The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular (aka As The Weeks Went On, So Did The Cartoons)

It's been a while since I last talked about a Simpsons clip show on here. Long overdue is my coverage of the clip show that many fans (although not I) would rate as the strongest of a questionable bunch - "The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular" (3F31), which first aired December 3rd 1995 as part of the show's seventh season.

"138th Episode Spectacular" is a more challenging episode to analyse than "So It's Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show" or "Another Simpsons Clip Show", thanks to the total lack of anything resembling a traditional Simpsons plot. Whatever our feelings on the artistic merit or integrity of being served up a casserole of reheated clips in place of a completely fresh narrative, its predecessors do at least offer the family the opportunity for a little personal growth and reflection amid the forced reminiscing; the recycled material is structured, however vaguely, so as to be building toward something of meaning for the Simpsons in the present. "Spectacular" eschews a framing narrative in favour of linking segments with everyone's favourite C-list fish fetishist, Troy McClure, who in a bit of reality-blurring is presenting the celebration from the Springfield Civic Auditorium. Troy, who prior to this episode had never interacted with the Simpsons in person and should logically have no idea who these people even are (although that would all change soon enough), has temporarily detached himself from the show's internal universe in order to provide to provide an external commentary. As such, this boasts the distinction of being the series' first non-canonical episode outside of the Treehouse of Horrors. It's an obvious precursor to the criminally undervalued Season 8 offering "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase", which uses Troy in a very similar fashion. Both episodes are characterised by a veneer of showbiz phoniness purposely designed to signal creative bankruptcy, and Troy, with his feigned enthusiasm and fixed plastic smile, provides the perfect human face for that veneer. I suspect that the unusually protracted emphasis on Troy is a huge factor in why this episode enjoys a somewhat sunnier reputation than others of its ilk. Both of Phil Hartman's recurring characters are obviously firm fan favourites and, compared to Lionel Hutz, Troy rarely got the opportunity to be involved directly in episode plots, "Spectacular" being one of only three appearances in which he was used as more than just a one-scene side character. That in itself makes it quite a rare and precious thing.

"The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular" was written by Jon Vitti, who was no stranger to the clip show arena, having previously penned "Another Simpsons Clip Show". In both cases, Vitti was so uneasy about having his name attached to something so discreditable that he hid behind the moniker of a certain child-eating, shape-shifting clown (this time, director David Silverman followed suit and assumed the pseudonym Pound Foolish). Vitti admits on the DVD commentary that he felt more comfortable with how this one turned out, chiefly for the fact that it advertises its magpie nature upfront, whereas "Another" opens more deceptively, like any regular Simpsons episode. Vitti also feels that "Another" hampered itself by approaching the series with a degree of reverence that "Spectacular" utterly spurns. The killer clown doth sell "Another Simpsons Clip Show" too short, methinks, although there's no denying that "Spectacular" gave the show an opportunity to be inordinately uncharitable toward itself, one of its most infamous gags being a particularly brutal one at the expense of the late Bleeding Gums Murphy, whose passing was viewed as a more serious matter in the episode in which it occurred (although in that regard he still fared better than poor Dr Marvin Monroe, who wasn't even considered important enough to receive his own exit arc). Gruellingly honest "Spectacular" may be, but it's also one of the series' fluffier pieces, and probably the fluffiest of the entire classic era. For all of its self-deprecating charms, the lack of even a perfunctory narrative does mean that "Spectacular" inevitably comes off as a shallow affair, one that's fun but offers little substance beneath the novelties (say what you will about the two previous clip shows, there were stakes in both their cases). I would suggest, however, that there is, once again, an implicit narrative being conveyed amid the collaging - it's one that I think "Spin-Off Showcase" would tackle a whole lot better later on, but "Spectacular" still makes for a perfectly respectable test run.

All three classic era clip shows, regardless of how straight the face with which they play themselves, contain a particularly pivotal line of dialogue that accentuates the unmistakably sour intentions behind the reminiscing. In "So It's Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show", it was about attempting (perhaps in vain) to relive long lost summers. In "Another Simpsons Clip Show" it was about opening up old wounds - discovering that certain summers are perhaps better off lost. In "Spectacular", I think the ethos of the episode is best summed up in Troy's comment, "As the weeks went on, so did the cartoons" - a seemingly banal statement on the development of the Ullman shorts that encapsulates, in the tidiest of nutshells, the entire history of The Simpsons and a few of the contemporary anxieties about where it might be headed. In its predecessors, the most grudging attacks on the entire clip show exercise were reserved for the episode titles, and "Spectacular" is really no exception, the 138th episode being a conspiciously arbitrary milestone. There's nothing particularly special about that number, aside from the fact that it was, at the time, considered a big one for a show of this nature. "Hasn't this cartoon been running for an extraordinarily long amount of time?" seems to be the underlying point at the heart of "Spectacular", a question that speaks to the impressive strength and endurance of the series, but also to the eternal drudgery in having to keep the damned thing going. It was a tension that dominated much of Oakley and Weinstein's tenure as showrunners, the implicit problem one that Troy McClure would raise explicitly at the end of "Spin-Off Showcase" - how do you keep The Simpsons fresh and funny after so many years? "Spectacular" is not so much a celebration of the show's longevity as a public unmasking that openly invites us to see the cracks within the series, something perfectly encapsulated in the visual metaphor of the auditorium set, which has been done up to resemble the family's living room, and which, from certain angles, betrays intermittent glimpses of the dark, empty stage space beyond.

When I covered "So It's Come To This", I noted that the prolificness of the clip show in US television (at least back in the day) can be attributed to their conforming to the basic principles in George Ritzer's theory of McDonaldization, mainly efficiency (clip shows mean a higher episode count at lower costs) and predictability. The assumption behind clip shows is that audiences don't mind being offered the same material all over again because humans are naturally drawn to what is familiar and and will enjoy getting to relive all of their favourite gags in quick succession. In that regard, "Spectacular" is something of a boat rocker; it offers a very different clip show experience to its predecessors, in pooling from a more adventurous range of material. Only around the middle portion of the episode, when Troy answers a sampling of faux fan mail, does it settle for simply regurgitating the familiar, yielding a couple of demo reels for Homer's devolving intelligence and Smithers' closet sexuality. Elsewhere, the episode concerns itself with quite unchartered territory, extending way back beyond the usual boundaries to the series' roots and to the dark corners that had previously been concealed from public eyes. For viewers familiar only with the show in its current, stand-alone form, it was a rare (and potentially startling) opportunity to get acquainted with its origins as a series of crudely animated supporting skits on The Tracey Ullman Show - a step further back than the show, in its contemporary form, was perhaps comfortable with its memories being cast. Elsewhere, discarded footage from favourite episodes saw the light of day for the very first time (Troy's term, "Cut-out Classics", being an obvious oxymoron) and, most shockingly of all, we learned of the existence of an alternate solution to the previous summer's "Who Shot Mr Burns?" two-parter, in which Burns named a different suspect as his shooter. Unlike a more conventional clip show, its purpose is not to immerse you in the cozy glow of nostalgia, but instead to upset everything you thought you knew about The Simpsons. It is, in many respects, an anti-clip show, a clip show for people who don't like clip shows, not altogether dissimilar to the South Park episode "City on The Edge of Forever", in that it presents us with a version of The Simpsons were everything is fundamentally wrong at every turning - not least, the fictitious representation of series creator Matt Groening as a gun-toting crackpot who, unbeknownst to us, was feeding us subliminal right-wing messages in the opening sequence every week.

For me, the best of the clip shows will always be "Another Simpsons Clip Show" - I know that's not a popular opinion, but it's a hill I will nevertheless die on. It's the one that I think does the best job in illustrating the futility of retreating down memory lane and taking comfort in past adventures - adventures which, on closer inspection, have distinctly negative implications that might reverberate within the present. It is, however, of little surprise to me that "Spectacular" is the one most commonly favoured among fans. After all, it has a ton of footage that, at one time or another, you couldn't see anywhere else, almost to the point that I feel that the presence of so much novel material gives it an unfair advantage over the other clip shows. The question is, how does it hold up now, when the march of time and media have brutally chiselled away at a chunk of that novelty? 

Clip shows in general are today regarded as something of an outdated television convention - The Simpsons hasn't made one since "Gump Roast" of Season 13 - making more sense in an era when viewers would not have known if or when they would get to see their old favourites again. The increased availability of complete show inventories through DVD box sets and, more recently, streaming has somewhat robbed them of their function. In a post-DVD world, "Spectacular" is left with little advantage over its brethren - deleted scenes, alternate endings and all sorts of miscellaneous goodies that, in Troy's words, "You were never meant to see" can be easily accessed at the touch of two or three buttons. As Erik Adams notes in his review on the AV Club, the episode now has the air of a "glorified DVD extra...were it not for the extra work that went into the Troy McClure sequences, it’d be indistinguishable from a retrospective featurette whipped up for the Complete Seventh Season box set". A distinction "Spectacular" does retain is that it's still one of the very few venues in which you can legally see a selection of the Ullman shorts, although only two of these, "Good Night" and "Bathtime", are shown in their entirety. The Ullman shorts have remained a surprising obscurity across the years, although if you're really interested then uploads of those can be easily accessed online, albeit seldom in outstanding quality.

Ultimately, "Spectacular" is at its strongest when it does appear to be making some statement on the current status of the series, even if very little from the show's regular inventory is actually shown. Of all the Simpsons clip shows, this one feels the most consciously structured to comment pointedly on not only the development of the show and how far it had come, but also its imminent, possibly concurrent decline. Professor Lawrence Prince's hilariously concise observation that "Homer gets stupider every year", represented a common charge from fans on Homer's continued debasement over the years (the people expressing this concern back in 1995 did so not unreasonably, although I think that Bachman Turner Overdrive might have had apt words for them nevertheless). The selection of clips used to assess this point is somewhat lackadaisical - for Season 6, they used a clip from the "Treehouse of Horror V" segment "The Shinning", in which Homer's over the top behaviour is NOT a sign of excessive stupidity, but a well-observed parody of Jack Nicholson's scenery chewing in the role of Jack Torrance - but we nevertheless get a decent taste of how increasingly outlandish the series had gotten as it went along, starting in the relatively grounded world of "Blood Feud" and "Flaming Moe" and (discounting the Halloween clip) ending up with the plausibility stretchings of "Deep Space Homer" (put a pin in that, because it comes up elsewhere in the episode).

The episode as a whole takes us from the visual grotesqueness of "Good Night", and the show's messy birthings, to more-or-less the present day and the conceptual grotesqueness of "Who Shot Mr Burns?", an intriguing mystery that ended with the deliberately far-fetched revelation that a baby had pulled the trigger. It's important to note that the alternate scenario shown in "Spectacular"  - where Burns was wounded by his best friend Smithers - was a dummy ending created purely to keep the animators from leaking the answer, and never considered seriously as a possible solution to the mystery (I emphasise that, in part, because I find the mere suggestion of Smithers as the gunman to be profoundly upsetting). Nevertheless, we might ponder if its existence undermines the validity of the ending we were given, in illustrating just how arbitrarily things could be tweaked in another direction, or if it ends up vindicating the actual solution as the only one that makes any kind of narrative or intuitive sense. The thinly-veiled cultural reference in Troy's remark about ignoring Simpson DNA evidence aside, that actually isn't the issue with the Smithers solution - Burns still has his lollipop tussle with Maggie, so he could presumably have acquired her eyelash in much the same manner. The real issue has to do with how the gun used to shoot Burns ended up inside the Simpsons' car, which isn't accounted for in this version of events (and Smithers obviously kept the gun on him, if he still went on to shoot Jasper). But the DNA thread does, at best, get turned into rather a weak red herring, while Smithers' established alibi is casually fudged. Ultimately, though, the major selling point behind Maggie being the shooter is underlined in the flagrant ridiculousness of Burns and Smithers' relationship resuming normalcy outside of a 5% pay cut for the latter - she was one of the few characters who could do the deed and reasonably face no repercussions. There is the status quo to maintain (Marvin Monroe Memorial Hospital notwithstanding).

Of all the truly salacious tidbits on offer, I'd say that the "Cut-out Classics" hold up the least well. It's a fairly arbitrary selection of deleted scenes (if you've trawled through the extras for each season's DVD release, you'll know that they had a lot of options to choose from), with only two clips that really benefit from being recontextualised here. It is, in all cases, easy enough to deduce why they might have been cut - presumably, the writers had enough confidence in their comedic merit for them to have made it into full animation, but the majority of them are weird tangents that don't contribute anything to the overarching narrative. The deleted scene from "Krusty Gets Kancelled" is the only one that would have furthered the plot in any way, in that it contains the pivotal development promised by the title, but even then the final edit had more impact for omitting it. The excised scene from "Treehouse of Horror IV" gives Lionel Hutz more closure than he received in the version that aired, but I think the implication there - that he scarpered and had no intention of coming back - is far funnier than him returning to present Marge with an empty pizza box. Sometimes less is more.

Some of them may have been excised for slightly more complex reasons than needing to speed up the narrative flow. As per the DVD commentary, the clip from "Homer and Apu" was cut because Bollywood was deemed too esoteric a target for The Simpsons to be ribbing. The clip from "Burns' Heir" was cut because Richard Simmons was deemed too obvious a target for The Simpsons to be ribbing. And, let's face it, as delightfully unnerving as that robotic Simmons is, it would be an inanely out of character item for someone as zeitgeist-challenged as Burns to own. Whereas most of these cut-out classics I can readily swallow as once having conceivably been part of their respective episodes, there's something about that robotic Richard Simmons encounter that strikes me as intrinsically inauthentic - it's so over the top, left of field and at odds with the friction of the scene in question that it's difficult to contemplate it fitting in without the benefit of Troy's quotation marks. I am not questioning the legitimacy of the clip, but it does feel like it was always conceived to go along with a show of this nature than with its supposed mother episode. It comes across more as a parody of a deleted scene than an actual one, an alternate resolution to the stand-off between Homer and Burns that's deliberately jarring in how much sillier it is than anything leading up to it (I think there's a good reason why they saved this clip for last - it may be one of the most out-there Simpsons cut scenes, period). That the clip receives a callback at the end of the episode, when we're treated to a montage of naked Simpsons arranged to the same KC & The Sunshine Band track emitted by robot Simmons, merely reinforces the idea that the clip's natural environment was always right here amid the show at its loosest and most pointedly self-aware. And yet, it seems that one of the greatest legacies of "Spectacular" has been to permanently rewire many a viewer's perception of "Burns' Heir" - I've encountered a number of fans who report that, upon hearing Homer's challenge of "Do your worst!", they reflexively connect the dots to Burns' response in "Spectacular", and it feels jarring when Simmons doesn't appear (I won't lie, I do it myself). Something in their heads tells them that this is how the scene should play out. Which raises an interesting question - if a scene is excised, but we see it anyway, is it still a legitimate part of the episode? Does it potentially undermine the authenticity of the cut we were given? At the very least, it gives us a glimpse into what could have been (and, in the case of robotic Richard Simmons, was anyway, thanks to "Spectacular"), making the final product seem less like the definitive version, but just one of several possibilities.

The other deleted scene that I feel works a lot better here than it would have done in its original form, or even as a stand-alone DVD extra (albeit for very different reasons), is that of "Mother Simpson", an episode that would at the time still have been pretty fresh in viewers' minds, having aired only a couple of weeks prior to "Spectacular". It's also the most restrained cut-out of the bunch - no dancing robots or pornography-peddling clowns, just Homer and Mona sitting at the breakfast table, continuing their game of catch up after decades apart. Ostensibly, the punchline of the scene is in Homer assuring Mona that, despite working at a nuclear power plant, he does not, in practice, support the nuclear power industry on the grounds that he's such a lousy worker. But a far subtler gag occurs just before, when Homer references the events of "Deep Space Homer" of Season 5 and asks Mona if she was aware that, two years prior, he was blasted into space as part of a publicity-baiting mission by NASA. The pivotal beat is in Mona's casual response - "I read all about it...after all, it was national news" - which is, when all is said and done, a more passive-aggressive variation on Frank Grimes' overtly disgusted reaction on being related the exact same story a season later. In both cases, it's an acknowledgement on the show's part of how debased its own adherence to basic plausibility had become in recent seasons, with Homer the astronaut being their mutual watermark for the series at the very peak of its absurdity (although a baby gunning down an old man has got to come close). In its early years, the kinds of adventures the family were involved in were of the low-key variety that typically wouldn't extend far beyond the local papers, if they even made that. Since then, Homer has enjoyed exposure of such magnitude that even someone as supposedly out of the loop as Mona has a decent idea of what he's been doing. Such humor was a defining characteristic of the Oakley/Weinstein era, when the series was evidently building toward an existential crisis regarding its own longevity, a malaise that came to dominate a significant chunk of the atmosphere in Season 8 (see below). You can catch traces of it in Season 7, but it tended to be a bit more stealthily disguised - take Marge's pep talk to Bart and Lisa toward the end of "The Day The Violence Died", for example, the actual purpose of which was touched on a little in this entry - with Mona's line being one of the earliest, if not the earliest examples. It's probably for the best that it didn't make the final cut of "Mother Simpson" - such snarky self-deprecation would have felt out of place in one of the most sincere and heartfelt episodes of the entire series - but it's great that "Spectacular" managed to preserve that status nonetheless.

Mona's words have additional resonance in this episode, for their logical conclusion is something that Troy makes all-too explicit in his closing reflection: "Who knows what adventures they'll have between now and the time the show becomes unprofitable?" Judging by a few of the adventures the family had in Season 8, this was a question that was evidently causing the production crew a few sleepless nights (not that they were sleeping much anyway, on their work schedule). A quarter-century later, and Troy's grim prophesy has still not come to pass, but throughout Oakley and Weinstein's reign the series seemed increasing resigned to likelihood that it was nearing the end of its natural lifespan, with multiple episodes underlining the basic practicality as to what more there possibly was to do with these characters after so many years on the air. Troy's words are ostensibly optimistic, pointing to the many exciting possibilities that lie ahead, but are undercut by a stark and deliberately unsentimental reminder that everything, even a cartoon institution as formidable as The Simpsons, is ultimately mortal, and that profit has the final word on everything. But there is another implicit threat in that statement, and one that did prove far more prescient - the suggestion that the show would keep on going specifically until it became unprofitable, as opposed to bowing out because the best of its years were now behind it. With hindsight, Troy's statement wasn't a warning that the end was in sight, but that the insanity was only just beginning. You thought Homer going into space was stretching the limits? Do Bachman Turner Overdrive have words for you!