“Dad, don’t you see you’re abusing your power like all vigilantes? I mean, if you’re the police, who will police the police?” – Lisa Simpson “I dunno, Coast Guard?” – Homer Simpson Oh, Joe Mantegna, I wish you were on every commentary. In case you’ve forgotten, in this episode Homer becomes the police force for Springfield and then Fat Tony tries to assassinate him, and then Maggie shots Fat Tony, and then it ends. If that sounds like a weak mashup of “Homer the Vigilante” and “The Twisted World of Marge Simpson” with a dash of “Who Shot Mr. Burns, Part 2”, that’s because that’s largely what it is. Fortunately, the commentary only rarely takes notice of the episode, and instead kills time with discussions of The Sopranos, Don Knotts and Dean Martin, it also finds time for funny stories from Mantegna and others. Only six people on this one, including Caroline Omine and Mantegna. 1:00 – The idea for this episode came when someone had to get one of those private security systems installed. 2:00 – Rehashing the origin of a joke about a fake monster’s wallet that shows up later. This leads to general banter of a not particularly remarkable kind. 3:00 – Mantegna was once in Australia shooting a mini-series, and interviewers kept asking him about Fat Tony and Simpsons. 3:20 – That leads to talk about the time Mantegna played Dean Martin. 4:00 – And that leads to a Dean Martin story about a time he called the cops on a party at his own house. 4:45 – Jean’s telling Mantegna that they’re going to kill Fat Tony and have him replaced by Fit Tony. I guess they were working on that worthless “Donnie Fatso” episode around this time. 5:05 – Mantegna’s talking about his Uncle Willie who was the basis for the Fat Tony voice. It’s funny. 5:50 – Following up on that, Omine and Jean talk about how sometimes people in real life think things on the show are based on them when they really aren’t. I guess Wikipedia used to say that Homer was based on Jean’s dad, but that isn’t true so he deleted it. 6:30 – Generalized discussion about how quickly the town riots. Jean then recounts how there were huge disasters in Southern California seemingly every three weeks in the early 90s. 7:20 – Apropos of nothing, Jean just asked Gould to do his Don Knotts impression. This leads to a story about meeting Don Knotts. 8:40 – Actual note on the show: sometimes the cast is kind of protective of their characters, so in this scene Bart is being eyed suspiciously by Homer for eating an apple instead of Lisa because Yardley Smith thought it was too Jerkass Homer (not her words) for him to be mad at Lisa. 9:35 – Selman’s telling a story about a time he called his security company because he heard a noise that turned out to be an ice machine. They told him…
An ongoing ramble by Charlie Sweatpants . .