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D'oh! That reminds me of a good movie

Film references abound in latest Simpsons season to hit DVD

By: Chris Knight

Posted: 08/24/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

Lisa develops a crush on the new smart kid in class (guest star Frankie Muniz) on The Simpsons episode Trilogy of Error. (FOX / TTCFFC)

The 12th season of The Simpsons, which arrives on DVD this week, marked the '80s-spawned show's entrance to the 21st century. The first episode of the new millennium was an Emmy-winning whopper called HOMR. The title can be seen as a play on WOPR, the supercomputer in the 1983 movie WarGames, but the episode's storyline comes from the 1968 film Charly, which was remade in 2000 as the name of the book on which it was based, Flowers for Algernon.

That's a fair bit of homage already, but the typical 22-minute Simpsons episode packs in more movie references than a similar chunk of Quentin Tarantino. HOMR alone includes the famous beach scene in From Here to Eternity (renamed From Here to Infirmity, and starring Itchy and Scratchy), a quotation from The Godfather, and just to bite the pop culture hand that feeds it, a scene in which Homer Simpson goes to the movies.

The marquee lists the film as Love Is Nice, starring Julia Roberts. (The animators point out in the commentary track that they also considered the Roberts-y title The Wedding Marriage.) When patrons notice that someone in the crowded house isn't laughing, suspicion falls on Homer, whose IQ has recently been boosted. (Flowers for Algernon is about a mentally disabled man who becomes a genius after brain surgery.)

"Hey, don't blame me," Homer says. "This movie is tired and predictable. You know she's going to wind up marrying Richard Gere." He then tops off his rant by correcting someone who thinks Bill Paxton is in the movie: "It's Bill Pullman, you fool!")

Booted from the theatre, Homer moans: "I'm a Spalding Gray in a Rick Dees world." (Gray wrote the dramatic monologue Swimming to Cambodia; Dees wrote the song Disco Duck.)

A fairly dangerous drinking game could be constructed around the many film and TV references in The Simpsons. The annual Halloween episode, for instance, features a Matrix reference -- this from a time, the animators point out, "when Matrix parodies were still only a little stale."

There's also a shot of a baby carriage bumping down a long flight of steps, "a reference to the many parodies of the movie The Untouchables, which was a parody of something else; no one knows." (It's from 1925's Battleship Potemkin.) And no one even remarks on a joke in which Homer tries to dance up the side of a wall and instead puts his foot through it, a parody of a famous Fred Astaire number in Royal Wedding -- or else a duplication of Donald O'Connor's take on it in Singin' in the Rain.

The Halloween episode ends with a story called Night of the Dolphin, a play on the 1973 science-fiction movie The Day of the Dolphin. It includes a parody of Free Willy, which the animators note was the second time they'd done so; the first was in the fifth season's The Boy Who Knew Too Much, which also pokes fun at The Pink Panther, Stand By Me, The Odd Couple, The Shining, Matinee, Last Action Hero and of course The Man Who Knew Too Much.

References within references ...

Sometimes The Simpsons' film-savvy storytellers tried to improve on their source material. Night of the Dolphin ends with a cetacean-themed remake of the final shot from Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, which then erupts into a human-dolphin donnybrook.

"I remember as a kid when I saw The Birds for the first time being really infuriated by the ending," an animator recalls. "Because nothing happens, they just drive past all the birds and then it was over. And I wanted this final confrontation."

The list goes on; one episode, The Computer Wore Menace Shoes, reworks the title of a 1969 Disney comedy but features an extended homage to the cult TV hit The Prisoner.

But perhaps the best movie reference is not to a specific film but to the conventions of cinema. In Homer vs. Dignity (a loose remake of 1969's The Magic Christian, which starred Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr), we see police chief Wiggum visiting a financial consultant and being told he hasn't planned for retirement.

"You know how it is with cops," he replies breezily. "I'll get shot three days before retirement. In the business we call it 'irony.' "

-- Canwest News Service

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 24, 2009 B9

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