Talking Simpsons - Bart Carny With Eric Szyszka

Cooter’s son’s full name is ‘Spudford.’ 😂

Hannah Culik-Baird

To this day I can’t eat caramel apples because I just imagine Homer drinking from that “vomit” bucket. So gross

Anna Mansager

I never connected Cooter to Jim Varney but it is so obvious in retrospect. Easily one of the best actor to one off character matches. If anyone is up for a deep dive of Ernest's filmography, there's an amazing You-tube Ernest Retrospective on the channel Guaranteed Video co-hosted by Internet Royalty Neil Cicierega. It's a very positive and thorough exploration of Varney's Ernest career that I think people here would dig.

SilkiePJ

The latest I remember them bothering to have Homer at least TRY to have an excuse not to be at work is season 11's Guess Who's Coming to Criticize Dinner with the "Work Hard For the Money" dummy; if it's the last time at least it's a hell of a gag to go out on.

Dayken

It's the best feeling going into an episode knowing you enjoyed it and then remembering you really really love it. I don't know if it was just heavily syndicated or what, but this really left an impression on me.

Bennett Billard

I agree that it's a button-down shirt. He wears it to work with a tie sometimes (as seen in Stark Ravind Dad and Homer's Triple Bypass). There is a specific way polo shirts are drawn in the Groening style -- a thicker, more flared-out collar, and buttons. See Hank Scorpio's pink shirt as a good example.

nina matsumoto

In the vein of poorly-made, bootleg posters, I remember one carnival in high school I played some dart game where you threw darts at a wall of balloons, and if one popped, you won a prize. Naturally, being a carnival game, it was harder than it looked. Dull as shit darts that couldn't fly straight, and half-inflated balloons that were very resistant to popping. Well, I decided to just wing the darts as hard as I could and not aim like I would a real dart and a dartboard. That was clearly the key, as I popped all three. I kept doing the ol' "double of nothing" with the Carny, always managing to pop at least one balloon each time, and my final prize was an aforementioned shitty framed knock off poster of Kyle, Kenny, Stan, and Cartman from Southpark, and also a weird reproduction of Dogs Playing Poker.

Andrew Bouvier

And if you guys like funnel cake, you gotta get some of that classic PA Dutch/German funnel cake. The PA Ren Faire actually does a solid job at it.

Andrew Giachetti

oh man speaking of carnival prizes, there's only one carnival prize I have left from the many many carnivals i went to as a kid (there were almost one a week every summer some years, rotating between all the local small towns.) and its appropriate to the podcast. Its currently hanging in my office at work. I have a framed picture of Homer simpson shredding on an electric guitar with the phrase "live large, rock hard" on it. I know its completely awful, but I love it. I got at when I was 13, so I was both an avid simpsons fan and getting super into guitar. Its held up perfectly fine all these years so everytime I move into a new office or university, it just comes with me.

Andrew Giachetti

If you've never seen Jim Varney's commercial work as Ernest I would reccomend it. They are full of really funny quick gags and routines. I believe you can get a DVD compilation in a set called Essential Ernest for practically nothing. Jim Varney was a real talent who I believe, if he was still with us, would be totally embraced today as an indie comic legend.

Glass bottom boat tours are about as exciting as the one in this episode minus the thrill of possible aquatic death. My family vacations to Florida as a kid included the glass bottom boat tour at Silver Springs more than once for some reason. You would mainly just see things covered in algae below you and lots of trees at the edges of the springs. The tour guides would always make a point to talk about how the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films from the 30’s and 40’s were shot there. I would say this was a very dated reference in the 90’s to early 2000’s, but those movies were also part of the Great Movie Ride until it closed in 2017.

Brian Hortin

Are there some polo shirt clues I’ve been missing this whole time? I think I’ve always assumed Homer’s shirt was a white button-down because of the time in which it was created. In the late ‘80s/early ‘90s my dad (whose job of local drug store chain manager was slightly less prestigious than Homer’s) wore a white short-sleeved button-down shirt every single day and didn’t graduate to polo until around 1995 or so. My dad is definitely a Homer kind of guy, so the clothing similarities seemed obvious to me. Now, I realize there are no actual buttons on Homer’s shirt, but if Lisa can have invisible blue irises, Homer can have invisible buttons.

Kat Heagberg

We need a Private Cabin x Talking Simpsons full collab on one of the shows.

Frank Grimes