[The long of it]
Have you ever noticed when a movie (or a TV show) is made up of parts of other successful movies the result is rarely as good as the material that inspired it? "Goo Goo Gai Pan" put me in mind of two "Simpsons" episodes I very much enjoyed: "Selma's Choice (9F11)" and "Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo (AABF20)." The new episode has some good material, but it's not playing in the same league as its predecessors.
Selma, despite her disastrous tryout as a parent in "Selma's Choice," still yearns to have a baby. (Some dreams never die, I suppose.) Unfortunately for her, her biological clock has run out, leaving adoption as the only realistic choice for her. Ultimately, she's matched up with Ling, a baby girl in the People's Republic of China. There are two directions the writers can go with this story idea: A farcical comedy of errors as Selma jumps through hoops to get the child and later makes the sudden adjustment to motherhood, or as a touching pairing as baby and mother find one another. "Goo Goo" doesn't really do either one. Selma has to pretend to be married to Homer, as the Chinese government won't permit single mothers to adopt. This could be hilarious, but for the most part Selma and Homer don't have to do much pretending. There's no scenes where they have to prove they know anything about each other, or demonstrate some affection, or anything that would be too uncomfortable (and thus amusing for us). Homer and Selma arrive with Marge and the Simpson kids, and yet no one questions why a couple with three kids -- one of them still an infant, no less -- would want to adopt yet another child. Instead, an adoption bureaucrat, Madam Wu (Lucy Liu; and I didn't recognize her until I saw her name in the credits) squires everyone around Beijing to see the sights, so all Homer and Selma have to do is not blurt out the secret. And there are few scenes of Selma and baby Ling together, so we don't get many "newbie mother" jokes, or even many touching scenes of mom and new child. Maybe they're saving that for a future episode.
The trip to collect Selma's baby is not the family's first foray into Asian culture; the family also vacationed in Japan for "Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo." This go-around isn't quite as funny. I suspect modern Chinese culture is harder to parody than its Japanese equivalent, because inner China remains faintly inscrutable in the West. If you're going to make fun of a social phenomenon, like Chinese acrobats or the Shao Lin monks, then the more familiar your audience is with your subject, the better. Otherwise, you have to do almost as much explaining as parody. Not everyone here is an expert on Japanese pop culture, of course, but with anime, Hello Kitty, sushi, and Pok�mon, it's starting to make inroads here, especially among the younger set. But what do we know of China? They're repressive bureaucrats, and they make a lot of stuff to ship to America, and that's about it. There are just fewer jokes that can be made that we'll get. This act also has a "wacky caper" feel to it, when Selma is revealed to be a fraud and Lisa comes up with a plan to sneak Ling out of the country. "Thirty Minutes" had a wacky third act, too, but they had the good excuse of the Japanese game show.
Like I said, "Goo Goo" did have some strong material. I've always been fond of Old Man Burns's anachronisms, so the driving sequence that opens the episode is nice. There were some funny lines when Homer had to impersonate the Buddha statue in front of an orphanage. One guard wants to bring the statue into the building because it is bad feng shui to leave it outside. "Feng shui?" his partner asks. "I thought that was a way to sell crappy end tables to the West." The acrobat theater sequence has some especially good clueless-Homer moments, and gets in some social commentary, as well. (When informed that the marquee acrobat wouldn't perform that night, audience members yell, "Then our leaders aren't all-knowing! Now I will question everything!") The sign proclaiming "nothing happened" at Tienanmen Square was also pretty cool. On the other hand, a menopause video by Robert Wagner was just okay. It's not Wagner's fault. Unlike last week's Busey film, which could only have been done by someone like him, just about anyone could have handled the emcee role for the video. The writers almost didn't need a guest star. (Then again, maybe they do, now that Troy McClure's gone.)
Jokes like these make "Goo Goo Gai Pan" a little better than average, but the whole of this episode is not quite the sum of its parts. If "Selma's Choice" is the expensive original item, then this episode is like the Chinese replica. Not bad, but not a replacement for the original, either.
[The short of it]
This episode combines elements from "Selma's Choice (9F11)" and "Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo (AABF20)" but isn't as good as either one. The idea of Selma pretending to be married with Homer is fine, but the script doesn't put this charade to enough of a test to be funny. Also, trying to parody Chinese culture is difficult; it's so mysterious that there are few familiar things you can base jokes upon. There's some good material here, like Burns's drivers' test, and Homer as both Buddha statue and acrobat, but the end result is an episode that's just okay. If the earlier episodes are the expensive original items, then this episode is like the Chinese replica -- not bad, but not a replacement for the original, either. (C+)
[DYN]
... the man at the consulate doesn't seem to notice that Selma doesn't have the same last name as her "husband"?
[References]
moo goo gai pan (Chinese-restaurant staple) - title a play on words
Bruce Lee (martial artist and movie star) - reputed to have a move where he can pull a man's heart out of his chest and show it to him before he dies
Kentucky Fried Chicken (fast-food restaurant chain) - Beijing has a "Krusty Fried Chicken" outlet
Chairman Mao Tse-Tsung - climatic acrobatic stunt called, "Chair Man Wow"
Tienanmen tank protestor - the shot of Wu driving up to Selma in the tank reminiscent of the protestor trying to stop a tank [See "Personal Comments & Observations" for more]
[Previous Episode References]
[9F11] Selma has a go at being a parent [9F11] Selma gets Jub-Jub [5F08] One spouse shudders "remotely" when the other does something bad [AABF20] The Simpsons go to a large Asian country [CABF18] Lisa sympathizes with the plight of Tibet
[FFF]
Burns' drivers' license:
What am I, your slave? Go pause your tape and get your own copy!
Sign at the consulate:
CONSULATE OF CHINA
RUSSIA'S WACKY NEIGHBORExports to the U.S.A.:
AMERICA'S HEARTLAND MAINE
CHOICE OATMEAL LOBSTERS
APPLE PIEMadam Wu's desktop name paperweight:
MADAM WU
FUNCTIONARYRestaurant sign:
KRUSTY
FRIED CHICKENTheater marquee:
ACROBATIC THEATER
THE SHOW AIN'T OVER 'TIL
THE TINY MAN IN DRAG SHRIEKSEerily accurate fortune cookie:
We will take Selma's baby
[this had some unreadably tiny characters underneath it --
I suspect these were lucky lottery numbers]Orphanage sign:
BEIJING
ORPHANAGE GREAT DEALS
ON 2004sSign at Tienanmen Square:
TIEN AN MEN
SQUARE
ON THIS SITE, IN 1989,
NOTHING HAPPENEDBurns' drivers' license:
Okay, here it is.
+-----------------------------------------------+
| SPRINGFIELD |
| DIVISION OF MOTOR VEHICLES |
| |
| OPERATOR'S LICENSE No. __000044_ |
| EXPIRES 1909 +---------+ |
| | | |
| Height __5-10___ | photo | |
| Color Eyes __Blue___ | of | |
| Sex __Male___ | Burns | |
| Weight __85_____ | | |
| Hair __gray___ +---------+ |
| |
| DEPARTMENT OF MOTOR VEHICLES, SPRINGFIELD |
| C. Montgomery Burns |
+-----------------------------------------------+
^
|
The signature is in cursive script[Oops!]
Selma decides to adopt, and is quickly given a Caucasian child? Oh, *right.* In real life, she'd be *Jacqueline* Bouvier's age by the time she got one.
The consulate's map of China has Taiwan on it (in big letters, no less). Do Chinese maps refer to Taiwan as "Taiwan"? The Chinese government's official stance is that Taiwan is a part of China being held by a band of rebels.
Newborn Ling already knows how to say, "Mama." Maybe she *is* Lisa's academic superior, after all.
[Personal Comments & Observations]
Mr. Burns' car probably wasn't intended to represent a specific make, although it most closely resembles a Rolls-Royce. What's interesting is that it is a four-door convertible, a body style that had all but disappeared by the end of the 30s. Burnsie's car must be almost as old as he is.
Robert Wagner -- Actor. He has had a long and steady career in movies and television, but might be best-known for his role as Jonathan Hart on "Hart to Hart." This was a late-70s series about a rich married couple (Stephanie Powers played Hart's wife Jennifer) who solved crimes together. (Yes, really.)
General Kao -- I've heard his name rendered other ways, such as "Tsao". Believe it or not, there was actually such a person. He led a successful rebellion, and is still a popular folk hero. However, he probably didn't have a chicken recipe named for him. (There are some who say that there is one, but it's a different recipe than the one used in America.) Either way, the locals seem amused at Kao's unusual path to fame in the United States.
Chairman Mao -- He's the leader that brought Communism to China in 1949. Then, as Homer mentioned, he went on to brutally repress his people. Mao passed away in 1976, but his influence looms large over China even today.
Brandine thwarts Selma's first attempt at adoption when she and Cletus reclaim their baby. In real life, this is a unique hazard of the adoption process. A few years ago, there was a well-publicized case when a birth father sued for custody of a girl he fathered two years before. It turns out the mother had ended her relationship with the father before finding out she was pregnant, and never informed him he had a kid. When he found out, he went to the courts, arguing that nobody asked whether *he* wanted a shot at raising the child. The adoptive family's lawyer said removing the girl from the only parents she had known would traumatize her, but the birth father prevailed in court. News footage showing the screaming kid being loaded into a minivan and carted away from her home had to have scared other couples considering adoption.
(Little-reported follow-up: Supposedly, the girl got adjusted to her new family. But I still say this was a pretty raw deal for her first set of parents.)
Lisa mentions that China has lots of girls available that foreigners may adopt, but doesn't get to say why. To head off an overpopulation crisis, the Chinese government, which controls nearly every other aspect of its citizens' lives, decided to limit each family to one child. Many parents want to have a boy as their one kid, so girls are often put up for adoption. (If they are lucky. If they aren't, they are sometimes just killed outright.)
Despite the sign posted near the plaza, something important did happen in Tienanmen Square in 1989. Then-Soviet premiere Mikhail Gorbachev paid a visit to the Chinese leadership. At the time, Gorbachev was getting great PR for his reform efforts aimed at making his government less autocratic. The Chinese thought this would be a great idea to adopt in their own country. With the world watching, they flooded Tienanmen Square -- one of the largest if not the largest public square in the world -- demanding more freedom from their government. The Chinese autocrats didn't think much of the idea. The waited patiently for Gorbachev to return home, called on the military to smash the demonstrators. That was pretty much the end of the democratic revolution in China, which today is one of the last of the Communist nations.
The military put-down of the demonstrators yielded one of the most arresting images of personal courage. Desperate to stop the army from rolling in, a lone man stood in front of one of the tanks bearing down on the demonstrators. The tank was briefly stymied, trying to maneuver around the man, who kept moving into the tank's path. Finally, someone pulled the man to safety before the tank commander's patience ran out. In the West, the footage of this event became symbolic of the democratic spirit, and the harsh nature of the Chinese regime.
My, the Chinese certainly had a lot of signs in English, didn't they?