“Is there room at your table for a foolish old man?” – Abe “Grampa” Simpson
“Well, sure! We’ll have to move a chair in from the den, but it’s no problem. Bart!” – Homer Simpson
Before we finish up with “Politically Inept, With Homer Simpson”, I want to point out one last trick they used to try and make this out-of-date hodgepodge seem snappy and current. Like the faces of the various Republican contenders (and the null signs over the pictures of Cain and Bachmann), this was clearly a late addition used to work around the fact that the production schedule prevents them from ever being with the times. Here is the establishing shot of the Republican meeting where Ted Nugent makes his unexplained appearance:
After this, the show cuts to a close up of Burns and Homer discussing Homer’s choice. When Homer balks and asks if they can get Chris Christie, Burns points stage left and we see . . .
. . . Chris Christie, as out of place as if he were in a flashback. Partly this is just Zombie Simpsons’ old habit of having characters beam in and out of scenes whenever a line and a half of dialogue calls for it. But in this case it doubles as another incongruous way to make this episode seem the least bit current. Just a few seconds after the above cuts back to Homer, he gets his gravy hat shot off by Ted Nugent, and we see that Christie is once again missing from the table:
And we’re back to how we were in the original shot. There’s no Christie, nor is there food all over the place. Most importantly, it’s all characters they could animate into the scene well in advance, so if Christie had actually run they could’ve shown Mitch Daniels sitting in his wife’s handbag or Tim Pawlenty quivering in a pool of his own flop sweat.
This is just a minor cheat, but it nicely illustrates what a Frankenstein’s monster Zombie Simpsons really is. It’s made of unrelated pieces (many of them quite old) sewn together and zapped to see if they’ll stand up and walk. And if they have to staple a few scenes on like a bad toupee to make it look kinda normal, then so be it.
Dead Homer Society 
9 responses to “The Fat Man and the Fumbled Sleight of Hand”
Boy, I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder.
I kid, I kid. As a side note, I would kill to see a Dead Homer Society “Top X Worst Simpsons Episodes of All Time Forever and Ever” list. Although, I’m afraid it would boil down to “the most recent ones.”
It would be much too painful to be worth doing. Sorry.
Also note The Incredible Shrinking Candidate Photographs. I don’t know if the bottom shot was supposed to be some kind of perspective shift, but they’re tiny.
In the top photo, the 6 photos, in their arrangement, take up more than 1/4 the table’s area. If you were to hold one photo up, it would be roughly the same length and width of Homer’s head.
In the bottom, almost 4 would match the width and height of Homer’s head. You could easily fit over 30 of those photos on the visible part of the table as seen in the bottom picture (and that’s not even the entire table!).
I also wouldn’t doubt that there could’ve been 2 more photos to the right in the top photo. This scene (and episode) is so shot through with the shoddy last-minute editing that it’s painful to see from this post. The scary thing is, I haven’t even seen the episode.
Maybe a Compare & Contrast could be done on last-minute editing. The Simpsons have done that all the time, but such edits were/are often new material or otherwise rare (i.e., Sideshow Bob and the rakes). This last-minute edit was, as it is so painfully obvious, done for the sake of timeliness and wasn’t really funny in the first place.
I wanna know how in the hell Homer knows who Chris Christie is and what political party he belongs to. Once upon a time, Homer didn’t even know that George Bush had been president (his story checks out). Now I’m supposed to believe he knows who freaking Chris Christie is??? God this show just insults my intelligence.
Dear current writers for the Simpsons, Homer is a character, he is not you. You know who Chris Christie is; he does not. Do not put your words in his mouth. And please quit your job, because you’re painfully unqualified.
Oh by the way, ha ha ha Chris Christie is fat. Timely and poignant, that’s what this show is.
100% agree with you on that
I found another inconsistency: in the news ticker, it says “Rick Perry accidentally executes himself,” but his picture is still on the table. So he’s dead, but he’s still running for President? Minor thing, but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Amazing, they shoehorn Chris Christie in and all they can manage to do with him is a fat joke.
That’s the sucksons for you