Notes for MABF03 (Million Dollar Maybe)

Pretty fun. On Homer's plot, I liked the initial way of hiding the washing machine, though the rest of the found presents was a little hard to swallow. Act four apology trip was sweet but the whole bit seemed a bit dumb - and the four-act structure just does not work, as we see here. There were a number of fun one-liners too. I also liked Lisa's plot with the old folks, just the right length for the point it was making.

DYN: ...WILHELM SCREAM? There were several of them in the war game, a Simpsons first! ...this new character, Ricardo "La" Bomba, is never named and dispatched in a very "screw you with this fan-made character stuff" way - and twice fails to deliver his catchphrase?

Previous episode stuff 1F07, CABF18: Fortune cookies BABF21: Horoscopes in that episode seem to be acted on similarly AABF11/BABF06: aerial shot of Homer swerving like that 7F06: I'm gonna make it! I'm gonna make it! (Plus bonus of falling down a cliff) 8F17: Big lotto winnings etc. 5F05: Buried bones for Lisa's benefit

Goofs A big widescreen TV like that is unlikely to have been made without a digital (ATSC) tuner. Not really a goof is that it stopped working "10 minutes ago" - during the real analog shutoff, many channels stopped their analog signal at about 10 in the morning. The novelty check for a million dollars said "1,000,000." - using a decimal point but no cents. Right after Homer breaks his arm, his right hand turns into a left hand.

Other stuff

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory: Homer and Bart burping their way through the zero-G plane quite a lot like Charlie and Joe doing the same to get down the fizzy lifting drink tower.

Maybe I missed something - why does Marge ask Homer for foregiveness after she finds out the winning lottery ticket was bought when she was angry about the botched toast?

It's not really a reference, but I must mention that on the DVD of one of the Futurama movies (Wild Green Yonder?), there is a goofy featurette about a trip Matt Groening, David X Cohen, and Matt's son made with a zero-G plane company. It does look a lot like how it was shown here.

On Jan 31, 9:24 pm, Matt Garvey wrote:

True in the real world, but remember, this is Springfield.

Not quite the same. The zero-g burping was done for propulsion, while in Willy Wonka it was done for deflation and defloation.

The old Jewish man mentions the History Channel as one of the networks he can no longer watch due to the analog shut-off. If you can get the History Channel, then you must have cable or satellite, which, of course, the analog shut-off would not have affected.

It's hard to believe that it took this many seasons to get around to some Wilhelm screams.

(If the name is unfamiliar, Wikipedia has a sound file for thine listening pleasure: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_scream and you can look it up on YouTube for film montages of it.)

Well, considering nowadays it's mostly a hacky, annoying in-joke, that may be a good thing. Of course, it sort of depends on how and in what it's used. In the Lucas oeuvre, it's gotten unbearably annoying; in feature animation, it's found a third wave, and it was originally kind of a *fun* in-joke, but enough is enough.

Anyway, where was I? In this episode, it worked because it was part of a video game, not part of the episode's own sound effects. (Not only that, but it seemed to be the only scream in the game, lampooning it more.) To have it as an actual scream doesn't seem to fit The Simpsons. On the other hand, it's been used a few times in American Dad and Family Guy (including the second Star Wars special) and fit their feel better.

On Mon, 1 Feb 2010 20:42:40 -0800 (PST), Matt Garvey wrote:

It got used on this week's episode of FG a couple of times, during the drunken helicopter pilot bit.

Matt Garvey wrote:

1F13, JABF06: Homer's previous visits to outer space.

You'd think that someone who'd been there twice wouldn't feel the need to spend a lot of money just to go back to zero-G. Then again, if he could pay for him and Bart and still have money left, he must have gotten a great deal; so far, I don't believe anyone has gone into space for less than $10 million or so, although there are plans to bring that down into lottery-winner price ranges in the future.

Once Upon A Time, Matt Garvey wrote:

There was only one Wilhelm Scream, but it was used four times.

** Captain Infinity