So I think my next pick is a top ten episode, but I had a hope it would fall here to round 4, and it did.
When I was young, I saw this episode and loved it, even though I had no frame of reference for either of its two main conceits at the time of my first watch. It also sprung within me a lifelong love of musicals.
New orleans.
Home of pirates
drunks
and whores.
New Orleans…
Tacky overpriced souvenier stores.
If you wanna go to hell, you should take a trip to the Sodom and Gomorra of the Mississip, New Orleans!
A Streetcar Named Marge is amazing in so many ways. I watched the episode again both after seeing A Streetcar Named Desire for the first time and after reading Atlas Shrugged. The layers are immense and insane. Blanche’s final line in the play is a heartbreaking look at a woman driven insane by a brutish, awful man who rapes her and mentally torments her. Feeling that she has been diminished to be nothing more than a physical plaything for the world, she states “Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
So what did the Simpsons do with it?
Why, they put together a jaunty tune about how a stranger is just a friend you haven’t met. Its biting, its hilarious, and its so damn catchy.
And Ned as Stanley… ohhhh boy, changing his anguised cries of STELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLAAAAA into a fucking musical tune… its so good. Just watch all the musical numbers.
And that’s essentially the C story in this episode, the A story being a Marge and Homer story with heart, paralleling their relationship with those that happen in the play.
The B story, of course, is a cross between Ayn Rand and The Great Escape?!?!?! Helping is Futile and A is A are on posters adorning the wall of a daycare for Maggie.
“Do you know what a baby is saying when she reaches for a bottle?”
“Ba-Ba?”
“She is saying… I am a leech!”
Jon Lovitz as both Llewelyn Sinclair and his sister.
There is not a bad moment in this entire episode, and its an easy top ten of mine.
Ill have my second pick up in a bit, Im juggling three possible options.