Lisa” is one in a long line of “The Simpsons go to another city/country and interact with the local sights” episodes — “Bart, get out of the Spirit of St. Louis” — and is precedent for many, many “Lisa against the world” (“Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy,” “Lisa the Vegetarian) stories to come. By the time we get to the finale, with Bart stalling for time by convincing the vain Bob to sing the complete score to Gilbert & Sullivan’s “H.M.S. The reason the episode works so well is because Homer makes the perfect patsy, of sorts. Her name is Rachel Cohen and she just got into Brandeis.”. Things only get sillier from there. Glastonbury 2021 Canceled, But American Festivals Still Set on Fall Returns. It was a surprisingly good mystery with a perfectly Simpsonian ending. Two days before testing positive, Chappelle was pictured with Joe Rogan, Grimes, and Elon Musk in Austin, TX. This episode is a Trojan horse — hiding an emotional story inside a visually sumptuous package. And because of the “Treehouse of Horror” tradition, there was just so much material for the writers to pull from in their first foray in joking about the actual holiday. It’s also a star-making episode for regular cameo player Rainier Wolfcastle, who pronounces the hero’s catchphrase “Up and atom!” as “Up and at dem,” and responds to an onrushing tidal wave of acid with a monotone, “My eyes … de goggles, dey do nothing!”. Springfield is a true community — part of the show’s joy is the variety and familiarity of its characters. Except for that. He observes a neighbor commit a terrible act. All rights reserved. The long-awaited live-action-movie version of Radioactive Man is scheduled to shoot in Springfield, starring Rainier Wolfcastle in the title role. The Simpsons has addressed almost every grown-up topic under the sun, but this one’s pure wonderful throwback. Some fans criticize “That ’90s Episode” for ignoring the show’s past, but I’d argue there are few episodes of the show more deferential to it. Nelson beats up Bart after school and warns him to expect the same treatment the following day. Krusty’s debt, by the way, is $48. A riff on the Frank Capra/Jimmy Stewart movie, this episode is an early example of how extreme and committed Lisa could get when she glommed onto something she believed in. Also, the characters didn’t necessarily feel settled yet. It’s one of the best jokes The Simpsons has done in its last decade. Here, of course, the “something” is nothing less than America itself, the compromises and corruptions of which she is forced to confront after going to the nation’s capital following her victory in an essay contest. However, what made the decision controversial among fans, even those from New York — especially those from New York — is that in many ways, the episode is a celebration of the city, capturing through the show’s extremes both what’s terrific and terrifically terrible about New York. Stewart lends his unmistakable gravitas to Number One, the leader of the Freemason-like secret society the Stonecutters, until it’s revealed that Homer is the Chosen One. Based on an idea Conan O’Brien had before he left for Late Night, “Lisa’s Rival” introduces us to Allison Taylor (wonderfully voiced by Winona Ryder). That, in a nutshell, is the plot of “King-Size Homer,” in which the titular giant gains weight to be able to work at home (basically, he turns into a proto-blogger). These run the gamut from Mel Brooks–level shticky (Sideshow Bob telling the parole board that his “Die, Bart, Die” tattoo is “German for ‘The Bart, the’”) to subtle (Bob’s Night of the Hunter–styled “Love” and “Hate” tattoos read “luv” and “hat” because Simpsons characters only have four fingers), to so drawn-out that they verge on anti-humor (Bob stepping on rake after rake). While the plot follows Homer, Moe, and Lenny as they chase down Carl after he skips off to Iceland with their lotto winnings, the episode is truly a perceptive look at male friendship. Periodically, especially in later seasons, The Simpsons takes on an issue of the day and nails it. A parody of The Da Vinci Code and National Treasure, “Gone Maggie Gone” uses the puzzle-solving, conspiracy-mystery format to create a wholly unique and wonderful episode. Nelson invites Bart's classmates to his birthday party, but Bart and Martin convince the other kids not to go. In one of the series’ most ambitious, structurally daring episodes, “Trilogy of Error” is split into Homer’s Day, Lisa’s Day, and Bart’s Day, and they all intersect. Then the gurney is accidentally wheeled into the kindergarten class. # the simpsons # bart simpson # episode 8 # season 18 # nelson muntz # birthday # happy birthday # happybirthday # birthday girl # birthday boy # season 1 # birthday # happy birthday # episode 10 # broad city An extended parody of James Bond in general and You Only Live Twice in particular, this is an almost entirely absurd episode that gins up world-changing events so that they can be forgotten the following week. Then, in that story, Mr. Burns starts telling a story. It first aired on the Fox network in the United States on December 10, 2006. At the annual “Bi-Mon-Sci-Fi-Con,” Homer saves Mark Hamill’s life by carrying him away from a pack of ravenous nerds. Once you stop this car, I’m gonna hug you and kiss you. In classic Moe fashion, the main plot of “Moe Baby Blues” starts with a suicide attempt, where, before he can jump from a bridge, he catches Maggie (who had been flying through the air after a fender-bender). (“No more Simpsons movies! After all, it’s a part of us all, a part of us all, a part of us all. “A Totally Fun Thing That Bart Will Never Do Again”, 94. The Simpsons is partly about how the intelligent view the world, and Lisa often is the writers’ proxy. He is often drunk, he drives drunk, he does lots of things drunk. Initially there are fringe benefits but then Nelson becomes jealous when Bart plays with Milhouse. Primarily, it’s a story of Marge cheating to win a baking contest because she wants to be known as more than “the wife of a husband who doesn’t go to work.” The second plotline is a ridiculous arc in which, after Marge cuts all the naked pictures out of Homer’s Playdudes (The Simpsons’ Playboys), Bart finds them and starts enacting a Hugh Hefner–like lifestyle, just without the sex. But the B plot, which finds Maggie getting socked away in day care and plotting a prison-movie-style escape, is just as strong, sweet, and funny. “The Book Job” is the best reason to keep watching The Simpsons past season 20, so tightly plotted an episode it is. Nelson declares Bart his best friend after Bart is the only child to turn up for his birthday party. Fortunately, those suspicions couldn’t have been further from the truth. But “Duffless” finally calls him on the carpet for it. Shelbyville was oft-mentioned on The Simpsons before “Lemon of Troy,” but this was our first good look at it, expanding its world that much further. The Simpsons goes sex-positive. That’s what “Homerpalooza” is. The episode's title is a pun on The Odd Couple, emphasizing Nelson's styl… The rapper had to debunk false reports about the case against Tory Lanez on Twitter. Bart auditions for the role of the hero’s sidekick, Fallout Boy, but loses it to Milhouse, who’s an inch taller. Marge tries to get out of one of her periodic ruts by throwing a dinner party at the Simpsons’s home and inviting the Flanderses, the Hibberts, the Lovejoys, and the Van Houtens, but Milhouse’s parents have a fight that cracks open the fissures already weakening their marriage, leading them to divorce. Cherish your youth, “Bart on the Road” brilliantly suggests, because before too long, you’re working as a courier, hauling a cooler labeled “HUMAN EYES” through an airport in Hong Kong. But this impressively adult episode is not about Bart; it’s about the two grown-ups, who bond over their mutual sadness. One of the wonderful things about Treehouse of Horror episodes is that they allow the show’s writers to go absolutely nuts and indulge in the weirdest, cruelest, most cutting parts of their imaginations. Though it starts with the simple concept of Homer playing on the power plant’s softball team, it descends (or ascends) into madness when Mr. Burns brings in nine professional baseball players to act as ringers. Things come to a head on a field trip when the boys are trapped in a flooded cave- before reverting to normal. From here on out, “Menace Shoes” is a twisty tale about drugs, doppelgängers, and guest-star Patrick McGoohan. It’s midseason on TV, and there’s only one show that catches Homer’s eye: Police Cops, starring none other than … Homer Simpson. Few scenes throughout the history of television and movies capture NYC better than the one in which Homer tries to remove the boot on his car by chewing off one of the bolts. Or, in the words of Lisa, “You’re experiencing spiritual emptiness because your power has isolated you from other human beings.” Homer tries to do some good in the world by opening a Stonecutters Daycare Center, among other life-affirming activities, but his brothers quickly grow tired of their leader’s newfound virtue, and everyone leaves to form the No Homers’ Club. When Apu realizes Lisa’s potential to be a star goalie, she joins his hockey team and begins to outshine Bart. Like a lot of Lisa-centric episodes, this one cuts to the heart of a young girl’s struggle to invent an identity for herself without being dishonest about her nature. First, it helps that the jokes were rooted in fleshed-out characters and real insecurities Homer and Marge have. He pays with a $50; the Don makes change. The show’s crowning touch is the sudden and unexplained appearance in the Simpsons household of Poochie’s doppelgänger, a teenager named Roy who, calls Homer “Mr. Already a subscriber? Leading the charge is Homer, until he learns that Apu isn’t from this country and he’s not supposed to be here. “If there had to be a bastardized version of Krusty, I’m glad it’s you,” Lisa tells her dad. This year, the show will be tackling Toy Story with one of its parodies, and the segment has … “Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace” is the cruel one, effectively riffing on Wes Craven’s “you dream, you die” conceit. From that point on, the two form an adorable yet undeniable, weird (not that sort of weird) bond. The show wanted to create an event around its season-six cliff-hanger, and it did just that. Lisa’s battle with the sexist Malibu Stacy doll company may be permanently stalled when her rival doll is dropped in favor of a last-minute hat upgrade, but it still results in Lisa’s strongest feminist statement on the show yet. Watch them and their deadly acrylic nails in the moody music video. The attic story is actually a twin story: Apparently, the creature rattling around upstairs is Bart’s conjoined twin Hugo, an id creature à la The Dark Half who’s chained up for everyone’s protection and subsists on fish heads. (Lisa: “Oh my God! That name again is Mr. Plow.” It’s simple, vaguely palindromic, and catchy enough for children to carry with them all their lives. Evelyn’s also a fan of Marge’s keen fashion sense, and she invites the entire Simpsons family to the Springfield Country Club. It’s a poison-pen letter to commerce interfering with art (Homer, who eventually voices the character, destroys his new gig by offering dim-witted notes of his own), but the dose goes down easy thanks to the sweetness of Lisa and Bart, who point out that every great TV show starts to seem tired if it’s around long enough, and that it’s not a bad idea to remember that their creators are giving fans hundreds of hours of entertainment for free. With the public on his side, Bob decides to run for mayor of Springfield, despite being an ex-con who recently tried to murder a young boy. She can’t remember her life before it, she says, which prompts Homer and Marge to tell her the saga of how the instrument came into their lives. By focusing their defining characteristics — Lisa’s stern activism and Abe’s blundering old age — this episode builds story lines that force them to tackle these traits head-on. “Hurricane Neddy” is a dangerously funny episode, but it’s also an intense character study. It’s as meta as “The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show,” though in a different way. Her new persona is an anti-intellectual “cool” girl. Homer grows sick of paying a ridiculous amount of money to see a movie only to be bombarded by 20 minutes of deceptive commercials and trailers before the film even begins, so he begins downloading them illegally online. It doesn’t last long, and Homer eventually turns himself in. What makes “Lisa’s Rival” so pivotal is that it drives home that Lisa is not a super genius, incapable of relating to a city of peons; she’s just a very smart young lady who wants to meet even an average person. It’s simple work, but he likes it and he does it well. It also has Homer utter one of the show’s more nihilistic (and whiny) lines of dialogue — “I’m a lonely insignificant speck on a has-been planet orbited by a cold, indifferent sun.”. The success of that verse leads the pair to the prestigious Wordloaf Literary Conference (a play on the Bread Loaf Conference) and results in a hilarious takedown of the literary world. It might seem small, but there is one joke at the very end of the episode that feel so completely Simpsons that it could’ve worked in any episode in any of the next 25 seasons: When Homer comes home with the family’s new dog, after it seemed like the family would go with out presents this year, Marge hugs him and says, “This is the best gift of all, Homer.” Adding, “Yes, something to share our love and frighten prowlers.”. Plus, the Brokeback Mountain kicker where Bart hugs his Nelson vest while Nelson shouts, “Haw haw, I touched your heart!” nails The Simpsons’ mix of bite and heart with one joke. “Skinner’s Sense of Snow” turns every kid’s nightmare — attending the only school in your district to remain open during a storm — into a riotous dream. The show is never afraid to spin more contradicting details to its biography, and that’s half the fun of keeping up with the many seasons of The Simpsons. Nothing gets by it. The most shocking thing about it (in a good way) is how funny the show can still be this late in the game. Homer is ready to ship all the foreigners out of the country because he has to pay an extra $5 per month, but once he realizes this would include a friend, he begins to fight Proposition 24. In its original run, the episode received 8.29 million viewers. There’s only one problem: Homer hates New York City. As close to a perfect half-hour as TV has produced, “Cape Feare” springs the giant-footed maniac Sideshow Bob (Kelsey Grammer) from prison and returns him to Springfield on a mission of revenge, with musical interludes. “Lisa’s Rival” shows what happens when she meets her match. Finally, he is airlifted and safely placed inside an ambulance, only for the ambulance to instantly crash into a tree and for his gurney to roll out the back. As The Simpsons turns 30, a superfan picks the best 20 episodes ever. It’s proof that the extended Simpsons family can be as complex as the core group. To quote something showrunner Mike Scully once said in an interview, “Guns in the hands of people like Homer Simpson are bad.” But an episode about it? Some of the jokes are so knowing that they verge on Woody Allen-style cultural-insiderism; when Bart asks Lisa why she knows so much about Judaism, she replies, “I have a Jewish imaginary friend. Marge wants to go on a nice, peaceful vacation with the family, but Bart and Lisa have other bird-sanctuary-less ideas. It’s a theme that runs through a series that is written by a bunch of Harvard nerds, but is especially well-articulated here. Bart gets into a fight with Nelson Muntz, the school bully, while defending Lisa and the cupcakes that she baked for Miss. You could probably organize a wickedly entertaining marathon consisting only of episodes in which Krusty interacts with Bart and/or Lisa. An homage to Rear Window — there are two moments when Bart literally sees a similarly injured Jimmy Stewart staring back at him through his telescope — “Bart of Darkness”’s two plots work hand in hand. Search for "The Haw-Hawed Couple" on Amazon.com, Title: After Bart chucks her saxophone out the window, Lisa is heartbroken. Think Go and Run Lola Run, but with poor grammar, fake addresses, thumbless buffoons, and hillbillies picking up hitchhikers. 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