My Recollection

The State Lottery. This is the part of the job I hate. Firm proud buttocks.

Gambling is harmless enough, but gamblers are sad creatures. When you fellate a scabrous penis for a barely functional modicum of stomped opiates, at least you know you’re getting something. The gambler would suck the same dick for the outside chance of a reward and even pay you for the privilege. But there’s a hierarchy to addictions.  A high roller is classier than the pokie barnacle for the same reason the man who quietly slugs his wife in the privacy of their own home will be the pillar of the community the man who merely screams at her on the lawn will never be.

Then there are the scratch-it folk. The scratch-it folk are the tambourine player’s understudy. Not on the hierarchy by questionable virtue of irrelevance, beings who never had to escape the wheel because the cosmos forgot to put them on it. The items are cheap, so few can go broke buying them; and they are an activity, so the hit’s edges are so dull even children can handle them. My friend’s mum was an absolute fiend for these, and it never really impacted her life. Though it once impacted his.

While it is true that there are a lot of animals in Australia that will kill you, even the deadliest have a kill count in the single digits. Most of these things are invisibly tiny or otherwise so out of the way that, really, if you manage to die via one of them you were probably doing something wrong in the first place. Australia isn’t a place where you can just have bears in your house or a mountain lion in your backyard, so there develops a kind of rogue Irwin instinct that makes you forget that the non-lethal things can still hurt you.

The Australian plover is technically its own thing, the Masked Lapwing. It’s about the size of a pigeon and looks like someone spat a half-chewed candy banana onto a large clump of bird shit. It has yellow barbs on its wings which, contrary to an understandable belief given that it’s an Australian animal, aren’t poisonous, but are harder than statue nipples. It is also an objectively stupid piece of shit of a species. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature recently changed its listing from “Least Concern” to “Feel Free to Kick It” and PETA microwave them for fun.

Birds won a lot of evolutionary bingo because they have magic arms that let them soar away from the endless sea of mouths that make up terrestrial life. They even use these to put their babies out of reach of most of those mouths, making them some of the safest babies. It’s hard for humans to imagine these days, but usually babies are the least safe things because they’re defenceless and cute things taste the best. Every bird knows this on an instinctual level and so use flight to put their babies up high to keep them safe.

Then imagine you’re the plover, who, rather than use its ability to fly, and it can fly, to move its defenceless breakfast-item young somewhere out of the way, chooses, fucking chooses, to just stick a nest on any open, flat bit of ground where everything can get to it. The people who’ve wasted their lives studying these things claim this is to better see approaching predators. Hey, you know where gives you a great vantage point to see predators from? UP A FUCKING TREE. Don’t worry, though, evolution doesn’t close a door without opening a tiny skylight. To make up for whatever punctured cyst the plover is stuck using as a brain, it evolved to defend its nest so psychotically aggressively during the mating season that they frequently explode while trying to fight jets.

I also can’t stress the “any” part of their nesting habits enough. This isn’t like they had a nice thing going before whitey showed up with a bunch of industrial era. They actually thrive in the suburbs; we’re not interrupting eons of specific behaviour with our concrete and juice bars. These animals will randomly pick a patch of dirt to kick a munted divot excuse for a nest into, shit a cluster of precious chicks on it, and then turn a Coles parking lot into Pearl Harbour for 3 months.

But the babies are cute, so as we were waiting for my friend’s sister to get into the car while getting a lift home one afternoon, said friend decided to get out and look at the mysterious baby birds on the little hill near where his mother had parked. She began on her regular afternoon scratch-its immediately and was dead to the world while I gazed out at what I knew was going to be good.

They have a call that’s halfway between Jason’s theme from Friday the 13^th and panicked Morse code, a grotesquely Gigerian combination of biological and mechanical that serves as your first and only warning. Websites will say actual contact swooping is rare, but for things whose evolutionary niche is to trade common sense nest placement for the mindless aggression of an American asked to do something trivial for the public good, that rare shit goes out the window when they’re presented with an actual reason to be pissed. Like a teenager who looks like the Annoying Orange in a Silent Bob costume and sounds like a warped Cypress Hill tape trying to pick up one of their children.

It turns out that things who think they’re hard enough to beat a Boeing in a fair fight will happily peg themselves at a teenager’s face with little concern for their own wellbeing. The first collision of feathery statue nipples with confused stoner head was enough to knock him down and I lurched forward with the kind of immediate, red-faced roaring gut laugh that looks like you’re trying to mouth-birth a demon.

He scrambled to his feet and began sprinting for the safety of the car, the doting parents belting him in the back of the head, while I, my brother, and now his sister, cry laugh at his nightmare. He slams into the driver’s side of the car, screaming like a balloon being let out through a small kazoo, and begins fumbling at the door handle as birds slam into his head. His mother, without looking up from her scratch-it, clicks the door lock button to keep a barrier between scratch-it time and whatever is happening outside.

My friend and his mother had a combative relationship, but not in the kind of mother and child way common to teens. It was more the kind of things you’d see between siblings. She called him Shitbags, frequently, and even came up with a little song that went along with it that, like an ad jingle, I can still remember to this day.

My friend shrieked and tugged at the door handle like a girlfriend who really wanted to get back to watching Netflix, while I sucked some Ventolin into my lungs between wheezing guffaws so I could live just long enough to see more of this. The birds slammed into his head, recomposed themselves, and flew off to get another runup like kamikazes who’d found the infinite lives cheat. His mother eventually put the completed scratch-its into the glove compartment, looked at her child being physically assaulted by animals protecting their young, and burst into a deranged cackle that made me think of if Pee Wee had said something really funny to Large Marge.

Silent Bob unsilently galloped around the car like a teacher’s aide who’d heard there’s cake, shrieking to be let in and yanking at any handle shaped thing he could find, while nature belted him with two birds so perfectly designed for this Darwin would have assumed they’d evolved to drink his brain. Each hard, knocking sound of barb on delightfully ironic “No Fear” cap prompted another round of screamed begging from him and a similar round of wild laughter from us.

The plovers broke before his own mother did, meaning she’d have left him out there long enough to give plovers their first official kill, and this made the eventual drive home a tense one.

The Episode.  

There’s a Catch-22 to Zen in that you can’t want to achieve it as that is the exact kind of desire you’re trying to avoid. It is the thing that must be found but cannot be sought, and this is why you meet so few Bodhisattvas. Realism in something as unreal as an animated sitcom is a simpler relative goal but a race with surprisingly similar hurdles.

The rules of narrative were not imposed upon us by some villainous alien state, they are emergent properties that developed over thousands of years of storytelling. From Rome to Aborigines, these things have common foundational patterns and follow similar evolutionary trajectories. Beginnings, middles, ends, often a point or two, no culture has stories that amount to, “Gary left the house…” and that’s it. We like tight patterns with internal coherence. Realistic things, like a major villain/hero dying of the flu weeks away from a major battle or any number of the random injustices that define real life are considered unfair and annoying.

Realism within narrative is then a paradox. Presenting something that registers as lifelike while not being frustratingly actually lifelike is akin to chasing Zen, but, like magic and various self-help books, there are tricks that present a close enough approximate.

While the basics of narrative are universal, their means of presentation are constantly evolving. For all its cultural cache, Citizen Kane can be a dry watch, a fact reflected by its lower rankings among younger generations. What makes it historically relevant, and why it’s at the top of so many lists, is that it helped define the language of cinema. Prior to this, cinematic language was still a dialect of theatre, which severely limited the potential expression available to film technology.

While major leaps in technology make for easy to see borders, similar processes occurred in writing. Ancient written stories were initially extensions of oratory, and the formal poetic techniques orators used to remember epics leave early writing reading more like poetry than prose. Later narrative writing less tethered to rigid forms has the dry expository style of a child trying to explain how the window got broken without incriminating themselves. Then there was Gustave Flaubert.

James Wood, in his lovely book How Fiction Works, says Flaubert, “…decisively established what most readers and writers think of as modern realist narration…” a feat he accomplished through a kind of dynamic noticing that blended the important and irrelevant to create vivid moments with a sense of temporal space. Here is an excerpt from 1869’s Sentimental Education, focusing on the protagonist, Frédéric, as he walks through a battle in the French revolution:

“There was firing from every window overlooking the square; bullets whistled through the air; the fountain had been pierced, and the water, mingling with blood, spread in puddles on the ground. People slipped in the mud on clothes, shakos, and weapons; Frédéric felt something soft under his foot; it was the hand of a sergeant in a grey overcoat who was lying face down in the gutter. Fresh groups of workers kept coming up, driving the fighters towards the guard-house. The firing became more rapid. The wine-merchants’ shops were open, and every now and then somebody would go in to smoke a pipe or drink a glass of beer, before returning to fight. A stray dog started howling. This raised a laugh.”

But what works as a means of narrative expression in literature clashes with us in a visual medium. The selected moments in prose create droplets of experience that ripple along our memories and tap into our sensations, each is like a synecdoche we unconsciously translate into something larger, so it only takes a few to render a scene. The visual nature of film forces these moments to exist too directly, and so one loses the forest to the trees. The only other option is to manifest the technique in the narrative structure itself, which is a risky strategy.

The kind of noticing that works in prose works because its realism is a matter of presentation, while the underlying narrative structure remains standard. When part of the narrative structure, Flaubert’s style makes for a logically connected series of events, but with little internal cohesion and, subsequently, little of the necessary narrative patterns.

I first noticed it in The Simpsons in Mr Lisa Goes to Washington. The family’s journey from Springfield to the competition in Washington D.C is a long one, but it’s translated into a tiny onscreen time by being cut into a well selected arrangement of travel experiences. This worked for two reasons: it was a small part of a larger coherent plot, and it had the anchoring point of comedy to centre it. By comparison, Blood Feud failed as the structure was foundational to the episode, and there was no anchor point. Critically, the story couldn’t even settle on a perspective. Robbed of its flaneur, a street full of artfully noticed moments is just a random assortment of things.

Dog of Death is a similar beast. It’s about the lottery, then a sick dog, then finding the money to pay for the dog, then being poor because of the dog, then the dog running away, and finally a little boy getting his dog back. Plenty of great moments, and some of these would fit as parts of a standard narrative, but altogether they crowd any pattern. Even obvious moments in typical places, like the line, “I love you, boy” from Bart at the episode’s climax, is a good touching sitcom moment, but there’s no setup for it. Bart is barely in the episode until the dog needs the surgery, but even then, the story shifts back to Homer, leaving Bart’s emotional arc just another briefly noticed thing.  

The family can afford to be the briefly noticed because it isn’t any of them doing the noticing. Anyone taking the role of flaneur would immediately become the core of the story, demanding a pattern and collapsing the delicate series of events that forms the story’s premise. So, the episode is anchored by Santa’s Little Helper, yet Dog of Death is not exactly about the eponymous dog.

Bart’s Dog gets an F centred the viewer on the dog’s perspective. The audience is even placed inside the dog’s mind to present its view of a black and white world full of gibberish-speaking giants. Doing this again would cause the same structural problem as any family member, so instead the story makes him another noticed thing by making his minor presence a conspicuous one throughout the lottery plot, and exploiting his ability to be both an unthinking animal and cartoon sapient dog at the same time. He does what nobody in the family can do: drive events with his own will while not ever needing real focus. Stripped of a character core but bound by an anchor, the audience becomes the flaneur, voyeuristically noticing all these real moments in the life of a family.

Dog of Death isn’t about anything in the traditional narrative sense, but neither is life and that doesn’t stop yours from having emotional stories in it. By using Flaubert’s noticing to shed the artifice of narrative, the story accurately depicts what it is like to be in a socioeconomic class that makes saving the ones you love a crippling expense. Just one thing after another. Stress upon stress. Normally, this is the domain of the odd art film, or one of the later series episodes that has some great moments but no plot. But by exploiting Santa’s Little Helper’s vaguely defined self-awareness, the story can have a centre without the demands that would create for a human.

The pair coexisting is a risky balance and a strong flavour, not the sort of thing one wants to repeat too often because, even with the balancing factors, audiences want the standard narratives they have for millennia. But jaunts like this are both fun and important. It has no arc, but it tells a story. The character moments are adrift, but they aren’t pointless. It has a core, but a mindless one. Dog of Death is bright yellow snapshot of reality.

Yours in hating this part of the job, Gabriel.

Jokes, lines, and stray thoughts

Starting the episode in the ad for the lottery is very impersonal and helps lay the ground for the way the story will work. Ads are brief things, not engaged in or really cared about, but noticed. Their repetition and familiarity, many have become early memes, make them great selections as they can function as a keyhole whose closeness reveals a much larger space.

One would think a sitcom wouldn’t be great ground for such a story style, but the comic focus acts a bit like the dog as anchor, so they can get away with them a bit, though typically not as well. Moments are great for comedy, but not so great for plot. A lot of later episodes, like Kill the Alligator and Run are fucking terrible episodes, but the moments that construct them are very funny. The movie The Other Guys is another great example of a film that scarcely works, but each scene is a gut laugh.

Speaking of, this episode has some fucking cracking moments. The ad is a great kickoff, with the absurdity of everyone winning the lottery, and the rapidfire consumer warning at the end, being solid gags.

Weird spare Lenny working, or formerly working, as a window washer here. I’m gonna call him Venny.

There’s an honesty to the way Moe treats bartending that makes his “Beer is the Answer” sign less cynical.

The Barney and Homer exchange over the “130 million dollars” is nice drunk comedy.

The way the story shifts from the bar to the Kwik-E-Mart, but to Apu instead of Homer, is another touch that keeps the story about the moments. The scene itself is busy, but there are no blurred crowd shots, each person in the store has their own face and self. Little moments abound; people run into each other, a man has brought his dog, a mother talks to her child, a goblin eats a giant cookie, another mother chastises another child. The primes the viewer for the form of the narrative.

Homer is a minor character in this scene, there only for the lucky numbers joke. Like his lottery chances, he is just one tiny thing amidst incalculable others.

Pans and long shots really emphasise all this by giving you the time to get caught up in these background moments.

“I promise nothing” is a goodun.

Homer marching in with fistfuls of tickets while Marge crochets is a nice shot. Highlights they way Homer intrudes on her domestic peace. Never really see Marge crochet much, but if she took loom in high school, she may have done a unit on it.

Homer’s too stupid to see a way out of the pit of torments his life as an idiot is. It’s why he can never escape and why only magical things like lottery tickets get his hopes up. It’s great for a laugh but don’t think about it too much or it becomes sad.

His excitement is so genuine.

Santa’s Little Helper’s first appearance is wonderfully subtle and has the exact amount of attention you want to draw to something that is supposed to be noticed but not focused on. The drop in front of the TV is a bit much for my tastes, but necessary for the format’s broader target audience.

So many distinct character models in this episode. I don’t think the grinning fat guy with the wheelbarrow is at the Kwik-E-Mart but they still add lots of unique characters in the background shot.

Fat Wheelbarrow Guy has a great run of facial expressions.

The Lottery isn’t a book, but a short story that was published in The New Yorker, you can read it online. It’s really good and has a great last line, garnered shitloads of hate mail for being dark which I find terribly funny.

This episode’s deliberate unfocus lets them leap about, from Homer to the news to Skinner, and this is why we get so many great moments in the episode. The somewhat discordant leaps for jokes in Separate Vocations are baked into this episode, so we can freely ride with them.

As someone who grew up in a failing school in a then neglected system, I love the jokes about Springfield Elementary. Skinner’s list of wants are funny by themselves and paint a humorous picture of the school. “… how the Korean war ended” is funny, Base 6 crap is funny and true, and the beautiful rule-of-threes peak at the detention ziggurat is brilliant. I’ve been using some permutation of “where children are held in place… with magnets” and “magnets, always with the magnets” regularly for nearly 30 years.

The flowing nature of this really lends itself to humour, as things can come and go without overstaying their welcome or getting scrutinised. Insane things like Skinner’s Ziggurat can almost feel reasonable.

Some of these teacher designs eventually vanish, which I think is a shame.

“President, Rock Star to Swap Wives” is funny.

More microwave dinners. The series still hasn’t landed on Marge’s exact type of housewife.

Toddlers will absolutely poke an eyeball.

Homer’s confidence at winning is so pathetically real, his following embarrassing rage is too.

Homer’s idea of being rich manifesting as being 9 feet tall and made of gold may seem like a joke, but it’s a harrowingly accurate window into the mind of someone whose brain is mostly animal sensation. His fantasy is just a patchwork of incomplete ideas the same way he can’t actually plan meaningful action to change his life.

The whole scene is another near perfect Simpsons moment. The delivery of “LOOK CLOSER, LENNY” so perfectly balances Lenny’s blasé attitude toward giant, gold Homer. It’s a great fusion of sight and word gags, culminating in the deranged image of him covered in jewels, laughing maniacally.

Drifting from his daydream back to reality, and having Homer still laughing, establishes the ontological status of The Simpsons’ dream sequences.

Homer starts smiling about the lottery before the dog hits the ground, keeping it from comically syncing up is another nice little way of making its existence an afterthought.

Homer ripping at the tickets bothered me as a kid and it bothers me now.

The scene of Homer losing it is funny through its absurd extremity, but I’ve seen similar scenes play out in real life. The way his rage seamlessly shifts from Grampa to Bart really hammers the aimlessness of it home.

“But nooooo, you had to be teeeeen”

Brockman winning is a great choice as it rubs Homer’s loss right in his face.

“We’ve still got each other”

“Hey, the dog’s dead”

 This whole moment with Grampa is an odd one. It’s funny, but the family reactions, particularly Lisa’s, are quite serious. Then he gets angry about being considered a coot and wanders off. He’s like a living cutaway that can wander into scenes and out of them. Grampa is a crazy character, so where he goes and how he gets there exist outside of reality enough to not require explanation.

The show really gets mileage out of the door slamming sound effect.

I’ve often wondered why the vet didn’t go on to become a pop-in side character. I figure it’s a combination of his role being too specific and the kinds of jobs he’d be doing already being filled by Dr Nick.

The vet is based on Ben Casey, titular protagonist of a late 60s medical drama, also the source of the music as they enter the building.

The subtle sound design on the hamster getting thrown into the bin compliments the obvious basketball hoop gag.

“Well, the parrots can” There’s a lot of that classic Simpsons speed here, the line is uttered and dismissed quickly. Following fast on the hamster joke and the midday drama severity of the “or he’ll die” line creates a dense moment that flows through artful construction.

A normal plot would focus on Bart from here on out, or the dog as more of a character. Bart’s feelings are both real and familiar to many viewers, but such feelings are just tiny moments in reality and so they’re a tiny moment here.

Although it does perfectly set Homer up for the “doggy heaven” line, whose saccharine absurdity works best against Bart’s genuine pain. It’s a great iceberg joke, the viewer knows exactly where this is going, but Bart’s too young and stupid to get it.

The cut to the external shot of the car driving over the horizon aids the cut to the next scene in the home, like the synecdoche mentioned above. It’s a smaller part of the journey that stands in for the whole thing, allowing a bunch to be skipped without missing the conversation.

There’s an almost cricket bowler arc to Homer’s butt gesture that always stood out to me.

Lisa’s angry glare, between the pair and off in the background, is brief but a great demonstration of how a shot can emphasise character.

Homer’s rush to add doggy hell to his canine cosmology is great. Struggling to come up with dogs that deserve ETERNAL TORMENT.

Lisa’s background faces tell her story while we watch Bart’s. She knows exactly what is happening, but won’t say anything, save correcting her father on the name of Nixon’s dog, for fear of hurting her brother.

“Oh. You did. Sorry” This moment is a nice touch

In a more standard narrative, the story would follow Bart as he prepared some grand plan to fix his pet.

“One with an untwistable stomach” is made by Homer’s TV shopping delivery.

Cartoon dogs are fascinating areas of study for fiction. They run the gamut of the essentially real Ladybird in King of the Hill all the way to the Family Guy’s essentially human Brian Griffin. Brian is a useful comedic tool because he can be as much of either as necessary—so much a dog that it’s funny to see him do human things while so much a human that it’s then equally funny to watch him do dog things—and either side can drive stories. Ladybird very rarely exhibits forms of awareness that almost breach what would be acceptable for a dog, but is otherwise only a plot motivator in the same manner a regular animal is: getting lost etc. Santa’s Little Helper is, excepting some rubber band jokes, closer to Ladybird, but he does exhibit more human moments. His head on Homer’s leg is him at his most human. Even when Bart’s Dog Gets an F put us in his mind, we were still in a dog’s mind. This scene is a conscious entity aware of something it couldn’t possibly be aware of, driving the plot forward with an emotional plea, but he’s so much of a dog that it can come and go without needing the attention it would were it happening to Brian.

“Lousy manipulative dog” caps the scene nicely.

The shot of Burns’ finger and the security button is a great choice and starts another comically dense scene. The button joke, the quick appearance of the goons, Homer’s instant and passive acceptance of being dragged away, the line, “endanger his job and, yes, even his life”, and the “if you did it, Sir?” all takes place over about 40 seconds. It’s like watching a beautiful display of dominos.

“even his life” really is a great, dark joke.

The cut to the canine surgery book and Marge’s instant “NO” is another great continuation of the comic energy from the last scene.

There’s a lot of continuity in the episode. The burning books include the earlier Lottery, Cosby’s Fatherhood book, and a gag in the form of Fahrenheit 451.  

I didn’t get into it in the article, because it’s a huge topic, but the most important part of the selection process for your noticed moments is what you choose to leave out. Comedy has an easier time as scenes that flow in a broad sense, like this run of Homer trying to find a way to get the surgery done, don’t need to connect too directly and the guiding selection criterium is, “is it funny?” These function like the bumpers in bowling and are similarly effective for learning. It’s a bit like balancing on a beam, though, in that you can study the theory forever but still not be able to do it. It really is a matter of feel, though I find the synecdoche point a good form of guidance.

The episode is littered with things that could have or did become entire plots, like Homer having to quit drinking. Making things like this B stories wastes them as there is too much focus to ignore, but when breezed by they can be dug up again easily.

“Chub Night” is such a great cap to the food budget sequence. It’s like the cellar door of funny, CHUB NIGHT, it just works in the ear of an English speaker. When I was in year 10 or 11, one of my friends began calling a classmate Chud, as we’d seen the film earlier that week. It’s common these days, but even back then, when nobody knew what the fuck a chud was, people knew it was an insult purely by the phonemes. The “uh” sound followed by a good hard consonant seldom produces a cute mental picture. From what I can gather, as it was a mystery to me at the time, chub is a method of packaging. Those tubes of hyper-processed devon that look like dog food only people eat them is basically what Marge is talking about. I’d be sad too, that shit really is dog food and is only eaten by the absolute gutter-grade ferals in Australia.

Ah, encyclopedias.

Maggie’s flex is a good joke made by her almost adult level understanding of what’s going on to time it. She’s a lot like Santa’s Little Helper in terms of her awareness level.

The line about becoming a family of travelling acrobats is good but the shot of the lean in from the rest of the family is absolutely gold. A reaction that keeps the silence going to let the phrase hit the ground with a satisfying thud while still punishing the stupidity.

“He’ll fight and he’ll win” for a game cock is funny. The guy looks like he could be related to Moe, and cock fighting is an appropriately shitty activity.

Doggy Heaven being real makes Homer a prophet.

You can give pets mouth to mouth, but you often have to get the mouth over the snout as well.

“Flunked out of dental school” is an odd burn considering being a vet isn’t exactly simple.

“How come he gets meat and we don’t” is borderline for Homer’s stupidity level but the anger helps it be more an emotional reaction and not a genuine thought. Marge’s “You wouldn’t want what he’s eating” is a great reply. Snouts and entrails are fine, you can eat em.

The return of the lottery is both a great way to further torture the family and a good example of the way this episode’s plot structure differs from the norm. The lottery isn’t a B plot, it as an issue was resolved and abandoned. No actual A plot took over because the narrative continues to shift. The dog getting sick and having to be paid for is a plot, but this is already resolved. The dog having to be paid for and hurting the family financially is a plot (and was basically the first episode), but this is resolved. The dog runs away is a plot that’s been done recently and gets done again, here it’s just a few minutes. In any number of other episodes, these are glaring faults, wasted space and poor plotting. But, intentionally or not, the dog’s function as a core that doesn’t need the kinds of resolutions or emotional payoffs of a human keeps any of these plot elements from dominating, and thus turning a lack of subsequent narrative points into a failure.

“A dinosaur” is delivered beautifully.

Skinner’s reaction to the eraser is perfectly understandable and the cruel frown on the lottery agent’s face as he hands it over is such a lovely detail. Skinner’s hands twitch with rage, which I only just noticed.

Cutting skinner off is the suddenness principle of comedy, it’s why things like cutoff screams are popular. It’s fairly basic surprise, but it’s good fun.

The run of misfortunes besetting the family is a good mix of the believable, like Marge’s numbers and Maggie’s clothes, and the more ridiculous like Lisa’s sudden Copernicus essay. No such thing would be asked of a second grader.

“MY QUARTER”

Proto Squeaky Voiced Teen ruining Bart’s hair, “I’ve done it again” is a goodun. I always thought Bart’s hair was a basic buzz job.

The family being angry at the dog would be a yard too far had the story really focused on it, particularly the generally more aware Lisa.

“Close the gate Maggie” feels more like a Bart line. I know they were following the seniority of the family, but still.

Cutting to the family already calling out for the lost dog is a great example of the selection process. Skipping the discovery is not necessarily better, a more emotionally focused story may even demand the reaction, but this scene gives us all the information, character, and plot developments in one.

The lottery is basically done with, the dog is no longer sick, the plot has changed again.

The map traipsing scene is a fun one. Schwartzewelder County being a reference to the lunatic writer.

More continuity in the Michael Jackson Expressway. Things like these are common in modern shows, Archer is practically made of them, but it stands out here.

The photos of Homer and the dog escalate well, up to the nicely absurd, and far more cartoony dog bit of Santa’s Little Helper boxing homer.

Flanders is wearing his Assassins, even more continuity!

“That’s a good thing”

Flanders’ scream as he flees the hounds is good, just the right amount of terrified shrillness.

Abandoning the action of Flanders fleeing murderous hounds is comic in the same way Skinner’s cutoff rant is. Letting something exist as just a sensation is good for the more primal things like comedy and horror.

Crippler, ha.

“Bagged his first hippie”

Similar to Blood Feud, the story has now dramatically shifted perspective. In that episode, it was just chaotic. Here, the structure of the plot eschews focal characters, so it’s free to move around successfully.

I won’t check until I get there, but I feel like the Springfield Dog Pound is the same building as Ayn Rand’s School for Tots.

“…sweet, gamey tang of human flesh” is a great line supported by great facial expressions.

You just can’t go wrong with “firm, proud buttocks”

Dead Skinner reference from Bart the Murderer. This is the most continuity I’ve seen in an episode so far.

The ultimately cropped photo is a goodun.

Homer’s posters being demolished is a good wacky gag that’s bolstered by the fact that just collaged them all on the one wall.

LOAD THE HEADCANNON

That is absolutely Smithers’ own girl scout outfit.

“If that were a real girl scout, I’d have been bothered by now” is great.

“He’s in here somewhere” is another one.

The ability of the episode to hop about like Flaubert’s eye opens up a lot of these rapidfire jokes. Imagine a compilation of the legitimately funny Family Guy cutaways but with actual supporting tissue, whole characters, and meaningful stories. That’s basically what peak Simpsons is, expertly blended absurdity and reality.

Ah, A Clockwork Orange, the lifeblood of this generation’s reference game.

As a child, I had no real idea who Lyndon Johnson was, let alone was able to recognize him in caricature, so I had no fucking clue what this shot was. Turns out, it was based on Lyndon Johnson actually lifting his beagle up by the ears, which is a fucking weird thing to do in front of a big pile of people.

I love that nobody in the family thought to check the pound. The speed of events keeps moments like this from weighing the show down.

“Remember, doggy heaven” “THERE IS NO SUCH PLACE… or, to put it another way, there is”

The Frinkiac has what Burns is repeating as he jabs Santa’s Little Helper in the face as “Poka poka poka” but I always heard it as “Boonka” as in related to the word “bonk”. With the headphones on, it’s poka. Either way, the general lack of real semantic meaning makes it funny. I used to do basically exactly this to my brother when we were children.

The look on Santa’s Little Helper’s face here is great.

The pan from Burns’ mansion to Brockman’s is a great choice as it aligns with the coming together of the show’s events.

Brockman’s response to Ted Kennedy getting bit is comically simple.

Burns’ longevity treatments come up again as references and then in the X-Files episode.

The muffled “release the hounds” is a nice touch.

The characters are at their most consistently cartoony when they scream.

To be fair, Santa’s Little Helper is certainly scary here.

This is the resolution to a different episode, largely an artefact of the format that demands endings like this. It’s better than the Blood Feud ending, even though it’s hokey, because it’s actually within the structure of the show, and not the writers making excuses directly to the audience.