“Wait a minute, Scully, what’s the point of this test?” – Fox Mulder
“No point.  I just thought he could stand to lose a little weight.” – Dana Scully
“His jiggling is almost hypnotic.” – Fox Mulder
“Yes.  It’s like a lava lamp.” – Dana Scully

There’s an interesting flow to this commentary.  There’s a hefty enough catch of guest stars and X-Files stuff that they start out talking about what sparked the idea and how things finally got going.  Then, about halfway, they’ve filled in most of the details there and start paying closer attention to what’s on the screen that moment.  This leads to some minor trivia and a lot of laughing. 

Six guys on this one.

0:30 – Jean mentions that this is one of the four episodes he and Reiss were able to do on the side while working at Disney (on The Critic).

1:00 – Reiss is joking around that they came up with the idea for this way back when The X-Files was brand new. Jean says he found a copy of TV Guide in the bathroom with the show on the cover and thought, “Oh, this is a good idea”. But it didn’t go anywhere until many years later.

1:45 – Reid Harrison, the credited writer, had been hired by Jean and Reiss to do an episode of The Critic for a season that never got aired.

3:00 – Jean theorizes that one of the reasons FOX cancelled The Critic was that they didn’t own the show, saw it was doing well after The Simpsons, and plugged in King of the Hill, which they did own, to fill the slot. Bastards.

4:00 – The board artist who did Act 2, with David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, was Kevin O’Brien, a big fan of The X-Files who went on to Pixar. Lots of people on the show were fans. That’s where they got many of the details from the show, such as the smoking man.

5:20 – Reiss laughingly plugs the Queer Duck movie by mentioning that Duchovny is in it playing Tiny Jesus. No qualms from me: Queer Duck – The Movie (2006).

6:00 – Jean mentions that because this was one of those split off episodes he and Reiss did, the writers room was only a handful of people and the whole thing got no laughs.

7:30 – They had to try quite a few things to get the glow on the Burns alien to look right. That comment is followed by the obligatory mention that it would be a lot different on computers.

8:00 – Some love for Leonard Nimoy as a nice guy who does funny reads. Reiss mentions that Nimoy doesn’t get used enough for comedy, which reminds me of this music video (which now has a healthy 4.5 million views on YouTube).

8:45 – Jean asks if this is the first episode Steven Dean Moore directed, and it wasn’t. His first episode was “Marge Be Not Proud”, which prompts someone in the background (can’t tell who) to say “What was ‘Marge Be Not Proud’”? Ha.

9:40 – Groening mentions that he hadn’t seen The X-Files when they did this and had wondered why their voices sounded so flat, which causes some deserved laughter.

10:15 – Reiss jokes that the lineup of aliens (Marvin the Martian, Gort, Chewbacca, Alf, and Kang/Kodos) was their “most illegal shot in history”. He and Jean had worked on Alf and they got a call from the Alf guy a couple of weeks later. He said if they ever do Alf again to let him do the voice.

10:50 – Appreciating, and laughing at, the shot of Homer running on the treadmill reflected in the glass as Mulder and Scully look on.

11:45 – Moore thinks it was a writers note to add Duchovny in his speedo on his ID photo. That always cracked me up.

12:00 – Laughing at Moe’s habit of smuggling animals.

12:20 – Jean mentions that this was the second time they had an animal steal Grampa’s teeth, but this was episode 167 and how much longer was it really going to go?

12:50 – Laughing at Duchovny’s goofy speech and Anderson’s eye-rolling reaction.

13:20 – Reiss and Jean are trying to remember how much they fiddled with this one after the script was completed. Consensus is: not much.

14:20 – Another animation note: shadows (Bart and Homer are talking in the kitchen at night) were much harder to do before computers.

15:40 – Laughing about how they don’t have cels to sell anymore, but that there are so many of them left over that paying a bunch of money for one isn’t the brightest idea.

16:20 – Laughing at Nimoy’s fake signoff.

17:10 – Jean always likes goofy file photos of Homer on the news. This is the one where Homer’s tongue is stuck to the frozen pole.

17:40 – Remembering that this was around the time FOX actually broadcast their “alien autopsy” special and how dumb that was.

18:15 – Reiss jokes that the reason they have commentaries is so that they can explain all of the dated jokes like the Budweiser frogs and Steve Urkel.

18:30 – They didn’t get the music rights for the Close Encounters of the Third Kind theme.

18:40 – Laughing at Nimoy’s “Surprise me.” That always gets me.

19:10 – They always had to be careful with lettering on things because the Koreans doing the animation weren’t native English speakers.

19:35 – Laughing at Lenny saying “It’s bringing love, don’t let it get away!”

20:00 – The explanation of the alien came along toward the end.

21:00 – Cracking up at Nimoy’s singing.

22:30 – And we close on someone having to go to a dentist’s appointment.