"Moe, I’m a little low on funds. Do you think you could cover me just this once?" – Homer Simpson
"No. Sorry." – Moe
"Why not? I think after all these years I deserve an explanation." – Homer Simpson
"I don’t think you’re ever gonna get another job and be able to pay me back." – Moe
"Oh." – Homer Simpson
"Don’t worry, we’re still friends." – Moe
Happy (one week belated) 20th anniversary to “Homer’s Odyssey”!
Dead Homer Society 
3 responses to “Bonus Quote of the Day”
I’m fairly certain that “Homer’s Odyssey” was the very first episode of “The Simpsons” I ever watched (for some reason, I missed out on “Bart the Genius” the first time it ran). This wasn’t quite 20 years ago though – in Australia, series one was first broadcast in 1991.
I think No Disgrace Like Home was the first I saw, and I think it was on video too. Satellite TV had The Simpsons since 1991 in the UK, but we were poor people and couldn’t afford that. Terrestrial TV got it in 1998, I think. Rupert Murdoch is to blame, I’m sure.
Strangely enough, 1998 is about when satellite/cable TV in Australia got The Simpsons, I think. Of course, by that time, it had been on terrestial TV (or, as Aussies refer to it, “free-to-air TV”) for years, often as frequently as every weekday. Christ, Australia really got saturated with The Simpsons. Of course, this was back when the show was great, so I’m not complaining…
Actually, the history of The Simpsons in Australia is interesting in some respects. (Homer: “Gather around, my son, and I shall tell you a tale…”). The first season didn’t air in Australia until early 1991 – roughly a year after the series began in America. As far as I know, The Tracey Ullman Show never aired here, or if it did, it wasn’t especially popular – so all we had to go on were vague reports about some new cartoon show’s popularity (and the popularity of “Bart Simpson”) in America. This was all pre-internet and so hype was fair less widespread. When The Simpsons first aired here, it was generally unknown, without much pre-sold fame (as far as I can remember, although I was about 9 years old at the time and I barely noticed when the USSR collapsed). I do remember The Simpsons making the front cover of various TV Guides around the time the show premiered. I didn’t watch “Bart the Genius” – I came into the show the second week, I think, and I missed out on a few episodes throughout the season – but I do remember that the triple-whammy of “Moaning Lisa,” “Some Enchanted Evening” and “Krusty Gets Busted” convinced me that the show was brilliant.
We got first-run showings of seasons 1-4 until August 1993 (with re-runs in the off-seasons). Then something weird happened. Season 5 didn’t premiere in Australia until February 1995. That meant for roughly a year and a half (including all of 1994!), Australia didn’t get any new episodes of The Simpsons (we just got seasons 1-4 repeated over and over, and for long periods of time, re-runs were on every weekday). For that reason, I’ve developed a sort of block mentality about the show, by which I mean, I tend to view seasons 1-4 as being one era of The Simpsons, and season 5 onwards as being another era. It was a HUGE deal when we finally got season 5 back in 1995, and the fact that the episodes had increasingly wacky plots (Bart becomes Burns’ heir! Homer goes into space!) really did make it feel like it was “The Simpsons: Phase Two!” or something to that effect.