Dead Homer Society

“I hate every ape I see, from chimpan-A to chimpan-Z!” – Troy McClure 

This afternoon, Vulture published an oral history of Stop the Planet of the Apes, I Want to Get Off!, featuring interviews with Alf Clausen, David S/X Cohen, Chris Ledesma, Bill Oakley, Josh Weinstein, and Mark Kirkland. (Dana Gould too, but, you know, why?) The whole thing is well worth a read, but I thought I’d highlight a few pieces:

Oakley: Our goal when we took over was to copy season three. Season three of The Simpsons — which we didn’t work on by the way — was the best season of any TV show of all time. When we took over, we said, “What was it about season three that made it so good?” We reverse-engineered it and said, “Well, a lot of the stories were pretty grounded, but they took a couple of crazy leaps out into space with like, ‘Homer at the Bat.’” They did seven Homer episodes, three Lisa episodes, a Sideshow Bob, an Itchy and Scratchy, so we did exactly the same thing. Now as far as the Selma episode, there was an episode in season three where she’s going to marry Sideshow Bob.

I’ve heard Oakley and Weinstein talk about their (justified) love for Season 3, but I never knew they followed it that closely.

On one of the most memorable lines:

Cohen: The reason I remember the moment at all is that it got a big reaction in the room from the other writers, much better than I had expected. So into the script in went. To overanalyze it a little, the question is what, if anything, makes the line better than a run-of-the-mill pun on the word “chimpanzee.”  The fun of it I think is that you get the joke prematurely during the contrived setup, without even needing to get to the pun part. It’s a slightly weird line in that sense.

I used to use that line as the ringtone for a friend of mine who had a (legit) job giving cocaine to monkeys.

On Homer and Bart’s love of “legitimate the-a-ter”:

Mark Kirkland (director for The Simpsons, 1990–present): It was a script that made me laugh a lot to begin with. The thing that struck me was the satire of those classic movies being made into Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals, like The Phantom of the Opera and Sunset Boulevard. I caught both of those in the theater so I knew what we were trying to do based on those.

My favorite lines were the one is when Bart says, “This play has everything!” and Homer goes, “Oh, I love legitimate the-a-ter!” The saying we talk about in art and drawing, but it comes from food preparation: A good salad doesn’t have everything in it, and here they are enjoying it because it does. They don’t know how bad it is! It’s a critical success.

That is such a wonderful Simpsons joke, packing so much meaning into two lines and some (expertly) mispronounced syllables by Castellaneta.

Finally (and as usual I don’t mean to pick on anyone with these), there’s another tacit admission that Zombie Simpsons ain’t The Simpsons:

Ledesma: Fans talk so lovingly about “the golden era” from seasons one to eight, this falls right in there, and I think it’s also part of the golden era of the show’s music as well. This is not to say that the show’s music has declined in any way, but the show is different.

Indeed it is.

Anyway, read the whole thing. It’s pretty long and worth every word. Oakley called it a rare visit from the joke fairy.