The Case
Let's start with a breakdown of this season's 25 episodes:
Disc One
• "Who Shot Mr. Burns? (Part Two)"
Everything
starts off with a bang (literally) in this much-anticipated conclusion to the
previous season's cliffhanger finale. After many accusations and red herrings,
we finally find out "who shot Mr. Burns." This is one of the most
joke-packed episodes of the series.
Highlights: Too many to mention, but
Moe's lie detector test and two gags with Dr. Colossus stand out!
Special
Guest Voice: Tito Puente
Grade: A+
• "Radioactive Man"
When a big-screen version of
Bart's favorite comic book is being filmed in Springfield, every boy in town
wants to play Radioactive Man's sidekick, Fallout Boy. An unlikely candidate
lands the role…
Highlights: Krusty tries to prove his
"range" to the casting director.
Special Guest Voices: Phil
Hartman, Mickey Rooney
Grade: A-
• "Home Sweet Homediddly-dum-doodily"
A series of
unfortunate events compels the government to take the kids away from
"negligent parents" Homer and Marge. But they don't take them far,
placing them in foster care right next door with the Flanders clan. D'oh!
Highlights: Marge tells the kids that someday they'll have to be adults and take
care of themselves, just before Homer comes to her about a spider near his car
keys; Homer's note-taking at the remedial parenting class
Special Guest
Voices: Joan Kenley, Marcia Wallace
Grade: B+
• "Bart Sells His Soul"
Skeptical about the
existence of the soul, Bart makes $5 by selling his to Milhouse, but then
regrets it. In other news, Moe tries to increase business by converting his bar
into a hokey family restaurant, "Uncle Moe's Family Feedbag."
Highlights: Homer thinks 40 seconds is too long to wait for his deep-fried
buffalo.
Grade: B+
• "Lisa the Vegetarian"
Eating lamb chops for
dinner after seeing an adorable lamb at a petting zoo is too much for Lisa.
Vegetarianism is the next logical step for the socially-conscious girl, but
Homer's love of greasy, delicious animal flesh may get in the way. Mmmmm,
flesh.
Highlights: The school's "independent thought" alarm;
Troy McClure's Meat Council film
Special Guest Voices: Phil Hartman, Linda
McCartney, Paul McCartney
Grade: A-
• "Treehouse of Horror VI"
This installment of
the fan-favorite Halloween specials includes three shorts: "Attack of the
50 ft. Eyesores," "Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace," and
"Homer Cubed." These three stories feature giant rampaging
advertisements, the ghost of Groundskeeper Willie killing children in their
dreams, and Homer entering a three-dimensional world behind the living room
bookshelf.
Highlights: "Lousy Smarch weather"; the kids realize
in terror that the next time they go to sleep they could die, then Grandpa
responds, "Ha! Welcome to my world!"
Special Guest Voices: Paul
Anka, Marcia Wallace
Grade: A-
Disc Two
• "King-Size Homer"
Tired of slaving away at the
Nuclear Power Plant, Homer schemes to gain 61 pounds so that he can get on
Disability. Bart happily conspires with him, but Marge and Lisa foresee a bad
end to this plan.
Highlights: Homer's shopping trip to "The Vast
Waistband" allows him to choose from a selection of "ponchos, muumuus,
capes, jumpsuits, unisheets, muslin body rolls, academic and judicial
robes…"
Special Guest Voice: Joan Kenley
Grade: A
• "Mother Simpson"
Homer fakes his own death to
get out of Mr. Burns' mandatory volunteer day. The false news of his demise
brings his long-lost mother back to Springfield.
Highlights: Homer falls
into his own empty grave and shrieks, "Why does my death keep coming back
to haunt me?!?"; Patty and Selma come over with a tombstone for Homer and
tell Marge, "We've been saving for this since your wedding day!"
Special Guest Voice: Glenn Close
Grade: B
• "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming"
This season's
obligatory Sideshow Bob episode finds Bob stealing a nuclear warhead. He
threatens to detonate it unless Springfield rids itself of television, which
apparently is his new nemesis now that we've grown tired of watching him try to
kill Bart.
Highlights: At the air show Milhouse plays in a fighter jet,
pretending to bomb his parents for making him see a
psychiatrist—"Take that, Dr. Sally Waxler!"
Special Guest
Voices: R. Lee Ermey, Kelsey Grammer
Grade: B-
• "The Simpsons' 138th Episode Spectacular"
Another clip show, of sorts. Actually, this one now seems more like a collection
of DVD extras before there were such things. It includes not only clips, but
early Simpsons shorts, deleted scenes, and the alternate endings to
"Who Shot Mr. Burns? (Part Two)." Apart from the creative material,
what really makes this one shine is the hilarious hosting by Troy McClure.
Highlights: All of McClure's lines; the "file photos" of Matt
Groening, James L. Brooks, and Sam Simon
Special Guest Voices: Buzz
Aldrin, Glenn Close, Phil Hartman
Grade: B+
• "Marge Be Not Proud"
Bart wants the new
videogame Bonestorm so badly that he resorts to shoplifting when he
thinks he won't get it for Christmas. Caught, he fears that Marge no longer
loves him.
Highlights: Bart's snowman—made from the dirty, leftover
snow under the car—is amazingly pathetic
Special Guest Voices: Phil
Hartman, Lawrence Tierney
Grade: B
• "Team Homer"
Avid bowler Homer forms his own
team, but needs to include the horrendously bad Mr. Burns to secure the
registration fee. Meanwhile, Springfield Elementary introduces school uniforms
after Bart wears a T-shirt with an inflammatory slogan to class.
Highlights: Smithers narrows down the list of possible Poppin' Fresh impostors
to Homer Simpson or Pops Freshenmeyer; Homer ends a phone conversation with the
highly quotable line, "I gotta go. My damn wiener kids are
listening."
Special Guest Voice: Marcia Wallace
Grade: A-
• "Two Bad Neighbors"
When former president
George Bush Sr. moves in across the street from the Simpsons, Homer fears he
will lose his role as king of Evergreen Terrace. Plus, Bart plays Dennis the
Menace to Bush's Mr. Wilson.
Highlights: The introduction of Disco Stu,
who doesn't buy Homer's "Disco Stu" jacket because, as he says,
"Disco Stu doesn't advertise."
Grade: B
Disc Three
• "Scenes from the Class Struggle in Springfield"
Marge buys an ultra-discounted Chanel suit at an outlet store. She happens to be
wearing it when she runs into an old high school classmate who is now a wealthy
socialite. The suit is Marge's ticket into high society at the Springfield
Country Club, but can the whole family keep up this upper-class charade?
Highlights: Mr. Burns's demand for his tires to be revulcanized
Special
Guest Voice: Tom Kite
Grade: B
• "Bart the Fink"
Bart unwittingly uncovers
Krusty's massive tax fraud and lands him in the poorhouse (or was that
crazyhouse?). This main plot feels a little familiar and disappointing, but
there are some decent jokes along the way.
Highlights: Homer comforts Bart
after Krusty's death by assuring him that he, too, could wake up dead tomorrow;
Handsome Pete
Special Guest Voices: Phil Hartman, Bob Newhart
Grade:
B-
• "Lisa the Iconoclast"
It's time for
Springfield's Bicentennial Parade honoring the town's history and its founder
Jebediah Springfield. With all the citizens excited and Homer working as the
Town Crier, Lisa busies herself researching Jebediah. But she discovers some
horrible truths that may make him—and her—far less popular.
Highlights: Lisa wakes up in the night shouting, "I want to help you,
George Washington!" Bart responds, "Even your dreams are
square."
Special Guest Voices: Phil Hartman, Donald Sutherland,
Marcia Wallace
Grade: A-
• "Homer the Smithers"
When Smithers takes a
mandatory vacation, Homer fills in doing the "2,800 small jobs" that
encompass caring for Mr. Burns. Unfortunately, Homer doesn't understand 2,700 of
them.
Highlights: The brief scenes we see of Smithers on vacation, at a
resort where "they don't allow picture-taking"
Grade: A-
• "The Day the Violence Died"
While trying to
help a bum reclaim his artistic creation, Bart and Lisa accidentally destroy
their favorite cartoon, Itchy and Scratchy.
Highlights: In the
Itchy and Scratchy copyright trial, Lionel Hutz stalls for time by
calling all of his surprise witnesses again: a ventriloquist and his dummy,
Santa Claus with a broken leg, a Barney-looking stranger, Ralph Wiggum, and the
fattest twins in The Guinness Book of World Records.
Special Guest
Voices: Kirk Douglas, Phil Hartman, Alex Rocco, Jack Sheldon, Suzanne Somers
Grade: B-
• "A Fish Called Selma"
Troy McClure bribes his
way into a driver's license by offering Selma a date. When press pictures of
them together boost his sagging movie career—as evidence that he may not
be a fish fetishist after all—he proposes marriage to her.
Highlights: Troy adapts his usual introduction by reminding Selma, "I'm
Troy McClure. You may remember me from such dates as 'Last Night's
Dinner'"; every second of the musical version of Planet of the Apes
Special Guest
Voices: Jeff Goldblum, Phil Hartman
Grade: A-
• "Bart on the Road"
Spring breeeeaaaaakkkkkk!!!
(Well, when are we gonna get rowdy?) Bart, Milhouse, Nelson, and Martin rent a
car and drive to Knoxville, TN. Meanwhile, Lisa accompanies Homer on "Take
Your Daughter to Work Day."
Highlights: The unexpected excitement of
Milhouse's trip to the cracker factory; Patty and Selma explain their job at the
DMV: "Somedays we don't let the line move at all." "We call those
weekdays."
Grade: B+
Disc Four
• "22 Short Films About Springfield"
A series of
mini-stories about Springfield's many goings-on in a single day. There aren't
quite as many as the advertised "22 short films," but that number
brings out the reference to Thirty-Two Short Films about Glenn Gould.
Highlights: A day in the life of Bumblebee Man; Smithers' bee sting
Special Guest Voice: Phil Hartman
Grade: B
• "Raging Abe Simpson and His Grumbling Grandson in 'The
Curse of the Flying Hellfish'"
Grandpa and Mr. Burns are the last
surviving members of an old WWII pact. Whoever lives longest will receive a
number of priceless paintings that their army unit found during the war, so the
two old codgers battle it out for possession of the goods. The Simpson codger
gets some help from Bart.
Highlights: Grandpa wields his "slippers
and an oatmeal spoon."
Special Guest Voice: Marcia Wallace
Grade: B-
• "Much Apu About Nothing"
Springfield is
suddenly up-in-arms about illegal immigrants and threatens to pass a proposition
to deport them all. Homer backs it 100 percent until he finds out his friend and
cashier Apu would be one of those deported.
Highlights: Homer tries to
teach Apu American history (watch for his relevant and complex diagram of
"stovepipe hat").
Special Guest Voice: Joe Mantegna
Grade:
B+
• "Homerpalooza"
Homer notices that young people
don't like the classic '70s rock he still treasures. To try to recapture his
cool, he goes to Hullabalooza and accidentally gets hired for the freak show.
The without-a-doubt, definitive low point of the season.
Highlights: When
asked about his religion, Homer says it is "the one with all the
well-meaning rules that don't work out in real life…you know,
Christianity."
Special Guest Voices: Cypress Hill, Peter Frampton,
The Smashing Pumpkins, Sonic Youth
Grade: D+
• "Summer of 4 ft. 2"
The family (plus Milhouse)
goes on vacation to the Flanders' beach house, which Lisa sees as an opportunity
to reinvent herself. But when Bart feels he is being overshadowed, he plots his
sister's downfall. Almost every joke works, and the animation is unusually
beautiful.
Highlights: Every Milhouse moment, particularly his yearbook
message to Lisa, "See you in the car!"; the "Mystery Date"
board game session
Special Guest Voices: Christina Ricci, Marcia
Wallace
Grade: A
This is a really solid season that contains quite a few classic episodes and
hardly any duds (except for Milhouse, as Homer labels him in the finale). I
enjoyed seeing a return in this season to the winning formula of killer jokes
balanced out by semi-gooey character moments. For every instance of Grandpa's
pants falling down, Homer faking his own death, or Patty and Selma sucking dead
crustaceans out of seashells, there is an instance of Bart making amends for
shoplifting, Homer's mother hugging him goodbye, or Lisa finding her first real
friend. Laughs are plentiful in The Simpsons, but some of these episodes
made me tear up a little, too…and then laugh again hard enough to squirt
milk out of my nose. In particular, this season boasts three of the all-time
best Lisa episodes. "Lisa the Vegetarian," "Lisa the
Iconoclast," and "Summer of 4 ft. 2" all demonstrate the great,
often unrealized, potential of this hard-to-write-for character.
The only gripe I can really make with the content of the seventh season
concerns the one blemish on its otherwise glorious visage:
"Homerpalooza." I'm not sure how other fans feel about this one, but
for me it painfully foreshadows the parade of "humor-killing celebrity
guest stars" that marred later seasons. Unless one is a fan of these
particular bands, it is neither funny nor entertaining to simply watch them
perform on the show and then flatly recite poorly scripted lines. Compare the
role of The Smashing Pumpkins in this episode to Mickey Rooney in
"Radioactive Man," for example. The former is painfully dull, while
the latter is great. What's the difference? Rooney's appearance is brief,
well-integrated, and playfully self-mocking in a way that actually makes me
laugh. "Homerpalooza" also suffers from a plethora of of-the-moment
music and culture references that don't age well, which the commentators admit
have "expired."
The presentation of this set is top-notch. Gone is the sixth-season's
cumbersome, plastic Homer-head packaging that elicited many a "D'oh!"
from fans (though the companion Marge-head packaging is available for those
couple of souls who liked the Homer-head…and for those thousands of
obsessive collectors like me who may grudgingly buy it anyway). Fox returns to
the standard fold-out case that slips into the exterior box, but with a pleasant
twist: instead of many awkward panels, the interior of the fold-out contains
four clear plastic DVD-holders that are bound together like pages of a book. All
the artwork on the packaging and the disc menus—with its red carpet
movie-premiere theme—is fantastic, too. New animations of the acne-teen
working a concession stand in the "Extras" menus or Mr. Burns sitting
in a director's chair in the foreground of the "Scene Selection" menus
actually contain a few short jokes that made me chuckle—which is way more
than I expect from my menu screens. From a technical standpoint, the discs
succeed, as well, with bright colors, smooth motions, and a nice audio
presentation. My only technical complaint is that I found a strange shading
glitch on the far right side of the English subtitles that remained there in
every episode. But nit-picking about that puts me at risk for Comic-Book-Guy
level geekdom—a Simpsons characterization that probably hits too
close to home for many of us.
The extras, as in previous sets, are plentiful and entertaining. As always,
there is a commentary track on every single episode, which never ceases
to impress me. The commentaries are done by a nice mix of writers, directors,
producers, animators, cast members, and even guest stars. Plus, Groening himself
is present for most of the commentaries, too. Previous commentaries have
sometimes lapsed into the participants simply laughing at the jokes and
marveling at how long ago these episodes aired, but this time the comments offer
a nice mix of behind-the-scenes info and inside jokes explained. This show is
filled with so many references that no one person could possibly get them
all…except for me. I understood every one of them. Not really, but
listening to the commentary tracks was a great way to figure out those allusions
and jokes that I didn't get the first time around. The tone of the commentaries
is jovial and everyone is having fun. I wonder whether that will change once the
releases get into the worse seasons or if it will just get…awkward. The
extras also provide the run of deleted scenes from this season, either as links
from the spots they would have occupied in the episodes, or all together as a
special feature. Many of them are really quite funny. My favorite is from
"Lisa the Vegetarian": when Lisa runs away, Bart exclaims, "She's
gone?!? Dibs on Lisa's…umm…ah, she doesn't have anything good."
Some of the most interesting extras are the "A Bit from the Animators"
features. In these, a few of the directors and Groening comment specifically on
the directorial and animation guidelines for creating the visual world of The
Simpsons. The format is nice, using a single act of an episode as the
subject and giving the commentators special tools to draw lines on the screen as
they talk…you know, like those football announcer guys. These bits are
both informative and surprisingly funny (one of the participants mocks the
project by circling
Bart's eyes and announcing, with a tone of self-importance, "this is
called 'open eyes'").
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