A guy from Top Chef is going to be on Zombie Simpsons (ugh) next Sunday.  That prompted Denver food blog Cafe Society to write up their favorite ten food scenes from The Simpsons.  There’s plenty of Hulu and YouTube, as well as an animated .gif of Homer trying to eat that pie in “Lisa on Ice”.  Naturally, there’s also not a trace of Zombie Simpsons.  The only double digit season episode is when Grampa and Jasper are tripping on the hippie juice in Season 10. 

I come across lists and articles like this often enough that it’s now actually surprising if one of them has any Zombie Simpsons at all.  While I can’t definitively speak for anyone else’s work, I’m increasingly confident that this is because nobody watches or remembers Zombie Simpsons.  It certainly isn’t for lack of trying on the part of Zombie Simpsons; they’ve done plenty of food scenes and stories since 1998, they even did an entire episode where Homer became “Pie Man”.  But none of them stick the way sixty-four slices of American cheese or not making friends with salad do. 

Think about Flanders’ drawn out hot chocolate preparation from the movie.  He toasts a marshmallow and shaves chocolate – it’s a very elaborate process – but there’s nothing about it that’s particularly funny or memorable.  It’s just a fancy hot chocolate. 

The Land of Chocolate, which is #1 at the link, is a completely different case.  It’s even more elaborate, but it’s also a joke, and it’s not some weird, out of left field flight of fancy on Homer’s part.  The Germans mention that they are from “the land of chocolate”, and he takes it from there for what we later learn was ten minutes of him daydreaming while his job was on the line.  It’s absurd, sure, but it’s the funny kind of absurdity that takes an ordinary conversational piece, the kind of small talk that people make in awkward situations like a performance evaluation, and spins it into something unforgettable. 

A week from Sunday the Top Chef guy is going to be on Zombie Simpsons.  He might have one of those two second parts, or he might be in the whole episode.  I have no idea.  But whatever little food gags he makes are unlikely to be remembered by anyone more than a week later, and it seems extremely unlikely that people are going to be posting video of it on the internet in 2031.  The Land of Chocolate, on the other hand, lives forever.