Talking Simpsons - Dog of Death With Andrew Jupin
Added 2023-02-22 05:00:02 +0000 UTCIt's time for season 3's memorable showcase of Santa's Little Helper, and we're joined once again by the fantastic Andrew Jupin from the We Hate Movies podcast! After we chat a ton about the show satirizing the lottery, we then follow the family dog on a journey from near-death to renewed life to murderous rage and back again to his happy home. So listen along as we announce "All hail, King Homer!"
Comments
We were easily entertained back then. 🤣
To Boldy Joe... Moore
2023-02-27 18:50:01 +0000 UTCThat sounds like a lot of fun.
John Harrison
2023-02-27 03:27:21 +0000 UTCIn the UK, the National Lottery started around the time this episode was broadcast but the presentation was quite different... in a weirdly sort of amazing way. The drawing was part of a massively popular, dedicated light entertainment show with a full studio audience, celebrity guests, musical performances and weekly premonitions from TV psychic "Mystic Meg". One of the jokes that comedian presenter Bob Monkhouse coined soon became a running catchphrase. Holding his hands together in prayer, he'd look to the heavens and say "I know I'm a sinner... but make me a winner." Yes, this all happened. Anyway, so when Kent Brockman just sort of read the numbers on the news, I was like "Is that it?" I know it sounds cheesy, but it was an actual fun show and so much more interesting than the "hope tax" we have today.
To Boldy Joe... Moore
2023-02-27 00:16:05 +0000 UTCI caught that the Burns estate is on the corner of Croesus and Mammon. I've known for a while that Mammon is a greed demon, but this was the first time that I could identify Croesus as the ancient king of Lydia (the bulk of Anatolia at the time), who loses out to Cyrus the Great. After looking up how that matches the theme for Burns, there's a Tolstoy story adapted from Herodotus called "Croesus and Fate" with a moral about a rich king being unhappy and a poor man being happy.
Bradford A Barker
2023-02-25 06:02:11 +0000 UTCLifelong New Yorker here, can confirm that Yolanda Vega is a household name. She actually retired just last year!
brian bonelli
2023-02-24 22:29:57 +0000 UTCEnormous gold Homer is pretty good, but the breakdancing ape from the Planet of the Apes musical is the peak for me. Honorable mention goes to the exhausted crowd waiting for Bleeding Gums Murphy to finish his anthem and U2's security beating the shit out of Homer while "Pride (In the Name of Love)" plays.
Erin Hardy
2023-02-23 17:14:04 +0000 UTCThe truck with pet insurance is to get it when they are puppies and don't let it lapse. Older animals are super expensive to insure
Paddy O'Rourke
2023-02-23 15:51:16 +0000 UTCI'm one of those fans who keeps confusing this with Bart's Dog Gets an F, which really speaks to how much more this episode stands out. I actually found out about New Math thanks to a joke in Incredibles 2, with Bob Parr complaining "Why did they change math?!" as he tries to teach Dash. That whole film really leaned on specific '60s cultural references, but I also have a feeling whoever came up with that joke had been trying to use Common Core with their kids. The "Spyglass" books Andrew Jupin was thinking of are actually from publisher Dorling Kindersley (or DK as they're known now) and are named the Eyewitness books, and I loved them too as a kid! There was also a series of VHS tapes based on said books, with different narrators depending on what side of the pond you were (the UK had Andrew Sachs, and the US had Martin Sheen), and they're all up on YouTube if you're curious. The "Peter and the Wolf" section was fun for me as a kid because I had also grown up with Disney's adaptation of it in Make Mine Music, the one Sterling Holloway narrated. It was a segment in one of those package films they could just release as its standalone short on tape compilations, which is how I saw it. Like a lot of the segments Disney's package films during that time it's not their greatest, but it still has the animation and feel of that era that I find very charming.
Harry Thornton
2023-02-23 04:29:26 +0000 UTCDan Castelleneta and Harry Shearer knocked it out of the park with their line readings in the King Homer gag. The timing and delivery of, "FOURTEEN KARAT GOLD!" escalates a surreal scene, with Homer coming close to cutting off Lenny with his nearly-angry, superior declaration. For the New Math, I was wondering, "Why Base Six?" But I think I figured it out: one one hand, you can keep track of the "first" digit (!), and in the other hand, you can keep track of the "second" digit. Seven would be counted with, say, a left index finger ("1") and a right thumb ("+6"). This way you can count up to 35 on two hands, though the benefits beyond that escape me. Maybe being divisible by the first three counting numbers was considered also helpful for learning multiplication and division (in isolation to the rest of society).
Bradford A Barker
2023-02-22 20:02:32 +0000 UTCIf you did it, sir...? 🤔
Frank Grimes
2023-02-22 18:45:44 +0000 UTC“Keno” and “The Ground Round” are two things I haven’t thought of since my own depressing Midwestern childhood. Holy cow. Those baseball sundaes. I think my parents still have the plastic hats. They did think think Keno was for suckers, though. Keno aside, also from a lottery family. I remember being at the grocery store with my mom when I was six or seven and she gave me ten dollars and asked me to go buy ten $1 scratchers to put in the Christmas cards. I got in line and it occurred to me “wait, I’m a child,” so I went back to my mom and she was like “oh, yeah, I forgot.” As soon as I was could scratch with a dime or letter opener my grandpa started getting me my own weekly ticket and would always give me the dollar or sometimes even five if I won. it was both sad and sweet. Also our New Year’s eve tradition was playing BINGO for lottery tickets, which as like, double gambling. On the upside, I have zero interest in gambling of any kind as an adult so I don’t think it had a negative effect. If anything, I just learned it wasn’t very lucrative.
Kat Heagberg
2023-02-22 16:57:49 +0000 UTCas a hamster owner - thank you THANK YOU to young Andrew for asking his dad to take it to the vet! They've gotten a bit of a poor reputation as a disposable pet for kids when they actually require a lot of space and enrichment. People tend to shrug and move on when they have a medical issue but they need vet treatment as much as any of the 'big' pets like a dog or a cat. Being a rodent owner is difficult as their lifespans max out at 3-4 years, but that makes me appreciate all the time I have with mine all the more and want her to have the happiest little life I can give her. (will get off my hamster soapbox now) needless to say, even as a kid this one was always a bit of a hard watch even for some great jokes solely for the scene of the family being mad at SLH while he's none the wiser to the situation and just wants to love them. for the life of me I can't watch that without my heart hurting. animals, man...
Blake R.
2023-02-22 14:49:34 +0000 UTCThis episode affected me on my re-watch a lot more than the last time I watched it years ago. In the intervening time, I had to make a similar decision regarding my dog as The Simpsons do. I adopted my dachshund in 2015, and named him Chester, after our 21st president, Chester A. Arthur, naturally. But a few years later, well...to put it bluntly, Chester A. Arthur fall down. He had an accident and fell from some stairs and it caused one of his inter-vertebral discs to bulge out onto his spine. By the time I noticed (it progressed slowly) and got him to the emergency vet, it was too late to just use a medical intervention of anti-inflammatories, and I had to make a quick decision if I wanted to spend a LOT of money on both surgery, and after care at the vet, and the very likely possibility of physical therapy sessions to get him the ability to walk again. Or I could chose to do nothing and let him be paralyzed, or I could chose to have him put to sleep. I decided to go ahead and get the surgery...and he did also need several rounds of PT, electro-acupuncture, and something called "cold laser therapy." And I'm happy to report that it all did basically nothing, and several years later Chester does not have any real use of his back legs. He scoots around on his behind when inside the house, and I take him on "walks" in a set of wheels. He turns a lot of heads, as everyone wants to take a gander at the little "differently abled" dog that's in a set of wheels. Required dog picture tax: https://imgur.com/a/XNWHiN1
Andrew Bouvier
2023-02-22 13:58:14 +0000 UTCthe reused animation always bugged me in this episode, even as a kid watching it. I could tell something was off about it.
Rhys
2023-02-22 08:39:44 +0000 UTCAlright, I’ll be that little freak, the recycled clip of Homer saying “And I’ll be right here watching TV.” The clip is from earlier in the season “Radio Bart”. It’s from when Homer’s watching the commercial for the microphone when he says “That could be Bart!”
Kiefer Fulsom
2023-02-22 08:04:59 +0000 UTCI’ll be one of the parent commenters, lol. I’ve got a 6th grader and a 2nd grader, for reference. I’ve heard mathematicians describe the common core standards as, if anything, very ambitious as opposed to poorly designed or whatever. Some say the complications were that, at the advent of its roll out, most teachers, specifically elementary school teachers, did not have extensive math education for the fact that primary teachers are not subject-focused. Middle/high school teachers are more likely to have additional education in math and therefore a better means also disseminating the new curriculum. Although it could be that the most fundamental changes were at the primary level; I suspect there are only so many ways you can teach calculus. In short, there was a learning curve for some teachers that may have made it harder to be flexible in teaching. These days I assume a good number of teachers come into the profession up to speed. If that all makes sense. Indeed, when our oldest was in first grade and had a worksheet to complete at night (thank god they dropped that ritual by my daughters turn) I remember being relieved he was such a natural at math. I couldn’t wrap my head around things like teaching “near doubles”. Why don’t you just memorize addition like multiplication? Or multiple digit subtraction: just cross out that number and put a zero then add a one over here. Why? How the hell do I know?? It’s the cross out/put the one up there thing, that’s why! Now they have them apply what they’ve learned from kindergarten about “making tens”, grouping them, what about the leftovers, those are ones, to explaining place values and then to equations. Still broke my brain. I thought it was a garbled waste of time. UNTIL…the light bulb went on during the the chaos of virtual learning. My son was in fourth grade and beginning to move beyond the times tables (which apparently DO have to be memorized at some point, for automaticity.) At the same time, my daughter began kindergarten so I was going back and forth working with them when necessary. Her’s was very basic, counting objects, learning strategies for counting (chicken scratches, drawing circles. I still can hear her teacher “very good! I like the strategy you used!”) Then moving on to making 10, understanding place value, base 10. Then with the fourth grader, they were brushing up on subtraction and addition of 3 to 4 digit numbers and would break it down using place values - I suddenly saw how the concepts used to introduce math - “number sense” is the buzzword - was reapplied with every new concept. It was definitely different from rout memorization. Loooong, too long, exposition proved to be a pointless read: it turns out that, when ran through many studies, the consensus is there’s not much difference of outcome between “number sense” or multiple ways of knowing strategy, vs rout memorization. Lol. That is, unless that undermines your ideology. 😆
Jessica S
2023-02-22 06:39:16 +0000 UTC
