Best Simpsons episode ever

Gummi de Milo is a classic too, though!

Favorite musical moment: perhaps "When I was seventeen, I drank some very good beer."

does anyone else think the orchestral version of 'insane in the brain' is so much better than the regular one? i guess marge and i have similar taste.

Favorite musical moments: The Canyonero jingle, and "Who Needs the Quik-E-Mart?"

'okay, you know the planet of the apes?'

'the movie or the planet?'

the brand new broadway musical starring you as...get this, the human!'

'it's the part i was born to play, baby!'

Best musical moment is in I think "Bart After Dark", where the curfew is put in and Ralph Wiggum interrupts the Adults/Kids song with "I just ate a thumbtack". Priceless.

Perhaps a better question would be - which is the worst Simpson's episode. The one where Bleeding Gums Murphy dies is pretty excrutiating. Infact nearly any episode where Lisa sings.

"Homer, use the forks!"

another great one: Lisa's Braces episode - "Lisa needs braces; dental plan!; Lisa needs braces; dental plan!" and "These pre-date stainless steel, so you can't get 'em wet!"

Hans Moleman is my God. (Runner up: John Frink.)

One of my favorites that I don't think was mentioned is the Halloween Special V(?). Its the one where Homer buys the matter transporter from Dr. Frink. Is that also the same one where Homer goes back in time?

Anyway, my favorite quote:

Dr. Frink: Well, sure, the Frinkiac-7 looks impressive, But I predict that within 100 years computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings in Europe will own them. Apu: Could it be used for dating?

Dr. Frink: Well, technically, yes, but the computer matches would be so perfect as to eliminate the thrill of romantic conquest.

Btw I really like Futurama. Lots'o people don't.

I still do like Zap Branigan and Kif.

Barney's winning entry for the Springfield Film Festival is the great art-movie ever made: "Don't cry for me _ I'm already dead."

*Sigh*

Futurama has it's moments, too. Certainly Bender the booze-swilling, pornography-consuming, cigar-smoking robot who dreams of destroying the human race is a wonderful, heart-warming creation.

-The Run Lola Run spoof was great, just for the parts where Lisa was running

-"Each leap brings us closer to God! Catch me Lord, Catch me!" "Tramampoline! Trombopoline!"

"the fingers you have used to dial... are too fat. To obtain a special dialling wand, please mash the keypad with your palm now"

haw that episode had several funny bits - play doh doughnut, greased fast food joint wall kills bird, mash nymberpad for dialing wand, ten hyiyiyih... xp

ass has own congressman

definitely some great stuff there, but wasn't the level i remember it being. of course i'd probably feel that way if i went through a lot of the old Simpsons episodes that i loved. it's been a while!

GOd not for me it hasnt, I watch my dvds constantly!

/utter saddo

Bart of Darkness is a contender.

I'm such a saddo that most nights I sleep to DVD commentaries to drown out the tinnitus / wandering thoughts. I should probably find something else though, give myself a while away so I can return to them fresh in a couple of years.

hank grimes?

Whoops. I blame Signal to Noise, which has a big article on bassist Henry Grimes in the new issue.

my second favorite episode, or perhaps tied with the hank scorpio episode, from my childhood is twenty two short films about springfield. bart and milhouse squirting ketchup and mustard off the overpass, gum in lisa's hair, steamed hams, aurora borealis in skinner's kitchen, "this was the largest car I could afford"... <3

also I had no idea why I said 'childtime' upthread makes me sound like a disgusting paedo.

Yeah I love 22 short stories as well, great Tarantino pastiche :D

Also, Bart of Darkness is grebt (thats the "rear window" one, right?)

radiation man movie is a sentimental fave for me

ie the one where they're filming the movie in Springfield

radiation man

"radioACTIVE man!"
"...I shouldn't have been able to hear that"

I actually watched King Sized Homer very recently (where he gets fat) and was surprised how good it was.

I'm always surprised at how varied my taste in simpsons is from other people's, in that I reserve myself to seasons 2-6 pretty much entirely, but have been watching some season 7 episodes lately, and am surprising myself at how much I'm enjoying them.

King Sized Homer is great. "All my life I've been an obese man trapped inside a fat man's body."

all my simpsons dvds were lost in the fire u_u

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kr1fotGQqh1qzma4ho1_400.jpg

Oh wow, how have I never noticed that!!

I remember when I was very young, watching the episode with the comet, seeing barney and nelson walk out together and thinking that Barney was Nelson's father. Of course I don't know why I inferred this, but, who knows...

^^^haha the REAL Simpson nerds saw that, inferred the same as you, and immediately remembered the Barney-as-sperm-bank-donor gag (babies belching all over town) a coupla seasons prior to that!

does Barney smoke?

smoke... what?

Didn't Nelson's dad pop out for a pack of smokes and never return?

Nelson's dad was present in season 4 at the football game in the episode with the big brothers, and in the the later "Bart Star" football episode.

There's no continuity to the existence/prescence of Nelson's dad. He's walked out and never come back, he's been in jail, he's been the soccer coach, they never stuck with a story, but meh, they never do.

I saw a later season episode where Nelson's actual dad came back. It was rubbish.

I saw a later season episode where Nelson's actual dad came back. It was rubbish.

― rhythm fixated member (chap), den 19 juni 2010 03:34 (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Last Exit, followed by Bart Sells His Soul

season 3 has some killer episodes - didnt remember them being so jam-packed w/subtle callbacks that early in the shows run but they totally are - but the soapbox derby racer episode is a+ classic

nelson smoking is a+

Monorail

Another vote for Bart of Darkness (Rear Window parody). One that I always liked but have probably settled on it as a favourite in the years of not watching the show. There are so many good lines and the feeling of a hot suburban summer is well pitched, from all the childish excitement of the pool truck, to watching black & white 'Classic Krusty' because there's nothing else to do but watch television.

I also love Bart's affinity with Victorian England which crops up in a few episodes. Thinking of his play gives me actual LOLs.

"Kippers for breakfast Aunt Helga? Is it St. Swithin's day already?"

"Tis!" replied Aunt Helga

I'm goin' I'm goin'!

The "Pulp Fiction" episode with Linguo was great.

And the one where he becomes a missionary.

"I'm not NOT licking toads!"

Didn't like the missionary one at all.

One more year and that show's been as bad as long as it's been good
― Whiney G. Weingarten (whineyg), Monday, April 3, 2006 7:04 PM (twenty years ago) bookmarkflaglink

I remember when I stopped watching this show and just enjoyed the DVD sets I had of the first eight seasons. It's mind-boggling it's still on the air, and I would've said that TEN years ago - this is just insane. FWIW, I unloaded all of these DVD's at the Housing Works Bookstore last year and it was nice seeing them all get sold. I think half of them went fast, and the rest needed a few weeks.

my son played some of the more recent episodes (like last decade) and they were...dire in a way i didnt anticipate, an unrecognizable show.

anyway the best episode is s7e25 "summer of 4 ft. 2" when they go to flanders' summer house in not-maine and lisa tries to become popular. it is all the simpsons family members in their funniest lanes: marge realizing she's harshing lisa's buzz, milhouse being pathetic, bart reeking of jealousy ad overcompensating, homer being generally oblivious but not getting in the way of the broader storyline, and lisa is the heart of the whole thing. even has one of the best ned lines and he's not even in it! also great christina ricci guest voice! i love this episode so much.

ooh yeah that's a great one, makes me remember middle school beach vacations

maybe the funniest thing my sister ever did was during senior year when she signed my yearbook "See you in the car. --Milhouse"

who does he think he is, Dennis the Menace?

My forever fave is "Last Exit To Springfield" (Lisa needs braces, Homer becomes the union boss).

I don't remember the context, but I accidentally watched a Season 30 episode ("Werking Mom", where Marge starts selling Tupperware to gays who think she's a drag queen) and it was genuinely terrific, with a line my brain quotes fairly regularly ("All aboard! Not Helen!"). On the strength of that episode (and because my boyfriend wanted to) we spent several months of the lockdown watching everything, every episode. We're pretty much all caught up.

Generally there's a stench about the latter-day episodes that you have to get used to. On one hand there are too many throwbacks-- the opening credits become intolerable as they try and meme-ify every popular gag from the first seven seasons. At the same time, it becomes its own pleasure seeing this forever show contorting and contorting in an effort to not repeat itself. Lisa and Marge remain two of the best characters ever created. I can't say I'd recommend to anyone to "watch the whole thing"-- unless you want to, in which case do so-- but I would recommend to anyone to google the top-rated episodes of the latter-day seasons and going through them all.

I watch maybe 1-2 new episodes a year, usually by accident (they come on after NFL games a lot), but I'll usually stick around until at least one commercial break. To give them the benefit of the doubt a lot of the things that bother me about the show now are kind of unavoidable, yeah it's weird to see Milhouse with a cell phone and all the main voice actors are like 70+ and just don't sound the same anymore but thats the price of having an animated show be on the air for nearly 40 years now. What does bother me though is the way they feel this need to explain every joke now, you can feel the writers' fear of having something go over someone's head and it often does wreck the moments of genuine cleverness. The jokes obviously aren't as good as they were before, most of the times they're not even close, but every once in a while they do come up with something worthy of the classic years. I thought one of the jokes in A Serious Flanders was possibly one of the best Simpsons gags ever, almost good enough to make up for how offputting everything else about the episode was.

one of the simpsons gags that most resembles adult life for me is where mr burns keeps telling don mattingly to shave his "sideburns" and mattingly keeps having to guess what burns means by "sideburns"

When I first got the DVD's, I binged through each of them in a week, but I watched them all with the commentaries on. They're really the gold standard for DVD commentaries - highly entertaining and everyone's very comfortable, but they also come prepared (particularly Al Jean) because they really go deep into detail about the making of each episode. Too much ground to summarize, but one stretch that was interesting involved a major LA earthquake - it get discussed in several episodes because that's how many were in different stages of creation when it happened. IIRC Dan Castellaneta said he and his wife woke up in the middle of the night, thinking, "oh another earthquake" but soon realized "this is REALLY bad!" as the house continued to shake. Then of course diving into the creation of iconic but unusual jokes (for example, the rake in the face was long because they needed to fill time so Al Jean, all by his lonesome, tried stretching it out and found out it was great after going past a ludicrous point) and what each guest star was like (all the baseball players were great except one - per Jean, "His name rhymes with Manseco"). Jon Lovitz, Conan O'Brien, Kelsey Grammar, and many other recurring guest stars even sat in for their episodes.

One that may need context - at the end of one episode where Jimmy Carter has been called "history's greatest monster," a few creators get into an argument over the merits of Carter. Turns out Al Jean did NOT like him, and then one of the writers (genuinely shocked) said the joke was actually a spoof of people who irrationally hated Carter. Jean said he thought Carter was a phony, but then added "I would vote for him over the current President...maybe I'll get my wish!" That was recorded in 2004, before the November election. He did not get his wish.

ya I remember those being great, idk where you can hear them anymore if you don't have the DVDs

one surprising bit was when they were trying to figure out who was the funniest guest star they had and one said Sting and the rest were like oh yeah for sure he was hands down the funniest guy we ever worked with

i have settled on itchy and scratchyland as my fav. there's a whole season's worth of classic gags in that one episode. everytime i go back to it I find myself thinking "wait, that's from this episode too".

re Carter, isn't Schwartzwelder fairly right-wing and hated Carter too? It's been a coupla decades since I listened to the DVD commentaries, tbh

watched Summer Of 4'2" last night with my kid, who is off on a residential camp for three days with school and has been anxious about friend stuff, and is so Lisa it's ridiculous. What a fantastic episode! Absolutely one of the best.

a few of those commentaries are on youtube (without the visuals), iirc on one of the Conan-written ones he describes how the writers would all work like crazy and then get really hungry and be really relieved when the lunch guy with a big stack of boxed sandwiches finally came through through the door, so Conan would pick up a big stack of empty boxes covering his face and blunder through the door to get the excited reaction, then theatricaly fall over and drop them everywhere to widespread annoyance