Notes for KABF01 (Funeral for a Fiend)

Another Sideshow Bob episode... fairly good, certainly more so than the last few. I will admit that, even knowing the general plot, I didn't recognize Bob as "Wes" at first, nor did I recognize the exact significance of the foot room (I noticed it, of course, but figured it might be done even for a legitimately dead Bob)... while the clues Lisa picked up on were a little weak, it was still enjoyable. Some things I enjoyed: Krusty's song... Homer's useless interjections throughout Lisa's explanation... Keith Olbermann's appearance, mainly since a big Simpsons fan friend of mine watches Countdown all the time and constantly mentions Keith's off-the-cuff Simpsons references. I made mention of a few negative things elsewhere, but also I wasn't nuts about the under-the-TV car mechanic gag for installing the TiVo. Anyhow, till next time...

P.S. (I.M.S.?): Don: Upcoming episodes page has said that we had a repeat of JABF15 at 7 today, but I noticed a few days ago that it was moved to 8:30, which is where it did in fact show up, at least in the eastern time zone. (At 7 there was supposed to be a new KOTH, but a football game ran till 7:50, so does that mean none of the country gets it now?) Just a note for the episode air dates list.

DYN: ...Snake is still #7F20?

Previous episode references EABF17: Someone tries to watch the Hibberts' car's DVD player from outside JABF17, HABF22: Opal show seems to be the new running gag DABF05: Afternoon Yak is something Marge recorded AABF13: Advice is given not to fill up on bread (particularly at a steakhouse-type restaurant!) 1F12: Sideshow/slideshow pun used HABF02: Duh, but I mean a picture of that adventure was seen in the slideshow, and the old lady and goat appeared to pay respects to Bob (also his wife and son) 4F14: Also in particular, Cecil (David Hyde Pierce) returns CABF07: Bart trapped in coffin

Other reference The cremation setup with Bart trapped inside reminded me of a scene in the Bond movie Diamonds are Forever.

Goofs -I know it's not supposed to be realistic, but Bob's laptop (which doesn't look like an Apple) boots up with the Mac sound, is instantly on, and then...well, we all saw the Clippy joke. -Krusty hawks a Sideshow Bob best-of DVD, but in CABF10 he said he erased all of Bob's old tapes. Well, maybe he didn't erase them *all*. (By the way, since this is not mentioned in the capsule, I think in that episode it was perhaps meant as a reference to NBC guys erasing a bunch of Tonight Show tapes once Leno took over for Johnny Carson, leading of course to more lost footage.)

TiVo stuff We saw a TiVo-like device in the couch gag for GABF19 (and again in HABF09), as well as Frink's device in GABF12. This is also not the first time a cartoon family has gotten one (a real one) - the Griffins did at the start of Family Guy episode 4ACX06 (part 2 of "Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story"), also to set up the plot. By the way, I think later we saw that Marge had previously recorded most of the stuff she was fast-forwarding through, but when they first hooked it up, weren't they watching Krusty/I&S live when they did so? Also, while there are some commercials I tend to pay attention to just because I like them, I do find it sort of fun not to fast forward through them on older tapes, even if I didn't care for them at the time. Finally: Marge's comment about running out of room and having to choose what to keep brings to mind one reason I have resisted getting a DVR, since I have a LOT of stuff I want to keep. Eventually, I guess I'll succumb, as long as I have some way to export to DVD (directly or indirectly).

Meta-reference act break Homer's remark about ignoring commercials right before an act break brings to mind a few Simpsons moments. Most notably, 2F10 (look it up). In addition, "we'll be right back" has been spoken by a character (Homer) in 3F04 and AABF21 right before a break (oddly, it makes more sense in the TOH, especially as it was talking about dangerous advertising), as well as to Kent's annoyance in 1F09, but that wasn't before a break. I feel like I'm forgetting another big one, but the only other that comes to mind is a big ado about act breaks in JABF21 this season.

10th time's the charm? Clearly this is the 10th Sideshow Bob *episode* (though not his 10th appearance), as referenced by the "10th plot foiled" cake (EABF10 picnic?). But earlier in the episode, Bob was mentioned as a 10-time attempted murderer. He didn't attempt to kill someone every time, so let's see here (going mostly by memory) 7G12: None 8F20: Selma 9F22: Bart 2F02: None 3F08: Krusty 4F14: None CABF10: Arguably Krusty and Bart, though he did call it off (and kill some network cyborgs instead) EABF01: Bart, sort of HABF02: All 5 Simpsons KABF01: All 5 Simpsons That could add up to 10 if, for example, you counted CABF10 but not EABF01, and counted tonight's but not HABF02 (perhaps because it's not under US jurisdiction). Also, I may have missed something. My guess is that it was just another reference to this being the 10th SSB show.

Freeze frame fun Here are the commercials Marge fast-forwarded through at first (they seem to be included in their entirety) Duff featuring SLH as Suds McDuff (EABF14) Turbo Diary (EABF03) Funzo (BABF07) Springshield (DABF17) Mr. Sparkle (including the introduction from the guy in the tub for some reason) (4F18, also seen in AABF20) SSB's fake commercial from this episode!

Finally Bob's anagram does work... but where's my cold pet rat?

Matt Garvey wrote:

It wasn't a Fox doubleheader day, so only a few stations got the 4:05 football game (and most of them were out west); most Fox stations got the new KOTH at 7:00 Eastern/Pacific.

-- Don

People in the Simpson universe have 4 fingers on each hand, so they would logically use base eight. Thus 10 for them is what we would call eight, not ten.

Or maybe Homer remembered wrong. He's not a rocket scientist, after all.

--- Christopher Heckman

P.S. The Simpson game that Bart advertises (in real-life commericals) is rated T for Teen, which means Bart shouldn't be allowed to play it!

The usual shtick of one of the kids quickly summarizing the clues to Bob's intended malfeasance. http://www.snpp.com/episodes/7G12.html, http://www.snpp.com/episodes/8F20.html, maybe more.

Mr. Museum

On Sun, 25 Nov 2007 21:41:44 -0500, Matt Garvey wrote:

For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure this actually happened in the late '60s or early '70s when The Tonight Show moved to Burbank, long before Leno. I think all/most of Carson's '60s shows were victims of erasing, but the rest are safe.

-lugnut

lugnut wrote:

Early Carson shows have been lost since at least the 1980s - Carson mentioned either on his 20th or 25th Anniversary Tonight Show that most of the early stuff, including the first episode, was gone. NBC also did a massive tape erasing in the late 1970s, which is why there are very few Chuck Woolery "Wheel of Fortune" or NBC daytime "Hollywood Squares" episodes in existence. (In some cases - "The Magnificent Marble Machine" comes to mind - this is a good thing.) The one show that survived was "Password Plus", mainly because Mark Goodson knew better (and because NBC listened to him - ABC erased all of their "Password" episodes anyway).

-- Don

"Don Del Grande" wrote in message news:[email]...

It's the big business equivalent of your mom throwing all your comics away.

-- R Flowers

lugnut wrote:

This could be true. My only real source on this comes from an Onion AV Club (i.e. not made-up) interview with Stan Freberg, and in fact he was discussing something from the late 60s:

(The subject is a couple of comedy bits he prepared to show while the Apollo 11 astronauts took a nap before stepping onto the moon; they weren't shown because the guys were too excited and did it right away.)

Stan: A week later, I was on The Tonight Show [... he showed some clips for the first time then ...] which got screams of laughter, Carson beating the desk and all that. Now, that is what is known as "The Freberg Lost Footage," because some brilliant executive at NBC, after Carson was off and Jay Leno was on, needed space, so he said, "Well, what are all these tapes here?" "Oh, these are 10 years of The Tonight Show." And he said, "Do we really need those?" "Nah, let's degauss the tape." So they degaussed all those shows, including the ones I was on. My only hope is that somewhere, after you print this, somebody on the Internet will say, "Gee, I made a recording of that."

So it's hard to guess. Obviously it's quite a jump from 1969 to the early 90s, and one wonders which 10 years they meant exactly. But that's all I know.

"lugnut" wrote

Back in the early 1960s, the BBC routinely wiped and reused the reel-to-reel tapes they used to broadcast shows, because the stuff was fairly expensive. If episodes weren't transferred to film at the time, they were lost. Many episodes of popular shows like Dr Who, Hancock's Half Hour and Steptoe & Son were gone for ever, as were some quite expensive drama productions like Quatermass.

Paul

Matt Garvey wrote in news:474A3268.D605AA43 @po.cwru.edu:

Early Tonight Show episodes were erased long before Leno became host.