Stark Raving Dad

By Gabriel, 16 Aug 19, 10

My Recollection

Lucky red hat. He wets his pants. HEE-HEE!

You can see Down Syndrome and chickenpox. You can get a blood test for Hep and HIV. Using wonderous modern tools, we can now look directly at the microscopic things that cause these problems. It’s not so easy with the brain.

Take autism. There’s no scan for it, no irregularity in the brain that an MRI might pick up. There’s no blood test for it, no microbe or virus we can point to and say, “yup, that’s the autism”. It doesn’t exist, and yet there are absolutely people who are autistic. We define it by its symptoms. It is measured as a distance from normal, and so this can be tricky when that distance isn’t very far. I know many on what we now call the spectrum, and you wouldn’t know it to talk to them. But the further you get from normal; the easier diagnosis becomes.

I’m a connoisseur of the mad for the same reason I spend a lot of time clicking at shit on the internet, I like to be surprised. I don’t derive much satisfaction from wanting a thing and getting the thing, but discovering a thing, ooh, that’s just the bee’s knees. I could never say to myself, “You know, Gabriel, I’d like to see a tiny fedora pop out of a man’s foreskin” and go looking for it but finding exactly that one day enriched my life immensely.

To work door in Brisbane, you have to take a course. Part of this is to legitimise the system of bribery brought in by Queensland’s Hillbilly Dictator, and the other part is to make sure you’re not too racist. It’s otherwise impossible to fail. I’m pretty sure you could shit on your desk and still pass, provided you said, “no homo” afterward. This is not that much of a joke, the final exam was “open book” which meant a list of answers were handed out so we could have them on the table with us. Don’t worry, it wasn’t a total fraud, the answers weren’t in the right order.

A guy I took the course with put “impossible to fail” to the test by being the human equivalent of a fedora secreted within a foreskin.

We’d get a 20-minute break at the course for a bit of lunch, and most of us would stay in the pleasantly air-conditioned office. There was an odd spread of humans here –people like me getting crowd control licenses for bar work, older gents getting stuff for armoured car work, others getting stuff for site monitoring– so there was little conversation as there was little common ground. This guy decided to start talking to nobody in particular, and I can’t stress what an alarm bell this is.

Time Bandits is the funniest fucking movie I’ve ever seen”, he says to a silent room.

Firstly, this announcement either means you didn’t think at all before you said it, or you did, and concluded that a room full of middle-aged men attempting a career change want to discuss Gilliam. Either is concerning. Secondly, as a Gilliam fan, Time Bandits is only the funniest movie you’ve ever seen if it’s the only movie you’ve ever seen. Even Gilliam fans seldom talk about Time Bandits. Which bit cracked you up? The giant head chasing the midgets through a wall? Or the way it ends with the main character’s parents dying after touching a rock in a microwave? Saying Epic Movie was your favourite comedy would just make you an irredeemable moron, this was like saying Tuesday is your favourite colour.

He wasn’t done.

 “I used to work in movies”

K

“Not anymore though”

Okay, so he’s got some story about being a gaffer or whatever on the set of Beyond Thunderdome, it’s his big anecdote, and dammit, he’s gonna tell it. Fine, I can eat my sandwich and listen to this.

“Not since Disney came after me”

Uh-oh.

There’s a thing in horror I love, and that’s where nobody around the main character acknowledges that there is anything weird going on, even as people turn into weird monsters. It’s a great way of adding a background hum of alienating cosmic dread to whatever weird mutants your special effects fella knocked up. Experiencing it in person is exactly as horrible as you can’t imagine.

I’m surrounded by grumpy boomers who are terrified of a world full of women, gays, and transiwhatsits. For them, ignoring something they find uncomfortably strange is every second of every day. Nobody else registers that the thing just uttered was odd, and ol’ Penis Hat took this as a cue to continue.

The rest of what he said lives in me like a hypnotic program and moves through my mind like a dust mote across my eye. I can only remember it when I’m not remembering it and I relive it any time Jupiter is directly over my house. It was the story about how he wrote the original score for the movie, Coyote Ugly and, rather than pay him, Disney sent actual assassins after him.

Even writing this now I think I’m lying, but some dormant PTSD reaches into my mind like a rapist reaching into a child’s bed and a cold shudder reminds me I’m not. He is wearing pants; how can he think this and get pants on? Surely these must be incompatible. Coyote Ugly, the movie I vaguely remember about women in a bar. I don’t even know if Disney had anything to do with it. Coyote fucking Ugly.

Conspiracies develop as a result of maladapted social instincts that prioritise a sense of self derived from social deviation coupled with a sense of superiority that comes from possessing esoteric knowledge. This is why they’re usually underdogs in some important war or cause. Being miserable at the bottom of a pile of impersonal systems is a bummer, being miserable because of a moustache twirling villain is fun.

This is how you understand the mad. It all follows a form of logic, just one that starts from premises distant from shared reality. His was madness within madness. If you’re gonna make up a cool story, make it cool. Why pick writing the score to Coyote fucking Ugly? Is it the spurious jab to make the rest more believable? He didn’t even elaborate, there was no effort to do the things that conspiracy theories do. I wasn’t being educated by a Knower. I wasn’t in the presence of a Resister. It just was in the same manner one sometimes gets toilet paper stuck to one’s anus.

He passed his exam, because it was impossible not to, and was partnered with a security dog, who I assume outranks him to this day.

 

The Episode.

The celebrity guest on a sitcom is a great case study for the different ways creators communicate with audiences. A TV show has stars who already rate as celebrities. Alec Baldwin is a celebrity, yet he’s not a celebrity guest star in an episode of 30 Rock. Oprah is a celebrity and she absolutely was. Sometimes a celebrity cameos as themselves, like Aaron Sorkin, and sometimes they appear as characters within that show’s reality, like Carrie Fisher. Animated programs do similar things, but have a few extra tricks, which The Simpsons has already taken advantage of, as they can hide celebrity behind a voice and alias. Each falls into a basic category.

The Special Guest star: This is basically Oprah in 30 Rock and any other celebrity cameo where the existence of the celebrity is heralded in promotional material or the celebrity isn’t otherwise an actor. It is largely motivated by external factors, like drawing in new viewers with the promise of a shiny thing.  These will often be “as themselves” but do show up as in-universe characters. For the latter, it is rarely more than a one-off, but occasionally you get a minor arc or recurring role.

The Less Special Guest star: This is more the Carrie Fisher episode. She is not as big a celebrity, and, though she does have appeal outside the show, it tends to be more niche. These will more typically be as story characters with relevance to the narrative, and this can sometimes, in the case of particularly structured realities, even be “as themselves”. Examples of this would be Mark Hamill in Just Shoot Me or Will Wheaton in Big Bang Theory. Each was in those shows as themselves, but a self that existed within that show’s narrative world and were actual parts of the stories.

And the Rest: This third category is for anyone whose existence in the show is not related to external celebrity and/or the show doesn’t communicate anything to the audience externally. This is the category that is easier for animation to get away with, such as Brad Pitt being Boomhauer’s brother, Patch, where he used the same rapid hillbilly dialect to almost entirely obscure his voice. This is the category that shows up as a surprise when you find out, or as a trivia contest question.

The Simpsons’ was hot from the start, but a lot of that was due to the idea of a cartoon for adults being a novelty and that it was fairly solid work by itself. What this overshadowed was that it was also a hotbed of 90s countercultural approaches that twisted the genre’s clichés beyond just darker takes on hokey family comedy tropes. The way they handled their first major guest stars is actually remarkable but is an easy thing to lose amongst the rest.

Having significant guest stars, like Dustin Hoffman and, I mean, Michael Jackson was fucking huge, only to hide them behind aliases and not promote them, is wild. It’s the kind of calm confidence that the kids would describe as Significant Richard energy, but each use is also a fascinating case unto itself as we can explore what is left when promotional value is gone.

Hoffman had a significant role in Lisa’s Substitute. Bergstrom was a well written character with scenes that carried emotional weight. Hiring Dustin Hoffman to be this character without telling anyone means you are left with an excellent actor who is able to easily translate that to voice acting. In this example, hiding his presence serves to boost Bergstrom as a character, as he is free to exist without the universe-disrupting status of SPECIAL GUEST STAR DUSTIN HOFFMAN hovering the corners of the viewer’s consciousness. Performance free from the identity of the performer is a challenging thing to manage, probably only Andy Serkis gets away with it regularly, and pulling it off so well is a staggering accomplishment for a family sitcom.

Stark Raving Dad starts odd and gets odder. Firstly, Michael Jackson called Groening and asked to be on the show. He literally said he wanted to be on the show and write a number one song for Bart, which he also did. For those of you young-uns out there who don’t remember, holy shit, google Do the Bartman and Deep Deep Trouble. Those jokes in later series about the family putting out lame albums weren’t jokes. So, already, Jackson isn’t in the show as a result of an existing creative need. Nobody was sitting around and saying that a character just HAD to be voiced by Jackson, which brings me to the second point.

Strip Dustin Hoffman’s name away and you’ve still got a great actor. Strip Michael Jackson’s name away and you’ve got an insane voice that can’t act. You couldn’t have him just be in an episode as Gary or some shit. His voice is so distinctive that, even if you’d never heard of Michael Jackson, it would stand out a mile, and that’s before you realise that he isn’t a very good voice actor (not terrible exactly either, but still). Bergstrom and Dustin Hoffman just sound like some guy; Michael Jackson talked like the ghost of helium. Narrative can’t deal with stray weird like that, it’s like having feral Chekhov’s guns around. Something that is so obviously strange as to demand attention can’t then be nothing without it registering to viewers as a fault. So, you aren’t promoting him, you sure as shit can’t hide him, what do you do?

Judging works should, mostly, be about the work, but there are circumstances when that’s just not possible. Jackson imposed himself on the show, and I understand why they couldn’t really turn him down, so, for the first time I can think of, the episode story has to exist as a response to an uncontrolled event.

Hiding Michael Jackson by making him the voice of a mental patient who thinks he’s Michael Jackson is fucking brilliant. There’s a stratum of tricks that you can only really pull off once. Things like The Outsiders in WCW, for instance, that the modern world’s rumour mills and general fan knowledge would thwart immediately. This was that. It’ll never happen again. A damn near once in a lifetime piece of narrative Judo that takes an external pressure and reroutes it into the audience’s mind to keep them wondering for at least another two years.

Aside from this, the rest of the episode is equally cannily structured. Lisa’s birthday starts the story, logically reacts to the events within it – “Jackson” being the cause of everyone forgetting it— and becomes the conclusions emotional core. This heartfelt thread is strong enough to support the otherwise wilder elements of the story and keep it from being just a stunt episode. It’s no mean feat to have Bart and Mental Patient Michael Jackson serenading Lisa feel like a sensible and satisfying payoff to events, but Stark Raving Dad manages.

Yours in talking like this, Gabriel.

 

Jokes, Lines, and Stray Thoughts.

A bunch of girls I’ve dated have been insane snorers. One sounded like an old diesel train full of running chainsaws. Pinching the nose never woke them up.

Lisa becomes 8 and stays that way forever. It’s odd seeing how many permanent changes happened this early.

Bart’s old-man line about turning 10 is made by him taking it so seriously. The gesture of rubbing his chin, his look at Lisa. Spurious seriousness is a great comedy multiplier. This gives it a good pile of momentum going into his much sillier, “old timer” line.

The only hotline I ever called was the Sega hotline of Australia. They taught me the blood cheat for Mortal Kombat one afternoon and I will never forget it. Ian from across the street was over and our minds were blown.

Bart not watching Maggie is a little specific for the moment. Pursuant to my earlier mention of stray weird being too much for most narratives to handle, it’s the kind of thing that The Simpsons would normally reserve for plot, because it’s so severe an event that it demands consequences. Here it’s sort of a throwaway, though it can kind of fuel the “Bart as Homer’s source of stress” element of this episode and Maggie’s habit of getting into serious trouble when ignored that comes up in later stories.

“I’m not popular enough to be different” is another perfect example of early Homer’s intelligence level. It’s like, if some deadshit picks a fight with me for no reason, I know it’s because they had a hard life and either have been taught violence as a primary communication method or are riddled with insecurities that hurt them. Someone picking a fight with me and telling me that, however, is less okay because their knowledge should prevent the behaviour. Homer’s problems aren’t external, so his awareness of the bars in his prison only make him all the more tragic.

Lenny and Carl in different clothes, for what is apparently the only time ever. According to several wikis, this has bothered fans and this is another note about how even the innocuous becomes a standout point if it’s the only time it happens and how things that stand out with no resolution will bother people. It IS odd, animated shows rarely change their primary character models and The Simpsons is no rebel in this regard.

The body cavity search and x-ray lines from Smithers are good examples of how to have really ridiculous crap happen but hide it behind throwaway lines to both not wreck up the pacing or reality of the show and to use the casualness to add an extra layer of absurdity.

I wouldn’t have listened to Lisa’s poem either.

Homer’s nervousness about filling out the form is one thing, but him getting Bart to fill it out is about late-Homer levels of stupid. It as a plot element is dispensed of fairly quickly, though, so it doesn’t stink the place up too bad.

Funniest Home Videos shows were where we used to watch people fall over before the Internet. But whereas FailArmy has the good taste to just show you the injuries, FHV would always have cartoon sound effects and a guy doing voices over every damn one.

Baby with a Nail Gun is great. It’s the perfect use of omission to craft the joke, then a juxtaposition joke of what we expect to have happened with the nail gun and Homer’s “Aw” afterwards.

Having some of Bart’s answers be informed by Homer’s actual behaviour saves some of the stupidity of the idea.

I need one of those red stamps.

The “I’m Michael Jackson from the Jacksons” “I’m Homer Simpson from the Simpsons” moment feels like one of those audience wink lines from a crossover episode. These tend to be crap, even if contextually relevant, as the most they’ll be is an ugly labouring of something obvious.

Unsurprising amount of Cuckoos Nest references here, but at least The Chief is a funny twist on the obvious.

Homer’s interactions with the human calculator is another great moment of comedy that works perfectly realistically within the situation. I mean, 5×9, the 5 times tables are the easiest ones. Even the special needs kid could do those.

Bart’s comedy phone answers were originally gonna be a running joke but they ran out of ideas really quickly.

Bart’s questioning of Jackson is funny, given that, these days, one could just look that information up and anything Jackson could only know wouldn’t be something Bart would, making the whole exercise pointless.

“Probably a downside I don’t see” about a clearly horribly lobotomised Homer is a goodun

“Mother was right” about the news. This episode has a great run of little throwaway lines that don’t quite connect exactly but make more an interpreted constellation of funny.

Jackson brought his own sound-alike, Kip Lennon, to do the singing moments, but there’s some interesting debate on the commentary track about this. Apparently Jackson DID record his own singing for all the moments in the show, but they weren’t used. Further debate and questioning occurs specifically around Lisa’s birthday song.

Homer muttering things he likes as he sleeps in the asylum includes “boobies” which is a rare moment of generalised sexuality that kind of phased out of Homer, and is one of the few times he’s audibly said anything close to a dirty word (boobs does come up again).

Homer’s mechanical brain struggling with agoraphobia is funny and familiar to anyone who has tried to explain mental illness to anyone operating on a primitive ego.

The kissy lips lunatic gave me the willies then and he gives me the willies now.

The shot of Lisa singing sadly to herself is a goodun and part of a palette of dynamic shots that fade over time.

A lot of reused footage in the phone tag scene.

It’s probably tough to imagine for anyone a little younger, but Jackson was insanely big. Go look up some concert footage, seas of humanity to the horizon, fucking nuts.

The emotion work of the tail end of this episode is solid enough to help gloss over the fact that Homer and Marge invited a huge guy who thinks he’s Michael Jackson into the house. He’s built like Ed Kemper.

The piano has always been in the Simpson house, but mostly as an afterthought. I don’t think anyone in the house actually plays it. Lisa probably can, but I’m struggling to remember anyone actually using it, aside from here. Marge is the only real option, and nothing is coming up. It’s an oddity.

See?

Gabriel

gabrielmeat

10 replies to Stark Raving Dad


pocketbelt on 16 Aug 19 said:

I have endless questions about that GIF that will never be answered.

Also I don't remember the specific episodes or seasons or anything, but I know for sure Homer of all people uses the piano a few times across the series, on and off, and he plays it properly to boot. The biggest example I can think of is the "I Hate Ned Flanders" song that made up an episode's plot at some point, I'm fairly sure that was well before the HD era of the series.


Gabriel on 16 Aug 19 said:

It shows up in the B-Sharps episode, but that verges on non-canonical so goddamn much I don't take the piano skill as his. It's more a necessity of the story, which is what the piano tends to be.


SteelCladGamer on 16 Aug 19 said:

That Gif is going to get you banned.


zombieplasticclock on 28 Aug 19 said:

Banned where? This is their website. That's like being banned for racism on InfoWars


Larger, More Powerful Alex on 16 Aug 19 said:

I've meet at least 3 people that have claimed to have had the idea of Coyote Ugly stolen from them. At this point I am almost convinced that it was not so much written as merely yanked from the ancestral memory of all humanity.


Gabriel on 17 Aug 19 said:

Bar full of women: GENIUS


SmallHatLogan on 17 Aug 19 said:

Homer and Marge play the piano while singing a parody of the theme to All In The Family in Lisa's Sax.


Gabriel on 17 Aug 19 said:

Yeah, but that's a parody sequence. Homer also plays piano expertly after being whipped in Kill the Alligator and Run, that doesn't mean he can play. There's a difference between things that the narrative establishes as part of its reality and things that are part of the rubber band stretch. Marge is a reasonably talented painter as that fact exists beyond the confines of a parody or gag. And this is the point, the piano exists in the house to facilitate specific jokes or moments, not as the result of established character or lore.


Magnumweight on 17 Aug 19 said:

Coyote Ugly was co-produced by Touchstone Pictures and distributed by Buena Vista pictures, two Disney subsidiaries. I feel the need to inflict this knowledge on the general public as it was on to me because I've known too much about this film for probably 15+ years. I owe this due to a sibling's overwhelming love of the film. Jerry Bruckheimer was the other producer/production company, fyi.

This is one of the episodes I can remember by heart though not really due to fondness, I'd rate it as fine/good, possibly because of Jackson's star power and the song at the end staying long in the mind.

Finally, I'd heard tell that this episode was going to be pulled from normal syndication recently as a reaction to Leaving Neverland, though I can still ondemand it through my cable box and FXX, so who knows


Gabriel on 22 Aug 19 said:

I figured Buena Vista was involved somehow but I actively didn't want to research it.

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