The Simpsons: The Complete Eighth Season
August 13, 2006
Man is it great to be in August, the dog days of summer are slowly winding down, the blistering heat is behind us, the crappy summer movie season is coming to an end, the amazing New York Mets are leading their division by 13 games and seem destined to steamroll their way to the N.L. pennant, the World Series of Poker has just concluded and ESPN is set to run Jamie Gold’s charmed run to 12 mill and poker immortality, and best of all, Fox has blessed us with another season of “The Simpsons” on DVD. Of the above catalogue, I can take or leave the summer heat, I’ll save my joyous Mets gushing for October, and come back in four or five years when yours truly is making his mark at the WSOP, which leaves us with my beloved Simpsons DVD’s, a bi-annual celebration commencing the release of yet another brilliant, classic season from the greatest television show of all time, and this one is special, because by all accounts, most die-hard fans will tell you that the ’96-’97 eighth season of Fox’s famed comedy was the end of what we now call “The Golden Years”, that string of seasons from roughly 1991 onward where the show could do no wrong, producing one immaculate, hilarious, and often warm hearted 23-minute masterpiece after another. With the exit of executive producers Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein after the eighth season “The Simpsons” found itself for the first time being run by somebody who hadn’t been around in the glory years of “Marge vs. the Monorail” and “Black Widower”, and the result was a series that for the first time started to show it’s age, repeating plot lines and increasingly stupefying Homer Simpson from working class hero to incomprehensible nitwit (this drastic change happens more from seasons 11 on, but nine and ten saw the beginnings), but we’ll get to the subtle changes in post-Golden Years ‘Simpsons’ this winter when season nine is released, for now we can still revel in the brilliance that was a show still batting .1000, with seemingly nothing to suggest that the shear genius would ever stop.
As was always the case in previous seasons, season eight’s 25 episodes, run for the second, and last year by Oakley and Weinstein, features an array of far reaching plots, classic quotes, and the kind of perfectly grounded, sometimes stinging satire the show was renowned for during its great early run, but mostly it was about Homer, his family, and Springfield’s secondary citizens to once again find themselves in remarkable situations that usually end in some kind of hilarious humiliation. Homer himself is always good for widespread ridicule from the townspeople, and he gets it numerous times in the season, from his painfully unmatched boxing bout with Drederick Tatum in “The Homer They Fall”, to his spotting an alien that nobody believes exists in “The Springfield Files”, and his short run as the voice of Poochie the Dog, a character everybody hates, in “The Itchy and Scratchy and Poochie Show”, Homer always seems on the brink of idol worship (season five’s “Deep Space Homer”, and season six’s “Homer the Great”), but somehow something, usually his own miscalculations with the situation, ruins it. Besides Homer and his mishaps (though he does have a fleeting glory in “In Marge We Trust”, when he’s recognized as Mr. Sparkle, an advertising icon on a Japanese dish soap box), most of the season’s best episodes feature supporting players, like Ned Flanders losing everything and questioning God’s motives in “Hurricane Neddy”, Seymour Skinner finding love, and the town’s gossip in “Grade School Confidential”, Sideshow Bob building a concrete dam with the help of his brother Cecil (David Hyde Pierce in a funny “Frasier” homage) in “Brother From Another Series”, and the one-time appearance of the brilliant Mary Poppins-esque character Shary Bobbins (“An original creation, like Ricky Rouse, or Monald Muck”), who magically comes to help Marge deal with her insane family, in the musical episode “Simpsoncalifragilisticexpiala(ANNOYED GRUNT) cious”. Elsewhere in the season, Troy McClure hosts a trilogy of potential spin-offs, including a riotously cheesy family variety hour in “The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase”, Bill Clinton and Bob Dole are abducted by Kang and Kodos in “Treehouse of Horror VII”, Homer goes on a soul searching psychedelic trip after eating Mexican insanity peppers, and meets a coyote voiced by Johnny Cash, in “The Mysterious Voyage of Homer”, Lisa harbors a crush for school bully Nelson in “Lisa’s Date With Destiny”, Bart gets a super dog but comes to miss Santa’s Little Helper in “The Canine Mutiny”, and in the finale, Lisa joins Bart’s military academy when everything else fails to stimulate her need for authority in “The Secret War of Lisa Simpson”, a sweet episode like season six’s “Lisa on Ice” that shows how much Bart ultimately cares about his braniac little sister, who he plots to destroy in the earlier ep “My Sister, My Sitter”.
I’ve seen these episodes hundreds of times, and know them inside out, so choosing which to include in a top ten list was, like always, an arduous task, but after some soul searching I finalized a definitive list of season eight’s best episodes, so here now are ten brief reviews of the ten best from the last truly perfect season of “The Simpsons”.
10. The Twisted World of Marge Simpson: When Marge quits her group of Investorettes after a disagreement on how to invest their money she buys into a Pretzel Wagon franchise, but only succeeds when Homer reaches out to Fat Tony for help. “Did you tell the mafia they could eliminate my competitors with savage beatings and attempted murder,” she asks Homer angrily. “In those words,” he replies, “yes.” Both of the season’s Marge episodes (including “In Marge We Trust”, where she becomes the church Listen Lady when Reverend Lovejoy loses his passion for his work) are top notch, but this one stands apart because of the mob war at the end between Tony’s gang and the Japanese Yakuza Marge’s rivals hire for protection, and for a guest turn by Jack Lemmon as the Pretzel Wagon’s franchise owner Frank Ormand, who gives a speech about territory (“wherever nacho penetration is less than total, you’ll be there”) straight out of “The Grapes of Wrath”.
9. Homer vs. the 8th Amendment: Season eight featured no less than 16 writers, most of them with just one lone script, a contrast to the earlier years where a handful of geniuses would crank out multiple scripts per season, but famed scribe John Swartzwelder, who penned this old timey masterpiece about prohibition in Springfield, had five produced; literally 1/5 of the season was his alone, a remarkable feat considering the quality of each singular script. When Bart is caught on camera drunk at the St. Patrick’s Day parade, alcohol is banned in Springfield, prompting Homer to bootleg homemade beer, and other concoctions (like the famous Bathtub Mint Julep) as the Beer Baron, who is hounded by the stiff new chief of police, Rex Banner (guest Dave Thomas). In the end, Banner is defeated by a town charter that says prohibition had been repealed almost immediately after it was enforced in the ‘20’s, and Homer celebrates with his now classic toast: “To alcohol, the cause of –and solution to- all of life’s problems.”
8. The Springfield Files: Along with “The Mysterious Voyage of Homer”, this episode features Homer at his most emotionally despondent, when nobody believes his claims that he saw an alien one night in the Springfield woods. “It’s just that people who claim they’ve seen aliens are always pathetic lowlifes with boring jobs,” says Lisa, “oh, and you, dad.” When the alien is revealed to be a doped up Mr. Burns, the whole town gathers to sing “Good Morning Starshine”, including Chewbacca in a “Homer Was Wrong” T-shirt, in one of the show’s most bizarre episodes to date, which also features the ‘X-Files’ characters Scully and Mulder (Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny), and for some reason Moe harboring a killer whale in the back of his bar.
7. Mountain of Madness: A brilliant Homer/Burns Swartzwelder episode that finds the two trapped under an avalanche during an employee retreat to the mountains, where they slowly come to appreciate each other’s company, before going insane and paranoid with cabin fever. When the cabin is freed from the snow by a blown gas tank, hurdling recklessly down the mountain, Homer prays to God for help, “Oh Lord, protect this rocket house and all who dwell within the rocket house.” I’d say the rocket house quote alone makes this mid-season episode a classic, but Burns’ army of snowmen, which he thinks are real (“206 bones, fifty miles of small intestine, fully, pouting lips, why, this fellow is less a snowman than a God”), and the power plant’s disastrous fire drill in the beginning puts it over the edge.
6. A Milhouse Divided: The rare ‘Simpsons’ episode to feature a plotline that would carry on past one episode (see also Edna and Skinner’s relationship in “Grade School Confidential”), “A Milhouse Divided” parallels the rocky marriage of Homer and Marge with the divorce of Kirk and Luann Van Houten, who seemingly split while playing a game of charades during Marge’s dinner party. Luann rebounds by dating an American Gladiator named Chase, Kirk cuts a demo called “Can I Borrow A Feeling?”, Milhouse reaps the benefits of being the only child of two guilty parents, and Homer begins to worry that his marriage, “built on a solid foundation of routine”, is in danger when he finds frozen hot dogs thawing in the sink. Kirk’s rendition of his song at Homer and Marge’s wedding vow renewal is both hilarious and painfully pathetic, which is pretty much how you sum up the character, but the funniest single scene in the episode is when he gets fired from his job at the cracker factory. “Kirk, crackers are a family food, happy families,” says the executive, “maybe single people eat crackers, we don’t know, frankly, we don’t want to know. It’s a market we can do without.” “So that’s it, after twenty years,” says Kirk, “so long, good luck?” Answers the exec coldly, “I don’t recall saying good luck.” In a season filled with humiliations, that may be the funniest, and harshest, one of them all.
5. Burns, Baby Burns: Written by future show runner Ian Maxtone Graham, this episode belongs yet again to Homer and Mr. Burns, but with the help of Rodney Dangerfield playing Burns’ long lost son Larry, who gets “no regard” from the old man when he comes to town and befriends the equally sloth-like Homer Simpson. When Larry can’t win over his father’s love, Homer suggests a fake kidnapping, and the two end up on the run from the law, setting up one of the season’s best sight gags: Homer and Larry ducking into a costume shop, presumably for disguises, with two figures promptly emerging as an organ grinder and a gorilla, only the two aren’t who we think they are, as we see Homer and Larry crouching in the shop’s bathroom, clueless and scared. Dangerfield’s puns are great in this episode (“this guy’s got more bread than a prison meatloaf”), and there’s an especially funny scene at the end where a party breaks out of thin air, ala “Caddyshack”, but that costume shop sight gag is beyond clever, and one of the best examples of how cautiously the show goes about setting up the audience for a payoff that unexpectedly comes as the opposite of what you were expecting. Comedy 101, ‘Simpsons’ style.
4. Homer’s Enemy: One of the season’s best new characters, Frank Grimes (voiced by Hank Azaria) has a grudge against Homer in this classic late season episode that slyly suggests that the bumbling Homer may in fact be the luckiest dumb guy on the face of the planet. Grimes is a nerdish, put upon self made man who is given a job by Burns after seeing a Kent Brockman news piece about Grimes’ unlucky life (Burns quickly forgets him when he sees an equally uplifting piece on a heroic dog he later names executive VP), but comes to loathe Homer for his seemingly charmed life of sloth and stupidity. When Homer invites Grimey over for supper Grimes is flabbergasted to see Homer’s beautiful family, his big house, his lobster dinner, his Grammy award, and his pictures of Gerald Ford and outer space (“what, you’ve never been?”), and when Homer somehow wins the plant’s children’s model building contest, it puts him over the top: “I can’t stand it anymore, this whole plant is insane, insane I tell you.” In a future episode Frank Grimes Jr. would come to terrorize Homer for killing his father (Grimes dies while mimicking Homer’s unsafe work habits), but it’s a pale comparison to this brilliant Swartzwelder ep which also features a B-plot involving Bart and an abandoned factory he buys for one dollar at auction, another outstanding coincidence that builds up in Grimes’ understanding of Homer Simpson as the ultimate middle class shlub with nothing but good luck and riches. Of course we know none of that is true, which makes Grimes’ ultimate demise because of it all the more hilariously tragic.
3. Bart After Dark: There’s usually at least one stand alone great musical number in any given season of “The Simpsons”, and season eight’s comes at the end of this classic that finds Bart working at Springfield’s oldest brothel, the Maison Derriere. After destroying a priceless gargoyle on the brothel’s roof, Homer orders Bart to go work for Belle, the madam of the house, while Marge and Lisa are away in Alaska cleaning rocks after an oil spill, but when Marge returns to find what Bart has been doing, she leads a moral crusade to have the burlesque house torn down. The town meeting she leads at city hall is one of the funniest scenes of the season, but the showstopper at the end, titled “We Put the Spring in Springfield”, a number straight out of “A Chorus Line”, only raunchier, is the dynamite that makes the episode so special. The lyrics (“we’re that little extra spice that makes existence extra nice, a giddy little thrill at a reasonable price”) rightfully won an Emmy award in ’97, and barring Homer’s “Garbage Man Can” number in season nine’s “Trash of the Titans” (also an Emmy winner), this might be the last truly spontaneous instance where the entire town gathered for a song that didn’t seem forced or out of place. When Marge shows up on the scene late to find that everybody now loves the house she demands to hear the song for herself, but Flanders says it all in return, “Gee Marge, it really was a spur of the moment kind of thing.” Ah, the genius, that such a detailed, full blown Broadway number is, in the end, just another daily occurrence for the insanely frenzied population of Springfield, USA.
2. Homer’s Phobia: The most famous episode of the season, and the one that makes most of the all time ‘Simpsons’ best lists, “Homer’s Phobia”, an Emmy winner for Best Animated Program, was kind of controversial in ’97 because of Homer’s homophobia when a gay local shop owner befriends the family, but really the episode couldn’t be more harmless, as Homer’s boorishness and single-mindedness lose out in the end to his own sympathetic reasoning in finally understanding a person for a person, not by race or sexuality. Of course John (played with much delight by John Waters) has to first save Homer’s life, from a herd of rampaging reindeer, for him to finally come around and see the light. This episode, while groundbreaking, is still just silly enough not to take too seriously, especially in the scene where Homer takes Bart – who he thinks might be gay – to a peculiar all male steel mill (“hot stuff, coming through”) that turns into a gay disco at closing time (“we work hard, we play hard”). The episode may be renowned for it’s liberal take on homosexuality, but this is “The Simpsons” after all, and that gay steel mill is as hilariously rebellious and surreal as the show ever got, and it’s just one of the countless double-edged jokes in the episode that makes it so delightfully camp, or as John might say, so tragically ludicrous.
1. You Only Move Twice: “Homer’s Phobia” might be the most significant episode of season eight, but this Swartzwelder masterwork, the first episode of the season following the Halloween special, is hands down the funniest, thanks in no small part to a brilliant Albert Brooks performance as Homer’s new boss, and not so closet super villain Hank Scorpio. The premise: Homer and his family are moved to the beautiful, seemingly perfect Cyprus Creek when Scorpio’s Globex Corporation offers Homer a handsome new job (only after Smithers turns it down), but only Homer is happy in his new position – Bart is miserable at school, Marge is lonely and bored in a modern house that eliminates the need for cleaning, and Lisa is allergic to everything in the forest. Meanwhile, to Homer’s complete ignorance, his boss is slowly taking over the East coast with his doomsday device in a plot that apes, and satirizes the James Bond franchise with it’s own brand of ridiculous humor (Bond even shows up in one scene as “Mr. Bont”, who Homer innocently secures – “I tackled a loafer at work today”- knowing little of Bont’s impending fate). Everything in this episode clicks, from Bart’s hilariously pathetic Leg-Up program at school (where all of the kids sound like Ralph Wiggum), to Smithers’ opening jingle (“I work for Monty Burns, m-m-m-m-m-m-m Monty Burns”), but it’s the banter between Brooks and Dan Castellaneta that really shines. Whether discussing where Homer can get work hammocks for his team (“oh, the Hammock District”), to Homer’s soul searching need for guidance about what to do with his family (“fine, let them go, stay with me, we’ll go bowling”), in the middle of a governmental raid on Scorpio’s fortress of doom, the two actors never miss a beat, lending an improvisational feel to Swartzwelder’s meticulously detailed absurdist script. In a season with memorable first time supporting characters like Kirk Van Houten, Cecil, John, Frank Grimes, and Shary Bobbins, Scorpio is the craziest invention of them all, and in the hands of a pro like Albert Brooks, and the words of John Swartzwelder, he’s the reason this Bond spoof is the best of the series’ last completely great season.
“The Golden Years” come to a close with these 25 episodes, which will forever live, along with the previous seven seasons, on DVD as the most accomplished run of comedic genius in the history of television. I may be an obsessive Simpsons geek, but I dare anybody to challenge that claim, one look at Hank Scorpio and Homer Simpson discussing hammocks, Kirk Van Houten singing “Can I Borrow A Feeling?”, and Larry Burns telling his pops to “make with the yackity-yack-yack” for his dinner guest, Homer, and I think you’ll find it’s physically impossible to argue against.
“The Simpsons: The Complete Eighth Season” is in stores now featuring a collectable Maggie head as a protective box cover. Needless to say, it’s my must have pick of the summer.
by Adam Suraf