. They head off to terrifying Pennsylvania. Oh, also on the DVD, you can see the full layout Silverman did for Burns carefully licking up the trail of blood from his mouth too, which is really good. I think it's meant to sort of reference the very creepy bit early on in the movie where there's a little like cut from shaving on his straight razor that Gary Oldman's Dracula like licks up ravenously. You know as an Ohioan I really appreciated that Pennsylvania

joke. Oh yeah it was scary for you to go to Pennsylvania as well. Never crossed that border. Well I still just love Homer's filthy, filthy neck. It's the first time he's ever washed his neck as instructed to by Percival. He's very proud of how dirty the rag is. He's waving it around. The projection over the castle is sort of in the movie version. Have you guys seen it being used as the basis for a parody image I've been seeing around a lot on Twitter?

I don't know where it first came from, but I've been seeing it. It is a parody of the Castlevania cover, the NES cover. It's the castle and then burns up in the corner and then there's a drawing of Homer with a whip posed like Simon Cowell. Oh, that's great. Oh, that's cool.

Yeah, I've not seen that yet. Yeah just google Simpson's Castlevania you'll see it. Though they redraw it as the more vampire look of burns not the burns you see in the fade in this so just so I can be fully pedantic on which version is there. Well now we know that thevania in Metroidvania refers to Pennsylvania. Yeah that's where they all took place. Yeah. Pennsylvania, everyone is getting new abilities constantly throughout their lives.

Everyone's searching and doing action while doing them. Roast turkeys are just sitting around on the floor in Pennsylvania. When they get to the door, I wonder if it was a sensor node or just that it makes it funnier when he says, well, son of a bitch, like bitches cut off with a slam that it makes it a good punctuation. But I do wonder if they were told don't, you can't have all of

the word bitch in there. I think the joke is that it's cut off. I'm sure they could say that word on Fox at 8pm. Within a year, Bart's taunting us with using the word bitch in the correct context. We see Burns dressed as Gary Oldman's old man, Dracula style, and Smithers, very briefly, you see Smithers, he looks just like the Tom Waits Renfield, right down to like his weird finger like devices or things. I think they're meant to like hold his fingers in place.

I'm not really sure what their purpose is for Renfield, who's his assistant classically in Dracula stuff. Also, it's funny, we're covering this right after we just did Adam Sandler's Dracula movie. Oh. Less blood in that one. And also surprisingly the Adam Sandler one, they do not use the word queer as a pejorative.

Homer had a lot of learning to do. It wouldn't be until season eight that he would get over his homophobia. That's true. You know, and he's using the term instead of inuit. Like Homer needs to grow and listen. Thankfully this is a fantasy version of Homer. That's true.

I also just love, man, the way Homer says correction, free blood and just guzzled it down like is so I feel like I've had the like a correction. This bad thing is free Also great posing when Lisa is looking for the excuse to leave the way she is staring ahead and rubs the blood on Bart's face What a great drawing. I love that. Oh, it's very gross. Yeah They start their search through the place. Bart tips over a light fixture while saying, it's not like we're just going to stumble upon it.

And he's right. They don't. They stumble upon the laundry room. And then there's a joke right out of the Duck Twicey Looney Tunes short where the villain's secret hideout is lit up by a neon sign. Although I guess there was supposed to be a glowing neon arrow. It didn't come back the right way So that's why there's a big blank spot between the text on the wall. Oh, man I didn't even think of that being a duck twicey reference. That's perfect, right?

Which we covered on what a cartoon a long time ago. That was the great piggy bank robbery, right? Yeah. Yeah We talked about it with thatad, our pal Thad, who brought a ton of animation history to that one. But yes, after they head down the stairs, Bart still isn't convinced. It's no different than the basement in Grandpa's Rest Home. Another great joke that it's full of coffins. Applying a whole lot.

They're just stuffing the dead tenants in the basement. It's gotta be a social security scam, right? That they hide the bodies to collect their checks? That's some good lore. Well then Bart is finally convinced by the book, Yes, I Am a Vampire by Monty Burns, forward by Steve Allen, who was a very prolific writer of many things. Though I feel like what they're talking around on the commentary is that by 2003 Steve Allen had joined the parents television council to talk against violence on TV, including the Simpsons.

Yeah. Former guest. He was in Bart the murderer as the witness in the fantasy segment. Yeah. The faking Bart's voice with a blue dot over him. Yeah. Oh, that's right. He faked Bart's voice, right.

And at the same time or a few months after this, he would be appearing on The Critic giving Marty advice. So as Lisa is enthralled with the book, Bart starts going crazy. And this is another classic symptom thing of when they animate a reference, they just call it out of like, yeah, yeah, I've seen your Shemp. I've seen your Curly too. Yeah. This episode has imitations of three famous mutterings, Charles Nelson Riley, Shemp, and Curly. They all make distinct weird noises. And Bart has great faces too.

Also like his hair grows, like as a reaction shot too, right? Yeah, emotive hair, yeah. But they're surrounded by more mindless vampires. They run off, but Bart can't resist the super fun happy slide. When's he gonna be here again? And I love how his wee turns into a scream as he's confronted by Burns.

Well, if it isn't little... boy. Mom, Dad! Mr. Burns is a vampire and he has Bart! Why, Bart is right here. Hello, Mother. Hello, Father. I missed you during my uneventful absence. Oh, Lisa, you and your stories. Bart is a vampire. Beer kills brain cells. Now let's go back to that... thingy where our beds and TV is. You know him saying uh boy because he can't remember his name I forgot that even when Burns is a vampire and he's you know got his decent shadow and everything he still needs Smithers

there to tell him what the name of this family is. And he's like, Oh, Simpson family. Yes. Yeah. The way Bart acts, like his flat acting of a recently turned vampire is also very good and that they are able to make him pale while still being yellow in their color. I love the designs of all those vampire corpse people. Yeah.

They are the more freaky monster style guys, like the giant bat that Dracula turns into in the Coppola movie, right? Yeah. The vampires in this remind me of the designs for the zombies in the Simpsons arcade game. Yes, you're right. Yeah, they're like, they have full on green skin, yeah.

And does beer kill brain cells? Well, according to the Mayo Clinic, not truly Like as in literally do your brain cells die from drinking beer? No, but here's what the Mayo Clinic says alcohol is a neurotoxin that can disrupt communications of the brain It also affects the functions of brain cells This can lead to intellectual impairment headaches memory loss slow thinking slurred speech and trouble with balance and coordination memory loss, slow thinking, slurred speech, and trouble with balance and coordination. Excessive drinking can affect your nervous system,

causing numbness and pain in your hands and feet. So does it kill brain cells? Not officially, but no, I mean, it's not good for your brain. That's what the Mayo Clinic has to say. So Homer could pedantically say, hey, the Mayo Clinic says it doesn't kill your brain cells. No one had smartphones so he couldn't pull up a study.

And maybe that's what the studies were saying in 93 as opposed to now. I don't know. This is where there's the final deleted scene and it's the fully animated one that's on the DVD. So after you see Bart has become a vampire, this is the breakfast the next morning as Bart floats into the room. Good morning, family. Does my hair look okay? The bathroom mirror seems to be on the blink.

Grrrrrr! You see, Dad? Animals always know a vampire. Oh, Lisa, they probably just have rabies. What about Maggie? Well, you know how contagious it is. Always know a vampire. Oh Lisa. They probably just have rabies Well, you know how contagious it is. There's that special breakfast you asked for Bart. Oh, how come he gets mice and I get crummy old oatmeal That's a very funny joke they probably just have rabies I Love that. Well, you know, I can taste this like he doesn't care that Maggie has rabies as far as he knows. He's just like, eh, you know. He's got it too.

I forgot about that. That was a genuine laugh at that joke. And also, Homer is jealous of a pile of mice. Like, that's what he wants to be. I think when you watch it, you can see they messed up on Bart floating into the room. You can actually, like, see the cell layer on it. So maybe that was

the tipping point for it being cut. Yeah, you can see the edge of the cell like at the bottom, but yeah, I don't know. I feel like it fits so well into the show, but I don't know where they're going to get these precious seconds from. Yeah. See now if this just streamed directly to Disney Plus, if it was like a minute over, who cares? They can just just air It longer. I like when I see on a streaming show. It's like this one's 38 minutes. This one's 43. This one's yeah Well, we may get there someday with Simpsons when they go exclusive to Disney Plus eventually

They're trying it out this year. They got four exclusive full episodes. So, but this scene is also good, like storytelling wise, cause it is kind of the connective tissue. I mean, it works fine of like you see Bart's recently turned and then in the next scene, he's the leader of the lost boys gang. Like you can assume it just changed over time, but this helps you see Bart's evolution as a vampire, right? And also I guess the eating of the dead mice thing is like that's what a Desperate vampire will do if they can't get to a human in time though. I haven't eaten rats this whole time I think that a lot of the stuff with Renfield is him eating bugs and mice in the novel and in the movie

Oh, yeah, Tom waits as much not bugs that whole movie, which I feel like they didn't dead and loving it. They made that the comedic gag for him too. Right. Bart is here to let Lisa know that being a vampire has a lot to offer. Come join us, Lisa. It's so cool. You get to stay up all night drinking blood. And if you say you're a vampire, you get a free small soda at the movies. No! No!

Lisa, it's not like you have a choice here. Fine! How many times have I told you not to bite your sister? Wait a minute! You are a vampire! Quick! We have to kill the boy! How'd you know he's a vampire? You are a vampire! Quick! We have to kill the boy! How'd you know he's a vampire? He's a vampire? Ah! Ooh!

Homer, we gotta do something. Today he's drinking people's blood, tomorrow he could be smoking. The only way to get Bart back is to kill the head vampire, Mr. Burns! Kill my boss? Do I dare live out the American dream this is dangerous I wish we could have found a sitter for Maggie super fun happy side

no dad oh I guess killing will be fun enough now I have seen this a thousand times but the entire clip in Lisa's room I can just see every pose it's one of the most dynamic and expressive scenes in this episode Just like you are a vampire that shot where he's pointing him in the nose And it's the cameras pointing up from the floor at them and they're a little off model, but they're just so super expressive also Wes Archer has nothing to do this episode, but the extended twister mouth on stay up all night drinking blood That used to be my Halloween avatar until I married someone who would draw a new one for me every year Yeah, I see shots of this scene like pictures of it on Twitter all the time of people being like

Why doesn't TV animation look like this anymore? And it's true for an animated, rarely do they look as fun as that. Yeah, I mean, well, do you have an answer for that, Ian? Or what do you think? Why don't they? Oh, I think it's a personal thing. I do think that there is a preference for more shows to look a little flatter and a little more naive nowadays, especially like any adult sitcom that comes out. I think if you try to give it a cartoonier sort of look,

the people in charge who are probably not cartoonists on those shows will be like, well, why go through the point of doing this? I wanted a thing that just looked like Rick and Morty, so just do that. I mean, I don't know, that's just my opinion, but that's what I think. I mean, the Simpsons doesn't even in season five, the Simpsons doesn't always look like this. Like this is peak for them too. Absolutely.

Same with like, I felt bad for seeing David Silverman on like the hot seat for some YouTube video where somebody asked him like, they basically took that thing that went viral a little while ago of comparing the classic opening to the HD opening and they are showing him like, here, look at this cool swirl Marge's hair does when she's turned around and now look how what are turning around look like now. And he basically is, you know, explaining budget and time explanations for it. I mean, I'm sure he would love it to look more like that too. This is his episode. I would think he wants it to look that way. Sure, and I think, you know, I would say even Modern Simpsons is at least a little grandfathered

in like it gets to be cartoony at times. Even recent Simpsons episodes, but I would say if you're doing like a new animated adult sitcom, people are probably gonna be turned off by it being really cartoony, you know, at least that's what I've seen. Also, you know, speaking of Twitter, I remember one time for a prompt on Twitter, you said like, what's your favorite

like transformation scene in anime? I replied to you with the one of Bart in this bat thing, like, it's so good. Yeah, super fun. I love, this episode has, like, some great, like, transformation things and also just, like, you know, a lot of, like, fun cross dissolves as well. Like, later when Burns dies, too. And Silverman told us that he was very into that Bart transforming to a bad thing. Like he worked a lot on that specific shot to get it right. I believe it. Also that free small soda at the movies. That's basically what you get for joining. Most movie theater

changes like annual membership thing. Though it takes time to earn that free small soda, at least it's in a market. It took me seeing three movies before they finally were like, do you want a free small soda? I saved up for the free popcorn. Oh, and the smash through the window with like three cuts of it. Like that's amazing editing, right? Yeah. Yeah, it was really cool. I love that. I think it's a reference to something to me. It just reads as very anime or like Hong Kong, a Kung Fu movie. I think Silverman intentionally trying to sound very fancy calls it a Potemkin homage, you know, which would probably be the first time an editor did that in a movie in the Battleship Potemkin, that classic film. Takes Homer, even when Homer sees Bart about to bite her, he still is just going to warn

him about biting before it finally, finally hits him that he is a vampire. And you know what? On the commentary there, just like us, Matt Grayden kind of complains that he is a vampire and you know what on the commentary there just like us Matt Grady kind of complains that he's a vampire is very much like he was a zombie Yeah Homer's animation during the super fun happy slide like sort of like chicken wing dance. He's doing I guess It's an homage to Humphrey bear the Disney character was never popular, but you can see him at Disneyland, not in the flesh, but what's his frontier land? Henry, you go to Disneyland eight times a year.

Oh yeah, well, Critter County, which I think they renamed it to fit with the new Bayou style of the refreshed Splash Mountain Ride. But yeah, I think Humphrey Bear, you'll find him around there. He was a shorts star in the brief conservation era of the Disney shorts. The only one I remember is put it in the bag, which is about picking up trash. But are you a Humphrey expert, Ian? I'm not a Humphrey expert. I just remember him being paired with Donald multiple times. I would say not my favorite character, but hey, whatever gets you going Humphrey bear or not. Last time I was at

Disneyland and I think 2020, I got a veggie veggie dog at a Humphrey bear branded restaurant within Disneyland So thank you Humphrey bear for your vegan options You know Humphrey bear is more open than you think yes, Silverman credits Brad Bird for suggesting Oh make it like Humphrey bear because Homer is a bit like a big dumb bear So and also that the only reason he won't do a stupid thing is because killing will be fun enough. That's why he's This is like another scene in the Coppola Dracula which is a character named Lucy is turned and they corner her in her coffin and stab her to death and like especially the posing of the stake and the handing of

The stake the Lucy scene which I pulled up on YouTube just to watch that scene to be like, Oh yeah, yeah. Except Burns doesn't vomit blood on Homer like they do in the movie. That's a shame. The sound of Homer removing the steak from Burns's crotch. That is a great sound. Like the squishiness of it. It paints a picture. And then Homer finally pounds it into his chest the right way.

Like you said, the Dissolvian, when Burns' death is great as it is, he turns into ash, and then he briefly pops back out of ash to fire Homer, and then goes back down. So after all of this, Burns is dead, and the day is saved. It's a happy ending. Or is it? It's so nice having everything back to normal. I'm a vampire and I've come to suck your blood!

This cape is giving me a rash. Grandpa's a vampire? We're all vampires. But no, we killed Mr. Burns. You have to kill the head vampire. You're the head vampire? No have to kill the head vampire. You're the head vampire? No, I'm the head vampire. Ha ha ha ha!

Mom? Well, I do have a life outside this house, you know. Ah! Happy Halloween, everybody! Bye everybody! Lulululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululululul What do we do? I like this choice because as a kid, this joke blew me away. Just complete shock and surprise, and then thinking, wow, I guess you could do that with a joke. It was before we were calling things random,

you know what I mean? And yeah, I remember I laughed really hard at it the first time I saw it. Like, that's allowed? That it could just become the peanuts, Christmas special ending. And on top of that, like not just with the singing, but also the snow layer looks like it,

the dancing on the piano, all of it. And there's one little joke that I feel that the animation doesn't convey it or there was an animation error when they all inhale to do more of the song. A bit of pig pen style dust falls off of Homer, and it's just a few frames. I feel like it was supposed to be there the entire time, or supposed to have generated

as they were singing the song, but it's caught out in the commentary, but it is just maybe three frames, you can see it in. Yeah, I saw that dust, and I was wondering what was going on there. I see, yeah, some kind of aborted pig pen joke. I also love how Kavner cackles. She's having a lot of fun being the evil vampire here. You know, on the commentary, there is some discussion of who pitched this ending on the commentary. Silverman goes, yeah, this was Mike Reese, wasn't it? And then murky goes, no, no, it was me. I thought it'd be good to do that. In 2024, just in September, Mike Reese said again that it was him who did it. Oh,

did you see this? Interesting. Yeah. I remember when this came up in the commentary, somebody brings up Mike Reese and Dave Merkin takes credit. I mean, it's people remembering who came up with a joke. So who's to say who did it? But Mike Reese also takes credit for this. But any case, great joke. You can look up Mike Reese's September 2024 treat where he says, you know, and it like Charlie Brown Christmas, it can snow in the kitchen was my pitch. 31 years later, I see the gag on display at the San Francisco Cartoon Art Museum. And it's a photo of him posed in front of a cell from everybody going Lou, Lou, Lou, Lou, Lou, Lou, Lou, Lou. Like John Vede told us before, it's been so long ago, these guys,

maybe everybody agreed on it or somebody added on or whatever. It's hard to, as much as we love to do it on this podcast, it really is hard to police, unless you have like a stenographer in the room taking the minutes, you really can't guess who came up with what. And if you're listening

and you want more Charlie Brown chat, well, we covered the Christmas and Halloween special on the What a Cartoon feed. So check those out. Those are both a ton of fun. We're due for the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving some year, but not this year. Not this year. To confuse you with a Christmas ending in your Halloween special is a lot of fun to also avoid murdering Lisa on screen.

It is similar in style to the end of the next one in that it Bart just calls out. Well, yeah, me and you can't die on screen. That's against the rules. And then they do die, but they wake up from a dream and then turn inside out. Yeah. And I forget it every time I hear it because I just hear the snaps in the ending music, so I just hear the snaps in the ending music So I just think of it as an Adams family one, but they say on the commentary like no

No, the orchestration is electric guitar like Munsters So it's a it's a mashup which I never registered it as the Munsters electric guitar though. It is it is Yeah, I didn't think about that until they said it on the commentary. I've only ever thought oh, it's the Adams family Simpsons theme But listening to it now, it's like oh, yeah, I've only ever thought, oh, it's the Adams Family Simpsons theme, but listening to it now, it's like, oh yeah, I guess so. I mean, in the battle of themes, I do think the Munsters have a more fun theme. They're both perfect classic TV show themes. The Munsters are more fun, though I love the Adams Family more than the Munsters. I will tell everyone out there, go up and look the slower Munsters theme up. It has

lyrics. And it's not, we're the Monsters today, not that way. No, that's different. Don't look that up, please, I implore you. But then, and then, what is it? Was it Fallout Boy, My Chemical Remix, one of those bands for children, or people five years younger than me.

They did that song called Uma Thurman, which samples the Monsters theme, and I'm in a bar, I'm like, why is the Monsters theme playing? What's happening? It's an awesome riff, I understand, but you can, why is the Munsters theme playing? What's happening? It's an awesome riff, I understand, but you can't just take the Munsters theme out of context. Good riff, yeah. You know, when we were teens, when a rocker wanted to reference the Munsters, they'd call a song Dragula.

Yeah, exactly. And it would be in every video game. And then go on to direct a Munsters movie that feels like some sort of money laundering scheme. I don't know what's going on with that film. I've only seen clips and reviews making fun of it. I've never watched even like five seconds of it on its own, but it's not a real film. It's more like a Munsters fan film.

It's a great episode from beginning to end. While I guess I'll test it in a year when we redo number five, it is always between four and five for me is my favorite. I just love the animation in this one so much that I feel like five is still my favorite. Watch me say the opposite and be a hypocrite here for now when we cover five again. good, but five is still very great. This one I've said so much about it. I just, the peak of Simpsons animation, this is an outlier. They don't normally look like this and they're usually not allowed to look like this because macroning is a stickler for things being very on model, but they

trust David Silverman enough to let him do whatever he wants. And this is a great case of letting the artists have a lot of freedom. And this is why it was one of the smartest moves they did when Silverman's going to direct the movie. They're like, well, yeah, the smartest moves they did when Silverman's going to direct the movie. They're like, well, yeah, rough draft. That's the studio who's going to do the movie. Give them the best chance they could. Yeah.

Any final thoughts Ian? Uh, yeah, I guess, uh, this is just like a really solid Halloween episode. I feel like, yeah, again, I'm in agreement. Five, I usually is the one that I go to, but I think this is like a close second. You know, if you do a yearly rewatch of all of the Treehouse of Horrors, this is just a great one to put on. It's great to have one where like every segment is really good and there's just fun animation like throughout the episode. Thank you again, Ian, for being on our show. Can you tell people out there where they can

find you online? Is there anything also you want to plug? Hey, yeah, you can follow me at at IanJQ on most social media. Don't really have too much to plug, except you can watch Steven Universe on some streaming services. OKKO you can buy on Amazon or find other ways. Coming soon is Invincible Fight Girl, which I did some direction on which is going to be a really fun show. So check that out wherever you get your cartoons.

Oh, awesome. I've been waiting for that show. Finally. It's going to be watchable. No, I didn't know you worked on it. That's even more exciting. Oh yeah. I just did some animation direction on like two episodes. Fortunately, I couldn't stay for the whole season. What I saw and got to work on really, really fun, silly show. So yeah, check it out when you can. And your Twitter account is always a great follow. I mean, you share cool images and archival stuff that you've done when some of your work starts to resurface on Twitter. And you've got some creative opinions that I always like hearing too. I feel like I rarely speak my opinions nowadays, but I try to share as much cartoon stuff as I can.

So yeah. I loved your point about like OCs and how don't be so scared about like not sharing an OC because somebody could steal it or whatever. Oh, yeah. I mean, look, if I could recycle that opinion here, if anybody listening is doing anything creative, don't say, I'm going to do my creative idea later when I'm better at writing or better at drawing or whatever. Just do it now. And if it sucks, it sucks. Then you'll get better later and you can just redo it.

Who cares? You're allowed. That's allowed. You're allowed to do that. And writing, do not steal on your OC is legally binding. That's true. First, mail your OC to yourself. Right.

There are ways to do this. Don't open the envelope, but you'll have it. Yeah. But thank you so much as always, Ian. Yes, thanks for having me. This was great. Thanks again to Ian Jones-Courty for being on the show. Please check out all of his stuff

But as for us if you want to check out more of our stuff and get nearly 200 bonus podcasts that are all full-length head on over to patreon.com Slash talking Simpsons and sign up for five bucks a month You'll get all of our normal podcasts ad free and one week at a time And again, you'll get nearly 200 bonus episodes covering things like Futurama King of the Hill mission Hill the critic and Critic, and Batman the Animated Series. And that $5 a month also gets you new monthly episodes of both Talking Futurama and Talking of the Hill.

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Bob is talking about the What a Cartoon Movie Podcast. In addition to all of the ad free and early podcasts you get access to at 10 bucks a month, you also get our feature length film discussion where we go super in depth into an animated movie, just like we do a tree house of horror episode, which often means talking for five or six hours long. It's like you're getting three podcasts at once with a super in depth history and a scene by scene discussion. If you enjoyed all of this Halloween talk, I know you're going to love the one we just posted of Hotel Transylvania the Genndy Tartakovsky Adam Sandler Animated film which we had a whole lot of fun with the month before that we cover Jerry Seinfeld's B movie and this month

We are gonna be covering as the holiday season begins the Hanukkah Animated feature film eight crazy nights and we've done six whole years of what a cartoon movies. If you want to hear the full gigantic back catalog of so many different films that we have covered, we teased several of them that we've done in the past, including our longest one ever, six and a half hours about Who Framed Rides a Rabbit. Please sign up today at patreon.com talking simpsons. 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 called RetroNauts. That is a classic gaming podcast all about old video games.

You can find RetroNauts wherever you find podcasts or go to patreon.com slash RetroNauts and sign up there for two full length bonus episodes every month. And Henry, what about you? Follow me on social media at H-E-N-E-R-E-Y-G. I'm always posting a ton of fun stuff all over Twitter blue sky and I'm at talking Henry on Instagram And if you're in all of those places, you definitely should be following the official Twitter account of this podcast at talk Simpsons pod At talk Simpsons pod keeps you in the loop whenever new stuff comes out whenever there is a new podcast Remember, there's a new live show whenever we've got some new t-shirts, any of that stuff, you learn about it first on At Talk Simpsons Pod. And of course,

an easy to follow list of all of our previously released free podcasts is available to everybody at TalkingSimpsons.com. Thanks so much for listening folks. We'll see you again next time for season 15's the fat and the furriest and we'll see you then And now to make the leap from dreams to reality. Sorry, Homer. While you were daydreaming we ate all the donuts. Well there were a few left but we chucked them at an old man for kicks. Damn butters, I ain't dead yet!