The Japan episode was amazing too. And watching this clip I just realized I still say “Awesomah Powah” in a moderately offensive Japanese accent all the time. I totally forgot where that even came from. There are so many things like that from the Simpsons.
At its peak, Simpsons was never afraid to go way out on a limb or to tell jokes that a big chunk of its audience wouldn’t get at all. How many primetime TV viewers in the early 90s knew anything about how insane Japanese commercials are? But still they spent two minutes doing a spot-on fake Japanese TV commercial. Simpsons was a lot like MST3k: tossing out a lot of deep-cut jokes that lots of people would miss but if you got it, it stayed with you.
Do we have to consider the rights of idiot Americans who buy $1,000,000 homes on sand spits with 10’s to 100’s of miles of open water in front of them and what used to be estuaries behind them too? I say caveat emptor, but it’s possible that I’m just an asshole who is incapable of empathy.