Notes for NABF20 (The Food Wife)

Rather enjoyed. The main conflict between Homer and Marge (that of being the cool parent and being a little underhanded/non-genuine to get it) was interesting to watch, and gave the episode a little extra weight - and it was pretty fun throughout. Yay!

DYN: ...CBG's food blog is called "The Android's Luncheon"? ...no time to freeze frame it all, but Lisa's list of cutest vegetarians concludes with one of my favorite guys, "Weird Al" Yankovic (who is vegan, even)? ...Lisa doesn't seem to mind non-vegetarian foodie fare (including 100 styles of pork chop)?

Previous episode stuff 2F06: Expo opening reminiscent of candy show AABF12: "Saturday surprise dad day" awfully similar to the outings in this ep AABF21: Food criticism DABF06: Wolfgang puck shows up (silently I think) JABF15: Marge's appearance in Gordon Ramsay's dream against a field of white much like Homer at the end of this ep

Goof (or animator's license I guess) I really doubt that the button Marge pressed puts down the locks & not the rear right window.

Opening Another one with a clouds-only opening, much like some season 1 entries and NABF15/16. I still don't like where this is going, but at least it seems to maximize the episode length (which is at the show's current max time, 21:50).

Finally Matt Selman shows up as an executive producer, on his own card, before Al Jean's and the Groening/Brooks/Simon trio's. I'm intrigued. Some episodes have had "guest" executive producers, but not recently; is Selman being prepared to take over showrunning from Al? I wouldn't object. (It seems like odd timing - not only is it not a new production season yet, but we already saw NABF21, which doesn't have this setup.) I notice he has writing credit on the episode, so maybe he put a *lot* of effort into it. As much as the show has bounced back from some of the crazier years (under Scully), Al Jean's 10 years is a bit much for one person, and I like him but don't always agree with him on the tone the show should take. Matt Selman's episodes - to the extent that the credited writer remains the voice of it anyway - have tended to be thoughful and fun explorations of character, while also pretty funny. Now that those episodes are hitting DVD, the commentaries make me like him more. I guess we'll have to see what happens.

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Something that unexpectedly came right out of left-field for me was the triggering of a childhood memory in the meth lab owner when he swallowed the "deconstructed" apple pie ball that was pitched at him during the police raid. Apparently this tough, tattooed, and violent drug criminal is not only French, or at least French Canadian, but also had a conventional, nurturing upbringing (living in a stable childhood home with a loving mother who made him pie a-la mode). Some subtle parody of the upbringing and career paths of meth cookers or French (Canadians?), or maybe both?

- -- Paul W. Schleck [email] http://www.novia.net/~pschleck/ Finger [email] for PGP Public Key

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It is a scene from Ratatouille in which Parisian food critic Anton Ego tastes a confit byaldi (cooked by Remy the rat) that makes him flash back to eating home-cooked ratatouille as a kid. I wonder if it is a Brad Bird joke as well.

Pretty solid. The freeze-frame stuff really helped. I loved the video-game convention. Electronic Crafts! Protovision~~!! (For the benefit of the young ones, the latter is a reference to the film WarGames.)

Yeah, that bugged me.

NABF16: Tom Colicchio appears. Also, Marge dreams of being on a reality television show with a famous foodie (Colicchio then, Bourdain now).

Singapore indeed has wonderful outdoor food centers, and Anthony Bourdain is known to be a huge fan of them. I don't think there's any such thing as "Hang Here Kway Chap"; Kway Chap is actually a soup dish. A real Singapore hawker center (as they're known) looks nothing like what was pictured here; they're much more modern.