Dead Homer Society

“Remember, Bart, I mean, Dances in Underwear, we take the white man alive.” – Lisa Simpson
“Alright, Thinks Too Much, it shall be so.” – Bart Simpson

As per usual with Zombie Simpsons commentaries, the actual episode is incidental to the conversation.  In this case, it’s one of those three part story episodes, the first is about Henry VIII, the second is about Sacajawea, and the third about Mozart.  They mostly discuss books and movies related to the actual historical figures rather than what’s going on here, but that’s to be expected since the actual episode is a parade of bad slapstick about which the less said the better. 

Nine guys on this one: Jean, Mike Anderson, Stewart Burns, Matt Selman, Tim Long, Ian Maxtone-Graham, Tom Gammill, Max Pross, and Brian Kelley.

0:30 – Jean starts off defending the trilogy episodes, half joking that he knew it was the only way they’d make it to 500 episodes. 

1:30 – They always have a hard time coming up with female stories that everybody knows, but this one was easy with Sacajawea. 

2:30 – The animators like these episodes because they finally get to draw the characters a little differently.

3:40 – To get the backgrounds for the castle they had interns photocopy stuff from libraries because there was no internet. 

4:00 – Jean’s continuing to praise the internet as a television writing tool, noting that it used to be a real pain to look stuff up.

5:10 – And just like that, they’ve gotten bored with the episode and are now discussing the novel Wolf Hall.

6:00 – Laughing at serial beheadings.

7:00 – Interesting animation note: before digital color they had like 19 colors that they had to use for the whole show. 

8:00 – Couple of desultory Sacajawea jokes.

9:30 – The Lisa/Sacajawea thing is going on, but they’re discussing a Sacajawea book and the actual Lewis & Clark trip.  Meanwhile, a log cabin just fell on Moe.

10:30 – With little to note of interest besides the animation, a small puddle reminds Jean of his favorite joke from The Flintstones, “They went to the Grand Canyon which was just this tiny little stream and Fred goes, ‘Well, it’s supposed to be big someday.’”.

10:45 – And we move right from that into, “Another thing in that book about Lewis & Clark . . .” 

11:45 – Tip for all you animators out there, if you’ve got something expansive and flat like a field of grass, put some patches of visible blades in it or some rocks or something.  Makes it look less flat.

13:00 – And after talking about those Sacajawea coins nobody uses for awhile, now they’re talking about all those state quarters. 

13:30 – Once the quarter discussion dies down, it’s time for Jean to note that the third segment involves Mozart which means they didn’t have to pay for the music.

14:00 – While Bart picks up the piano and plays it with his teeth, Jean notes that the movie Amadeus wasn’t very historically accurate.  Discussion wise this is more interesting than most of these commentaries, but it has very little to do with what’s actually happening in the episode.

14:30 – There’s a new Mozart book coming out! 

15:40 – “The other thing that was not true about Amadeus . . .”

17:10 – Jean with the helpful note that the melody is Eine kleine Nachtmusik.

17:45 – When you have crowd shots with people moving independently, that’s a real pain to animate.

18:45 – They’re very bored now.  Dr. Nick just showed up to put leeches on Bart, and Jean starts talking about how that really did kill people if they let out too much blood.

19:10 – To get the candles to glow you animated the centers independently and do a pass over it two or three times. 

20:10 – Jean jokes that they go through “four, maybe five ideas” before getting the three they do.  Heh.

21:20 – And now, because Mozart was in Animal House and this episode did a brief “here’s what happened” thing, we’re talking about how brilliant Animal House was and how endings like that got overused for a while.