Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: You're listening to Evergreen Simpsons. I'm Chris Greenspan.
[00:00:15] Speaker B: And I'm Felipe Flores. We're creating a timeline for the Simpsons, placing them in history.
[00:00:20] Speaker A: We're looking at the first 10 years. We're discussing what makes the show timely and timeless.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: This time, it's Lisa's first word. The 69th episode, which originally aired December 3, 1992.
[00:00:32] Speaker A: Okay, so we just rewatched this. What was your general feeling?
[00:00:36] Speaker B: It's a solid episode. Much better than I married Marge.
[00:00:41] Speaker A: I don't know how many people would agree with that. Why didn't you like I married Marge this much? That much?
[00:00:47] Speaker B: Just a lack of Bart just feels like a stopgap. Before we get to this, I also think I've never been at a place in my life where Homer and Mars were at that point, but I was very much like the first child in my family.
And the vibe of being in that starter apartment and moving to the big house once the younger sibling is born was very real to me. And I really identified with that in this episode.
[00:01:12] Speaker A: So in this episode, it opens with the family gathered around Maggie trying to get her say her first words, and it's not happening. She's a baby. Marge's copy of Fretful Mother magazine recommends a corrective tongue extender to remedy this.
[00:01:27] Speaker B: Yeah. Maggie not speaking yet tells me that she may have a developmental disability, perhaps autism.
[00:01:35] Speaker A: You think so?
[00:01:36] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, in the show, she's only one year old, but in our timeline, this is around three years old, and she's still not talking.
[00:01:45] Speaker A: Yeah. So the kids want to know what their first words were when Marge is hesitant to share the story of Bart's first words, which are? I carumba. While seeing Homer and Marge get it on.
[00:01:55] Speaker B: Yeah. Bart is actually witnessing Lisa's conception. No wonder he's so screwed up. And I would set this at around September 1982.
[00:02:04] Speaker A: So Marge and Homer pivot to telling the story of Lisa's first words. Like flashing back to 1983. Ms. Pac man has just struck a blow for women's rights. We see the Simpsons first family apartment on the lower east side of Springfield, which is an analog for the Lower east side of New York, replete with ethnic stereotypes and clotheslines between the buildings.
[00:02:26] Speaker B: Yeah, and I like the Pac man reference because in the previous episode we just watched, Mr. Burns is playing Pac man, and the way he's talking to Pac man is kind of like he's projecting himself into the game, and he's the maze, and his workers have the upper hand. But it's fleeting. And Burns is the mastermind behind the whole thing.
[00:02:51] Speaker A: So Burns and the Simpsons destinies, in my opinion, maybe are inextricably tied together, like Cyclops and Sinister from the X Men. Just the further you go back, you probably find a limitless amount of connections between their two histories.
[00:03:06] Speaker B: Sure. Mythology. This is Harry Potter and Voldemort.
[00:03:10] Speaker A: And Marge is talking about MASH with the girls in on the Steps.
[00:03:15] Speaker B: Yeah. The Last episode of MASH was February 28, 1983.
So events are really out of whack on this episode. And we have Marge and Homer telling it, so it should really be pretty consistent.
So there's things Marge doesn't want to remember, and there's things Homer can't remember,
[00:03:35] Speaker A: and there's things that Bart claims to remember.
[00:03:38] Speaker B: Right. We have a third narrator now because Bart could kind of remember some of these things.
[00:03:42] Speaker A: Yeah. Marge announces that she's pregnant. And Bart's immediate lie is, oh, yeah, I thought that having a baby would be great because I'd have somebody to blame everything on.
[00:03:53] Speaker B: Right.
So Homer arrives from work. He seems pretty happy. He's whistling Girls Just Want to have Fun. But this is another inconsistency because this song doesn't come out until October.
[00:04:05] Speaker A: Yeah, I want to believe that is sort of a meta foreshadowing moment because Homer's singing a song from the future and in the future, and he doesn't know this yet, Marge is pregnant. They're going to have a child. They're going to have a girl.
So going back to the apartment, Bart has become a full time pain in the ass. He doesn't call Homer daddy, he calls him Homer. He swings buck naked from the clothes lines, and he flushes keys and wallets and other useful items down the toilet.
Marge, meanwhile, has become a full time milf.
[00:04:35] Speaker B: And Marge wants out of this neighborhood. Despite how good she looks, she feels probably having another baby would force Homer to get them to a new place. But this seems like a very manipulative thing, something her mom would have done. It's very Jackie of her.
[00:04:53] Speaker A: Oh, have another baby. So they could leave.
[00:04:55] Speaker B: Right. Because she's pretty passive about the whole situation.
Just like, okay, we could live here. It's cool.
[00:05:01] Speaker A: She's not working anymore.
[00:05:03] Speaker B: No, absolutely not.
[00:05:04] Speaker A: So the Simpsons need a bigger home. They go house hunting, which is an affair. They have prospects in Springfield's Rat's Nest neighborhood, which is funny to me because where my wife comes from, there's a neighborhood called the Rat's Nest.
[00:05:16] Speaker B: Oh, lovely.
[00:05:17] Speaker A: And there's Other east side analogs, like a home next to a hog rendering plant where apparently they still aren't desensitized to the body odor of Homer when he peeks in through the window.
[00:05:28] Speaker B: Right.
And like, moving is always stressful, but it's 10 times more stressful when you're having a baby. This is all happening in March. Lisa will be born in May, so
[00:05:41] Speaker A: 7:42 Evergreen Terrace can be theirs if Abe Simpson ponies up the dough for a down payment. He agrees. And Homer insincerely promises to house Abe with the rest of the family.
A pledge which lasts several weeks to the the laughter of all Simpsons present.
[00:05:59] Speaker B: Yeah, this is another example of Homer refusing to acknowledge Abe's gesture of love.
For three weeks, Homer is able to forgive Abe. But then all the bad memories come crashing back down on him.
He can't just let it go. It's like, wait, you're the monster that tormented me my whole life? You paid for this house. But it's my house, so get out.
This is like their whole relationship back and forth.
[00:06:25] Speaker A: Yeah, but on some level, you can't blame him. Almost all of Abe's recollections, however unreliable they are, showcase him in a negative light as being shiesty or underhanded.
[00:06:38] Speaker B: Oh, so you think he's self aware of himself to warts and all, Abraham.
Yeah, yeah, because Homer does a lot of self aggrandizing and he remembers himself better than what he actually was.
[00:06:51] Speaker A: So anyway, flashback from 1944 to 1984. The Simpsons are moving into what Frank Grimes will one day accurately describe as a palace. Homer meets his arch nemesis, Ned Flanders, and promptly begins borrowing things from him.
[00:07:06] Speaker B: Right. I think Flanders comes from inherited wealth.
And I think it's ironic that neither of these guys bought their own houses with their own money.
Homer and Ned are pretty much shadows of each other. Homer has a conservative father. Ned has a beatnik dad. It's kind of weird that Ned comes in singing a sort of a gay coded wizard of Oz song.
[00:07:28] Speaker A: What song is that again?
[00:07:29] Speaker B: We welcome you.
[00:07:30] Speaker A: La la la la la la.
[00:07:34] Speaker B: I don't think that would be like a movie in their house. They're almost like a no media house.
I don't know.
[00:07:41] Speaker A: Maybe.
But the thing is, Flanders growing up and to this day would have all the latest and greatest things he always does.
So, you know, when wizard of Oz first came to Betamax, I'm sure he had it. And to go back to your observation about the weird shadow concurrent themes between Homer and Flanders life. We have Abe Simpson, his Background includes such professions as soldiers, grifter, snake oil salesman. Right. Hitler seductress.
All working class jobs. I want to imagine that the Flanders, you know, were in on, like, stock market shorting or something like that. I've got Boardwalk Empire on the mind.
[00:08:25] Speaker B: Yeah. Lord Thistlewick, Flanders Scott bodies buried somewhere.
[00:08:29] Speaker A: That one.
[00:08:30] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:08:30] Speaker A: Yeah. So Bart begins his terrible twos. He's terrorizing Marge, banging pots and such. And he's probably contributing to Lisa's mental health struggles in utero. He begins watching Crusty the Clown.
[00:08:43] Speaker B: What's cool here is we see Sideshow Bob with blue hair, and Crusty is a spring chicken only two years away from his on air art attack.
[00:08:52] Speaker A: So Bart is forced to give up his crib for the baby, and the bed frame Homer builds for him is a terrifying clown.
Insult is added to injury when Bart has to stay over at the Flanders house. Their beautiful house, let's be honest. When Marge goes into labor and. And he has to see how much more affluent the Flanders are and that they even take care of their crazy grandmother, Ma Flanders.
Meanwhile, at the hospital, we get the second installment of Dr. Hibbert's Retro Hairstyle sampler platter. This time he's got the beaded braids downgrade.
[00:09:22] Speaker B: I like the Afro.
[00:09:24] Speaker A: Yeah. And then the next one is going to be flat top right, kid and play.
[00:09:28] Speaker B: I think so, yeah.
[00:09:30] Speaker A: So you see a discrepancy here in the timeline though, right?
[00:09:34] Speaker B: All of Homer's recollections.
Lisa's being born concurrently with the 1984 Olympics. But this would be impossible because that would make Lisa not two years younger than Bart to have her land on the May birthday. It's got to be 83.
[00:09:51] Speaker A: Okay, so somebody's full of shit here.
[00:09:53] Speaker B: And it's Homer. For him, the enduring memory from this period is how he swindled Krusty Burger out of hundreds of burgers because the Russians didn't want to participate in the Olympics that year.
That supersedes the memories of the birth of his daughter.
[00:10:10] Speaker A: It was the food baby.
So completely fed up. Pun intended. By the time the baby comes home, Bart plans to run away.
[00:10:18] Speaker B: Yeah. And we have a montage of Bart being bad and being punished. And a really cool reference here is a recreation of a panel from Life in Hell of a Bongo Buddy.
[00:10:29] Speaker A: So this next scene is probably resonant for millions of people around the world. It sure was for me because I had a little sister who was two years younger than me. He's about to chuck it in and leave for good when Lysa says her first word, Bart.
And that's all it takes, really. He runs downstairs to show the parents, who remind him that Lisa already loves him and he falls in love with her in return.
And I also want to note here that Lisa, I think out of loyalty to Bart more than anything, refuses to call Homer Daddy. She jumps right from her first word to like four or five more David Hasselhoff.
[00:11:09] Speaker B: She joins the Bart faction.
What's interesting to me is Homer gets mad when Lisa calls him Homer, not Daddy. Meanwhile, he just kicked his father, who just bought him a middle class two story home to the curb three weeks into, promising that he could live with them.
[00:11:33] Speaker A: So this flashback dissolves back into Lisa and Bart fighting in the present over a spot to stand on the carpet, which Lisa doesn't see his name on, except his name has been written on the floor in giant red letters. Homer takes Maggie upstairs to put her to bed, and he utters the immortal line, the sooner kids talk, the sooner they talk back. I hope you never say a word.
Which is actually kind of twisted when we think about his own relationship with his father.
But forget that. Just focus on Elizabeth Taylor as Maggie uttering her one line ever.
Yeah, even in any of the Flash Forward episodes, she never talks. That's the gag. Yeah, she says, tati, and you know, Alf Clausen brings us home with some beautiful instrumentals that they'll reuse about 400 times. And a classic episode is thus closed.
[00:12:29] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's a great episode.
[00:12:31] Speaker A: So, going back to the headcanon aspect of the timeline, did this episode happen?
[00:12:40] Speaker B: We have some unreliable narrators in this one. We have three unreliable narrators opposed to just the usual two.
And I think since the last storytelling session, I think Homer's had a lot of blunt force trauma to the head.
So the timeline is totally wacky.
[00:12:59] Speaker A: Which season did he go over the gorge?
[00:13:02] Speaker B: That was two.
So we're on four.
[00:13:05] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I'd say.
[00:13:06] Speaker B: I think he also had his stroke since then, too.
[00:13:10] Speaker A: He had a stroke, didn't he?
[00:13:12] Speaker B: Heart attack.
[00:13:13] Speaker A: He had something. We're talking about the. The fugu episode, right? Where he thinks he's going to die?
[00:13:17] Speaker B: No, the April Fool's mishap.
[00:13:20] Speaker A: Oh, with the exploding beer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's no doubt about it. Homer is missing a few.
[00:13:27] Speaker B: But March, there must be shit she doesn't want to remember because she's not correcting him this time.
[00:13:32] Speaker A: And that's part and parcel to Marge's character, who's always suppressed the obvious.
[00:13:37] Speaker B: Yeah. So I'm saying this is like a lower 65 to 70% of this happened.
[00:13:43] Speaker A: Yeah.
So moral and theme of the episode.
[00:13:48] Speaker B: Yeah. In the pursuit of the American dream, there are winners and losers.
[00:13:52] Speaker A: Who are the losers?
[00:13:54] Speaker B: The losers are Abe and Bart.
The winners are Lisa, Homer, and Marge.
[00:14:02] Speaker A: And what's the emotional baseline of the characters here?
[00:14:05] Speaker B: Yeah. Homer and Marge are making a lot of decisions that will become problems in the 90s.
Bart's idea of self is shattered by the birth of his younger sister.
[00:14:14] Speaker A: Relatable.
[00:14:15] Speaker B: Right.
[00:14:16] Speaker A: What do you think are those problems that are going to come up for them in the 90s?
[00:14:19] Speaker B: Well, they bought a home that they can't possibly afford.
[00:14:22] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:23] Speaker B: And they're in the middle class now, so they probably could have been a big fish in the rat's nest. Yeah.
Instead they're in Evergreen Terrace.
Yeah.
[00:14:36] Speaker A: And forever trying to keep up appearances, aren't they? Buying bad RVs, going on vacations to hell, yeah.
[00:14:44] Speaker B: PTA meetings. All the trappings of middle class life that Homer and Marge were comfortable avoiding throughout the 70s.
You know, Chris, the sooner podcasters learn how to talk, the sooner they talk back.
I hope we never drop an episode.
