“Excuse me, Mr. Burns, now that you’re completely ruined, how do you feel?” – Kent Brockman
“Excellent. I’m on my way back to the top! I’ve turned these cans into can-do!” – C.M. Burns
“Well, you smell terrible. Good luck to you, sir.” – Kent Brockman
Happy 20th Anniversary to “The Old Man and the Lisa”! Original airdate 20 April 1997.
Dead Homer Society 
4 responses to “Quote of the Day”
I know a lot of you think this episode is weak, but I enjoy it. How can you not like a Burns who is “even more evil” when he tries to do something good, or Barney licking the recycled booze bottle windows? Or Homer suffering four simultaneous heart attacks upon seeing Lisa reject the check… and that was before he learned the true amount.
Oh, it’s George Takei’s birthday today, too.
You’re mixing the conclusion of the episode with the premise and execution. The conclusion of the episode (Burns doing worse things when he’s a “good” person) might be interesting, the premise and the execution are piss poor IMO.
The whole idea of “The Old Man and the Lisa” is a repeat of the German episode: Burns is stripped of what makes him Burns. Except it’s not an exact repeat, because in the German episode, Burns merely lose his ability to inspire fear, otherwise he remained the same character as always. He didn’t sell the plant in an attempt to prevent bankruptcy or because he was nice, he only sold it because he got a really good deal. Yes, they did a joke about Burns not being the same kind of old person as Grampa and Jasper in the German episode (Burns being physically weak), but the scene happened at one of Burns’ properties. And once it became clear money wasn’t enough for him to screw everyone’s life, he tried to take his power plant back, and yet he still earned more money than what he had at the beginning of the episode. That’s a classic Simpsons ending, the bad people always win. Burns’ story wasn’t also the main focus of the episode, the real protagonist was Homer, who desperately tried to not lose his job and failed. And it was Season 3, when the show was still fresh and creative and had potential for millions of storylines.
In “The Old Man and the Lisa”, though, Burns lose his entire fortune in an unconvincing, poorly written way, and it became incredibly stupid, an even more exaggerated version that the weak, pathetic Burns from “Homer the Smithers”. Not only that, he was the protagonist of the episode, a sympathetic person that we must feel sad about him. Two thirds of the episode are the show attempting to restore his fortune, because we know (the writers know) he’s not gonna remain a ruined guy, and the episode suffers from such a poor initial premise because it cannot go anywhere else, whereas in the German episode Burns’ actions and story were a mere excuse for making jokes about Homer’s (and the typical white American’s) terrible life, just like nearly any Homer-centric episode.
i actually enjoyed this too. while it didn’t portray Burns as a cartoonishly-evil villain (would the old Burns have offered Lisa a 10% commission?), it didn’t portray him as a completely stupid old man. I liked how he turned his fortunes around step-by-step, and I liked the irony of Lisa’s attempts to do good turning into something horrible (a similar thing happened in Lisa the Tree-Hugger (S12))
Lisa the Tree Hugger was pretty bad, as I recall (I think I only saw it once) but I did like the line that went something like “I’m a level 5 vegan, I don’t eat anything that casts a shadow.”
The rest, including the song at the end, was awful.