The Simpsons: The Complete Seventh Season
December 4, 2005
The seventh season of “The Simpsons”, one of the last of the so-called Golden Years (eight is my count), is out on DVD this Tuesday, and since it’s always an occasion in my house, or more specifically, in the tiny room where I sit by myself obsessing over stuff like this, so when the greatest show of all time (again, by my count), gets a new, spiffy release, it’s time once more to celebrate. A lot happens to our favorite yellow-skinned family and their crazy town in the seventh season, which ran during the ’95-’96 television season (ten years ago already, how time does fly), not the least of which was the resolution to Season Six’s big Who Shot Mr. Burns cliffhanger. If you followed the various clues spread out throughout Part One than the writers drove you to think Burns’ lapdog Smithers was the culprit, and indeed, in the later episode “The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular”, a kind of variation on the clip show format hosted by Troy McClure, a deleted scene shows what would have happened had that occurred, but the mystery was eventually solved when Burns points the finger at Maggie, the Simpson baby, whose only crime was that she didn’t want the lecherous old man stealing her green lollipop, and Springfield not residing in Texas, no state in the country was going to convict a baby. That wrapped up neatly, and in the best kind of mystery story, very few people actually got it right, which is a testament to the cleverness of the writers, who had the gumption to turn sweet little Maggie into a potential murderer. Whether you thought the resolution was a cop out or not, it was a good start to the new season, a season with stories stretching far and wide, from Homer joining a rock tour as a featured performer, to Bart driving he and his friends to Branson, Missouri to see Andy Williams, and then to Knoxville, Tennessee to see the World’s Fair (14 yeas too late; it’s now a wig depot). The stories might not have the vintage feel of “Lisa’s Pony”, “The Way We Was” or “Mr. Plow” anymore, but for every 23-minute episode, no show in its seventh season has ever packed in so much and still been so original and possess the same charm, wit, and satire that got it though its best seasons so gloriously.
A rundown of the more memorable story lines from the season starts with the Burns resolution, just because it was so big at the time, but I don’t think it’s one of the funniest episodes of the season (the “Twin Peaks” references seem dated today), so we’ll leave it alone and pay more attention to other groundbreaking happenings, like Krusty faking his own death after Bart accidentally exposes his tax cheating to the IRS, Lisa’s discovery that town hero Jebediah Springfield was really George Washington enemy Hans Sprungfeld, a silver-tongued pirate, Marge’s brush with Springfield’s elite in “Scenes From the Class Struggle in Springfield”, and Grandpa’s Nazi painting theft in the action-packed war comedy “The Curse of the Flying Hellfish”. The sweetest two family stories of the season are “Mother Simpson”, with Homer’s long lost mother coming home to explain her absence, and “Home Sweet Homediddly-Dum-Doodily”, where the Simpson kids have to go live with the Flanders while Homer and Marge take parenting classes after welfare agents find the house in a state of disarray, and Maggie, wearing Bart’s Lisa-intended “Stupid Baby” sign on her chest, eating from the dog bowl as babysitter Grandpa sleeps on the couch in his own filth (says the inspector, “stupid babies need the most attention.”) Guest voices for the season include golfer Tom Kite, helping Homer with his swing in ‘Class Struggle’, Bob Newhart eulogizing Krusty in “Bart the Fink”, Donald Sutherland as the town curator who opposes Lisa’s Hans Sprungfeld theory, Christina Ricci as one of Lisa’s cool friends in the hilarious summer vacation ep “Summer of 4 ft. 2”, and Paul McCartney, the final of the three living Beatles to do the show, as Apu’s close friend (“Back then I was known as the fifth Be-atle”), in the Homer vs. Lisa episode “Lisa the Vegetarian”. Obviously if I don’t stop here I could write a book treatment just listing the great story lines of the season (double the length filling it up with priceless quotes), but I’ll stop to focus on my biannual list of the season’s ten best episodes, a grueling selection process that includes much debate and erasing, but when it’s all said and done, it’s quite a list of good animated comedy. I’m biased, for sure, there’s no denying, but judge for yourself, study the list, take its suggestions, buy the set with the specially designed blue Marge head box, and enjoy.
X-X-X
10. Team Homer: Disgruntled that the local bowling ally won’t let him bowl on league night, Homer forms a bowling team with Moe, Apu, and Otto with Mr. Burns’ money, only Burns wants on the team, and what money wants, money gets. Says Moe about the unwelcome 104-year-old addition to the team, “Call this an unfair generalization if you must, but old people are no good at everything.” This funny buddy episode features a classic Skinner monologue about subsisting on a thin stew of fish and prawns while in a Vietnam POW camp, and Mr. Burns’ ether-induced hallucination of Homer as the Pillsbury doughboy.
9. Much Apu About Nothing: Written by future “Futurama” co-creator David X. Cohen, this satire on American patriotism and paranoia of foreigners, concerning Springfield’s attempts to adopt a closed border immigration policy, has one of the all time funniest Apu moments: decked out in a cowboy hat and red, white, and blue, he tries to pass himself off as a pure American to Homer, saying, in a bad faux Southern accent, “The Ny Mets are my favorite squadron”. Might be the first and last time that the Mets are part of a comedy joke without actually being the joke themselves.
8. The Day the Violence Died: Every “Itchy & Scratchy” centered episode of the early years of the show are all classics – “Itchy & Scratchy & Marge” from Season Two, “Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie” from Season Four, and “Itchy & Scratchy Land” from Season Six – and this John Swartzwelder penned episode is no exception, featuring Kirk Douglas as a bum who bankrupts I&S studios when it’s found that his design for Itchy was stolen in 1928. His restitution: 800 million dollars, with which he buys a solid gold house and a rocket car. There are many brilliant bits, but the “Steamboat Itchy” cartoon and the mock ‘70’s “Amendment to be” musical are standouts.
7. Radioactive Man: Another pitch perfect satire from Swartzwelder, “The Simpsons” most prolific, and consistently genius writer, finds a Hollywood studio choosing Springfield to shoot a big screen adaptation of the “Radioactive Man” comic book, with Rainier Wolfcastle as the superhero (“Up and at them”, is his botched catchphrase), and a reluctant Milhouse as his sidekick Fallout Boy. Naturally, the film is a disaster, and the production shuts down when Quimby’s excessive taxes bankrupt the idealistic Hollywood producers. There’s a funny Mickey Rooney cameo near the end, and Moe’s “Little Rascals” flashback is hilariously disturbing, but the best scene is the million dollar acid dump sequence that goes horribly wrong, burning everything in its site, including the lead actor, despite his director-demanded safety glasses; “My eyes,” he screams, “the goggles do nothing.”
6. Homerpalooza: The penultimate episode of the season is something of a Gen X flashback seen today, as Homer joins the Hullabalooza music tour as a cannon ball target, part of the freak show, and features such guest performers as The Smashing Pumpkins, Sonic Youth, Cyprus Hill, and a ticked off Peter Frampton. Ultimately, this large episode is just about Homer recapturing his lost youth, through the murky sounds of mid-90’s alternative rock, but it’s also a ripe satire on the music industry, and the commercialization of rock concerts. Lisa’s take on the tour says it best: “Wow, it’s like Woodstock, only with advertisements everywhere and tons of security guards.”
5. Bart Sells His Soul: Bart literally sells his soul to Milhouse for five bucks, that he promptly spends on lame expanding water sponge dinosaurs, and begins to panic when stuff he normally feels doesn’t register anymore. For example, at the Quick E Mart, his breath doesn’t produce a condensation on the ice cream freezer (“Way to breathe, no breath”, mocks Jimbo), and his nightly hug from his mother feels cold and fishy, like maybe he’s a monster without something vital inside. The script is one of those smart, philosophical scripts that often get cited when discussing the show’s treatment of religion, for better or worse, in this episode it’s about the existence of a soul. Also a rare episode where the B-plot, involving Moe turning his bar into a family friendly eatery (Uncle Moe’s Family Feedbag), gets more laughs than the A-story, except when the two converge in the second act, then it’s all gold.
4. A Fish Called Selma: A tour de force for the late Phil Hartman as C-list celeb Troy McClure, who marries Aunt Selma to squash rumors about his bizarre sex life, and to potentially stage a comeback as a married man. Star struck Selma, who married Sideshow Bob two seasons earlier, once again chooses poorly when it comes to men. Troy’s Camelot-themed Muppet film is a hoot (“Oh Princess Fair, willst thou grant me thine dainty hoof in marriage?”), but his “Planet of the Apes” musical is an all-time classic, easily the season’s best musical number, and along with his performance in “Marge vs. the Monorail”, Hartman’s greatest contribution to the musical history of the show. The Dr. Zeus number will be in your head for weeks. Some would suggest the series never recovered from the loss of Hartman, a weighty statement, but given his performance in this great episode, maybe a true one.
3. King-Size Homer: The craziest story line of the season, maybe of the entire first seven seasons, is also one of the funniest, as a lazier-than-usual Homer schemes to put on 60 pounds so he can qualify for disability and work from home. The gigantic fat Homer design, in a blue flower pattern muumuu with cape, makes him look 500 pounds rather than 300, but the point gets across, as he says to Marge in rationalization, “the slim lazy Homer you knew is dead, now I’m a big fat dynamo.” The fat jokes come fast and furious in this first-time script from Dan Greaney, directed by series vet Jim Reardon, as Homer’s flawless plan soon burdens himself (the local theater refuses to allow a man of his carriage in as a fire hazard precaution), and his marriage. Bart’s daydream of one day becoming a lardo on workman’s comp like his father (“I wash myself with a rag on a stick”) is a season high point.
2. Mother Simpson: If fat Homer wasn’t crazy enough, a week later he’s faking his own death to skip work, a stunt that leads him to discover, as he pleads with the local registrar to reinstate him as living, that his thought-deceased mother is alive, and wanted by the FBI, and Mr. Burns, for radical ‘60’s era protests and disturbances against Burns’ germ warfare wing. Glenn Close plays Mother Simpson, who runs out on her family when the image of Joe Namath’s wild, rebellious hair awakens in her a hidden hippy, wholly unsatisfied with the buttoned down life of being Abe Simpson’s wife. Most of the series’ sweet, teary moments of the past involve the kids in some way, but Homer’s final farewell to his mother here, as she goes underground again, is the season’s emotional crux, a bittersweet ending to an otherwise warm and funny episode.
1. Two Bad Neighbors: Being a sentimentalist, I usually choose the heartwarming episodes as the season’s best, but not this year, because this classic war-of-the-neighbors ep, written by Ken Keeler and directed by the great Wes Archer, has it all, from motorized tie racks, and Ayatollah Khomeini T-shirts, to locusts, Disco Stu, and Mikhail Gorbachev. The plot: on the day of the Evergreen Terrace street-wide yard sale, the mysteriously vacant mansion across the street from the Simpson’s house is bought by former President Bush, and ever reluctant to loose the spotlight (especially after his rousing rendition of “Hey Big Spender”), Homer immediately starts a feud, with the help of bratty Bart, who gets a richly deserved spanking from the Pres after destroying his memoirs. “First Bush invades my turf, then he takes my pals,” says Homer, “then he makes fun of the way I talk – probably – now he steals my right to raise a disobedient, smart-alecky son, well that’s it!” More prankster than politician, Homer attacks Bush with a superglued clown wig, which really disrupts his speech to the local Moose club, while Bush, less skilled in neighborhood battles, hangs a poorly painted sign on his house proclaiming Homer and Bart two bad neighbors.
Of course the real Bush had nothing to do with the episode, given his own feud with the show during his presidency about the show’s low moral family standards (quite a misjudgment), but the impersonation by Harry Shearer is seamless, reminding you just how talented the voice artists are on “The Simpsons”. In a season that saw many a celebrity visit Springfield, from Sir Paul McCartney rocking out to Apu’s rendition of ‘Sgt. Pepper’, to Bob Newhart, giving the worst awkward eulogy in recent memory, the funniest and best remembered cameo is the one that was entirely fake, for Homer’s childish feud with the fictionalized George Herbert Walker Bush is my personal favorite from another great year from Matt Groening’s immortal comedy masterpiece.
“The Simpsons: The Complete Seventh Season” will be released on DVD on Tuesday, December 13th.
by Adam Suraf