By Brandon Nolta
THE SIMPSONS: Apparently, they won’t wait another 20 years to make another movie, as Bart writes on the board. Springfield is still being rebuilt as the pre-credit sequence rolls, and Homer’s got a silo of pig dung strapped to his car, but everybody’s favorite weirdly yellow family is still cruising at warp factor Homer.
As things fire up, Mr. Burns falls into a water fountain trying to retrieve a penny, but Homer rescues him, and as a reward, Mr. Burns flies him to Chicago for dinner. Being Homer, he falls in love with the whole experience of flying on a private plane, and becomes despondent at the thought of never getting to repeat his flight. Marge hires life coach Colby Krause (Stephen Colbert) to help Homer get through his depression, and thanks to his coaching skills and Homer’s magic bowling shoes, Homer fails to get a new job at a company with their own private plane. Having quit work at the plant, Homer’s despondence returns, and getting caught out by Bart at the Krusty Burger when he’s supposed to be working doesn’t help.
Finally, Homer bribes a pilot to take him and Marge up in a plane so Homer can break the bad news to her, but the pilot goes into a heroin-induced coma in midair, and only some last-minute coaching from Colby can help Homer get through it all. It seems like it took a lot longer to write this review than it took to watch the episode, probably because I wasn’t pausing due to laughter every five minutes. Lionel Richie’s cameo could have used some spicing up, and I kept waiting for Colbert to break into his Phil Ken Sebben routine from HARVEY BIRDMAN. Still, it’s THE SIMPSONS, and even after 18 seasons, it’s still smarter than most other shows going. Maybe next week, Mr. Burns can cross the last item off his to-do list and buy the Brooklyn Dodgers.
KING OF THE HILL: Drinking beer while the world passes by; the metaphor is too perfect. Anyway, it’s a new season, and Hank’s heart sings with joy as Bobby is captured by the wonder of football. So, it’s road trip time to the Texas/Nebraska game to capitalize on Bobby’s newfound interest in things that aren’t troll dolls. Unfortunately, when they arrive, it turns out that Boomhauer bought fake tickets, so Hank has to do business with a scalper to get them in.
Stuck in the nosebleed seats, Hank, Bobby and the rest are getting into the game as much as they can from the north orbit of Venus, when Bobby decides to go to the concession stand. Suddenly, Boomhauer spies Bobby through his binoculars, sitting in an empty skybox. Hank goes to bring his son back, so it’s not long before everybody’s sitting in the skybox and enjoying free beer and hot dogs. Meanwhile, back at the Hill estate, Peggy’s cheering reaches a fever pitch, threatening Luanne’s sanity and the TV alike.
Through a series of seemingly reasonable but insane steps, Hank ends up pretending to be a famous Nebraska quarterback on the phone, whose desperation play ends up clinching the championship for the Cornhuskers. The rest of the episode finds Hank and the gang trying desperately not to get caught by Longhorns fans mightily pissed at the loss, even to the point of wearing…ulp…Nebraska shirts.
Funny? Yes, but not in the shotgun approach that THE SIMPSONS takes. KING OF THE HILL is character-driven comedy, as long-time fans are already aware, and the writing is still pretty sharp. There’s no obvious one-liners, but plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, particularly when Boomhauer and Dauterive open their mouths and something mind-bogglingly dumb falls out. Hank’s and Bobby’s relationship makes for a nice subplot, as Hank tries his damnedest to establish a relationship with his weird son through football. Nice work all around, as anyone familiar with Mike Judge should expect.
FAMILY GUY: Because hey, George Lucas ain’t done much recently, so Seth MacFarlane and his crew decide to help George out with some royalties and do up Episode IV, FAMILY GUY-style. R2 with a ‘fro, Stewie in Darth Vader gear, Lois with Danishes on her head hiding the secret plans in a DEAL OR NO DEAL set: that’s just the first five minutes. Basically, Peter is retelling STAR WARS to his family during a power outage, giving the crew a chance to upgrade their animation with some nice CGI and squeeze in as many pop culture jokes as they can.
Normally, I’d do a summary of what happens in the episode, but there are probably only six people in America who haven’t seen the original STAR WARS, and they aren’t reading this website anyway. Moving on … I wonder how much they had to pay George for this, as they not only parallel the story line super close, but multiple chunks of dialogue and virtually all the sound effects are lifted straight from the film (believe it or not, they even managed to score some of the visual effects, too). Yes, like you, I have seen the entire series enough times to tell.
In terms of funny, FAMILY GUY is the clear winner of the night; the jokes run fast and furious in the usual fashion, but haven’t fallen in the rut some other shows have. Of course, FAMILY GUY’s only been on for six seasons or so. Plus, STAR WARS is such a cultural touchstone that there’s no end of good jokes that can be spun out of it. And yes, somebody finally addresses Lucas’ misuse of “parsec” in the original! Man, that’s bothered me for years. Yes, like you, I am an über-geek, enough so that the DOCTOR WHO joke made me laugh really hard. The Minnie the Moocher gag, too.
Still, not everything works. The old pedophile as Obi-Wan Kenobi singing that lame-ass song from DIRTY DANCING … boy, that fell flat. Plus, seriously, you can only do so many real estate jokes before that horse is beaten into glue. As cool as Cleveland is as R2-D2, Quagmire is just as lame as C3PO, and the “saving the couch from the garbage chute” gag wasn’t funny when my friends and I were rescuing furniture from similar circumstances in college.
Overall, though, a few stinkers are to be expected, if for no other reason than to give you breathing space to hear the next good joke. Even if there were fewer good lines, any episode that manages to squeeze in dialogue from AIRPLANE!, Magic Johnson and the evil monkey in Chris’ room…that’s fried gold right there.